{"id":2920,"date":"2021-08-18T18:38:55","date_gmt":"2021-08-18T18:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2920"},"modified":"2021-08-18T22:08:48","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T22:08:48","slug":"wednesday-18th-august-2021-day-520","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/08\/18\/wednesday-18th-august-2021-day-520\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday, 18th August, 2021 [Day 520]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today was one of those days when even the weather forecasters were given to explain ‘<\/span>The only word we can use for the whole of the country today is ‘cloudy<\/em>‘) and so it proved to be. Meg and I walked straight on down to the\u00a0newspaper shop and then retraced our steps as far as the park. On our way down, we encountered the French lady who we had round for tea in the garden about a couple of weeks ago. We were commiserating with other that the one Arts Centre that we had in\u00a0Bromsgrove called ‘The Artrix’<\/em> was initially ‘dark’ at the start of the pandemic when all\u00a0public places of\u00a0entertainment were closed. It was then ‘repurposed’ as a vaccination centre which I think was quite an inspired choice of building. Given that it couldn’t be used as an Arts Centre until the end of the\u00a0lockdown, I think a vaccination centre was a brilliant idea. It\u00a0could process up to 2,000 vaccinations a day, there ws plenty of car-parking and ‘The Artrix<\/em>‘ was on\u00a0signposts all over the district and just off the arterial A38 road.\u00a0Although we are getting to the end of \u00a0vaccinating most of the\u00a0adult population, it now looks as thought the vaccination regime will extend into the\u00a0secondary schools \u00a0and the the more\u00a0elderly sections of the\u00a0population, there is talk of combining the normal autumn ‘flu vaccine with an updated COVID-19 booster in the autumn. Perhaps, eventually, we might get our Arts Centre back but in the meantime, I think there will be plenty of work for the repurposed building for the foreseeable\u00a0future.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Halfway through the afternoon, the daughter of our recently deceased neighbour called by. \u00a0She gave us the date when the funeral was going to be, now that\u00a0then post-mortem had been conducted. The daughter was explaining that whilst her mother had had a stroke followed by a second one that we to prove fatal,mshe had no predispositions that one can think of such as high blood pressure. She\u00a0also led an abstemious lifestyle with no alcohol and an avoidance of ‘junk\u00a0food’ so we commiserated with each\u00a0<\/span>other that there was no justice in the world. As our neighbour’s daughter is in the final stages of completing her PhD, I tried to proffer what I hoped might be some useful advice , namely to choose\u00a0one’s external examiner with care. I say this because in the course of my academic life I have seen 2-3\u00a0rampant injustices where deserving candidates \u00a0were denied their just desserts because an external examiner had a hidden agenda or a point to prove by turning down the applicant.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In the late afternoon, I finally got round to planting out the nice rose that our\u00a0French friend brought round\u00a0with her the other day. I rescued some topsoil from a bag I\u00a0scarcely knew I had, laced it liberally with\u00a0chicken pellet manure and then planted out a rose and also a\u00a0companion\u00a0stone container which is awaiting a nice plant to go in it. I am also minded to take the small collection of hazels I have put in a temporary location in the front garden to start to form a little hazel hedge along the front of the raised\u00a0wooden beds I\u00a0painfully constructed down the side of the house some\u00a0years ago now. If this comes off, we shall have effected our ambition to have a good ‘green screen’\u00a0between ourselves and the newly developed housing estate (now some three years old built on the site of an orchard down by the side of our house)<\/span><\/p>\n

Today the House of Commons was recalled for an eight hour emergency debate on the situation in Afghanistan. The Commons was in a sombre mood and the government were peppered with questions, many from their own side, about Britain’s lack of preparedness for the scenario unfolding\u00a0before us. The mood in the House of Commons was almost non-partisan – in some of the \u00a0 contributions\u00a0it was not easy to discern whether the MP who was speaking\u00a0<\/span>was a Tory or not. In fact, Teresa May, the previous Prime Minister, was\u00a0particularly scathing. The fact our Foreign Secretary was on a beach when Kabul was falling speaks volumes. Boris Johnson himself reinforced his reputation for being unprepared, if not asleep on the job. I think the House of Commons is at its best on occasions like this – the\u00a0previous debate of a\u00a0similar nature I remember was when the Commons was recalled for a Saturday debate \u00a0after the invasion of the Falklands (the Malvinas to the rest of the world). I have been\u00a0considering whether\u00a0to not to pen a one line letter to the Times posing the following question -‘In view of the long\u00a0historical\u00a0association of the UK with Afghanistan and in view of the commitment to\u00a0promote the education of\u00a0<\/em><\/span>women, why does the government not suggest that it should build and fund a university in Afghanistion solely for the education of Afghani women?<\/em>‘\u00a0Were the Taliban to refuse such an\u00a0offer, this itself would speak volumes about their real\u00a0intentions.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was one of those days when even the weather forecasters were given to explain ‘The only word we can use for the whole of the country today is ‘cloudy‘) and so it proved to be. Meg and I walked straight on down to the\u00a0newspaper shop and then retraced our steps as far as the […]<\/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-2920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2920","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=2920"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2924,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2920\/revisions\/2924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}