In the middle of the night (when else?) I was reading my emails and got some rather disturbing news from our closest friends in Spain. We had not heard from them for a week or so which is quite unusual and we hoped that nothing was amiss. Their daughter was due to come to the University of Gloucester as an ERASMUS student – the acronym ERASMUS stands for European Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students. Our close friend had been one of our earliest Erasmus students at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University, Leicester) and now about thirty years later, it was the turn of her daughter (who we know very well, having watched her grow up since she was a baby) to undertake a year’s Erasmus experience in an English university. Naturally, I was distraught to discover that the daughter would not now be coming to England as we were expecting her shortly. So what to do? I sent off an email in the middle of the night to the University of Worcester, one of our nearest universities, to see if there was anything that could be done. Then I got onto the international pages of the university in Madrid where the daughter is studying and sent these pages off to our friends in La Coruña, suggesting that they might contact the international office of the university themselves to see if they had any other contacts with UK universities which could take over the contract reneged upon by the University of Gloucester. Then I did some internet searches  and discovered that whilst Boris Johnson and his Brexit mates had withdrawn the UK from the Erasmus scheme (on the grounds that ‘they could not afford it’), this did not apply in Northern Ireland. Apparently, the universities in the Republic of Ireland (Eire) had stretched out a hand to their ‘cousins’ in the north and whilst the UK universities were withdrawing from the Erasmus scheme, the Irish had extended a massive hand of friendship to their colleagues in Northern Ireland offering them the opportunity to continue participating in the Brexit scheme. So this is a bit of a lifeline – but it all depends whether the university in Madrid has any contracts with any universities in Northern Ireland which might not be the case. Anyway, I must communicate all of this to our friends in la Coruña but I haven’t had the opportunity yet. Then, of course, the evident idea occurred to me (a little late) that I could contact the international department of De Montfort University to at least speak to an informed academic from within the UK system – this is a prime task for tomorrow. 

I am just in the process of transferring my fuel accounts from my old supplier to me new one. My new supplier sent me some helpful emails (and a very clear website) which just says ‘Enter your existing Gas and Electricity meter readings‘ So I went outside to my external meters which I have not at looked at for a long, time long time and was faced with a blank screen on the gas meter and a blank screen with three buttons to activate the blank screen on the electricity meter (which gave unhelpful options such ‘Consult’ ‘Engineer’ which was not particularly helpful) I then pressed several buttons several times on the ‘gizmo’ which we have in our kitchen and, fortunately, the meter reading numbers of the gizmo and on the meters seems to agree. Now to enter them into the system – easier said then done. The Gas reading went in fine but the Electricity one needed the correct number of zeros before the digits before it would enter correctly but at least the deed was done.

This task having completed, we got some very bad news by phone. We had planned to go out with our two closest friends whose wedding anniversaries are very similar to ours for a joint meal on Thursday next. But the phone call revealed that the wife of one of our friends had had a heart attack yesterday (and perhaps two smaller ones) but at least she had been got into hospital within an hour or so of it happening. Evidently, she would have had some clot-busting drugs or similar but we know she is more comfortable than she was and had a good night in hospital last night. We have no more news than that but, evidently, we are very anxious that one of our closest and dearest friends makes her a speedy recovery. We bought a card from Waitrose which we popped through the door on the way to Pilates.  To save a bit of  time, we had  earlier gone down to town by car and picked up our newspapers (and much needed ice-cream for this hot weather) It looks as though tomorrow we should have a really hot day (28° to 30°) before the weather breaks down completely on Thursday. Of course, we may have spectacular thunderstorms and/or rain but I hope our damsons remain undamaged (as I due to pick them this weekend)

According to the newspapers, we are due to have a mini heatwave over the next day or so and today the weather was certainly even warmer than yesterday. Tomorrow is going to be a really hot day with a temperature of 28º which is 82ºF in the ‘old’ system. Then, on Wednesday, the weather is due to break probably with thunderstorms and some much needed rain. Meg and I were a little delayed because we were in telephone conversation with our building society getting  some details of our accounts regularised. As you might expect, this is still a complicated business as it involves going through a series of apps to get at your accounts online, then we have to send them a secure message (presumably to prove who we are), then they are going to send us some forms  which we have to fill in and finally we have to go in person, together with two kinds of ID to see them in person (which we will do next Monday) to get the account details altered to our satisfaction. I suppose one can see the point of all this to overcome potential fraud but you still have the feeling that a genuine fraudster might be able to circumvent the system a little more easily. Eventually, and a little later than planned, Meg and I wandered down to the park which, as you might expect, was particularly quiet as it was both Monday morning and also  it was the day when all of the schools returned after their long summer break. One did wonder, though, why the occasional young adolescent was to be seen on the skateboard board and even on the swings for the younger children.  We had an enjoyable time and I left Meg to enjoy the late summer sunshine whilst I went to pick up the newspapers.

