Yesterday as it is Friday we go on our normal trip down into town to visit ‘The Lemon Tree‘ cafe which is now our favourite venue for a Friday morning. After the pouring rain of the last few days, it looks as though the bands of rain are sweeping their way northwards and, upon our return, the weather was rapidly brightening and yielded quite a pleasant day during the afternoon. We were delighted to meet up with our University of Birmingham friend who we often see at the weekend, either on a Friday or a Sunday. Then we rather had to dash up the hill to ensure that we get home in plenty of time for Meg’s late morning visit from the carers. I recently had to repair (i.e.wood glue together) some of the legs from a little occasional table we have in our lounge – I suspect the legs had become loosened from when Meg in her falling about days had sent the table crashing. The wood glue seems to have worked its magic although I a treating it very gingerly these days.

I have managed to get the Bluetooth keyboard upon which I am currently typing communicating directly with my iPad whilst sitting in my favourite leather armchair. This means that I can now chat with Meg, watch the TV and also type notes to myself all at the same time which is true multi-tasking. We also treat ourselves to a bought haddock fish pie which we are going to have for our Friday lunch and today is no exception. We finish off our lunches these days with a small bowl of plain Greek yogurt but enhanced a little with some spoonfuls of coconut yogurt (sold in Aldi) which is delicious. Last night was a disturbed night for both of us. Although Meg had been put into the bed by the carers so that she was all tucked up by 7.30pm, in practice she did not fall fully sleep until about 11.00pm.This happens occasionally such as every third night and, on occasions like this, I try to keep Meg calm and unagitated but this is easier said than done Eventually, I got up and started to do the jobs that I reserve for the evenings when Meg is (hopefully) asleep. Consequently, last night I got very little sleep last night and consequently have felt like ‘death warmed up’ the whole of the following day. After Meg has had her ‘tea time’ call from the carers in the late afternoon, we always go to the main lounge and see what YouTube has to offer. Sometimes we are presented with some classic comedy and so, sometimes with some classical musical offerings, depending on what the YouTube algorithm has sorted out for us. Today, there was an examination of the lives of the three great tenors,Caruso, Gigli and Bjorling (the Swedish tenor), As a follow up, there was a biopic of the life of Mario Lanza who had a magnificent voice but, coupled with his good looks, lent itself to the TV and cinema era rather than the opera house. But Mario Lanza died at the age of 38 and although he had recorded the sound tracks to The Student Prince, the powers that be that in MGM substituted another actor who played (and lip-synced) the role pretty well by all accounts. We were happily watching our TV when suddenly we lost all TV signal in both of our lounges. Suspecting a transmitter fault, I got onto the appropriate website which informed me that there were no problems with the transmitters (but I am not convinced about this) After an urgent phone call to my son, he came over and we experimented with a little portable TV and various lengths of TV cable to try to work out if the problem was with our aerial.To cut a long story short, we got first the portable and then the big Toshiba TV working but only in the other end of the lounge and only receiving the terrestrial channels and not the internet channels. But from the important standpoint of keeping Meg engaged, we now have a TV that offers something, if not everything, and she can view this by locating the wheelchair into a different part of the lounge. After various experiments and trials with different combinations, my son and I think that we may have an explanation for what is going wrong. It could well be that the transmitter has some kind of fault and is transmitting at a lower power than is normal. This might be effecting the big TVs but not the portable. In addition, to put the TVs where they need to be proximate to our armchairs, I have deployed long lengths of cabling along the skirting boards of the Music Lounge and this will degrade the signal further. So we think that a reduced transmitter power coupled with our cable-induced signal degradation may account for the problem. We are going to wait until the morning to see if anything has been sorted out overnight and whether the TV in our Main Lounge is functioning as it should in the morning. But as things stand, they are now looking somewhat less bleak than they were an hour or so back when it looked as though we might have to call a TV or aerial specialist and be without TV for days on end. I am relieved that we have a solution that will just about work for now and we will have to see what the morning brings.

The foreign affairs news on the evening bulletins was disturbing in the extreme. Israel had attacked the Hezbollah HQ in Lebanon and the scale of the destruction left a huge red glow over the horizon that rather reminded me of the initial American attack on Iraq when they were promising ‘shock and awe’. It looks as though some of the major Hezbollah leaders may have been successfully targeted but not their actual leader. Of course, there will be others who will step up into the role and I have always thought that the military doctrine of (almost literally) decapitating the enemy was a futile strategy. For example, if Churchill had been killed at the height of WW2, would the reaction of the rest of the population that now is the time to sue for peace? So a ceasefire seems to be a long way off and the Israelis are preparing for a ground invasion of Lebanon in the near future in any case. One has to despair what a solution might be in the face of these calamitous scenes.

