After the Pope's death yesterday and the multitude of tributes that were paid to him, we now enter a period of religion, politics and sheer intrigue. Already there are discussions of who might be the next Pope and the Italians have a special word - 'papabile' which is applied to those who are considered to be capable of being elected the next Pope. In this process, although in liturgical theory God-bestowed, there is often a lot of politics involved and often a person who is chosen who surprises is all. This happened with Pope Francis who was not considered to be a front runner but who 'came up on the rails' to use a horse racing terminology. I also remember the case of Pope John XXIII who at the time was not initially on the running but was elected as it was thought that he was a 'safe pair of hands' but turned out to be one of the most reform minded Popes of recent times. This time around, many new cardinals have been elected from regions and states previously under-represented so nobody is quite sure how these will vote. Insofar as one can discern, the currents of thought at the moment seem to in favour of a candidate who would carry on the reforms initiated by Pope Francis and it could be the case that the person elected will be theologically conservative (to help maintain existing theology) but socially progressive. Donald Trump has announced that he is going to attend the late Pope's funeral and one wonders about his motivation - I think the last time a serving US president attended a Papal funeral was in 2005. Donald Trump had some differences with the late Pope principally on issues such as climate change and does Trump therefore believe that he is capable of supplying a 'nudge' towards whom he considers to be a suitable candidate?
I continued with my study refreshment and one of the changes I have made is already bearing fruit. I have various groups of files located on the tidied-up bookshelves and I am making an HTML page for each group of files. These are then linked together with navigational links to move forwards and backwards between the pages and the first or type of index page indicates in which location the group of files is to be found. I have already run off some three pages of HTML which I put in a transparency and this considerably simplifies the process of finding what I want. So to locate any particular file, I consult the list on top and think that, for example, I might need to consult the fifth file in the pile which is green in colour. Eventually, when the process is complete, I will then have complete lists of the files in the study, and each group of files will have on the top an index indicating which file houses what. I should, of course, once I have a complete list of files in the entire study be able to re-arrange them into a better functional order so that all of the health related files are in one location, the IT/computing related ones in another and so on. My efforts to neaten up the study able borne fruit because I have discovered a little electronic clock I bought some years ago the batteries of which had run out. Fortunately I had some 'AAA' batteries to replace the dead ones and although a little fiddly to set, the clock has a mechanism whereby the large screen clicks forward to reveal the date or the temperature of the room so this timepiece has been recommissioned, as it were.
I was delighted that Meg seemed much more lively than she did yesterday, when she slept for most of the day and I was full of foreboding. The care workers and I got Meg nice and secure in her existing wheelchair so all seemed to be well and we made our way down the hill and met up with our three friends in Wetherspoons. It was a beautiful fine spring day and so much of a contrast with the day before when it had been so showery. On our way up the hill, I popped in to see our Italian friend who had previously texted me to tell me about an Easter card she had written for me. We exchanged news about our various 'gammy' knees and then I made for home to prepare for 'sit' session with the young male Asian care worker in the morning. We lunched on a meal of smoked haddock, potatoes and petit pois where I had some left over from an earlier day's cooking so this made the meal easy to prepare. In the afternoon, our son called around and it gave me some pleasure to show him the progress I was making in restoring the study to rights although there is still a fair way to go. I asked my son to reflect on the bits of his working life which were likely to ensure way past his actual period of employment because both myself and some University of Winchester colleagues discovered that systems that we had set up decades before in previous places of employment were, paradoxically, still in use.
Britain's economy will be among the hardest hit by the global trade war and inflation is set to climb, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned – as it slashed its UK growth forecast by a third. In a sobering set of projections, the Washington-based organisation said it was grappling with 'extremely high levels of policy uncertainty' - and the global economy would slow even if countries managed to negotiate a permanent reduction in tariffs from the US. Echoing earlier warnings about the risks to the global financial system, the IMF said stock markets could fall even more sharply than they did in the aftermath of Donald Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs announcement, when US and UK indices recorded some of their largest one-day falls since the pandemic. Although Rachel Reeves is set to visit Washington to negotiate a better set of tariffs for the UK, it is hard to predict that she will return with any degree of success.
© Mike Hart [2025]