Tomorrow I have a genuine clash of commitments to brighten up my start to the weekend. Firstly, our local Methodist Church organises on the first Saturday of each month an event called CAMEO which acronym stands for ‘Cone and Meet Each Other’ This event is designed so that the widowed, bereaved and those who find themselves in a similar situation meet for a coffee and biscuits, followed by a talk or presentation on generally local topics. This, as the demographics would suggest, largely consists of widows rather than widowers but there is a very large overlap between this and the U3A (University of the Third Age) membership and is an event tat I usually attend but tomorrow there is competition in the form of a free concert of the Brandenberg concertos in our local parish church and, for me, the concert wins out (and I expect that I shall bump into members of my U3A Classical Music Appreciation group there). Later on today, I have offered to take my American friend to one of the local hospitals in Worcester where she has a couple of scans organised, but we had arranged to have a light brunch together before the hospital trips. The car parking can be a nightmare in the local hospitals and sometimes it can take as much as three quarters of an hour to locate a parking space after much circling around and if your blood pressure was not elevated at the start of this little venture, it almost certainly is by the end of it. After my own little hospital visit the other week, I was surprised to get a letter written by the consultant which started off by thanking me for my attendance. This I showed to my son who came around the other day who informed me, probably correctly, that no consultant had ever put pen to paper as it were but the whole letter would have been AI generated after some inputs from the hospital. There is an unexpectedly little political row going in our political scene at the moment. As England progress to their next opponents in the World Cup, and this is scheduled to start at 1.00am in the morning, then the Government in an attempt to court some popularity is going to pass some emergency legislation to allow all pubs to stay open until 5.00am in the morning. But this is far from universally welcomed as the pubs chains say that they themselves are staffed by people who are already juggling with second or third jobs and they doubt that they can get the staff to work all the way through the night. The England manager (German!) is suggesting that parents allow their school age children to stay up all night to watch the match whereas our Education Secretary and school leaders are saying that they expect their pupils to be in school at 9.00am the following morning. I am certainly not going to stay up all night to watch this match but if I happen to wake up in the middle of the night, I might just allow myself a pee to see what is going on. England playing at altitude against Mexico on their home ground are almost certainly destined to lose in any case so who put oneself through the agony of watching it all? As my domestic timetable works out, I have to get the car into the garage to have its annual service by about 8.15 I the morning so I don’t intend to  do this on zero hours sleep. A thought that has just occurred to me is that  wonder what kind of state the mechanics will be in who are due to service the car that morning? In any case, I have the international Rugby competition  to which to look forward starting this weekend and whilst any people follow Wimbledon avidly at this time of year, I have long lost interest in this sport.

In the mid-morning, I journeyed down the road and picked up my copy of my daily newspaper and bought a small, speciaiist pie for my American friend and I to have as a sort of brunch before we made tracks to Worcester Royal Hospital where my friend was timetabled to have a couple of scans. The first of these went fine and then we had a coffee and then set in search of the mobile MRI scanning unit which was based in a sort of caravan arrangement in the hospital grounds and was quite hard to find – there were no signs to it either. Eventually, we located the unit and when the scan was completed we set off for home just a little after 4.00pm.This is when the fun and games started because  we ad only just got onto the M5 motorway when we ran into the mother of all traffic jams.  After about an hour and hardly any distance having been travelled, I phoned my son and got the news that the motorway had been closed some ten miles up the road. A lorry had jackknifed and burst through the barrier separating the two carriageways, spilling its entire load of diesel fuel across the road. Evidently, this had to be cleaned up, the lorry removed and then the carriage way checked for signs of damage whilst we were stationery in our vehicles for hours on end. Eventually, we got off the motorway having spent five hours covering a distance of about 8 miles. Both my friend and I felt the need to go to loo but of course we were stuck in the car, not even able to navigate to the left hand most lane where it  might have been possible  to relieve ourselves on a suitable verge which is what some male drivers actually did. So this was probably the worst motorway holdup of our entire lives, but we survived it OK without mishap and got home just after 9.00pm in the evening, heartily relieved. We listened to a mixture of Classic FM, a local radio station where we got commentary on a cricket match and then a combination of Radio4 and Radio4 Extra. After this incident, we are resolved to make sure the car is equipped with some portable receptacles in case we ever find ourselves in a similar situation with no loos in sight. I personally think the motorway authorities could have acted more expeditiously to find a solution to getting us of off the motorway because closing the motorway for some 6 1/2  hours and having  a ten mile queue of largely stationery traffic is not really acceptable.

It is perhaps of no surprise the football dominated the evening before last. England were facing DR Congo and I, for one, was not surprised when DR Congo took the lead in the 7th minute after a lamentable defence which seems to be the England trademark these days. The England performance improved for the rest of the game, but it was difficult to break the opposition defence until a Harry Kane header in the last quarter of an hour. So it was a nervous match to watch but once England had equalised, the winner was scored by Harry Kane, only 4 minutes from the end of normal time. Kane scored a brilliant captain’s goal by rounding two or three defenders and then unleashing an unstoppable volley to secure the ultimate victory.  However celebrations may be very short-lived as our next match will be against one of the co-hosts, Mexico who will be playing ‘at home’ as it were in the Azteca stadium in Mexico City and at an altitude of 2,200 metres and England has only 48 hours in which to acclimatise. This combination of circumstances massively complicates the probability of another England victory and I expect an early England exit. The match does not start until about 1.00am on Monday morning so I wonder how many will actually be watching it. The other football match was Senegal vs. Belgium in which Senegal undoubtedly playing the better football throughout the majority of the match, making the Belgians appear tired and disorganised. Senegal were two goals up and apparently cruising to victory when Belgium unexpectedly scored two goals in the last five minutes of normal time to level the scores. After two periods of extra time, Belgian was awarded a hotly disputed penalty after a VAR review of what appeared to be a foul on the goalkeeper. If there was contact, it was very slight but nonetheless the referee awarded the penalty from which Belgium scored with an impressive shot that secured a 3:2 victory. One could only sympathise with the Senegalese who had so completely outplayed Belgium for so much of the match only to see victory snatched away from them in the dying seconds of the game. I suppose the moral of all of this is not to relax, even when victory seems minutes away and to reflect that the better team does not always win matches, particularly in the World Cup. To make matters worse for the Senegalese, almost exactly  the same thing had happened in the regional African cup when Morocco had secured a victory against them. But we can reflect on the fact that England will almost certiainly be knocked out in the Mexico match and we can look forward to a final which I predict will be Argentina vs France. The day promises to be quite a busy one as I have my Tai Chi class quite early in the morning and this will be followed by a Spanish conversation class early in the afternoon so I shall have to organise a lighter, high-speed lunch for myself in the middle of the day. I have looked at the longer range weather forecasts and it looks as though another spell of hot (but not intensely hot) weather is heading our way so in the next days we may seem temperatures of 28° which seems quite tolerable after the experiences  of the last week of June. The year seems to be racing away with us and I suppose we should enjoy the summer whilst it persists and reflect upon the fact that the nights will only start to get a bit longer from this point on.

