Last night, I attended church which is now the norm for early Saturday evenings. But on my way out, one of the members of the congregation just about recognised me and enquired after Meg so this triggered my usual description of how Meg had died peacefully at home surrounded by family and friends. It transpired that my fellow worshipper had worked for a large multinational company (in the transport business, of which I had heard) but she had to take early retirement a few months ago after a reorganisation of the company. We had a most pleasant chat and, if the opportunity arises which it might well later in the week, I might be able to pursue and extend our conversation. After I returned home, I had some blueberries together with some freshly prepared custard. Although I have some packets of ready-made custard in stock, it is so much cheaper to prepare it yourself and I now have the quantities and the proportions of to a fine art so that it is now no trouble to prepare it. But I do have to stand over it and constantly stir it so that it does not boil over and\/or stick. I have treated myself to a beef joint which I always put in the slow cooker and then put it on as soon as I get up the following day. Once cooked, I shall divide it into about three portions and freeze two of them for future weeks which is what I do with joints of meat these days. The political news this morning is an acknowledgement about the damage Brexit has wrought on the British economy. Brexit will have a negative impact on the UK’s economic growth ‘for the foreseeable future’, the UK’s most senior banker has warned. The Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey said a decline in the UK’s potential growth rate from 2.5% to 1.5% over the past 15 years was linked to lower productivity growth, an ageing population, trade restrictions – and post-Brexit economic policies. But he did add that the economy is, however, likely to adjust and find balance again in the longer term. ‘Over the longer term, there will be – because trade adjusts – some at least partial rebalancing,’ he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the week to come, there are two major events to which I can look forward. The first of these is the homecoming of my University of Droitwich friend who has been in South Africa for the past three weeks seeing her family. Both she and I know that she is going to be pretty miserable for the next few days as she has enjoyed seeing her extended family so much and has seen so much of them for the past few weeks. By now the long trek home is commencing, involving two changes of flight but after a text, I have agreed to pick her up at the airport on Tuesday morning so that she will be arriving back in the UK to a friendly face. The second major event this week is the formal induction of our new parish priest next Thursday evening. There will be a formal church service attended by some fellow ministers from other Christian denominations and in many ways, this is like a ‘rebirth’ of the parish community. Afterwards, there is going to be a reception for all of the members of the congregation and this is to be held in a large meeting room attached to a local pub which is literally a hundred yards or so away from the church. I am looking forward very much to this event as it is a chance to meet with other members of the congregation whom I got to know some years ago but have not met recently if they attend the Sunday morning rather than the Saturday evening service at the church. The last occasions in which I had a similar opportunity for meeting was at a Summer and a Christmas church ‘f\u00eate’ but a combination of COVID and then Meg’s illness and my inability to attend church rather terminated such events for me. I must remind myself to run off several more copies of the eulogy I prepared for Meg which just happens to be a good summary of her life and which will be appreciated, I am sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the morning, I did not rush too much because my University of Birmingham friend could not make it for his customary coffee so I knew I was going to be on my own. The weather was all rather wet and drizzly and I wondered whether to go down to town by car. Eventually, I\u00a0decided to walk down and got a little wet in the process but I reasoned that a bit of light rain did not hurt anybody so I walked down into town, had my coffee and then walked back home again. Waitrose<\/em> did not have any copies of the ‘Sunday Times<\/em>‘ for which I have a voucher so I knew that I would have to take the car into town to get my copy of the paper. Now started a fruitless search which involved a visit to two supermarkets and a petrol station. I was unsuccessful at each retail outlet that I had tried and I know from bitter experience that one outlet sells out, then customers like myself dash from one to another and even if copies were printed and distributed in the normal fashion, they soon go. The minute I \u00a0got home, I had to start cooking the lunch which involves quite a lot of work when I have cooked a joint in the slow cooker as it involves cleaning out the dish, making some onion gravy and dividing the joint into four smaller portions for eventual freezing. After I had eaten my lunch, I had a little doze (how unusual?) and then my son called around as we agreed that he should and we exchanged news of our comings-and-goings over the past few days. Later in the afternoon, I busied myself with some domestic jobs and wondered if anything would grab my attention in the broadcast TV schedules. Nothing grabbed my attention so I may do a search on the BBC iPlayer for some popular science programmes, probably made by Hannah Fry, Jim Al-Khalili or Brian Cox as these are generally excellent. I still have my book on ‘The Grieving Brain<\/em>‘ which I am finding interesting on a second read and tend to read one or two chapters a day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last night, I attended church which is now the norm for early Saturday evenings. But on my way out, one of the members of the congregation just about recognised me and enquired after Meg so this triggered my usual description of how Meg had died peacefully at home surrounded by family and friends. It transpired […]<\/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-7758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7758","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=7758"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7760,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7758\/revisions\/7760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}