Thursday is my shopping day but we had a slightly different timetable of events in prospect for us today. For a start, the two carers who were detailed to get Meg up washed and dressed in the morning were detailed to start 45 minutes later than usual. But one of the carers (a young psychology graduate with whom Meg and I get on particularly well) was detailed to stay on and be Meg’s ‘sitter’ whilst I go out to do my weekly shop. This new arrangement seems quite sensible to us so I was happy to go along with the slightly changed regime. Shopping ought to have been quite straightforward but turned out to be quite fraught. This was because this week is the first full week after the children had been let out of school and the long summer holidays started last Friday. I do not want to sound curmudgeonly but the store was a bit of a nightmare to go around this morning. There seemed to be quite a lot of excited 6-9 year olds careering round the store with empty shopping trollies and I even heard one exasperated father exclaiming to his two young children that he never intended to come shopping with them ever again if they continued behaving in the same way. The children seemed to be under the temporary control of grandmothers as well as mothers (hardly any fathers) and the net effect of their behaviours was to slow down the shopping process considerably. Perhaps by next week they might all have gone off on holiday to theme parks or the like but we shall have to wait and see.
I have been doing a certain amount of research how to clean one’s silver (or in my case, recently acquired EPNS soup spoons) using simple ingredients. My web-based searches have recommended the following, some of which I vaguely already half remembered but all of which are simple remedies which means one does not have to have recourse to commercial silver cleaning solutions. The first of these is to wrap the articles in tinfoil and then place them for a few minutes in warm water in which some baking power has been dissolved. I do not have any baking powder to hand and it sounds a bit complicated so I will pass over this one. The second method is to use tomato ketchup (the cheaper the brand with a higher vinegar content the better) where the acidic content combats the tarnish on the silverware. A third method is to use toothpaste and a worn out old toothbrush and I have used toothpaste before to remove slight blemishes from the paintwork of cars. Toothpaste itself contains both a bleach band a mild abrasive agent so this appears to be quite an effective remedy. The final method is just to deploy coca cola which again has a fizzing and an acidic mode of action. I have seen videos of how to clean toilets using coca cola and when you consider the effective job that it does to clean the enamel from toilet bowls, it does make you wonder what it does to your insides if you consume a lot of coca cola regularly. Of these various methods I am inclined towards the tomato ketchup home made remedy as less likely to be as aggressive in its cleaning action as some of the other suggestions.
The US presidential elections have now been transformed as Joe Biden has dropped out and suddenly Donald Trump is bearing the burden of being by far the oldest candidate. I must say that I have been quite impressed by the showing that Kamala Harris has made so far and i thing the various factions and groups within the Democratic party are delighted to bury their differences and to back a candidate who may just about be able to beat Donald Trump. But there is one factor that has not received much attention over here in the UK but which may prove to be vital. I decided to enter the search term ‘Will the issue of abortion rights win the 2024 election for Harris’ or something similar and discovered that this is a raging issue on the other side of the Atlantic. The Trump nominees to the United States Supreme Court effectively overturned the ‘Roe vs. Wade’ ruling which regulated US abortion for over half a century. This means that the women in several US states have less abortion rights than even their grandmothers. Democrats are pretty united in trying to preserve the rights to abortion in the US but the Republicans are more divided on the issue. The extreme fundamentalist, pro-Life groups in the Republican family have chosen to weaponised abortion as a stick with which to beat the Democrats and to win elections. But even Trump himself is wavering a little on this issue seeing how unpopular the abolition of the Roe vs Wade ruling has become with about two thirds of Americans (and particularly young and female voters). So I think that this issue alone might give Harris the extra 2-3 percentage points that will enable Harris to sustain a lead over Trump in the November elections. I would predict that this issue, which is the Democrats strongest card to play, will receive hours of airtime and debate in the months ahead.
There are two news event stories running this afternoon. The first of these is the fact that there are now several candidates throwing their hat into the ring to be the next leader of the Conservative party. The party had adopted the process of voting to whittle the number of candidates down to the top four who then go onto the party conference where they will engage in hustings. the four will be then be reduced to 2 and these two will go ahead to the wider Conservative party for a final vote. The second major news story today is a really shocking bit of video which took place as members of the Manchester police were attempting to make an arrest. With their suspect on the floor and I believe already ‘tazered’, then a policeman is shown kicking the prone suspect and then stamping on his head. Needless to day, this case has evoked a collective national horror and the policeman in question has been suspended whilst the case is investigated further by the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Who actually took the video I do not know but with the ubiquity of mobile phones it is not surprising that this clip ad film has emerged.
© Mike Hart [2024]