After my Tai Chi class, I had my normal coffee but forego the toasted teacake or the biscuits in which I used to indulge. Whilst I was in conversation with members of the charity table, one of the regulars gave another one a copy of the printed brochure advertising all o the concerts and events in the Bromsgrove festival which goes on for about a fortnight in late June and early July. Wondering where I might get hold of a concert programme, I decided to pay a visit to our local town library where I was directed to a stand with copies of the brochure. Whilst I was there, I availed myself of a couple of copies of the Bromsgrove Festival brochure and other leaflets advertising local events – when I got home, I made up two piles of leaflets, one for myself and the other for my American friend so that we cam peruse the leaflets at our leisure and decide what local events we wish to patronise. I did notice with particular pleasure that a concert is being provided free in our local Anglican church (which is sufficiently large and capacious to be a sort of mini-Cathedral for the town) by a father and daughter duo who are well known local musicians in the area, the father playing a keyboard whilst the daughter is a violinist. They  are going to be playing the JS Bach Brandenberg concertos Nos. 3,4 and 5 and of course  these will sound magnificent given the acoustics of the church. The whole is advertised as a ‘Coffee and Cakes’ concert and is provided free of charge including refreshments but voluntary contributions are invited and judged by past events, the audience are generous in their contributions. So this is certainly a ‘must’ for me this weekend and I remember attending a similar event last year which on that occasion felt particularly strange as I attended the concert on my own. I had to have a fairly quick and thrown together type of lunch because it was the afternoon of my U3A Conversational Spanish group. We have quite a loose format to these meetings because the convenor will put on  a couple of short but instructional Spanish videos explaining the usage of some verbs or idioms and this forms the basis of subsequent discussions. But we often stray off the point and discuss whatever we want which occurs to use as one thought sparks of another and this format seems to suit us quite well as the point is to develop whatever facilities we have in the language. After the class I was over, I spent a long time in conversation outside the community hall with one of my fellow class members (mainly on political topics) and at the end of our extended conversation was amazed to discover that he attended the same church as I do and had actually spotted me and my American friend within the church when we attended the song concert given by schoolchildren on Tuesday last.

The evening before last turned out to be a ‘musical’ evening in a way I could not predict. Last Sunday, when  went to Church, the priest mentioned at the end of the service and not contained in the weekly parish newsletter was going to be a little song performance, put on by the pupils of our local Catholic schools who were touring all of the Catholic churches in the area and putting on this impromptu performance. This was only to be about 30 minutes in duration  and was scheduled to start at 6.00 pm in the evening. Knowing that my American friend both sings in her local choir and is always keen to advance the cause of young people, it was not a difficult task to persuade her to accompany me.  In my imagination, given the short notice  thought this event would be very poorly attended but when we arrived at the church well before time, the car park was already full. The choir consisted of over 30 young adolescents aged from about 13-18 and comprised equally of boys and girls who would sing both the soprano and the alto voices. The little programme consisted of some ten items ranging over a whole mixture of musical genres including the Coventry carol, some gospel music and a difficult piece by John Taverner, I thought the choir performed remarkably well and straight after our performance were racing off to another performance at Mount Carmel in nearby Redditch. The choir master explained  that the choir was shortly to go on a school trip where they would perform in Austria and I was left to contemplate what a wonderful experience this must be for these young people. So as we were quite near to my house, my American friend accompanied me home where we had a light supper of melon slices and some cheese and biscuits together. Whilst we were I our kitchen, I showed my friend some of the collections of CDs that I had assembled to make a musical experience for both Meg and myself  in her declining years. So we put on a little concert of our own, ranging over some of the CDs that I had in stock but also deploying  the facility of ‘Alexa’, our smart sound system, to play whatever we suggested. So for own little musical entertainment, we played for each other, we played a variety of genres starting off with Allegre’s ‘Miserere’ performed by ‘The Sixeen’ followed by some of the introductory  cantatas and arias from Handel’s’Messiah’. Then  I played some Joan Baez (Mexican-American folk singer, very popular in the 1960s whilst we were at University). Then I sang the only folk song  knew I in its entirety, (‘Foggy, foggy Dew’) to my friend followed by a proper rendition by the well known folk singer, Burl Ives. We then concluded with the final cantata from Matthew Passion (‘In tears of grief’) which I heard for the first time when  about 14 years old. To indicate how the ‘folk singing’ part of my musical tastes came about, I explained how Meg had a very good friend at school who not only had a fine singing voice but could accompany herself on the guitar. Hence, she was very popular at the little partes that adolescents organised for themselves in the 1960’s in each other’s houses. So it was natural that Meg would gravitate along to what was the folk singing night each Sunday in the each in a huge old Victorian building in which the University authorities had devoted the whole floor of the building (‘J’ floor) to the students union. The one-time president of the Students’ Union was Anna Ford to receive much prominence in later years as an ITV news reader and later presenter. So Meg and I used to attend these events although neither of felt we had the inclination (or the skills) to perform ourselves. Afterwards Meg and I would treat ourselves to a meal in a nearby Chinese restaurant and that was our recreation for the week until the next weekend. Nightclubs did not really exist in Manchester in the mid 1960’s and even though the Manchester scene was shortly to explode with popular music, we could not have afforded to go to them anyway. Our first inclination was always  to provide our own entertainment or to play Beatle/Stones/Joan Baez records on a Dansette record player when we partied in each other’s flats. These parties were great affairs and were always consisted of three stages the first being the singing and some dancing, then the inevitable pairings off to be followed by deep philosophical meanings on the meanings of life through an alcoholic haze, generally having collapsed to the floor at this point and breaking up at about six or seven in the morning. Then it was a had week’s work before the next round of partying the following weekend.

