{"id":2874,"date":"2021-08-10T18:56:43","date_gmt":"2021-08-10T18:56:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2874"},"modified":"2021-08-10T21:46:29","modified_gmt":"2021-08-10T21:46:29","slug":"tuesday-10th-august-2021-day-512","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/08\/10\/tuesday-10th-august-2021-day-512\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday, 10th August, 2021 [Day 512]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was the day when our son and daughter-in-law were due to return from their holiday in Jersey. We knew that they would be returning today but assumed that the flight would be later on in the day and we would expect to see them in the evening. However, we got a text early on telling us that their flight from Jersey was at 9.00am this morning and therefore we should expect them home from Birmingham Airport at about 11.00am. This stimulated me into an activity I would rather have done\u00a0<\/span>without. I\u00a0suspected that\u00a0there ws a slight odour of something going ‘off’ whenever I opened the fridge door. The only thing to do was to\u00a0strip bare the whole of the fridge, see if there were any offending\u00a0articles (and I did find something in a bowl that I think was the source of the problem) Then, of course, you have to take out all the shelves, give them a good wash down, replace them in the right order if you can remember what that is and then replace all of the food items. This I now have done but the whole\u00a0process took an\u00a0hour and a half and I finished it a few\u00a0seconds before 11.00am which is when my son and daughter-in-law were\u00a0scheduled to return. I was glad, in a sort of way, that this had happened as you do\u00a0need to do it\u00a0periodically, particularly in the summer time. I am also determined to keep the fridge somewhat understocked in future so that errant items are less likely to be forgotten and I also decided to introduce a more logical order for\u00a0things such that they can be located more easily. \u00a0We have another little domestic drama which is causing \u00a0some annoyance. One of the taps in the utility room adjoining our kitchen sprung a leak from somewhere around its base. Eventually the\u00a0seepage became a drip and then a more-or-less continuously\u00a0running tap and I had to\u00a0report to all\u00a0kinds of binding cloths to attempt to stem the flow and stop what\u00a0what was rapidly\u00a0becoming a type of Chinese water torture. Evidently, I had left messages for the plumber last Thursday and Friday but in the nature of the beast, a dripping tap is the very last of a plumber’s\u00a0priorities when there are boilers to service. The\u00a0refrain from Woodie Allen kept running through my head ‘not only is God dead but you try finding a plumber on a Sunday!<\/em>‘ My son took charge of the situation and gave the tap unit as a whole a tweak which I dare not do for fear of making a bad situation worse. We have finally got a time for the plumber to call round but we will have to wait until Thursday afternoon. As we were running a bit short of time, we raced down in the car to pick up our newspapers, had the briefest of elevenses breaks in the park, raced back home again in the car and then I do a quick change before heading off for my Pilates class (routine every Tuesday)\u00a0Perhaps because of all of the running\u00a0around this morning, I was not feeling in top form and subsequently the Pilates session proved a\u00a0bit more\u00a0difficult for me than is usual. Then it was home and a\u00a0lightning quick\u00a0lunch which we just about finished by 3.30pm<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

By arrangement, I then Skyped<\/em> one of my ex-colleagues from the University of Winchester. We tend to have an extended chart every fortnight or so but this time round it had been a longer gap than this and we had a lot to say to each other (and not the kinds of\u00a0things to go into a blog anyway) All in all, by the\u00a0time we had exchanged accounts of what had happening to us in our day-to-day lives we spent the best part of a couple of hours together which\u00a0absolutely flew by. We will probably chat again in a fortnight’s time but we reminded each other\u00a0go jokes, stories and\u00a0reminiscences which permeates our chats with each other. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There are two news stories dominating the media this evening, one foreign (sort of) an the\u00a0other domestic. The ‘foreign’ story concerns Prince\u00a0Andrew where a woman claims she was sexually assaulted by him when she was 17 twice at locations in the United States and once at Maxwell’s home in Belgravia, London. Sky news incidentally have an amazing graphic dawn upon the flight logs of various aircraft in which the young\u00a0woman question had been flown all over locations in the US as well as London, Paris and southern Spain as part of the Epstein sex-trafficking operations. The interesting question is actually the\u00a0writ can actually be served upon Prince Andrew given his policy of\u00a0non-cooperation and non-availability. Also, once\u00a0entered into the legal system, the rich\u00a0and powerful have tremendous\u00a0options to delay and hinder a full court hearing so one imagines\u00a0the this particular scenario will go on for months or even years.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The second domestic story today is that it is ‘A’level results day and the headline\u00a0figure is that\u00a0practically 45% of pupils\u00a0entered for the examinations have achieved a grade of ‘A’or ‘A*’ Those\u00a0responsible for teaching the pupils argue that the\u00a0results indicate a lot of incredibly hard work from\u00a0<\/span>pupils whose educational\u00a0progression has been far from smooth in the last couple of years given lockdowns, distance leaning and the innovations having to be shown to\u00a0deliver education in the most trying of circumstances. On the other hand, are these results fair when measured across the generations (people might not have got into\u00a0course\/ universities of their choice last year when they would have\u00a0done this year)?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was the day when our son and daughter-in-law were due to return from their holiday in Jersey. We knew that they would be returning today but assumed that the flight would be later on in the day and we would expect to see them in the evening. However, we got a text early on […]<\/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-2874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2874","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=2874"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2878,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2874\/revisions\/2878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}