{"id":2591,"date":"2021-06-18T20:57:33","date_gmt":"2021-06-18T20:57:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2591"},"modified":"2021-06-18T22:30:03","modified_gmt":"2021-06-18T22:30:03","slug":"friday-18th-june-2021-day-459","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/06\/18\/friday-18th-june-2021-day-459\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, 18th June, 2021 [Day 459]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was one of those days that I describe as ‘chewy’ i.e. we felt a bit out of sorts with the world. Matters were not helped when Meg woke up this morning with a very bad neck – it might have been that she had slept in a somewhat awkward position but from the word go her neck has been troubling her. More of this later. Our domestic help texted as she was without a car today so after breakfast I had a quick shower and went to pick up by car (never a chore!) She was chattering\u00a0excitedly about her job as an\u00a0activities assistant\u00a0in a residential home and from what she tells me about it I am sure she\u00a0will prove to be excellent and a real asset to the home. Having got her into the house and had our normal chat, Meg and I decided to go down into car as it was drizzling quite heavily – and it has been all day. I am sure that the gardens need all of this rain and we are not\u00a0massively disappointed but it does come as a bit of a shock over the last few days. Having picked up our newspapers, Meg and I went to reestablish our customary relationships with the Waitrose<\/em> cafe – but we have to say it was incredibly quiet and I hope that\u00a0trade picks up or the powers that be may decide to devote the floor\u00a0space to something else, which would be a great shame. After we had had\u00a0our comestibles, we decided to go to the park to see if\u00a0anyone we knew was foolhardy enough to be taking a turn in the\u00a0park. We parked in the car-park and did a circular tour (in the\u00a0rain) to give us ourselves a breath of fresh\u00a0air\u00a0as much as anything. The park was practically deserted and, needless to say, we met none of the usual crowd so we made for home. Then I cooked lunch for Meg and I but she\u00a0was quite a bit of distress with her neck. So we\u00a0got prepared by\u00a0downing some\u00a0paracetamol and organising some heat in our living room, the\u00a0electric blanket bing switched on in the\u00a0bedroom, a specialised ‘neck\u00a0warmer’ warmed up in the microwave and finally a tube of\u00a0ibuprofen gel that had been\u00a0presided for my ‘trigger\u00a0finger’ but which could be pressed into service. Meg had a good sleep in the\u00a0early part of the afternoon so a lot of our remedies did not need to be used but we might have try some of these if things do not improve.<\/span><\/p>\n

The political news is interesting this evening as overnight and, almost out of the blue, the Liberal Democrats have scored a stunning victory in a\u00a0true-blue Tory seat of Chesham and Amersham, replacing a Tory majority of 16,000 with a Liberal\u00a0Democrat of 8,000. Of course, it is often said that people\u00a0vote differently in bye-elections compared\u00a0with the General\u00a0Election i.e. prepared to cock-a-snook at the government in a bye-election but returning to the\u00a0file at the time of the next General Election. There two\u00a0particular factors that riles the good voters of Chesham with Amersham. Probably the most\u00a0significant is the\u00a0whole issue of HS2 which, as they see it, destroys some of the\u00a0beautiful countryside surrounding them (and not benefitting them but only people from the Midland\u00a0the North with whom they share no fellow feeling!) A\u00a0second factor about which the Tories have been repeatedly warned is the\u00a0provision new housing. The Toy Party needs people who are house owners (they feel) before people vote Conservative but this is difficult when prices are so unaffordable so the solution is to build a lot more houses- but where? The present government\u00a0policy is to encourage housebuilders to build houses almost\u00a0wherever they want to but this means that the Tories\u00a0who are sitting in good housing in beautiful countryside do not want this ‘ruining’ by lots of new housing all\u00a0over the place, even including areas that were formerly protected by the so-called ‘Green Belt’ \u00a0Yet a third factor is that fact that the voters felt they were ‘taken for granted’ as the Tories poured resources,and promises of investment, into the former Labour-held ‘red wall’ seats in the Midlands and the North. But of course, the feelings in the minds of suburban Tory voters, is that ‘more money for them means less money for us<\/em>‘ \u00a0and Tories in the South have never shown themselves to be over-keen to share their\u00a0own good fortune with less fortunate areas. Yet a further factor is that the more educated the\u00a0<\/span>population, the less likely they are to have voted Brexit or even regarded it as a good idea. Boris\u00a0Johnson himself, on the quiet, is not well regarded by well\u00a0educated (and well-heeled) Tory voters. So this while\u00a0cluster of factors have come together in a perfect storm to help the Liberal Democrats to claim a famous bye-election victory.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was one of those days that I describe as ‘chewy’ i.e. we felt a bit out of sorts with the world. Matters were not helped when Meg woke up this morning with a very bad neck – it might have been that she had slept in a somewhat awkward position but from the word […]<\/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-2591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2591","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=2591"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2597,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2591\/revisions\/2597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}