Sunday, 7th December, 2025
What a horrible morning – dark and wet – but at least it’s warm. Didn’t fall below 12C/54F over night. Still, it doesn’t make me want to go out.
Two birthdays to celebrate this morning. The Blog is 18 today. I was only 56 when I started it. It has seen some real lows and some wonderful highs. Of course, by its very nature, it contains much that is ordinary and unremarkable.
If you stick with it, Dear Reader, it will help you sleep although I do try to amuse and to be prevocative at times. If you are a regular reader and you have my sympathies, you will feel my joy and pain, my patterns of life and inconsistencies. In short, you will see an ordinary man laying out his life before you. Hope to see you this time next year and every year until 2051.
The other birthday is that of young David. He is 28 today. Do you remember when you were 28, Dear Reader? A year of weddings and new challenges. Anyway, we wish David a happy day even though it is pouring with rain in London. It sounds like we are going to have a warm but very wet week ahead. So, that’ll be something to write about, won’t it?
At the beginning of the year, I decided that I would trial doing without our landline. We both have smartphones with unlimited calls, texts and data. It seemed over kill to have a landline which just duplicated that service. First couple of weeks felt a bit strange but this morning I realised that it wasn’t even an issue today. Like the loss of High Street Banking, Landlines are yesterday’s technology which we just need a nudge to abolish.
Our contracts with EE for smartphones are up in a couple of months and they will offer us new models. We have Samsung S24 Ultras and I will almost certainly choose S25s or S26s as an upgrade. We will be able to trade our existing phones in for about £450.00 each which will contribute to the new 18 month contracts at about £180.00 per month for the two.
What I could never abolish is this piece of music that makes me cry instantly I hear it. The opening Aria from Handel’s opera Xerxes – commonly know as Largo. It throws me back to 1973 spontaneously and a grubby flat in a grubby street in a grubby town in a grubby world. I am playing it now in my comfortable Office in a comfortable street in a comfortable town in a comfortable world but I am still crying. I have lost so much.
Monday, 8th December, 2025
The morning is dry and fairly bright. Incredibly warm for December. I’ve got an early appointment for a diabetic rhetinopathy eye scan – the last real medical testing of the year. It involves pupil expanding drops so I’m not allowed to drive. My chauffeur is only too pleased to get her hands on the wheel.
This is another fantastic service that I am offered. Every year they contact me and push me to be scanned and photographed to see if there is any change. I always go although I do worry about it because a fellow student who is the same age as me lost his driving licence when deterioration was found in his sight. Anyway, all is well. The feedback was immediate and positive so I get to drive for another year.
The problem is that the enlarged pupils because of the drops means seeing is painful for some hours to come. The sky suddenly feels electric and so painful. Plus, I can’t read or write which is a nightmare. Anyway, now all I have to be concerned about is the body scan report which won’t be until the beginning of February unless they spot an emergency.
After what seemed like an age, I was able to complete my 28th consecutive Christmas Newsletter ready for printing and placing in cards for posting. If you were getting anxious about your card, Dear Reader. Don’t worry. It will be with you soon.
Tuesday, 9th December, 2025
A grey morning but a frantic start. Gifts ordered for friends – mainly cases of wine – being delivered and delivery men are contacting me. I began to wonder why I’d bothered. Then the task was printing 50 newsletters, 65 address labels and putting stamps on 60 envelopes. Do you know how much 50 x 2nd class stamps cost these days – £43.50! It wasn’t helped by my knocking a glass of coffee over my keyboard but a little woman rushed to my rescue and I was up and typing again in hours.
Amazon may be delivering my Christmas presents to friends but I couldn’t resist sending myself some with the same service. I have written before of a friend of mine who had his car stolen from his drive this time last year. It took months for him to get back on his ….. wheels. I bought a Faraday Box from Amazon to shelter our car fobs. Today, we went one stage further with a Faraday Card Holder to protect our Financial Accounts particularly when travelling abroad. Might be overkill but you never know.