When we returned home, it was fairly easy to prepare our lunch as we had cooked our ‘main’ joint yesterday. Today, we had pork, Cavolo Nero (kale) and a smidgeon of baked potato and it was delicious. After we had our post-prandial nap, we decided not to avail ourselves of one of the rolling news programmes that we generally watch at about this time of day but throughout we take the feed live from Parliament to see what Boris Johnson had to say for himself. The session started at 3.30 and carried on until 4.45 so the Commons organised itself in such a way that a greater number of MPs then usual could question the PM about Afghanistan. Boris Johnson put on a fairly typical performance for him. Most of questions from MPs (on both sides of the house) put fairly direct and pointed question, mainly entering upon the plight of those still trapped in Afghanistan or their relatives. Boris Johnson’s replies were a typical mixture of bluster, political point scoring, evading the question and often avoiding the main point of the question altogether. Of course, all politicians do this particularly on the media – to the frustration of many, including myself, the interviewers often do not pursue the point that the question has not been answered and move onto the next question in their schedule. The politicians know this and often fill up the available space by always starting an answer with a preamble that is only generally loosely related to the question and then going on to answer half the question or quoting a statistic in their favour that does not really answer the question that was asked. Because all politicians do this (I make an exception for Nigel Farage whose politics I detest but who generally did answer the question that he was actually asked) I wonder whether they engage in this evasive mode almost by force of habit. So I found the questions asked by the MP’s generally hit the point but the answers do not. So, for example, many MP’s asked why so many emails remained unanswered in the Foreign Office system. The response was that all emails would be ‘attended to’ by the end of this evening – which in practice meant that they might have been opened and then immediately ‘filed’ in a kind of pending folder without the substantive point ever being addressed. Another case in point was a very intelligent question asked why there was no coordination or cross-referencing between the various schemes of headings under which people could apply for admission to the UK – the reply from Boris Johnson just stressed how many people had been aided by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in the last few days which, of course does not answer the question.

In the late afternoon, I undertook a task I had been meant to do for days. I had an old adjustable spanner  soaking in a tub of white vinegar for several days to loosen/get rid of the rust. Then it had a good hard scrubbing with a wire brush, several rinses with cold water and finally a drying off and a good treatment of WD-40 before it will get put carefully away.

Today being a  Sunday, I got up earlier than normal and set off for my Sunday morning walk to the newsagents, wearing my trusty old iPhone which I use on these occasions as an MP3 player. The first track I played was actually the ‘Hallelujah‘ chorus from Handel’s Messiah. Whenever, I hear this chorus, it always sets me in mind of the Huddersfield Chorus Society whose rendition of the Messiah is well known.  This reminded me of our neighbour whose funeral we attended the other day as she came from Huddersfield – as I was born and bred in Yorkshire and there was only a sixteen month gap between our birthdates we felt very mcuh part of the same generation. Indeed, we seem to have many values and attitudes towards life from having been reared in similar ‘soil’  so to speak. Our neighbour and I used to chat about all kinds of things when we went down to our Pilates class each week, and so I had one of those strange feelings that you sometimes have when someone ‘s death has been recent that you cannot believe that they have actually ‘gone’ and may not suddenly reappear. In the case of ‘the Messiah‘ it used to be the case that if you were reasonably musically competent and could read a score you could go down to the Town Hall Qquare in front of Leeds Town Hall and you could actually sing in the chorus of the society (tenor, bass etc.) I think that this tradition is actually carried on in other northern and midland towns and cities but I haven’t heard of any performances recently. After this track, there was a track from Mozart’s opera ‘Don Giovanni’ entitled ‘Il mio Tesoro‘ which our son played on his clarinet for one of his music exams when he was aged about 10 – certainly at primary school. He carried on playing the clarinet and actually won the school music prize for playing the second movement (slow) of the Mozart clarinet concerto when he was about 13. Shortly afterwards, a combination of locomotives , photography and young women became his abiding life interest and the clarinet was abandoned. In fact, to this day, I am not even sure what happened to it. Anyway, we were extraordinarily proud of our son having won the music competition when he did but then he musical tastes changed to Marillion and the like (late 1970’s and early 1980’s)

We had a lunch of pork which had been cooking in the slow cooker all morning whilst we had been out in the park. Then it was a typical lazy Sunday afternoon whilst we slowly digested the newspapers. Then we treated ourselves to watching the progress of the English cricket team in ‘Today at the Test‘ where the Indian batsmen built up quite an impressive lead, leaving England a total of over 350 to reach in their final innings which has hardly ever been done before. However, the English batsmen managed to make a  score of about 70 without loss, setting the scene for an incredibly exciting run chase tomorrow. We will resist the temptation to listen to it on the radio but will wait until we know the best (or the worst) when we tune in tomorrow.

