Sunday, 27th September, 2026
September is almost gone and October won’t be long. All I’m asking is more time. Help me make it through my life. I don’t care who’s right or wrong. I don’t try to understand. Let the devil take tomorrow. Help me make it through my life.
I don’t know where that came from but it certainly rings a bell. The cadence of words that spill out directs the chords that follow and plays Help me make it through the night. My inner life often seems to surface on a Sunday and plagues me. Outside the world goes on unchallenged and I sit in my Office in my head in my thoughts in the music of the words.
It is a lovely morning after a very warm night. I must wish my old friend, Nigel (aka Nog) a happy 77th birthday up in North Yorkshire. He is an artist and sculptor and still works inspite of ill health.
Despite the lovely weather and the good fortune I look forward to, I’m feeling rather empty and sad this morning. There is something missing. I am constantly chasing to catch up.
Maybe I will find it at the beach. So lovely and warm with late Summer sunshine and still the holiday makers wander around and beachside enterprises fish for custom. The train is still running for the kids and elderly. It always amuses us that we walk further and faster than the train takes its passengers and it costs them £3.00 for a return.
Ice creams are soon spotted by the kids but the fish&chips are still doing well even though they cost around £13.00 for a portion. Haven’t eaten fish&chips for so many years and, even then, I wasn’t persuaded. Still, it is a nice place to sit with a coffee and watch the sea on the turn. It is going back to a far off beach only to return this evening.
There is something elemental about this scenery if you can see past the tourist frippery. The smell, the sound and the force of the sea reaches down into humans who subliminally recognise their origins in the primordial slime – the organic mixture on early Earth from which the first life-forms evolved.
Monday, 28th September, 2026
Warm over night. My phone app said we were double the temperature of Oldham which was just 7C/44F in the means streets of Acre Lane. I’m obsessed with the places that form the timeline of my life. I have so many of them on my weather app, on the Live Cams that let me revisit in real time and links with the people that I know.
This morning a couple of minutes ago, I was on Sifnos in the port of Kamares watching people come and go almost as I would have when I lived there. It is a lovely day there.
But then there is Blackpool this morning which I don’t know much about but is enjoying its own lovely day although not quite as warm. These cameras are all around the country and the world if you know where to look and can get into the systems and they allow one to look in like some digital god.
But place is important even to a traveller like me who has lived in a number of places. I associate them with people and experiences that I always need to revisit, can’t let go.
I was born and brought up in a central Midlands village of Repton, Derbyshire. It was a rural, parochial place surrounded by more rural, parochial places. The next village over the River Trent was Willington. It was the next village but I rarely visited it and knew little about it other than it had a signal box where the husband of our cleaner worked and once let us pull the levers to switch the tracks.
I was watching Countryfile last night because I like the country and farming things but last night I was surprised to find the programme was set in Willington and the reintroduction of Beavers to the Wetlands surrounding the Trent.
An hour later, I was moving on to episode 7 of 8 of a drama I’ve been gripped by. It is on iPlayer and called MotherFatherSon with Richard Gere, Helen McCrory, Sarah Lancashire & Billy Howle. It is set in London although the American voice of Richard Gere dominates. Suddenly last night it opened on the scene above. I looked twice before I realised it was Sarah Lancashire walking towards me on Worthing Pier.
Two in one night was lovely but while we were in Athens one Summer, we were watching a film on Netflix in the evening when this scene appeared. The film was an English thriller set in Athens and suddenly the romantic conman took the gullible female tourist out for coffee. They sat at the table we had been at that morning overlooking the ruins of Hadrian’s Library which dated back to 132 AD.
In subsequent years I have returned to that spot many times. It is certainly better to see and touch for yourself than to experience through the medium of a CCTV camera but sometimes that is the only way.
Tuesday, 29th September, 2026
Blue sky, strong sunshine after a really warm night for September. I haven’t slept in a bed since April. I sleep on top of the bed because it is so warm. I wonder how much longer it will be. Hardly been in the Gym because of the weather but tomorrow is the last day of September and that can only mean cooler times are ahead.
