Our day started with us waking at just after 6.00am and the two care worker (not the most friendly or communicative, unfortunately) turning up just after 8.00am. Why I mention this is because if the care workers chat in a friendly fashion with Meg, it helps to set her up for the day but if they only chat with other about the clients they are going to meet later on that day, this is not the best of starts. We would normally have expected to meet with our University of Birmingham friend today but he has a cold that he does not wish to communicate to us so the morning's coffee has to be given a miss. It was a cold but brilliantly sunny day so Meg and I make a trip down the hill, collect our newspaper and then come straight home again to see what the rest of the day has in store. The carers are coming quite late for the lunchtime call so Meg looked at the previous evenings offerings and eventually selected Alice Robert's trip through the Ottoman empire (modern day Turkey) by train which is a very good travelogue. For lunch, we have one of those chicken crowns that you just pop into the oven complete in their tinfoil tin (which is a bit of a cheat, for which one pays) but it does make life easier. I tried a complete experiment with the vegetables to accompany the chicken. As well as a baked potato which does by itself in the microwave, I am trying a little experiment. I had a couple of quite large leeks left over which needed eating up so I have parboiled them and then thrown a couple of whole tomatoes. Then the whole lot is going to go into the oven to give me some baked vegetables which I really enjoy. It rather puts me in mind of when Meg and I used to fly to Murcia which was very accessible from our local airport when we lived in Southampton. In Murcia and its surrounding region, there is a speciality of baked vegetables so we had these every morning for breakfast as they were the standard fare of the hotel in which we stayed. As the oven was on for the chicken, I thought the experiment was worth while and I have just liberated from a charity shop some of those really old fashioned thick glass old Pyrex dishes that cook vegetables to perfection.
The highlight of the afternoon is going to be 'The Jungle Book' where the young Asian Actor who plays Mowgli is superb (despite the American accent)and the CGI for the animals is excellent as well. My mother in her cub mistress days used to have the cubs sitting around a campfire in the basement of the building where the Cub pack meeting was held and used to keep the group of approx. 8 year olds enthralled as she read out portions of 'The Jungle Book' week by week. I presume having engaged in this activity before she went to College to train to be a teacher late in life would have enhanced her application process no end, as she was desperate to train to teacher and it was a rare event for mature students in 1956 to attend Teacher Training College as it was in those days.
The big row over inheritance tax and its impact upon the farming community is an interesting little case study. At the outset, it must be said that whilst inheritance tax is a tax that only the dead pay, in practice it is their relatives. But in the case of a smallish family farm to pay the tax means actually selling some of the farm to pay the bill which lessens its overall viability. Although special rules apply, as well as particular rates, farmland is evidently in a very different category to the normal type of inheritance and although the figure of £1 million is often mentioned, sometimes inflated to £3 million if split between members of the family, the amount of political capital that has been lost on this issue is enormous. Th question has to be asked whether these consequences were thought about or modelled because the Labour government had long enough to contemplate the issue. If an 'oversight' had been committed because an emergency budget was undertaken a week after the election, one could understand the error if indeed there was one. But now one has the feeling that there is a complete stand-off with the government refusing to countenance whether it had made any errors of judgement at all. But we are now faced with the prospect of queues of tractors throughout London, as well as North Wales over the weekend and perhaps even the prospect of supermarkets running out of fresh produce (but not, paradoxically, junk food). It appears that Starmer in particular does not wish to appear 'weak' or to be pushed around by special interests but the political fallout is considerable and could have easily been averted by a formula to look at the issue again. There are various techniques that could be used so the government could save face and claim not to have been faced down but it could, for example, delay the legislation relating to farmers for a year or so, more technically, allow elderly farmers to give away heir assets and not have to wait seven years but only about two years for example. Like the whole row about winter fuel payments being withdrawn, a tremendous amount of political capital is being wasted for hardly any money being realised in savings. One would have thought it would have been politically sensible to have a quick change of policy and move the agenda onto other issues but, once again, the new government has shown itself to be not at all adept at anticipating problems and taking steps to avoid or mitigate them.
As the weather is getting colder, the phrase 'winter draws on' comes to mind. But at one time the BBC had a little Green Book for the benefit of producers which stipulated that among jokes banned were those concerning lavatories, effeminacy in men, immorality of any kind, suggestive references to honeymoon couples, chambermaids, fig-leaves, ladies' underwear (such as 'winter draws on' and so on), lodgers and commercial travellers. It has been observed that if these rules had been strictly followed a great many of the BBC's most successful comedy shows since, such as 'Beyond Our Ken', 'Till Death Us Do Part' and 'Steptoe and Son' would never have been aired.
© Mike Hart [2024]