{"id":2947,"date":"2021-08-23T20:08:47","date_gmt":"2021-08-23T20:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2947"},"modified":"2021-08-23T21:58:56","modified_gmt":"2021-08-23T21:58:56","slug":"monday-23rd-august-2021-day-525","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/08\/23\/monday-23rd-august-2021-day-525\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday, 23rd August, 2021 [Day 525]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today has turned out to be one of the ‘chattiest’ of days. It started with a near\u00a0neighbour of ours – as we were\u00a0commiserating about the lack of a pavement on the stretch of road between us and the main\u00a0Kidderminster Road, we were complaining to each other about the ways in which the local traffic often reaches the speed of 40-50 mph despite a 30 mph\u00a0speed limit being in place. There is a sort of explanation for this. If one to examine the road which acts as a\u00a0distributor road to us, it is a ‘de facto’\u00a0inner ring road but in practice had not been widened or upgraded in decades whereas the traffic has increased\u00a0<\/span>exponentially. Also, there are a great variety of speed limits along the road with very frequent changes (variously 30mph, 40mph and 50mph) but\u00a0absolutely\u00a0 no speed cameras in place, so when the local populace\u00a0reaches this stretch of road, they tend to let rip (particularly as the first bit is\u00a0downhill).\u00a0Further on down the road, we were particularly pleased to make contact again with some of our close (church) friends who live down the road but who we have not seen for a week or so whilst they have been off on their jolly\u00a0holidays (in England) We confirmed the fact that their wedding anniversary is within about a week of ours so that that\u00a0makes three of us couples (the two\u00a0near neighbours, plus Meg and I) who\u00a0have decided to ‘push the boat out’ and\u00a0have a celebratory wedding anniversary meal two weeks on Thursday. I still have to organise this with the hotel but that will happen later on this\u00a0afternoon – as indeed it did (after, frustratingly, it seemed to be difficult for them to answer my call). So we had a good old natter in the sunshine and then struck off, very late, to collect our newspapers. Meg felt she would appreciate a stop off at the Waitrose<\/em> coffee shop so\u00a0I left her there munching away whilst I went to collect our newspapers. Then I needed to collect a few things that\u00a0unfortunately made my rucksack\u00a0extraordinary heavy –\u00a0I needed to buy just a few baking potatoes but finished off with 2kg of King Edwards plus 2 times 2 litres of milk so the\u00a0resulting load was so heavy that Meg couldn’t even lift it off the floor. Nonetheless, we trudged home even though we were incredibly late by now but half up the hill we were stopped by someone we know well by\u00a0sight who had\u00a0only\u00a0just heard that the Honda Civic \u00a0was no\u00a0<\/span>longer to be manufactured in Swindon but either in Japan or in Turkey for the UK\u00a0market. As our neighbour was an absolute fan of all vehicles made by Honda, he was a bit dismayed to\u00a0learn they are no longer to be manufactured in Swindon. But is in the nature of modern manufacturing that vehicle production can be switched from location to location as often the same model is manufactured in more than one plant.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

We had a very, very delayed lunch. I improvised by trying out a tin of\u00a0chili\u00a0beans into which I stirred some cubes of beed that were to be eaten up, petit pois, a stirring of chinese curry and topped with some plain yogurt. If this sounds absolutely foul, then it really wasn’t too bad – and I did get the meal prepared in just about 5 minutes flat. We did treat ourselves to a\u00a0smidgeon of ice-cream to help to compensate for the earlier culinary ventures. In the late afternoon, I had set myself the task of putting a restraining ‘tie’ on one of our plum trees which is fairly\u00a0<\/span>heavily laden with fruit but which could snap or shear away from the main tree if not supported. For tasks like this, I always implore the women of their household not to throw away their old tights but to donate them (having been washed)\u00a0<\/span>to my ‘ties’ bag. Because of the material of which they are made, nylons make an excellent tying up agent as they are strong and\u00a0rot-proof but with a tiny bit of ‘give’ in them which is just\u00a0what is required. To put this in place, I had to balance on two of my home made devices – one is an old (heavy duty) plastic milk crate which I must say is well prized by those in the know as they can easily bear one’s weight.\u00a0The other is a stool arrangement which I use to balance on the\u00a0milk crate.In case, this sounds precarious, it was but at least I\u00a0didn’t fall off and I managed to get the job done in\u00a0about 5 minutes.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The Afghanistan pull-out is proving to be incredibly problematic. The\u00a0Taliban say they are going to allow no extensions but the USA are saying that it will take 3 days (70 hours) just to pull their own troops and equipment out, only leaving four days as from this moment to pull out civilians. I have\u00a0<\/span>potential solution to this: why do the\u00a0British and Americans not pull out (complying with undertakings given to the Taliban) but leave it to the UN to organise whatever\u00a0evacuations need to take place over their own timescale?<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today has turned out to be one of the ‘chattiest’ of days. It started with a near\u00a0neighbour of ours – as we were\u00a0commiserating about the lack of a pavement on the stretch of road between us and the main\u00a0Kidderminster Road, we were complaining to each other about the ways in which the local traffic often […]<\/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-2947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947","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=2947"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2951,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2947\/revisions\/2951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}