In the early evening, I gave my sister a FaceTime call to see if there was any more news about her husband (my brother-in-law) who is currently in hospital. We know that they are going to try a shot of radiotherapy to alleviate some of his symptoms but this might take several days  to organise.   The only bright spot about all of this is that he is hospital in Harrogate, Yorkshire which was a very good reputation. We were FaceTiming for quite a long time with my sister because she is alone in the house and I felt that she needs as much moral support as we can give her – particularly as the immediate future is somewhat uncertain. When I get some time, I thought I would write my brother-in-law a long letter to give him some diversion. My sister informed me that they have taken away all of the TV’s normally over each patient’s bed as an infection risk. One of his sons has managed to get his a little radio upon which he may be able to follow the Test Match (as an ardent cricket fan) but he of the generation that finds even using a mobile phone phone problematic, let alone an iPad so he can FaceTime. I imagine the next few days in hospital are going to be rather a miserable time for him (particularly as he quite deaf so communication with hospital staff may be problematic).

The newspapers are full of the dilemma facing the government as they intend to make a long-delayed announcement about the funding of long term social care – a ball which had been ‘kicked into the long grass’ for about a decade now but decisions do have to be made. I gather the preferred option seems to be a rise in National Insurance contributions but  large part of the Tory Party are up in arms about that (as the burden falls upon those who are younger and in work but most of the recipients are the older generation who have been quite well provided for over the years) This autumn is going to see quite a lot of fireworks politically – watch this space!

Today was one of those ‘nothing’ like days – there was some autumnal sunshine and a few clouds but it felt neither warm nor cold. Having said that, I was very pleased that we got the lawns cut yesterday evening because my neighbour and I concurred that when the weather is a little muggy then the grass seems to grow much faster. So it always a source of satisfaction to look over our communal green area  between our houses (sometimes nicknamed ‘Meg’s Meadow‘) and see that is always has a particularly tidy appearance the day after mowing. We walked down to the park as normal and I left Meg in the company of the Bromsgrove Literary and Philosophical Society (aka known as our University of Birmingham friend and a mutual friend with whom we tend to discuss geopolitics at the drop of a hat). After we had set the world to rights (I think we were looking at the world from the perspective of a Russian submarine captain who surfaced near the Arctic Circle and for whom the actual map -and mental map- would have been a Russia surrounded by hostile forces – America, China. Europe.) You really need to look at a globe looking down on it to fully appreciate the point we were trying to argue. Anyway, having discussed our little geopolitical problem for today, I went off to collect our newspapers. There I handed in a little bit of card to exactly tell the newsagent when our subscription to The Guardian runs out and I have to remember to destroy my remaining vouchers and not to use them. So it will be ‘The Times‘ during the weekdays, the Sunday Times on Sundays from now on and I will read the Guardian /Observer online. On our way home, we bumped into one of our Catholic friends whose wedding anniversary is practically on the same date as ours and we discussed some of the transport arrangements for the joint dinner which we are going to enjoy together with even more friends whose wedding anniversary is also proximate. Then it was home for a somewhat delayed lunch nd we had a generally quiet Saturday afternoon.   

Each Saturday, we attend our local church for the 6.00pm service and tonight was no exception. We chatted for a little while outside the church and informed our priest that on Thursday we would have been married for 54 years and that we were married by a member of Jesuit religious order in the Church of the Holy Name just besides the Catholic chaplaincy in Manchester. Our new priest has quite a sense of humour which can occasionally be liberating when he quipped that ‘None of the marriages conducted by the Jesuits are now regarded as valid‘. So we got home and treated ourselves to a meal of strawberries and ice-cream which was bought on Thursday but we had been saving until tonight. Meg and I made ourselves made ourselves a little miserable by looking at ‘Today at the Test‘ (which just coincides with the time we are ready to eat) only to see the English bowling put to the slaughter by the Indian batsmen who seemed to have found just the form they needed when it was needed to win the match (probably) and the series (probably)

