It is so nice to have the month of January behind us and to be at last in the month of February. Certain dates stick in the mind and one of them is 2nd February which is traditionally known as ‘Candlemas’ This used to be regarded as the very last day of the Christmas cycle although I think a lot of the traditions associated with this Christian feast day are not now observed. On this day, candles used both in the church and also domestically were blessed and, of course, they symbolise life being brought into the world. One of the traditions that may survive until today is in Hungary where children dress up as bears, eat honey and generally celebrate the glimmerings of the end of winter. Knowing that yesterday was going to be a busier day than normal socially, I tried going to bed a little earlier but woke up again after an hour or so (and then got up and toddled about a bit) so the idea of getting an early night did not quite work out. Later on in the morning, I am due to go round to have a coffee with a parishioner who used to call round regularly and give spiritual comfort to Meg when she was alive but has now been ill herself. Although I will get the news later on, she appears to be responding to treatment and on the mend which is very heartening. In the afternoon, my son is due to call around as well and I am pleased that we can put the final arrangements in place before we go off to Worcester at the end of the month to arrange for the final stub of my mortgage to be redeemed. I attended the church service late on Saturday evening and ran into an incredibly cheerful lady who hails from Liverpool and who always manages to be in an irrepressible good humour although she has been diagnosed as suffering from leukaemia. Also sitting behind me in the pews was the Treasurer of the church committee on which I used to serve and our meeting was quite fortuitous. This is because the Church used to have a system of envelopes in which to make donations to the church split between first and second collections and used in slightly different ways. I used to have a standing order for the first of these collections and make a weekly donation in money for the second but these old arrangements are being swept away and replaced by enhanced digital methods of making donations. As well as relieving one of the weekly chore of always remembering one’s collection money, the digital collection does ensure that the church can reclaim the tax that has been paid upon it and this has the effect of increasing the donation by 20%. My donations have all been a little awry since my finances were in a certain degree of turmoil following Meg’s death but now everything has settled down a bit, I am in a better position to regularise my donation method. As you might imagine, practically every front page of the Sunday newspapers has been dominated by that ‘infamous’ photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (ex Price Andrew) crouching on all fours over the body of a prostrate girl and whilst there is no caption, date, or context supplied for the photograph it looks both unusual and damning at the same time. There is a renewed call for Andrew to be stripped of his peerage and the Government are urging him to return to the USA to answer questions about his affiliations with Epstein but this is not going to happen. The US Department of Justice has released only 3 million of the 6 million pages of material associated with the Epstein affair but they say that they are complying with the law passed by Congress to hand over all material. They were allowed to redact the name victims in order to protect their identity but the actual practice has been partisan in the extreme because the names most commonly redacted are the rich and powerful perpetrators of the sex acts performed with underage girls (including Donald Trump) Meanwhile, as was demonstrated in one video released yesterday, we have the bizarre appearance of a page of allegations in which the whole of it has been redacted including the name of the victim although according to the letter of the law, the actual details of the allegations should be made public and not redacted. There is still a lot more to be revealed by an examination of the 3 million pages of evidence that have been released and one suspects that the most damning of material has probably been retained. There is such a mountain of evidence and therefore ‘smoke’ that surely there must be an underlying ‘fire’ but as it America’s rich and famous that are implicated not confined to Donald Trump, one wonders if this material will ever see the light of day. Needless to say, because of the ‘Statute of Limitations’ (usually five years) none of the rich and powerful perpetrators will ever be prosecuted apart from Epstein and Maxwell (and Epstein committed suicide, or was murdered in jail)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After watching the Lorna Kuennsberg programme on BBC1, I made my way down the hill to pick up my copy of the Sunday newspaper and a little something to take along with me when I visited my friends for coffee. As both of my friends are very keen and competent musicians, we spent most of our time chatting about things musical both locally and also in terms of what we had seen both in the locality and also on TV. Both of my friends were just returning from their walk when I arrived and evidently they are doing this to keep themselves in good shape and I am hopeful that they can both give me a return visit as soon as the latest tranche of treatment is successfully completed. My friend had read a reference to the town of Salobre\u00f1a in this blog where Meg and I often stayed as clients of Saga and they themselves had visited the hotel and swum in the hotel’s pool so we exchanged some happy memories of the hotel. I have on my computer a folder of two years of holiday snaps taken in and around Salobre\u00f1a so when my friends call around this will be interesting viewing for us all. I got home and my son had just arrived for a weekend visit so we chatted for over an hour after which I went ahead and cooked myself a conventional ‘meat and two veg’ type of meal. The rest of the day is probably going to taken up with going through a pile of recent newspapers to extract articles of interest. Looking at my local ‘rag’ I was appalled to discover that Bromsgrove’s target for housing developments had been increased by 85% whereas nearby Birmingham, with a lot of acreage of available brown land, had been decreased by 31%. I am only too aware that building is going on all absolutely all around my house at the moment but I suspect that central government has responded to pressure from big building firms because whether it was Green Belt or not, the building is taking place on what used to be flat and easy-to-develop farming land (in the past populated by rabbits, pheasants and sometimes badgers).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is so nice to have the month of January behind us and to be at last in the month of February. Certain dates stick in the mind and one of them is 2nd February which is traditionally known as ‘Candlemas’ This used to be regarded as the very last day of the Christmas cycle […]<\/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-8015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8015","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=8015"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8016,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8015\/revisions\/8016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}