This has been a very interesting couple of days for a variety of reasons but first things first. Whilst we were in Worcester yesterday, we took the opportunity to pick up another late Victorian captain’s chair, very similar but not identical in style to the one we picked up in Birmingham just before Christmas. This latest chair will complememt beautifully the one bought earlier and although evidently not from the same ‘stable’, the two of them form an interesting pair in our hall. I had negotiated a special price about three quarters of the price I paid for the first one as this exemplar had a little flaw in a decorative band that runs around under the main back of the chair and has straight, rather than turned legs. Nonetheless, the seller (who was raising funds for his ‘Men in their Sheds’ project) accepted my offer and his address was very easy to find but it was just around the corner from an acupuncturist that Meg used to frequent in Worcester whn we first moved here sixteen years ago. Once I got it home, I gave the chair the ‘grade 0000 steel wool and beeswax’ treatment which should gave the chair a patina that lasts for several years. I have put a couple of matching cushions on it that I just happened to buy the other day and they make the whole ensemble in our hallway very attractive in my opinion) But as well as this purchase, another parcel arrived to which I had been looking forward for several days. I am evidently on the email list of a firm that specialises in reconditioned laptops and, several days ago, I received an offer which I felt I could not resist as it was a ThinkPad machine with a pretty modern processor, a 500GB hard disk and 8MB of ram, complete with Windows 11. Last night, after Meg was in bed, I decided to just open up the parcel I had received during the day with the intention of just unpacking it and then plugging it in to make sure it was not DOA (dead on arrival) Upon unpacking it, I thought that the model and screen size was larger than the one I had ordered and indeed, I had been supplied with a different but markedly superior model to the one that I ordered and paid for. (I wonder of the supplier had run out of the model which he had advertised and had one of these machines available and thought that his customer would not object to a superior model) So I have finished up with a laptop built by Lenova to IBM standatds and officially classed as a ‘workstation’, which I can well understand as it was pretty heavy and I would not like to lug it around very much on a train or what have you. The new model has a superior processor clocked at a higher speed (an ‘i7’ rather than an ‘i5’ for the cognoscenti), Windows 11 Professional and the MicroSoft 365 suite of applications. As you might imagine, one thing led to another – after switching it on, the first thing that Windows 11 demanded was the password to link in with our router and I managed to get this installed at the second attempt. You then needed to uilise a MicroSoft account but I had a copy of Outlook credentials installed on my main system so these had to be resurrected, complete with passwords. Then, of course, I had a mouse to install instead of using the inbuilt trackpad but this proved to be relativey simple. So what started off as a simple little session ended up as being up for about an hour and half later than I would have normally have gone to bed whilst I played about with a new toy. I had already got the two utilities I am using the most (a text editor for which I had paid a subscription years ago and which the Swiss form involved supplied me with a brand new and up-to-date copy once I had interrogated my email program and found an order number from years ago, and also my favourite FTP transfer program.) So there is quite a big learning curve for me as Windows 11 has an entirely different interface and user experience from the Windows 7 on my previous ThinkPad and I suspect that I am going to need the faster processor and CPU power given the increased functionality bundled within Windows 11)

Today, we decided to do our weekly shopping when the Thursday carer had called around so I did a lightning tour around the big Aldi store in the centre of town, thinking it was going to be quite a light week but nonetheless doing something like a normal week’s shop. After we had got this unpacked, it was getting quite late so we made do with a light lunch of mushromms and ham on toast (which we found delicious and enjoyed greatly). In the afternoon, Meg and I decided to watch ‘Schindler’s List‘ which was first broadcast on BBC2 a couple of nights ago and was transmitted in anticipation of World Holocaust day which is tomorrow, Friday. Meg and I watched this with a combination of fascination and horror and whilst we were both generally broadly aware of the Schindler’s List story line, there were nonetheless some dramatic scenes to add twists to the story. Meg was able to concentrate upon this for the whole of the afternoon and it was one of those films where it was difficult to tear oneself away.

