Saturday 9 January: Urgency in getting vaccinations done is still lacking

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its comments facility (now reinstated, but not as good as ours),
Intelligent, polite, good-humoured debate is welcome, whether on or off topic. Differing opinions are encouraged, but rudeness or personal attacks on other posters will not be tolerated. Posts which – in the opinion of the moderators – make this a less than cordial environment, are likely to be removed, without prior warning.  Persistent offenders will be banned.

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/01/09/lettersurgency-getting-vaccinations-done-still-lacking/

1,014 thoughts on “Saturday 9 January: Urgency in getting vaccinations done is still lacking”

  1. Twitter permanently suspends Trump’s account to prevent ‘further incitement of violence’. 9 january 2021.

    Twitter has permanently suspended the account of Donald Trump, citing his repeated violations of the company’s rules and risks including the “further incitement of violence”.

    Morning everyone. The legally elected President of the United States has now been prevented from communicating with the electorate. If that isn’t a coup it certainly looks like one!

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/08/donald-trump-twitter-ban-suspended

      1. The trouble is that so many people are determinedly anti-Trump that they would be happy to have Biden as president even if it was proved beyond all possible doubt that the election was completely dishonest.

  4. I thought I would tell this on here just as a warning to others about being careful what you post.
    I got a knock on the door last night, it was the police, issuing a warning.
    They said I had been encouraging people to break the lockdown laws.
    What evidence do you have I said.
    The Constable said that on a number of occasions it has been recorded that on facebook I have told people to ‘get a life’.

  5. The Law Of Unintended Consequence

    Father buys a lie detector robot that slaps you when you lie.
    He decides to test it out on his son at the supper table.
    Father asked the son, “Where were you last night?”
    Son replies, “I was at the library”
    The robot slaps the son
    “OK I was at a friend’s house, watching a movie!”
    “What movie?” the father asks
    “Toy story,” robot slaps the son, “OK it was porn.” cries the son.
    Father yells, “What? When I was your age, I did not know what porn was.”
    Robot slaps the father.
    The mother laughs and says, “He certainly is your son.”
    Robot slaps the mother.

    1. In a statement, the force said all of its fixed penalties issued during the new national lockdown will be reviewed.

      Fixed penalties are the denial of Justice since you are apprehended, convicted and punished without a hearing of your peers. Its Judge Dredd Justice!

        2. They are digitising the process. You will be charged, found guilty and punished on the spot!

        1. 328300+ up ticks,
          Ptv,
          Different version same result the trigger pulled has already been triggered, with more to follow before this day is out.

        1. Morning Nan. These things are arranged so that it will cost you more than if you just payed!

          1. Then one asks the Judge, when you’ve won your case, to have the police pay your costs.

          3. 328300+ up ticks,
            Morning AS,
            So after decades of trials & testing by the electorate
            which of the lab/lib/con party’s come to the fore as the savior party ? someone
            must know, maybe blair could advise, nige has confidence in him.

  8. These lockdowns are because the NHS has failed and cannot cope. What did we do in the past.just cope as best we can.

    1. ‘Morning, Johnny, despite the lockdowns the figures for Covid infections, with results from PCR tests, keep rising.

      Either the lockdown isn’t effective or the test figures are wrong. Is that one or two defective areas?

  9. Morning all

    SIR – Michael Brodie, the interim chief executive of Public Health England (Letters, January 8), says his organisation has “delivered 100 per cent of NHS vaccine orders on time”.

    The Health Secretary visited a GP surgery to watch the Oxford vaccine being administered only to find that the surgery had been told that the 400 doses they had been promised had been delayed by 24 hours.

    Discuss.

    Graham Sullivan Captain RN (retd)

    Gislingham, Suffolk

    SIR – The letter from the interim chief executive of PHE made me angry.

    Thousands have volunteered to assist with vaccination, and many pharmacies, community buildings and other facilities have offered but at present are unused. The goodwill and enthusiasm for battling this crisis is needlessly frittered away.

    Nothing better shows the sluggish complacency of our bureaucratic masters. Instead of boasting that “vaccine can be sent on Sundays if required”, PHE should insist on seven-day delivery and explore 24-hour operation if that is in the country’s interest.

    Iain Henderson

    Bathgate, West Lothian

  10. SIR – Dr Andrew McIver (Letters, January 8) has volunteered to administer vaccinations but, as his is a private practice, he is “not allowed to give patients the coronavirus vaccine”.

    My wife and I are also patients of a private practice. I am 76 with an underlying health condition and my wife is over 70. We do not wish to jump any queue but feel we have been totally abandoned by the system.

    What can we do?

    Gordon Hamlet

    Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire

    SIR – A wealth of qualified people have volunteered to vaccinate (though many seem to have been ignored). It would be a disaster for family doctors to “cease routine care in race to deliver 14 million jabs” (report, January 7). People must not wait for serious diagnoses, nor would their GPs want them to. Covid kills but so do many other medical conditions.

    Georgina Leyland

    Belford, Northumberland

  11. SIR – Vaccination has been fine for us in Shrivenham, organised by our NHS Trust and accessed through our local surgery. My wife and I had to go to the old Steam Museum in Swindon, to which we got someone to drive us.

    We found ourselves at a huge empty old railway shed. From there it was just like our flu vaccinations but on a grand scale. You are identified on arrival and queue. Five or 10 minutes is spent with each person, checking their health. Then the painless jab – and you’re done!

    You sit down for 15 minutes in case there is an adverse reaction. Then off you go – but not to make whoopee. That’s still a long way off.

    Brian Foster

    Shrivenham, Oxfordshire

    SIR – Yesterday my mother-in-law had her first Covid vaccination. She is 83 and extremely vulnerable.

    Before the injection , she was asked: “Are you pregnant?”

    Dr Roger Onyett

    Topsham, Exeter

    1. The trouble is that it probably wasn’t a joke just as a person obviously aged over 50 is asked if he/she is over 18 when buying alcohol.

      1. Instructions say, you have to ask. So they ask, regardless of what seems pretty obvious.

        1. Amazon drivers have to ask for proof of age when delivering alcohol. When I took delivery of a bottle of Dubonnet lest year, before W/rose started restocking it, I offered to show the driver my driving licence,. Before I could extract it from my wallet, he laughed & said, “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

      2. If I find an under-age cashier on the checkout, & they stop proceedings at the first bottle & call a senior, I always wink at them & tell them, “It’s all right, I’m over 21.”

        1. But, of course, they still have to call a senior as in that instance your age is irrelevant and theirs is the problem.

          I remember working in a pub years ago and no one under 18 was allowed to be behind the bar even if they were not serving. If the little waitress came through from the dining-room for bottles of fruit juice she had to wait at the door for one of the bar staff to fetch it for her.

          1. Yes, I know. I was making the little joke. It brightens their day.
            & mine.

            Similarly, if I get an old turkey on the checkout, as I lay the booze down, I ask her if she’s over 21.

  12. Morning again

    SIR – President Donald Trump is held responsible (rightly) for the attacks on the US Capitol. But the blame is not his alone.

    From the beginning – from the very beginning – he was painted by the American media and much of the Democratic party as being wholly unworthy of the office to which he had been democratically elected.

    As a result, he and the voters he represents were deliberately isolated by liberal opinion in America, and that isolation is now bearing fruit in the accusations of electoral fraud.

    Robert Ramage

    West Wickham, Kent

    SIR – Amid all the hullabaloo surrounding the invasion of Congress lies another possible explanation.

    A large percentage of the American population feels alienated and ignored by the Washington distributors of pork. Obama possibly and Trump certainly were elected to halt the export of well-paid jobs to China and to reinvigorate the Rust Belt.

    I suspect that they do not have high expectations of the insiders’ insider who takes over on January 20.

    Christopher Watkins

    Brentwood, Essex

    1. Election fraud or not it is astonishing that the best presidential candidate the Democrats could come up with was a senile and corrupt man already in the early stages of alzheimer’s disease. Even more astonishing is the fact that the world’s MSM including the BBC and British press has almost unanimously backed him and remained completely silent about the criminal corruption with which he and his drug-fuelled son, Hunter, were involved in eastern Europe.

      1. Morning, Richard. The Dems know that America is not ready to elect a black female President. Six to twelve months after Biden’s inauguration he will be gone and America will have their first black female President.

      2. Biden is the Chosen One of he Corporatist Left, so naturally he gets support – either because he’ll do what they want, or because Harris will.

  13. Muted applause

    SIR – I am not surprised that the Clap for Heroes initiative fell at the first. It is now winter and virtue-signallers need the light of day to be admired.

    Lieutenant Colonel Jonny Dart

    Warminster, Wiltshire

      1. I used to love this song when I was a child and I worked out a good guitar accompaniment for singing it when I became enthusiastic about learning a finger-picking style.

        Of course the words were bawdlerised: it was only when I checked the original lyrics on the internet that I discovered it was about syphilis.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGtqopISr90

    3. Perhaps the BBC’s frequent v-s inspired plugging of this (non) event had the opposite effect? Just a thought, Jonny.

      1. Hhhmm, a prick from the hypodermic syringe or from the scorpion? Very clever from BoB?

    2. Now it’s daylight, it’s a beautiful, sunny, snowy day. Seems to have warmed up a bit, now -17C.

  17. 328300+ up ticks,
    May one ask, has Parler fell in the fight for free speech on the field of combat ?

        1. The free market can’t function when a handful of billionaire globalists manipulate it.
          This is where the government should step in to stop bullying of smaller parties by warlords.
          Ah. The government’s just been fixed by the warlords.
          Doesn’t look too good for the future, does it.

  18. Charles Moore today, the calm voice of reason:

    Trump’s greatest mistake was to undermine the legitimacy of the state
    The irony is the President won in 2016 on issues of political legitimacy, which are just as relevant today

    CHARLES MOORE
    8 January 2021 • 9:30pm

    It has been pointed out, correctly, that the US Capitol was ill protected from the mob that attacked it on Wednesday. President-elect Joe Biden contrasted this under-policing with the heavy-duty force which confronted Black Lives Matter protests nearby last summer.

    Some suggest the contrast shows Capitol Police bias, or even racism. Maybe it does, but there is an alternative explanation. Remember that the crowd had just come from a rally addressed by the President of the United States. They had cheered him. He had told them to “march” to the Capitol where he promised to join them (in fact, he did not). They marched.

    Police officers charged with protecting the Capitol of the nation’s capital are rightly not trained to expect violent attack from the supporters of the head of state. In a functioning democracy whose rules it is their job to enforce, they have to work on the assumption that their ultimate boss upholds those rules, too. So it was not surprising they were not prepared when Donald Trump did the opposite.

    Why, exactly, did Mr Trump want to whip up his crowd and march to that place at that time? To protest at the certification by Congress of the Electoral College’s vote which had declared, following the election in November, that Mr Biden had defeated Mr Trump. The debate on that certification was currently in progress. He wanted it stopped. It had been a “fraudulent election”, he said.