Yesterday was my shopping day and we almost overslept this morning – I suspect that the dark mornings makes it slightly more difficult to awake at our normal time. But the two carers came on time to get Meg up and ready but she did appear to be a little sleepy this morning. Perhaps the RSV virus jab that we had the other day is making us both a little more tired but at least we are happy to be within the narrow window of the system (75-79 year olds) and to have been given a level of protection that may last for at least a couple of years. One of the carers was detailed to stay on with Meg as a ‘sit’ carer whilst I went off to do our weekly shopping. This particular carer has a very happy and friendly disposition and I was actually quite relieved to leave Meg with her whilst the shopping was done. At Aldi, I saw a pair of admittedly thin cotton men’s pyjamas marked down to £5.00 so I bought this to complement a similar pair I bought last week thinking to myself that in the very cold weather, two pairs of thin pyjamas might actually prove warmer than the traditional Winceyette, particularly if they trap a layer of air between the two pairs. Upon my return, the carer helps me to put things away and this seems to take most of the morning. At midday, the manager of the care agency who details himself as one of the duty rota was due to call around accompanied by his manager. The idea of this is that the management team as a whole have sight of each of their clients periodically so that they can get a more rounded picture of their domestic situation and attendant care needs. This sounds like excellent practice and I took the opportunity to enquire how our application to Social Services for an extra visit was being processed. I was told the most incredible tale of woe about how things were with Social Services these days. Every request for an extra resource has to go through several layers of bureaucracy and then sent out to an assessment panel to see if the extra resource can be approved or not. So a decision can take months to emerge and the whole scenario is a response to the absence of resource within social service departments. The levels of bureaucracy are an attempt to save money be delaying and delaying the decision making process. As though all of this was not bad enough, I was told blood curdling tales of what was happening in Birmingham Social Services now that the city council is effectively bankrupt. Birmingham’s problems were brought to a head when it was ruled that they had underpaid their female employees for decades and were then faced with a huge bill in back payments. At the same time, there was a huge squeeze in local authority budgets which in the big cities were generally under the control of a Labour administration. This suited the purposes of the then Tory government who starved the big cities of resources and then found it quite easy to deflect any criticism by pointing out that Labour administrations were always profligate whereas their Tory counterparts in the more affluent shires did not have the same scale of problems exhibited in the large conurbations. We received through the post a written confirmation of the fact that the wheelchair service are due to pay us a visit in about 10 days time to see if the ankle straps arrangements that I utilise to keep Meg’s legs from slipping off the footrests can be replaced by a more professional arrangement. The occupational therapists were generally happy with my pragmatic solution but they have made an onward reference to the wheelchair service itself that may have some more professional kit to help to keep Meg more secure (and less liable to slippage) in her wheelchair.

Last night, I had a sudden burst of enthusiasm and wondered whether a keyboard that I had purchased some time ago to make a Bluetooth connection with my iPad would actually work with my existing iPhone. After a certain amount of experimentation, I found that this would work pretty all so in the afternoon, I wondered if it possible to view the TV whilst also using the keyboard to write some text for this blog. As we been watching a Lucy Worsley program on Mozart in London yesterday, I had unfortunately had a doze in the middle of it and the carers had also come along before we had got to the end of it. So today, we are resuming our viewing of this and I am also trying out this innovative bit of kit and am using the ‘Pages’ app on the iPhone. From here, it is a fairly simple task to use a few keystrokes to upload the text into an email and then I can send it to myself so that I can read it on either of my laptops. This afternoon, it has been rather a gloomy afternoon so we are not unhappy to have another little burst of Mozart for this afternoon. We had been watching some ‘BlackAdder’ on BBC catchup but the selections were not some of the rib tickling ones so we were happy to resume our viewings of yesterday.

In the late afternoons, Meg and I have a little routine that seems to work pretty well for us. After the carers have made Meg comfortable, we stay in our main lounge where we have a chair in which the seat cushion has been tilted back somewhat to help keep Meg from sliding off and whilst Meg is sitting happily in her chair, I go off and make ourselves some tea and also treat ourselves to a little bit of chocolate. Then we either watch some comedy or view a YouTube concert until it is time for the 6.00pm news. I have also got into the habit of giving Meg her ‘evening’ pills at 6.00pm before Meg is put to bed at about 7.00pm. For the last day or so, this timing has worked out very well for us and it seems to help Meg settle down for the evening a bit more readily. This then releases me to get some more of my evening routine jobs done which is always a bonus.

Last night, Meg seemed to get off to sleep relatively quickly and I felt as though I could benefit from an early night. However, that is not how the night transpired because as I had ordered new iPhone, an iPhone 16, I thought this would be a good opportunity to clean up some of the clutter on my existing phone. So I went through the entire collection of Apps, deleting about half of them and evidently only keeping those that I thought would still be useful to retain even though I had not used them a great deal. At the same time, I made sure that I could access my NHS app and, in general terms, tried to make things neat and tidy before the changeover next Tuesday. I feel that I would like to start off with a fairly limited set of useful apps and I believe that in the updated model, Apple will actually group together apps that are similar to each other and this sounds a useful feature. I managed to locate some ‘Getting Started’ guides which I have run off on the printer and put in a file. Whilst up and about, I thought I would see what range of Amazon books might be available for me to make maximum use of my new phone but the available offerings were both extensive and, to some extent, confusing. Sometimes, these books can be excellent and sometimes they are a complete waste of money so I decided to stay my hand and see if I could find a book that was a clear market leader or, at least, not a complete waste of money. Perhaps I do not have the search terms correct but when I try to search for some recommendations or evaluations of the various books to make sure that I do not buy ‘a pig in a poke’ but decided to stay my hand for the time being. So I was pretty tired this morning as I had been up half of the night but it is only once in a while. After we had breakfasted this morning, our domestic help turned up as is usual on a Wednesday and then Meg and I decided to make a Waitrose trip. This all worked out as we had intended although we did not bump into any of our regulars but had a brief snatch of conversation with our Irish friend who we passed on the way down. After we returned, we awaited the arrival of the carers to give Meg her late morning call which was an hour later today for some reason. The two girls who turned up were of a very chatty and friendly disposition and this certainly helps to both keep Meg in a good mood and also make the whole carer session progress so much more smoothly. I thanked the care workers and then let them know that I thought that if the visit was filled with a lot of jolly conversation, this was very good therapeutically for Meg. We lunched on the fishcakes and microwaved vegetables which is normally our Tuesday rather than our Wednesday fare and settled down to see a biography of D H Lawrence on Sky Arts which was reasonably informative.