Today the pair of carers turned up for Meg very promptly and we had scarcely woken up before it was time for their ministrations. They are always so cheerful despite having to dash from pillar to post every morning and we were commiserating over a colleague who had just crashed and written off her car which she was going to have to replace. Carers are probaly only paid the minimum wage so to have one’s car written off when it is essentiual for you to get from job to job must be a trouble indeed. After we had breakfasted and digested some of the day’s news, we set out on the road both to collect our newspaper (our regular newsagent not quite having got his act together with the new owners taking over) and to fill the car up with petrol. You would have thought this was easy but most of the pumps that allowed easy access to the fuel tank opening on the passenger’s side seemed unaccountably to be out of action. But we got filled up after a certain amount of waiting around and then made for the Methodist Centre for our mid morning cup of coffee and teacakes. Once inside, we were greeted warmly by someone we know well from our own church and for whom it just happened to be their rostered day serving the tea and coffee. Then we saw our 90-year old friend that we helped in a minor way to celebrate her birthday on Friday last and another opportunity for a good chat. We also got into conversations with a gentleman who had been recruited into the Army Apprentices Corps which was based in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. As residents of Harrogate, we got used to seeing waves of young 16-17 year recruits turn up at the railway sation and then be whipped away to their barracks elsewhere in the town. We wondered whether we might have passed each other in the street before we ever knew each other. The Methodist cafe was particularly full today because in an adjacent hall there is a type of ‘Balance and Keep Fit’ session organised in several classes on a Wednesday morning and we just happened to coincide with a period where one class ended and the other was about to start, so this always ceates a crowd at change-over time. Meg and I left before 12.00pm which meant that we get home in time for ‘Questions to the Prime Minister’, which is, of course, the usual knockabout and over-rehearsed stuff. But a senior Conservative has come out into the open and publically criticised Rishi Sunak’s leadership, arguing that the Conservative party is facing a meltdown in the general election which surely must come some time this year. The Conservative party really is in panic mode right now and althouugh no other MPs were ready to thrust their heads above the parapet and argue that Rishi Sunak should be replaced, it is rumoured that quite a lot of Tory MPs privately feel that both they and the party as a whole are doomed.

This afternoon, we made a lighning visit into Worcester to pick up a parcel and found the distance both closer than we thought and the whole journey comparatively easy. But we had to endure roadworks at both end of our journey in both Worcester and Bromsgrove which adds to the length of the journey. But having made our trip it was good to get back in plenty of time for the wheely bins to be wheeled to the end of our drive. This is a weekly job which I must prefer doing in the daylight whilst I can. This afternoon, we accessed YouTube and watched a concert put on initially by a Dutch group called ‘Voces8’ They specialise in baroque choral pieces but they also are strong on modern master pieces by Faure, which tends to start off the concert. When we access YouTube, we tend to start off with Faure’s ‘Cantiques de Jean Racine’ but the YouTube algorithm chooses a slightly different selection of works each day, which suits us greatly. This afternoon, for example, we found ourselves listening to some of the choruses from J S Bach’s Matthew Passion, which we greatly enjoyed.

The news has come through today that the Royal Mail service is under investigation to determine its future role and funding. The backdrop to this story is that the Royal Mail is losing money and the number of letters has dropped significantly from about 14 million items a day to about 7 million. Evidently, people are using email and a variety of social media so it is not surprising that with its business halving, the letters part of Royal Mail is now in a dire state. One suggestion is that to balance the books, it may be necessary to move to three deliveries a week. But nothing much is likely to happen in the very short term because the major recipient of postal services are the elderly and the thought of offending this key part of the electorate before an election in the UK is anathema. But any new government will have to take some very unpalatable decisions – as first class stamps now cost about £1.25 the scope for further price rises may well be limited. Meg and I are both part of the generation where we worked on the Christmas post in a variety of locations – Meg in Staffordshire and I worked in Harrogate, Leeds and also Manchester delivering the post. I have vivid memories of bacon butties being cooked on a shiny steel shovel over a brazier in a sorting office in Leeds in 1966. But these opportunities were denied to students when preference was given to the unemployed and now the number of extra staff taken on by the Post Office at Christmas time must be very small.

Today being a Tuesday, it is my Pilates day if everything works out all right. So Meg and I got upselves up, washed, and breakfasted catching up with some of the news on the Sky News channel. We left in plenty of time for our Waitrose visit but first made a trip to an ATM to get out some weekly cash. Visits to an ATM are a bit more problematic these days because there is no free parking immediately adjacent to one unless we make a trip to the Morrison’s supermarket on the far side of the town. But we collected our money and then treated ourselves to coffee and a snack in the Waitrose cafeteria, meeting one of our usual number who has recently been bereaved. We swapped stories about the sequelae that follows the death of a near relative such as getting multiple copies of a death certificate and then engaging with the various agencies such as banks, building societies and government ministries to get everything regularised. I can remember on the death of Meg’s father, I went along to register the death and got into the office of the local registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths. Having run off a death certificate, she asked me if I would like more some more and I blithely replied about six which the registrar than ran these off at a touch of a button and asked for for £7.00 for each one. I gather the death certificate is a lot more than this now but it seemed to be a very easy way for the registrar to make some money for a cash-strapped local authority. My only other details of a dealing with a registrar was when Meg and I were Census enumerators for the 1971 census. As social science students, we had knowledge of the census as well as research methods and we were briefed by Manchester’s chief registrar. We asked him if he had ever recognised anybody coming before him as having been married before. He was certain he had recognised the person in front of him on a few occasions but in the absence of any definite proof of bigamy, he just had to go ahead with the proceedings with the people in front of him. The 1971 Census was interesting to administer because in my patch, I got both the retired professor of surgery who had performed a minor operation on my neck in 1967 (but missed the lump he should have been taking out by at least an inch and told me to ignore it for the rest of my life – which I did.) I also enumerated a mosque which had taken over an old Anglican church and I didn’t know that the inhabitants were there then until the last moment and then they invited me in for a meal. I also had in my patch a hippie commune who were very reluctant to put down all of these ‘Head of Household’ nonsense (as they saw it) but instead I successfully negotiated with them that the members of the commune all put themselves on the census form describing each other as ‘co-spouse’ of each other. What the census coding authorities made of all of this, I will never know but in our briefing, it was acknowledged that at times we would run into tricky situations and under these circumstances, we were enjoined to get as much useful data as we possibly could on the grounds that some information from an address would be better than none at all. Meg and I quite enjoyed our period as Census enumerators and with the proceeds bought a souped up Ford Anglia, painted in BRG (British racing green) and with wide wheels/types. This vehicle cost us £150.00 and after we had successfully house hunted in Leicester (at quite a distance from Manchester), we sold it about six to nine months later for £125.00. It really was the most enjoyable little car and Meg and I have very fond memories of it.

