{"id":2998,"date":"2021-09-01T19:57:12","date_gmt":"2021-09-01T19:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=2998"},"modified":"2021-09-01T21:53:55","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T21:53:55","slug":"wednesday-1st-september-2021-day-534","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/09\/01\/wednesday-1st-september-2021-day-534\/","title":{"rendered":"Wednesday, 1st September, 2021 [Day 534]"},"content":{"rendered":"

I suppose to start off this blog saying ‘yet another gloomy day’ is not saying very much – I suspect that the whole nation is getting rather fed up with this weather pattern. Of course for schoolchildren, it is\u00a0their last week of ‘freedom’ before the new academic year begins. For the rest of us, it is the start of another month and one is beginning to sense that autumn will soon be upon us. This morning we had a morning punctuated by telephone calls and text messages. I had sent a text to my\u00a0favourite niece in Yorkshire, asking when was a good time to have a chat with her about the\u00a0health problems of \u00a0both her mother (my sister) and her father (my brother-in-law) who was currently in hospital. I felt my niece, as she is the eldest of my\u00a0sister’s four children, would be in a good\u00a0position to assess what domestic changes might need to be made once her father is discharged from hospital. She texted me to say that she on the way to see her mother and we should expect more news later on in the day. Then my professor friend from\u00a0South Oxfordshire\u00a0phoned for a friendly chat. He and his wife had spent a few days in\u00a0<\/span>the city of Liverpool and were extolling its virtues to me. They had found a\u00a0place to stay near to the waterfront and were incredibly impressed by the various museums they had visited there aa well as the two cathedrals. I know that the\u00a0new-ish Roman Catholic cathedral being built in a circular shape is known to the\u00a0locals as ‘Paddy’s wigwam<\/em>‘ But our friends told us that the footfall in the Anglican cathedral was actually much greater than in the Catholic rival. From the glowing\u00a0picture of Liverpool that our friends painted (and it had, quite recently, been a ‘European Capital of Culture’ in 2008), we think that it may well be worth a short break of about 5 days or so.\u00a0Later on in the morning, I got an extraordinary phone call from my\u00a0sister whose birthday it was yesterday. I had bought her a card in Waitrose<\/em> and then addressed it and posted it in the local Post Office. What actually arrived was an envelope, correctly addressed but unsealed \u00a0and with no card inside. It looks as though in my haste to get the\u00a0card off and into the system I had put a message\u00a0inside the card and then forgot to put it into the envelope unless it came out in transit.\u00a0Another of life’s little mysteries.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

When we got home from our daily walk, we had lunch \u00a0and then I contemplated the tasks for the afternoon. After lunch, I got a phone call from the\u00a0energy company from which we are\u00a0purchasing our gas and electricity but from whom I am moving to another\u00a0<\/span>company which is offering me a deal which is \u00a350 a month cheaper and with no\u00a0price rises guaranteed for the next three\u00a0years. My existing company are evidently desperate to retain my business but when they\u00a0kept\u00a0offering me ‘new deals’ I argued back with them that they were\u00a0offering too little, too late and if they\u00a0had really valued me as a customer they would have offered me a better deal before\u00a0I threatened to take my business away. Eventually, when I insisted I was certainly going to move my account. they go so frustrated with me that they put the phone down.\u00a0<\/span>As we are going to a funeral tomorrow, I\u00a0felt as though I needed to give the car a quick wash. I always have a feeling that is a mark of\u00a0disrespect to turn up to a funeral in a dirty car so it had a wash for the first time in a month or so. We are picking our Italian friend up tomorrow and we are making our way as a threesome to the\u00a0cemetery and then to the refreshment\u00a0<\/span>afterwards. I also needed to fit the car up with petrol,\u00a0nothing that\u00a0out the first day of the new E10 regime where\u00a0ethanol constitutes 10% of the petrol that you buy. The government argues that most modern cars will comply with ease to the new fuel and, altogether, the government argues that doubling the proportion of ethanol from 5% to 10% will reduce emissions to the equivalent of taking 350,000 cars off the roads. Having got the car filled up with petrol I then\u00a0popped into the \u00a0local ‘Home\u00a0and Garden’ stores to buy one or two bits and\u00a0pieces.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In the late afternoon, we got a call from my niece which did not contain welcome news. Her father’s prostatic cancer had now spread to his spine and had actually cracked some of the vertebrae.\u00a0After a\u00a0case conference on Friday, they may well be offering some\u00a0targeted radiotherapy which I hope will relieve some of his\u00a0symptoms a little. All I could actually do was to say that I would phone or FaceTime<\/em> my sister much more\u00a0regularly to giver her whatever kind of\u00a0emotional\u00a0support I can in these difficult times.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I suppose to start off this blog saying ‘yet another gloomy day’ is not saying very much – I suspect that the whole nation is getting rather fed up with this weather pattern. Of course for schoolchildren, it is\u00a0their last week of ‘freedom’ before the new academic year begins. For the rest of us, it […]<\/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-2998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2998","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=2998"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3001,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2998\/revisions\/3001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}