Yesterday, Saturday, I was just on the point of going to bed when my iPhone sprang into life with a FaceTime call from my sister in Knaresborough, North Yorkshire. She had left hospital on Thursday afternoon and so had spent the best part of a couple of days in her new surroundings in a residential home. So far, the facilities and the care staff seem to be excellent although my sister had a somewhat rocky start to her stay when the care staff were not sure how they could her comfortable when she is lying in bed and when the pain intensifies. In addition, my sister encountered a 'Server error' when trying to access this blog and so she wondered what was going on. We had a fairly lengthy conversation and, of course, she is in her own room and not on a public ward and so we could chat. I suspect that my sister could do with both a specialised hospital bed (which alters its shape) and perhaps also a specialised mattress so I encouraged her to push for this to be provided for her. I also gave some alternative links to the website of the blog because it may be something to do with the permissions surrounding the domain names rather than the actual server or the website itself. I have managed to get it to work OK and have sent my sister some links that ought to help. In the meanwhile, I was also encouraging her (and the rest of the family) to invest an up-to-date smart TV (perhaps, as we have done a brand-new TV but a lot cheaper because it is the model of one or two years ago) plus a YouTube subscription. Meg and I watch a film or a concert on YouTube and life without it would actually be unimaginable. When the carers called around this morning, one of them was a young girl who had gone off to university but just returned to do one or two 'bank' sessions at the weekend. She was suffering from what she called 'Freshers' flu' where youngsters at university exchange rampant viruses with each other so to alleviate her symptoms I gave her a Lemsip which we always have in our kitchen drawer ready for the autumn and winter colds strike. As normal, we walked down into town and had a fairly lively conversation, at one stage laughing so much that the staff from the store wanted to join in. The story of mine that occasioned the laughter was my account of the elderly German tourists we used to see on the beaches of La Coruna in Northern Spain. After more than half a century of bathing topless, their skin looked brown and leathery and I explained that upon viewing them afar, it was akin to seeing a group of old ladies with leather handbags swinging on their chests. Then upon our return home I received a phone call to enquire whether I could assist the one carer in a late morning call to which I agreed readily. The care manager has let me download an app which means that I can read live all of the comments that the carers make on each visit but the app does not, at this stage, give me access to the visit schedules for the day ahead which would be very useful in our case. Last night, Meg was 90% asleep because the 'put to bed' call was delayed by an hour and an almost asleep person is so much harder to get undressed, washed and put to bed. This afternoon proved to be rather frustrating. At one stage, the weather looked fair and I thought I would seize the opportunity of giving the front lawn their penultimate cut of the season. But then it clouded over and I thought I had better wait until the threat of a shower had passed. Then the weather brightened up again, Meg started to have one of her agitated spells so my original plan was thwarted as I thought I could not even leave her alone outside in her agitated state whilst I was cutting the grass. So I stayed indoors and did my best to calm her down with an old-fashioned antihistamine a doctor had prescribed on one occasion and which he thought might help to ease spells of agitation in the afternoon. I covered Meg with a fairly large double blanket and put on a Mozart Piano Concerto available to us on YouTube and this worked to a small extent - the lawns, though, remain uncut. I am hopeful that the weather stays bright and relatively warm for a day or so that I can seize whatever grass cutting opportunities present themselves.
Sky News is reporting that Donald Trump has finally outdone himself. His rhetoric has long been extreme but, in campaign remarks as it heads towards a close, it's more so. Asked about 'bureaucrats undermining you' in a second term, he replied: 'We have two enemies: we have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries....We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics. It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary by the military.' Critics have interpreted the remarks as a threat to use the military against political opponents, even though he would need to be president to try. They accuse Trump of shaping an authoritarian agenda - true, they say, because it is laid out in his own words. To the committed Trump supporters, of course, this is music to their ears and demonstrates why they feel that Trump is the new Messiah who has come to save them from the so-called 'liberal' establishment. But how this plays out with the uncommitted 'middle of the road' voters in the swing states is, of course, the critical question. Conventional political wisdom is that politicians should moderate their stances in order to try to capture the middle ground. But many observers have commented upon the fact that Trump does not play the political game by the conventional rules - and to some is not regarded as a politician at all. There is an alternative and rather frightening narrative that Trump is attempting to force the middle ground to ultimately back him and hence for the 'middle ground' to break into opposing camps with the calculation that there will be more who are persuaded by him than repulsed by him. But if the rhetoric is to be believed, then a Trump presidency may result in mass military action against his own population but would the military obey? In case we think that such madness is confined to the other side of the Atlantic, our own Kemi Badenoch in her Tory leadership campaign suggested that up to 10% of civil servants should be imprisoned for being enemies of the state and thwarting the desires of a future Conservative government.
© Mike Hart [2024]