I apologise to anyone who has been following my blog but I seem to have let things slip in the last three years. I can hardly believe it has been so long but I guess there have a few family and business events which have needed to take priority. Our daughter is now properly married and our son and daughter in law has a second child. Both events deserve a special mention of which perhaps more detail later.

The country has endured a couple of new Prime Ministers after the clown was deposed and King Charles finally ascended the throne. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has impacted energy supplies, inflation and European artillery munition stocks. Last year, an atrocity committed against Israel has resulted in the utter devastation of Gaza and the death of thousands of innocents. We face the prospect of another contest between Presidents Biden and Trump and an almost inevitable defeat of the Tories in the UK before Christmas.

The continuous background of war and death has become the norm and we are being warned to prepare ourselves for a “war footing”. The significance of this hasn’t penetrated the public mind yet but in the interim the public is becoming acclimatised to institutional corruption, incompetence and inhumanity as perpetrated by the Police, the Post Office and the Blood Transfusion Service.

Some of these issues make our mixing and packing seem to be rather insignificant by comparison.