    To understand this is to recognise the depth of the wrong committed by the outgoing President. He was trying to subvert something even more basic to a secure system of government than its degree of democracy – its legitimacy. Legitimacy is never more fragile than at a moment of handover. He chose that moment to strike.

    I doubt that Mr Trump is against the American system in theory. He doesn’t do theory. I am not even certain – though I wouldn’t bet against it – that he intended violence to take place that day. More likely, his huge but vulnerable ego is simply incapable of applying to himself one of his favourite tweeted words, “loser”. In his mind, if someone tells him he hasn’t won, it can’t be true. So if the system tells him that, he concludes it must be “fake”, “crooked”, etc. To characterise him thus is not to excuse him.

    Legitimacy means the process by which constitution, law, custom and consent come together to agree that the government is the government – not just to agree which party or person is in charge. It can be entirely legitimate to challenge an election result. This happens, in a small way, in every recount in Britain’s local council elections. In the US, whose presidential elections produce what we still call “the leader of the free world”, the result can matter a great deal. Consequently, the incentive to cheat is high, and electoral cheating has happened quite often in US history. One should not blame the Republicans for suspecting Democrat misbehaviour. But if their electoral/political machine cannot, in the couple of months since the elections, come up with sustainable, significant examples, what have they left to say?

    A legitimate order contains remedies for its own potential failings. In the case of electoral malpractice, these include everything from what we call returning officers right up to, in the American case, the Supreme Court and Congress itself. If, at every stage of the process, the complainant fails to prove significant wrongdoing, he must lose. If he rejects this, he is saying the entire system has no legitimacy.

    This is just what Mr Trump was saying on Wednesday – even though the Supreme Court which earlier found against him is dominated by sound conservatives, and even though his own Vice-President, Mike Pence, withstood pressures not to certify. Wednesday’s mob followed the false logic of Mr Trump’s rhetoric. If they had stormed the Capitol at their own instigation that would have been dreadful enough, but what made it so disturbing was the knowledge that they were there because of him.

    That, however, is where George 
W Bush’s comparison with a banana republic ends, and where China’s gleeful comparisons with crushing democratic revolt in Hong Kong are comically inapposite. On Wednesday, the nearly 250-year-old American system rose to the occasion. Each person, in both parties, who holds a position of a responsibility exercised that responsibility. The Congress debated certification properly and, despite the mob, certified. The next day, Mr Trump changed his tune, because he had to. He started to speak about peace and an orderly transition. The legitimacy of the American republic had reasserted itself.

    The natural reaction, encouraged by the mainstream media, will now be to consign the Trump period to the history of infamy, let social media potentates silence him, and worry about legitimacy no more. What a mistake that would be.

    The problem has become real in the US and the wider Western world, and was not created by Mr Trump. Indeed, he recognised it in an era when more mainstream politicians were blind.

    Much of the popular unease which Mr Trump identified and exploited comes from the feeling that their idea of America was being delegitimised. Centre-Left politicians should recognise, for example, that BLM-related violence last year, and especially the destruction of statues, made millions feel as millions feel today about the desecration of the Capitol. It was disturbing for such people that respectable, elderly Mr Biden followed the BLM rule of “taking the knee”, thus literally bending to an authority which attacks many aspects of the American way of life. These phenomena led many middle-Americans to see the system of government as no more than the arm of a “Washington” which hates them.

    Even in calmer Britain, it was shocking to see similar, Covid-rule-defying mobs deface Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square or attack the Cenotaph. One felt the nation was being deliberately violated. Authorities did not defend the monuments properly. Therefore those authorities began to lose legitimacy themselves. We have also seen the growth of more formal challenges to legitimacy in growing refusals to accept electoral results. The Democrats tried this in the 2016 election over Russian interference. They also attempted to delegitimise the electoral college system by which Mr Trump became President, because Hillary Clinton exceeded his total popular vote.

    Here, the greatest agony about Brexit was caused not by the issue, but by the attempt to delegitimise the Leave victory. Numerous methods were deployed – wriggling out of MPs’ promises to enact the referendum result, the Speaker grabbing control of government business in Parliament, attempts to get a second referendum to produce the “right” answer and daily television cameras in Parliament Square seeking anti-Brexit protests.

    Even in well-established systems such as those of the US and Britain, legitimacy needs to be secured anew in each generation. Sometimes history decides that a person who undermines legitimacy creates a new one. That half-happened with Oliver Cromwell. He ordered the Speaker’s mace to be taken away as a “fool’s bauble”, yet now he has a statue outside Parliament.

    Looking at Wednesday’s photograph of Richard “Bigo” Barnett from Arkansas, as he sprawled over the desk of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House the Representatives, I wonder if one day he will be thus commemorated for challenging the corrupt status quo. I devoutly hope not, but if that status quo does not change, it could happen.

    * * * *

    No BTL comments permitted.

      1. When I looked at it last night no comments were allowed.

        It is becoming increasingly rare for the DT to allow its readers to express their own opinions.

        1. It’s increasingly rare for the Telegraph to echo its reader’s opinions. Hardly an issue goes by without ‘climate change’ somewhere, whether the weather is hotter or colder. I tried to get an e-mail to Charles Moore who has written to me in the past but failed. I am desperate to get some brave journalist, should there be any, to break the story of Ivermectin and the murderous failure of our doctors to use it. Silence, although one of them wrote in the paper today that arthritis drugs have been found helpful.They must be under some formal restraint or just too frightened to defy the accepted narrative. Each day someone dies needlessly because doctors have failed to prescribe a life saving drug.

          2. Can you provide a link for that?

            It is clear that it is effective against the virus in vitro, but there is not a single conclusive in vivo study to be found.

  20. Please don’t get vaccinated with British, American or French vaccines because they might have been designed to contaminate other nations.

    This must be true because Ayatollah Khamenei said so: “The import of American and British vaccines is prohibited… It is not unlikely they would want to contaminate other nations… French vaccines are not trustworthy either,”

    If all the malevolent, terrorist loving, ayatollahs are infected with Covid-19, it will be a service to humanity!

    Please, Mr. Biden, don’t appease these people!

    4. What would happen if the next pandemic were a disease which had a fatality rate of 100% but which could be easily cured with a medicine derived from pigs and this was the only cure which would work?

        1. Muslims don’t do choice, they do submission to the rules of their prophet.
          Choice and free will are Christian concepts.

          1. I find it odd that this factual statement has been downvoted by you-know-who. Islam means submission, Christianity accepts the concept of free will.

          2. Jennifer downvotes a lot of stuff because she doesn’t want to get involved in a discussion, which is a pity because if she did, she might learn some new information of which she is clearly unaware at the moment.

      2. They would allow it. This from the UAE a couple of weeks ago: “If there are no alternatives, UAE Fatwa Council Chairman Sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah said that the coronavirus vaccines would not be subject to Islam’s restrictions on pork because of the higher need to “protect the human body””

        1. In exactly the same way that Jewish survivors when the concentration camps were liberated were permitted to eat pork and bacon rations supplied by Allied troops… their need for food was deemed greater than any kosher restrictions.

      1. 328300+ up ticks,
        Morning S,
        The creators of this sh!te are residing in westminster take note of the last vote.
        Along with their intentions regarding Parler the click of the ratchet was quite audible.
        Been building for years and given succour via the electorate for decades, now coming to a head.
        Talking of heads & regarding the lab/lib/con political hierarchy and their agenda any future news outlets WILL be via the local imam.

      2. Why wouldn’t they?
        They’ve just got away with blatant electoral fraud that wasn’t examined by a court in one of the world’s biggest democracies, and they’ve got everyone cowering at home while small businesses (owned by pesky, independent-thinking people) get shut down.
        They can do what they want now.
        2020 was the best year yet for globalists.

  22. Looks like we’re having another “Attack of the Clones”. I’ve just flagged 4.

      1. There are so many popping up now that you may need to pre-moderate any posts with links for a while.

    1. Tony Benn held the European Union in total contempt. He saw it for the complete dishonest fraud it is and always has been.

      Is Hilary Benn still in a state of pettish adolescence where he thinks that anything his father said must be wrong and rebelled against?

  24. Street urchin Tony Walker’s tribute to his biographer was quite moving in the way the cockney sparrah was quite open about his loss. Tony (whom we all thought was going to prison once) was the most enthusiastic of all of them about the show, and the first to say that there should be a 70-up in 2026.

    It would be a fabulous twist if documentary producer Charles Furneaux (and actually one of the most interesting of the fourteen before he pulled out at 21) produced the next episode, having long been the one who most hated it.

      2. It was a TV series which followed the lives of a disparate group of (initially) pupils from a cross section of society. They made one at 7 (7 Up) and another when they reached 14 and then at seven year intervals, although some of them dropped out. I saw the first couple (as part of a civics class), but lost track after that.

  25. Hi mods.

    I flagged/blocked someone a few minutes ago and have now come across another new poster with just a link attached. Enrico Henry Guelfi. Am I right to flag/block unknown people?

    1. Hi

      Just a link should now be stopped by the auto-bot, but otherwise, please flag.
      Also, unknown short-named posts with short text, such as “I like my friend” or slightly weird drivel like that by someone not au fait with English.
      (I realise that last makes me suspect…)

  26. Just been outside. Clear blue sky; sunshine; very chilly at a fraction above freezing. Very heavy frost. Kittens mystified at seeing me looking at them from outdoors!

    1. Our Big Cat was horrified the first time he saw me take off my spectacles… Nearly flew up in the air, he was so shocked.

        1. As the Rabbi emerged from the car crash unhurt he made the sign of the cross.

          “But you’re rabbi,” said his mother, “what are you doing?”

          “Don’t worry, Mama, I’m just checking: spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.”

    1. I thought the girl on the right was applying her make-up; and the nun on the left was holding a tambourine.

    1. I’d be happy for yer Twitter itself to be suspended completely and never brought back. And yer FB and others as well.

      1. 328300+ up ticks,
        Morning SiadC,
        But then again it would deny decent peoples a say,
        much the same as abusing the polling booth in giving the lab/lib/con coalition party succour / and a vote, an odious close shop.

          1. 328300+ up ticks,
            Evening SiadC,
            I am not in disagreement
            but to my way of thinking
            it’s still gives decent peoples a platform for a comment, although narrowing rapidly.
            We managed pretty well without any of the politically engineered sh!te we are witnessing now, but we suffer it until……

  29. Morning all.
    Heading towards the bottom of the pit, now police issue warnings that throwing snowballs can result in 200.00 pound fines.
    Snow ball warning ?
    ‘evnin’ all.
    Is that ice in your drink sir ?
    Your nicked.

    2. I think it was in relation to bombarding the houses of locked-in pensioners. They tweeted that their use of words had been unfortunate (I guess that’s the equivalent to “mis-spoke”)

    3. The lock downs have failed with all their other mad cap ideas so now it blame us for ther stupid ideas. They have put off with their lock down what in the end is bound to happen. One way or another the virus will run its course. They have never been able to cure the common cold and just why is that.?