The internet of everything is here and has been for a while. Artificial Intelligence is being brought in to the controll of more and more areas of life. Even our washing machine and our tumble dryer have AI settings which means they weigh the clothes, ask the material and automatically calculate the processes needed to complete the task.
Needless to say that, if there is a fault with the internet, there is a problem with normal life. I have so much depending on it, I have long paid for a gold plated fibre optic broadband delivery to our property to make the services run smoothly. In my Office I have a BT/EE smart wifi hub which comes automatically with a backup hub which operates on the 5G mobile network. I have gigabyt broadband which means I should get a download speed of 1000 mbps.
It is never exactly that but it is superfast at all times. To put it into context, normal speeds before fibre optics was around 25 mbps and upload was so slow that large files took half a day to upload. That was with just one computer using it and, if neighbours either side were using the net, the shared rate (contention) was slower. With fibre there is no contention rate. It is individually to my door so the past couple of weeks have been quite confusing.
My TV network is supposed to operate seemlessly across the house. I can watch something in the Gym, finish mt workout and pick up the thing I’m watching in the Kitchen, the Lounge, Bedroom or in the Office. The process relies on the Sky Boxes talking to each other and on the reliability of the Broadband feed that links them.
For the past couple of weeks, the Sky boxes have lost connection to the internet and to each other over night and I wondered if my 10yr old boxes were failing. I’ve upgraded their software, rebooted their connections, messing about every morning and got really irritated with them. Eventually, I tried to speak to someone in the Technical Department at Sky. It is impossible.
I looked to my internet and found it had been compromised. BT/EE looked at my network remotely and told me I had a settings problem and how to fix it. I’ve done that and everything is back to normal but I was left wondering how many people could have done that at home. Certainly, my wife couldn’t and I suspect many people couldn’t. There is still a need for face to face conversations to walk people through these problems and give them the confidence to cope.
Down at the beach this morning, I once again did the 10 kilometers return down the coast and back and that I’ve been doing for months. It felt good in a warm breeze and a temperature of 24C/75F with weak sunshine on my skin and sea spray bathing me. Got to keep going.
Wednesday, 30th September, 2026
The last day of September 2026 has arrived after the most incredibly warm night for this time of year. We didn’t fall below a steamy 22C/70F and we started with some useful rain. By 9.00 am, I was at the surgery donating another armful of blood for my INR venous crosscheck while my accountant was busily giving away £640.00 for her car tax. The DVLA website makes it so easy to give them money.
You can’t have watched Andy Burnham’s Conference speech yesterday – and I know you did, Dear Reader – without being moved and uplifted. It was a speech I could have written myself for the past 40 years. In fact I did when presenting a paper to a Research group on the M.A. course at Huddersfield University in 1985/6. It was an update of the old Gas & Water Socialism that we espoused in those days and it proposed rolling back Thatcherism. I went to bed at midnight still on a high and was awake at 4.30 am listening to a podcast discussing the speech. I heard commentators on the Far Right GB News saying that the speech was historic and would mean a second term of Labour was baked in now. We will see.
The speech featured many things that I wanted to hear but most that people have been afraid of raising for so long.
- Public Ownership of essential Utilities
- Social Care knitted in to the National Health Service
- Return of Apprenticeships
- Help to Buy Housing for young people to get on the ladder.
- Social Housing for those who can’t afford direct ownership
- Moving back to the European Union
- Proportional Voting for real representation
These are ideas and concepts I have been reading and writing about for so many years. While I was sitting in my Office in Huddersfield, they were the focus. When I was sitting in my Office in Greece, they were the focus.
Just 15 years ago today I was sitting on this patio under a pergola reading books and newspaper articles about just these ideas as the waves crashed on the beach by the port. I am well known as a cryer and I am not ashamed to admit that Burnham’s speech moved me to tears. It has been a long time coming.
For me it has been quite a journey. From a conservative voting home to a conservative Grammar School to a conservative Anglican Training College, left wing politics rose slowly. I think meeting people from working class backgrounds at College was a trigger. I would never have read a book like this before I arrived. I know I’ve featured it before but a student lent it to me and the story has stuck with me.
