29 June 2011

The thundery rain has now passed over and we awoke this morning to a beautiful bright sunny day. Perfect for the men’s quarter-finals and the Murray match this afternoon.

First thing this morning, my lovely sewing lady, Janet, came to measure up for making me another custom-made under sheet with a satin centre. I think we can actually improve upon the WendyLet sheet which was kindly given to me. Janet is going to sow a central satin panel onto one of our own sheets and to make this into a fitted sheet by putting bands of elastic, from side to side under the mattress. This should prevent it from rucking up when I try to turn over.

Men’s quarter final day at Wimbledon. Our man Murray, seeded four, predictably creamed through in three straight sets against Lopez the Spaniard, ranked 44^th. in the world Djokovic, the second seed, beat Tomic. the 18 year-old rising Australian star, in three sets to one; Federer, the number three seed incredulously lost to Tsomga, the French, twelth seed after an epic battle and finally Nadal. the defending champion and number one seed beat the American, Fish, the tenth seed, three sets to one and will meet Murray in the semi-final.

The economic situation in Europe is still very tenuous. There have been serious riots in Greece against the government’s vote for austerity over the next decade or so in order to bring the Greek economy under control. Without the government vote in favour of the proposals, Greece could well have gone on under and not received the additional €10 billion it needs to sustain its current situation. Grease like a number of other European countries has been very slack over the years in collecting income tax The wealthy have always been able to get round paying a fraction of what they should have paid and, as a result, the country is bankrupt. Heaven knows what they will do in a few years time with pensions for their increasingly older population.

The UK is not a great deal better off, it’s main mistake has been the soft treatment of the people in public service. For many years those in public service have been allowed to retire earlier than the private sector and pay less towards their pensions. Now the government is evening things up and raising the retirement age to 66 for both men and women in both the private and public sector. This means that people like schoolteachers ,who were allowed to retire at 57, will have to work an extra nine years and to contribute an additional 3% to their pension. As a result a 48-hour national strike has been called from tomorrow, by a number of the public sector unions, which will cause a great deal of disruption. However, without the governments proposed measures there would be something in the order of an £8 billion hole in the public service pension fund as soon as the year 2015. So the government has absolutely no choice in the matter and therefore I cannot see what can be achieved by this national strike. One would have hoped that schoolteachers, at least, would have been intelligent enough to see that some stringent economic constraints are necessary to bring our economy back to an even keel. It is refreshing to find a government which is prepared to look long-term, no matter what the consequences are for their popularity over the short term. I just pray that government does not give in to the demands of the strikers, however rough it becomes over the next few weeks. All sectors of society from rich to poor man must bear some financial pain to compensate for the gross overspending – both in the public sector by the Labour government and by the millions of feckless individuals who used their credit cards as if money was going out of fashion – which has occurred over the last decade or so.