My Pilates session session went OK and I left Meg in the care of a Peruvian care assistant whilst I attended my session. Upon my return, we made our normal Tuesday lunch of fish cakes and microwaved vegetables and then settled down to watch a D H Lawrence film of ‘The Virgin and the Gypsy‘ This moved at the most glacial pace and had themes that can be found in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Women in Love and Sons and Mothers. We broke off before seeing the film to its conclusion to have out afternoon repast and whether she shall resume it tomorrow or not is an open question.

The Post Office scandal investigation rumbles on. Tody, there was further examination of the investigators who were charged with examining the deficits that appeared in the sub postmaster’s account with the Post Office. It looked as though at least some of these investigators looked in various parts of the house to try to find the ‘missng’ money and, needless to say, in no case were they successful. One investigator was a witness today and when asked whether or not they had found any of the money would not answer the question. Several of the sub postmasters have died with the presumption of guilt still hanging over them. The general response of the investigators is that they were just ‘following orders’ but one has to ask why the middle managers in the Post Office never asked their investigators to track down what had happened to the so-called stolen money.

This morning we were expecting our normal couple of carers just after 8.00am but only one turned up and the other, probably delayed by horrendous traffic jams, we did not see at all. So I got Meg ready practically single handed and then we went to have breakfast. We knew that we had a few things to sort out on the Bromsgrove High Street, the principal of which was to hand in a bundle of clothes for which Meg no longer has a use and was going to find its way into the Cancer Research charity shop. We popped into a few of the charity shops that are adjacent to each other at that end of the High Street and finished off buying some cushions, a pair of which are almost an exact match for the new leather armchair I had acquired just before Christmas and were too good to miss. As we popped into and out of various shops with Meg in her wheelchair, we found that people were incredibly friendly and accommodating, holding doors open for us and generally being as helpful as they could be. I reflected upon the ‘kindness of strangers’ upon which I do not rely but always fully appreciate when it occurs. I also bought a couple of little brass owls which, after a Brasso treatment, now sit alongside the brass owl which sit on our front shelf and could almost be her chicks – the styles happen to be incredibly similar. We are always pleased to get back in time to watch the ‘Politics Today‘ program on BBC2 at midday and were interested in seeing a journalist, I think from ‘Private Eye‘, absolutely making mincemeat of his opponents. I cooked a dinner in which I was augmenting some sprouts (laced with a little syrup in the cooking water to reduce/eliminate a sprouty smell around the kitchen) with some packet chestnuts I happened to see in the supermarket the other day which went with yesterday’s mince and onions and a baked potato. Meg often says that I make her portions too large, which I probably do, but then she promptly eats it all up which must be a good thing. Last night, I made Meg and I a Spanish omelette with onions, peppers and a little garlic served on slices of butttered toast and it was delicious. It was a dish simple enough to prepare but I have not done it for quite some time and I might try it as a main course midday meal sometime, served with a baked potato and perhaps a little salad.

This afternoon, we finished off watching the final part of ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles‘ which was poignant, but also a little disappointing. This is because the film ended rather abruptly with the arrest of Tess at Stonehenge and did not include some of the final scenes which I remember well from the novel I read a few years ago. We had just about got ourselves ready, after our afternoon cup of tea and biscuits, to watch a D H Lawrence film on Prime video when our chiropodist called around, as planned. Although I had got the appointment on our planning board, I had momentarily forgotten she was due to call around this afternoon but, of course, she is always welome. This week we have hardly any appointments on our weekly schedule so nothing to disturb our equilibrium. Last night, though, we could hear the winds and the storms raging over most of the country and the winds actually reached 99mph in a Scottish location. Although there are no power cuts in our part of the world, I am sure that falling trees and garage roofs that are blown away may well be resenting all kinds of hazard in various parts of the county. No sooner do we get over the aftermath of one of these storms but another seems to be hard on its heels, all propelled across the Atlantic by a jet stream in the high atmosphere which seems to be the source of these succession of storms.