The morning turned out to be an interesting one. As the rose tree in our back garden has certainly produced an abundance  of scented, deep red roses I decided to cut about eight af them, stripping off the lower leaves and then making a wrapping of tinfoil around the stems. I took these down to the Methodist Centre and whilst having my normal cup of coffee distributed the roses around the serving staff and those sitting round the chatty table (which was naturally, well received) One of the ladies on the chatty table is a volunteer with AgeUK so she gave me some indication of the ways in which  Occupational Therapy can make an assessment of one’s needs for small adaptations around the home to make life generally safer. I am going to pass this information onto my American friend so that she can lo at the feasibility of having a shower rail installed in her shower room. After she had left, I spoke with my bank manager friend who had just experienced his mother-in-law’s funeral and was now busy making multiple visits to charity ships to dispose of unwanted personal effects.  I shall have another coffee with him tomorrow as it is my Tai Chi day, cancelled last week as the weather was so hot. Then I went an did a routine weekly shop in what seems to be a quiet time in the supermarket and, upon returning home, prepared a lunch  comprised of some quiche with salad accompaniments. Late on this afternoon, England will meet the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the English management has already expressed some nervousness about the progress and outcome of the match as the Congo play a similar style of football to Ghana with all-defence from which there are lightning breakaways to score winning goals.

In the evening before last, I joined with my American friend in the park for our little early evening strollwhich we are both beginning to enjoy. The cares of the da are generally behind us  and we have a walk around the lake, a sit on or favourite bench and, of course, a chat. I handed over some press cuttings and a spare bottle of cordial. When I had visited Waitrose earlier in the day, the shop were selling two bottles of cordial for only 20p more than the price of one so I bought one for my friend and we shared them between us. Dog walkers often seem quite keen to stop and chat and of course there are always the dedicated runners in their Lycra who are doing their designated circuits. After I returned home, I had a light supper of some cheese and biscuits and a slice of water melon and looked forward to the Germany vs. Paraguay match. The course of the match went pretty much as the commentators had predicted with an incredibly stout and well organised defence by Paraguay and good German approach work which failed to supply the finishing touches. Towards the end of the game in which no goals had been scored, it looked as though Germany had headed a winner only for the goal to be disallowed after a VR review of what was adjudged to be a foul on the goalkeeper. Naturally, the Germans and the commentary team were incensed at what they thought was a poor decision, the bone of contention being whether the slight contact and collision with the Paraguayan goalkeeper was sufficiently serious for the subsequent goal to be disallowed. Whether this was or was not the case the football aficionados will argue about for years and I think one can say that in past, pre-VAR competitions, the goal would have been allowed to stand. But the best one can say is that VAR is being applied consistently in the competition and judged by this standard, the VAR ruling was not out of line with decisions made in other matches and so we proceeded to penalties. But Germany has had an excellent record with this to date but not in this crucial match and eventually Paraguay emerged as spot winners but to evident German distress. The first German player had his shot saved, the first time that this has happened in a German penalty shoot since 1982 which, of course, was over 40 years ago. There will be much soul searching over how German dominance has waned over the years and, it must be said that the tactics of a slow passing build-up but without definitive strikes at the end as cost Germany dear. (Much of the same fate may befall England in a day or so) In the morning, we had a meeting of the clans because my son, daughter-in-law and our domestic help all arrived and excitedly shared all their news with each other. My son and daughter-in-law had had a quick bird-watching break in Suffolk and had a good time with a very rewarding bird-watching experience as well as some excellent food and general hospitality.

