Yesterday, Meg entered our Sunday morning rituals which starts off with the carers making an earlier than normal than visit on Sundays, after which we breakfast and watch the Politics programs on Sunday mornings. The Labour Party is bound to come under scrutiny for the policy of withdrawing the winter fuel allowance just when prices are destined to rise. Our friend who calls around from the parish is away on holiday this week so we go down into town to pick up our copy of the Sunday newspaper and then come back via a visit to the park where we normally bump into acquaintances. We were especially pleased to see our University of Birmingham friend and, later on we bumped into our Italian friend whilst I was pushing Meg back up the hill. Whilst I am prepared the Sunday lunch, Meg followed the 'Pilgrims' series which we to reserve for just time slot on a Sunday morning. As today is a Bank Holiday, we have changed our plans and are visiting Waitrose which we have checked is probably going to have 'Sunday hours' trading on the Bank Holiday. The care workers came an hour earlier today so we had a bit of a rush around to get ready for them.
Recently, I wrote about the experiences of pre-teenage lads building ourselves go-carts. I checked out with our University of Winchester friend and he did the same at a similar age but he and his friend appeared to be even more ambitious by utilising tricycle wheels, but not always successfully. Out family did not start to rent a TV until I was about 15 but before our TV days I did have a hobby in common with many lads of a similar age. There was a firm called 'Keil Kraft' and they produce model kits from which you could construct an aircraft. The kits were incredibly simple and consisted of designs printed onto thin sheets of balsa wood. With a craft knife, you cut out the essential 2-D shapes and then set about modelling into a 3-D shape, for example an aircraft. My first craft was a Hurricane which did not figure so much in the public collective memory and affection as the Spitfire. The Hurricane was slightly slower than the Spitfire, but it was robust, stable, and had impressive firepower. It played a critical role in defending Britain against German bombers. The Spitfire was more advanced, faster, and more manoeuvrable. However, it was also more complex and less easy to repair than the Hurricane. The construction process started off with two or three bulkheads with little notches cut along the top and the sides. Into these notches, one then glued the 'stays' of the fuselage which were in effect only thin strips of balsa wood. I remember that there was an awful lot of gluing involved as well as a fair degree of patience because each stay had to be held in position for about 15 minutes until the glue had set. After the fuselage came the wings and the tail assembly and then the whole was glued together. At this stage, you were left with essentially what looked like a wire model (although it was actually in balsa wood) and thus then had to be covered in a type of tissue paper and something called 'dope' which shrunk the tissue paper and made it cling to the frame like a skin. Finally, one followed the instructions by painting it up in the relevant colours and if you were bold you could even flit a propeller, powered by a wound up large piece of elastic band. These models took weeks to construct but it was the pre-TV era so whiled away the hours. I think the model construction process taught one a degree of patience and, of course, you had something tangible afterwards to show off to one family and friends. After the Hurricane, I bought myself a glider which was on a much bigger scale. Just out of interest, I did manage to locate on the web some cine film that had been shot within the Keil Kraft factory dating back to the 1950's. The video showed an operative with several layers of balsa wood being shaped by a revolving band saw and in which the operative's fingers only seemed to be a matter of millimetres away from the bandsaw. There was an amusing strap line that had been added to the cine film either originally of when it was made into a file to be displayed on the internet but the strap line read 'No fingers were lost in the making of this film' When my son was of the appropriate age, I seem to remember that the original Keil Kraft concept had evolved somewhat and now the current model making kits consisted of parts made of plastic that one had to detach from their containing frame and then clip together to make a battleship or what have you. But I think Keil Kraft ('the greatest name in model kits') is no longer still in existence but a company known as 'The Vintage Model Company' still produce replicas of the original balsa wood models. I wonder, though, whether the materials deployed today are considerably more advanced than the simple balsa wood of the late 1950's.
The government has withdrawn the winter fuel payments for pensioners but retained a much more restrictive version for those who are in receipt of Pension Credits which is a very much smaller number. This has come when the Gas regulator is going to allow prices to increase by 10% this winter and so the interest on the Labour back benches is palpable. I can see that some sort of back down or way of refining the policy might be on the cards but it looks as though a massive backbench revolt may be imminent. The government could decide to tough it all to show who is boss but the danger is that once backbenchers have the taste of rebellion in their faces then they might be tempted to keep on rebelling over a whole host of related issues.
The Guardian is reporting that even some of Donald Trump’s supporters are now asking the question that was the undoing of Joe Biden: is the former president fit for office? But while Biden’s run for re-election was largely sunk by a single disastrous televised debate before a national audience, Trump is ramping up doubts with each chaotic, disjointed speech as he campaigns around the country. While rambling discourse and outrageously disprovable claims, interspersed with spite and vitriol, may seem nothing new to many of Trump’s supporters and critics alike, the former president appears to have been driven to new depths by suddenly finding himself running against Kamala Harris a month ago.