21 March 2012

My mother and Richard were driven down from Church Stretton, Shropshire, today for lunch. It seems a very long way to come to such a short time but my mother is 95 and Richard only a couple of years younger, so from 12 to 3 was quite long enough for all of us.. Again we were extremely fortunate with the weather. It was a perfect spring day and the garden was looking particularly lovely although it was not quite warm enough for us to sit out. Richard was characteristically generous and bought me a bottle of Bollinger and for Alice a fine box of chocolates handmade in Church Streeton he did the same last time he came and we begged him not to do it again but how on earth can we stop him?!

Some good news, for a change. Mrs Tebbutt, who was snatched by Somalis from a luxury resort in Kenya after shooting her husband dead, was returned home yesterday, ostensibly after the family raised a substantial ransom. Alice was over the moon and she has felt an affinity this poor woman whom I wrongly suspected would have been murdered herself by now. I’m glad to say I was wrong. No doubt the full account of her ordeal will appear in the national newspapers and this is one occasion where I have no strong feelings against someone cashing in, hopefully, recouping sufficient to pay back the kind people who put up the ransom money.

Talking of money, today was Budget Day when the Chancellor .of The Exchequer spelt out the measures he is taking over the next 12 months or so in order to continue reducing GB.Ltd s indebtedness. Although he took measures to ease the financial burden on the very rich by reducing the top rate of income tax from 50 p in the pound to 45 p and neither one of them neither one of them helped the lower paid by increasing the amount they could earn before they paid tax, but he did nothing for the pensioners. By doing nothing, i.e. leaving the personal allowances untouched, where as other categories were all increased, he has left the pensioners hypothetically around £250 a year worse off which, to some folk, will be significant. Whilst I fully appreciate the reason for a tight budget I am at a loss to know quite why he singled out the pensioners as one of the losers.

Bearing in mind the number of pensioners, most of whom would probably traditionally vote Conservative, he has to be taking a bit of a risk by singling them out. Similarly I think he missed a trick when it came down to tax credits. These will only now be paid by people earning more than £60,000 per annum but he has not addressed the inequity of two people living together where their combined income may well exceed £100,000 but individually neither one of them earns £60,000, which perpetuates the problem that it is always financially beneficial not to get married.

This really has nothing to do with my problem but it amused me when I read it. The point being, have you ever wondered why English is the official language in the EU, why not French or German, after all we are not the most popular member of that particular club? Click here and find out how and why we ended up with English!

20 March 2012

Today is the last day of winter or looked at the other way the first day of spring. Why today? Well, when Julius Caesar established his calendar in 45 BC it set March 25 as the spring equinox – the time when the length of day and night are roughly equal. (is the Latin for […]

19 March 2012

The astute reader will realise that I wrote nothing yesterday on Mother’s Day. This should not be confused with Mothering Sunday, a Christian festival which falls on the fourth Sunday after Lent and is celebrated throughout Europe. In the UK however secularly in 17th or 18th century it became the only day that domestic servants […]

18 March 2012

18 March 2012 Following on from my comments yesterday on Rees Mogg’s article in The Times, ‘ Protect traditional marriage for which children’s sake’, ‘my lovely’ presented me with a full-page advertisement from The Times, placed by Coalition for Marriage, claiming that 70% of people say keep marriage as it is. It goes on to […]

17 March 2012

There were two issues in articles in The Times over the last couple of days that ‘my lovely’ cut out for me to read , as they are both matters about which we both have strong views. The first concerned experimenting on animals, testing out new drugs etc in the interest of research. It is […]

16 March 2012

Another milestone day. Our 49th wedding anniversary. I remember the day well. I have arrived back, on Friday evening, from a three-week ski holiday in Zermatt and St Moritz, played squash on Saturday morning and got married at 2.00 at Holy Trinity Brompton-but that’s another story, other than to say that the best place for […]

15 March 2012

Another absolutely beautiful ‘summer’s day. When the temperature in the mid teens and an almost clear blue sky, it was a repeat of yesterday’s weather when I really should have gone to the golf club left it too late to book with Ollie’s. Wheelchair Friendly Taxi Service. I’ve had a couple of calls now to […]

14 March 2012

Yesterday was meant to be my second visit this year to join the geriatrics on the Tuesday golf day and have lunch at the club. The weather forecast was for a sunny day with a temperature of around 15°. In the event, having spoken to Ollie’s wife Debbie neither of us were happy with the […]

13 March 2012

I had a bit of a shock yesterday when I thought that my artificial urinary sphincter (AUS) had finally gone wrong. I should perhaps explain, for those readers who were not with me in the earlier days when I recounted the history behind the AUS. What happened is this. In 2000 I misdiagnosed with prostate […]

12 March 2012

Another broken night with a painful foot. I couldn’t say exactly where the pain was coming from but it was fairly excruciating at times, although once I was up and dressed it was fine, no further pain.. I think the medical profession are just as foxed as I am as to the cause but I […]