We’re having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave as the old song has it and by God we are too. 102 degrees! We might as well be in the middle of the Sahara. The Cote D’Azur is flooded, there’s drought in Thailand. Violent storms in America and we’re having this heatwave which evidently is coming from Africa and took me completely by surprise, so much so that I now know why heat kills off the elderly. Being elderly myself and without leaving the house I went down with heatstroke, maybe only a minor case but very nasty all the same. Virtually comatose, if it hadn’t been for the administrations of Christopher Beeching I would have been in a very bad way indeed.
Evidently there has been any number of dogs for the blind attacked by other dogs in the UK. The attackers have been mostly of the bull breed: bulldog, pit bull, bull terrier, mastiff. Poor gentle Labradors and retrievers for whom it is a traumatic experience and humans being bitten and scratched I am really surprised ‘Elf and Safety haven’t latched on to this. With the number of animal species lost globally every year, mostly because of hunting and man’s encroachment on their natural habitats, the loss of a few more won’t make that much difference so I think parliament, urged on by Elf and Safety, should pass a bill requiring all members of these breeds alive today be spayed or castrated so that no more will be born. End of problem. I don’t means to be facetious but it really seems to be a big problem, not only for the blind, for their dogs, and for the society that trains them. Some dogs have been so traumatised they have been unable to continue with their work and what effect does it have on the owner who is suddenly in the midst of it and is unable to see or do anything about it? I apologise to those who love dogs of the bull breed (including my brother-in-law who has loved and kept them) but just making it illegal to keep such a dog hasn’t worked. People still love and keep dangerous dogs. The breeds have to die out.
Party, Party, Party. Have been reading yet another autobiography pulled from the shelves, this time that of Hermione Baddeley, a gossip column 234 pages long with names dropping like confetti on every page; names from the highest in the land to lowly theatre folk. The highest in the land seem to have been the more important as, marrying into an upper class family, her husband was David Tennent, second son of a lord, so many “dear friends” who partied with them were titled. For example from page 82 to 86 here is a list of the names dropped (this is just a small percentage overall) - Nancy Mitford married to Peter Rodd, Unity Mitford, Amy Johnson and her husband Jim Mollison, Rosa Lewis (The Duchess of Duke Street), King Edward Vll, Lord Ribblesdale, Daphne Fielding, Mrs Wooly (American party giver), Barbara Redhead whose sister married Lord Rothermere, Ribbentrop, Sir Alfred Beit, the Countess of Seafield, The Honourable Mrs Cardiff, Lord Stanley, Margot Fonteyn, Emlyn Williams, Lady Elmsmere, Cecil Beaten, Stephen Tennent, who inherited the title.
I don’t wish it to sound derogatory but it is a book that could only have been written by a woman, even if a ghost was involved.

‘You can lick our chops but you can’t beat our meat’, sign in a butcher’s shop.