After Donald Trump’s success in Iowa,many political pundits are trying to understand his appeal, despite the numerous potential convictions hanging over him. Much of the analysis revolves around the nation that ‘Trump is a businessman who puts America first and will make America ‘great again’ So the belief in a ‘strong man’ is not too far away from the motivations that lead people to adore fascist leadets such as Hitler and Mussolini and makes one wonder whether the roots of democracy in the US are exceptionally shallow. Many liberals are of the view that having got the Supreme Court packed with his own nominees, a newly elected President Trump may bypass Congress and rule by presidential order (or ‘presidential decree’). All of this is going to prove extremely problematic for democratic leaders in Europe of whatever political party. One cannot ignore the fact that Trump may well have been re-elected but there are a host of practical problems, not least in the operation of Nato and the war in Ukraine which is going to make complete cooperation with the US very difficult. But those with long political memories may recall that Harold Wilson maintained reasonable relationships with the Americans whilst not getting involved in any show of support for the Vietnam war, which proved to be a quagmire for the Americans in the long run. And there are some analysts that are saying that ‘sensible’ Americans will still collaborate in matters such as security and intelligence sharing whatever the inclinations of the actual president in office.

Today we enter our normal Sunday morning routine which means getting us both up, washed and dressed and sitting down in front of the Lorna Kuenssberg show at 9.00am. This morning was one of the first through which I have not actually dozed through and the big political interview this morning was with Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, who was explaining to us the threat that Russia is offering not only to the Ukraine but the rest of Europe as well. Once this had concluded, we were contemplating a visit down to Waitrose when our University of Birmingham friend phoned up inviting us down for a coffee later on in the morning. Our friend and I got into one of our usual conversations (how degrees were classified, the various problems we had faced in the examinations process) and perhaps we had been talking quite loudly and excitedly but our conversation was overheard. Eventually we were joined by a person who was a fellow academic, had worked in the Open University Business School and also, for several years, at the CNAA (Council for National Academic Awards). Before the polytechics had their own degree awarding powers and eventually became part of the generation of ‘new’ or ‘modern’ universities, the CNAA was the body that awarded degrees. The thoroughness of the documentation demanded and the rigorous inspection standards over the course of a 1-2 day visit helped to ensure the quality standards of the ex-polytechnics. In many cases, too, we were cognizant of the fact that the CNAA helped to keep standards high by insisting on a certain degree of staffing which had to be wrung out of the grasp of the Polytechnic authorities and in this way, the CNAA became the students’ best friend ensuring that their qualification had academic credibility and that the colleges which came under their aegis were resourced at least to a minimal level. When the new universities acquired their own degree awarding powers and after the demise of the CNAA, the various directors of the polytechnics were delighted not to have to comply with increased staffing demands enjoined by the CNAA. So we had a very interesting conversation with the lady who joined us who seemed to have quite a lot of strings to her bow (e.g. a postgraduate degree in Music) so we invited her to come along and join us next Sunday when we can carry on with our trips down memory lane and our oft-repeated refrain that standards were so much higher when we were working and in charge.

I always look forward to an in-depth read of the ‘Sunday Times‘ to get the background to the stories that have surfaced during the last week – in particular, because of the revelations in the Post Office scandal I was expecting some detailed reported of the various transgressions both in Fujitsu and the Post Office itself. But I was to be disappointed because whatever analysis there was proved to be thin in the extreme. Instead many more column images were devoted to the machinations that lay behind the Rwanda vote in the House of Commons this week. I suspect that all of this is due to essentially lazy journalism. To investigate the wrong doings of large corporations requires good and persistent investigative skills as well as an examination of a mound of documents. But how much easier just to sit in a bar and talk over ‘who said what’ to an MP who is providing the information on a non-attributable basis. It rather reminds me of the war correspondent(s) who used to file stories such as ‘we had to negotiate our way through the alley ways of the city whilst sniper bullets whizzed past our ears’ whereas the truth of the story was that they had never left the confines of the bar in a safe hotel and got all of their information second-hand.

There is an interesting story emerging from the other side of the Atlantic. One of Donald Trump’s Republican challengers is Nikki Haley who is an ex US ambassador to the United Nations. She was well behind Trump in Iowa but is reported to be ‘within touching distance’ in the forthcoming primary poll in New Hampshire. She has indicated that she might only appear if Trump does likewise whereas Trump himself seems to have confused Haley with Nancy Pelosi the ex Democrat Speaker of the House of Commons. So Nikki Haley is publicly questioning the mental competence of Donald Trump and who knows how this might play out in the more liberal political environment of New Hampshire. The point here is that Trump appears massively ahead but in the primaries, things can change very rapidly as candidates gain (and lose) momentum. However, at this point it does look as the centre of American politics is evaporating. There was an ITV programme on Trump recently that revealed that many illegal immigrants were being ‘dumped’ upon the Democratic stronghold of Chicago. As these migrants are housed in makeshift shelters of plastic sheeting and random materials acquired from anywhere, so the predominantly poor (and black) citizens of Detroit are turning against Baden. The president is blamed for having to cope with these migrant ‘camps’ which is eroding the core support for the Democrats. We have seen hints of this policy played also in the UK where asylum seekers have been known to be visited upon poor communities (eg the Potteries) where there is little power to resist. This is one of the reasons why UKIP and the associated Brexit vote was so strong in poor communities such as Stoke on Trent.