As I was getting up this morning, I heard a report from America which almost made my blood run cold. One of the enduring legacies of the Trump administration was to ‘pack’ the Supreme Court with (really) conservative judges and I think the present balance is about 6 conservative to about 3 liberal. As Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, then a 40-year old could serve for about 40 years until they die  and so the balance of the Supreme Court far outweighs a presidential term of office (4 years in the case of Trump) Now that a really conservative Supreme Court is in place the Pro-Life ,anti-abortion Christian Right can try and get passed the most draconian legislation that they can rely upon not being overturned. A new law has been passed in Texas which allows anyone anywhere to sue anyone connected to an abortion in which cardiac activity was detected in the embryo as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, before most women even realise they are pregnant. This means that any ‘bounty hunter’ can sue anyone connected with an abortion (e.g. a texi-driver taking a pregnant women to a clinic) for about $10,000 which they can then keep. This has the effect of almost, at a stroke, abolishing any abortion (even for victims of rape or incest). Normally legislation as draconian as this would be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court – by not intervening when they could and before the law comes in force, the Supreme Court has effectively condoned the type of legislation, which then be  ‘cut-and-pasted’ into laws anywhere where the Republicans/fundamentalist Christian Right have a majority (many of the states in the whole of the USA)

Today seemed as though it was going to be a tad less gloomy than we have been used to over the days so Meg and I made our way to the park after our usual ‘chat’ with our domestic help who makes a visit to us every Friday. We exchanged news (gloomily, about family illnesses) before we set off for the park but once there, we were delighted to meet up with our University of Birmingham friend who we had not expected to meet in the park on a Friday as his tennis commitment had been postponed until the afternoon. I collected our newspapers and then popped into town to access an ATM  – we don’t tend to use these very often as we now get out a block of money which lasts us for several weeks. Then we got home and eventually after our domestic help and I had a joint effort to give Meg’s hair a bit of a tweak with a special hair curling implement that our domestic help uses on Meg. Our domestic help tried to teach me how to use it but I think I can say that Mr. Teazy-Weazy (hair dresser star of yesteryear) does not have a rival in this house. After lunch and a bit of rest, I decide that the lawns badly needed a cut. The sun came out to give us a gloriously fine afternoon, so it seemed a shame not to avail myself of the opportunity to make hay whilst the sun shines. Half way through the lawn mowing  our neighbour came out and seeing me had a chat – both Meg and our son joined is so we had a jolly few minutes as neighbours do when they are in a relaxed frame of mind. Our neighbour had just bought some large original whisky half barrels (still smelling of of whisky) so I went round and admire the trees he had planted in them – bamboo in one and fir trees in the other. I must say our neighbour has put a lot of investment of thought, design, materials and not to mention money transforming the back garden of his house which is now a sheer delight to visit. Before our new neighbours moved in, I did my best to keep the garden of our former neighbours ‘ticking over’ as I cut their grass once a week and tried to keep the borders weed-free whenever I could spare the time. However, the garden is now transformed with several new raised beds, new fences and  a variety of additions  so, subject to invitation, it would be delightful to pass an afternoon drinking either tea or beer as the inclination takes us.

There is quite a debate going on between the the Joint Committee on Vaccine and Immunisation (JCVI) and the government at the moment. The decision of the JCVI is not to vaccinate the 12-15 year school population unless there are underlying health conditions but the decision is evidently quite a balanced one as the committee are saying that they will keep their decision under constant review. One suspects that the government may want to over-rule the committee as there are reports from other parts of the scientific community that the COVID rate may well surge enormously once the schools return next Monday.

Each Friday night, we are in the habit of FaceTiming one of our erstwhile University of Winchester colleagues and we always seem to have a fund of stories with which to regale each other. Some of these relate to incidents that we found amusing whilst we were both employed at the University of Winchester but many of them relate to our student days that we seem to remember with an alarming clarity as the years proceed. We reminded ourselves that in those days, the mid-1960’s before the sexual revolution had really swept over even the universities there were a variety of institutions and rules to keep the female of the species in a degree of obeisance. For example, at Manchester University they had a ‘Women’s Moral Tutor’ but what she actually did in her day to day work was rather hidden from the rest of us. Meanwhile, at the University of Oxford, our colleague informed us that some of the women’s colleges had a rule that no men were to be allowed in a female student’s room after 7.0pm – for which one could infer that if two young people were very much in lust with each other, then anything they did before 7 in the evening was regarded as quite ‘legal’. 