In the late morning,  I went down for my Pilates class with the normal attendees who have been doing his class for years now. Naturally, the heatwave and how we had survived it all was the dominant head of the conversation we had throughout the class but we all knew that we could not afford to be too complacent  because  we may well have another spell of hot weather over the forthcoming weekend. To avoid cooking, I had defrosted some mackerel fillets and these I had with some salad accompaniments for my principal midday meal. The political agenda was dominated by the long-awaited Defence Investment Plan over which there have already been some ministerial resignations as the amount of new money needed seems to fall short of what some would regard as essential. The UK will scrap some older weapons and kit, including Storm Shadow cruise missiles and a range of military helicopters, under a major investment plan which falls billions of pounds short of what military chiefs say they need. But it could have been worse. The Treasury agreed to give the Ministry of Defence an extra £1.5bn in the wake of John Healey resigning as defence secretary earlier in the month in protest at a lack of cash. This has pushed the total amount of extra money for the defence investment plan to £15bn in spending power over four years, but only £11.6bn of that amount is new money, with the rest comprising a reallocation of existing resources. In a further sign that Sir Keir Starmer belatedly believes even more money is needed to re-arm, his investment blueprint does say funding and plans behind a goal to push defence spending to 3% of GDP in the next parliament from around 2.3% now would be revealed in the next spending review, expected in 2027, where defence will be the number one priority. One detail which seems sensible is that less money will be spent on new ships (which take a long time to design, build and commission) with some of the diverted funds to be spent on drone technology which is one lesson that the whole Ukraine conflict is teaching our military planners. One bit of important news  has emerged today from the US Supreme Court which is heavily dominated by Trump appointments. Trump loses his Supreme Court fight to end birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court has ruled against Donald Trump’s executive order to limit birthright citizenship in the US. Trump issued the order on his first day back as president in January last year as he began a crackdown on immigration. The presidential edict sought to deny citizenship to babies born to illegal and temporary migrants. However, a US court initially blocked it, saying that it went against the 14th amendment of the US constitution – leading to the Supreme Court considering the case. But despite the Supreme Court having a majority of conservative judges, it has ruled against him today. The vote was split 6-3 against Trump’s executive order. Five justices said Trump’s executive order fell foul of the constitution’s 14th amendment, which has long been interpreted to bestow birthright citizenship on almost anyone born in the United States. This is important because Trump is deploying every means he can to disenfranchise parts of the US electorate to attempt to secure victory for the mid-term elections in November which he is predicted to be in danger of losing heavily. Several Republican  states have already engaged in ‘re-districting’ which means redrawing the boundaries of electoral districts within a state to maximise the likelihood of Republican success and to minimise the possibility of any Democratic gains. This is the ‘dirty’ side of American politics (is there a clean side I ask myself?) in which either side tries every means possible to maximise its own electoral base and to minimise that of opponents. Control po elections is delegated to each individual state which according to the US Constitution is solely responsible for the conduct of elections and not even the Federal government even in the case of elections for a new US President.

I awoke yesterday to a rather gloomy day which is a change after the severe hear experienced last week – it looks as though these conditions are to prevail for most of the day but temperatures hovering at about 21° for most of the morning. There is going to be a major political speech by Andy Burnham later in the day where the probable next Prime Minister will lay out his vision for the future. Most incoming occupants of No 10 like to be remembered  for one huge policy and I remember that in the case of John Major, who succeeded Margaret Thatcher, it was the ‘Citizen’s Charter’ to be followed by the ‘Patient’s Charter’. and in Andy Burnham’s case, it is to create a  ‘No 10 in the North’ accompanied by a concomitant commitment to devolve many much more decision making to the regions and to city mayors. Of course, we shall have to wait and see what is actually being proposed and, as is often said, the ‘devil is in the detail’ I expect that the London and metropolitan elite may give this whole plan at best only a lukewarm reception as it may spell out the transfer of power and money from some of the richer to some of the poorer regions of the UK. Whether this transfer of ‘Manchesterism’ as it has been dubbed will be very successful is quite another question. The Boris Johnson government tried to create a ‘Department of Levelling Up’ and whether much was achieved as a consequence it is for the economic historians of the future to decide. I suspect that the Boris Johnson initiative did curb and mitigate the increasing power and influence of the more prosperous South East of the UK  without  actually reversing any of the trends and hence the Reform party could tap into the discontent felt by many of the regions left behind. I think it is true to say that on the few occasions I have journeyed to London in recent years I have felt that I am entering a somewhat different country such is the disconnect between  the generally prosperous capital and the rest of the country. In this respect, I often think of the Crossrail project which attracted hardly any public attention whereas HS2 linking the capital with the Midlands and the North only made it as far as Birmingham. Crossrail, or the Elizabeth line as it is widely known, is the newest railway through the UK capital. With London’s population set to reach 10 million by 2030, it is’ designed to improve a public transport system already struggling to cope. The railway was once the biggest infrastructure project in Europe. It took 14 years to build and  measures 118km long and includes 42km of track in new tunnels under London. It connects the city of Reading in Berkshire and Heathrow airport in west London, to Abbey Wood in south London and Shenfield in Essex. Linking 40 stations – 10 of them new – the line provided the biggest increase in central London’s train capacity ever delivered by a single engineering project. It is expected to see 200 million passenger journeys every year and the central section opened on 24 May 2022. The week in prospect is rather a ‘non-week’ for me as I have no U3A activities in prospect but of course the week marks the end of June and the start of July or the second half of the year. 

I have developed a theory about the performance  of the England football team which I am trying to validate by asking friends and acquaintances a simple question. My theory is that the England game is so dominated by strikes (i.e. goals) and strikers that all of the prestige and rewards of the game are focused on the strikers and not the defenders. Hence, we do not have, or even develop, talents in defence which is why the England team appears so vulnerable. The Ghana game was a case in point because their whole game is structured around defence and one saw because when an England players received a pass, he was immediately surrounded by about four Ghanaian players and hence there was no way through. So when the England backs are under pressure, the commentators would argue that one of the English strikers might drop back in defence whereas for the Ghana team it is not the odd striker called into defence but the whole of the team To validate my theory, I asked my chiropodist who called around  today and whose level of interest in the game probably matches mine if she could name some of the English strikers. She immediately came up with a list of three but when I asked for similar names providing the England defence, she could not name a single defender This absolutely matches my own experience as well and thus it will be rather flukey if the England team make much progress in the later stages of the competition. I lunched on a prawn omelette complemented with some salad left over from the weekend and ate rather late in the day as I was quite absorbed by the Andy Burnham vision of the future, outlined in a major speech in Manchester.  The highlights of this were the notion to create a Northern No10 and to transfer some important governmental functions to it. The second pledge was to restore a good level of council house building but I wonder how much of this come to fruition unless a lot of ‘brown’ sites (previously developed land) is utilised rather than green open spaces.  In the course of the afternoon, I located the series of documentaries in three parts of the whole of the Suez debacle. Here, the English and French tried to utilise the Israelis to start a phoney war against Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian leader to regain control of the Suez canal. The Americans facing an election did not want to be involved in any foreign ventures so the UK was left with a humiliating climbdown – and lost the services of Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister, as a consequence. The whole lesson to be learnt from the Suez debacle is that Britain’s ability to act as an erstwhile colonial power had come to an abrupt end and without support from the rich and powerful Americans we were in effect a ‘toothless tiger’ I had always supposed that this phrase had Chinese origins as indeed it had. The original Chinese idiom—referring to something that appears formidable but is actually weak and ineffectual—was popularised globally in the 1940s and 1950s by Chinese leader Mao Zedong during interviews and political speeches against Western powers. Over time, native English speakers substituted ‘tiger’ into a more menacing, predatory metaphor (toothless tiger) to describe an organisation, law, or threat that lacks the ability to inflict harm or enforce its rules. 