Today, Saturday, the weather forecasters are telling us that it is the end of the cold snap so the weather should be considerably improved – but I must say that there was quite an icy wind to add to the windchill factor so the weather still seemed quite cold for us. We made for Waitrose knowing that some of our friends would not be there but we still made contact with the third so we had a pleasant coffee and chat together. Then it was a case of a quick whizz around the shop followed by a cooking of the Saturday lunch (some left over chicken heated up and enhanced by a thick onion gravy which seems the story of my culinary life these days) After lunch, Meg and I had set ourselves a little treat which I did not know how it is going to turn out. On BBC2 earlier in the day they were showing ‘The Pure Hell of St. Trinians‘ and I hoped that we get this on catch-up which we did. We did not know whether this was a sequel to the original ‘Belles’ of St. Trinians made decades ago or the much more recent remake where the schoolgirls were a lot more knowing, not to mention saucy, in keeping with the spirit of the 1970’s or 1980’s. This film was actually a black-and-white film made in the 1950’s I would imagine and was faintly both amusing/ridiculous in equal measure. We watched most of it before deciding that we had had enough of this and thinking that we would turn our attention to other things. One of the little rituals of life is that we wait until 4.00pm and then enjoy our afternoon cup of tea (but Meg is indulged with a chocolate biscuit). We have some things lined up for later on this afternoon and are enjoying a few minutes of relaxation with ClassicFM. They have Alan Titchmarch as a presenter of Saturday afternoons and it is always quite a pleasant selection of classical tracks (not the ‘tumpty-tum’ type music or the Straus walzes which fills the airwaves at less popular times) Then we watched a little more of the Thoams Hardy film of ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles‘ until it was newstime and we left the final quite dramatic scenes for another day. Incidentally, one of the closing scenes in the film shows Tess and her husband cavorting themselves on the stones of the monument of Stnehenge. I, too, when I was on a cycling holiday organised by my school in about 1958, did the same but of course no member of the pubic can get anywhere near the stones of Stonehenge these days (and for good reason)

The news from the Israel:Gaza conflict seems as dire as ever. There is now a direct conflict between the US on the one hand, which is still advocating a 2-states solution, and the government of Benjamin Netanyahu who is publically rejecting the notion of a 2-state solution. Israel has a very ‘pure’ form of proportional representation and I think I am right in sayng that the extreme right wing National Religious Party (or whatever its successor is nowadays) has had a place in every Israel government since the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948. So here we have a form of PR in which a very small tail is wagging a very large dog. I used not to believe in PR but I do so these days but I think it has to be thought about carefully. One solution to the ‘Israel’ type problem is to have a constitutional arrangement to make sure that extreme parties of either the right or the left cannot be invited into the government unless they reach a certain trigger amount (which I believe that Germany does, of about 5%) Another quite innovative solution is to ensure that he party with the most votes/seats is allocated an extra block of seats so that the resultant government has a reasonable working majority. This is to try to ensure that you do not have a situation in which, in a tight electiopn won with only a handful of seats, that certain maverick MPs do not use this ‘fractional’ bargaining power to exert a hold over the direction of policy.

I think the political class is starting to absorb some of the lessons of the Fujitsu/Post Office scandal. Now that it has emerged that Fujitsu witness statements, used by the Post Office as evidence with which to convict some of their own sub postmasters, were ‘doctored’ (i.e. incriminatory evidence removed), I think that it was Fujitsu staff themselves who doctored their own evidence but it may have been the Post Office staff themselves and I shall have to wait for a good detailed piece of investigative reporting (perhaps in the ‘Sunday Times‘ tomorrow) to ascertain where the blame arises. Evidently, the removal of evidence from a witness statement is perjury but can the state ascertain who are the people who thus perjured themselves – after all, they could have retired a decade ago. And if individuals cannot be identified, can ‘perjury’ be laid at the door of a company like Fujitsu itself? None of the precedents (e.g. the perjury committed by some of the Maxwell newsapers in the phone hacking scandal) bodes well for the future.

