We sort of look forward to Fridays because we tend to make a journey down the hill to see friends in Waitrose. This morning after Meg’s carers had got her up and dressed, we had our normal breakfast of porridge and toast and then started to think about our journey down the hill. We received a phone call from our University of Birmingham friend and so we happily made an appointment to meet in the cafeteria which we did. Our 90 year old chorister friend also turned up so we had a nice little chat which made our day. Tomorrow, though, although Saturday is one of our normal meeting days, tomorrow it is Carnival day and so a lot of the local roads are going to be closed to allow for the processions and floats to take place. I spoke to some of the staff in Waitrose who were not looking forward to tomorrow morning because the store and its cafeteria and the immediate environs are populated by crowds of onlookers who use the facilities in Waitrose without necessarily spending anything. I think that I think that we may try to make our way through the crowds and get to Waitrose if we possibly can but it is possible that our path is blocked by the crowds who have come to watch the procession so we have to be prepared to turn back if we cannot reach our destination. After we had returned home, the late morning carers made their call and then we concentrated upon lunch which is a (bought) fish pie baked in the oven and supplemented by vegetables, I decided to make a mélange of vegetables starting off with some fried onions and complemented by some diced up tomato, mushroom and parboiled beans with a squirt of tomato essence to enhance the taste. This worked out fine and then we started to contemplate how the afternoon would pan out. I had in mind that the front lawn badly needed a haircut not having been cut for I think a couple of weeks now and the clover and vetches were starting to go mad. There was a large black cloud overhead but I judged that it would probably move over and we would not get rained on. I cut the lawns first on a North-South direction and then a transverse cut in an East-West direction but half way through the first cut, we started to get some spots of rain. So I relocated Meg to inside the porch and then after the first cut, we had a few refreshments which I had put outside ready for ‘half time’ Then the weather started to brighten a little and I managed to get the second half of the cutting job done without getting ourselves wet. After we had got ourselves indoors, we knew that we were going to treat ourselves to watching yesterday evening’s ‘Question Time‘ which we knew we would be able to get on the BBC iPlayer. We watched the programme with quite some interest today if only because they seemed to have a very interesting set of panellists in the programme last night without the usual political ‘knock about’ and this made for a much more interesting programme.
Last night, a lot of media attention was focussed on the fact that Joe Biden was going to conduct a press conference and the American press and media really wanted to know how Biden would perform without an autocue. There is a head of steam building up with the American Democrats to try to replace Joe Biden as their candidate but nobody is quite sure how to administer the ‘coup de grace’ or find a way of persuading him to step down. So tonight’s performance was going to be regarded as critical. But the press conference was to be preceded by end of Nato meeting press briefing and here Joe Biden performed the most enormous gaffe, With the Ukrainian president by his side, Joe Biden referred to him as ‘President Putin’ before correcting himself. A little later on, Biden referred to his own Vice President, Kemala Harris as Vice President Trump. Now Joe Biden is fairly notorious for his verbal gaffes but with the increased media scrutiny, this was about the worst possible time to perform gaffes like these. I had been watching NewsNight and the American drama critic, Bonnie Greer, seemed to change her mind from lukewarm support for Biden to the expression of a view that he really ought to go now. But Joe Biden is absolutely determined to stay as a candidate believing that he and he alone has the ability to beat Trump. His problem now is that every sign of infirmity, large or small, feeds into an established narrative – one that tells the story of a stubborn old president, cosseted by a government machine not listening to a growing crescendo of concern for his mental fitness. If the Democrats are going to move to replace him, there is now only a very small window of opportunity to do the deed – commentators are of the view that a move against Biden has to be made within a fortnight or it will be all too late and the Democrats will have to be reconciled to Joe Biden as a candidate and an almost certain election victory in November by Donald Trump.
Keir Starmer has probably enough reason to be satisfied having been invited into the Oval Office of the White House and having an hour long discussion with Joe Biden in which the Brits (unlike the Americans) always like to utter the sentiment of a special relationship. But Starmer’s problems are likely to mount the minute his feet touch the ground back in the UK with immediate problems crying out for solutions such as the threatened loss of thousands of steel jobs in Wales, the absolute crisis in our prisons which are completely full and the necessity to end the junior doctors dispute. But in the first week of the new Labour government, most ministers seem to have made a promising start.
© Mike Hart [2024]