Today being a Friday was the day when our domestic help calls around which is always a joy for us. We had great pleasure in showing her our latest (and probably last) furniture acquisition which was the occasional chair that I had purchased at a good price from the local AgeUK shop on Bromsgrove High Street. I have given this chair both a clean up and a treatment of orange oil with a subsequent buffing up although it was in a pretty good state when it was purchased. Having taken a photograph of it, I then used the Google Images app to find similar images of it and I now have a fairly clear idea how it can be described. It is, in all probability, a repro Sabre Leg Regency style Carver chair when I match up the images of my photo with the images found by Google. It is were a genuine vintage chair, it would sell for about £1,000 but if I were to buy one new, as a piece of ‘modern’ repro furniture, it would retail for about £220 which is over 10 times what I actually paid for it. It has been brought into use twice already since I have spruced it up to its final condition so I am highly delighted with it. The day had dawned fairly bright and clear as a beautiful autumn day but after we had got up and breakfasted, we set off for Droitwich to our normal cafeteria. Here we treated ourselves to a big pot of tea and one huge bacon butty between us. In the cafe, there were a group of four friends celebrating a birthday so the whole cafe sang ‘Happy Birthday’ and we were all treated to a little piece of birthday cake. After we had left the cafe and as we were conveniently parked, we popped into the Worcestershire Association of Carers charity shop and I found two items for Meg which I think she will find particularly useful. One is a skirt in a very pleasant floral design and a very reputable make and the one was a long and quite colourful long cardigan which is particularly useful to start to wear in the late afternoons after the sun has gone down and it starts to get a little chilly.
After our Eucharistic minister had called around yesterday, as she is so musical and had such a wide repetoire, I managed to find a Handel aria ‘Waft her, angels, through the skies’ which is an piece from a little performed oratorio called ‘Jeptha, composed in 1752. YouTube provided us with three filmed versions of this and we delighted in the tenor performance. As a follow on, though, there was a concert of other Handel pieces performed, I think, by a Dutch ensemble on period instruments but the singing of the soprano was absolutely breathtaking – so much so, that I am resolved to listen to it on several more occasions. This evidently acts to gladden the spirit after the succession of depressing news if you tune too much into Sky News these days. We have witnessed recently rows of babies in Gaza taken out of their incubators and laid out in a row because there was no power left to power their incubators. The Israelis are claiming that Hamas are operating a command and control headquarters from underneath the principal hospital in Gaza and this justifies them entering the hospital complex with their tanks. Some automatic weapons and other munitions have indeed been discovered but the world is still waiting for definitive proof of the tunnel complex and command-control HQ which was the justification for the Israeli incursion into the hospital in the first place. Althpugh there is a United Nations attempting to gather evidence of a war crime, it is the case that some countries – including the United States, Russia and Israel — do not recognize the court’s jurisdiction, and the ICC does not have a police force to execute arrest warrants. So the world shall never know whether we are witnessing a war crime unfolding daily on our TV screens or not.
© Mike Hart [2023]