I awoke yesterday morning to a little nightmare (Meg and I were in a cafe we didn’t know and Meg wandered off and was lost, as was I) from which it was good to wake up and discover that the dream was not true. Fortunately, when Meg was alive this never happened but it is interesting how the subconscious retains these memories and even fears. The temperature this morning was an almost unbelievable 8\u00b0 and this is predicted to rise to 11\u00b0 throughout the day, although a lot of rain is forecast to accompany this rise in temperature. The evening before, I was all scheduled to have an early night and to start getting to bed at about 9.30 but I did quick consultation with my emails before retiring. Then I discovered that a long lost friend had sent me a long and informative email so this evoked an equally long reply and what with one thing or another it was nearly midnight before I finally took to my bed. During the cold spell, I had invested in a couple of hot water bottles and these have proved very efficacious but I wondered if I could make some covers for them. In one of our kitchen drawers, I located a couple of small kitchen towels which, to be frank, we hardly ever use so I pressed these into service, putting a strip of ‘gaffer’ tape to keep the cloths in place. I expected these to unravel during the night but they did not and actually kept warmer for longer so the plan worked very well. If I can find the time later in the day, I may try to do a little sewing job on these to make the tea towels into permanent covers but I might be able to prevail upon a friend who I know has a sewing machine to do a quick little job for me as this stitching job might take seconds on a machine or, mote likely, I might scour eBay for some bargains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the mornings, I tend to have a quick look at the political news and discovered this morning news that economic protests had broken out in various parts of China. These events are quickly stamped down upon by the authorities and the censors make sure that nothing ever reaches the internet. But in this era of smart phones and the ability to take instant video, then details are leaking out of workers walking out of factories to appeal against low wages which the kind of protest that you associate with the capitalist West rather than China. Perhaps this is a sign that the world economy as a whole is running in trouble and one wonders whether the Trumpian policy of tariffs everywhere is acting as a dampener upon world trade. Now that we are in 2026, I wonder if there will be any commemorations of the General Strike in Britain which started on 3rd May and lasted only for a total of 9 days. I suspect that this event will hardly receive any media coverage although plenty of archive film exists from that time. The (upper class) university students thought it was quite a jolly jape to run the buses and the trains although they probably did not have the skills to do either – after all, to be a train driver was to be a king of the working class in those days. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yesterday morning I devoted quite a lot of time to getting an .html program working the way I wanted to display photos of Miggles, the incredibly beautiful tortoiseshell cat who sort of adopted me\/us and who I fed night and morning for the best part of seven years before he\/she mysteriously disappeared just before Meg’s death. I am in email contact with an old friend who is quite a ‘cat’ person and I wanted to put some of the photos I had into some of my own webspace. I have an .html program which is about ten years old which I have used in the past to display both holiday snaps and wedding photos and it uses some very clever html way beyond my capabilities to display photos with a little index bar so that any particular one can be chosen to view. If the original photos are in a landscape mode then the images are resized to a pretty standard 3:4 aspect ratio but if they were taken in a portrait mode then adjustments have to be made. I have got the images available on the web for my friend to view but I need to go back to some of the originals, discern the original dimensions and then make some adjustments either to the images or the code that displays them (or both) This took up most of the morning so I was pretty late getting down into town for my newspaper and then cooking myself some lunch later in the afternoon than normal. I am on Day 1 of a regime in which I am moving slowly towards a 16:8 diet regime in which I eat nothing after about 6.30pm at night and then see if I can hold out until 10.30 the following day for breakfast. I managed it this morning and it will be interesting to see how tomorrow goes – but cups of tea are allowed at any time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not being a pet owner, I have no real idea of the cost of vets’ bills but I gather they are pretty enormous these days. BBC are showing a Panorama programme asking the question why these bills are so high. In the trailer for the program, the information was given that about half of the households in the UK own a pet and that, increasingly, big business have moved in so that now we have a situation in which 60% of the market is controlled by just six large companies. Vets have told BBC Panorama they feel under increasing pressure to make money for the big companies that employ them – and worry about the costly financial impact on pet owners. Prices charged by UK vets rose by 63% between 2016 and 2023, and the government’s competition regulator has questioned whether the pet-care market – as it stands – is giving customers value for money. One anonymous vet, who works for the UK’s largest vet care provider, IVC Evidensia, said that the company has introduced a new monitoring system that could encourage vets to offer pet owners costly tests and treatment options. A spokesperson for IVC told Panorama: ‘The group’s vets and vet nurses never prioritise revenue or transaction value over and above the welfare of the animal in their care.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I awoke yesterday morning to a little nightmare (Meg and I were in a cafe we didn’t know and Meg wandered off and was lost, as was I) from which it was good to wake up and discover that the dream was not true. Fortunately, when Meg was alive this never happened but it is […]<\/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-7970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7970","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=7970"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7971,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7970\/revisions\/7971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}