{"id":2609,"date":"2021-06-21T19:28:58","date_gmt":"2021-06-21T19:28:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2609"},"modified":"2021-06-21T20:47:23","modified_gmt":"2021-06-21T20:47:23","slug":"monday-21st-june2o21-day-462","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/06\/21\/monday-21st-june2o21-day-462\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday, 21st June,2o21 [Day 462]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today is the longest day but it does not quite feel like it as we have endured quite a humid cloudiness for most of the day. Meg and I did our usual walk into town,\u00a0bumping into one of our near neighbours on the way down and it was quite useful to inform her that we would be away for\u00a0a few days, starting on Wednesday, although our son and\u00a0<\/span>daughter-in-law would be keeping the\u00a0home fires burning. Meg and I are settling into a rather\u00a0different\u00a0routine now as we go\u00a0straight to the Waitrose<\/em> cafe and have our\u00a0elevenses there. I have started to partake of their spicy soup\u00a0which I have instead of a coffee and a pastry which I reckon is probably better for me carbohydrate-wise. Then I go up and pick up our newspapers which is 2-3 minutes around the corner and then I call back and meet up with Meg again. In the cafe, we did bump into one of our previous Waitrose<\/em> acquaintances for a brief chat – also we just missed a young lady complete with young son with whom we share quite a lot of\u00a0interests as she teaches Politics and History at Bromsgrove school. In the past, I have off-loaded to her some of my collection of politics books which are probably of much more use to her and some of her pupils than it would be for me. I must get round to slimming down my collection of other academic books once I found a reasonable home for them. Actually, some months ago before the lockdown I was in contact with a firm who would take them off my hands – but every book had to be catalogued first and I reckoned that for several hundred books this would probably take for ever so I never\u00a0got started doing it.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

When we eventually got home, we had a rather delayed lunch and then\u00a0after a bit of a rest got going with the major task that we had set for ourselves in the afternoon. This was to get packed up for our\u00a0mini-holiday starting on Wednesday. We have a fairly simple rule given that we are not going to be away for long and that is to have one clean set of clothes for when we start off and two copies of other items (e.g. underwear) to go in the suitcase. Things like our nightwear always\u00a0goes in last of all, of course, and I am never quite sure\u00a0whether we provide our own towels or not but we had better be prepared. We have made an\u00a0arrangement, confirmed by telephone conversations, to see Meg’s uncle and godfather on Thursday morning. I am sure he will be\u00a0delighted to see us and he is, of\u00a0course, Meg’s oldest living relative. On Wednesday, we are already booked in for lunch at an establishment at which we have dined several times before. It is a restaurant attached to a golf club in a country park just off the A55 North Wales expressway, so all being well we will have a good rest there before we progress to make the rest of the journey (another 30 miles or so) after we have been fed and watered.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The COVID news continues to be mixed. The number of new infections is still quite high at 10,000+ but at least the rate is not rising\u00a0<\/span>exponentially. Boris Johnson is\u00a0simultaneously trying to\u00a0sound optimistic about July 19th (which he is calling the ‘terminal’ point) but pessimistic about the prospects for international travel until next year and the prospects of a resurgence in the virus to coincide with the winter months\u00a0cannot be discounted. We are now in the position where all 18+ adults can at least book a vaccination – there may be a waiting\u00a0time and then of course quite a lag between the first and the second jabs before the immunity\u00a0really builds up. A\u00a0Scottish player in the Eurofinals has tested positive so he will miss the remaining games – meanwhile a\u00a0couple of English\u00a0players are having to self-quarantine as a\u00a0precaution. The interesting question is how the virus has managed to evade the\u00a0protective bio-security cordons that ought to be protecting both of the football teams.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The big ‘infected blood’ scandal that hit our country in the 1980’s is finally facing the scrutiny of a public enquiry. In a nutshell,\u00a0haemophiliacs who suffer\u00a0constant bleeds and need \u00a0to have their\u00a0<\/span>blood supplemented by blood products such as plasma received supplies that were\u00a0infected with AIDS and hepatitis-C from which many (thousands) subsequently died. The point of all this is that the initial days of the NHS, this would have been impossible because all blood was donated. Then someone had the (not very\u00a0bright) idea to import blood products from America where it is common knowledge that blood is often sold by drug addicts, down-and-outs and the like because no doubt it was ‘cheaper’ than the administrative costs\u00a0associated with taking blood from the volunteers in the UK. A prime example of where ‘the market’ does not provide the best (actually, the\u00a0worst) solution to\u00a0problem of shortages.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today is the longest day but it does not quite feel like it as we have endured quite a humid cloudiness for most of the day. Meg and I did our usual walk into town,\u00a0bumping into one of our near neighbours on the way down and it was quite useful to inform her that we […]<\/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-2609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2609","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=2609"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2612,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2609\/revisions\/2612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}