Went out to an active beach where birds were searching urgently for food. It was absolutely wonderful to be there and smell the change, hear the shoreline shift with every ebb and flow of the heavy tide. It is important that we accept that Life does not stay the same. It moves and changes constantly in a state of flux. We should be constantly looking for new beginnings, Dear Reader. Resistance is pointless.
Wednesday, 10th December, 2025
Lovely bright and very warm morning. Going out walking in the sunshine to make the most of it. Alexa read the jobs for the day to me. It included ordering fish for Christmas. Our meal will be a Fish Platter including King Scallops, Langoustines and Fish Goujons which will use Tusk Fish, a Lobster flavoured white fish from the Indian Ocean. At 5.30 am, I also listened to a podcast about the attacks on European Liberal Polity by the Trump-led, Far Right movement in America and about Trump’s increasingly autocratic attempts to control the media.
You may have heard or read of the battle for the Media outlets in America at the moment. It is happening because of the change in accessing news and entertainment over my lifetime. In the 1950s, Mum & Dad had a shiny, walnut cased radiogram sitting proudly on a shiny, walnut table in the Lounge. They listened to the BBC Home Service. It was piped through to a huge speaker on the wall in the Dining Room & Kitchen which was quite advanced for those days. They listened to the Today program that dominates my mornings now and which first came on air in 1957. They listened to The Archers in the evening and Sing Something Simple on Sunday afternoons.
In the 1960s, my brother Bob bought an old, valve radio in a jumble sale and we listened to Dick Barton, Special Agent drama and ‘pop’ music – Pick of the Pops with Alan Freeman on Sunday afternoons. It was on this tatty old box with a fraying speaker cover that I read the place names I dreamed of visiting – Prague, Strasbourg, Brussells, Lyon, Oslo, Warsaw … Oh, let me go … and where I first heard The Moody Blues, Go Now. It was an old radio that really spoke to me.
We didn’t even have a television until after I had left home although I watched Doctor Who and Dixon of Dock Green at my Grandparents’ house on Saturday evening. In those days, Television & Radio was totally linear. You either accessed them when they were broadcast or not at all. Time-shift suddenly became possible in the late 1970s when video recorders first came on the market. I had only been married a year and just bought our first colour television. I chose a Betamax Video Recorder. I have always been an early adopter of technology and sometimes suffered because of it. I loved the machine but it was soon dropped in favour of the VHS process.
We increasingly gathered more control over the process of accessing media. Sky came along having pushed out BSkyB. I had an early satellite installed and everything changed. Suddenly, we had extra channels and could choose when to watch programs. Time shift was almost built in to reception. Now, it felt like the consumer was in control and not subject to the tyranny of the scheduler. Increasingly, its capacity increased. Today I can record 6 channels while watching a 7th. I can save them and watch them whenever I want but then along comes streaming. I don’t even need to save them. They are always there to download and consume wherever I am in the world and what ever time of the day.
I can watch PMQs at 3.00 am or Gardener’s World at Lunchtime in Spain. I can download a podcast recording of the Today programme in Greece or Newspaper Review from Sky in Tenerife. The World is my Lobster, as they say. I no longer have to wait for Episode 2 of a drama to come round a week later on a Wednesday evening when I’ve already forgotten the plot of Episode 1. I can access the whole thing from BBCi Player, Netflix, Prime, ITV-X, etc when I want and binge.
Sky has huge power. Owned by Murdoch (Right Wing)and controlled along with Fox News in the States, The Times and The Sun in UK plus lots of other news outlets around the world this one family hold huge influence over how the news and politics is reported and accessed. The gullible think they are getting the facts. They are not. They are only getting the facts according to one ideology.
But now we have Trump who wants to bend the media narrative to his view of the world. We used to say the Chinese and Russian state control was Totalitarian. Trump is bidding for the same. You might laugh but this is really serious. His biggest backer, Ellison who is the 2nd richest person in the world, has a son who is trying to buy up the streaming services of Warner Bros and HBO. Trump’s son also has a stake in the industry. Trump sees a way to influence and control media output. If the Labour Government announced it was going to restrict news coverage to only what it considered appropriate, we would be up in arms. But that is what Trump is trying to acquire abroad and through that to influence other markets abroad. We should be very afraid.