      1. JN….Isn’t it always the same when our political classes eff everything up.
        Everyone else gets the blame.

        1. Another chance to quote from the song from which I have just quoted!

          It’s the same the whole world over
          It’s the poor wot gets the blame
          It’s the rich wot gets the pleasure
          Ain’t it all a bloody shame.

          3. He thought I was insulting him which was far from my intention, but the actual comment was one I made when Richardl proposed banning him for abuse.

    4. Standing on the bridge at midnight
      Throwing snowballs at the moon
      Mr Plod said: “You can’t do that,
      Or you’ll be in prison soon.”

      [Adapted from: It’s the Same the Whole World Over]

  30. Bugger.
    Our local has announced they have gone bust because of the virus.
    Not a fantastic place, but nice to sit out and enjoy a beer or several in the sun on a Friday afternoon on the way home from work.

  32. Am I alone in noticing how the commonplace and terminally vacuous Americanisation “So“, as a standard prefix to the answer to any posed question, is now being supplanted by the even more teeth-grating “I mean“, also imported from the same Standard English-challenged source?

    2. I think it’s a warming-up noice, like the groans of an air-raid siren before it starts howling. JUst to break into the conversation before vocal cords and brains are properly engaged.

      3. Quite a few people start talking with the worrd “No” – weirdly, they often asnwer in the affirmative!
        “No, I’d like a coffee, please”!
        Same in Norwegian, the first work out of the mouth is “Nei”.
        Strange habit.

    4. It makes me furious Grizz! As though the person really doesn’t know what to say and needs time to think about an answer! In my humble opinion, it makes them sound quite stupid and I tend to switch off! Even quite smart people seem to be using it! So! I must conclude that it’s a dumb thing!

    6. My sales training taught me to repeat the question to give me time to think through the answer. It works.

      1. I think BBC presenters must be taught to repeat anything they feel ought to impress us rather thatn ask any meaningful question about the impact of the statement they have just heard. If someone says eg. I have climbed Everest five times”, they say “Five times?” or if they say “There are twenty thousand people in the UK living with HIV” they say “Twenty thousand?” as if they think we didn’t just hear it for ourselves.

    7. My first encounter with Americanise was as a small child, when everything I showed or said to a certain group of adults was met with the drawled response, “Shurr”. This was intended as an affirmative grunt but not being aware of that, I answered their question. Yes, I was sure.

    8. Not that recent – that has been grating my nerves for a couple years Grizz, along with every question now ending in “or?” and having to do things “for” people, as in “Take a seat there for me”, “I need you to wash your hands for me”, “Could you fill in this form for me?”

      1. My pet hate is the “Can i get a [insert food/drink/item]” – I don’t know, can you??

      2. Oh, and why does everyone ask “What was your name?” I’ve never married so my name has never changed (Not that it would if I did 😊) but even if it had, surley it’s more relevant to know what it is now.

      3. Oops. I have to plead guilty on occasion to the first of those – when I’ve been thinking in German (ending a sentence with ” . . . Oder?” is fine auf Deutsch). Sorry!

      4. My pet hate is the “Can i get a [insert food/drink/item]” – I don’t know, can you??

  33. This is totally off-topic but may be of interest to some.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/43f9f8b4fd5baf1e499444bd983760bc7dcd549df2f2bc6d8e655186bcbc6e04.png

    No, it is not the contents of my coal scuttle! It is a photo of some of the samples returned by the Hyabusa2 spacecraft from a small asteroid 300 million km from Earth. The probe travelled a total of 5,2 billion km to collect this material that has been there since the beginning of the solar system, over 4 billion years ago. An extraordinary achievement by the Japanese.

    1. And who knows what detrimental substances to life on earth might be being imported along with this space debris?

      2. The solar system, not the entire universe!

        By the way, do you know what Fallick means in Arabic? فلك – astronomy!

        1. Well I’ve been called a ‘star’ before. I’ve also been referred to as a Uranus :o)

      1. It set off on 3rd December 2014 and arrived at the asteroid in 27th June 2018. The samples arrived at Earth on 5th December 2020. The photo above was only released a few days ago after they opened the second container of samples.

        2. Given their rarity value i suspect each ounce is worth more than the current value of Bitcoin….

  34. I walked round to the Pharmacy this morning in solidly frozen snow and ice on the roads and pavements. The Well pharmacy was locked but an assistant opened the door but I wasn’t allowed in until the pharmacist arrived. He was late but arrived a few minutes later. When I got in to collect my online medicine order which I was advised would be available to collect on Thursday, the assistant told me that it was not quite ready. I said I would wait while they made up the order. She then admitted that the order would have to be sent away to be processed and I could collect it on Tuesday after lunch. This was unusual as the medicines are usually well stocked in the Pharmacy. My medicine runs out on Tuesday but I think I can survive for a few weeks if I can’t get the tablets on Tuesday.

    1. We are extremely fortunate where we live. We post the repeat prescription in the GP practice letter box and within 3-4 days, excluding weekends, a local volunteer delivers to the front door.

      1. I would have thought that all surgeries had online prescription ordering by now. Mine – Onto their website, enter my DoB to get me in. Tick my repeat prescriptions and “send” – anytime day or night.

        1. Lucky you. We have to input our password and then letters from our “memorable word” once we’ve put in the ID. Despite these checks, we then also get an email saying that activity had been detected on our account. If it wasn’t us we are to order an investigation.

      2. Good heavens! That’s what I used to do before the panic, now no paper repeat prescriptions are allowed and you can’t phone in to re-order, either. It has to be on-line or via the national phone line service (can’t remember what that’s called).

        1. I think we can order a repeat on line but I have tried several times to register with my local practice but I can never get it to work.
          So I’ll keep shoving them through the letter box 🦊 just call me reynard.

    2. Sigh
      More time wasted.
      Why can nobody advise of a problem, instead waiting until you ask?
      Trying to process Power of Attorney at the bank. Sent off all the papers and identity stuff in November, no response so enquired in December – apologies for slow processing, virus… blah blah. Followed up Wednesday – they can’t find my Mother’s bank account by her address and name, do I have the account number (no). Why find an issue and not do anything about resolving it until the customer asks? (more likely, they did nothing until I enquired, this being Barclays Bank). Arseholes. She’s had an account with them since befoire I was born! and no, I don’t have access to her cheque book, sort code or account number, all these being locked away in Fortress Wales.
      AAAAAHH!

      1. My sympathies but we are now ruled by the ‘can’t do’ society rather than the can do.

        1. And use all the invented excuses they can under the current circumstances to delay help.

          1. Seems that government and a lot of other agencies can’t operate with employees at home.
            My employer has managed to keep the office work going without interruption, and the factories also. The company I’m hired out to is managing to develop an offshore platform, from novel concept through to construction, without using the offices.
            Wonder why banks find it so difficult to do their admin?

          2. The Bank of Scotland are still using what is now euphemistically called a “legacy” system. This means that the computer and the programs were originally set up in the last century.

          3. All you need is the Interweb and citrix to dial in to the mainframe systems from your laptop..

          5. ah but then they come up with the security excuse.

            Somehow they can get it right for indian call centres but cannot manage a secure link for office workers in the UK.

          6. To be fair I’ve had to spend some time on the phone to HMRC staff working at home and they have been able to access the necessary information. One lass said that she would never have believed she’d be sitting at her kitchen table with access to HMRC data — but there she was. But it has tended to mean very long waiting times as calls have to be put through from the central switchboard to individual phone numbers rather than a “next in line” office system.

            DEFRA was also accessible, but more complex as their operators only had access to individual bits of the system and if you picked the wrong number at the “options” stage you had to start again from the beginning. Of course the options never match the question you want to ask so a certain amount of guesswork is needed.

          7. All three of our sons have been working from home probably carrying out the equivalent of six and a half days work in the 5 they’ve been at it.
            But the eldest who is a global product manager. Having furnished a spare bedroom. He has conference calls from all over Europe and offices in the United States.
            But his company has decided to shut down its British production line and move it to Bulgaria. Saving a lot of money. But of course, not good for the people who spent many years working there.

          8. I don’t get the excuse about working from home either. Are the employees getting less money? Are they working shorter hours? Why can’t they deliver the same amount of work from home?

          9. My sister did this for my parents last spring. Clydesdale Bank managed to do it all – including giving her internet access to the account and a debit card in her name, in less than 3 weeks. It would have been a little longer if she didn’t have an account of her own there so she didn’t have to wait for a card reading gizmo. On the other hand she did have the account details and she was able to go into the branch and set things up face to face.

          10. The problem is the physical access to a branch, and the account number. Barclays do have an internet ID system where you use your phone camera to take a pic of your face, and your passport – although their instructions don’t say do both at the same time or you get accused of modifying the passport…
            But then, they can’t find the account. Surely the address is enough – and I don’t know how many accounts there are, and my mother isn’t much use on that front, either.

          11. Is there a carer/neighbour/anyone whom you could trust to take a photo of your mother’s cheque book, showing the relevant numbers, and send it to you? I know it’s asking for quite a lot of trust.

            Once you find one account you should be able to sort out any others.

          12. The carers don’t do stuff like that. Mother’s friend won’t go there ‘cos of the virus, so we’re kind of stuffed.

        2. Unfortunately, we are also in a society where everyone wants things spoon fed and sorted out for them and demand all services to cater to their individual needs.
          For example, I often take calls from patients wanting to come into clinic, I give them the opening times, and they say, they are no good and they can’t come then because they are working. I offer different days in a different location and they say they don’t want to travel.
          I sometimes counter that I understand their frustration because our staff are all working too and if they want a doctor/dentist/bank/carpet fitting/hair appointment for example, they have to take time off work to go.

          1. Because my work is scattered over a wide area I do try to get GP appointments, blood/smear/mammogram etc tests at either the beginning or the end of the day so that I can get a reasonable work time into the day too. Hospitals (fortunately infrequently) I take what’s offered and the clients just have to accept the changes if I’ve already got work booked on that date.

            If I have one appointment in the middle of the day, then I try to book something else before or after so that I get two disruptions out of the way at the cost of one day’s work.

      2. Annoying, true, but I think its reasonable for the bank to ask for more details. Perhaps you could have anticipated their needing the account number and been prepared for that.

        1. Since I can’t get to Wales due to endless travel bans and lockdowns and haven’t been there since December 2019, it’s a bit difficult. Mother is too vague to supply said info, and I hoped the bank might have a clue – seems I was wrong.

      3. You have my sincere sympathy – I had to deal with Barclays to get my late mother’s accounts through probate and they were appallingly incompetent – only a couple letters from my MP to their CEO eventually unlocked things – I still haven’t had a reply or apology but at least they have released the funds.

