{"id":7598,"date":"2025-08-14T15:50:26","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T15:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=7598"},"modified":"2025-08-14T15:50:26","modified_gmt":"2025-08-14T15:50:26","slug":"thursday-14th-august-2025-day-1977","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2025\/08\/14\/thursday-14th-august-2025-day-1977\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday, 14th August, 2025 [Day 1977]"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The day dawned with the prospect of a being a little cooler so it looks as though the current heatwave is gradually losing some its \u00a0power. Today I have nothing scheduled on my planning board so we shall have to see what the day will bring. Of course, I shall start off with a walk down the hill to pick up my newspaper and to have a free coffee and I hope that I might bump into someone that I know. It is actually a period that you might expect when a lot of people are holidaying and I am starring to vaguely think of some plans that I might make for September after I have made the trip up to Yorkshire in just over a fortnight’s time. The daily news is typically dire this morning with plenty to make one feel depressed both on a national and an international level so I may try a day of ‘cerebral hygiene’ in which I expose myself to precious little news today and find diversion in a good book. My friend brought with him a punnet full of plums from his garden which I most admit are absolutely delicious and although we got a handful of plums from our own plum tree, those from the Hampshire garden are so much more delicious. One of my long standing Pilates friends is in the process of selling up and moving to be a near her daughter in Hampshire so this occurrence is more and more frequent amongst my acquaintances these days. I did turn to the Huffingpost Post<\/em>, though, for an interesting news story and read with a certain amount of glee how Channel 4\u2032<\/em>s anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy tore into Reform UK\u2019s Andrea Jenkins last week over her party\u2019s confusing policies. During a press conference, several representatives from the party blamed illegal migration for increasing violence against women and girls \u2013 although it\u2019s well-known that a third of such\u00a0abuse comes from an intimate partner. Faced with a well briefed and experienced interviewer, such politicians new on the block often crumble under pressure. \u00a0I think some politicians, particularly on the right, when they know they are going to have a hard time just refuse ever to be interviewed e.g. on Channel 4 and seek out journalists such as on the Daily Mail who they know will never present them with a serious challenge (such as presenting them with facts that shows their own prejudices are just that and are not rooted in reality) Having said that, it is pretty evident that illegal immigration is being used in a typically scapegoating way and as the probable source of all of the problems that the country does face and the so-called ‘race card’ \u00a0instead of being deployed on an occasional basis is now used practically daily and some of the myths are now well embedded in some sections of the not-well-informed population. In fact, I suspect that not a day passes in which there is not an ‘illegal’ story somewhere on the front pages in a news bulletin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This morning, I reattached a cleat to the inside wall of my bedroom window, the cleat holding the string to the blind to keep it in the ‘up’ position. \u00a0This sounds no great shakes but it more complicated than might be imagined. First the holes in the wall have to repacked with wooden splints to form a retaining plug and, over the years, I have found a match stick cut to the required length and then hammered into the wall works well, But then I have to hold the blind away with one hand as well as its draw string whilst screwing in the cleat left-handed and at a 90 degree angle. I made a good enough job of tis and then returned later with a Philips screwdriver which had a sharper point and did not just rotate in the screw hole together with a rubberised gardening glove to get my screwdriver plenty of grip and succeeded in getting the cleat really tightly against the wall where I hope it will last for years. I then turned my attention to see if I could get the YouTube<\/em> video of a ‘bench’ exercise located and then made accessible on a very old iPad that I have. The idea is that I will keep this 9-10 year old iPad permanently in the bedroom on a stand so that I can view the video clip whilst following \u00a0the exercises, which take about 20 minutes. I have used this particular video clip for years and it can be difficult to locate on YouTube<\/em> but I particularly like the young American instructor who is pleasant and not too demanding and seems able to gauge her instruction very carefully to her intended audience. In the past, I have always put on my Pilates jogging pants before attempting these exercises and these get me into the right frame of mind, as it were. When I thought about getting a bike, I thought this might be a recipe for eventually getting knocked off it as well as all of the gear that you need to buy so I thought that the bench exercises might give me most of the fitness gains I desire in the most efficient way. \u00a0One of the features of the video is a timer that counts down the timings of each exercise (anything from 30-60 seconds) and helps to keep you motivate to complete it and then to press onto the next. I spent a certain amount of time playing about with my spare mobile phone (my ex iPhone) into which I had put a Tesco<\/em> mobile PAYG (Pay as You Go) Sim card but this proved a little awkward to do. In theory, you just use the App to download some extra credit but the app refused to play ball \u00a0even after deleting the old app and installing the new one. The app asks you to send in the number which it will then verify with a message but the message never arrives so the app fails to install. I put credit on the phone using an old web-based link on my previous computer which seems pretty reliable. So it has been rather a chewy type of day messing about with technology that seems to half work and then fail but at the end of the day I have got my exercise routines ready to play and some credit on my backup phone so cannot complain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The day dawned with the prospect of a being a little cooler so it looks as though the current heatwave is gradually losing some its \u00a0power. Today I have nothing scheduled on my planning board so we shall have to see what the day will bring. Of course, I shall start off with a walk […]<\/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-7598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7598","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=7598"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7599,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7598\/revisions\/7599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}