The day before yesterday, after I had exercised, showered and breakfasted, I made my way down to the Methodist centre where I spent quite a jolly half hour with one or two of my acquaintances including ‘Mary’ from Liverpool who can chat the back legs of a donkey. She had been undertaking a tour of the local undertakers seeking some quotes for a simple funeral without any ceremony which is what she indicated she wanted. This gave rise to a certain degree of black humour. I did wonder out loud who owns your dead body once you are dead. The answer is that legally, a dead body does not belong to anyone because a corpse is not considered property under the law. Instead of ownership, the law gives specific people the right to take possession of the body and the duty to arrange for its burial or cremation. Resuming a more ‘normal’ life, I made my way to Asda to get some money out pf their ATM and I popped in to buy some celeriac and other soup making ingredients for the weekend. I also took the opportunity to buy a couple more Kilner jars whilst they were available at only \u00a31.50 each. I then did my more normal shopping and came home and unpacked the shopping and was contemplating preparing my lunch when my son and daughter-in-law turned up with some of those specialised containers which are called ‘Freeze pods’ and which allow you to put 2 x 400ml portions of soup into the freezer from which it is quite easy to eject a soup portion when you need to consume it. These were sold in specialised kitchen shops and are, evidently, worth their weight in gold and coming from a reputable source they are BPA free. One of my Kilner jars broke by blowing a large hole in the side when I tried to wash it in warm water so I am faced with the dilemma whether to take it back to get it replaced or whether it is not worth the trip for a small amount of money. I cooked myself some slices of beef in an onion gravy and then some sweet potato rubbed with olive oil and salt and baled upon some parchment paper in the microwave onion. My son and daughter-in-law had journeyed into town and when they returned, we discussed some arrangements we are making for a day out at the weekend and also for the family meal with cousins in just over a months time from now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the evening I was engaged in watching two science programmes on BBC2 the first being an examination of what appeared to be a crucifixion conducted by the Romans in a village in Cambridgeshire. Although the Romans undoubtedly performed thousands of this cruel form of torture and death, only one other example has been evidenced and that was in Israel some time ago. The programme reconstructed the life of the crucified man putting together the mass of scientific techniques that can now be deployed even including the reconstruction of the appearance of the crucified man. The second programme was an examination of the changes that occur in the human body all the way from conception until death – I learned that one stage during puberty, the growth rate declines in order to devote resources to the growing brain. The following day, I got up late as, quite uncharacteristically I overslept by an hour so had to adapt my morning routines accordingly. But I got down to pick up my Newspaper and to undertake my Tai Chi class on time where we were joined by three or four new members making the class fuller than normal. Afterwards I had a cup of tea and chatted with some well-known faces and confirmed that the next day would be the one day in the month when members of the Ukrainian community come and cook some of their national dishes whilst the rest f us come along and enjoy a meal which is slightly out of the ordinary knowing that the proceeds that they charge for the cost of the meal goes to a good cause. Quite late in the day I popped along to Asda with the broken Kilner jar in which a hole had appeared the minute I put it into some washing up water. They replaced it at once and without question so I now have a collection of four of these jars which will certainly suffice for the moment. After I got home, I cooked myself a simple vegetable curry meal with a few left over cubes of beef and then, as the afternoon was a fine one, decided to make another cut the front greened area. This I did and was glad to have done so as the grass seems to have leapt up since the last cutting. Donald Trump’s war with the American media is still proceeding. CNN went to court to have the Trump ban overturned. A judge has temporarily blocked President Trump’s ban on three media outlets and said their access must be restored but so far the White House is ignoring this. Journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were banned from reporting from the White House grounds last week. Mr Trump said \u2060they shouldn’t \u200bbe able to constantly \u200bwrite or report ‘fiction \u2060and lies’ and claimed it was a national security issue. The three outlets filed a lawsuit and argued the ban was a ‘blatant violation’ of their First Amendment right to press freedom. ‘Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting,” the publications said. It could be that Trump is cutting off his nose to spite his own face as in the next day or so, there will be an important meeting between Donald Trump and President Xi of China and Trump in particular craves the publicity surrounding such important visits. There is a particular irony in all of this because we associate the banning and muzzling of the press with authoritarian regimes like China whilst Americans’ rights to freedom of the speech, and by extension the freedom of the press, is supposedly guaranteed by the first amendment to the American constitution. This dispute with the press may well extend to various Appeal Courts and eventually may end up the Supreme Court but all this is happening when we are only about 40+ days away from the mid-term elections. The normally uber-loyal Fox news is actually acting in solidarity with their ‘pool’ colleagues so we may end up with the spectacle of important images but no sound tracks to accompany them which rather makes a mockery of the whole media circus which normally surrounds visits by other Heads of State.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The day before yesterday, after I had exercised, showered and breakfasted, I made my way down to the Methodist centre where I spent quite a jolly half hour with one or two of my acquaintances including ‘Mary’ from Liverpool who can chat the back legs of a donkey. She had been undertaking a tour of […]<\/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-8596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8596","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=8596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8597,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8596\/revisions\/8597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}