The night before last, I treated myself to a delayed viewing of the romantic comedy of ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ which is always worth a repeat viewing. After I had viewed this, I went to bed but thought I would watch one of the many documentaries that are being broadcast to commemorate (if that is the right word) the destruction of the World Trade Centre twin towers in New York some 25 years ago now, the Americans referring to the disaster as 9\/11 (11th September). The documentary was mainly a compilation of video shots taken from people’s mobile phones and stitched into a commentary-less account more or less echoing the events as a type of real-time event. What I think was most dramatic was that the collapse of the second tower which was not a slow crumbling but a huge instantaneous collapse after fire had gutted the upper stories. This was followed by a huge cloud of dust and debris with the intensity of a tsunami and although many people were running for their lives, they still caught up in the speed of the huge dust and debris cloud speeding towards them. I wondered how many people would have their lungs affected for the rest of their lives by the catastrophe in which they were engulfed. We have never seen huge buildings being deliberately destroyed by aircraft being flown into their upper stories and no wonder the effects were unpredictable. Even Bin Laden was reported as saying in subsequent years that he had only expected the destruction of the upper stories and had not imagined the progressive collapse of the lower storeys which we all now know is what happened. This film did not make for easy viewing but after I had watched over an hour of it, I thought I had had enough and decided to go to sleep. The following day, I awoke to a night where we had evidently had rain during the night which is always welcome. On the domestic front, although we are expecting a budget from the new Chancellor within the month, the omens are not all all good and we may be heading for another financial crisis if the AI bubble of speculative stocks comes to burst. The most immediate cause for concern is how much extra we are having to pay to service the debt on the monies that the government has borrowed. In the UK, the yield on 10-year gilts stretched to 5.22% from 5.15% on Friday, while the 30-year hit 5.85%, up from 5.79% on Friday. The 10-year gilt had traded earlier on Tuesday as high as 5.25%, an 18-year high, and the 30-year at 5.89%, a level last seen in 1998. As the Sky News analyst Ed Conway explained in the article, bond yields are effectively the interest rate in the markets: ‘the ultimate interest rate’, if you like. ‘We are used in the UK to talking a little bit about bond yields \u2013 we all remember the mini budget. This time round it is an international story, but the problem in Britain s because we start this with really high bond yields; we are more in the firing line than most other countries around the world.’ It does not really reassure us to know that the UK shares this problem with several other advanced economies, including the USA, but the effects for a variety of technical reasons is so much more severe. But there is huge political pressure to increase the volume of defence expenditure, the enormous costs associated with the funding of social care still has to be fixed and the costs of the welfare expenditures seems to rise inexorably. In the latter case, cuts will do tremendous damage to the social fabric and thus we have the familiar situation in which the poor and disabled are being asked to bear the brunt of economic problems, even though the causes lay beyond their control. Whilst on the subject of shortage of money, the last day has seen the transfer deadline for the large football clubs to buy and sell players from each other. Premier League clubs have broken their all-time summer transfer record with spending reaching \u00a33.49bn. English top flight clubs had already pushed well beyond the \u00a33bn barrier when Iliman Ndiaye’s move from Everton to Manchester City on deadline day for an initial \u00a360m took the amount spent past the previous mark of \u00a33.14bn from 12 months ago. A total of \u00a3506.5m was spent on deadline day itself, up from \u00a3391m last year. The total amount spent during the window considerably dwarfs the \u00a31.13bn spent by clubs just five years ago and underlines the power top English clubs have to attract talent, according to figures provided to BBC Sport by Paul Macdonald, founder of FootballTransfers.com. These sums are subject to VAT which is reclaimed anyway so to my mind, here is the opportunity to tax some of these really sums with a special ‘Football Transfer Tax’ Bankers’ bonuses are subject to special taxes on occasions and given that houses are taxed when they are bought and sold with ‘Stamp Duty’ why could the principal not to be extended to these obscene amounts of money. Just out of interest, \u00a33.5 billions matches the exact estimated cost required to clear the highest-risk safety-critical maintenance backlog across crumbling NHS hospital buildings. Historically, a \u00a33.5 billion real-terms boost was earmarked to transform out-of-hospital care, funding 24\/7 rapid response teams of doctors, nurses, and physiotherapists to prevent hospital admissions. In terms of Social Care and Workforce Reform then this amount of money aligns with cost models for broad social care reforms, such as implementing financial caps on personal care costs or raising social care worker pay to NHS band standards. So if I were in government, I would subject football transfers to a large transfer tax (of the order of 20%) since they can evidently afford it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the middle of the day, I did my normal weekly shopping and was relieved to have a fairly light week as I was spending more than usual on my days away in Yorkshire. Upon my return, I cooked myself a simple lunch of quiche accompanied by some mange-tout peas (which always to keep especially well, even if beyond their sell-by date).I thought I would engage in a little experiment to make the meal a little more exciting and a bit less bland, so after microwaving the mange-touts, I gave them a quick toss in olive oil to which added a teaspoon full of mint sauce (after all, one adds sprigs of mint to garden peas) and this worked out OK as an experiment as well as a thin sliver of sweet chilli on the quiche sauce although I am sure this is not good for you unless consumed in the most sparing of quantities. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The night before last, I treated myself to a delayed viewing of the romantic comedy of ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ which is always worth a repeat viewing. After I had viewed this, I went to bed but thought I would watch one of the many documentaries that are being broadcast to commemorate (if that […]<\/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-8540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8540","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=8540"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8541,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8540\/revisions\/8541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}