I awoke yesterday to a day when I expected rain to be sweeping across the country but got one of those dull, cloudy days. with a 75% chance that it will be raining within a couple of hours. Late in the afternoon and before the arrival of my American friend, I managed to complete the sweeping up job that needed to be done besides the recently hand-weeded (and now salted) gravel border. In fact, the sister of my next-door neighbour who was staying with my neighbours for ‘the’ birthday party came and gave me a hand for the final 2-3 metres which was very good of her. But as she and her sister (my neighbour) had been brought up on a Welsh farm they were used to turning their hand to almost everything, so we had an interesting little chat whilst we finished off our tidying up job. I now need to turn my attention to the other side of the roadway which looks terrible by comparison but which I intend to tackle section by section and day by day as long as I do not have a downpour with which to contend. When my friend came around and we had regaled ourselves with some nice cooling drinks and a bite of light supper, I knew my friend was worried about the air conditioning in her car which seemed to be non-functioning and she was unsure whether to return the car to the main dealership in Worcester to have it fixed. However, I consulted the web and found a specialist car-conditioning firm who claimed to be ‘female friendly’ and who could probably sort out the air conditioning in her car for her. Of course, we have had some very hot conditions in the last week or so but my friend had worked in Florida for several years which, having a hot and humid climate probably has air conditioning units in every single building (not to mention cars) that one enters. Although I listen to a modicum of news each morning, I do tune into ClassicFM to play in the background and heard the latest in what I thought was a commercial solution to a problem which most people never knew existed. The product advertised was a way of getting better drinking water inside one’s cat. Just out of interest, I wondered how much of our national income is spent on domestic pets and found the following. Britons spend over \u00a311.8 billion every year on pets and related services. Nationwide, owners spend roughly \u00a31,000 to \u00a31,500 annually per pet on everyday care, with food, routine vet care, and insurance making up the bulk of the bills. Average Costs can vary significantly depending on the animal you have but for a dog, the average annual costs range from \u00a31,000 to \u00a31,500 for basic care, food, and vaccines. When taking into account larger breed food costs and insurance, this can easily push higher. Cats typically cost between \u00a31,000 and \u00a31,500 per year once you factor in food, litter, insurance, and routine healthcare. So the annual spend is huge and by way of comparison we spend about \u00a38 billion on childcare costs which is itself is about double what was spend only three years ago. So as a society we spend nearly 50% more on our pets than we do on our pre-school children, a figure which I find simultaneously amazing and shocking. I realise, of course, that pet ownership is much more widespread than the demand for pre-school care but, even so, this gives one ‘paws for thought’ (sorry for the shocking pun but I could not resist it). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anxious to get some gardening jobs done before rain sweeps across the country, I tackled the back garden patio in which after the hot weather some weeds had re-established themselves so immediately after breakfast I gave this a once-over. Then I popped into town by car and picked up my daily newspaper but then, immediately upon my return, set to work clearing weeds from the other side of our access roadway. I made reasonably good progress n this endeavour and cleared about half of the required length before I judged that I had done enough for the day and went indoors to cook myself a dimmer of beef, half a baked potato and cabbage -the first ‘meat and two veg’ I have actually cooked for myself for several days. After lunch, I looked at some YouTube current affairs videos and started watching one of my favourites who is James O’Brien who is a British journalist, writer, and presenter on radio and television. Since 2004, he has hosted a weekday morning phone-in discussion for talk station LBC. What I saw today was a piece of video which made my jaw drop in complete astonishment. After the recent local elections, the Reform party has often swept the board replacing generations of both Tory and Labour councillors who knew how the system worked. But Reform is so ‘new’ that many of its candidates, now elected, have little or no idea how local government works. What we witnessed was a film shot in a Council Meeting of Kirklees (Huddersfield) A Reform candidate was putting herself forward as Leader of the Council but she admitted, on tape, that she had not read the constitution, dd not understand ‘Standing Orders’ and was ignorant of the meaning of terms such as ‘amendment’ Se also said that she still not understand matters even when they ad been explained to her. Then she claimed that the operation of the council was fundamentally antidemocratic because those councillors who understood the rules were at a great advantage compared with those recently elected Reform councillors who did not or could not, understand the council procedures. All councillors will have been offered some training but the exact form of this varies from one local authority to another. A typical pattern is an intensive induction day followed by perhaps a week or so of in-house training. The phrase ‘Lunatics in charge of the Asylum’ probably dates from 1919 when established film stars like Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford decided to run their own studios. But the thought that may of our councils are now in the hands of individuals who literally have no idea what they are doing is frightening. Here in Worcestershire, the Reform ‘leaders’ have fallen out with each other and the current leader of the council is a Green (which is a supreme irony given how far apart the politics and polices of the Reform and Green parties are) one can only be fearful for the future of democracy when this kind of event occurs and, of course, it may be repeated at a national level if Reform were to be the winners of the next general Election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I awoke yesterday to a day when I expected rain to be sweeping across the country but got one of those dull, cloudy days. with a 75% chance that it will be raining within a couple of hours. Late in the afternoon and before the arrival of my American friend, I managed to complete 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-8313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8313","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=8313"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8314,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8313\/revisions\/8314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}