Next week, if the weather remains fair, we shall to think picking some of our soft fruit. We have a plum tree which has some clusters of plums but very high up so we may have to adapt a long handled pruner to reach these. Similarly, we need to think about collecting our damson plums (from old trees at the bottom of the garden) and the new season of making damson gin will start all over again (but we still have some of last season’s gin in stock to give to unsuspecting recipients)

We knew that today was going to be quite a day out of the ordinary, what with one thing or another, and so it proved to be. It started off well at 1 minute past midnight when my son and I turned to our National Savings Premium Bonds app to see if we had won any ‘prizes’ (in lieu of interest) this month. We were delighted to have won three prizes totally £75.00 which was particularly welcome as it has come at the end of what seems to have been quite a lean period for us. Some years ago, my son and I decided to pool some of our savings and buy Premium Bonds and if we win anything, then we share the proceedings between us. I think the ‘lean’ period we have had can be explained by the absolute collapse of interest rates in the last year. The current rate for some of my savings accounts seems to be 0.5% and I suspect that people all over the country have been coming to the same decision, reasoning that as interests are negligible, they might as well pile their savings into NS&I where you get no interest but there is always the (remote) possibility of winning quite a big prize. As the pool of National Savings has got so much bigger, so one’s chance of getting a prize had diminished.  In fact £8 billion has been piled into National Savings in the last 5 months, £1.8 billion in July alone. Meanwhile, the Government is quite happy to act as home to a mountain of people’s savings (no foreign holidays to go on – do you need a new car when you are working from home so much?) The second bit of good financial news came when I checked my account details of my new  energy supplier which will become active in 11 days time. My new combined fuel bills are going to be £75.00 a month cheaper than my existing supplier – I get a £25.00 bonus for switching and a two-week cooling period should I wish to return to my old supplier and pay £75.00 a month more. Thursday is the day when I started to shop in person at Waitrose in Droitwich but I was 15 minutes later this morning and the store was starting to fill up.   Nonetheless, I got everything on my list (and a few extras that I really had forgotten about) Then Meg and I put on our ‘funeral going’ clothes for which we were going to attend our neighbour’s funeral today and had already agreed to take along our Italian friend who knew  our neighbour as well. The funeral service was fine with long recollections of our neighbour’s life and then some photographs of various stages of her life. As the head of midwifery,  she had a lot of professional colleagues and I suspect that as many 50-60 people turned up for the committal.

Afterwards, we had been invited to attend a local golf club with large catering facilities. But this is the point where things started to go a little wrong. We had a little fishing about to do even with our SatNav to get to the venue in plenty of time. When we got there, all of the tables were full up (after all, the locals knew how to get there quickly and bag the available spaces) – or worse, empty seats whilst friends were queuing for food. As there was nowhere to sit and we knew no-one in the reception, we decided to cut our losses and strike straight for home.  We dropped off our friend and got home to a treat ourselves to some good homemade soup that we already in stock. Then the rest of the family came home and as we had variously had a rather trying day, we treated ourselves to a family meal of fish and chips (which we do occasionally)

Throughout the course of the day, Meg and I have been thinking about our brother-in-law in Yorkshire who has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer that has now spread to his spine. We will understand a bit more tomorrow when I am in touch with my sister again because her husband is going to be the subject of a case conference where his various specialists will discuss his conditions and treatment options. My brother-in-law will remain in hospital for about another week and, I suppose, that gives the family just a bit of time where they can work out collectively what degree of support they are able to give to their parents. All that I can offer at this stage is a degree of emotional support but I have in mind to write my brother-on-law a long letter (as he is profoundly deaf and a letter might be a different kind of reading matter for him).

The international news apart from Afghanistan is rather dominated by the the various floods and fires which are raging across different parts of the USA. If there can be a brighter side to all of this, it might be that American society finally wakes up to the challenge of climate change and puts in place some policies which help to avert, or at least postpone, the impending crisis.

