Yesterday when I awoke, it was to the most glorious of days and, no doubt, the temperature will climb to about 27\u00b0 which I think is practically 80 on the Fahrenheit scale. I have a busy morning in prospect this morning because after church (and the necessary coffee and biscuits) I need to hit the road to get my newspaper and wash the car before a friend calls around to collect my old TV. I am going to take along my laptop to the coffee morning because I have taken a photograph of the Lowry print of the Whit Walks and then emailed it to myself so that it displays well on the laptop. Here in the Midlands, they are probably unused to the Whit walks traditions in the Manchester and Lancashire areas but there are a few \u00e9migr\u00e9 northerners, like myself, who might remember the tradition. Meanwhile, we must get acclimatised to that most rare British phenomenon which is a heatwave coinciding with a Bank Holiday weekend. There are already some who have tried to make a quick dash to enjoy a continental holiday but the entire new border checking systems could not cope the other day and queues of up to five hours were reported at Dover. All of this would have played so much havoc with the ‘normal’ operation of the border that the French reportedly abandoned the use of the new system to clear the huge backlog. Even when the new technology works, it relies upon face recognition and other biometric procedures and is slower to process each passenger compared with the previous system. The system, which became fully operational in April, replaces passport stamps with a digital registration to make the EU’s borders more secure, more efficient and stronger against irregular migration, according to the European Commission. Non-EU passengers and some transport providers have raised concerns about the new system — especially in Britain, which left the EU in 2020 under Brexit. On the diplomatic front, it does appear that Iran and the USA are edging every so slightly towards a deal. We do know that Trump is actually quite desperate for a deal but the two sticking points are likely to be the issue of the non-pursuit of nuclear weapons in the first place and control of the Straits of Hormuz in the second place. The nuclear issue can be fudged in several ways but whether Iraq will give up strategic control of the Straits of Hormuz, given their proximity to the Iranian mainland is another matter altogether. In international law the Straits are an international waterway and I do not know what wiggle room there might be for international negotiators to argue around this. Some parts of the relevant UN convention may be a somewhat ‘grey’ area but I am unsure that Iran could try and argue for increased rights given the recent conflict with the USA. So this may be the absolute stumbling block n the attempt to find a solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the political front, Donald Trump has announced that an Iran-USA peace deal is ‘close’ but, of course, we have no idea what this actually means given the American president’s tendency to dissemble. But it is undoubtedly true that domestic pressures at home such as rising petrol prices at the pumps and the unpopularity of the Iran war in the USA may be impelling Trump to whatever exit he thinks he can maintain. Whatever happens, or fails to happen, Trump will declare a resounding victory in any case and at least a small proportion of his MAGA supporters will believe whatever he says. In the morning, I went along to church at my normal time but I went along equipped with my iPad. When it came to the coffee and biscuits afterwards in the parochial hall, I showed some of the people sitting near me that Lowry print showing the Whit walks and explained how these was a regular part of Christian life in the Manchester and nearby cotton towns since the start of the nineteenth century. The gentleman on my right knew all about these traditions as his home town was Chester whereas the person to my immediate right (we were travel companions to the trip to Derbyshire) knew nothing of the as she was originally from Kent. In the car park I chatted briefly with a parishioner who was assisting her very elderly and disabled father making the transition form a wheelchair into their car. I sympathised and offered her any help that she might need, explaining that I had ‘walked down the same road’ as I was caring for Meg and making the transition from wheelchair to car until it became impossible. So we did not have a great length of time in which to chat but I think that next week, if we have a bit more time over a coffee, there may be some practical things that I can impart. After we had all dispersed, I went and put some petrol in the car and picked up a copy of my Sunday newspaper. I then gave the car a jet-wash (with lances that you handle yourself) as the car seemed to have acquired a great deal of airborne dust and grit just in the last day or so. Then got home and made myself a cooked breakfast before I settled down to watch the film of ‘The Railway Children’ – this film originally starred Jenny Agutter but this remade version still starred Jenny Agutter but now playing the part of the mother. The film has just about ended and I made myself a quick ‘fish-on-bread’ meal, after which my son and daughter-in-law called around and we spent a very pleasant afternoon together, but keeping in the cool of the house. Tonight I am going to watch some ‘catch up’ TV – my son had told me about a magnificent series on Channel 4 giving a vivid and in-depth account of the Suez debacle in the mid 1950’s so am sure this is well worth a watch. The TV news bulletins are full of news of play-offs for promotion and demotion but surely on the luckiest teams of all mist be Hull which had gained promotion by virtue of the fact that although lying sixth in the lower division, they secured a winner in the 95th minute of their play off match and thus secured entrance to the very lucrative Premier division.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday when I awoke, it was to the most glorious of days and, no doubt, the temperature will climb to about 27\u00b0 which I think is practically 80 on the Fahrenheit scale. I have a busy morning in prospect this morning because after church (and the necessary coffee and biscuits) I need to hit the […]<\/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-8291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8291","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=8291"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8291\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8292,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8291\/revisions\/8292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}