The afternoon before last was a quiet one but I browsed across the TV channels and saw again the closing half hour of a film I had first seen in about 1957 or 1958. The film was ‘The Desert Fox’ and was unusual in that it was a very sympathetic portrayal of the career of Rommel, the German adversary of Montgomery in the deserts of northern Africa in the second World War. James Mason delivers a critically acclaimed, restrained performance as German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the 1951 biographical film ‘The Desert Fox’. The movie portrays Rommel’s final years, his leadership of the Afrika Korps in WWII, and his ultimate descent into a conspiracy against Adolf Hitler. This was a brave film to be made only six years after the end of the war but I remember it made quite a deep impression on me at the time. At the boarding school that I attended in the late 1950’s, at the  first night back at school after a vacation break generally a good film was shown to us and I can remember quite a lot of the films shown us including ‘The Student Prince’ On Sunday nights, if we did not have a film, we would have a whilst drive (where you move from table to table and new partners after every few games) which I always enjoyed. In the early evening, the doorbell rang and it was my Asian neighbour from across the front lawned area in front of the house with a bag of freshly prepared samosas which his wife had just made. This was a wonderful kind thought and I shall look forward to eagerly to their consumption. In Indian subcontinent, samosas are prepared with an all-purpose flour (locally known as maida) and stuffed with a filling, often a mixture of diced and cooked or mashed boiled potatoes, onions, green peas, lentils, ginger, spices and green chillies. I am not sure exactly what ingredients my Asian neighbour will have used but it is always a heartwarming gesture to be offered food by neighbours. The evening before yesterday was the day of the anticipated World Cup match between England and Panama and after a lack-lustre first half, the score remained at 0:0. Eventually, in the second half England started playing with a little more urgency and then scored a couple of well-taken goals. This meant that England had progressed in this World Cup by playing for some 150 minutes in the last three matches, including  this one, until they actually scored a goal and unless they up their game considerably, I can see England being knocked out quite early on in the competition. The England defence seems pretty shaky even against inferior opposition and is vulnerable to a quick opposition break-away. in fact Panama did score a wonderful break-away goal but the VAR video system showed there to be an offside but only by an incredibly small margin, perhaps as little as a kneecap, so this was a vivid illustration of the England weakness in this area. In the morning, I awoke to a layer of thick cloud but a glance at the dry patio showed that we had not had any rain during the night and I am hopeful that a good downpour will occur later in the day, now that I have the lawns cut. During the course of the transmissions of the football by ITV, I notice an advert for the forthcoming Nations Cup rugby competition. This is a new competition  and this is what I discovered about it. The Nations Championship debuts in July 2026. Two groups of teams compete in a Northern versus Southern Hemisphere tournament format across six rounds, with three fixtures in July and again in November, before culminating in the first of its kind Finals Weekend to decide the dominant nation and balance of power between the rugby hemispheres, every two years. In the Nations Championship, every point, result and match matters, to every team. This brings together the twelve biggest international rugby teams in the world, packed with the best players in the sport, competing to win rugby’s newest title. So this will brighten up next weekend for me.

The Sunday morning pattern took on its usual shape with my attending church for the 8.30 service in the morning, after which I have coffee and biscuits in the parochial hall. Afterwards, I normally go along to a local BP garage where they have a do-it-yourself car washing machine. If you are very quick and have a small car, this can be done for as little as £2.00 but I generally double this and the amount of time that is bought There are a variety of ‘programmes’ that can be activated within your allotted time span and I tend to go for a quick pre-wash with a minimum level of detergent, followed by a foaming low pressure clean and then finishing off with a very high pressure rinsing. I find that doing this week by week suits me down to the ground as it probably does a more through job than I can manage at home and is a lot less strenuous than heaving buckets of water all over the place. When I got home, I started preparing things for lunch which happened to be quite minimal as my American friend was going to bring some quiche around and I had purchased a Mediterranean vegetable mix which needed an oven roasting. Once we had lunched, we eventually located the YouTube version of ‘Rigoletto’ which we had started to view last week. This week, we concluded our viewing of the really dramatic ending to the opera (which I did not spoil for my American friend by telling her about the ultimate twist in the story line). We then made our way to our local park where we have our evening constitutional walk and then we retuned home to a light supper of samosas (kindly provided by our Asian neighbour) complemented by some salad. Afterwards we viewed the second half of one of the first football matches in the knockout stages of the World Cup being Canada (one of the co-hosts) vs. South Africa. After quite an exciting match, the Canadians snatched the deciding goal with only about three minutes of stoppage time left and this meant that the game as a whole did not have to go into extra time and penalty shoot-outs. England play Democratic Republic of Congo on Wednesday next and the result of this contest is difficult to predict.

