The evening before yesterday, I was treated to a planned visit by some of the young people who used to care for Meg. They were three in number, two who knew Meg plus a resident boyfriend, and the principal thing we wanted to discuss was the arrangements for Christmas party I was going to throw for them – just as we did last year. They are all delightful young people and it was a joy to see them again and, of course, to party with them. The most important thing to determine was the date and we decided to bring this forward a day to Sunday, 7th December as this would fit with their shift and duty patterns so much the better. We discussed the kind of food and drink I should supply which is much of what we did last year but the young people said they would bring along some bits and pieces of party food themselves and help me put things out. We have decided that the actual party food should be laid out as a buffet in our dining room and there people can sit around the table and chatter whilst they eat which will be easier and less messy than balancing things on a plate on your knee. The young people were full of the comings and goings of staff in the care agency – as might be expected, there is quite a lot of comings and goings with some people leaving, coming back and then leaving again in the agency. I am going to leave all of the invitations to the young male Asian carer who has got most of the contacts available to him via social media and Facebook pages but also access to the agency’s contact list as he himself is a ‘Team leader’ and is often responsible now, as he has been in the past year, for organising some rotas and plugging short term gaps. They all had very happy memories of Meg including some of the witty things she had said, even last year at this time when they were busy refilling her glass with Prosecco. As the young people were driving, I offered them all some soft drinks but also I made some onion bhajis for them. I had bought a packet of the mixture to make 8 altogether and this was a little messy although they turned out all right I had to fry off a couple of onions and then add the powder and some water before forming them into balls. These then had to be fried in hot fat for a couple of minutes and then finished off in the oven for about 15 minutes. I had actually just finished cooking when the young people arrived so the timings could not have been better. I was delighted to learn that the young female carer who was particularly fond of Meg (and it was a mutual feeling) had secured a place on a nursing degree at the University of Worcester which is probably our nearest university and as this was her first choice I was delighted for her. This was the young carer to whom I gave a cross that Meg had worn constantly around her neck and who had burst into tears (by all accounts) when she received Meg’s piece of jewellery on the occasion of her 18th birthday. Just before the carers arrived, my Droitwich friend had arrived unexpectedly at my house as she had locked herself out of her own house grabbing the wrong set of keys in a hurry to pick up he boys from the nearby public school. But she knew that they had some keys so it was just a case of coinciding with them when they were ready to leave. I anticipate that we will be spending some together over the weekend cooking some steak together (unless further mishaps intervene) as the boys will be with their father and, of course, it goes without saying that I love to have company over the weekend. It looks as though Sunday might be a final burst of quite good and even sunny weather so we are going to grab the opportunity of a walk in the park whilst we have the fortune of a fine day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the morning after a fairly leisurely start to the day, I walked down into town a little later than usual but was relieved to obtain the very last copy of ‘The Times’<\/em> as I sat down and availed myself of the free cup of coffee available to cardholders. As I flicked through the pages of the newspaper, the principal headline screamed at me that the hospitality industry was going to be hit by an unprecedented tax rise from the spring onwards. This was due to the fact that the business rates payable were calculated on very out-of-date valuations and the average high street property was worth much more than formerly. Also, the whole industry was benefitting from a 40% discount on business rates following the pandemic and this was due to end next April. In other words the hospitality industry had been the recipient of a double handout in the form of a less than up-to-date valuation coupled with a 40% discount but methinks many of those affected would probably complain about the rise in claims made upon Universal Credit and the increase in the welfare budget. When this is thought about, there is a massive hypocrisy and double standard in all of this where some state subsidies and handouts are seen as ‘justified’ (if they go to businesses) but not if they go to welfare recipients many of whom are suffering from disabilities either mental or physical. \u00a0As I was walking back up the hill this morning, I started wondering about the average wage both wen I started work in 1962 and today. So I looked up the figures and was frankly astonished – the average full time earnings in 1962 was \u00a3754 pa \u00a0(\u00a314.50 per week) whereas today, in 2025 it is \u00a336,000 (\u00a3692 per week). My first weekly wage was \u00a33 17s. 6d a week (\u00a33.87) which was less than 30% of the then average wage so this was low – even when I started washing dishes in one of the 4 star hotels in Harrogate I was paid 2s 6d (12.5p) an hour which meant that if I worked a 40 hour week in the vacations at Christmas or during the summer vacations, I could earn \u00a35.00 a week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The evening before yesterday, I was treated to a planned visit by some of the young people who used to care for Meg. They were three in number, two who knew Meg plus a resident boyfriend, and the principal thing we wanted to discuss was the arrangements for Christmas party I was going to throw […]<\/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-7867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7867","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=7867"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7869,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7867\/revisions\/7869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}