        1. The power of ceo.com
          I’m poised to send a mail, but don’t hold out much hope.
          I send a problem to the CCO Barclays REtail bank a few years ago, when Barclays couldn’t sort out the telephone banking.
          The amazing thing was, neither could he! Lost cause. I don’t bank there any more.

          1. I’d suggest that you say that in view of their inability to deal with the matte either promptly or efficiently, you are referring the matter to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

            That is another useless body – but mentioning it can worry banks – who may actually apply their tiny minds to the problem.

        2. When my mother died over 30 years ago, Barclays staff were very helpful. Obviously progress doesn’t mean things have got better.

        3. When my mother died over 30 years ago, Barclays staff were very helpful. Obviously progress doesn’t mean things have got better.

          1. After my father died I went to the bank with my mother to help her start to get things sorted. When she said her husband had died, the bank manager (?) said “I apologise for that”.
            I think he confused the two uses of ‘Sorry’

          2. When my father died I had trouble with Lloyds Bank in Milford-on-Sea where I had had my own first bank account and where my father had banked for 40 years.

            They immediately froze my father’s pension which was paid quarterly and due to arrive the day he died and so my mother had to struggle on for three months without any income. The bastards clearly hoped she would have to take out a loan on which they would charge interest.

            It is a very long time since the banks could be trusted as family friends who wanted to help their valued clients.

        4. Hopefully we don’t have to go through that, so far so good. The probate application has gone in and now it is thought to be a three month wait for approval.

          1. I have to admit I found the probate process itself very efficient – mostly done online with the papers sent once everything was approved – I got an email saying it should be completed within 8 weeks and five days later, on a Sunday, another saying it had been approved – the whole thing was much faster than expected. Good work by our Probate Registry!

        5. Look at it from the bank’s point of view. The longer they keep that money in their bank – the more interest they get on it. Not much for one person maybe – but thousands of people die every week. Mutiply the two numbers and the bank is holding onto several millions.

      4. Having done a number of Probates, we can assure you that Government departments and banks are by far the worst.

        With the exception of National Savings who are quick and professional.

          1. Yes but the surgery is 2 miles away and they decided it was too much effort to continue to supply drugs from there so they bought premises 13 miles away and opened up a pharmacy, they’d make more money that way

        2. Morning Alec – They offered to deliver it on Tuesday but I didn’t want the chance to have an excuse for a walk even if it is only 200 yards each way.

      1. Good afternoon Stormy – I was offered that but declined as I am just a couple of hundred yards away from the pharmacy and it is an excuse to escape my prison for a few minutes.

      2. You can, but the echo service is weird. If you order, say, five prescriptions and 4 are in stock but one isn’t they’ll hold off sending the other 4 until that one is in – regardless of how long it takes.

  35. I wonder if we will ever see the headline one day in the future –

    Big Tech Excommunicates Pope.

  36. Where do our big chiefs find their wisdom?

    In these difficult days, most of us have wondered how our great leaders
    and policymakers reach their ‘wise’ decisions. A few days ago, I came
    across this little fable which may help.

    It’s late Fall, and the Native Americans on a remote reservation in South
    Dakota ask their new chief if the coming winter is going to be cold or
    mild. Sadly, the new leader has never been taught the old secrets and
    when he looks at the sky, he can find no answer.

    But he thinks it wise to be prepared just in case, so he tells his tribe it
    will indeed be a cold winter and they should start collecting firewood
    immediately.

    A few days later, he decides to check with the National Weather Service and it tells him:
    ‘Yup, it looks like it’s gonna be a pretty cold winter.’

    So he goes back to his people and tells them to collect even more firewood.

    A week later, he makes another call. This time, he’s told it’s going to
    be a very cold winter. So the chief goes back to his people yet again
    and orders them to collect every scrap of firewood they can find.

    By now, winter is almost upon South Dakota, so the chief makes one last call.

    ‘Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?’

    ‘Absolutely,’ the man replies. ‘It’s looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters we’ve ever seen.’

    ‘How can you be so sure?’ the chief asks.

    The weatherman replies: ‘The Indians are collecting a load of firewood.’

    JOHN HUMPHRYS

    1. I thought ministerial decisions were reached on the basis of putting 10 utterly absurd ideas in a pot and picking one out. If anyone thought it vaguely credulous, it was ripped up and thrown away and another suggestion picked until only the most moronic idea possible was dragged out.

  37. Lordy, I forgot how tiring it is to work outside in -15. It’s dry as a bone, and chilly. Now stopped for a beer and lunch.

    1. At that temperature isn’t the beer more like a lollipop which you suck rather than a drink which you slurp?

      1. Humidity drops way down at those temperatures. The key is not to get sweaty, as then when you stop, you can get really cold.
        Here, they teach you to have several layers of clothing and adjust according to your exercise level, and ideally to have something dry to put on when you stop – hence the populatity of puffer-jackets. I have a down one that can squash up into almost nothing, yet puffs out onnce you need it – and is lovely and toasty once you’re stopped. Thanks, Eiders. Best insulation I have (and my reindeer-skin boots… and military cap… and military two-layer mittens ( heavy wool and canvas wind/waterproofing layer – has a unicorn digit – sticks up, for trigger finger. When really cold, a layer of silk glove underneath the lot. Thinsualte is carp, as as soon as you grip something, it squashes to nowt and loses any insulating effect – the big-rib wool remains thick & insulating).

        1. I remember the silk under-gloves used to be used by motorcycle riders under their leather ones.

        2. I used to go outside to feed on winter mornings wearing many layers, shed them as I went along and got warmed up, then gather them up on my way back to the house for breakfast… ready for the next foray out of doors.

  39. Zulu shows that even history’s darkest moments can inspire rousing cinema. 9 january 2021.

    Endfield told Caine that his was the worst screen test he had ever seen, but there was no time to replace him because the team were about to leave for South Africa; Caine told Endfield that no English director would ever have cast him as an officer. For all that, Zulu remains a great film: if you’ve never seen it, seek it out soon – before somebody bans it for its “colonialism” and “violence”.

    Zulu is a great film though it’s not intellectual enough to make the official lists. It will probably pay to buy all your favourite movies on DVD before they are edited for anti-woke sentiments . A similar measure might be taken for your books provided you have room to store the paper versions. Kindle books can be edited on line without your permission or even knowledge!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/zulu-shows-even-historys-darkest-moments-can-inspire-rousing2/

      1. They were colonists! They themselves had only invaded the country some fifty years before and not being British had simply exterminated the original inhabitants!

      1. Indeed.
        :-((
        I was shocked about that! Moved with parents to Wales in 1977 – grew up drinking Brains, SA for preference (apart from any other fluid containing alcohol, of course). It’ll never be the same, even buggering with the water chemistry and minerals never seems to work, often because the original recipe has “expensive” ingredients, and the new brewer knows better.
        But I guess the brewery is worth a lot in Cardiff when developed into apartments. :-((

  40. I have to go out this morning to pay my Credit Card Charges and buy some grub from Marks and Spencers. See if I can do it without being arrested and fined! See you soon. Maybe!

  42. BitchFish-slapping at Holyrood!

    Muss Sturgeon and Mister Salmon(d) are fish-slapping each other over which is the scummiest politician north of the border. Hopefully the winner will then get put up against the winner of a similar political bitch-slapping contest between all the filthiest corrupt politicians south of the border.

    Muss Sturgeon seems, at this, point to enjoy a lead over Mister Salmond, due to his recent trial on groping charges and Muss Sturgeon’s current position in power.

    May the best slimy fish win.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpszAoraZuc&list=WL&index=62

    1. Good! The whole campaign against Salmond was deliberately orchestrated by Wee Krankie’s husband, Peter Murrell, who feared that Salmond’s possible return to active politics threatened his fragrant wife’s position.

      1. I thought that she had dumped him when it emerged that she preferred women to men.

    3. Salmond is no nice guy. However he was found not guilty/not proven on all charges. It seems possible, perhaps likely, that the coven of complainants, aka victims, were part of a conspiracy. All the evidence is concealed within the civil service and the Scottish government. The Scottish government has dragged its feet on providing evidence to the enquiry, refusing to provide documents and blacking out others.
      There has been no police investigation into possible conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Also note that the job of head of the prosecution service, Lord Advocate, is in the gift of the First Minister who just happens to be Ms Sturgeon.

    4. I’ve an easy solution: sack them all. The entire Scottish assembly. Every single one of them. Rent the build to businesses at cut down rates and stop paying all these wasters.

        1. Gimcrack was an excellent racehorse. So much so that there is a race named in his honour; the owner of the winner has to make a speech at the Gimcrack dinner.

  43. Watch out everybody. That A Allan chap is all over the DT letters page this morning, sounding off on all manner if topics beyond their ken. Bound to show up here before too long and make a nuisance of themselves.

    1. Some men use starting arguments and losing their temper as a substitute for the rush of sex as they become impotent with old age. Think Fagash and others.

      1. Right on cue… Now I’m off to the DT to see what you’ve been stirring up! Pity I’m too mean to be able to post!

        1. Am Fagash is all over the place like a rash.
          I really don’t understand the mentality of people who indulge in tit-for-tat rows with he/she/it.

          2. My father was a great one for drawing you into an argument. Not as blatant as Fagash, but you’d suddenly find yourself thinking “How on earth did we get to this point?”.
            It has made me very alert to that sort of long, winding road to a major bust-up.

          5. My father was very even handed. He didn’t speak much to anyone (after the war). He would write wonderful letters to me at boarding school. We became great friends once I had graduated and was off his payroll.

          6. I think it’s the fact that he never comes up with an alternative suggestion – he just tramples any debate with rudeness and name calling! And he’s soooo depressing, writing from his marshy Munro!

  44. 328300+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,

    Saturday 9 January: Urgency in getting vaccinations done is still lacking,

    Could this also be another way of saying the peoples are showing a reluctance to having an untested over time of a controlling vax, introduced to their systems with re-actions in the future complete unknown territory ?

  45. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/government-to-let-farmers-use-bee-killing-pesticide-banned-in-eu/ar-BB1cAHX7?ocid=msedgntp
    Just wen we need our ever shrinking (built over) agricultural land to be maximised, this comes a long.
    This is so typical of our politicians and civil service, collectively they couldn’t run a domestic bath. You need to place the plug in the right place chaps and chapesses and stop stuffing shiney bits into your bank accounts.
    There’s a decent novel by Peter May I read about all this stuff it’s called Coffin Road.
    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27798536-coffin-road

  46. Good morning all,

    Frost has vanished , overcast , and not a breath of wind.
    Younger dog has a squidgee tum, consequently he needed a few visits into the garden over night !

      1. Morning Anne .

        Now that we are restricted to the village, where there are dogs galore , he has probably picked up a bug . We usually take ours outside the village a couple of miles away, away from the madding crowd !

    2. My Oscar found and ate a rabbit leg, of unknown vintage, on Kit Hill this morning. Glorious walking conditions and view though. Hope your doggy’s tum improves.