I suppose to start off this blog saying ‘yet another gloomy day’ is not saying very much – I suspect that the whole nation is getting rather fed up with this weather pattern. Of course for schoolchildren, it is their last week of ‘freedom’ before the new academic year begins. For the rest of us, it is the start of another month and one is beginning to sense that autumn will soon be upon us. This morning we had a morning punctuated by telephone calls and text messages. I had sent a text to my favourite niece in Yorkshire, asking when was a good time to have a chat with her about the health problems of  both her mother (my sister) and her father (my brother-in-law) who was currently in hospital. I felt my niece, as she is the eldest of my sister’s four children, would be in a good position to assess what domestic changes might need to be made once her father is discharged from hospital. She texted me to say that she on the way to see her mother and we should expect more news later on in the day. Then my professor friend from South Oxfordshire phoned for a friendly chat. He and his wife had spent a few days in the city of Liverpool and were extolling its virtues to me. They had found a place to stay near to the waterfront and were incredibly impressed by the various museums they had visited there aa well as the two cathedrals. I know that the new-ish Roman Catholic cathedral being built in a circular shape is known to the locals as ‘Paddy’s wigwam‘ But our friends told us that the footfall in the Anglican cathedral was actually much greater than in the Catholic rival. From the glowing picture of Liverpool that our friends painted (and it had, quite recently, been a ‘European Capital of Culture’ in 2008), we think that it may well be worth a short break of about 5 days or so. Later on in the morning, I got an extraordinary phone call from my sister whose birthday it was yesterday. I had bought her a card in Waitrose and then addressed it and posted it in the local Post Office. What actually arrived was an envelope, correctly addressed but unsealed  and with no card inside. It looks as though in my haste to get the card off and into the system I had put a message inside the card and then forgot to put it into the envelope unless it came out in transit. Another of life’s little mysteries.

When we got home from our daily walk, we had lunch  and then I contemplated the tasks for the afternoon. After lunch, I got a phone call from the energy company from which we are purchasing our gas and electricity but from whom I am moving to another company which is offering me a deal which is £50 a month cheaper and with no price rises guaranteed for the next three years. My existing company are evidently desperate to retain my business but when they kept offering me ‘new deals’ I argued back with them that they were offering too little, too late and if they had really valued me as a customer they would have offered me a better deal before I threatened to take my business away. Eventually, when I insisted I was certainly going to move my account. they go so frustrated with me that they put the phone down. As we are going to a funeral tomorrow, I felt as though I needed to give the car a quick wash. I always have a feeling that is a mark of disrespect to turn up to a funeral in a dirty car so it had a wash for the first time in a month or so. We are picking our Italian friend up tomorrow and we are making our way as a threesome to the cemetery and then to the refreshment afterwards. I also needed to fit the car up with petrol, nothing that out the first day of the new E10 regime where ethanol constitutes 10% of the petrol that you buy. The government argues that most modern cars will comply with ease to the new fuel and, altogether, the government argues that doubling the proportion of ethanol from 5% to 10% will reduce emissions to the equivalent of taking 350,000 cars off the roads. Having got the car filled up with petrol I then popped into the  local ‘Home and Garden’ stores to buy one or two bits and pieces. 

In the late afternoon, we got a call from my niece which did not contain welcome news. Her father’s prostatic cancer had now spread to his spine and had actually cracked some of the vertebrae. After a case conference on Friday, they may well be offering some targeted radiotherapy which I hope will relieve some of his symptoms a little. All I could actually do was to say that I would phone or FaceTime my sister much more regularly to giver her whatever kind of emotional support I can in these difficult times.

The gloomy weather continues today – the weather forecasters tell us it is because of a ‘blocking high’ to the north of Britain which is encouraging some cooler winds to flow around it. So we may have to endure this gloomy spell for a little while longer yet but there is a hint that things might get a little bit better in a few days time. Because today is my Pilates day, Meg and I thought that we would go down into town by car and we would treat ourselves to a cappuccino and a cake (which was very enjoyable) We then went by car knowing, that as usual, I have quite a quick turnaround to start my walk down to my Pilates class. All of this worked out well and the class went very well with five of us in attendance altogether. On the way home, I called in at our local Asda because I needed some home-made remedies to clean toilets and  washbasins. If you look on the web, you will see a whole torrent of articles that extoll the virtues of a combination of bicarbonate of soda (which the Americans call ‘baking soda’)  and white vinegar which will react together to form a foaming mass which should, with a little bit of friction, help to remove ground in dirt. So having bought these ingredients, I shall have a fun time doing a little bit of home-made chemistry. There are some sources on the web that argue that these ‘natural’ and ‘home-made’ cleaning agents are both more effective and also less damaging to surfaces than the conventional commercially available cleaning agents.

Meg and I had the lunch which we reserve for my Pilates day which is normally fishcakes accompanied by some of those greens that only take a few minutes in the microwave. So after our  lunch and a coffee, we FaceTimed my sister as it was her birthday today. I had taken great pains to try and get a birthday card to her in time for her birthday – unfortunately, it had failed to arrive. When I got through to my sister, she was not having the best of birthdays as her husband had been admitted to hospital the previous day and they were running some scans on various parts of his anatomy to identify the source of his problems. We only had a few minutes chat with my sister because the time was approaching when we normally FaceTime our ex-Waitrose friends and so terminated the call with my sister, having agreed to call her later. Then we had our normal weekly session with our ex-Waitrose friends and we updated them with various bits of news (some medical, some culinary, some domestic and family) by which time we were ready for tea.

