So January is gradually drifting away leaving only February as the winter month which is the most to be feared for bad weather. I do consult my calendar once a day to note with a certain degree of pleasure how the amount of daylight is increasing by about 2 minutes every day. February and March are quite good bonus months as well because the way in which council tax bills usually paid spread the payments over ten months rather than twelve gives one a little of a extra money for a couple of months before new payments of all sizes and shapes clock in next April. When I awoke yesterday morning, I consulted my iPhone \/emails for messages and was delighted to receive an invitation to coffee from a Catholic friend of mine who used to call round and give spiritual support to Meg for the last year or so of her life. My friend was very well herself but I think is now well on the road to recovery but I will get all of the latest news, no doubt, in a day or so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am sure that Bromsgrove is not an atypical town but the branches of local banks are disappearing like snowballs in June, as they say. The latest to announce closures across the whole of the country is Santander which has just announced a closure programme. Santander has announced plans to close 44 bank branches, placing almost 300 jobs at risk. The lender said its move was a continuing response to the changing needs of its customers as more people bank online. News of the fresh closures come less than a year after it revealed plans to shut 95 sites. Santander UK said its latest decision would leave it with just 244 full service branches. The company revealed a list of the locations affected and the dates when closures are due to take place and I rapidly consulted the list to find, to my relief, that my own local bank was not one of those scheduled for closure. But even when one does walk into a local branch one is consulted by machines and encouragement to undertake transactions on-line but I have had occasions when even the in-house facilities do not work as intended and one is forced to seek the attention of the one (or sometimes two) staff who are still employed in branch. I started banking with what was then called the National Giro and that was 57 years ago but the banks have kept changing their ownership over the decades so I wonder if I must number amongst some of their oldest customers? I can understand how the banks are keeping pace with technological changes but there must be a whole tranche of elderly people who are not conversant with smart phones and the like and for whom day to day banking must be a nightmare. Occasionally, I meet up with a friend when I do Tai Chi who used to be an ‘old fashioned’ bank manager and we reminisce about the days that we remember from a long time ago. The political news this morning is dominated by Keir Starmer’s visit to China which is, no doubt, important but is earning our prime Minister the soubriquet of ‘Never here, Keir’ In the days of the former Soviet Union, leaders hardly any made any trips abroad because, when they did, this is when a putsch was organised against them (and those with long political memories will recall that Margaret Thatcher was in Paris when the same thing happened to he and she lost a crucial vote in a leadership contest by a couple of votes).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After I had breakfasted, I was just a little too late to get to my Tai Chi class on time but I went off to do my weekly shopping which had been postponed from yesterday. Then I popped around to the Methodist Centre hoping to catch up with my bank manager friend but he was evidently not in the class this week so I chatted briefly over a teacake and a coffee with some people on the ‘chatty’ table. Then I needed to race home to unpack the shopping and I treated myself to some magnificent pork sausages that I was tempted to buy. After lunch, I realised that I needed to go and collect my daily newspaper and I also made a return trip to the supermarket because I needed to exchange the furry cloggies I had bought recently for other ones as the ones I had purchased recently had a flaw in the retaining strap which caused it to detach and evidently I wanted a good and not an imperfect pair. Both of the German supermarkets, Aldi<\/em> and Lidl<\/em>, have a concept of the ‘centre aisle’ which contains all kinds of normally quite high quality household goods which may be sold off through the supermarket chain and the slogan to remember is that ‘when it has gone it has gone’ So some real bargains are to be had by purchasing things from the centre aisle but one has to make sure that the article was needed in the first place and not just a white elephant In the USA, the Democrats are starting show a bit of political muscle in a showdown with the White House Democrats are starting to use a bit of backbone in an attempt to avoid the excesses of the Trump ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) policies. Democrats have blocked a US government funding package, bringing the prospect of a shutdown closer. Senate Democrats had threatened to block the wide-ranging spending bill in their fight with the Trump administration about its immigration crackdown. They have been pushing to remove funding for the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, from the $1.2tn government spending package after the killing of Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday. Donald Trump told his cabinet earlier that he was optimistic of avoiding a shutdown. The bill must be passed by midnight on Friday to avoid a government shutdown. In the state of Maine, the Governor has discovered that many of the 200 people taken off the streets by ICE agents appear to be here legally. So a real fight-back against the excesses of ICE appears to be underway and already there are signs that Trump might actually acknowledge that the behaviour of ICE units in randomly picking up supposed illegal migrants is actually causing Trump real political damage and we are starting to see some slight modification of policies in action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So January is gradually drifting away leaving only February as the winter month which is the most to be feared for bad weather. I do consult my calendar once a day to note with a certain degree of pleasure how the amount of daylight is increasing by about 2 minutes every day. February and March […]<\/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-8008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8008","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=8008"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8009,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8008\/revisions\/8009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}