Late yesterday afternoon, I participated in my normal late Wednesday duty of making sure that our wheelie bins are pulled to the side of the public highway. As we live on a private road, the bins have to be hauled about 150 yards and yesterday was our brown (garden waste) day. By the side of our communal roadway, there were tall but fast growing weeds which were a real eyesore. In the past, I have maintained this strip of land and my neighbour has done it in the past but yesterday was too good an opportunity to miss. As the weeds are inhabiting gravel they were very narrow rooted and easy to get rid of and so after 10 minutes work the task was done and everything looks so much better, although to be fair I only concentrated on the tall growing weeds like rose bay willow herb and thistles that proved amenable to a rapid disposal. Then in the late afternoon when I was in our newly tidied up study, I thought I would try and see if the ancient IBM Thinkpad was still in operation and was a bit dismayed to see that I needed to supply a password to activate the account. Thinking whether I might have saved the password a year ago, I found a little blue book in which I may have written down some details but as it is about a year ago, I had completely forgotten whether I had written down this critical password or not. Whatever gods of fortune there are must have been smiling on me because when I opened the book not only was it the correct one but it even fell open at the page revealing the forgotten password. So now the little laptop swung into operation and I must say that I found the old operating system, Windows 7 Home Premium was crisp and intuitive to use. Doing a bit of reading, I think this particular operating system was a successor to the much loved Windows XP which is now defunct but was loved by millions worldwide. I detached the little credit card portable drive which the Thinkpad was utilising and took it off into our Main Lounge where I downloaded several downloads of music (principally Mozart) on to it. Then it was a case of whether the Media Player would recognise these .mp3 files. The first few, the media player would not play for whatever reason but I was left with a handful of quite playable Mozart tracks. Now it was a case of whether the hooked up laptop speakers would work. These are powered by a USB connection but the Thinkpad has very few of these and one of this is occupied by the unit for the cordless mouse. The speakers that I have are designed for laptops i.e. not big and clunky but designed to give the laptop a decent sound whilst still being portable enough when necessary. These I reminded myself were a Logitech Z120 and are I think are still available for purchase as the reviews of the sound quality were almost universally favourable. These, once I had plugged in the audio cable correctly, worked like a dream and I utilised some of the online 'Test my Speakers' programs to ascertain they were working correctly. To my ears, the sound quality was superb and intrigued, I did a quick browse on the web to gather some consumer views. A generally held view was that these little speakers punched above their weight and one reviewer went so far as to claim that the quality obtained was almost comparable to a Bose (which are generally globally acclaimed for their best-in-class sound and balanced output). My final little act of recommissioning was to charge up a little portable power source which means that the speakers can be run directly from this releasing one precious USB port and generally reducing the clutter on the computer table. So all in all, I had a very satisfactory late afternoon and early evening's work although it delayed my bedtime a little.
Yesterday was the day when the electricity supply company told us there was going to be a planned electricity shutdown between the hours of 9 and 12. The power went off at about two minutes after 9.00am and once Meg's 'sitter' carer had arrived, I went off to do our weekly shopping. This all went off as planned and Meg had been fast asleep all during the morning, as indeed she has for the last day or so. Even when the carers came to check on Meg in the middle of the day, she was in such a deep sleep that I asked that Meg not be disturbed. I was not particularly hungry today but made myself a meal of fried tomatoes and scrambled eggs thinking that I might be able to get some of this soft food inside Meg. Anyway it was not to be so I just have to leave things until Meg becomes somewhat more responsive. Yesterday was the day of the local elections which included some mayoral elections and a bye-election as well. But many of the councils are not starting to count until Friday morning, so there appears to be little point in staying up at all late as there is precious little to report upon, unless there are some exit polls. On the other hand, the start of the month is when the Premium Bond prizes are announced which is a flutter of excitement for some.
There is some surprise news on Wednesday that the US economy had contracted over the first three months of the year - caused by a dash for imports to beat tariffs - drove a decisive blow to oil prices. They have fallen steadily since Trump 2.0 began in January but the declines accelerated after the 'liberation day' tariff bomb was dropped early last month. Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell 15% in April alone and is currently trading at a four-year low of $60. So all of this may mean that energy prices and petrol prices could see a drop. However, it is wise not to hold one's breath as a drop in wholesale process like this does not imply that prices to the consumer will drop, the utility and energy companies not resisting the temptation to add to their profits whilst buying more cheaply but not reducing prices to the consumer.
© Mike Hart [2025]