After tea, I had just started this blog and my sister returned my FaceTime call (fortunately, I was sitting right in front of my portable which I have in the living room so that I could respond quickly) We got the full blow-by-blow account of what had been happening to her husband (my brother-in-law) so we are hoping that his stay in hospital his short and that the various scans will help to suggest some treatment options for him. Once he returns home, then certain adaptations may have to be made to their accommodation. My sister had taken it upon herself to order a   specialist ‘riser’ chair for her husband which will assist him in getting out of his chair and keeping a degree of mobility and it seemed that a firm with which they had been dealing for decades was helping to expedite all of this. So we will have to wait until my brother-in-law is discharged from hospital and then, no doubt with plenty of assistance from other family members, we have the situation in which my brother-in-law had been my sister’s principal carer but now their roles are going to be reversed – at least temporarily.

Earlier in the day, our good Italian friend called around dressed in her ‘going to a funeral’  gear had turned up to our house, thinking that the funeral of our near neighbour was going to be today rather than Thursday. Our friend had tried to telephone us on our landline but as I was in the shower and Meg was simultaneously at the wash basin, we neither of us heard the telephone. To cut a long story short, we have now got our plans aligned for next Thursday (the day after tomorrow) and we have arranged to pick up our friend and we will all go to the funeral together. This is bound to be quite an emotional day for all of us but we are a little sustained by the thought that our neighbour did not linger too long (after her first stroke) and died in her sleep (from the second stroke). So we trust that she did not suffer in her final days and we are just left with lots of memories (all  generally happy ones)

Today was a Bank Holiday – and true to form, it was a dull and uninspiring kind of day. In fact the temperature seemed to have drifted a degree or two cooler but, undeterred, Meg and I made our way to the paper shop to pick up our daily ration. Tomorrow, I am going to inform my newspaper supplier that I have formally ended ny subscription to the Guardian and that I only have about 9 days of subscription left. On the other hand, I’m looking forward the the extra £50 a month of my subscription which can be put to a much better use. Meg and I occupied out normal bench and marvelled, yet again, at our 86-year old who regularly works 7-8 kilometres a day on his daily rounds. Although he has a little rest when he sees us, he does  not tarry for long as he reckons his muscles might seize up unless he keeps himself going. He has a special app which ‘pretends’ that he is navigating a world famous trail somewhere else in the world and, no doubt, this adds to his motivation. We popped into Waitrose and picked up one or two things of which were were running short, including some green veg, so then we struck off home and finished off the beef for yesterday.

After lunch, we had a bit of a household drama with which to deal.  We noticed that our downstairs toilet seemed to be draining a little slowly – more critically, when it was first flushed it looked as though it was not far from overflowing. I was keeping a careful eye on it and if it was evidently getting better, then whatever blockage there was might cure itself. My son did a quick inspection of some of the outside manhole covers and discovered nothing amiss so we decided that the fault must lie in the toilet unit itself. We consulted our ‘household’ file ( which is several inches thick) to find the name of the firm we might have used some 5-10 years ago when we thought we had a blockage and it turned out to be  blockage in a feeder drain (it could have been a nappy or something else in the system) We decided that it was a bad idea to call anybody on a Bank Holiday so we decided to tackle the problem ourselves insofar as we could.  I have a ‘mighty plunger’ which I call into service on occasions like this but it seemed to have no effect on the problem. Much against my better advice and instincts, my son decided to tackle the problem himself by inserting his arm as far through the system as he could. At first he located some wedges of toilet paper and then, to our mutual delight, discovered the obstruction. It turned out to be one of those plastic toilet rim disinfectant units – and this happened to be a particularly awkward size as it was one of those that appeared to be five little circular units in line with each other. Once we had located this and extricated this, the source of the problem was clearly identified and cured. We were left to imagine what a professional firm of drain unblockers might have charged had we actually needed to engage their services. Anyway, I told my son and daughter-in-law I would reward thereby paying for a ‘home delivered’ meal the next time they decide to have one. In the meanwhile, although we still have a replacement toilet rim unblocker in place, I have attached it to a large and cumbersome weight such that this problem could never reoccur. I must say that in my years of being a householder, I have never experienced a problem like this ever before and, of course, one always resolves that a similar problem will never reoccur in the future. 