Today was meant to be a degree colder than yesterday but the weather station in Pershore, Worcestershire registered a low of -9.7 degrees yesterday which was one of the coldest (if not the coldest) in the country. The temperature here when I went shopping yesterday was -6 degrees and today it was -5 degrees but it actually felt colder. Fortunately, my windscreen protector had done its job and the car was relatively easy to put to rights before we set off this morning. The carers arrived on cue but one of my regulars had had an accident, probably weather-related, and so another carer was sent in her stead. Three of Meg’s carers have suffered five accidents in the last fortnight which must have put a lot of pressure on them as they have to dash from appointment to appointment and are given hardly any travelling time, the situation being exacerbated of course by road works on the one hand and rush hour on the other. Our domestic help calls around on a Friday and she is always a joy with whom to chat but we were quite keen to try and get into the Waitrose cafeteria by about 10.30. We were particularly pleased to have done so because we thought that there was a 50:50 chance that one of our regular friends (the chorister one) was celebrating her 90th birthday today. We were particularly pleased to give her a birthday card where I had managed to find one not liberally adorned with glasses and bottles of alcohol which, I suppose, reflects the fact that the card designers imagine that you spend your birthday boozing all day long. But we had also bought a little gift for our friend which we saw in Droitwich yesterday and she was very pleased to receive it, after ripping off the layers of protective bubble wrap and wrapping paper in which I had sellotaped it. They say, in popular parlance, that it is ‘better to give to receive’ and it certainly gave me a great deal of pleasure to able to able to hand over a gift to our friend who had achieved the ripe old age of 90. In fact, whilst she was bobbling around the shop, I had a word with the counter staff and left a tenner with them to provide our friend with a donated coffee when she came to order but the counter staff insisted on giving me back my money and giving my friend whatever she wanted ‘on the house’ (that is Waitrose for you)

This afternoon, Meg and I watched in real time as the Japanese attempted to land their ‘sniper’ module on the surface of the moon. We watched the descent, monitored through instruments in real time, and it did appear that the craft had indeed made a soft (i.e. not a crash) landing on the moon’s surface. But the Japanese are still trying to establish contact with their craft to establish its exact orientation – it could, for example, have toppled over or slid down a slope. For reasons that are not entirely clear the Japanese were attempting to land on a slope (was it a crater lip or something?) but it looks as though we may have to wait a couple of hours before the Japanese and the rest of the watching world may be able to ascertain exactly what has happened. Immediately after touchdown one would have imagined whoops of delight from the scientists monitoring their craft from Japan but there was instead an ominous silence, so we shall just have to exercise some patience for a little.

Some further news has dribbled out of the Post Office scandal enquiry and from the revelations today, it looked as though Fujitsu itself was editing out some of the negativities about the software (bugs and the like) before the Post Office were informed. But Fujitsu are admitting that the Post Office knew of the presence of bugs and even the ability of Fujitsu to enter the individual accounts of sub postmasters and informed the Post Office of this. So the Post Office may well have been prosecuting in the knowledge that the software was problematic. From this distance, it appears to be hard to ascertain where the major degree of culpability might lie but we have unfolding before us two large corporations engaging in behaviour which protects their own interests and seeks to pass the blame onto the ‘little’ men i.e. the sub postmasters. One wonders how one starts to calculate whatever compensation might be due – what is the price to be put upon the fact that the aged parents of sub postmasters will probably have died thinking that their sons and daughters were guilty of a fraud? Similarly, the children of the sub postmasters would have had their lives blighted by the reaction of school friends not to mention the fact that their parents had lost their livelihoods. Just to add fuel to the flames of this story, Rishi Sunak to appease his (rabid) right wingers over the Rwanda bill is intimating that he may appoint 150 additional judges to fast-process claims of asylum seekers – but no such offer of additional judges seems to be available to offer an acquittals or compensation to the sub postmasters. The two little bits of news may not have connected in the public’s mind but a half-decent opposition should have been shouting it from the roof tops.

Thursday is my shopping day and things were slightly fraught this morning as I needed to cope with the sequelae of an overnight temperature of -6 degrees, plus the fact that a crucial access road that we use to get around Bromsgrove is blocked off which means that I have join a traffic queue of two thirds of a mile long to get anywhere. But these annoyances having been negotiated, I got the shopping done expeditiously and then joined queues to get back home again. When the weather is as cold as this, I have started to put on a windscreen protector on the car, held in place by rubber mats and these always help to allay the worst of the frost. Then it is a case of hot water in a specially designated long-spout watering can to clear the windscreens before I set off. Today, dawn was just about breaking as I left for the supermarket but by the time I got there it was half light. I tell myself that with a bit of luck, if the sunrise starts about two minutes earlier per day, then I might manage the trip to the supermarket in the light next week when I do the weekly shop. I had just about got back when the carer allocated to us on a Thursday turned up one hour earlier than we really wanted or needed – the carer herself realised that the start time they had allocated here was probably wrong and had texted them to this effect but the information had not really got through to those responsible for the staff allcation each day. The carer on a Thursday is a Pyschology graduate so we often have extended chats about matters which of interest to us both. Once she had departed, the sky was blue and the air was clear so we decided to make a trip to Droitwich to our favourite cafe where we indulged in our usual pot of tea and a bacon butty on large, chunky brown bread. We normally finish our little trip to the shop run by Worcestershire Association of Carers and today was no exception. We did purchase one item which was quite a pretty silvered dish which I bought as a present for our friend who is going to be 90 years old tomorrow. If she does not happen to like it, I am sure she will have a relative to whom she can pass it on. We may or may not see her tomorrow but if not there is always Saturday and failing that, next Tuesday.