This afternoon, Meg and I set ourselves down to watch a film hosted by Lucy Worsley being run as a supplement to the Mozart series on BBC2. Entitled ‘Mozart’s London Odyssey’ it details the stay in London of Leopold Mozart, Mozart’s father who was attempting to cash in on his son’s prodigy status. The family stayed at various addresses and performed at a series of locations but occasionally times were hard and Leopold Mozart had to accept whatever opportunities came his way. On at least one occasion, both children were to be heard performing for just half a crown (12p) at a tavern named the Swan and Hoop near the western end of Cornhill, in the heart of the City. Leopold Mozart advertised his son’s age at seven even though he was in fact eight at the time but even more remarkable is the fact that Mozart composed his first symphony at this age and whilst staying in London.

The Labour party conference closed today having been dominated by the row of the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowances and the rank hypocrisy exercised by some of the leading figures of the party, including the Prime Minister, as they accepted gifts from wealthy donors. Whether or not all of this is transparent and within the rules is completely besides the point as the ‘optics’ of members of the party accepting handouts whilst benefits are denied to old age pensioners just seems to scream of a lack of political common sense. But the Tory party conference will start shortly and I have always found this to be a lot more interesting. I think this is because one expects the Labour party to be rowing with each other and to be fractious but the Tories would always like to generate the impression of complete party unity. In fact, party unit is said to be the Tories secret weapon but post-Brexit all of this has broken down since the premierships of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. At this party conference, there will be four candidates for a new Leader of the Opposition strutting their stuff but there is to be a vote amongst the representatives (not delegates to a Tory party conference!) to whittle the four down to two and then these two names will be put to the constituency parties. The possibility remains, of course, that the successful candidate may appeal to the right wingers in the constituency parties but not command a majority of their own reduced number of MPs and this does not bode well for the future. Of course, the number of corporate sponsors and big business interests will shrink dramatically at this party conference as the Tories may well be out of power for 10 years and therefore not be in a position to hand out contracts and other largesse as they have done over the years. The big political question for the Tories is what kind of party they want to be and will they swing further to the right (which probably spells out further electoral oblivion) or will they tack to the centre ground which the Tory party has not done for some decades now? And of course most parties in opposition, and after heavy defeat, take the opportunity to have a rethink of their policies but I cannot really see this happening in the modern Conservative party which probably appeals at a more visceral rather than an intellectual level these days.

Yesterday, we woke up to a somewhat finer day and we were relieved that the huge band of rain that had swept over all of the country seems to have passed over. I was just getting washed half an hour before the carers were due to call when the doorbell rang and there was the manager of the care agency (who often puts himself on a shift) saying that they had changed the timing of the morning visit to half an hour earlier but had forgotten to inform us, and by the way could I act as No. 2 to the manager as a second care worker was not available. This kind of thing is par for the course these days and although initially somewhat exasperated, I get on well with the manager who is literally ‘hands on’ so I did not mind the opportunity to have a chat. Also he knows how to jolly Meg along first thing in the morning and a chat over care related issues is always worth while. We made our usual trip down to Waitrose in order to meet up with the grandiloquent granny gang.I took along with the lyrics of ‘Airn’t it grand to be blooming well dead’, a comic song first written in 1932, and we all had a good giggle with this. Our table was delighted to be the recipient of four bunches of roses (one per couple) as one of Waitrose partners who has responsibilities for looking after the ‘flowers’ section of the store donates bunches of blooms to us regulars rather than throwing them away which is always a much appreciated gesture. Having got back in plenty of time for our ‘sit’ carer, she failed to make an appearance. After a time, the normal lunchtime carer call was made and she had just about checked Meg over when the District Nurse turned up. She was visiting to administer our RSV vaccine to us, a new vaccine which is only being made available to people in their 70’s this year. This service is not available once you have passed the milestone of 80, the ostensible reason being that the original trials had so few people of 80+ acting as volunteers that they did have the data to vouch for its effectiveness. I have considerable doubts about this explanation but at least Meg and I came within the appropriate vaccination window and the effectiveness is claimed to be for at least two years or more. Then one of the carers left and a second carer turned up to perform the ‘sit’ service almost 30 minutes after the scheduled time. Evidently, the care firm is having its usual logistical problems with staff but some of these are probably due to the prevalence of zero hours contracts. I needed Meg to be ‘sat with’ for at least 30 minutes so that I could go into town and start the process of renewing my mobile phone contract. Needless to say, when I was short of time, all of the staff in the EE office were busy with other customers and I had to wait about 10 minutes before anyone was free to attend to me. I indicated that I was incredibly short of time but to cut a long story short, I was dealt with quite expeditiously and have ordered a new iPhone 16 (the last one having been sold this morning, which is surely Sod’s Law.) Although I cannot quite believe it, the new phone contract will work out cheaper than I am paying at the moment but I do not have the time to sort out what the snags might be. As it was, I spent a lot of time flipping through 11 pages of contract saying that I had read it, understood it and agreed with it but I imagine that I am only doing what most customers tend to do. The new phone will be delivered to the store and I will go down in a week’s time when I have another ‘sit’ session on a Tuesday to get the final handover from the old phone to the new. I was given the option of having the phone delivered to my home address but I feel happier with the store organising the changeover in case any problems should arise. The whole trip to town took 50 minutes rather than 30 I had anticipated so I abandoned the lunch that I had originally planned and made a quickie lunch based upon an Aldi thick soup so that we could eat fairly soon after my return. Then we watched the Keir Starmer first address to the Labour Party conference as party leader and this was workmanlike as you might have anticipated.

This afternoon, I had been saving as a treat the latest in the BBC2 series ‘Mozart: Rise of a Genius’ I had originally thought that there were only gong to be two episodes but consulting the BBC2 web pages, it indicates there is a third episode. Rather tantalisingly, it indicates that this is ‘Series 1’ which might imply that there are other series to follow. Although I am familiar with the main points of Mozart’s life, there are always new things that are learnt. In particular, I learned last night that ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ was considered so revolutionary (servants getting the better of their aristocratic masters) that it made some of the upper class audience of Vienna so uncomfortable that it was pulled after 9 performances to make way for another opera which was less threatening. Mozart conducted the first night and although the first night was well received, it was spoiled somewhat by some of Mozart’s rivals who were paid to boo and hiss and to generally disrupt the performance. But it was performed subsequently in Prague where I think it was much better received. It is generally regarded as one of the finest operas ever written and contains some hilarious scenes not to mention a certain amount of cross-dressing. For example, Cherubino an adolescent page boy, is generally sung by a mezzo soprano but in one scene is dressed in girl’s clothes to play a practical joke upon the Count.