  47. 328300+ up ticks,
    I thought for a moment this foreign type nonentity got a church building program in mind ?

    breitbart,
    London Mayor Sadiq Khan Demands Shuttering of Churches and Other Places of Worship,he has asked johnson who was busy at the time polishing off a halal chicken in the parliamentary canteen, after having just sworn in another political foot soldier via the koran upstairs.

    I really can see it coming to pass as in, job boost CAB seeking 20000 to train as imams for a smooth transition from
    Christianity to ………..

    Would that get the ovis blessings ? via the polling booth……. probably.

    1. Happy Birthday, Thayaric! Have a good one and I hope the sun puts in an appearance for you.

    2. The wonderful thing about that record is how the Beatles pronounced all the T’s in Getting Better, properly and clearly. One can only imagine how a South-Eastern-based group might have slurred it in their dreadful estuary noise, “Ge”in’ Be”er!

  49. ‘Afternoon, Peeps.

    Simon Heffer on my all-time favourite film – Zulu. A fair and balanced article, even though the film itself had some historical inaccuracies:

    Zulu shows that even history’s darkest moments can inspire rousing cinema
    If you haven’t yet seen this dignified portrait of heroism, seek it out soon – before somebody bans it for its “colonialism”

    SIMON HEFFER
    9 January 2021 • 10:00am

    Zulu shows that even history’s darkest moments can inspire rousing cinema
    If you haven’t yet seen this dignified portrait of heroism, seek it out soon – before somebody bans it for its “colonialism”

    SIMON HEFFER
    9 January 2021 • 10:00am

    The recent ludicrous decision by the Royal Collection to label Lady Butler’s 1880 painting of the defence of Rorke’s Drift with the warning that it has links to “colonialism and violence” prompted me to do something I hadn’t for 40 years, which was to watch the film of this stirring episode in history, Zulu.

    Shot in 1963 on location in South Africa, about 60 miles from the scene of the battle and with hundreds of Zulus as extras, its authenticity is striking. The Zulu chief was played by his own great-grandson, who would become the leading South African politician Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Watched on Blu-ray on an ultra-high-definition television, the picture is probably sharper than when first seen in the cinema: never have the landscapes of Africa looked so spectacular. And when the action starts, the viewer is gripped by its precision.

    Advertisement
    Advertisement
    How it looks may be important for credibility but that is, of course, only one aspect of the film. It succeeds because the script is understated, vitally so if it is to comply with our received wisdom about how the Army undertook, and still undertakes, its duties.

    This is all the more remarkable because of the preconceptions the director, Cy Endfield, brought to the project. He had been driven out of America a decade before he made Zulu after falling foul of the House un-American Activities Committee, which decided he was a communist. Endfield perceived Zulu as a Western, with the British soldiers as the 7th Cavalry and the Zulu warriors as native Americans; but few films of that genre have Zulu’s dignity. The viewer grasps that, while the heroism of the British defenders was remarkable and, importantly, is portrayed in the film without undue glamorisation, the heroism and nobility of the Zulus is just as overwhelming.

    Endfield had been a nondescript director before the McCarthyites attacked him, but coming to England was the making of him. Zulu was the fifth of six features he would film with Stanley Baker, whose production company, Diamond, made Zulu. One previous collaboration had been Hell Drivers, a highly original, memorable but somewhat mad 1957 film about truckers for a crooked gravel company; another was Jet Storm, from 1959, a precursor of later airliner disaster movies. Endfield was always looking for something unconventional, and Baker’s persona lends stability to, or acts as an anchor in, his scenarios.

    In none of his films is this more the case than Zulu. It is Baker’s film, not only because he is the star, but also because of the moral authority he brings to the role of John Chard, the Royal Engineer who, as the senior officer, decides to defend the field hospital and mission church at Rorke’s Drift against the Zulus. The previous day, between 10,000 and 15,000 Zulus had slaughtered more than 1,300 British and European troops at Isandlwana, 11 days into a British campaign to invade Zululand and effect a federation in South Africa; the odds were stacked against the defenders.

    The truth of what happened – 150 British soldiers, plus perhaps another dozen or so walking wounded, holding off up to 4,000 Zulus of ferocious bravery who kept walking towards volleys of machine-gun fire – is stranger than fiction, but it is to Endfield’s credit that the action never lapses into the improbable.

    As well as Baker’s level-headed performance, two others are intensely realistic, and help shore up the credibility of the narrative: Nigel Green as Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne, and Glynn Edwards as Corporal William Allen, both fulfil to a tee the stereotype of the by-the-book British non-commissioned officer, and quite possibly portray exactly the calmness under fire and in face of attack that the real defenders of Rorke’s Drift must have shown.

    One divisive aspect of a film in which so much else is right is the casting of Michael Caine as Lt Gonville Bromhead, who in real life, like his brother officer Chard, was one of 11 men to win the Victoria Cross that day. This was Caine’s first starring role, and perhaps it is only in light of his later gorblimey screen persona, with which we are so familiar, that some of us find him less than credible as a languid toff in this.

    Endfield told Caine that his was the worst screen test he had ever seen, but there was no time to replace him because the team were about to leave for South Africa; Caine told Endfield that no English director would ever have cast him as an officer. For all that, Zulu remains a great film: if you’ve never seen it, seek it out soon – before somebody bans it for its “colonialism” and “violence”.

    Leading BTL comment, which made me smile:

    John Steed
    9 Jan 2021 11:32AM

    Certainly see if before the remake in which the Zulu Warriors will be 60% female, and probably include a few chinese for diversity, and the script will include endless examples of white male cowardly racism, put down by the 50% brave, resourceful, crack-shot gay women in the British ranks who don’t just take the knee to fire at Zulus, they take the knee to pray to a BLM flag each night.

    * * * *

    Bravo, John Steed! Not sure how long your comment will last, however.

    1. As several BTL comments point out, the British army had no machine-guns. They had single-shot breech-loading Martini-Henry rifles.

        1. Yes – Rorke’s Drift was later the same day, with much of the action being fought during darkness.

          1. Cunning bastards, those Zulus, exploiting natural camouflage.

            Hence the saying, “Hold your fire until you see the whites of their eyes”

          4. But then the order was to shoot at only one Zulu – “Fire at Will!”
            Edit: Citroen1 beat me to it!

      2. “…had slaughtered more than 1,300 British and European troops at Isandlwana”. ‘European troops? I’ve recently read ‘Washing of the Spears’ and was interested to learn of the black South Africans who fought alongside Britain in the Zulu War, but ‘European troops’, I can only assume Heffer means white settlers living in SA at the time. The presence of black Africans on our side confirms my own view which is that the Zulu War was an inevitable clash between two expanding empires – ours and the Zulu.

        PS, I’m the proud owner of a Martini-Henry rifle of the type used in the war, which I’m told was issued to my grandfather who was in the Home Guard in WWII.

          3. Thanks. The floor was a bonus that we discovered after moving into the house. It extends to two rooms and both were covered my a shabby old carpet. It needed a fair amount of restoration, but we were lucky to find a local craftsman who was really into restoring wooden floors. he did an excellent job; a real labour of love, for a good price.

        2. Heffer, with his ‘European troops’ comment is probably referring to units like the Natal Mounted Police. As you say, there were several black units fighting alongside British troops e.g. The Natal Native Horse.

        3. When that film came out, we were reading “Pecheur d’Islande in the French class. The French protagonists were in Indo-China fighting the “Black Flags”. It seemed reasonable to ask the French teacher about the type of weapons used. It was a logical flip to the weapons in “Zulu “-were they similar? Thus was twenty minutes spent away from the text.

          1. Yes, Boers, although, I’m not sure there were many Boers fighting on the British side. But, it’s complex because whilst we tend to think of the Boers who trekked away from the Cape Colony to escape British rule, there were Cape Dutch who remained. I understand quite a few Boers were actually of French Huguenot or German origin as well as Dutch. Either way, I wouldn’t use the term ‘European’ to describe Boer/ Cape Dutch troops in 1877 anymore than I’d use the term for Americans of the same period.

          4. Vague references can be found to ‘European colonial troops’. The land that became Portuguese Mozambique is less than 150 miles from Isandlwana.

          5. I assume Eugene Terreblanche was of Huguenot descent.
            But, thinking about his politics, I wonder if it was a nom de guerre.

          6. Most of the Germans were further west in what became Deutsch-Südwestafrika in 1884.

            Invaded by the Allies in 1915 it became part of the British Empire via the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

          8. It became Namibia upon independence in 1990.

            I remember learning about the removal of German overseas territories at Versailles from my schooldays, but I had to look up the independence bit… that happened long after I was in school.

    3. Don’t be silly, Mr Steed.

      The crack shots will be trans. The Zulu’s will also be white. The rest of the british soldiers will be gay. There will be no engineers, but there will be a diversity awareness co-ordinator who will point at that as the enemy is a white male and’the patriarchy’ their actions are stunning and brave!

    1. Even more so when the Hitlerine is reported as saying that the Commission will take legal action against any of the 27 countries daring to try to obtain their own vaccine.

      1. It’s ‘funny’ really. At a point when the EU could crow ‘look at our buying power! Look at the great single market!’ and in reality it’s a useless failure. When it came down to it, individual nations too the necessary steps to protect themselves by closing those things the EU has tried to destroy: borders.

    1. Down voted on the grounds of taste. I can’t imagine what the clothed bloke is tasting….nor do I wish to!

    2. Down voted on the grounds of taste. I can’t imagine what the clothed bloke is tasting….nor do I wish to!

  56. Lordy, they’re back – the Monsters from the Deep.
    :-((
    Have put “Comments with links” to pre-moderate, since it seems to slow the flow. Currently arriving quicker than I can swat them – and thanks for all the flagging!

      1. There’s a pile accumulate in “pending” now because of the link premoderate. You’re welcome to go & do great scathe over there!
        Where’s a Saxon Queen with sword & axe when you need one??

      2. Better get your running legs on, then, Geoff! ….Oh! ;-))
        Morning. The rate of arrival seems to have dropped.

  57. When the people were asked who should be pardoned and not executed by crucifixion : Barabbas or Jesus – the MSM of the time (the Scribes and Pharisees) stirred them up to insist that Jesus was crucified rather than the criminal.

    There are similarities 2,000 years later – the MSM has backed Biden over Trump.

    1. This is why the police are not well thought of. 3 police officers? No one else around? A bloke outside, on his own?

      1. Perhaps, but as Atilla hints, a photograph can be used to imply something very different is happening from what is actually happening.

      1. That’s in case one of them leaves the group and the others start talking about them…

      2. Like the NKVD – one to read, one to write and a third to keep an eye on the two intellectuals!

    4. I wonder what it says on the back of the bench.
      “DONATED IN THANKS FOR NO LONGER HAVING TO SIT WITHIN SIX FEET OF MY HUSBAND” ?

