{"id":1888,"date":"2021-03-04T20:16:12","date_gmt":"2021-03-04T20:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=1888"},"modified":"2021-03-04T23:14:34","modified_gmt":"2021-03-04T23:14:34","slug":"thursday-4th-march-2021-day-353","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/03\/04\/thursday-4th-march-2021-day-353\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday, 4th March, 2021 [Day 353]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was another cold day in the current spell of cooler weather with the\u00a0thermometer just above freezing, but only just (about 4\u00b0) Tomorrow is\u00a0going to be cold as usual and we have a few days more before the weather gets a little milder over the weekend. One would think we would be used to pretty cold weather at the start of March but we had got used to a few glorious days of spring-like weather a few days ago and I suppose we have got a little spoiled because of it. We collected our newspapers and sought friends and friends of friends in the park and we had a jolly good chat until the weather got to all of us (as we\u00a0are standing around socially distancing) and so we made for home. I was telling our friends of an\u00a0embarrassing incident that we had when we were students in 1968. Below the\u00a0maisonette that we rented was a series of little stalls in some converted\u00a0shops and one of them was a haberdashery stall, run by an Asian lady. At that time, we needed, in order to effect a minor repair, some knicker elastic (it is called ribbon elastic today) and it was on sale for 1\u00bdd a yard (i.e. the old money) We explained that we only needed a foot and the stall-holder told us ‘That’s all right – I will sell you a foot’<\/em> So she carefully measured it out, wound it round into a little ball and p<\/span>opped it into a little brown envelope. So we were asked to pay \u00bdd \u00a0– we handed\u00a0over our 1d and got \u00bdd in change. We\u00a0felt a\u00a0little embarrassed about\u00a0this transaction even at the time – \u00bdd is worth\u00a0approximately a fifth of the modern day 1p coin.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

News is emerging this evening about Sir\u00a0Philip Putnam who was the previous principal civil\u00a0servant in the Home Office and who was suing the Home Office for constructive dismissal. It has been announced that an out-of-court settlement has been reached and Sir Philip was to be\u00a0awarded more than \u00a31\/3rd million after it was acknowledged that he had been\u00a0subjected to a campaign of bullying and abusive behaviour. The Standards chief Sir Alex Allan found that Ms Patel had broken the code governing ministers’ behaviour and\u00a0ruled according only for Boris Johnson to not accept his findings (and thereby exonerated Priti Patel) whereupon he promptly resigned. My own stance on this if she had the intellect to argue her case, she\u00a0would not have to\u00a0resort to bullying and\u00a0obscene language. Every time I see her on the TV I am reminded that she was the communications director of James\u00a0<\/span>Goldsmith’s\u00a0Referendum Party which then transmogrified itself into UKIP. Eventually she found a\u00a0natural home in the right wing of the\u00a0Conservative\u00a0party here she is quite popular with the rank-and-file (although there are\u00a0rumours that she is destined for the chop in the next government re-shuffle, probably forthcoming in June). I am reminded of the minister in the first Labour Government who was not given a new portfolio in the Labour Administration from 1945-1950. He sought an an interview with the (very headmasterly) Prime Minister, Clement Attlee who, when asked why he had not offered a new ministry to the\u00a0disappointed politician\u00a0merely drew on his pipe and uttered the\u00a0immortal words ‘Not good enough!<\/em>” And that was that.\u00a0However, since then we have a legion of ministers who have shown the most astounding incompetence but\u00a0still retained office (they are all right\u00a0wingers needless to say) The most\u00a0outstanding example was Chris Grayling (popularly known\u00a0amongst MPs as ‘failing Grayling’) whoo is estimated to\u00a0have cost the taxpayer some \u00a32,778,072 (i.e. nearly 3 billion\u00a0pounds) in a succession of\u00a0eleven failed\u00a0ventures.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

There is some dark talk tonight of yet new variants of COVID-19 that have emerged in the last few weeks. These are always\u00a0<\/span>worrying in the extreme, not least because they appear to be ‘super-infectious’ and seem to have evolved by evading all of the current vaccines.It is possible (as with the ‘flu vaccine) to reformulate the current range of vaccines to cope with these new variants but in the meanwhile even more\u00a0variants might\u00a0appear. The\u00a0one real answer seems to jump hard on even a single case that appears. For example, Auckland in\u00a0New Zealand discovered one case of the\u00a0virus appearing and immediately put the whole of the city in lockdown for several days (it goes without saying that\u00a0New Zealand is coping with its COVID-19 pandemic much better than we are). But to be slightly more positive, we are now up to 21 million having received their first ‘jab’ which is practically 40% of the adult population. Meg and I are counting off the days until April 12th when we are\u00a0scheduled to receive our second dose of the vaccine and about three weeks\u00a0after that, our immune status should be as high as it can be.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was another cold day in the current spell of cooler weather with the\u00a0thermometer just above freezing, but only just (about 4\u00b0) Tomorrow is\u00a0going to be cold as usual and we have a few days more before the weather gets a little milder over the weekend. One would think we would be used to pretty […]<\/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-1888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888","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=1888"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1895,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888\/revisions\/1895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}