Two stories have emerged overnight, the first heartning and the second almost unbelievable. We hear that from midnight, a 10 day ceasefire will be in place between Israel and Lebanon and it looks as though Hezbollah, one of the principal dogs in the fight, have agreed to this proposal. This is surely good news for the battered Lebanese and one can only hope that this paves the way to a settlement between Israel and Iran. It looks as though the USA has effectively ordered the Israelis to stop their bombardment of Lebanon which of course they could have done weeks ago had they had a mind. But the much more important political story is that it now appears that Lord Mandelson actually failed his vetting but that the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary were not informed of this result. When the senior civil servants appeared before a Parliamentary Select Committee, they apparently told their political masters that the full and proper procedures had been undertaken in the vetting of Mandelson but managed not to reveal the actual result i.e. that Mandelson had actually failed his vetting. The immediate political reaction was the sacking of the top civil servant at the Foreign Office but massive questions remain. All of the opposition party leaders have called for Starmer’s resignation on the grounds that he had misled Parliament i.e. lied which in the British political system is the ultimate hanging offence would that that were true in the US!) If it is indeed true that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary were not told that Mandelson had failed his vetting (which strains our credibility to the utmost) then why was there an evident lack of curiosity to be informed of the result of the vetting? More heads may well roll in the days ahead and Starmer’s hold on power looks even more precarious. Yesterday, I received my Spring booster jab for COVID from a vaccine whose name I do not recognise. Although I must have received multiple jabs and boosters since the start pf the pandemic, this particular one has left my arm more sore than any of the others. No doubt, this will pass in time but I am used to even mild reactions to jabs received in the past. In the autumn, I should receive both a COVID and flue jab (one in each arm) I have have read that a sore arm indicates that you have had a good immune response which is a good thing but that symptoms should only last for about 36 hours. As long as I can carry my shopping bags and mow the lawn, that is all that concerns me. One tiny little ask for today is to restore the Spanish primers that I had taken along with me yesterday to their rightful place on my bookshelves. But I think I probably need to take one or two of them and start to revise my Spanish grammar which is a little rusty not having used it for six years. One of the waiters that I used to know when I was a teenager always used to joke with me that the best way for a young male to learn a foreign language was to acquire a ‘long-haired dictionary’ and he probably had a point but easier said than done at my age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later in the morning, I popped down into town by car to pick up my newspaper and proceeded to do my weekly shopping at Aldi<\/em>. This \u00a0all went smoothly enough and so I re-parked the car and strolled around to see my acquaintances in the ‘Gifts of Love’ cafe. Then I had a little stroll along the High Street to see of there were any shirts in my size and colour (there weren’t) so I came home. For whatever reason, I was extraordinarily tired and the minute I got back so I got into my comfortable armchair with the feet up and promptly fell asleep for a couple of hours. I suspect that it was a combination of my COVID jab yesterday as well as being quite a busy day and then not a great deal of food inside \u00a0me. I felt disinclined to have a full scale meal so I mashed up a tin of tuna with butter, mayonnaise and Thousand Island dressing which I have on a slice of toast. \u00a0Then it was a case of routine domestic jobs such as clothes washing and putting the shopping away. In the course of the afternoon, I tuned into Emily Maitliss and Jon Sopel (two respected UK journalists) who were reporting with utter astonishment the dispute that Trump has entered into with the Pope, a conflict which Trump is bond to lose. At the same time, J D Vance the American Vice President, who is a recent convert to Catholicism, seemed to be warning the Pope not to interfere with the Trump agenda. The vice president also seemed to echo Trump’s assertion that Leo should concentrate less on global affairs. ‘It would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what is going on in the Catholic church and let the president of the United States stick to dictating American public policy,’ Vance said in a Fox News interview. I other interviews, Vance has come close to arguing that the Pope’s theology was mistaken as the messianic MAGA faction almost seem to believe that Trump is a God-given saviour brought into the world to rescue America. I am looking forward to a quiet day tomorrow but there is a free concert in our local St Joh’s church in the morning and it is possible that my American friend may call around in the afternoon so we can have some quiet time together. In the meanwhile, one of my fellow group members from the Musical Appreciation group of U3A has sent me some photographs of a whisky distillery deep in the heart of Gloucestershire. It does sound a very interesting place but the difficulty is that we need to cajole a non-drinking partner to accompany us so that we can sample its delights. I had told him about the specialist whisky liqueur enhanced with chocolate and orange to which I may treat myself on my own birthday in about three week’s time (which also happens to be the anniversary of Meg’s death)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two stories have emerged overnight, the first heartning and the second almost unbelievable. We hear that from midnight, a 10 day ceasefire will be in place between Israel and Lebanon and it looks as though Hezbollah, one of the principal dogs in the fight, have agreed to this proposal. This is surely good news for […]<\/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-8204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8204","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=8204"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8205,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8204\/revisions\/8205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}