2024 General Election (and other Minor Distractions)

Saturday. 7.45 a.m. Well, I sat up and watched the BBC's coverage of the General Election on Thursday night. The polling stations closed at 10 p.m. and I had been to cast my vote at 7.15 a.m., at the Oldbrook Community Hall, which is on Oldbrook Boulevard and opposite the Green. (No, I'm not going to reveal how I voted, it's between me and the ballot box.) I watched about the first couple of hours of the coverage and when the exit poll results were announced at 10, just after the polling stations closed, suggesting that Labour would have a landslide majority and the Conservatives were likely to get no more than 120 seats, I went back to bed.

I woke later to continue watching the election results as they came in. It was around 2 a.m. that it was clear that Labour had won, that Keir Starmer would be our next Prime Minister, and that the Conservatives conceded defeat. It has been revealed that it was the largest defeat of the Conservative Party in its entire history. 

Saturday. 2.25 p.m. My genealogy research is going well. Actually, I should say more than well. I am nearing 10,000 people on my tree. I am surprised how many of them, particularly on my paternal side, went to America. One was a soldier in the Civil War and, as far as my research goes, another during the American War of Independence. On my maternal side, one branch, the Gylkes, was a Quaker family and Thomas Gylkes was a clockmaker, some of his clock are valued at well over £1000, according to my Google searches.

Friday. 6.05 a.m. As you will have realized, I haven't posted anything on my blog for quite a while. One reason is that the browser I use most, Safari, has not been working properly. I can't scroll up and down, which makes it virtually impossible to view many websites and in particular, the functions on Blogger are difficult to deal with.

Saturday. 7.20 a.m. I have been struggling to find out why Safari has been playing up (not scrolling up or down.) I have been looking at the settings and trying different settings to see if any of them will work and after a great deal of effort, I have solved the problem! I can't see how this particular setting got altered but it has worked and things are back to some sort of normal. I have been using two other browsers, Firefox and Chrome and find all of them have advantages over each other, but, as I have fot used to Safari that's the main one I have used more or less since the first time I got an Apple Macintosh computer.

I must have mentioned that I had an appointment with a consultant at the cardiology department at Milton Keynes Hospital a few weeks ago. As a result the consultant suggested I have an implant in my chest which would monitor any irregularities of my heart rhythm and hopefully prevent me from having a further episode of either a heart attack or blackout which I had in the early days of 2024. Yesterday I had an appointment to have this procedure done. It was scheduled for 12 mid-day. It was easy enough parking, immediately outside the department. That was one of my biggest worries, not being able to park the car and then having to find a space somewhere else and then not be late for the appointment.

Monday. 6.20 a.m. It is taking a good deal longer than usual to complete writing this post. I will attempt to do so now.

I digress . . . Continuing from the above. I waited for a brief moment in the waiting area in the cardiology department, before a nurse came out and called me in with another patient.

I had to change into a hospital gown. I hate these things! I know they get you to wear them if you have to have a procedure done or have an operation, but they only tie up with a few lengths of thin tape and the back is open, that is, if you don't manage to hold on to it to prevent your behind being exposed. I took off my shirt, remained in my underwear and socks, and just waited. Other patients in the six-bed unit came in and then disappeared to have their procedure done. Above all else, it was just boring sitting and waiting.  Eventually, at around 1.30 I was called in by a nurse, who took me into the (I won't call it an operating theatre. It did remind me of the room where I had the stents fitted after I had my second heart attack in September 2018, at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.)  The nurse got me to take off the gown and lay on a bench (for want of a better name. It was more like a bed, padded and not too uncomfortable. A surgeon, dressed in a gown (perhaps called a smock, but I don't know, also with a face mask and, one again, reminding me of the stent-fitting, with the surgeon wearing a green gown and a face mask. But the memory of face masks is related, to me anyway, more to the face masks we were expected to wear during the covid pandemic lockdowns, and the second heart attack was around 18 months before all that happened. The surgeon cleaned my chest and then said that I would experience a slight sting, which would have been when he made an incision in my chest, on the left, just over my heart, and the procedure was over, and I returned to the unit to wait, yet again.

A nurse came to talk to me about the gadgetry I was given, which communicates with the implant in my chest (I.L.R. or Implantable Loop Recorder.) I have a box, which looks vaguely like a landline telephone which includes a separate handset which sits in the cradle on the box, as well as a remote device, small enough to fit on my keyring and should go with me everywhere. If I hold the remote device over the implant when, or if, I have a irregular heart rhythm, the device will record an electronic measurement, similar to the reading that is given by an E.C.G. and this data is sent to the cardiology department at the hospital. I was also given a letter, telling me that a remote appointment had been arranged for the 23rd of August, and that I have to send data from the home monitor (the gadget I describe above, and which sits on my bedside table. So, having had the implant and given instructions on the various aspects of its use, which are also included in several leaflets I was given, I got dressed and then left the cardiology department.

It's A Lovely Day Today!