This afternoon, I wondered what film I might try to access in order to keep Meg entertained. After a false start, I thought I would try and see if YouTube had a suitable Thomas Hardy film and found ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles‘ which is a story that I know reasonably well. We watched about one half of the film but, as it is quite a long one, decided to cut it short about half way through so that we can watch the second half another day. When Meg and I used to go on extended holidays in January in Salobreña, Southern Spain I located a copy of this Thoms Hardy novel in the hotel’s book collection and read it avidly. I was particularly interested in the final few pages because the sister of Tess and Tess’s one time ‘amante’ walk up the slope of a hill in Winchester called West Hill, half way up which is Winchester gaol. In this gaol Tess is to be executed and the pair observe the black flag flown when there is an execution. Now it happens that King Alfred’s College which was to become the University of Winchester (where I worked for ten years) is built on the slopes of West Hill and I used to walk through the grounds of the West Hill cemetery (more of a park than a cemetery these days) on my way to college. So I feel that there is quite a connection between the final pages of the novel and the scenes over West Hill that I used to walk and knew quite well.

Last night, the vote took place on the government’s Rwanda bill and, as I had anticipated, many of the Tory rebels drifted away from voting against their own government when it came to it. In popular parlance they had ‘bottled it’ and the government won by a fairly comfortable majority. The bill having got through the Commons now passes to the House of Lords which is where the fun is going to start. One of the (very few) virtues of un unelected second chamber in our parliament is that members are not always looking over their shoulder having to appease an electorate who might might turf them out if they did note vote the ‘right’ way. Consequently, the House of Lords has many independently minded members, irrespective of party, and the whipping system is very much more light touch than the Commons. So the Lords may not feel they could refuse to pass the bill but they might pass so many amendments that it emerges an entirely different creature from the one that was passed to them by the Commons. The Commons then has to decide which, of the probably many, amendments to accept or reject and then the consitutional game of ‘ping-pong’ starts in which the bill is batted backwards and forwards between the Lords and the Commons. My own feeling is that the Bill is probably doomed and the Lords will have no truck with any legislation that will make the UK a laughing stock and the only European country apart from Russia and Belarus that does not accept the jurisdiction and the rulings of the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights – nothing to do with the European Community but largely drafted by British lawyers at the end of the second World War)

Today we got ourselves up and breakfasted, with the assistance of the pair of regular carers who are proving to be a great boon at the moment. This morning, we had in mind to attend the Methodist centre which we have not requested since before Christmas. After New Year, the centre was closed for a week and then last Wednesday, we were otherwise engaged in the club organised by AgeUK on the second Wednesday of each month so this was our first visit for some time. We sat at a table with a patron of the centre with whom we have sat before and had some interesting conversations before he left us. We were then joined by one of our Tuesday crowd of Waitrose friends and we learnt that a special birthday was in the offing, specifically a 90th birthday next Friday. I must say that our friend is being quite sprightly for a 90-year old and I am amazed how she manages to keep so active. For example, I asked her if she had any domestic or cleaning help but she informed me that she is still all doing all of her own housework. I may be wrong in this but I think she is still an active member of a local choir as well.

All of today, there have been a lot of political machinations as the Rwanda bill is due to have a critical vote this evening and there is always the possibility that the bill as a whole might be lost. Last night, the right wing rebels of the Conservative party forced two votes on amendments the import of which was for the government to not comply with any judgements of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The rebels secured a vote of about 70 on the first and 60 on the second but it was relatively easy to rebel because with the Labour Party supporting the government in rejecting the amendments they were bound to fail – which they did as those voting to reject the amendments was the vast majority of the House of Commons of over 500. Knowing that the amendments could never succeed, the right wing rebels felt that they could vote against their own government with impunity but two deputy chairmen of the Conservative party resigned just before they voted in favour of the rebel amendments. The political commentators have got very excited about these results thinking that Downing Street may well feel that the Bill is effectively lost but this is rather to misread what is going on. The right wing rebels are trying to exact as many concessions from the government as they can and so on an elaborate game of ‘chicken’ is going on. The rebels are demanding that they be invited into Downing Street to argue with the Prime Ministers and his advisers holding the threat of defeating the Prime Minister on a core piece of legislation. As this is essentially a game of chicken, many of the rebels will not actually do so if it means that the bill as a whole is lost but this is all part of the bluff and counter-bluff of politics. The rebels are using rather weasel words not saying that they are going to vote against the government but saying that they are ‘prepared to consider voting against the government’ which, of course, gives the wriggle room to not actually lose the Bill as a whole. The result should be known at about 7.00pm this evening but may be later in the evening.

