Perhaps because I was out on the carol concert the evening before yesterday, I overslept a little yesterday but I put this down to the dark mornings. But the winter solstice occurs at 3.03 on Sunday, 21st December in Birmingham (although I should be in Yorkshire at that time having lunch with my niece and her family) to which I always sort of look forward. Today is hopefully going to be a quieter day after much running around yesterday but it never puts me in a good mood if I get up a little bit later than I intended and feel that I am chasing my own tail this morning. The financial news this morning is that the inflation rate dropped by a smidgeon more than was expected when the ONS announced the figures recently but at 3.2% the rate is still higher than the Eurozone at 2.2%. The reason seemed to be lower food price rises but often food prices maintain an upward trend just before Christmas as I suspect that supermarkets know that most customers are prepared to spend a little bit extra at this time of year. Speculation is also now rife than another interest rate cut is in prospect which although minute (of the order of 0.1%) will shave a little bit off the costs of the normal household budget. For once, I have some good political news this morning. The UK is to rejoin the European Union’s Erasmus student exchange scheme, according to reports. The popular programme allowed Britons to spend a year studying at European universities as part of their degree, without paying extra fees, and vice versa for their European counterparts. It ended for British students after Brexit on 1 January 2021 and was replaced by the Turing scheme, but ministers could announce the UK will rejoin Erasmus from January 2027. It so happened that the Erasmus programme played a significant part in both my own and also Meg’s life as through it we acquired some significant students who went on to become life-long friends. Also, because of the exchange relationship that De Montfort University had with the Complutense University in Madrid, this enabled me to go and spend a term teaching Information Technology to public administration students in that university. The amounts of money spent on the Erasmus programme were pitifully small compared with agricultural subsidies in place at the time. I seem to remember that the amounts of money to be claimed by students to help with travel and accommodation costs was only of the order of \u00a32,000 and of course there was a lot of bureaucracy and form-filling involved. But I always felt that withdrawing from the Erasmus programme (and replacing it with the ‘Turing’ programme) was rather a vindictive and unnecessary part of the anti-European sentiment which swept over the country in those Brexit days. I have to admit that the scheme was a little unbalanced as far more students who had studied English as their second language in their European universities wanted to come to the UK (to further improve their English) whilst there never an equal number of UK students proficient in a European language who went to a European university. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I gave myself a quiet morning this morning and just engaged in a bit of computer work before I had a quick lunch and then ventured out to a hardware store in the afternoon. I managed to buy one of the five things on my list but that is about par for the course as the shops seem to be full of Christmas flotsam-and-jetsam but the essential things for which you are constantly looking can never be found. Eventually, I found what I was looking for but was confused because the store stocked the same items in two different places (normal place plus Christmas stuff I suppose). Earlier in the afternoon, I received a text from one of my nieces and we have set up a rendezvous in a bar opposite the hotel in which I am lodged for Saturday afternoon so this is something to which to look forward. I need to have an early night tonight because I have to be up really early tomorrow morning to get to a local hospital for a routine test but, even at the that time in the morning the traffic will be horrendous and parking at the hospital is always problematic as well. I decided to leave my Christmas food shopping until late on Thursday afternoon as I do not fancy leaving it until literally a day or so before Christmas. Last night after a telephone call to a friend, I watched the second half of the first of a series of films on ‘Mozartiana’ broadcast by Sky Arts at 9.00pm each evening this week. From this I learned the following – as a result of her pregnancy, Mozart’s wife Constanza had considerably swollen ankles and Mozart engaged the service of a friend to find her a ground floor flat in Vienna. In return for his good offices, the friend who was a local choirmaster, asked Mozart to compose a little something for his assistance and the result was one of the most magnificent and tender works ‘Ave Verum Corpus’ (‘Behold the Body of Christ’ when taken down from the cross, a frequent subject in religious art)! Tonight, the programme is going to focus on Mozart’s sister who in her early yeas was almost as good a musician as her brother but who, almost inevitably, has been overshadowed. At this time of year, I always have similar feelings as our ancient ancestors found a way to bring light, heat and feasting into the very darkest days of the winter just around the winter solstice and early Christianity latched onto this festival and built the Christmas story around it. But in the Koran, for example, there is still the Christmas story but Mary goes out and gives birth under a palm tree (without the attendance of shepherd, kings, angels and so on) In fact, Meg and I bought a very beautiful and stylised sort of vertical crib when we visited the cathedral shop in Chester cathedral. This I bring out and display in one corner of our lounge and when suitably lit, it does indeed look as though the figures are sheltering under a palm tree. I enjoy showing this to visitors to the house, e.g. the carers who attended the little Christmas party which was about ten days ago now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Perhaps because I was out on the carol concert the evening before yesterday, I overslept a little yesterday but I put this down to the dark mornings. But the winter solstice occurs at 3.03 on Sunday, 21st December in Birmingham (although I should be in Yorkshire at that time having lunch with my niece and her […]<\/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-7910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7910","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=7910"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7911,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7910\/revisions\/7911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}