Saturday. 9.50 a.m. I've been constructing a bookshelf, which I bought on Amazon. I ordered it earlier in the week and was expecting it to arrive next week, probably Wednesday or Thursday. I got back from the doctor's appointment yesterday and there was this large parcel left outside my front door, so I left it unopened until around 7.30 this morning and have been working on putting it together. It is now finished and it's in the kitchen, but it will eventually be put in my walk-in cupboard, which will then contain all the cooking ingredients which are still awaiting a home since before the kitchen was ungraded.

12.35 p.m.  Amoxicillin is making me feel very sleepy. I was told to stop taking the Piriton, which I have done, and the remainder of the packet is now stored in my medication drawer. Well, I presume it's the new medication making me sleepy.

So, we have a new Prime Minister in Liz Truss. Well, I use the term 'Prime Minister' lightly. She's only been in office barely a month, and it seems the wheels are falling off the wagon. She's made more U-turns than a learner driver in a cul-de-sac. Seems likely she's going to have the shortest Premiership in history. It can't be long before there's a vote of no confidence, and we have a General Election. If you thought Boris Johnson was a disaster as PM, then Trussy takes the biscuit. She has the authority of an inept primary school teacher who can't get her class to behave. If she is forced out, which seems likely, does it mean we'll have to go through the ridiculous circus which is the Tory party system of voting for it's leader, which took around two months last time. Who would replace her? There can't be many candidates left.

A great deal seems to have happened in only a few days, but, as someone said so succinctly, 'A week is a long time in politics.' How true. Apparently attributed to Harold Wilson, former Labour Prime Minister.

Kwasi Kwarteng must have had the shortest time in office as Chancellor of The Exchequer and is now replaced by Jeremy Hunt. The contents of the disastrous 'mini budget' have been more or less totally replaced by new tax rates and goodness knows what else. They should install and revolving door to Number 11 Downing Street. How many Chancellors have we had in the last year? 

It seems the Conservative Party has been responsible for several disasters. So many splits within it's membership regarding the EU ('Euro Sceptics, I think the term is.) which led to the craziness of Brexit,  and now splits regarding the former Chancellor's 'Mini Budget' is likely to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. Meanwhile, we have had two years of lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic and now a war in Ukraine. Has nobody thought that closing down the economy for two years and paying people to sit at home doing nothing, would lead to soaring inflation, which is exactly what we have at the moment? Then, attempting to get people to go back to work, usually those in offices, when they've been told to 'stay at home and protect the N.H.S., and using scare tactics to prevent people from meeting up, and not understanding that you can't expect things to return to any sort of normal when people have been filled with this sort of stuff.

Monday. 8.05 a.m. My cough is certainly showing signs of disappearing. The medication must be working. 

4.45 p.m. I've done a considerable amount more writing. What I have created has already been word processed and there is far more. Things in that department are going surprisingly well.

General Election 2015

The 2015 General Election campaign seems to have dragged on for ever, or so it seems. Having fixed term governments means that you know exactly when the next General Election will be, unlike when an Election is called because of something like a Vote of No Confidence and the current Government loosing and 'going to the polls.' It's also not a 'Two Horse Race' this time with just Labour and Conservative, so we have to contend with all the other minor parties such as U.K.I.P. and even the S.N.P. weighing in as well as Liberal Democrats. I have heard that around 6 million people have not even registered to vote, which seems idiotic. So, when we get another 'hung parliament' as we're very likely to have, those who don't turn out to vote have no right to say 'we don't like the government' or 'we don't like 'The Cuts' ' or whatever as they didn't make an effort to vote and make a decision on the next government. I think that it took long enough for people to get the vote, you only have to think of the Suffragettes, those who even died for the cause of not just women's votes, but men's as well (you have to remember that not all men could vote up until fairly early in the 20th Century, and the over 21. It wasn't until around 1969 when the voting age in this country was lowered to 18.) This is why I think it so important that everyone should at least make an effort to vote in all elections, regardless of which party it is or what your political views are.

I have had exactly one lot of door-to-door canvassing from Labour. Well, at least I can say they have made an effort.  The other parties have stuffed their leaflets through the door and Labour and Conservative have gone to a lot of bother to actually post their leaflets, but still only Labour have made an effort to come and speak to me but then it wasn't the actual candidate. They really should make the effort to come and speak to me personally if they want my voteWhen I lived in Bedford I threw down the challenge to all prospective candidates from all the local political parties to come and speak to me on my doorstep. I ended up in quite a long conversation via email with the Conservative candidate, Richard Fuller and he did make quite a good representation of his policies for Bedford (I think it was a local election, not a General Election, but I forget now.) I didn't hear anything from any of the other major parties so they didn't get the vote. I did the same with the last General Election and only the Liberal Democrats made any sort of effort so they got my vote. I'm afraid if the parties want to make some sort of effort then they have to make the effort to come and speak to me face-to-face. I'm not sure who to vote for this time, unfortunately and may not know up to the very last minute on Polling Day 7th May.