Yesterday morning, I got up rather later than I had intended because I indulged in watching a late night offering on Sky Arts. Normally, I would not stay up late, but Sky Arts does not have a catch-up facility like BBC or ITV so it is necessary to stay up late or record the programme. The programme was entitled ‘Mozart’s Women’ and was good but not that good. Strangely, they did not give a rendition of Cherubino’s ‘Voice che sapete’ which is sung by the love-sick teenager to the Countess in ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ and is incredibly well known. So today I am rather running to catch up with myself but my son is coming round to see me for half an hour after his swimming session and then I have Pilates in the middle of the day which I try never to miss. Last night, there was also a Panorama programme on the Post Office scandal. Although I watched several of the cross-examinations live, last night’s programme was hard hitting and very well researched. It focused on several individuals who, when the enquiry does report, really should be prosecuted and probably spent a considerable time in gaol for the misery they have caused. The programme fingered, as it were, an ex-Chairman of the Board, a lawyer, a computer expert, a civil servant, an ex-managing Director, and the senior manager in charge of bringing prosecutions. The most egregious example of wrong doing was Venables, an ex-Managing Director who conveniently ‘could not remember’ receiving several emails informing her of the problems exhibited by the Horizon computer programme and the fact that many prosecutions could be fatally flawed as it was known that accounts in the Post Office branches could be altered manually by Fujitsu, te Japanese software company who were responsible for writing and maintaining the code of Horizon. Venables, who incidentally was an ordained Church of England priest, personally removed from the privatisation prospectus a sentence which indicated that the Horizon system might not be as robust as claimed. Withdrawing relevant information from a prospectus is plainly against the principles of commercial law but the government and the Post Office Board were desperate to ensure that a privatisation could go ahead. If Venables had allowed the critical sentence to remain in the prospectus, then the whole privatisation would probably have to have been pulled, and a false prospectus was promulgated to keep the privatisation on track. I think it is unlikely that any of those responsible individuals will see the inside of a gaol. The enquiry as a whole has to report next year and then there will be a delay whilst the Crown Prosecution service considers the findings of the report as a whole. Prosecutions will be years down the line and lawyers of those guilty can argue that with the passage of time, it will be hard to establish legal liability. A fine is always possible and perhaps a judicial ‘slap on the wrist’ but I doubt whether the jail sentences inflicted upon sub-postmasters will ever be applied to their culpable masters and seniors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The day was a quiet one today but I had Pilates in the middle of the day which I was keen to attend as I missed the session last week. I found a couple of extraordinarily interesting health articles in ‘The Times’ in today’s issue. The first of them was exploring the link between the menopause, subsequent hormonal changes and the fact that Alzheimers is twice as common in women as in men. The crucial intervening variable seems be a certain amount of ‘grey matter’ in the brain which has been shown to shrink in the case of menopausal women and to have shrunk in Alzheimer’s patients. This grey matter seems to affect cognition, emotion, depression and more besides but evidently the science is still evolving in this area. The second article was an examination of the relationship between gut health and cognitive functioning. This is an area of science which some have dubbed one of the last unexplored frontiers of science – we have known for years that that there are brain-like cells in the gut and there are some subtle communication processes between them. Here again, the science is still evolving and we are left with a situation in which we are dealing with probabilities and not certain certainties. So it is possible to have a healthy life style, be careful over food and drink and to exercise regularly and still develop a cancer (although the possibility is reduced.) Conversely, it is possible to have the unhealthiest lifestyle, diet etc and not to develop a cancer of degenerative condition (although again, the probabilities are decreased) The point is that articles in ‘The Times’ are usually very well researched and referenced back to recently published scientific reports which gives these accounts a degree of credibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the Greenland debacle, it appears that Trump may be backtracking on some of his more outrageous policies. The local head of the ICE operations in Minneapolis has removed from his post (after the two shootings which can probably be classified as murder) and Trump has agreed that Federal and local law enforcements officials do collaborate on a joint report into the ’causes’ of the unrest. The citizens of Minneapolis are taking to the streets in their thousands day after day and so the Republican party as a whole may be coming to experience that the ICE operations were conducted without any of the degree of professionalism or indeed training that was required. So it has possible that the USA has arrived at a turning point but at a tremendous cost to its social fabric and institutions. Back in the UK, a massive storm {Chandra} is sweeping the country and flooding is reported to be quite widespread. Most of the South of England as well as the Pennine district of the North appear to be the worst effected. However, the West Midlands seems to be relatively unaffected which makes a change as Atlantic storms often seem to track across the middle pf the country. The Scandinavians have an expression that ‘there no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing’ but this implies that one can protect oneself completely using the appropriate winter clothing. But what appears to be a major source of danger to the general public is the combined effects of wind and rain in which trees and large branches fall upon power lines, block roads and railway tracks and occasionally even cause death and injury by falling on top of cars. It may be that under the impact of climate change, warmer air is carrying potentially more rain and, on a personal level, it seems that even on quite short journeys one is more likely to see evidence of surface flooding and local drains and culverts unable to cope with essentially quite moderate degrees of rainfall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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