The night before last was cooler and I, for one, managed to get to sleep practically as soon as my head had touched the pillow so the intensely hot spell is thankfully coming to an end. The hot weather zone sitting over most of the country is moving away eastwards and will be replaced by somewhat cooler and fresher weather blowing in from the Atlantic. I valued the walk in the park which I undertook with my American friend and in the park, there was a magnificent and somewhat cooler breeze blowing which we both appreciated. We shared the experiences of the day with each other and chatted with a solitary dog walker who was explaining to us her pleasant experience of cruises she had undertaken since she had lost her partner some years before. After I returned home, I had a light repast of some melon and watched ‘Question Time’ which had been displaced from its usual time slot, perhaps because of the football. I watched the football a little  and the became absorbed into what turned out to be quite a long documentary on the life and work of Mozart which the YouTube algorithm had thrown in my direction. In the morning upon scanning the international news, I learned that Donald Trump has threatened to impose a 100% import tariff on the UK over its digital services tax on American social media firms. The US president also said it would supersede Britain’s existing trade deal. Mr Trump had previously raised the spectre of such a move unless Britain dropped the 2% levy on the revenues of several major US tech companies. The tax targets companies whose worldwide revenues from digital activities exceed £500m, with more than £25m of the revenue from UK users. So all of this means is that the UK is in hock to the large American corporations such as Amazon, Google and the rest and we cannot get them to pay the appropriate amount of tax to which we as a nation are entitled. The large American corporations have the ability to ‘shift’ their profits from one country to another so that they can take advantage of the lower tax rates available in some countries. If there is a solution to this problem, it probably lies at the European level in which all countries can shelter underneath the shelter of a joint European tax policy but, of course, such an approach is closed off to us since we left the EU and countries like the UK can be picked off one by one. Any British government, including the present Labour administration, can point to financial turbulence which arose far distant from our shores (the original financial crisis, then the COVID pandemic, then the war in Ukraine only to be followed by the present Iranian conflict and all overlaid by the 6%-8% reduction in our GDP following Brexit) and one can see that the room for manoeuvre by any British government is limited in the extreme. How much of this has percolated into the minds of the great British public , I could not say but it is the present generation of politicians who have to shoulder all of the blame. Part of the problem is that blaming the international order looks to the British public like whinging and a refusal to accept responsibility, but I would not like to be a minister in ay British government at the moment. Europe as a whole is suffering from problems of an ageing population, declining birth rates and immigration flows the benefits of which may be uncertain and certainly not immediate. 

The morning turned out to be quite a full one. On my way down into town, I noticed my Irish friend doing some outside gardening work so I swung the car around onto the service road outside his house so that I could have a brief chat with him.I knew that today was the day in which Bromsgrove (public) school was to have an annual service for its leavers and I realise from past observations of this event, it is also an occasion for mothers, sisters and girlfriends to get dressed up in their most fashionable clothing and to demonstrate this to the world at large. I had received an invitation to tbs event via a distant friend but decided (wisely as it turned out) not to attend the church service. There was massive competition to get into the nearest carpark to the church which was the local authority car park adjacent to Waitrose and cars were queuing about six deep patiently waiting for a space to appear. Perhaps it was not surprising that on three occasions when I was patiently waiting for a space to appear a big and expensive car zoomed ahead of me and occupied the space for which I was evidently waiting. I picked up my newspaper from Waitrose and bought some coffee after which I availed myself of the ‘free’ coffee made available to Waitrose cardholders. The elderly coffee-drinking lady sitting next to me indicated that she had kept cool during the past week by hunting out the shops with the most efficient air conditioning and effectively staying in them for most of the day. Then I journeyed to Asda and bought some of those items unavailable in my local supermarket such as bicarbonate of soda (which I bought to mix with vinegar and some washing up liquid to make a home-made remedy to alleviate the effects of black spot stains on my patio, occasioned by moss tumbling off the roof during the night) I bought some extra fruit and salad and then made for home but had an extraordinary motoring incident on the way home. As I proceeding along quite busy and well-used road  which runs along the back of the local parish church, I was confronted by the most enormous tractor and combine-harvester. This vehicle literally took up the whole of the road space and I had to reverse about 150 yards, with this great monster bearing down on me as I ‘retreated’ . When and if this monstrosity hit even more major roads, it would probably cause some traffic chaos but he was going to have his way as I retreated. Naturally, I was not a happy bunny about all of this as you can imagine. Upon my return home, I cooked myself some chicken pieces which I heated in a jar of pasta tomato sauce and a smidgeon of some pre-cooked rice.

Yesterday was a case of negotiating and managing what may prove to the hottest day of the current heat wave and it was a day in which, again, a record was made of the hottest-ever June day of 36.7° recorded at Merryfield in Somerset. I had a sort of plan in place to cope with yesterday because my American friend called around and we took ‘care’ of each other by having copious supply of cold cordial and seeking out the coolest places in the house. We made a salad lunch together and then ended the afternoon after which the temperature had just lowered a tad which meant that we could enjoy a bit of our evening supper ‘al fresco’ as it were. I am always quite well supplied with fruit so we made a whole fruit salad to share between us complemented with just a little dollop of ice cream and some plain Greek yogurt. This was most welcome and after the patio as been cleaned up and given its daily brush, made for a very pleasant environment. After supper was consumed and the dishes washed up, we settled down to watch the Germany vs. Ecuador match in the World Cup and this turned out to be one of the most exciting and memorable matches in the whole competition. There was none of the ‘slow and patient’ build-up that we have grown used to expecting from England performances but instead, both teams adopted a frontal attacking approach. Germany scored first but the Ecuadorians equalised soon afterwards and from that point on it became a really thrilling match to watch with the eventual winner always in doubt. The Ecuadorians scored a deserved winning goal in the 77th minute and this meant an exceptionally tense last quarter of an hour whilst the Ecuadorians defended with all of their might. The emotional outbursts over this historic victory over the defeat of one of the tournament favourites was a sight to behold with may of the Ecuadorian team in tears of joy and relief, as they now progress towards the last 32 of the World Cup, incidentally, almost certainly putting aid to Scotlands very slim chances of qualifying as a best placed third team. Meanwhile, we have been appalled by the shocking earthquake in Venezuela in which one quake was followed by another less a minute later. As the movement of the tectonic plates was at quite a shallow level then the level of destruction has proved to be enormous, with 235 deaths reported and a figure of 4,300 missing or injured. Apparently the last time there was an earthquake of tis magnitude in Venezuela was in 1967 but I do not really remember it, working as I was in a cardboard box factory during summer whilst Meg worked next door in the McVities biscuit factory. Of course those summer vacation factory jobs have disappeared but the experience of working  in factories taught Meg and I quite a a lot at the time. The evening before last threatened to be a hot and sticky one in which sleep was always threatened. However, with the windows open and the assistance of a small fan, I managed to get to sleep quickly after going to bed.  I was desperately hoping that some thunderstorms might develop in the later stages of the night, but it was not to be and the chance of rain, according to me weather app is zero today and with a 35% chance tomorrow. I intend to make at little peregrination along the High Street  to have a coffee in the ‘Gifts of Love’ charity outlet where I am always guaranteed a warm welcome and I may do little bits of shopping afterwards. This I did but I must say that the High Street seemed pretty deserted as I walked along it and the temperature was probably not discernibly lower than yesterdays. So the assistant/volunteer who I know well made an iced coffee for me ad we chatted for half an hour before I went on my way to do some shopping. When I got home, I propped the front day open to allow the breeze to permeate the hall then prepared for myself a prawn omelette with a few salad type accompaniments and this was fine on another roasting hot day. 