This afternoon, I decided that my little patch of beetroot was never actually going to come to fruition. Although in my little beetroot patch, the seeds had germinated within a few days, the resulting plants were very weak and spindly and were in danger of being overwhelmed by weeds. I am not sure whether the soil underneath trees) is basically a little sour and denuded or whether the beetroot seed had deteriorated with age. So I decided to call it a day and basically dug over the whole patch – as it was only about two yards by one yard, this did not take long. The last time I was in Wilko in Droitwich I had bought a box of lime so I used some handfuls of this to ‘sweeten’ the soil before I try some new re-plantings.  Tomorrow, we hope to be on a more even keel as we will have got the Bank Holiday over and done with – on my way back from Pilates,  I will see if Asda are selling some begonias or other colourful plants towards the end of the season and put them in the plot to brighten it up a bit during the autumn months.

Today started off somewhat dull and overcast and the the temperature seemed to have drifted down a degree or so. I walked down for the newspapers at about 8.00 am as I generally do – and didn’t even come across the usual crop of joggers and dog-walkers who are the only other people to populate the streets at that hour. Nonetheless, I was back by 9.0 am and instead of the Andrew Marr show, we had plenty of Team GB successes in Tokyo to watch and to celebrate. After we had our fill of the paralympics, we engaged in our normal walk down to the park where we met with our University of Birmingham friend. Before he turned up, though, we had a fair share of the regular dog-walkers to entertain us. Most people bring with them a special long handled plastic ‘thingy’ (called a ‘launcher’ in the pet-shops) which helps to propel a standard tennis ball a long way – hence, those in possession of one of these implements can send their dogs crazy by launching their ball a long way and there are always some breeds of dogs (e.g. collies) which love chasing after the projected ball. Other breeds of dogs, though, seem to be indifferent to a flung ball – I suppose it must depend upon the volume of ‘retriever’ type genes that are in the dog’s heritage. We must have spent at least an hour in the park deep in conversation which we both enjoy before we realised that we had better get home and cook some lunch. We had a conventional lunch of beef, cabbage and baked potato before we settled down to a good read of the Sunday newspapers.

In the midst of all that was written about the fairly ignominious retreat from Kabul, one particular offering stood out for me. This was a cartoon brilliantly drawn by Riddell in today’s Observer in which one sees a ghostly line of soldiers, all drawn correctly in the military dress and with the contemporary weapons of the day, trudging away in the road that leads away from Kabul. Each soldier’s kitbag or uniform is labelled with the year of the retreat in question and they are in order: 1842, 1880, 1919, 1989 and finally 2021. The whole cartoon is titled ‘Retreat‘. The post of the cartoon is clear – Britain had had many military ‘adventures ‘ in Afghanistan and they always ended in disaster and a military retreat. In what has been termed one of the greatest disasters in Britain’s military history, in 1842 some 16,000 lives were lost in the retreat and there was only survivor who limped into Jalalabad on his mortally wounded horse. When asked what had befallen the rest of the army, the survivor pointed out ‘I am the army’. The point here is to wonder any of our military high command or senior civil servants in the Ministry of Defence have ever read any British history – did they not know (or care) that campaigns in Afghanistan nearly ends like this? Another related point is the realisation that any so called ‘special relationship’ with the United States is only in the fevered imagination of the British – and seems completely moribund. There are also columnists who are arguing that Jo Biden is not up to the task of the situation in which the USA finds itself. Although most American citizens are in favour of their troops not being in Afghanistan any longer, they also recognise a blunder of a withdrawal when they see one. So the presidents short term popularity is at an extreme low and may never actually recover. There are still folk memories of the retreat from Saigon decades before. Finally, the Sunday Times lead story is that the recriminations in Whitehall are reaching fever pitch. One particularly shocking revelation is that MP’s and ministers to asked to log concerns about individual Afghans that were particular worthy of rescue (in the main, interpreters) by email to the Foreign Office. it now transpires that at least 5,000 of these are logged onto Foreign Office computers and have not even been read, let along entered in to a spreadsheet or similar. The Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab is due to appear before a select committee next week and in view of his already manifest failings (being on holiday and not returning the minute that the fall of Kabul was evident), he looks as though he might receive the most severe of grilling from MP’s. Many think his days are numbered in any case. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s national security adviser has suggested the West faces another 9/11 if it abandons Afghanistan for a second time. It seems that the only sensible way forward is for British diplomacy to seriously engage with the Taliban to try to establish a ‘modus vivendi‘ for the months ahead. Certainly, there are many with military experience (sometimes in Afghanistan) on the back benches of the Tory party who are deeply unhappy with the government’s performance – so we may see quite a lot of blood-letting in the weeks ahead!