We’re having a warmish finale to March, but it’s grey and at times wet. Not a ray of sunshine to be seen, even in the long-range forecast. This could be England. (I much prefer this to the hellish temperatures we’re likely to get three months from now, though.)
Last night I had a chat with my brother. Inevitably, we talked about Mum and Dad. Especially Mum. My brother said she has an incredible knack for emotionally distancing herself from her family. We mentioned Dad’s mother who flew to New Zealand in 2005. She was 83 and largely immobile. She flew business class and needed a wheelchair to get to and from the gates. It wasn’t an easy trip, and it came at great expense – business class isn’t cheap and she wasn’t exactly wealthy – but she did it because she really wanted to see her son, even though she knew he’d be coming back to England in a couple of months for his heart valve surgery. That was the operation that nearly killed him and that Mum (emotional distance again) didn’t go over for. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a mum that really wanted to see us (and her two grandchildren)? One major difference between 20 years ago and now is the proliferation of ways to make video calls, but Skyping and Zooming are no real substitute, even if Mum thinks they are.
Mum hasn’t got any worse, so I’m bumping their chances of coming over back up to 80%. I’m concerned though that, apart from the scan, she’s done nothing to investigate a problem that started years ago. Taking a bunch of laxatives doesn’t get to the bottom (ha!) of the issue at all. As for Dad, he’s been in pain because he bit his cheek badly in the middle of the night. He has a habit of doing this – the insides of his cheeks are full of scars – but this episode was particularly bad.
Book news. Not great. Dorothy got in touch with the “publishers” yesterday. They’re now saying they’ll do 500 copies but the book would need to be accepted somehow by the Ministry of Culture and, if that happens, it’ll come at an unknown cost to me. I have no idea how their distribution works, if it works at all. There are a lot of ifs, suddenly. If it’s going to cost me more than a three-figure sum (in pounds), I’m out and I’ll try and find a publisher worthy of the name. They certainly exist in Romania, but the one I’ve been dealing with certainly isn’t it.
More chaos in the Trump “administration”. That leaked Signal group chat prior to the attack on Yemen. I mean, seriously, what a joke. And it obviously was a joke to them, with their use of emojis. This is what we’re dealing with here. A bunch of 12-year-olds. The idea that they’d even discuss something so serious and sensitive over some chat facility is ludicrous. And why did they need to bomb Yemen (and kill dozens of innocent civilians including children) anyway? It reminds me of the Tory ministers’ – and Dominic Cummings’ – WhatsApp messages during the early stages of the Covid pandemic. They didn’t have a clue, nor did they care. How have we sunk so low?
Last time I spoke to my parents, they had a game of cricket on TV in the background. New Zealand were playing, presumably in a Twenty20 match. Mum mentioned that NZ had already qualified for the football World Cup, long before it even happens. Well that’s nice, but that isn’t the achievement it used to be. The 2026 World Cup will feature 48 teams and 104 games. It’s too big. Everything has got too big. That’s half the reason we’re in this mess. What’s more, the group games – all 72 of them – will only serve to eliminate 16 of the teams. Most of the action will take place in the US; all the more reason to give it a miss. I watched NZ qualify for the 2010 tournament (32 teams) by beating Bahrain. That felt exciting and, well, meaningful, especially since NZ gave such a good account of themselves in the main competition. I wish I’d been around to see NZ qualify for the 1982 edition. It was a marathon campaign. The All Whites won in Australia to put them in the final round, then they eventually beat China in a do-or-die play-off. A country of three million beating one of close to a billion. Only 24 teams qualified then, so it was a huge achievement.
There has been a break in domestic football to accommodate international matches. This weekend the final run-in starts. There is talk of Birmingham breaking points records. Most teams in their division have eight or nine games left. Blues have eleven, including the EFL Trophy final. Their packed schedule might be their undoing; we’ll see.
Kitty injured her neck on Monday. I don’t know how she did it, only that it must have happened while I was out. There was a raw red patch. Later that day I saw blood on the windowsill in the little room next to my office. As I’d expect with Kitty, she was totally undeterred by this.