The evening before last, I watched on the U&Drama channel the first two episodes of Thomas Hardy’s’Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ As it happened, this was one of the classic versions that I have seen on at least two previous occasions but I love any dramatisations of Hardy and cannot resist another viewing. The last two episodes will be shown back to back next weekend so this is something to which to look forward. The latest of my soup making ventures – leek and potato – seemed to go well enough but the overall result was so bland that this is a soup I do not think I will repeat making in the future, Next week’s foray will be to make some pumpkin soup and evidently, I will parboil and roast the pumpkin slices first to extract the maximum flavour. I scoured the American media to see if there is any news of the fate of Christa Pike after she survived the administration of two lethal injections in Tennessee but no medical reports are being released. Her lawyers have informed us that she has not regained consciousness since the botched execution attempt and may not do so for several days yet and no-one knows what the eventual prognosis will be. As things stand at the moment, the probability of her being irreparably brain damaged is quite high as her brain was deprived of oxygen for a long time until she was admitted to the ambulance\/hospital. To be brain damaged is a sort of reprieve, though, as under the US constitution and subsequent Supreme Court decisions, the death penalty is not permitted on a person who cannot give full consent and is not aware of their surroundings or is cognitively incompetent. So now we have the absolutely bizarre paradox that the state of Tennessee with an array of equipment cannot perform an execution competently despite all of their protocols. But – and this is only a thought experiment- the medical authorities could achieve the same result (the death of Christa Pike) by the simple flick of a switch that would turn off her life support system. The only 100% certain method of execution would be death by a firing squad but this is rejected for diverse reasons in several state legislatures. Ironically enough, traditional methods such as hanging or the guillotine will cause death within a second or so. Meanwhile, there are strange goings-on here in the UK. There is a huge American airforce base at Fairford in Gloucestershire which housed a range of American bombers such as the B1, B2 and B52. But there is some evidence that an Iran-linked plot attacking the base may just have been foiled by the UK and, probably as a consequence, the Pentagon has ordered the withdrawal of all the American bombers back to their bases in the USA. On the face of it, this seems a bizarre decision as some on the left of politics have argued for years that Fairford is the American equivalent of an aircraft carrier from which America could launch attacks on the other side of the world from America. There is some speculation that Trump as commander-in-chief may have ordered this removal of American aircraft as a precursor to bringing the war to and end in Iran. I any case, we are now only 29 days until the mid-term American elections on 3rd November and postal voting as already started in several parts of the USA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I waited in for my chiropodist to arrive early in the morning but she was delayed so I had time to pop into town and pick um a copy of my daily newspaper. I had done some research earlier on in the day what can be done to enliven a rather insipid leek and onion soup – from the accounts I read on the web, this is not an infrequent complaint. The answer seems to lie in the administration of some salt which I had avoided completely in my preparations yesterday. I had a small portion of the soup left over and enlivened it with some garlic salt, onion granules, Worcester sauce and a dash of apple cider vinegar. This was to enough to turn the remnants of my soup into a rich and tasty sauce into which I dropped some slices of ham and then I had a meal of this with a parboiled and oven roasted mixture of carrot and parsnip as well as a small portion of cabbage. After I had rested a little after lunch, I girded up my loins and set to with the mowing of the green area in front of the house which receives two cuts and I have a little break for ice-cream in the middle. After I had completed this task, I turned on Classic FM and two of may favourite pieces of music were played one after the other. The first was Offenbach’s ‘Barcarolle’ but with the addition of two female singers (a soprano and a mezzo I think) followed by Pelagia’s Song from the film ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’ which is both a love story and a war movie in the one film but one which I find emotionally very compelling. Later on in the evening, there is going to be a Sky Arts presentation of the work of Andrea Bocelli lasting an hour and a half so this is going to keep me enthralled for the evening. The Tory party conference is taking place at the moment and it appears that Kemi Badenoch wants to established a marked right-wing agenda, wishing no doubt to emulate Margaret Thatcher. The snatches of policy changes that I have gleaned today (but I may be mistaken)is a commitment to abolish the Environment Agency, to restore child allowances to a of those with incomes in excess of \u00a3100,000 a year and to release building developers from the obligation to provide any social housing. I cannot see these policies will appeal to the demographic of middle income, undecided female voters who may well be crucial in the next election. The party is advocating the ‘most ambitious deregulation project in a generation,’ arguing that accumulating rules have stifled British living standards. Plans include dismantling environmental regulators like Natural England and the Environment Agency, moving their necessary functions directly into government departments to cut red tape for businesses and farmers. There is no doubt that the Conservative party has been pulled almost ineluctably to the right by parties such as Reform but the acid test is how to appeal to the floating voters. When you see what had happened to Britains rivers and water supplies since privatisation, one would have thought that deregulating the almost farcical light self-regulation is not the political path to choose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The evening before last, I watched on the U&Drama channel the first two episodes of Thomas Hardy’s’Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ As it happened, this was one of the classic versions that I have seen on at least two previous occasions but I love any dramatisations of Hardy and cannot resist another viewing. The last two […]<\/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-8621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8621","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=8621"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8622,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8621\/revisions\/8622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}