It was a very dull and gloomy day when we woke up yesterday and after our thorough soaking of the day before, a day when we had to make difficult decisions whether to venture out and risk another soaking or stay confined indoors. Now that the vernal equinox is over, there is still a month to go before the clocks go back and the gloomy mornings do make it a little difficult to get oneself up and going in the morning. Nonetheless, we had both had a fairly good night’s sleep and after we had breakfasted, it was evident that the rain was going to be falling steadily so I made a lightning visit down to the supermarket just to collect our copy of ‘The Times‘. Whilst listening to Radio 4 in the background this morning, reference was made to the fact that the ex Defence secretary, Ben Wallace, was going to give evidence to the Afghan enquiry. The Afghan Inquiry is a British public inquiry that is investigating extra judicial killings by British special forces in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. The inquiry is examining night raids carried out by UK special forces, specifically known as Deliberate Detention Operations (DDOs). Intrigued by an enquiry of which I had never heard, I thought I would investigate how many public enquiries are taking place in the UK at the moment. I knew, of course, about the ongoing COVID enquiry and the last phase of the Post Office Enquiry is due to resume this Monday but when I consulted the internet, I discovered that there were no fewer than 17 enquiries taking place at the moment. Some of these are admittedly very small scale such as excess deaths in a Scottish hospital but I was amazed at the number. I think that in the UK that after a very public scandal we say that we must have an enquiry but the pressure must first build up for the enquiry to take place, then the enquiry itself might take a year or more and then there is a period of time in which the report has to be written up. After publication of the report, the Government indicates that it will either accept or ‘consider’ the recommendations. But the net effect of all of this is that when redress is sought and one thinks of the Hillsborough football disaster, the enquiry is so long after the event that nobody actually carries the can or is effectively punished. Some miscreants ought to end up behind bars (and one thinks of the lies told by the Post Office) but this never happens. In the case of the ‘Bloody Sunday’ enquiry, the inquiry was set up to establish a definitive version of the events of Sunday 30 January 1972 and was set up in 1998, reporting some 12 years later in 2010 at a cost of £21.6 million and with a report running to 5,000 pages. So the report was published some 38 years after the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ had taken place and evidently some of the key army personnel were either dead or retired. This was admittedly a long and expensive enquiry but it fits a pattern where the greater the scandal, the longer it takes to report upon it. In theory, the idea of a public enquiry is that ‘lessons must be learnt’ but by this stage, so much water has flowed under the bridge that any lessons cease to retain their relevance.

As it was such a dire day weather-wise, we decided to stay at home and have a nice quiet day. This was perhaps just as well because after the thorough soaking we received yesterday and then entertaining our friends yesterday afternoon, I think that Meg needed a little recovery time. She did seem somewhat sleepy this morning but gradually recovered as the day wore on. For lunch, we took the carcass of the chicken left over from yesterday’s meal and made a fricassee of it, together with some chicken gravy which we served on a small bed of rice and some petit pois. This was absolutely delicious and we enjoyed it tremendously. For our post lunch entertainments, I now consult the TV schedules for the night before and see what I can get on catch-up TV. The Politics programme of ‘Question Time‘ resumed last Thursday evening so we saw the re-run of this and then after this treated ourselves to a retrospective of the life and humour of Victoria Wood which is both entertaining and informative at the same time. I remember seeing Victoria Wood together with a neighbour in the De Montfort Hall in Leicester where she brought the house down. Here she sang ‘Let’s Do It – The Ballad of Barry & Freda’ which must be one of the finest comic songs of all time with some hilarious one liners in it. It is interesting to reflect that she admired the monologues of Alan Bennett and there is something both about the northern edge and self deprecation that runs throughout both of their work. She could also be deprecating about her Northern roots with a brilliant one liner from a TV announcer apologising to the people in the North of England with the acid comment ‘It must be awful for them’. And of course the ‘Two Soups’ sketch is still remembered by many of us of a certain age, even though it is making fun of an elderly deaf waitress.

The enquiry into Post Office ‘Horizon’ scandal resumes again today and just when we thought that all of the reported problems were just a part of history, we find in a report published today that some problems are continuing. The vast majority of sub-postmasters operating Post Offices (92%) reported ‘some form of issue’ with Horizon in the last year. More than half (57%) said they had experienced unexplained discrepancies, with 19% reporting unexplained transactions and 14% experiencing missing transactions. When resolving those discrepancies, more were dissatisfied (48%) than satisfied (19%). In the past, this has provided some quite compelling viewing and I wonder if the last phase of the enquiry will generate more eventual revelations. The thing that sticks in my mind when witnesses have to take the stand and to account for their past actions, how often even when confronted with the evidence (often in the form of an evidence trail facilitated by emails), witnesses have selective amnesia and suddenly find that they ‘cannot remember’ Some of this must be undoubtedly due to the passage of time but there must be multiple occasions when the inability to remember is just a convenient cover for their own shortcomings.

