{"id":7945,"date":"2026-01-02T18:08:41","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T18:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=7945"},"modified":"2026-01-02T18:08:42","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T18:08:42","slug":"friday-2nd-january-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2026\/01\/02\/friday-2nd-january-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, 2nd January, 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So the evening before yesterday was evidently New Year’s Eve and it turned out to be an evening of pleasant surprises. After a day that had been pretty fraught what with my escapades with the car’s battery and my tribulations in dealing with mobile phone companies, I received some pleasant surprises. My Droitwich friend turned up with her son and we spent the early part of the evening together cooking a meal for the three of us – the other son was away in London adjacent to the ‘London Eye’ eagerly anticipating the end of year celebrations. My friend had specially commissioned a Christmas gift which failed to arrive by Christmas Day but did arrive in time for New Year. It was a glass\/acrylic medallion designed to be put on a Christmas tree but could be deployed anywhere. Our friend had surreptitiously taken a photograph of the wedding photograph which displays Meg and I looking at each other on our wedding day in 1967 and this had been incorporated into one side of the medallion. On the other side was the inscription ‘Those we love don’t go away- they walk besides \u00a0us every day. Meg and Mike 2025<\/em>‘ This was the most thoughtful and imaginative gift and it will give me a tremendous amount of pleasure as well as reminding me of the generosity of my friend who had it made for me\/us. My friend and her son left my house to conclude their own Christmas Eve celebrations at home and, just as they were departing, I received a phone call from my Italian friend down the road with New Year best wishes. My Italian friend and I made a tentative arrangement to see each over this New Year period but she had the most terrible cold and felt flu-like symptoms coming on so was retreating to her bed without seeing New Year celebrations. I did stay up until the magic hour but did not to be honest see much of the fireworks as I was too busy texting ‘Happy New Year’ greetings on my phone to a range of family and friends. my longest standing Spanish friend texted my greetings for the New Year and I tried to reply to her in Spanish using the words ‘Y para ti tambien!” which means ‘and the same to you as well’ Unfortunately predictive text wrought its worst and I finished up with the terrible greeting ‘And for your tampon’ which I did not stop until it was too late (the predictive text had turned ‘tambien’ into ‘tampon’) I immediately sent a corrective message and I am sure my Spanish friend so well versed in English will understand and be amused by what happened. I did have a vey\u00a0small liqueur glass of whisky with which to see in the New Year but one of my resolutions is to have a ‘dry’ January which should be not too difficult for me. New Year’s Day will see me renewing contact again with an old friend and I hope that in 2026 I can extend and consolidate my social circle which shows ominous signs of fast diminishing around me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To start of the New Year, as I intend to carry on, I had arranged to meet a long lost friend in the Webbs Garden Centre down the road as it is easily accessible for those coming from further afield via the M5. As we both arrived, it was pouring with rain but after a coffee and a catch-up, we went our separate ways. On my way home, I picked up a copy of the newspaper and popped in to offer New Year Greetings to my Italian friend from down the road but she was still feeling pretty poorly and even asthmatic and may need to make a doctor’s appointment to get one of those puffer decongestants that asthmatics use to keep their airways clear. I had prepared some risotto earlier in the day so this meant that there was a fairly instant meal awaiting for me after my return. After lunch, I spent a frustrating degree of time trying to watch the Channel4 film ‘Hidden Figures’ about the contribution made by young, female black mathematicians to overcome all kinds of prejudice and the contribute to the space programme in the early 1960’s. To my dismay, this film did not seem available via catch-up for Channel4 but eventually it transpired that the system wanted me either to rent or to buy it, neither of which I was inclined to do. Then I had a long conversation with my Droitwich friend as we are both, in our own ways, looking forward to some order and consistency in our day-to-day lives, the patterns of which have been disrupted by the Christmas festivities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A major question overhanging the recent political scene is the nature of the Trans-Atlantic alliance. European allies worry that the Trump administration will push for a quick and easy peace in the Ukraine war, which as a result will not prove a lasting one. One pressing question for the year ahead is can European leaders find a way of living with an unreliable partner in Washington who does not share their values, whatever they claim to the contrary, or is some kind of deeper split increasingly inevitable? There is an ebb-and-flow in the nature of this relationship but an impending issue with Ukraine may well bring the issue to the fore once again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I looked rather too late at the TV schedules to discover that ‘Pride and Prejudice’ was being broadcast during the whole of the afternoon in six episodes starting quite early in the afternoon and going on until 9.00pm this evening. However, most of the real action and drama of the novel comes in the second half of the book so I was not unhappy to start viewing from episode 4 (of 6) onwards. Later on, there is comedy in abundance with a review the life of Dave Allen (the celebrated Irish comedian) as well as an episode of ‘Outnumbered’ which I have always found excruciatingly funny. My TV viewing is quite likely to be interrupted by telephone and\/or video calls at this time of year which is always a good thing, of course, and certainly takes priority over a TV programme. Tomorrow of course, is a ‘back to work’ day for some whilst others are squeezing the last bit of vacation out of the festive season before back to work with a vengeance on Monday next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So the evening before yesterday was evidently New Year’s Eve and it turned out to be an evening of pleasant surprises. After a day that had been pretty fraught what with my escapades with the car’s battery and my tribulations in dealing with mobile phone companies, I received some pleasant surprises. My Droitwich friend turned […]<\/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-7945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7945","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=7945"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7946,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7945\/revisions\/7946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}