My American friend phoned me and we agreed to have a rendez-vous in the park with the multiple purposes of cooling down a little, having a breath of fresh air and catching up on the days news. June’s temperature record has been broken for a third time today, with the mercury hitting 37.1C at Cavendish in Suffolk. There is just a hint that as the day progresses, we might even have a new record later on in the day. The red danger zone issued by the Metrological service has now receded a little from the Midlands. Meanwhile, rai authorities in the South of England are discouraging travellers from making a journey the coast as the railway network cannot cope with these extremely high temperatures. Overhead power lines sag and the rails themselves absorb heat increasing the chance of buckling. Railway tracks reach temperatures much higher than the surrounding air due to a combination of solar radiation, thermal absorption, and insulation. When the air temperature is 30°C, steel rails in direct sunlight routinely climb to 50°C or higher because they act as highly efficient heat traps. They are used to this in continental Europe but it no surprise that we engineer things to a lower standard. The football this evening is going to be France vs. Norway and I would fully expect the French (and Mbappe in particular) to prevail but unpredictable things can happen in a World Cup. Tomorrow  the England team are due to meet Panama and I would not be surprised to see another disappointing and complacent England performance. Even teams from lower-ranked nations (in footballing terms) have to go through qualification matches and it is often forgotten that the players  from some of the lesser-ranked nations are fit young men who might be able to make up in speed and endurance what they may lack in technical skill. The next stage of the competition when there are 32 teams left in become straight knock-out football as the 32 becomes 16, 8, 4 and then 2 in the final. At this stage, many games will end in a penalty shoot-out as well, a skill in which England frequently succumb to the Germans, for example.

Yesterday was dominated by one important visit that I needed to make. Eight years ago I was successfully treated for a polyp in my colon which had turned cancerous but was itself picked up by routine monitoring and subsequently the NHS had offered monitoring of my GI (gastro-intestinal tract) One such monitoring event took place about a month ago and as a result of this the endoscopist has identified another polyp which looked a little suspicious. Yesterday, I saw a colorectal surgeon who explained to me that the offending polyp was not cancerous but the histology (tissue examination) indicated that it might become so in the yeas ahead. So I was offered the option of doing nothing and leaving it to chance or having it removed in a few weeks time. I must have taken little more than half a second for me to choose the latter option and the words of the surgeon were to the effect that I was still a young man but if I chose to ignore it, then I might have problems in later years that I would choose to regret. But I have to say that this is the NHS at its finest i.e. monitoring and treating conditions before they become much more serious. The weather yesterday was the hottest June day ever recorded and I was in two minds whether to cancel the appointment but, in the event, was very pleased that I did not cancel my appointment but instead received the news that I did. The weather forecasters are indicating that it is possible that it is possible that yesterday’s record June temperature may even be exceeded today so we have about a couple of days more of extreme weather through which to navigate ourselves. My Tai Chi has texted each member of her class to take soundings whether or not to hold a class this week, as a result of which the class has been cancelled as I suspect that most of us want to stay safe indoors. My American friend and I decided in a conversation that it was too hot even for an early evening walk in the park as the temperature was still in the 30’s (C) and she also informed me that the Ukrainian lunch time event, normally held on the last Friday of each month, had been cancelled as the Ukrainians themselves did not feel inclined to cook in a hot kitchen and felt that the meal would probably be badly attended in any case. So my friend has decided to come round to my house midday when we can prepare a salad lunch together and keep cool with the assistance of a large fan that I keep in my lounge in the bottom of the house. At her suggestion, I have even located a copy of the Scrabble board game that had hunted out in a trip to a charity shop in the hope, vain as it turned out, that Meg and I would be able to share in this game in her declining few months. Last night’s football turned out to be less than entertaining. After a pedestrian first half, Canada and Switzerland finally made something of a game of it with the Swiss eventually running out as 2:1 winners. I was disinclined to watch the Scotland vs. Brazil game but as I was going to bed in a hot bedroom decided to watch a few minutes of it only to see the Scots make a huge defensive error and give away the softest of goals to their Brazilian opponents within the first five minutes, after which I decided that I would rather sleep than watch the rest of the game.