Yesterday being Sunday, we woke up just a tad early and were delighted that we both seem to have had a fairly restful night. I was pleased to say that I had enough time to have a shower and put the various preparations in place before the couple of carers called around at 8.00pm. Whilst Meg was watching the Politics programmes, I was preparing breakfast and so did not catch up with as much of the comment as I would have liked but then we got an extremely welcome phone call from our University of Birmingham friend to meet up for a coffee. We knew that the weather forecast was not very propitious but nonetheless took a chance on the weather and made our way in the spitting rain. I had taken with me, as I promised, some of the Civil Service Commission examination papers dating from about 1963 which I had taken and which eventually secured me a position in the Central of Information in London. Our friend was going to take these home and peruse them at his leisure and then try to infer whether standards had risen or fallen in the sixty years since they were first set before the intending applicants. On the way back home, though, the skies opened and Meg and I got absolutely drenched, practically to the skin. Fortunately the carers were there waiting for us upon our return and they themselves were a few minutes early so whilst they stripped Meg off and put her in dry clothing, I did the same for myself and we both hoped that exposure to a bit of a rain would not subject us to any deleterious consequences.

Yesterday afternoon, as we had our pre-planned, our Irish friends called around with a fully cooked meal for our enjoyment. We would normally entertain each other in our respective houses but now it is too difficult for Meg’s wheelchair to get over the threshhold of their front door so we decided that it would better if our friends came round to us and they very kindly suggested they would they us to a cooked meal. This worked out extremely well and we dined on a newly roasted chicken, mashed potato and broccoli. I had already bought some apple pies so we had this with ice-cream as our dessert. Our friends bought a bottle of Chilean Malbec with them so we enjoyed this as well as helping to finish off some of the Cava which I had left over from our wedding anniversary (but protected by a wine stopper) Then we repaired to our Music Lounge and I explained to our friends some of the various bits of furniture we had acquired since their last visit to our house. This included our latest captain’s chairs, the little two man sofa we acquired some months ago, the story behind the Flemish tapestry we acquired from the Worcestershire Association of Carers and culminating in the beautiful leather sofa which forms a beautifully intimate space where we could all sit and chat. I played them the Joan Baez track which had made such a profound impact on us only yesterday and then we caught up on all sorts of things including health matters relating to all of us, aspects of folk music and our mutual opinion of what we felt about the way in which the present Labour leadership is accepting gifts from wealth donors in which receiving the gifts, even if technically within the rules generates, the most terrible ‘optics’ for the Labour party and the kind of bad publicity which could easily have been avoided if only they had shown a little more temperance and self-restraint. But is this asking too much of the present generation of politicians? Our friend told us that Joan Baez had died soon after her last tour in which Meg and I had actually attended in Central Birmingham and I was dismayed by the news. Buy on consulting Wikipedia and its edit history, I discovered that as of two weeks ago, Joan Baez was still alive and aged 83. I am sure that when she does die, the event is bound to attract at least some attention from today’s media. We enjoyed each other other’s company so much this afternoon and hope to be able to repeat it more often. Our friends commented how the new hair style that our regular hairdresser had given Meg suits her down to the ground and makes her look years younger – if only!

I suppose that I ought to feel fairly happy that Kamala Harris is leading Donald Trump by about 3% in the opinion polls. But there is a massive snag about this lead because it could be that Harris is piling up more votes in places that will not necessarily swing the election. In the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, a popular epithet was ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ – in other words all other issues fall into insignificance compared with how well off people are, or rather feel themselves to be. Trump is trusted more than Harris on the economy, probably because he has sold the idea that he is a ‘successful businessman’ who therefore ought to understand how the economy works. Harris is closing the gap on the economy but there is a lot of convincing to do. Although some of the economic indicators such as inflation are heading in the Democrat’s direction, Americans in the mass do not feel better off. In other words, after years of sharply rising prices (a box of eggs costing two and a half times more than they did five years ago as what was $2 is now $5) So an interesting paradox occurs at this point which is that it is perception of one’s standards of living whatever economists say which becomes the crucial political fact. So the sad fact remains that unless Harris is able to convince voters of her economic credentials, the presidency seems to be heading Trump’s way. But there are some interesting things that sharp followers of the American elections might look out for. Pennsylvania is said to be a key battleground with the parties practically level and Harris might not gain it. But North Carolina which has consistent but small Republican majorities may be heading the Democrats way thanks to the resurgence of the black vote in the rapidly expanding suburbs of that state and so capturing this state could carry the election for Harris. Some analysts are of this view that the race to win North Carolina is the tightest of the whole contest and winning this state might prove to be critical.

Yesterday, Saturday, did not start off particularly well. Meg had been very restless after she had been put to bed the evening beforehand and did not properly get off to sleep until nearly three hours later at about 10.15. She needs a fair amount of supervision when she is in this restless state as she throws off her bedclothes and I have to restore a semblance of order. Consequently, we were somewhat tired this morning and got up an hour later than we normally do and after this restless night, there was a fair amount of attention that Meg needed. The two carers though, were very good and I was relieved to see them as they took over at 8.00am. Today we make one of our bi-weekly trips down to Waitrose where we meet up with the ‘granny gang’ as I call our little gathering but I also take the opportunity to get one or two things from the store when I buy only some of the things that I know the store sells. On one occasion when I saw a male employee checking the stock on the shelves with his hand-held computer and asked him if they still sold ‘Extract of Unicorn Hoof Oil essence” because they used to stock it in their section on exotic goods in a little brown bottle. Half way through searching the database for the product, which he thought he remembered, his brain registered the fact that unicorns do not exist, then neither does ‘Extract of Unicorn Hoof Oil essence’ and so he stopped his search forthwith.