  59. The Boris unfinished deal is not going in our favour . Independent reporting that £billions of trading went back to Europe and won’t return. Other financial agreements still to be agreed and not likely and/or necessarily in UK’s favour. BBC Radio news reporting that there are problems at ports which could take months to sort out. It looks as if, as some of us were predicting, that this incomplete deal is going sour with the EU loose ends more toxic than BJ expects.
    Perhaps Gina Miller could tell us whether we left with a deal or a No Deal.

    1. I wouldn’t put much faith in the validity of what either the Indie or BBC are saying, especially after the BBC were caught using stock footage of ports to pretend they were overflowing when they weren’t. The Indie obviously has an interest in pretending things are far worse (and permanent) than they really are. Unfortunately, that is the way of today’s MSM – they don’t report events that happen, they report their slant on things in line with an agenda, mixed in with opinion, rumour and (often) downright lies.

      1. There are some indications that our “negotiators” were not that brilliant, seed potatoes for example. The newly invented requirement for EU businesses and individuals to register for, and pay UK VAT on their sales to this country is a masterstroke in Remainer civil servant sabotage. This includes eBay and the number of EU sellers who will sell to the UK is now about the same as those willing to sell to Haiti.

    2. Remember that Boris’ deal states that the EU can re-open negotiations in 2024.

      What’s the likelihood of the Remainers making another determined attempt to get us back in the EU?

    1. Everybody will be ordered to stop exhaling in order to prevent transmission of the virus.

      2. I would refer you to my comment a few days ago predicting a law against intimate contact, including between married couples.

  61. The Queen and Prince Philip receive first dose of Covid vaccine. 9 January 2021.

    The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have been vaccinated against Covid, joining more than a million people in the UK who have been given the jab.

    In an unusual move, Buckingham Palace – which rarely comments on the private health matters of the couple – announced that the 94-year-old head of state and her consort had been given the injection.

    It is understood the Queen decided the information should be made public to prevent speculation. A Buckingham Palace spokesman said: “The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have today received Covid-19 vaccinations.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jan/09/the-queen-and-prince-philip-receive-first-dose-of-covid-vaccine

    1. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? It would be ironic if Her Majesty and the Duke died within the next three months (whether or not they had had The Jab). The best laid Government Plans and all that…..

      A comment from BTL in the Express

      “People genuinely appear to believe that the COVID 19 vaccines have undergone clinical trials and have been proven to be both safe and effective. That belief is simply wrong. The main point is this. If you decide to have Pfizer and BioNTech’s experimental mRNA-based BNT162b2 (BNT) vaccine, or any other claimed COVID 19 vaccine for that matter, you are a test subject in a drug trial. The mRNA in the BNT vaccine was sequenced from the 3rd iteration of the original WUHAN published Genome SARS-CoV-2 (MN908947.3). However, the WHO protocols Pfizer used to produce the mRNA do not appear to identify any nucleotide sequences that are unique to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. When investigator Fran Leader questioned Pfizer they confirmed:
      The DNA template does not come directly from an isolated virus from an infected person. Nor are there any completed clinical trials for these vaccines. Trials are ongoing. If you are jabbed with one, you are the guinea pig. This may be fine with you but it’s not a leap of faith I or my loved ones wish to take. However, everyone is different.
      ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (the AZ/Oxford vaccine) has an acceptable safety profile and has been found to be efficacious against symptomatic COVID-19 in this interim analysis of ongoing clinical trials. There were no peer-reviewed publications available on efficacy of any severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine.”

      https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32661-1/fulltext

      1. It amuses me when people complain at my posts regarding the paucity of testing by saying that thousands have volunteered, yet they completely ignore the fact that those being done now are part of the testing regime, voluntary or not and that we are looking at a maximum of a few months worth of tests.

        It’s akin to saying that by having 600 clocks run for a minute that 10 hours have passed.

  62. Some delightfully catty observations here…

    Douglas Murray
    History shouldn’t be used against us
    From magazine issue: 9 January 2020

    Can you feel the fascism yet? You ought to by now, more than a week after Britain leaving the EU. So many people warned us of this moment.

    There was the former journalist Paul Mason, who claimed to see crowds of fascists thronging the streets of London. The former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell became so disturbed by our national turn that at one stage he dressed up in a sort of regimental uniform and sang a song about Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings.

    And then there was the cruelly titled Lord Adonis. The once-sensible former Blairite schools minister spent recent years so apparently worried about the dangers of Brexit that he became not just hysterical but homosexual too. It has been a disturbed few years for these, among other, people.

    Still, anyone hoping for some diminution of the fascism sirens will have been disappointed by events over the past week.

    On 1 January, the day after Britain left the EU, the New York Times led with a piece by one Peter Gumbel titled ‘Britain has lost itself’. In recent years the NYT has had a strange jihad against Britain. It will haul people off the streets to contribute to its pages so long as they recount a UK riven by modern poverty and fascism. Kicking off the paper’s new year, Gumbel asserted his credentials by stating that his grandparents fled Nazi Germany in 1939 and found sanctuary in Britain. Though he himself resides in France and has now sought citizenship in Germany, he found a political use for his late grandparents. He claimed that they ‘would be heartbroken to see [Britain] today. Inward, polarised and absurdly self-aggrandising’.

    Continuing to use his dead relatives as a mouthpiece for his political prejudices, Gumbel said: ‘I mourn the passing of the country that was my family’s salvation.’ Personally, if I had avoided Auschwitz I might regard Britain’s membership or exit from the Common Market with a degree of equanimity. And, of course, if Britain had never possessed a sense of its own self-worth and uniqueness then there may not have been any Holocaust survivors for the New York Times to try to use against us seven decades on. But perhaps that is a debate for historians.

    Instead it was picked up by Dan Snow, the hereditary TV presenter who goes under the somewhat presumptuous moniker ‘The History Guy’. On 1 January, as the Johnson junta tightened its grip, Snow tweeted: ‘75 years ago, after history’s bloodiest war, with its unimaginable brutality, a generation of survivors tried to prevent future war by building institutions to curb assertions of national sovereignty. The UK forged that. Now we help to dismantle it. Brexit is a tragedy.’

    I never had any special admiration for Snow’s analytical skills. A few years ago, when the commemorations for the centenary of the first world war were going on, he seemed — for four years that appeared to go on longer than the war — to be absolutely everywhere. True, he had quite nice hair, and has demonstrated an ability to marry upwards, but I never could see why that meant he should become a representative of the dead of the Great War.

    Why do I relay these calumnies? Only to register that the more they occur, the less willing I feel to allow anybody to use history against me or my country. To draw facile lessons — perhaps any lessons — from history is becoming ever more aggravating to me. For this reason, in recent months, I have become increasingly worried about the ugly Holocaust memorial that the government plans to erect in Victoria Tower Gardens, right beside the Houses of Parliament. The scheme, announced several years ago, now looks certain to be pushed through, despite the fact that the UK already has many excellent and informative Holocaust memorials.

    The more you study the plan, the clearer it becomes that the putative project will not be a memorial but a political project. There are many aesthetic and planning grounds to object to the proposed memorial. But personally I object to what I know its erection will portend. Naturally it will be an extension of that way in which German war guilt keeps being spread across Europe and indeed the whole western world — as though we all did it, or were capable of doing it, as cheap would-be historians keep insisting.

    Yet even that will not be the sum of what the proposed building will likely teach. For it is also due to be — dread term — a ‘learning centre’. And as David Cameron said when he announced the project back in 2016, it is due not only to teach the ‘lessons’ of the Holocaust but also ‘British values’. What are the chances those values would include national pride, self-determination, doggedness in the face of all opposition, or a willingness to walk against the international flow of your time? More likely the focus will be on how Britain did not let in enough Jewish refugees in the 1930s. And since no one likes an unhappy ending, it will stress how we have made up for this in the years since by taking in millions of economic migrants from across the third world — something which we must obviously continue to do.

    Fortunately a growing number of Holocaust survivors are speaking out against the Westminster project. But as they die out, their descendants like Gumbel and others like Dan Snow will step forward to presume to tell us what the slaughter of six million Jews means. They will instruct us on what lessons to take from it, and say what we must and must not do because of it.

    Personally, whenever the 1930s, fascism, the Holocaust and what to think about all of this comes to mind, I am increasingly reminded of nothing so much as a phrase from Paul Valéry. ‘Le simple est toujours faux. Ce qui ne l’est pas est inutilisable.’ Everything simple is false. That which is not is unusable.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/history-shouldn-t-be-used-against-us

    1. Fortunately a growing number of Holocaust survivors are speaking out against the Westminster project. But as they die out, their descendants like Gumbel and others like Dan Snow will step forward to presume to tell us what the slaughter of six million Jews means. They will instruct us on what lessons to take from it, and say what we must and must not do because of it.

      We don’t want a Holocaust Memorial. We are not Jewish and we bear no responsibility for its occurrence!

      1. If you’re white, you bear responsibility for every bad thing which has ever happened in the history of the world.

        1. If you’re white and British , you bear responsibility for every bad thing which has ever happened in the history of the

          world. Universe, since the Big Bang, umpteen million tiers ago

        2. If you’re white and British , you bear responsibility for every bad thing which has ever happened in the history of the

          world. Universe, since the Big Bang, umpteen million tiers ago

      3. “We don’t want …”. You speak for only yourself, please don’t claim otherwise.

        1. Fortunately a growing number of Holocaust survivors are speaking out against the Westminster project.

        2. Good evening, Cochrane

          I presume you do want it. If this is the case, why do you want it?

          1. I really don’t care that much. i understand Minty’s view and if forced to choose, would agree with it, but you’re missing my point.

    2. Damn. I KNEW there was something else I meant to do today.
      Now where did I put that swastika banner?
      “La lal la …… mi mi mi …. ” (Quick gargle)
      “Die Fahne hoch” …. boom boom boom.

    3. Building institutions to curb national sovereignty? Clucking twonk.

      That was the league of nations. It was NOT the EU. The league became the UN. For a historian, he’s a bag of effluent.

      Brexit was necessary to prevent war. I’m truly tired of these characters pushing their agenda unfettereed by the truth. The EU is an aggressive, abusive assault on liberties and free will. It is a destruction of the nation under the oppression of dictators.

      World War 2 was started by Lefties desperate to erase the nations of Europe. He doesn’t mention that, does he? No. It was intended to achieve complete control under one man – Hitler. A fascist, authoritarian, hard Left dictator. That man would have loved the EU. That is why we left. Far from a tragedy, it was the first attempt at ensuring the collapse of those vicious, vile, monstrous oppressors.

  63. Dominic Green
    Joe Biden’s Big Tech takeover

    https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltf04078f3cf7a9c30/blte0a31dd7cf2baefa/5ff96a3c396e65084a9e9d77/Twitter_SE.jpg?format=jpg&width=1920&height=1080&fit=crop

    Twitter’s banning of Donald Trump is like bolting the stable door after the QAnon shaman has gone. The damage was done long before the assault on the Capitol was planned on social media. Long before Donald Trump tweeted his way to the White House, social media had reduced American democracy to a lurid freak show.