This afternoon, we engaged in our normal diet of a bit of comedy with ‘Yes, Prime Minister‘ taking the pride of place. Today’s episode was concerned with the machinations of a possible tobacco rise in tobacco tax where the relevant figures quoted were that 100,000 people a year would die of smoking related diseases in return for a return to the Treasury of about £4 billion in revenue. This episode may well have reflected some of the political machinations that were alleged to have taken place when some of the East European economies liberalised after the demise of the ‘Iron Curtain’ The story that I have heard is this. Senior executives of the tobacco industry met with senior civil servants of the country which may well have been Hungary. The tobacco industry chiefs let it be known that they privately knew that tobacco smoking killed a lot of people, even though this was denied in public. They then argued to the Hungarian civil servants that it not be a good idea to tax tobacco too heavily. It was much more sensible to let people smoke, stay alive and pay their due quota of taxes and then die, shortly after retirement, so that the State would not then be responsible for the heavy costs of pensions and healthcare for the elderly. So the tobacco chiefs argued that in purely financial times, it was more advantageous for the newly developing economies to collect the taxes whilst they could and then not be too unhappy about lots of people dying of smoking related diseases before the state incurred the heavy burdens to the tax payer of paying for people to survive too long. In any event, this argument seemed to succeed because the taxes were never actually levied on the tobacco companies (whose arguments must have proved to have been very influential)

Today being a Tuesday, we enter into our normal routines but today was going to be a little different. Although we generally meet with our friends in the Waitrose cafeteria twice each week, we knew that one of our number who has recently lost her husband was probably going to be heavily involved in the sequelae following a death in the family and when we met with her yesterday, she let us know that she might not make it today. Neither did any of our usual companions so Meg and I had our coffee alone, which is quite an unusual experience for us these days. We knew that today the airways were going to be full of the investigations of the Post Office scandal as well as the ongoing debates about the Government bill to expedite the transportation of refugees and asylum seekers to Rwanda. Although the transmission of some of these investigations started off early, we knew that we would have to wait until later to get to the juicy bits. When we returned from our morning excursion, the care worker turned up but about 50 minutes too early but I did manage to go and attend my Pilates session, albeit for only 45 minutes instead of the allotted 60 minutes. I left Meg in the care of the Peruvian-born care worker, listening to Joan Baez (the Mexican-American folk singer who made her reputation in the 1960’s) One of her signature songs, which I must admit I do not really know that well, is ‘Diamonds and Rust‘ which is said to be a commentary on her relationship with Bob Dylan when it was breaking up. The symbolism lies in the fact that diamonds are meant to ever-lasting and indestructible whereas rust is the absolute opposite. Meg and I did go to see Joan Baez in Birmingham when she was staging one of a host of farewell concerts and we bought one of her earliest CDs which her ‘roady’ was selling in the foyer. One of the outstanding tracks upon this is her version of ‘The House of the Rising Sun‘ which many will know from the raucous ‘Animals’ version. But this version is sung by a 17-18 year old Joan Baez, accompanying herself on a guitar and singing (in Spanish) with the utmost precision and clarity. How many realise that the full story of the ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is the lament for a sister who falls into prostitution, the ‘House’ in question actually being a brothel. When I got back fom Pilates, the YouTube had given rise to other folk singers of a similar ilk, including I think Mercedes Sosa- I think that Meg and the care worker had had quite a good time together but of couse I was not present to witness it. Then it was a case of getting our lunch prepared of fishcakes and microwaved vegetables before settling down for the afternoon. But we had an phone call from our social worker and this necessitated emails that needed to be forwarded as well as a host of domestic jobs that could not wait any longer.

Meg and I caught some snatches of the proceedings of the House of Commons committeee that was cross questioning some of the Fujitsu executives. An apology of sorts was issued but in response to detailed questions, the Chief Executive of Fujitsu and of the Post Ofice were both tending to say the some thing along the lines of ‘It was before my time.. I have no direct knowledge…There are a mass of complex documents through which we are trying to wade to make sense of the past…’ and so on and so forth) Although not directly questioned on this, it does appear that the Post Office knew of the errors and bugs in the software for quite some time but were of such a mindset that it looked as though they could not believe that the software that they had commissioned was at fault. But two little nuggets did emerge from the questionning. One was surely that the senior executives at the Post Office must have noticed that there was suddently a dramatic rise in the number of ‘deficits’ in the sub postmasters’ accounts but the (now) chief executive argued that the number of prosecutions and investigations had stayed fairly constant over the years, which surely be the most blatant lie. Another fact to emerge is that crucial documents are either said to be ‘missing’ or even ‘shredded’ which either suggests the utmost venality or else incompetence in equal measure) No doubt, this will run and run.

Yesterday, I stumbled across a website that I found intriguing. A tester of laptops was making a comparison between the old, but incredibly sturdily built IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad laptops on the one hand and a modern, but cut-down-to-a-price Dell laptop on the other. The commentator could not hide his disdain for the more modern Dell laptop which was constructed using not very high quality plastics that flexed and creaked when leant upon whereas the Thinkpad was built like a tank. The thrust of his argument was that an ‘old’ machine built to high standards and with high quality components would prove to be a ‘better’ machine than its more modern counterparts that, despite more recent processors, chips and other components may well fail before the much older machine. Certainly, to a journalist who was bent on bashing out his/her 1000-2000 words a day the legendary quality of the keyboard on the older Thinkpads would make the journalist reluctant to abandon their ‘older’ and ‘inferior’ machine in favour the ‘newer’ and ‘superior’ one.