11 June 2012
Great excitement last night, most of which I was oblivious to. Apparently my respirator was constantly setting off the alarm and poor Lillian, my all night carer, was not sure what she should do about it. In any event she did not wake Alice but waited until she came down just before 5.00 a.m. The first I knew of it was Alice waking me up in bending over me and manipulating the mask. Apparently the alarm has sounded, intermittently throughout the night, We all came to the conclusion that it was either an ill fitting mask or that the increase in volume of air that we had requested was proving too much for that particular respirator mask. Alice contacted Papworth hospital this morning and was told to revert to the original mask – which frankly is less comfortable than this latest one – and from that we should be able to tell whether it is the mask at fault or the respirator.
This much I do know, and that is to remove the respirator slowly in small stages as I really believe that one of the ‘surges of adrenaline’ I have suffered from was caused through removing the respirator too suddenly, in effect, before my own system had taken over breathing manually.
We were expecting Kay and Tony Dunn to tea, but they fell victim to the floods which followed the torrential rain we had experienced over the past few days. Some parts of the country had their entire rainfall for June in one day with predictably catastrophic results. Hundreds of houses flooded and the wind, in conjunction the storm, wrecked a number of buildings. Anyway, Kay and Tony’s visit was postponed until tomorrow
The other storm, brewing up in Europe over the financial troubles being experienced by Spain, Greece et al, continues to rumble away. The powers that be thought that by throwing another €100 billion at Spain that would buy them time to sort out their financial affairs. That was the reason for the stock exchange rising initially when this announcement was made. Now, in retrospect, and having had more time to consider the consequences, the international stock exchange markets have fallen right back, wiping out the increases which followed the announcement of the further loan to Spain.
I do not want to be a know-all but I really do think they are just putting off the day of judgement by throwing more money at Spain. In my view it is merely deferring the day when they have to face up to the music. I sincerely hope that I am wrong and this latest loan will get them out of trouble. In the meantime the other Eurozone countries wait and watch on the sidelines with bated breath. The problem is there’s never been a situation quite like this before so no one knows exactly how the market is likely to react to a total default. In my view this latest gesture is merely postponing the evil day. Better to face up to it now then to continue week after week of uncertainty.
How is all of this affecting the man on the Clapham omnibus? Undoubtedly, people are cutting back . The good Doctor Michael I noticed the relative lack of customers in The Cricketers where we went on Friday. ‘My lovely’ has notice that the same can be said of the shops that she frequents. People are simply not spending, so frivolously as they did before and are actually concentrating on playing off their debts. All very laudable, except that we need expenditure in the ordinary retail market in order to demonstrate a return of confidence. It is possible to talk yourself into recession and it is just as easy to talk your way out of one. (The class half full syndrome) It gets increasingly more difficult when you’re juggling with such fine tuning as we are at present. For example, our GDP for the last quarter was finally reported at 0.00%, not exactly encouraging, but at least we are still in the black (just!). Bumping along the bottom, so to speak. People can take confidence from the fact that we have yet to go into negative figures then they might loosen their purse strings a little and start to buy our way out of this recession.
Even my supply of media material, with which I usually end of my entries, has, all but, dried up accordingly I can only offer you some words of wisdom which you might think were spoken in jest but are, in fact, the untarnished truth. A good illustration of one of the problems we are facing today. Click here to see the sorry state in which we find ourselves.