After a much cooler and better night, the whole family go to St Neots for chores and coffee at the Harvest Bakery. More work on my investments this afternoon, before mowing the games lawn and mopping out the spilt diesel from under the floorboards of The Lady.
The UK balance of trade deficit is at record levels, the NCB is closing two more mines, the Soviet Baltic republics protest about Soviet annexation and Turkey closes its borders to Bulgarian refugees.
A nice night which was much cooler and better for sleeping. We were awake quite early and, after breakfast, opted to go to St Neots together to do some things. Debbie had to go to the dentist, Daniel to the opticians and I did a round of the banks and building societies. I was planning on rebalancing my cash investments. Now that the Abbey National has become a limited company, I can longer trust them with all of my deposits.
** PRESS "Read More" BELOW for the complete story **
We met up for coffee at the harvest bakery and then went home afterwards. It was before lunch that I had a chat with Di and organise the next few days together. We stayed home for a salad lunch. For the second day running, we had Emma and Holly Richardson staying with us and they followed us about all day.
This afternoon, I carried on with my computerisation of our investments and decided to transfer some funds to create two new accounts and so drove off into St Neots to do this. I did some more chores there and, after tea, I mowed the games lawn and then raised the floorboards of the lady and pumped and mopped out the diesel oil from the bilges. Joan had cleaned the boat today and we will soon be all set to go away.
The news today is of a very large deficit for the UK economy on the balance of trade – the second highest on record stop the oil supply has run out, UK manufacturing industry is unable to cater for the consumer demand and the government are hoping that the dock strike distorted the figures and that the month of July was a ‘blip’. The NCB has announced the closure of two more pits in South Wales with a loss of 1400 more mining jobs. This comes after the closure of the last mine in Kent to end a long period of coalmining in that county.
In the three Soviet Baltic republics of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania people made a massive public gesture by linking hands in a human chain across 400 miles. They are protesting at the 50th anniversary of their annexation by the USSR. Following the flood of refugees from Bulgaria, the Turkish government is close the border as they cannot cope with the numbers.
There was the tragic death today of a 15 year old girl Addenbrooke’s Hospital who was unable to get a liver transplant. An organ was available a little while ago but budget cuts led to a freeze on operations.