    The ban also shows how far the big-tech oligarchs are prepared to go in order to retain their absurd and damaging monopolies. After the 2016 elections, social media promised to clean up their act. The digital fiascos of the 2020 election and its aftermath confirm that Big Tech is incapable of being the value-free guarantor of the modern public square. Instead, it has been heavy-handed and incompetent: blatantly intervening on behalf of the Democrats (the silencing of the New York Post for running the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the pompous tagging of Trump’s tweets as unverified), yet incapable of stemming the tide of cross-party incitement and lies.

    Silicon Valley is even less able to bear the responsibilities — legal as well as moral — that come with power. Or perhaps the manchildren of tech just wanted money, which means power without responsibility. The internet has consumed media, politics and entertainment and mulched it into a slurry of depravity. Social media is not the place to find out what’s going on in the news. But it’s great if you want to keep up with the hottest trends in porn, racism, terrorist snuff movies and the thoughts of Ayatollah Khamenei.

    Slowly, even the dimmest among us, the politicians, have realised that ‘the medium is the message’. The right now sees Big Tech as digital Democrats. The left now sees Big Tech as a big dupe, the funnel for disinformation Russian and domestic. Only a vast tide of ‘donations’ has spared Silicon Valley from regulation. That, and Trump’s failure to do what he promised to do: dismantle Section 230 and treat Big Tech as monopoly publishers.

    Trump’s Justice Department started the process last October by launching an antitrust suit against Google, which controls nearly 90 per cent of online search enquiries in the US. Before he disgraced himself by pandering to the mob, Sen. Josh Hawley called it ‘the biggest antitrust case in a generation’. Sen. Elizabeth Warren supported it too, and called for ‘swift aggressive action’ to what she fluently tagged as ‘#BreakUpBigTech’

    Joe Biden has said he wants to restore amity and work across the aisle — but that was before the Georgia runoffs gave the Democrats the Senate. Even before the elections, he was softer on Silicon Valley than Trump: where Trump threatened to break up the tech monopolies, Biden took Obama’s line, and said he’d ask them to play nice.

    Biden also took more money from Big Tech than any candidate in American history. Donations to the Democrats by Bay Area residents rose from $163 million (£120m) in 2016 to $199 million (£146m) in 2020. Bay Area residents gave $800,000 (£590,000) to Trump in 2016, and $22 million (£16m) in 2020. That says all we need to know about who Silicon Valley thought would give it an easy ride.

    Big Tech wanted Biden, the lesser threat, to win, and it did its best to make sure he did. But it failed to pre-empt the riot at the Capitol, which was promoted, premeditated and live-streamed on social media.

    ‘This is going to come back and bite ’em because Congress, in a bipartisan way, is going to come back with a vengeance,’ Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Friday, hours before Twitter banned Trump, and Apple and Google, who claim they’re not monopolies, threatened to ban Twitter’s right-wing rival Parler from their app stores.

    Big Tech has jumped before it was pushed. It has landed heavily on free speech, and led with its left foot too. Don’t assume that this time Big Tech has gone too far, and that a bipartisan consensus in Congress will follow through on Mark Warner’s threats. This is the policy that the Biden administration wants, and the Biden administration is the government that Big Tech bought. This isn’t overreach: this is the embrace we cannot escape.

    1. See “the Space Merchants” by Pohl and Kornbluth. In future sightly ahead of now the representatives on Capitol Hill are all places of Big Business.
      Only the President is not. Sometimes they let him speak, but not often.

  64. SIR – Michael Brodie, the interim chief executive of Public Health England (Letters, January 8), says his organisation has “delivered 100 per cent of NHS vaccine orders on time”.
    The Health Secretary visited a GP surgery to watch the Oxford vaccine being administered only to find that the surgery had been told that the 400 doses they had been promised had been delayed by 24 hours.
    Discuss.
    Graham Sullivan Captain RN (retd)

    Now if that letter had been from any old Tom, Dick or Harry I wouldn’t have given it much consideration. Thank goodness Graham Sillivan told us he is a retired naval officer. That obviously makes his opinion far more important so I will pay more attention.

    2. Theses people are beneath the pits. Nothing to do with the Pfizer vaccine being rumoured to be a bit dodgy…?

      ‘Nationalist’ Patients Refusing Pfizer Vaccine to Wait for the ‘English One’, NHS Doctor Claims

      An NHS doctor has claimed that patients are refusing the American/German Pfizer-BioNTech injection to “wait for the English one” instead.

      Doctor Paul Williams, who is also the former Labour MP for Stockton South, claimed: “Some local patients have turned down an offer this weekend of getting a Covid vaccine when they found out it was the Pfizer one. ‘I’ll wait for the English one.’”

      “People at risk of death in the depths of a pandemic. A lesson that Nationalism has consequences,” he said, according to a Metro report from Thursday.
      *
      *
      *
      https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/01/09/elderly-britons-refusing-pfizer-vaccine-wait-english-one/

      2. Probs the same kind of people who are telling others to get the vaccine ‘cos your ancestors might catch it because they weren’t vaccinated and when they visit you in your dreams they could pass it on to you.

        1. BLM was founded by two women who seriously believe they can call up the spirits of their ancestors.

          I spent time with Mum in my dreams last night but she always had her flu jab, so that’s OK.

      3. Ah, nationalism. Or, as it’s really known, patriotism.

        Frankly it’s up to the individual. A vaccine is not a silver bullet.

      5. Why can’t we provide enough of our own vaccine for the whole population.
        Something is very fishy about all this nonsense.

        1. 328300+ up ticks,
          Afternoon RE,
          Please refrain from mentioning fish.
          Ask instead,
          Why have we been very,very reluctant to get behind a English / GB party
          especially over these last three decades.
          That should be answered & rectified first & foremost.

      6. I would imagine many of his patients can’t remember ‘Oxford/AstraZeneca’, they only recall that that the vaccine was developed in this country.
        Little to do with nationalism, more to do with easily memorised facts.
        But, sadly, many Labour politicians despise their voters.

  65. ‘Morning, all.

    When “Paddy” Biden is inaugurated, as now seems inevitable, Britain will have a confirmed enemy in power in what used to be thought of as a trusted ally. The alliance survived the reign of that other well-known Irishman, the Brit-hating Baroque O’ Banana, but the world has moved on and now we have bitter enemies across the Channel as well, who will stop at nothing to sabotage our regained independence as a sovereign nation. Of course O’Banana will be the eminence grise, a “Grima Wormtongue”, dripping his poison into Chinese Joe’s ear, his hand well-up the senile President’s arse pulling his strings – yes, Peddy, I do know that’s a mixed metaphor – and it will take a strong UK Prime Minister to stand up to him. That man is not the flaccid weathervane, Boris Johnson.

    The suggestion has even been touted that Biden appoint O’ Banana to the rôle of Ambassador to the Court of St. James. The UK Government must have a quiet word with Washington to say that such an appointment would be completely unacceptable but – God forbid – if this should happen, the Prime Minster must have the balls to refuse O’ Banana’s accreditation.

    After eight years of his disastrous misrule, followed by four more years of his shite-stirring, it’s high time O’ Banana split.

    1. 328300+ up ticks,
      Morning DM,
      Many are reluctant to mention the main three internal political enemas, the close shop lab/lib/con coalition party, could the reason be self interest the multitude I wonder ?

    2. If you think the US has been the UK’s ‘trusted ally’ for the past 40 years then I have to suggest that you have not been paying attention. The US with Reagan was a dependable ally, otherwise not. Trump would have been, but he didn’t control the Congress at any point in his Presidency.

      1. Agreed.
        The only ones banging on about special relationships are the delusional Brits.

        1. The ‘delusional Brits’ are only the media and the politicians, and they’re just blowing smoke. No one else believes a word of it.

          2. It has been that way for as long as I can remember. I recall the frank surprise when the US was so very helpful during the Falklands war, they drained the USAAF of Sidewinders they gave us so many. But that was Caspar Weinberger, if Alexander Haig had been Defense Secretary I doubt it would have been the same. The guys flying patrols ‘sharp end’ on the West German border only had dummies for months, announced in the briefings as “OK guys, you’re flying no panties’.

          3. Well now, have you ever been in a real war, sunshine? Here’s one soldier who was glad of the help the US gave us in when we went into the Falklands in 1982 and I was at the “sharp end” – as you put it – not on patrol.

          4. Which is why I was respectful of the support the US gave during the Falklands. I made clear the very substantial risk the US took to support us. And no, I have never been in a real war.

          5. 1982 – -wow – makes you realise how long ago it was – next year it will be 40 years. Seems unreal.

          6. I remember it like yesterday. Was just about to be married, wondered about whether I’d get call-up before or after the ceremony.
            Pretty fantastic effort, though. To go so far away with B-all assitance from “allies” and succeed was the thing of fantasy – but the Brits did it! Skin of the teeth job, but isn’t it always? Then, of course, there was a PM with balls kicking arse to get it all to work.

          7. And who else but the British would think of sending a multi-refuelling Vulcan all the way there and back?

          9. The same PM had failed to heed warnings from her ambassador in Argentina that trouble was brewing. She refused (she wasn’t the only one) to believe that they would invade. If she had been more prepared to take advice then action wouldn’t have been necessary.

          12. If HMG had known that the Argies had Exocets that they were able to bring into service (although not many) they wouldn’t have gone. It was a horrible shock went the Coventry was hit. Purchasing went into overdrive to find, and buy, every single spare available on the market worldwide for both Exocets and Super Etendards. Counter measures on ships were completely re-jigged in great hurry to deal with incoming Exocets.

            France was very supportive, and banned all French citizens from supplying or working or the Argentine Exocet kit.

          13. The ships being wrecked was a nasty surprise. How quickly they were damaged and disabled. Worrying if one were to try again, with so few surface vessels.

          14. Add to that the Argentines were bombing ‘on the flat’ and not lobbing their bombs in an arc. As result the fuses didn’t wind down and many bombs didn’t explode. They worked it out the day before the Sir Galahad. Glamorgan had several UXBs.

          15. The Argies didn’t need to work out why their bombs failed to explode. That vital piece of information was gifted to them by our “National Treasure” – the BBC – who told the world and his wife all about it through their news bulletins, in the interests of BBC “impartiality”.

          16. Did they? That’s interesting. I had thought it was kept a deadly secret within the Task Force, as it should have been. Perhaps Sir Trumpington Brainless Prat (Air Commodore Retired) worked it out and rang them to show how clever he was. Retired military personnel were a major problem throughout that conflict. I remember some idiot retired Admiral giving a fully accurate assessment of why the landings would be at Carlos Bay. Nobody shot him, sadly.

          17. That wasn’t the only useful intelligence the BBC gave out. They blithely broadcast news of the time and the location of the transfer of troops, at sea, from the QE2 to other ships.

