The evening before last proved to be quite an eventful one as half-way through the evening, the announcement was made from Buckingham Palace that the King had formerly stripped his brother, Edward of all of his titles and privileges and hence he was to be known as simply ‘Edward Mountbatten-Windsor’ Moreover, he was being made to relinquish the lease on the 16 room mansion known as ‘Royal Lodge’ and would henceforth be accommodated in other accommodation on the Sandringham estate. This was a very swift and comprehensive action on the behalf of the King but it appears that he and the rest of the family had simply had enough and it looked as though further revelations in the posthumous biography of Virginia Giuffre (with whom it is alleged that Edward had underage sex when she was 16) looked as though he had sex with here on three occasions. Despite earlier denials that he had ended an association with the convicted paedophile, Epstein, an email has come to light that Edward maintained a contact with him at least a year after he had claimed to have stopped their association. So Edward was himself shown to be a liar and public opinion was very much indicating that the King and the rest of the Royal family needed to take decisive action to protect the monarchy. The general reaction seems to be a sigh of relief and amazement that this has not actually been done before now. I was listening to ‘Question Time’ in the late evening and the programme had been recorded a couple of hours earlier. When the presenter, Fiona Bruce, received the news over her headphones and paused the programme whilst she informed the audience, then only after the first sentence of the announcement the audience broke into spontaneous applause which was an excellent indication of the public mood. In all of the subsequent analysis following the announcement, there is no-one who has suggested that the King has not made the right move stripping Edward of all of is titles and, in effect, banishing him from the Royal family. During the remainder of the evening, I composed what might be the file in which I keep some daily reflections (technically, I suppose a journal) and experimented with some techniques how this might be password protected should I decide to post it on the web for friends to read. I am going to compose a couple or so of sentences a day and then post the file to some webspace about once a week as there is no need for a daily blog but I already possess some webspace with a URL which is easy to remember, as well as an accompanying password which although long is also quite memorable. I decided not to buy any special journalling software as I am still at the experimental stage but it appears that my own home-made solution is more than adequate for what I have in mind. It could be that I run out of reflective material but a couple of sentences should be child’s play to compose each evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the morning, I went down to town by car and having picked up my newspaper and some porridge oats walked along to my favourite caf\u00e9 that I frequent on a Friday. There were two other people in the cage being husband and wife and whilst the wife browsed around the shop, the husband and I got chattering about steam trains. He had worked at the Didcot railway centre for well over 30 years and was a real steam enthusiast so we got talking about the kinds of locomotives with which I was familiar from the 1950’s and early 1960’s when I used to go ‘train spotting’ with an older boy who lived around the corner from me. From Harrogate we go to Leeds or to York to do this but our real local ‘Mecca’ was Doncaster where thee were some engine repair works. Provided you kept to the perimeter and did not interfere with any of the work being undertaken, one could wander around the repair sheds which was always a fascinating and eye-opening experience. Doncaster also received and repaired the rarer engines located in Scotland so this was an additional bonus. After a pleasant half an hour’s chat, I shopped for some cosmetics and then returned home to make myself a lunch out of bits-and-bobs. The afternoon was dark and gloomy but later on tonight I am going to video chat with a Hampshire friend which is always welcome. This afternoon proved to be one of those frustrating afternoons where for some unexplained reason my text editor of choice (which I use to prepare this blog) decided to stop functioning. It took several resets pf my laptop to restore it to some kind of functionality and one could have done without that. But in the late afternoon, I got a call from my Droitwich friend and we have arranged to meet on Sunday afternoon which will be a good catching up time for both of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today a YouGov poll found only 26% of people said immigration and asylum was one of the three most important issues facing their community. Only a quarter of people think immigration is an important issue locally – and concern about it is a manufactured panic, it has been claimed. This was half the 52% who said it was one of the biggest problems facing the country as a whole, and put immigration seventh on the list of important local problems behind issues like cost of living, health, crime, and housing. Saeema Syeda, of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), said the poll ‘proves what we have been saying all along – there is no immigration crisis. It is a manufactured panic, pushed by some politicians and parts of the media to distract from what actually matters to people. Across our communities, we share the same priorities – making ends meet, accessing healthcare, decent schools and secure homes. We need to end scapegoating and look for solutions.’ I suspected that this might be the case but immigration\/asylum seekers seems to be prominent in every news broadcast and the issue is being exploited to the full by all of the right wing (Conservative and Reform) parties for all it is worth. If you include the Brexit campaign (in which the last week or so were filled with arguments about immigration) then this issue has been forced up the political agenda for years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The evening before last proved to be quite an eventful one as half-way through the evening, the announcement was made from Buckingham Palace that the King had formerly stripped his brother, Edward of all of his titles and privileges and hence he was to be known as simply ‘Edward Mountbatten-Windsor’ Moreover, he was being made […]<\/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-7789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7789","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=7789"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7796,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7789\/revisions\/7796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}