{"id":1376,"date":"2020-11-30T21:14:46","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T21:14:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=1376"},"modified":"2020-11-30T21:14:46","modified_gmt":"2020-11-30T21:14:46","slug":"monday-30th-november-2020-day-259","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2020\/11\/30\/monday-30th-november-2020-day-259\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday, 30th November, 2020 [Day 259]"},"content":{"rendered":"

We always\u00a0knew this was going to be a busy day and so it proved. We started off in the outpatients\u00a0department of our (very) local hospital where Meg was attending for an outpatient’s appointment –\u00a0all masked up and hand-gelled up as you might imagine. After a fairly long and\u00a0quite satisfactory appointment, Meg was\u00a0prescribed some new medication\u00a0with might prove to be efficacious. \u00a0Once we had concluded the outpatient appointment, Meg and I went to our little local newsagent where we\u00a0sympathised with each other because we both had experienced\u00a0computing difficulties in the past day. And so on to the park where we partook of our coffee on a blustery not\u00a0particularly cold day. Fortunately, the park was much less busy than yesterday as you might\u00a0expect on a dull autumn day. Then we jumped in the car and made our way to the Webb’s department store to collect our\u00a0Christmas tree voucher (available only to club card holders). When we got to Webb the queues were absolutely horrendous and must have snaked over at least one hundred yards with crowd control barriers that one got used to at airports in the\u00a0days when we used to fly.\u00a0Fortunately one of the\u00a0Marshalls\u00a0indicated that those wishing to seek Customer Services (as we were) could bypass the queues for which we were truly grateful as\u00a0otherwise we might have queued for an hour just to get in. So we eventually got our precious Christmas tree voucher and made for home. In the early afternoon, I decided I would make a trip out to the pharmacists in order to get Meg’s new medication prescribed. Whilst it was being\u00a0dispensed, I took the opportunity for a\u00a0quick ‘whiz’ around Asda to get one or two things that I\u00a0know that Waitrose does not stock and a few things that are so much cheaper at Asda. Then I picked up Meg’s medication and made for home. In the\u00a0early evening, my daughter-in-law and I\u00a0made a tip to the afore-mentioned Webbs store \u00a0so that we could pick up our Christmas tree, as we\u00a0always do. Normally, it takes us about 1 minute and 20 seconds to choose a tree but on this occasion, we did take two minutes and\u00a0went seconds. Then we met with our\u00a0next door neighbour (who happens to work in Webbs anyway) and she had very kindly\u00a0arranged to\u00a0transport our tree home. This was because both my daughter-in-law and myself have changed our cars in the past few months and as they are both shorter than the Honda CR-V we have used in the past, there as a severe doubt whether we could get the tree home by\u00a0ourselves. (The problem does not occur in reverse\u00a0because we chop up the tree into manageable ‘bits’ before we take it back to Webbs for recycling) So we got our\u00a0tree home and it is now firmly in its stand but now ‘resting’ i.e. we are allowing its branches to\u00a0settle a little before the act of decoration starts in earnest in a day or do. Although we\u00a0do put some decorations around our living room and have our own little ‘fibre-optic’ Christmas tree, I have taken the view over the years that the fewer the decorations we use for adornment and the less\u00a0elaborate is their\u00a0deployment, then the easier it is to clear them all away on or before the traditional ‘Twelfth Night’.<\/span><\/p>\n

The economic news tonight is that\u00a0Sir Philip Green’s Arcadia retail empire has collapsed in the worst single corporate failure of the COVID-19 crisis to date, leaving 13,000 jobs hanging in the balance. Even though he was\u00a0given his knighthood by Tony Blair, modern commentators are being far from kind to Sir Philip. The consensus view of him now is that he was not a natural retailer but he was very good at asset stripping. Apparently with many of his stores, he sold off the properties they occupied to a property management company domiciled overseas (where they paid hardly any tax) but under the control of Philip Green and\u00a0his family. \u00a0The stores, meanwhile, had to pay rent for he premises they occupied which reduced their profitability (and the amount of tax they had to pay) but the net effect of all of this was to make\u00a0Sir Philip Green\u00a0obscenely wealthy. It is said that Sir\u00a0Philip Green’s wife once was awarded a\u00a0dividend payment in excess of one billion pounds (but I have yet to check on the\u00a0veracity of this story)<\/span><\/p>\n

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We always\u00a0knew this was going to be a busy day and so it proved. We started off in the outpatients\u00a0department of our (very) local hospital where Meg was attending for an outpatient’s appointment –\u00a0all masked up and hand-gelled up as you might imagine. After a fairly long and\u00a0quite satisfactory appointment, Meg was\u00a0prescribed some new medication\u00a0with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1376"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1379,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions\/1379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}