After we had lunched, I consulted yesterday’s TV schedules to see if there was anything good that we might have missed that we could view on catch-up TV. There was an historic ‘Peter, Paul and Mary’ broadcast (mainly 60’s and 70’s folk group) and although this was tolerable, it was not absolutely to Meg’s taste. So whilst on the i-player.I did a search for our favourite folk singer, Joan Baez and found an early 60’s concert that she had played to a British audience. The track of ‘Plaisir d’Amour’ was so poignant it actually brought tears to my eyes. But thinking about a British audience and, no doubt, their dark sense of humour, Jan Baez sang the old folk-singing standby of ‘Airn’t it Grand to be Blooming well dead’ I thought I would run off the lyrics to this and relay it the ‘grandiloquent granny gang’ when next we meet on Tuesday next. The i-player then went on to play a concert by Pete Seeger and this was interesting as there was a radical slant to each of his songs. He explained, between tracks, that folk music was not meant to be played in concert halls but was music ‘that had never gone away’ and so often reflected the tribulations and the concerns of the underclass and underprivileged in American society. Afterwards, we decided to search YouTube for a Joan Baez concert and found one recorded in London in 19655. This was doubly interesting because the audience members looked like Meg and I when we first met in 1965 and there was a preponderance of sweaters, hair parted down the middle like Joan Baez (and Meg herself) and ‘designer clothes’ were a thing of the future. One of the tracks from this is such a powerful statement of liberal values (‘There but for fortune – go you or I’) that I noted its position in the track of the concert and then played it to the two young carers who give Meg her tea time call. I would normally do this but these two young people get on exceptionally well with Meg and myself and are have a very sympathetic nature so I thought they would appreciate the sentiments. Needless to say, they are never heard anything like it with Joan Baez’s amazingly clear diction and emotional import so the two of them sat on our new settee absolutely transfixed as I hope that they would be. After this tea time call, we often to see what YouTube available on our FireStick in the main lounge has to offer – and sometimes we vacillate between comedy such as ‘Yes Minister’ or an orchestral concert of which there are many. But whilst we were in the mood for Jan Baez’s music I did a search for Violetta Parra (an outstanding Chilean folk singer) who performed an exquisite rendition of ‘Gracias a la Vida’ (‘Thank you for life’) after which she committed suicide by firing a pistol into her skull. We also searched for Mercedes Sosa who perhaps has an even finer voice and rendition of ‘Gracias por la Vida’ than either Joan Baez or Violetta Parra. Then we were amazed to find a crossover concert which Sosa and Pavarotti had recorded together and their songs were full, as you might imagine, of Latin passion and emotion. We finished off the day by watching a gala performance in front of invited celebrities of Dame Edna Everage which really was tremendously witty and amusing. The most amusing parts of the Barry Humphries routines were when he played the part of ‘Sir Les Patterson’ the Australian Cultural Attache. By Humphries’ own account, the character of Patterson first appeared in a one-man show that he performed at the St. George leagues club in Sydney in January 1974. Appearing in the guise of the boorish, loud-mouthed and uncultured Patterson, Humphries claimed to be that club’s own entertainments officer as he introduced the next act, Dame Edna Everage. As Humphries recalled, ‘I understood later that many members of the audience thought Les was genuinely a club official, which says a lot for his charm and sincerity’

It looks as though the whole notion of accepting hospitality donations for one’s own clothing is starting to hit home with the PM, Keir Starmer. As the political class are wont to say ‘the optics of this are terrible’ and this is now reluctantly recognised. Sky News reports today that Ministers now acknowledge that the past few days have seen constant distraction, whether about free clothes, gifted football hospitality and how Downing Street itself is operating. Criticism of Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to take £16,000 of clothes from a Labour donor, and donations for his wife’s wardrobe, has been raging in the newspapers. After digging in for days to defend it, the leader’s team bowed to pressure, announcing that neither the prime minister, nor his deputy Angela Rayner or chancellor Rachel Reeves – both also revealed to have taken donations for clothes – will do so in future.

Yesterday, Friday, was a rather gloomy day and when the mornings are so much darker, it is a little bit more difficult to rouse ourselves first thing in the morning. But after the two cheerful carers had called and got Meg up, washed and dressed and then we had some breakfast, I hit the phone to get onto our doctors to book a flu vaccination appointment. I have been receiving text messages from our local surgery regarding vaccinations and when I telephoned them at 9.30 I was amazed to discover that I was No. 1 in the queue which makes a change. I booked both Meg and myself in for both the new RSV vaccine as well as the regular flu jab. For a reason best known to itself, the Government is making the RSV virus available to all of the population aged 75-79 and Meg and I come into this category. I wondered why the 80 plus group were not being offered the vaccination and discovered this. The over-80s are under-represented in medical research and so part of the issue is reluctance of over-80s to volunteer for the trials. Often they are less likely to be eligible to volunteer or the trial may be designed in a way that’s harder for an older person to take part. So there is limited data on the effectiveness of the new RSV virus on the over 80’s but also there is some research evidence that it benefits 75 years olds much more than 60 year olds. This sounds suspiciously like a cost saving exercise and makes one wonder whether the government would not mind excess deaths from whatever cause in the 80+ age groups as this will relieve pressures on the Health Service. Mid morning, we received a visit of the Eucharistic minister from our local parish church who we have not seen for a week or so now. Afterwards, we made our way into town, picked up a copy of our newspaper and then paid a by now traditional visit to ‘The Lemon Tree‘ cafe where we treated ourselves to the Friday bacon sandwich. Then we rather had to rush up the hill, no mean feat, to ensure that we got back in time for the late morning call which we did by the skin of our teeth. Just after we had breakfasted I received a text from EE, our phone provider that my two yearly contract was expiring that day. Eventually, I managed to speak with a human (which is quite rare these days) in order to secure continuity of our contract. As it happens, we have historic contracts for our broadband with BT and for our mobile phone with EE. Now BT has taken over EE so over the phone I was offered a new combined deal which looks on the surface somewhat better than our two combined bills and has Netflix and AppleTV thrown in as part of the deal but I am not sure how this will work with our existing FireStick but we shall see. I must admit that this morning I was more concerned to have absolute continuity of supply and this seems to be the case and I am hopeful that I should be able to go down to the EE shop in town next Tuesday (when I have a ‘sit’ service for Meg) where I may be be able to discuss the upgrade of my iPhone which is now two years old at a fairly minimal cost.