At 16, Sally Trench left her comfortable upper class home to live and work on the streets with homeless people. Among the homeless on London’s streets, she put love into their situations from sitting with a drug addict through agonizing days of withdrawl to saving a tramp from a burning building. I’m sorry but that would never be me. But I admired it and realised my own limitations.
I couldn’t be Sally Trench. I can’t rescue injured birds. The feel of their feathered bodies is too much for me. I can’t rescue down-and out-tramps, their dirt and smell makes me shudder, I really admire the people who can do those things but I can recognise their plight and I can argue their case for treatment by people more suited than me. I will never be good enough but I can be of use.
Thursday, 1st October, 2026
Happy new month, Dear Reader. Happy October. Let’s hope it continues the way it has started – warm with blue sky and strong sunshine. We had a brief bout of heavy rain in the middle of the night and the world looks all the better for it this morning.
For me, there was one good thing about 1973. UK joined the EEC. I was delighted to be European. Having escaped a restrictive village life a few years earlier, to escape a introverted and restrictive island life was the next step. By 1980, when I had the time and money to enjoy it, Europe became a passion. Being European became a raison d’etre.
I can still see the moment now with Geoffrey Rippon MP watching Ted Heath sign the Accession document that he himself had drawn up and a sense of pride that Britain could now move on. Looking back at the black & white photos of grey men in grey suits with not a woman in sight just about summed up what I wanted to escape but it wasn’t until I got on a plane in 1981 and flew to Athens that I realised how exciting a place I now belonged to. Anything and everything was possible.
And so it was just like you said it would be. Life went easy for me … most of the time. From that moment, I was a committed European. I loved Europe and all it had to offer. In those days, my wife was trying to teach kids in Domestic Science and introduced them to Spaghetti Bolognese, Lasagne, Risotto, etc, and would receive letters from parents telling her they didn’t eat that foreign muck. It is a refrain you can still hear from people holidaying abroad who complain about Spain being full of Spanish people and the food being horrible. But, for most of us, open minds lead to widening horizons, exciting experiences and enhanced lifestyles.
I say for most of us but the referendum suggested the closed mind syndrome was more extensive than we thought. We should have known that the British Pubs and Fish&Chip bars that the large number of Brits abroad liked to frequent, indicated an inability to rise to the challenges of European integration.
The result was a shock to me and I was hurt by it. Cameron was stupid and too arrogant to set safeguards on the referendum. It should have required more than a simple majority to make such a momentous change. But that’s Tory Boys for you. They believe that the rabble electorate will follow their lead and give them what they want. Not this time and, as we warned, the result has been disastrous.
Of course there is a lot of voter remorse. As the current poll running in The Mirror this morning indicates, there is a strong majority for rejoining. Whether that survives the Far Right attempts to scare them with membership of the Euro and being ruled by ‘unelected’ European bureaucrats, we must wait and see but at least we have a leader prepared to try for the good of the country.
Already the opposition are raising the ‘second referendum’ spectre but I think it may just be part of the Labour Party’s Election Manifesto. It will certainly be part of the Lib. Dems. manifesto and the Greens as well. If, as expected, there will be a strong anti-Reform move for tactical voting and the result involves power sharing amonst the progressive Left with Labour by far the largest party, a unifying theme could well be found in Rejoin.
We already know that Europe will welcome us back with open arms. As soon as Burnham spoke, Macron of France and Sanchez of Spain openly stated they would be happy to see us back in the fold. Just as 1973 was a momentous year for all sorts of reasons, so the next few years will see a lot of those problems readdressed. I really believe we can put an end to this isolation and I can die happy.
Friday, 2nd October, 2026
Don’t you just love organised weather. Warm over night but wet. Real rain. The morning has opened warm, dry and sunny with lovely blue sky. I know I go on about it but I am British (European) and it is a national obsession. If I’d been born in the Canaries, weather wouldn’t have featured at all. So near to the equator, the weather is more or less the same all year which is why it is a ‘safe bet’ for tourists.
