Dawn, gym and Rudd

Today I had lunch with Dawn. We went to the Wheatsheaf. I spent most of the time talking about Japan and a little bit about Oz. It was a good job she asked for the bullet pointed, short version. As she herself pointed out, she could have read all about it on the blog (or looked at the photos on Flickr) but there you go, she only has herself to blame. Anyway, hopefully next time I’ll hear a bit about her life.

Before lunch, though, I went to the gym for the first time since late March. Being a Wednesday, I had my weekly weigh-in. And, frankly, I was amazed.

Just to prove that the lo-carb lifestyle works, even though I’ve not been to the gym for over two months my weight has gone from 84kg to 81kg and my waist, the most dangerous place to carry extra weight, has gone from 104.5cm to (drum roll) 98cm! Like most people, I always dread reading the figures but this time I was in a sea of absolute delight.

During the day I started loading some old photos onto Facebook which caused a lot of fun and some hilarity. It also caused a bit of ‘drama’ which made me deactivate my account. Denise and Trace managed to convince me to reactivate it and everything returned to normal. Hopefully.

Anyway, my favourite photo has to be this one:

Native or flamingo?

For anyone who doesn’t know, we have an election next week. There has been some talk about the party leaders having a live TV debate. Tonight it happened and was a clear example of how bad a Prime Minister Theresa May actually is.

Rather than go herself she sent her Home Secretary, Amber Rudd to fill in for her. Not that the PM had any other pressing issue. She claimed in one interview that she would be working on the Brexit negotiations and in another she claimed she’d be seeing the voters rather than standing in a studio arguing.

I see a couple of things wrong with this. Firstly the leaders in the studio would be talking to a lot more voters than the PM could manage to see in a couple of hours of hand pressing and, secondly, if she needs every single moment of every single day to work on the Brexit negotiations, surely she’s not fit for the job.

What’s worse than not turning up was the very sad situation where Amber Rudd’s father died 48 hours before the debate. How could Theresa May, the daughter of a vicar and supposedly caring Christian, expect Amber to attend? Well done, Amber Rudd for managing to perform her duties admirably but, really, she shouldn’t have had to. Surely Boris could have gone instead…

So, Theresa May thinks so little of the British electorate that she won’t even debate the election issues with the leaders of all the other parties. With the exception of the Tories and the SNP, the other parties were all represented by their leaders. From all reports the debate was pretty crap but even so…

Theresa May also said that she debates Jeremy Corbyn in Parliament during Prime Minister’s Questions. I’ve seen some of these so-called debates. She never confronts, she evades questions, she is not a very good debater. You’d think she’d have learned something from David Cameron (who was an excellent debater) when he was PM and she was sitting on the front bench but I guess she just wasn’t paying attention.

It’s a rather good thing for the PM that Jeremy isn’t very good either.

Then again, maybe this is all part of the plan with Trump hand holding Theresa to move us away from Europe and into the open maw of the Evil Empire.

In recompense, here’s a blurry peony from our garden…