Today has turned out to be quite an eventful day. But I am pleased to say that last night, Meg seemed to fall soundly asleep which is a relief all round. The weather is so warm these days that Meg’s carers and I have to judge that Meg does not have too many bedclothes on so as to feel uncomfortable in the heatwave that we are experiencing which is reaching the stage of being quite humid. The weather forecasters are telling us that the spell of really hot weather will break down in about 24 hours leading to some thunderstorms across the country. Personally, I cannot wait until we get a really good thunderstorm which will clear the air for us as well as watering the gardens. When Meg was soundly asleep, I took the opportunity to finally fill the nice cushion covers which I purchased from the AgeUk shop earlier in the week. I am pleased with the results as I happened to have some material in which one of my recently purchased chairs had been wrapped. I assumed that this was a type of carpet underlay but our domestic help who is knowledgable about such things looked at one of the little offcuts that I had left over and announced it was probably furniture padding foam which is exactly what I needed. After a little experimentation, I now have locations sorted out for where all of these newly filled chair pads are going to go.
Wednesday is the day when our domestic help calls around and so this is always very welcome to us. Today, I took the opportunity to pop down into town in order to pick our newspaper and then after my return home, Meg and I viewed the women’s high diving competition where the Chinese and the North Koreans took an outstanding gold and silver. But the British pair managed to cling on to secure a bronze medal fighting off strong challenges from Mexico and the Ukraine. When this competition had been completed, Meg and I got ready for a trip down the road to the park. On our journey down the hill we had just accessed a little service road down which we regularly walk when we heard behind us the most tremendous bang. We turned round to see a large car that had collided with a lamp standard and had completely overturned at a distance about 80 metres away from us. What exactly had happened we cannot say as the accident had happened behind us. The car was at the entrance to a small gated estate on the other side of the road and whether it had reversed at speed into the lamp standard or gone into it forwards we could not tell. All the traffic stopped and people seemed to run from all over the place – we could see a man’s legs pocking out from under the car who we suppose was the driver. The emergency services were on the scene within about three minutes and we counted five ambulances, 2-3 police cars and a fire appliance that had turned up which would have been necessary to either jack up the car or to cut into it to free the occupants. We did not stay to stand and gawp but let the emergency services get on and do their job and we carried onto the park which was a haven of peace and tranquillity after the scene we had just witnessed. So we only decided to stay for about 15 minutes because we needed to get back in time for the carers and, in any case, we suspected that there would be absolute chaos in the road as the emergency services had to cope with the consequences of the crash. No other vehicle was involved and the lamp standard had been bent over to a most crazy angle and we would only speculate as to how the accident could possibly have happened. But as we were passing the scene, we got a call on our mobile from our niece was returning form a camping vacation in Somerset and was coming us quite close to us as she had to journey along the M5. Of course we were delighted to able to see her so unexpectedly and at such short notice – the minute she had put our post code into her SatNav, the system had taken account of the crash and immediately made a new route for her which was a little circuitous but meant she was not unduly delayed before she got to us at about 1.00pm. Immediately, I had got Meg home and told both our domestic help and the (delayed) carers the news about the traffic accident, I raided the fridge to get a quiche warmed up and put got some soup put into a saucepan, gently warming. So when our niece arrived, I managed to give her a little bit of sustenance and we all spent a very happy hour and a half in each other’s company. Then it was the time for our niece to leave to get back home and we took a tearful farewell of each other, wondering how we could possibly organise some logistics so that Meg and I could meet up with other members of the family for the first time in months.
After the terrible stabbings that have taken place in Southport, the far right have organised a huge riot in the vicinity of the mosque in Southport. The police have been attacked by stones larger than bricks and the latest count is that some fifty police officers and three police dogs have been injured by the rioters. The motivation seems unclear at the moment but one can only assume that the Far Right have in their heads that there is an ethnic dimension to the stabbings and have reacted accordingly. Of course it is not the first time that fake news has dominated the social media and the nation is holding up its hands in horror at the further suffering inflicted upon the inhabitants of Southport.
© Mike Hart [2024]