A couple of days ago, I received a communication from the Government to participate in the Family Resources Survey. This entails making ourselves available for an interviewer to call round to the house and to ask us both questions about all kinds of things I would imagine and as a token of appreciation for our efforts, we have been a voucher of £10.00 to cash at the Post Office. I happen to believe that surveys of this type are important for the government to get more comprehensive pictures of how families actually do live so we are happy to participate. I need, though, to make some phone calls to get all of this activated. Upon our return home, we received a really pleasant surprise. Our Irish friends who have just returned from holiday have invited us for a Sunday lunch and we have a lot to catch up between us. As it is difficult for Meg to travel, our friends are going to call round to our house and are going to be bringing a Sunday lunch with them so this is an occasion to which we can look forward with a great deal of pleasure. After our Friday lunch of a fish pie, Meg and I wondered if there were any decent films on the TV and were rewarded with a showing of ‘Born Free’. This is a 1966 British drama film starring the real-life couple Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers as Joy and George Adamson, another real-life couple, who raised Elsa the Lioness, an orphaned lion cub, to adulthood. The theme music from this film is very well known and we are enjoying the film but with an idea that it all might end in tears at the very end. The young lioness, Elsa, matured into a fully grown animal and then it was realised that she would eventually have to be released to fend for herself. But the emotional tension comes in the film when the Adamsons come to realise that a hand-reared lioness has no hunting skills and would probably perish in the wild from other predators. After several not very successful attempts to ‘re-wild’ Elsa, the Adamsons eventually succeed in then go off on a holiday. Upon their return, they return to camp near the point where they had released Elsa but there was no trace of her so, sadly, they are starting to make tracks for home. Just at the point of maximum despair, they fire a rifle shot in the air and Elsa hears this and reappears together with a litter of her own cubs. They then spend a very joyful afternoon in each other’s company before Elsa and her cubs return to the wild as they are ‘Born Free’. So this was a very emotionally compelling film and a nice way to spend a Friday afternoon.

Yesterday, Thursday, is my shopping day so I needed to remember to buy cat food without which, Miggles our adopted cat would be left bereft. I find that as a male cat he has rapidly transferred his affections towards the young female carers one of whom, at least, is a ‘cat’ person and showers him with affection. Whilst on the subject of being showered with affection, I remember well when we used to visit Almuñécar, a small town on the coast of Spain east of Malaga. Here Meg and I got off the beaten track and discovered a little coffee bar where they happened to serve some hot chocolate which I think was some of the finest to be had in Spain. The little coffee bar was stuffed full of locals, practically all female, and a six month male baby was being passed around from one neighbour to another. The child had a beatific look on his face as well he might as he was passed from loving bosom to loving bosom. An elderly gentleman was leaning against the bar and I asked him, in Spanish, if he was the father of the child. The answer, as I expected, was that he was not so I asked him to whom the child belonged and got the most wonderful response that this ‘child belonged to all the world’ This puts me in mind of the wonderful expression originating I believe in India that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ We had hints of this when we lived in Hampshire. We had to buy a house in a hurry and bought one in a Close in the district of Hedge End. Living in the Close were several children from the age of 4 to about 10 and they all played together much of it on their bikes and in and out of each other’s houses. The various mothers took care of whatever child happened to be around and put an elastoplast on them if they fell off their bike, for example. When it came to the Millenium celebrations, we closed off the Close with some strategically relocated traffic cones and then utilised a little green area the developers had provided nearby. Here we set up our Millenium party with lots of garden chairs and trestle tables. The mothers provided the face painting for the children whilst the men used their car batteries and extension cables to provide us with some music. We all bought supplies of beer, wine and ‘street food’ to eat in our hands and the communal atmosphere was wonderful to experience. Having said that, the children grew up, went to university and moved away and the whole communal atmosphere faded. Meg and I acted as surrogate grandparents for a couple of children whose father was a doctor and mother was a midwife and who lived about two or three doors away. Again, these children were in our house quite a lot and we enjoyed their company tremendously. When we came to leave, there was much crying and heaving of shoulders as the young children, on their way to school, had to say goodbye to us and in fact the whole departure process was incredibly emotion filled.

After lunch, we had our normal monthly session with the chiropodist who calls around once a month and then settled down to complete our viewing of the Trump ‘Heist’ programme which was quite an eye opener. I do not suppose it takes very long for disillusionment with the current government to set in. Today it has been revealed by the Sky News Westminster Accounts project, which tracks the flows of money through the political system, that since December, 2019 Keir Starmer has received more than £107,000 in freebies ranging from invitations to top flight sporting events and, of course, the donations for his wife’s clothing which hit the headlines recently. What is so disappointing about all of this is that on Day One of his premiership, Keir Starmer could have set the tone and declared that the slightest whiff of scandal or indeed impropriety would result in instant removal of the miscreants from their post. Instead, by accepting all of these gifts which is two and a half times the amount claimed by the next highest recipient, a terrible impression is created and some Labour MPs are already expressing their unhappiness. Sir Keir ignored warnings from some in his senior team that the issue of freebies could cause him political damage while in opposition. Senior Labour figures are incandescent that the story about freebies for the Starmer family has dragged on for days, and ministers going out with different and often contradictory explanations. Firstly, I think it was Harold Wilson who said that the Labour party had to be a moral crusade or it was nothing and accepting these huge amounts of money looks as though the leader of the Labour Party is in office for his personal gain. There was a golden opportunity to draw a line under the undoubted sleaze of past Conservative governments (particularly the Johnson government) and this has been missed. It also feeds into the dual narrative that all politicians are just in the game for their own personal profit and also that they ‘are all the same’ Accepting money from the football industry is particularly dangerous as the government is seeking to exert a degree of control over it. There is also a strong case that the PM and his spouse should receive a personal clothing allowance given their public appearances instead of having to rely upon a wealthy donor. Other societies seem to manage these affairs reasonably well but accepting a clothing allowance from a wealthy donor does not go down well in this era of people being forced by necessity to shop in charity shops for their own clothing. It looks as though the government could do with much sharper political antennae to ensure that issues like this do not arise. Keir Starmer could have put the issue to bed much more easily by clarifying what is necessary for the performance of one’s role (and clothing comes into this category) and that which he should personally pay out of his own pocket. Senior figures in the Labour Party such as Harriet Harman are already expressing their disquiet and going on the airways to imply that Starmer should have realised the political damage and sought a solution much earlier.

