Today we enter our Monday morning routines which consists of a longer walk than normal down to 'The Lemon Tree' cafe, swinging past Waitrose to collect our daily newspaper. Typically, the schoolchildren are being given a last little treat by their grandparents in the form of coffee and cakes before the school regime starts tomorrow. I am reminded of the little child who after their first day at school and explaining that they had done some painting and singing before being read a story asked of their parent 'Do I have to go again tomorrow?' not fully appreciating that the education bureaucracy will have them captured for the next 14-15 years or so.
Yesterday was the 1st of the month and I have to resist the temptation to say to my nearest and dearest 'White rabbits! White rabbits! White rabbits' and then keep my fingers crossed behind my back until I saw a policeman on a white horse. These were the ridiculous rituals in which we used to engage at about the age seven and evidently it must have a Yorkshire thing. Here in the Midlands some of my friends tell me that elder brothers gave their siblings a pinch followed by a punch whilst exclaiming 'Pinch! Punch! First of the Month!' But the 1st September always seems to symbolise for me the end of summer as every time I have started a new job or venture (all of my periods of employment, attending university) I always seemed to start the new venture in September or October. Consequently, I tend to think of this time of year as the starting point for ventures new. Schools start back in early September once the August Bank Holiday is well and truly over and we start the long haul towards Christmas. Of course Halloween and the activities associated with it constitute a way of breaking up the long period between now and Christmas. When I worked in higher education, the start of our year was effectively the middle of August because this was the point in the year when 'A'-level results were announced and we were always pressed into service to start the recruitment process for the forthcoming academic year. From that point on, there was a gradual intensification of activities when one was marshalling the resources for the forthcoming academic year and there was generally a frantic period in which we needed to recruit not only students but the staff to teach them. In an ideal world, we would have wanted to recruit full time staff in about May but the resources never seemed to be forthcoming when we needed them so there was always a lot of last minute of ad-hoc planning. Then having recruited the students there was a variety of induction activities and a series of rolling starts for the various years of the course. I noticed that by about early November, the spirits of both staff and students started to drop considerably. August seemed a very long time ago and Christmas seemed a very distant shore so the Autumn term, coupled with nights getting longer and the first blasts of bad weather made this a difficult period of the negotiate. Things were much better in the Springtime after Christmas because with a modularised system there were typically examinations in mid January, a couple of inter-semester weeks for the holding of examination boards and then only about six weeks of the second semester before the Easter vacation kicked in. When possible, Meg and I tried to go away for about a week in mid January before the second semester of teaching started and this, too, helped to draw the sting of winter.
Just when you think that Donald Trump is one of the most unsuitable men ever to run for President of the United States, another extraordinary story has emerged. Donald Trump has threatened to imprison Mark Zuckerberg for life if the Facebook founder does 'anything illegal' to influence the upcoming presidential election. Next to a photograph of him meeting Mr Zuckerberg in the White House, Mr Trump wrote: 'He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT.' This was a reference to the more than $400m (£303m) Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg, donated to election offices in 2020. The gifts mostly went to Democratic-leaning counties in some states - partly because Republican politicians rejected the donations as Mr Trump warned against funding election offices so they could instead encourage postal votes during the coronavirus pandemic. Donald Trump and his supporters have repeatedly blamed the donations for contributing to his loss in 2020. The extraordinary thing about this outburst is the limited grasp that Trump seems to display of how legal processes work in the context of the United States and in particular whether a (newly elected) Trump would have the authority to imprison anybody 'for life'. It also displays the sort of threatening and bullying behaviour for which Trump is now becoming notorious and one has to wonder whether in his commercial activities Trump found he could use bullying tactics against anybody who happened to cross him with complete impunity. Even more stories are starting to emerge of Trump's incoherence and ability to think through straightforward questions, the latest example being his incredibly confused stance on abortion. The latest national opinion polls put Harris some 3.4 percentage points ahead of Trump with only just over 60 days to go before the election in November.
I read a remarkable technical story recently that almost reads like an April 1st spoof. Scientists have found a simple trick that could dramatically change how our batteries perform. A lithium-ion battery, of the kind used in everything from our phones to our cars, is usually charged up soon after it is first made. That first charge is key: it decides how long the battery will work for, and when it will eventually deteriorate. Now researchers have found that if that first charge is done with unusually high currents, it dramatically changes how those batteries perform. When that happened, the batteries’ lifespan was improved by 50 per cent and the initial charge took just 20 minutes, compared with 10 hours usually. If this story 'has legs' as it were, then this might have a dramatic impact upon many aspects of our lives, not least mobile phones. One is forced to wonder, as well, whether the battery power in the present generation of electric cars could be similarly improved.
© Mike Hart [2024]