Anyway it doesn’t seem to be detering readers. My readership is quite respectable for an old man’s dribblings. My 1st October entry was read by 1,076 people who had nothing better to do. Let’s hope they come back for this morning’s good news of my running Government Bonds account.
Every beginning of a new month provides the excitement (OK interest) of potential winnings from an £18,000.00 investment. This morning, I found that this month’s prize was the best yet at £200.00 although that is still only providing 3.3% annualised which is not good enough. I have 18,000 Premium Bonds and I have won 10 separate prizes each on a different Bond. There are still 2 x £1 millions each month, 90 x £100,000.00 each month, etc, so hope springs eternal.
Hope is all we have for fuel prices at the moment. Trump’s short sighted war against Iran and the war between Europe and Russia centred on the invasion of Ukraine have combined to create a shortage of oil products and particularly petrol and diesel. I have never driven a diesel car. I would never drive a diesel car. I have always seen them as noisy, polluting engines. Honda has never made one anyway which meant I never had that dilemma.
Nowadays, driving a diesel car is like riding a dinosaur. And it is increasingly expensive. The Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown encouraged diesel car ownership through tax incentives because diesel vehicles produced less CO₂ than petrol cars. The policy was intended to help tackle climate change. The controversy is that while diesel engines emit less CO₂ than equivalent petrol engines, they also produce higher levels of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulates. Later evidence showed these pollutants had significant health impact as well.
So it is an example of the dangers of unintended consquences. Blair & Brown based their actions on the latest expert advice at the time. Subsequently, the electorate found they had followed official advice only to have the rug pulled from beneath them. Petrol is cleaner and cheaper. Unfortunately, the poor who can’t afford to change still have their diesels and will probably run them into the ground for years to come unless the price of diesel overwhelms them.
Of course, diesel is far more important than that. It still fuels most heavy goods vehicles which impacts the costs of moving goods around the country and adds to the price and raises inflation. Actually, we rely on diesel imports and Trump is so under pressure at home he is threatening to stop all exports. We import about 30% of our diesel supplies fro the US and that could see rationing here. Domestic vehicles will be at the bottom of that food chain with Commercial traffic and Public Transport at the top. As long as they don’t affect my flights, I don’t care. Electric is the way to go and this may just encourage the switch. I’ll be documenting it over the next decade of the Blog.
Saturday, 3rd October, 2026
Tic Toc, Tic Toc, Tic Toc …. the irresistible metronome of time continues unerringly. I hear its sound in my head constantly. My Blog beats along, charting its course. Past years remind me that this week – the first week of October was a time of movement and return. For years it was return from our Greek home. The car was being packed up. The house was being put to bed for 6 months and arrangements were being finalised for the journey – ferries, hotels, etc.
Although it was a wrench, in my head it was not leaving but moving my life for while confident in the knowledge that I would return. That is important to me. It was also a highlight for me because I love driving and particularly driving that tests me – across different countries with different languages, on and off ferries, across wonderful bridges, through romantic places like around Lake Garda and through Dijon.
One of the great experiences was always driving ove the Rio–Antirrio Bridge the world’s longest fully suspended bridge. It crosses the Rion Strait between the Gulf of Corinth and Gulf of Patras it connects the Peloponnese peninsula to mainland Greece by road. We first drove to Greece in 2000. We had just bought our second new Honda CRV. It was the perfect car for hauling vast amounts of luggage across Europe in air conditioned comfort.
I don’t know what it says about me that I ve bought at least 10 new Honda CRVs since then and I am currently looking at the next iteration of it which is now timed for early 2028. The next one will almost certainly be plug-in-hybrid which has the most amazing fuel economy.
As you will see from the bottom right corner of the chart, currently, I can achieve 40 – 46 mpg. A plug-in-hybrid will give something like 200 mpg which this current world will really appreciate. One of the reasons for this is my retired lifestyle. I don’t drive 40 miles a day for work. I don’t drive 3000 miles for a Greek round trip. I drive 3 miles to Sainsburys and back. At the 2yr anniversary of the car, I had clocked 4,100 miles. Pathetic, I know but that’s the reality and, if I want to do a long journey – say to Lancashire – it will always have the petrol back up.