The hot weather, having  scrubbed out my Tai Chi class this week, left me with the prospect of a nice quiet morning but I decided to make the best of it. The back lawn was in desperate need of a cut and I know this only takes about 20 minutes. So before the sun got too high and whilst the inclination of the sun was such that much of the back garden was shaded by the bushes, I ventured out to give the lawn a mow at 9.30 in the morning when the temperature was a ‘mere’ 25° C. I have never cut the lawns so early in the day before but, there again, we are experiencing record temperatures day by day, I rather expected that work might cease in the building site at the bottom of my garden in view of the extreme heat but the activity and associated noise seems to be just the same.  As I was cleaning up the mower, prior to putting it away, I heard the sound of another lawn mower from a distant neighbour so the same thought must have occurred to both of us. We have been warned to expect some spectacular thunderstorms probably within day and so this was another incentive to get the lawn cut before the downpours begin. A rather macabre thought occurred to me which I will discuss with my American friend when she calls around. If her aged 95 year old mother had been alive as well as Meg with her rapidly declining health then both of us might have been faced with the most difficult time keeping both of them hydrated and cool and it is not beyond the possibilities  that our respective loved ones might have succumbed to the extreme heat and would we have blamed ourselves for it? I have just read the horrifying statistic that in France there have 40 drowning deaths recorded in the last week alone. Whilst we all have to ‘tunnel through’ the current heatwave, the much more pressing questions is how much more we need to invest as a society to counteract the heatwaves of the future which, with rampant global warming are only going to intensify. I would really like  to see our media dragging prominent climate-change deniers in front of the TV cameras and asked to justify their denial claims in the light of all the scientific evidence and the evident distress of millions of us across Europe. Because of its land mass, the heatwave seems to be much worse in France. At least 101 million people in Europe are expected to experience temperatures in excess of 35C on Thursday, including 50 million in France, as an intense heatwave sweeping the continent continues. Spain is reporting an excess of 200 heat-related deaths as well.

It was no surprise to me in the England vs. Ghana football match that this was certainly not going to be a pushover. The Ghana team were superb in their defence and whenever an England player seemed as though they were about to be in a position to shoot for goal, they immediately seem to be surrounded by 4-5 Ghanian shirts. So the England team found that there was literally ‘no way through’ and the traditional tactics of a slow patient buildup remained just that – a buildup with no finish. The commentators  on the match were practically screaming at the English team to play ‘through’ the Ghanaians i.e. run at opponents with the ball. But this can be dangerous because if you lose the ball, a Ghanian opponent can make a quick breakaway to score a goal at the other end of the pitch. The English substitutes did make a little difference and the last ten minutes of play, England attacked quite well and nearly scored but it was a case of too little and too late. Looking at domestic politics, the ‘coronation’ of Andy Burnham looks all but certain but before everyone gets carried away on a wave of emotion, the economic problems surrounding the government severely limit the locus of action of even an incoming Prime Minister.  If we are to look at problems one by one, the most prominent is the under funding of our defence budget but in the very simplest of terms, where is the money to come from? The answer may lie in some imaginative new funding streams such as special ‘Defence Bonds’ as in the second world war but all of this has to be thought through. The Conservative answer is to ‘cut the welfare bill’ and devote the released funds to defence but this is not as easy as it sounds. It is true that that there is a huge problem of NEETS (Not in Education, Employment or Training) There are approximately 1.01 million young people (aged 16 to 24) in the UK who are not in education, employment, or training (NEET). This figure equates to 13.5% of all young people in this age group but about 60% of this figure are people who are disabled or otherwise unfit for work. For the remainder, there probably needs to be a joint policy involving government and employers but hard-pressed employers will not do this for nothing  and will require some economic incentives – and this of course, costs and does not save money. The traditional Labour answer  to problems is to borrow the money but here we are at the mercy of the bond markets or, as it is popularly known. ‘the kindness of strangers’ In other words if foreign investors are not convinced of the probity of UK politics, then they will simply not lend the money to us. At the risk of a very simple economic analysis if in times gone past one approached a bank manager  for a loan to buy a car without which it was impossible to get to work, the bank manager might give one a sympathetic reply. But if you wanted to buy a car simply as an enjoyable consumption good, then the same bank manager would probably refuse a loan. I am aware that one should not treat Government economic activity as though it was a huge domestic household but I think it is often not appreciated on the left of politics that that they may not be people in the world who wish to lend to you unless the price in interest payments is extraordinarily high. The total amount the government owes is called the national debt. It is currently about £2.9 trillion. That is almost as much as the value of all the goods and services produced in the UK in a year, known as the gross domestic product, or GDP. The current level is more than double that seen from the 1980s through to the financial crisis of 2008. The combination of the financial crash and the Covid pandemic pushed the UK’s debt up. But, in relation to the size of the economy, UK debt figures are still low compared with much of the last century. They are also less than the equivalent figures for some other leading economies. Even so, just paying the interest on this huge debt costs the economy over 8% of total government expenditure so just borrowing more money may not be the answer. In the meanwhile, the NHS always seems to be desperately short of cash and most of our public services have been starved of investment for decades now so who would want to be in charge  of a government faced with al of these unpalatable choices. The traditional answer is ‘economic growth’ but for decades now the UK economy has seemed to grow if anything by the most miniscule amounts and hence the tax take does not increase by very much. One answer may lie in innovative new forms of taxation. I personally would put a £1 levy on every parcel or package delivered to households in the UK and this would rase A £1 levy on all parcels and packages in the UK would raise between £4.2 billion and £5 billion annually. By way of comparison, increasing the basic rate of income tax by 1p raises approximately £6.9 billion a year.

I went shopping yesterday morning and the supermarket was very crowded but perhaps this is because it was so cool inside – I wonder whether some people had discerned this and so had gone shopping to help to draw the sting of what is proving to be the hottest June day on record. Yesterday was officially the hottest ever June day, breaking the 1976 record. A temperature of 35.7C has been recorded in Charlwood, Surrey, according to the Met Office. This year marks half a century since the 1976 heatwave: a summer when people put foil over windows to keep out the sun and were forced to use standpipes in the street as water supplies ran short.  The UK’s all-time high is 40.3C, recorded in July 2022. I may meet my American friend in the park later on in the evening if we both need feel the need for a bit of fresh air. We have about one more day of really hot weather to negotiate and then things might break down with multiple thunderstorms towards the end of the week. I think a lot of people would really welcome a good thunderstorm and a downpour to help to clear the air after recent days.