The weather became noticeably cooler again after the glorious summer came to an end at last, with the days warm and the nights chilly. It started dry and ended with the odd wet and windy day.
Kimbolton School featured this month, socially and with us and our children happily participating. Daniel was leaving, had secured his place in University and passed his driving test and so enjoying the freedom of his car and Debbie had happily started Main School by taking the school bus and now had her pony Sundance in better circumstances at Great Staughton with safe hacks on nearby farmer’s fields.
Mum’s visited from Stanton for a meeting with the monumental mason to agree Dad’s gravestone and we collected Dad’s trophy from Harlequin in Norwich for her to present to the first awardee of the Historic Ambulance Society. Di and I had a few trips out to a barn dance and a GOBA dinner and evening and our cleaner Joan had her last morning working for us after some nine years of service. I planned to host a dinner date later in the month but was also a grateful guest of Nigel and Lynne Smith for a dinner date too.
At home, I was struggling with the swimming pool, but I had employed a new gardener, Mr Tee, as our housekeeper Joan advises us of her plans to leave. The electrician fitted the downlights in my office, British Gas finally commissioned my heating and I contracted a decorator to decorate the outside of The Hayling View for £2,200. My journal, investment account planning and council business was relentless. I negotiated my investment with Ian and Margaret James, of On-Site Training.
My District Council work continued in the main forum and in committee and I was also an active participant in constituency and local LibDem political meetings. During two trips to Heronshaw in Horning, the second one with Diana accompanying me, I was renovating the old thatched garage using mental extension plates, made for me by Jack Edwards, connecting in new wooden timbers to both raise and replace the walls.
A meeting with architects conformed that the main building of Heronshaw was beyond repair and needed replacement. Whilst with me, Di and I enjoyed a few nice meals locally and took a trip along the Horning waterfront looking at the local building designs.
As the Gulf War situation deteriorate, Thatcher sends another 20 tornado attack aircraft, 6,000 troops and 120 tanks to the Gulf in what I take as her opening gambit for the forthcoming election campaign to divert attention from domestic inflation, which is 10.6%, the highest figure since the early 1980s, and we now have a record balance of payments deficit, high inflation, and rising unemployment as well as a shrinking economy in real terms!
Another UK army recruitment sergeant is shot and seriously wounded outside his office in the Prime Minister’s Finchley constituency and the Liberal Democrats have opened their conference with a radical package of measures to improve the environment and reform the political system.
On the world stage, the fate of the hostages held by Iraq is uppermost as the first plane carrying Western hostages flew back from Iraqi with the US Sen Jesse Jackson. The Bush/Gorbachev meeting on the Gulf seemed to have gone well, after Gorbachev first met Jordan’s King Hussein. A convoy of women and children has arrived in Baghdad from Kuwait heading for Jordan but they worry about their fate and leaving their husbands and fathers behind.
The US and Britain stance ‘reserved the right’ to invade Kuwait without the further endorsement of the United Nations even though the blockade appeared to be working. Food and medicines are now being allowed in for humanitarian reasons. as Britain and other European Community countries expelled not the Iraqi military attaches based in Europe.
Iraq then invaded the French and Dutch missions in Kuwait. After a U.S. warship boards an Iraqi-flagged tanker bound for the port of Basrah. Saddam Hussein stated his willingness to strike first and confirmed his intention to damage oil fields in the region if attacked, claiming that the US will repeat Vietnam experience as the UN Security Council voted 14-1 to impose air embargo against Iraq.
