So today being a Sunday, we enter into our Sunday morning routines which this morning started 40 minutes earlier than we would have liked because the scheduling of the care workers was timed for 7.20 rather than 8.00am. Nonetheless, with the light mornings, we awoke shortly after 5.00am so entered our morning routines about an hour earlier. Two friendly and jolly care workers, both with families (so it shows they are of a certain age by which I mean they have acquired several years of experience which, to my mind, is very important) turned up this morning and got Meg up and going. Then it was a case of getting our breakfast of porridge and toast down us and then I shot down to our local Waitrose to pick up my copy of the newspaper. Normally, I have a quick glance around to see if I can avoid the predations of the car park attendants who penalise those who have not paid the relevant charge and then see if I can sneak in for is essentially a two minute stay within the store. But as from tomorrow morning, Bromsgrove council are about to change their policy so that people can have a half hour parking without charge which will be excellent for those people like myself who like to pop into and out of the store. Once I had collected the newspaper, it was almost time for the Eucharistic Minister to attend from our local church and as we have not seen her for a couple of weeks, her visit was even more welcome than usual. We got told a horrible hospital story involving the death of a near relative which I will not go into for the moment but entering hospitals these days does not always mean that you will emerge intact. Then it was time for us to prepare our coffee and comestibles ready for a journey down to the local park. We were just on the point of departure when our University of Birmingham friend phoned and we coincided on our ‘normal’ bench and had a very happy hour of discussions, as is our pleasure at the weekend. Then we had to make the journey up the hill and I was conscious of the fact that we did not dare to leave our carers outside and we made it with one minute to spare. In the meantime, I am reflecting that I have about another week left of trundling along with our trusty little wheelchair that has served us so well for the past several months but I am hoping the somewhat bigger wheels on the new chair when it arrives will serve their purpose.
We lunched together on some beef which I had roasting in the slow cooker for several hours this morning. When I cook a joint like this, I take the cooked jaunt and immediately divide it into two halves, one half being for immediate consumption and the other destined for the freezer so that we can have it on a future occasion. To save time, I just did a baked potato, a tomato and some sugar snap peas with the same and it was very tasty, Meg enjoying it pretty as much as myself. Now I am going to report on an exceptional happen chance of good fortune, or the avoidance of misfortune, that has happened to me. When Meg and I started to bring into use the lounge which we now call our Music Lounge, I needed to somehow bring the TV into the end of the room where our armchairs are located. Rather than asking an aerial technician to install a new aerial point, I hit on the expedient of buying an extra long TV cable of some 15 metres in length which effectively transfers our TV viewing from one end of the room to another. So far, so good but I have noticed in the last week or so that we are getting a lot of digital dropout on Sky News which is a channel we actually watch quite a lot these days. I did not know whether the fault in the TV reception on Sky was a TV problem or an aerial problem but I resisted one solution which was to retune the television. To see if the problem lay in the aerial I tried a little experiment on a small portable TV and found that Sky News worked perfectly at the other end of the room. Seeing that it did, I came to put the correct aeriel leads back into place. Then on the floor in the midst of other cabling I noticed what seemed to be a spare aerial lead which, upon connection, worked perfectly. So after all, the cable I must have been using was connected to nothing at all so the TV must have been working without the benefit of an aerial which I find hard to believe. At the end of the day, though, I now have access to Sky News which I thought I would have to forego just before the culminating days of the election campaign. Needless to say, I am now a very happy bunny and am still left a little puzzled how the wrong cable had been connected in the first place.
It seems remarkable that only eleven days out from the General Election that the Tories appear once again to be mired in sleaze. We now have a total of four prominent Tories who appear to have bet on the likely date of the election before it has been officially announced, two of them being candidates in the election. It may be that even more names might come to light in the next day or so and prominent Tories such as Michael Gove are now saying this has the appearance of another ‘partygate’ in which it appears that rules which must be obeyed by the many are ignored by the Tory few. And now another embarrassing snippet of news has come to light. One of the prominent aides to the Home Secretary when addressing a gathering of Young Conservatives in April has been recorded as saying that the Rwanda policy (of deporting asylum seekers there) is a ‘crap’ policy – and even the Home Secretary in his former days used similar disparaging terminology in the past although he now sees fit to deny this. That these allegations are now seeing the light of day must be a nightmare to the organisers of the Tory election campaign – although the chief of the campaign is himself one of the accused.
© Mike Hart [2024]