Friday, 25th October, 2024

[Day 1684]

We approached today with a certain degree of apprehension because last Thursday, our normal shopping day, Meg experienced a period of agitation once I was out of the house. Today started off in a little harum-scarum way because we got a text to say that one of the allocated care workers had been delayed by a puncture and could I assist the remaining one of the pair. As it happens, I get on well with the young Psychology graduate who has a very cheery disposition so, not for the first time, I acted as 'Helper No. 2' I received a phone call from the health care agency changing the care worker allocated for Meg's sit but by the time she was due a third worker had been allocated and she turned up once her children had been dropped off at school. Meg was OK today with this carer, I am glad to say and I got my shopping done and unpacked as per usual, even though this takes up most of the morning. The care worker and I chatted whilst I put the shopping away and then organised some lunch which was a quiche supplemented by a tin of tomatoes enhanced with various herbs. Then we eventually settled down in the afternoon to shock and horrify ourselves with a programme first shown in the evening before detailing how Trump attempted to 'steal' the last presidential election. The focus of the programme were the proceedings conducted in the state of Georgia where Trump made a telephone call,recorded at the time, when Trump cajoled the official in charge of the elections to 'find' him 11,000 votes so that he could claim the state. Eventually Trump was indicted i.e. charged in the Georgia court system but an appeal against the character of the prosecutor went as far as the Supreme Court who, helpfully for Trump but unsurprisingly, delayed proceedings until after November 5th. No doubt in a few days time we shall see all kinds of shenanigans (what a delightful Irish word!) to contest results and gain electoral advantage. There is a lot of what I would call 'throwing sand in the eyes of the opponent' and I suspect that this practice probably dates from the times of gladiatorial combat. If one is on the ground, potentially defeated and weaponless, then the only desperate hope that you have is to grab a handful of sand and throw it in the eyes of the opponent in order to gain a few seconds of advantage. To carry on with the analysis of Georgia, the BBC correspondent is now reporting that Georgia may represent 'Ground Zero' for the Republicans as the Georgian court system is already full of actual, not to say potential cases, concerned with the 2020 election. In recent days a Georgia judge has rejected as 'illegal, unconstitutional, and invalid' an attempt by Republicans to enforce new practices in the election process. They included the hand-counting of votes and the right to examine any election-related documentation 'prior to the certification of results'. Opponents said the documents could have involved anything from training manuals to poll watcher credentials - they dismissed the legal action as a spurious effort to undermine faith in the legitimacy of election results.

There was a story which broke yesterday that nightclubs are going broke at a very great rate. New research by the Night Time Industries Association shows that in the past four years the UK has lost 37% of its clubs, which works out at about 10 clubs closing each month. I must confess to being a bit curmudgeonly but this news does not trouble me at all. I always associate nightclubs with a certain degree of drug taking and other unsavoury happenings. When Meg and I lived in Leicester which was admittedly a long time ago now as we left Leicester in 1997, there was a large night club in the centre of town next to the bus station and when the nightclub closed each morning there were frequent disputes and altercations (normally over girls) and the rates of stabbings averaged out at one per week. The person who acted as Meg's assistant as a placement tutor had a husband who was a paramedic. He was regularly assaulted by club members whilst he was attending to the injuries which were occasioned by the night club clientele. So I, for one, would not miss this scene at all. I gleaned the opinions of some of the younger care workers when they arrived to attend to Meg but there was not an ardent clubber among them, so none of them were particularly enamoured of the club scene. In fact the younger female workers told me that they had to be assiduous in avoiding getting their drinks spiked with the so-called 'date-rape' drugs which only added to my apprehension about this particular part of our economy. I appreciate that there is quite an ecology of other commercial activities that might be spin offs from the night time trade such as fast food outlets and taxis which must do a lot of business but the fact remains that after several years of austerity, the young do not have the spending power that they did and perhaps take their pleasures elsewhere.

It looks as though Kemi Badenoch is now the odds-on favourite to become the next Tory Leader. Amazingly, she made two terrible gaffes at the Tory party conference (saying maternity pay was excessive and that 10% of civil servants should be in gaol) but she somewhere escaped undue strictures, probably because she is on the right of the Tory party and admired by the party faithful.There was a TV debate on I think GB News between the two Tory party contenders and it looks as though Kemi Badenoch won this hands down whilst her opponent, Robert Jenwick, seemed to display nervousness and tried to relate everything back to immigration. But I think she is fairly quick witted and can think well on her feet which may make her look a lot more dynamic than Keir Starmer who can appear wooden at times. Tories, though, are not really used to being in opposition as they have been in power for so long so how good an opposition leader she will prove to be is an interesting question. She has the reputation of being extremely combative so I can imagine that there may be some quite 'sparky' performances at PMQ (Prime Minister's Question Time) when she has a chance to confront Keir Starmer across the dispatch box (but faced with a huge phalanx of Labour MPs in front of her and only 120 Tory MP's behind her)