The summer blasted out with a heatwave that left those of us of a certain age floating in a sea of lethargic sweat. This morning there is a lift in the breeze as brown leaves fall and swirl, crackling underfoot, telling us that autumn has arrived. Children are returning to school, politicians to their chambers, and nobody really knows what is happening in Ukraine. The huge earthquake and toll of over 2,500 deaths in Morocco has blasted the Ukrainian war off the front pages but not completely out of the news. 

Widowed 26-year-old Margo sits at her desk inside a small brick mortuary close to the front line in Donetsk. Unknown soldiers are brought for her to check and record what she can about each body. And where she says – she speaks to the dead. “It may sound weird… but I’m the one who wants to apologize for their deaths. I want to thank them somehow. It’s as if they can hear, but they can’t respond.” Ukraine gives no numbers of its war dead – but Margo knows the losses are huge. US officials, quoted by the New York Times, recently put the number at 70,000 dead and as many as 120,000 injured. This from an armed force estimated at only half a million strong.

Crime Watch Live was a BBC weekly program in which the public were asked to help the police solve a crime that has been reported yet remains unsolved. Britain loves this work, it plays into the ancient forest hunter. In Crime Watch the police would put up a situation, giving as much detail as they could and a phone number to call. And sometimes it worked, while the show was still going on ‘a suspect was apprehended and brought in for questioning’. The TV public loved it and so the escape of the ex-army soldier and terror suspect Daniel Khalifa from Wandsworth Prison on Wednesday brought the public out hunting again alongside the police. Daniel is only 21 years old, with an Asian name and light coffee coloring. Dressed as a chef he managed to escape the prison strapped onto the undercarriage of a food delivery truck as it left the prison. I was not the only person with a smile on my face. An ex-prisoner interviewed by the BBC, could not stop grinning as he said. “He’s off out of here now.” But it was not to be. 75 hours after dangling under the truck out of Wandsworth Prison he was pushed off of his bike by an undercover police officer while cycling the towpath by the Union Canal in Chiswick. While Daniel faces the law on Monday it is time to point a finger of blame at someone. The finger circulates around and comes to rest on the conservative government as the country pays the price for another slice of the Austerity measures put in place by George Osbourne and David Cameron. On BBC radio, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth affairs James Cleverly, previously secretary for Education – so it’s not clear how much he really knows – claimed there was no evidence that cuts imposed by his government were to blame because, “the number of escapes had decreased dramatically, while “4,000 extra prison officers” had been recruited. To which the Prison Officers Association national chair, Mark Fairhurst, rebutted that the Prison Service was “now unable to retain the staff we recruit. That tells you everything about the working conditions in our prisons.” And blamed the escape on “The link goes back to 2010, when the Tory government came into power and hit us all with austerity measures.” 

But this little bit of amusement is only one part of the austerity chickens coming home to roost.

As children put on their uniforms, several schools will be closed due to those chickens roosting. Construction codes were loosened in the 1980s and 90s and buildings built during those years are now crumbling apart from the light-weight, porous, cheaper, easier concrete. Classrooms are getting soaked through in the rains and even clumps of ceilings are falling down in classrooms. The hold-your-breath not-said-yet page-turner are those other buildings – hospitals, apartment blocks, offices – built during that boom – and is going to be a very big problem once someone puts the question to the government. Which is maybe why the Prime Minster nipped off to India for the G20 summit. Better to be shunned and dissed by world leaders than hounded in parliament. It’s tricky for Rishi and he really has no way out. There is no one else to blame for the state of the nation but the Conservative government and everybody knows it. And Rishi will have to show up in parliament soon. 

The King and Queen must also come down from the highlands and back to London. The King managed a few weeks away in his beloved Scotland, to take the time to honour his mother and reflect on the first year of his reign as he moves forward. Where now can he now shine a careful light without poking his finger into politics? It is rumored that his first big personal project is a national initiative to tackle food waste. The Evening Standard newspaper – which reports a surprising amount of truth – writes that 2.9 million tons of good-to-eat farm produce, enough to provide the equivalent of seven billion meals, is being dumped in landfills each year. And you can be sure that more than one someone is making a profit from that.

The Promenade Concerts from the Royal Albert Hall ended this weekend. The last night of the Proms usually concludes with a roar of British national fever but this year it was pitched a little differently and though ending with the usual Rule Britannia – sounding a little tired – the National Anthem – God Save the King and For Auld Lang Syne while people stood swaying together singing along in harmony. But there were as many European Union flags and berets in the audience as there were Union Jacks. Members of the Government are asking for another investigation by the BBC but it could be – that just like the late Queen before them – with her clear message hat, the people are speaking calling for a greater self than just this treasured Isle.

September 8th marks a year since the late Queen died. An evening program set out the timeline of the day leading up to her death. Little nooks and crannies of tit-bit information came to light as we watched and remembered that day and our Queen. While the Queen’s condition became more grave, the then Prince of Wales took himself off for a solitary walk in the forest as he began to prepare himself for what lay ahead. This program was a moment for the nation to reflect on the passing of a beloved monarch and mother, a person who affected all of our lives, like remembrance prayers for all of our dearly departed. Years ago coming to All Hallows Eve, St.Michaelmas – of the daisy and the dead – an old friend wrote to ask if I would like my mother’s name included in the prayers for the dead at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was an unexpected act of kindness and a remembrance of all things past. And we do remember them, those we knew, those we loved, and those who taught us life lessons. We will remember them until we become among those who are remembered. 

This has been A Letter from A. Broad.

Written and read for you by Muriel Murch