Yesterday was the day when our domestic help calls around and her arrival is always greeted warmly, needless to say, with a steaming great mug of tea. She and I are both devotees of charity shops and we have to restrain ourselves from over-impulsive purchases although there are occasions when we succumb to temptation. I had asked our help to look out for some napkins which she did happen to see in one of her visits so these were gracefully received. In return, I had organised the delivery of a plate glass kitchen surface protector because we had just replaced one of ours which had cracked but I managed to secure an identical one. The day was a very gloomy one but no rain was forecast so Meg and I made a trip down to collect our newspaper and some bread but did not tarry in the park, preferring to get home and have our elevenses at home this morning. Some months ago, I had got into the habit of cooking a risotto once a week but have got out of the habit. But yesterday, I decided to cook a risotto for us, and we find that some smoked mackerel fillets makes for a wonderful meal. We always tend to cook a little too much but our domestic help absolutely loves our risotto so I am more than happy for her to have an overflow portion of this which she can heat up for a quick lunch whilst she is dashing between jobs. We actually did make rather too much for our own needs so I was delighted to send off our domestic with some home cooked goodies. On our journey down into town, we were delighted to bump into our Irish friend who we have not seen for over a couple of weeks now. She explained that they had both been away in Ireland on a family holiday which does explain why they were not at home when I hand delivered an anniversary card to them as I knew that their wedding anniversary was within a week or so of our own. We exchanged some rapid news about the health of our respective partners and promised that we would meet up when we could in the next few days when we could exchange a lot more news with each other. After we returned home, it was time for the late morning call from Meg’s carers and actually we were a few minutes late in our walk back. In mitigation, although we do have a spreadsheet detailing the times of the visits and the names of the carers, this tends to change on a daily or even an hourly basis as little crisis events occur that have to be managed. A case in point was one of the carers for Meg who should have turned up yesterday but did not. We got a message that she had been involved in a near-miss motoring accident and was quite badly shocked by the incident and unable to work. Naturally, when she turned up today I was sympathetic and made her a cup of sweet tea which she was initially loathe to accept, indicating that she did not really have the time. Anyway I insisted that she have some tea and I explained to her not to be alarmed if she experienced a ‘delayed shock’ syndrome as this can occur some 24-48 hours after the initial incident had occurred. She had not heard of delayed shock so I tried to reassure her that if she did experience some symptoms in the next day or so, they would be transient and would pass. Lots of rest and hot, sweet tea is probably beneficial as well. So the question is raised ‘Who cares for the carers?’ One could extend this ad infinitum saying ‘Who cares for the carers of the carers’ and so on in an ever-widening circle. Still on the subject of carers, when our carer called this afternoon, he recounted to us rather a sorry tale of woe as he had apparently been subject to an assault by a near neighbour, recently discharged from prison, of a relative. The lad was not seriously hurt but his nose might require a bit of further attention from the medics to straighten the cartilage a little. I asked him if he had been to the police but reckoned that things might be worse for his relatives if the aggressive neighbour decided to take reprisals against the rest of the family. I was very sympathetic but could not offer any real advice in this difficult scenario.

Late on this afternoon, we started watching with a fascinating horror the first half of a documentary on Channel 4 entitled ‘Trump’s Heist: The President Who Wouldn’t Lose‘ Evidently, the whole documentary is an expose of the machinations of Trump to attempt to prove the last election was ‘stolen’ from him. What was the extraordinary was the number of close aides and former Trump supporters who became increasingly worried and disillusioned by the behaviour of the former President. I shall leave the second half of the two part series to an afternoon viewing with Meg but it is rather compulsive viewing. What is perhaps so surprising to us on this side of the Atlantic is the way in which the Republican party had completely ‘hitched its wagon’ to the Trump star and are quite willing to give him their support.

I was intrigued by a story I read in the Huffington Post but which has not found its way into the UK media as yet. The impact on UK businesses from Brexit’s red tape is only getting worse as time goes on, a new report has found. According to Aston University Business School, the value of UK goods exported to the UK was 27% lower – and imported goods 32% lower – compared to what the economy may have looked like if Brexit had not happened. Leaving the single market officially in January 2021 has had a ‘profound and ongoing’ impact on Britain’s trade with the EU, according to the economists’ modelling. The variety of exported goods has also declined, with 1,645 fewer types of British products sent to every EU country and many manufacturers no longer sending their produce to the bloc. Trade with smaller states further from the UK have been most impacted, the authors found. Workers in farming, clothing, wood and paper manufacture have particularly struggled with the post-Brexit red tape, as they grapple with the new time-consuming safety checks and extra labelling requirements. In fact, annual exports to the EU are now 17% lower while imports are 23% lower than they would have been if the UK had not left the EU. The report also suggested the impact is only getting more severe as time goes on, rather than levelling out, as the authors spotted a ‘noticeable worsening of EU-UK trade’ in the last year. So although none of this is a real surprise to many of us, I do not think that the deleterious effects of Brexit worsening over time is really fully appreciated by any of the political class.