The news which is emerging yesterday morning is to the effect that Trump has, in effect, been defeated in the conflict with Iran and the Sky News American correspondent is posting to the effect that this whole venture was one of the most strategic American blunders of all time. The Iran ‘deal’ is a tacit admission of strategic defeat by the Trump administration and of a failure to achieve nearly all of his war aims. The US and Iran have agreed to stop fighting and to open the Strait of Hormuz. Everything else is being kicked down the road over 60 days of ceasefire and beyond. Given that the Strait was open before the conflict was started by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, reopening it is no great achievement. It simply restores the status quo ante bellum. No doubt, there will be acres of newsprint devoted to this story and an endless degree of spin but, at the end of the day, the conflict has revealed that Iran can exert a chokehold on one of the world’s most critical shipping routes (the Straits of Hormuz) almost whenever it chooses. But the evening proved to be an interesting one in many unanticipated ways. When my American friend and I were taking a late afternoon ‘constitutional’ around the park, we sat on our favourite bench. We were soon to be joined by one of my immediate neighbours of whom I do not see a great deal because they spend an enormous amount of their retirement time cruising around the world and visiting various parts of India. They hail from the Punjab and my American friend who is vehemently anti-racist soon got into an earnest conversation with my neighbour about her life and experiences in England. Rather embarrassingly, my neighbour told my friend of the admiration of her and husband as they observed me pushing Meg up and down the Kidderminster Road almost whatever the weather. We got onto the subject of religion and, to cut a long story very short, my Asian neighbour invited us to go along and visit the local Sikh temple, perhaps on a forthcoming Wednesday. A Sikh temple, known as a Gurdwara (meaning ‘gateway to the Guru’), is a place of worship, community support, and education. Anyone is welcome regardless of background, and they are recognised for the langar\u2014a free, vegetarian communal kitchen that serves all visitors. A Catholic is completely welcome to visit a Sikh temple, or Gurdwara, out of respect, curiosity, or for a social event and the Catholic Church encourages respectful inter-religious dialogue and engagement. However, Catholics should avoid participating in actual religious worship of another faith, such as taking religious vows or praying to other deities. Now my American friend jumps at any opportunity to experience new cultures (one of the reasons why we get along so well with each other) and so I am resolved to go and get a visit organised in about a fortnight’s time. I have also found, with minimal searching, a website indicating the ways in which a visitor to a gurdwara should conduct themselves so I may avail myself of a suitable little head covering other than my big Australian style bush hat and I can buy a ‘patka’ style skull cap very cheaply from Amazon which I will do. But the other significant event of the evening was that, after that the telephone conversation with my niece when we agreed dates for me to visit my Yorkshire relatives on the occasion of my sister’s birthday, I should browse the availability of hotel rooms in Harrogate. Now the end of August is a bank holiday and obviously many people use these dates for a long weekend break which impacts upon the availability of rooms at a reasonable price. But I have managed to secure some rooms which were the last available at a good price by acting immediately and I am delighted to have done so, even though it is some 10 weeks before the event. This will be a ‘mini holiday’ for my friend and I so I have already sketched out in my mind visits to both York and Ripon whilst we are in the area (the first being very accessible by train and the second by bus)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I spent quite a long time this morning chatting with our domestic help as we seemed to have a lot to say to each other, mainly on the subject of family matters. I had noticed from our bedroom window that we have one particular standard rose tree\/bush (which is at least 10′ in height) and with the recent sunny weather there was quite a proliferation of beautiful scented deep-red blooms on the top of the tree. I located some tree loppers from the depths of the garage and with the assistance of these cut off about eight blooms with quite long stems. As it is our domestic help’s birthday next Sunday, I put together a birthday card, a present and one of the roses to complement the same. I also put a beautiful red rose in front of Meg’s picture (which I keep replenished with a flower) and then made a collection of the remainder to distribute to my Pilates fellow class members by wrapping the stems in some tinfoil to avoid scratches and to make them easier to carry. Then I gave a red rose to each of my fellow class members ( only three in number) and to our Pilates instructor, explaining that last week was the anniversary of Meg’s funeral and the distribution of the red roses was an act of remembrance. As it happened, on the way to my Pilates class I bumped into one of our ex-Waitrose coffee club gathering who is now in a residential home but was pushed out by her son in a wheelchair and she was also the grateful recipient of a red rose. I must say that the gift of roses to my fellow class members was very much appreciated and our tutor gave the whole class a reward by allowing us to have a special 5 minute relaxation period at the end. After I returned home, I heated up some risotto saved from a previous week followed by an inevitable little doze. Then my lavatera decided to lurch over again (which is not surprising as the wood is so light, soft and pappy) so I popped out and pruned a few more branches of it and added some extra support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The news which is emerging yesterday morning is to the effect that Trump has, in effect, been defeated in the conflict with Iran and the Sky News American correspondent is posting to the effect that this whole venture was one of the most strategic American blunders of all time. The Iran ‘deal’ is a tacit […]<\/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-8349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8349","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=8349"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8351,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8349\/revisions\/8351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}