Update 15

We’re trying establish which menus are best for my eating challenges - not just the changes to my tasting ability, but a shortage of saliva that makes many foods quite difficult to swallow. The frustrations of chewing the same piece of meat for five minutes with no sign of its being ready to go down are significant. Michelle came to visit on Thursday and wants me to quit the steroids completely from tomorrow. She also believes that my problem with eating is related to oral Thrush which can be dealt with quite easily - I can’t wait. On Wednesday morning I found it difficult to form my words when I woke up, something that corrected itself within half an hour. In the middle of the night on Tuesday I’d been woken by an acute pain in my right lung - it was reminiscent of the pain experienced with my first Pulmonary Embolism back in 2014 - fortunately it passed after some twenty minutes, things are certainly in flux this week.

With the period of mourning and the funeral behind us, we  see the return of political debate and with the budget, one of the more interesting topics has been the extent to which ordinary folk ever benefit from “the trickle down effect”. This is an economic theory that says if you give rich folk even more disposable income, then poor folk will also be beneficiaries because the rich people will spend that surplus cash to the benefit of the less well off. Liz Truss is partly using this theory to justify taking away any cap on the size of bankers’ bonuses.  President Biden has said that he’s “sick and tired of people advocating the trickle down theory” because he doesn’t believe it works.

Let’s take a moment to think about why he might be correct; if you gave more disposable cash to an average earner, they might well spend it in a way that could ‘trickle down’. They might go out to eat more frequently, they might take an extra holiday or even change their car more frequently. In other words, they would cause more cash to circulate in the general economy. But if you give more disposable cash to an already wealthy family, they are probably already eating out as often as they want, have all the cars they need, and couldn’t fit in any additional holidays. Rather than trickling down to the less well off, any extra income they receive is most likely to be stashed away in an investment fund or somewhere similar. This distinction is also illustrated by a sign I saw advocating the benefits for society of shopping locally:

When it comes to any trickle down from the already wealthy, I’m with President Biden rather than Ms.Truss. If her plans do cause millionaires to make their homes here rather than in Monaco, I’m still unclear how the rest of us get to benefit. In the meantime let’s hope that I’ve got it wrong, and Jerusalem, or maybe Singapore on Thames, is indeed just around the corner.

Looking back, one of my greatest satisfactions comes from the relationship I enjoyed with the great music radio broadcaster Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman. I’d listened to him when I was still at school and if you’d told me then that I’d end up writing for and producing him, that I’d become his personal manager, and that he’d become a much loved part of the Blackmore family, I’d have laughed at such possibilities. But that’s what happened, and I looked after his interests for almost all of the last thirty years of his life. We never had a contract, and he wisely told me the most difficult thing I’d have to do would be to tell him when it was time to retire. It was, but I did it, and he didn’t argue. Shortly after that moment he told me: “You know what Tim, if one of us had had my voice and your brains, one of us could have done really well.” One of his greatest charms was that he never understood just how good he was at what he did, and anyway, together we really didn’t do too badly at all.