            Of course, the Argentines at once put up recon aircraft over the area, but luckily for us, their searches were unsuccessful.

            Somebody should’ve gone to prison for that piece of treachery.

          19. The US also offered the use of one of the carriers from their reserve fleet, though this was ruled out as impractical given time and other constraints. However, the US secretly gave an undertaking that in the event of one of our carriers being lost, they would send a USN carrier group to provide air-defence for our forces. They would play no part in offensive operations, but the mere presence of a couple of squadrons of F-14s and decent airborne early warning assets would have kept the Argie air force at home.

          20. That is most interesting, I had not heard of it before. Because something I was told in the early 80s I have always believed that the US had a Carrier in the South Atlantic, within helicopter range of the Task Force, but doing exactly what I don’t know.

          21. There was one of those ‘What If…’ programmes on Radio 4 about 10 years later where is was discussed.

        2. not quite that special, you need to hear Canadian PMs talking about how special the US Canada relationship is.

          It doesn’t mean anything, Trump is not the first President to offend their closest ally with trade tariffs to suit their interest.

      2. 328300+ up ticks,
        Afternoon C,
        And on every corner next to the mosque if the lab/lib/con coalition
        party & members have their way.

  66. I see that the DT is getting absolutely slated in the Comments below both today’s Letters Page and in their ‘editorial’ about free speech – mostly about their Gates-funded pandemic ‘coverage’ and the censorship (the ironic comments about the editorial are glorious) of the Orange Man Bad lies, ahem, I mean ‘articles’ that mainly have no reader comments facility or where readers’ comments regularly get deleted if they don’t agree with the paper’s line on those subjects (amongst a growing number, it appears).

    Let’s hope there will be vastly more unsubbers over the coming weeks and months, as its the ONLY way they will learn to respect their readership and continue to make money. If not, eventually most readers will cotton on and leave en-masse in a short period, and they won’t be able to a dickie bird about it, as it’ll be too late.

    1. The DT is funded by the Globalists now so its loss of readership will not affect its future!

      1. It is probably a core feature of the proposed new order to be uninterested in what people actually think and to encourage them not to think at all

      2. What I find so distasteful is their rank hypocrisy in both their ediotrials, whilst simultaneously censoring views they don’t like (but which are not extreme and reasonably put).

        What I also found (today) very disappointing was how easily and completely supposed Trump supporters and the cause of anti-Establishment, anti-woke conservatism from columnists like Tim Stanley and in his column today, Tom Harwood from Guido Fawkes. Both appear to have bent the knee to the Establishment Never-Trumper GoP/Dems and gone full Orange Man Bad. Even Douglas Murray appears to be wavering – perhaps they all value their jobs (and nice salaries) more than adhering to their values, assuming they had any to start with.

        https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/07/watch-trump-brought-will-pay-consequences-tim-stanley-analysis/

        https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/08/republican-party-must-follow-labours-deradicalisation-attempts/
        https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/01/07/crowds-attract-strangest-folk-us/

        No comments allowed. In my opinion, they are now no better than the likes of Ben Riley-Smith and the rest of the Orange Man Bad US Newsdesk. Saving their own skins in case they got cancelled. How progressive of them. Tony Blair & Co would be proud, as will Biden, Gates and Xi.

          1. I haven’t as yet, although I have heard of it. I will have a look at it over the next few days in more detail (I’ve seen the front page). Again, more of a commentary magazine than a newspaper, which there doesn’t appear to be that just reports all news in a factual way.

            Good commentary is great, but that’s all the Right appear to want to do these days, hence my criticism (pardon the pun) of the DT, which to me has gone well off the rails. Opinion sites tend to cover just the outcomes of big events and don’t cover WHAT actually happens on the ground, often skating over important facts or not going into detail where doing so would bring valued information to the public.

            The problem is that many people think that straight-laced news reporting isn’t ‘sexy’ and won’t bring in the bacon on ad revenues and subscribers, however that’s because almsot all news coverage today is of poor quality, sensationalised and/or biased/distorted/made up.

            One other problem – rather like the plethora of paid TV streaming services available, rather than being able to subscribe to one or possibly two news sites (one more opinion-orientated), now we have to shell out much more (even accounting for inflation) than before for 6 or more sites because they don’t provide a full news and comment service or that are, at least in part, not up to the quality that, say, the DT was 10+ years ago.

            I certainly cannot afford to subscribe to 6+ media sites and similarly for entertainment because free-to-air TV (even prior to the pandemic) is of a never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width type, and the few good programming that still existss is spread very thinly around many pay sites.

            I even took a free months trial sub to Amazon Prime a month before Christmas to be handy for buying Christmas presents (quicker delivery) and so I could binge-watch one of the few good scifi shows (the entire run up to the latest season’s early episodes) on TV at the moment – The Expanse, but there was very little else I found worth watching.

            I miss the 1990s – mid 2000s when the content was far better and prices still were reasonable. Maybe I’m getting old.

        2. Being “cancelled” is no small thing! Remember it isn’t just the one job you lose but the possibility of employment in the same sphere and income vanishes. Your whole future is cast into doubt. It’s effect must be calamitous on your personal life!

          1. If everyone were spineless like that and appeased bullies, we’d all be speaking German in this forum and praising Herr Hit**r and the latest Dear Leader. There are time when we need to show moral courage and stand up for what’s right, not what’s easy.

    2. If I wanted pure Trump bashing, I would go to the Guardian or CNN. I don’t expect Orange Man wonderful from the Telegraph but a bit of unbiased reporting would be good. Literally just tell me the “Trump said that the election was fixed”, don’t judge it with “falsely claims”.

      We will still disagree about what happened but let us decide.

      Those letters comments are still coming in with rather forceful views about censorship.

    1. That is as funny as it is ridiculous, Philip!🤣

      Only 66 million years between the extinction event that put paid to the dinosaurs and the evolution of Joseph Hanna and William Barbera.

        1. There is absolutely no mention, whatsoever, in that museum’s website about Hanna & Barbera.

  69. In late November and early December, some relatives and good friends posted off their Christmas cards to me. Some came early: same came very late. Few came in-between!

    Spikey and Barbara posted theirs early (from the north of Scotland) and I received it within four days!
    That was the only one.
    Last Monday I received cards from Richard (cousin) and Wendy in Sheffield; and Philip (brother) and Alison in Cornwall.
    The next day I received one from Robert (nephew), Dawn and Nile in Manchester.
    On Thursday I received one from Toots and his wife in London.
    Today I received one from Elsie in Colchester; one from Pete and Viv (friends) in Aberdeen; and one from Ted and Hazel (friends) at Grenfell in the NSW Australian Bush.

    All those cards were posted early but not received until now, except for Spikey’s, courtesy of Postnord!

      1. So am I! What are they doing? I bet they sat on their hands, hoping to be able to blame Brexit!

        1. They will say they are short staffed because of covid. Of course they had no idea with the lockdowns that everyone would be buying online and sending parcels. No forward planning at all. Idiots.

        2. Well, only one of you can get the parcel! Please decide who – maybe toss a virtual coin?

    2. Most of our Christmas deliveries happened after Christmas – gifts & cards – meaning it was a bit thin on Christmas Day – few cards, immedite family presents only.
      Oh well.
      It’s the virus, innit?

      1. The one gift i received was a ticket to a Gin Distillery. They give you a balloon glass which you keep and then you go and get rat arsed.

          1. They supply a full range of Gins and tonics. They also have lots of dried botanicals (pot pouri) that you can bung in.

          3. There was a cartoon at the time. Matt i believe. As they are going down the street shouting no Popery, just around the corner was a pot pouri seller looking worried. 🙂

    3. My granddaughter ordered a special Moonpig Christmas card for her mother. It’s still not arrived.

    4. My wife ordered a pack of Christmas print face masks back in November, they arrived this week.

      I suppose that this is the wrong forum to ask if anyone wants some!

        1. Probably. The Ontario government are still fuffing around talking about who should be prioritized for vaccination and the feds have completely missed the boat on getting the vaccine.
          They have promised everyone will be able to be vaccinated by September, no one believes them.

          Rumour is that Ontario gets a nighttime curfew on Monday. Well to hell with them, I haven’t been out after 8PM since the golf club ago in early November, I am not going to miss my beauty sleep for them.

          Your Canadian trip might be in jeopardy

    2. How will people be able to tell the difference between BBC employees and criminals with electronic tags?

      1. Apparently these devices hang around your neck rather than being clamped to your ankle. Frankly if I choose to leave it on the desk, no one will be any the wiser because I’m the only person still working in zone CG of Television Centre most days. The nearest other person is more like 20 metres away than 2.

        1. is the intent to just warn when you get too close to another device or are they like the phone app that silently tracks who you have been near?

          3. Electric shock collars are banned in the UK. Those which simply vibrate or buzz are still permitted. My niece has a wire around the perimeter of her garden and her spaniel won’t step over it, or even go within a couple of feet of it. He stops as soon as his collar vibrates.

          4. I always thought those collars were an appalling piece of equipment and thought less of anyone who used them. I was pleased to hear they had been banned.

          5. I never saw one in action, but I never liked the idea. If you can’t train your dog without that then you probably shouldn’t have a dog.

            The ones which buzz or vibrate have their uses though, like the invisible fence which children, vehicles and bicycles can go straight over but the dog stays at home. He knows that he can walk across it wearing his slip-lead when going for a walk, but won’t approach it wearing his collar which he wears when outside with the children.

          9. That ‘official explanation’ usually comes just before, “We are handing you your P45, for your own protection.”

          10. I’m 65 and pensionable, Grizz. I could walk but it’s not in their best interests to let me. I’ve actually tried to teach others what I do but as long as I’m there, they don’t fully take it on board. I joined a team of 12 people in 1993. Now there’s just me.

          12. Sue is perched on the high end of the see-saw all by herself, trying to balance the BBC.

        2. Just for fun, go around the building and collect a few dozen. Put them all in an office with no windows, turn on a radio to a loud music programme, and lock the door.
          Now report the illegal party to the police (anonymously).
          The Met will be round at the toot, mob-handed in riot gear. Just make sure that the film of them raiding the BBC gets wide circulation..

      2. How will people be able to tell the difference between BBC employees and criminals with electronic tags?

        Sue not included 🙂

      3. How will people be able to tell the difference between BBC employees and criminals with electronic tags?

        Sue not included 🙂

  72. I was given the Pfizer vaccine on Thursday at River Brook Medical Centre, Stirchley, Birmingham (by a very tasty female doctor). Walked there and then took a long walk and had an outdoor coffee at Bournville Green. Yesterday the arm was a little stiff, but today everything is fine ….

    5. It cannot be that harmful, there is quite an uproar over here about hospital management jumping the queue and getting the vaccines that were reserved for care home residents. Front line doctors and nurses are a touch miffed.

      1. I’m hospital management. I would like to have the jab but am happy to wait my turn, however, I and colleagues have been put on the priority list.
        (No indication though as to when I will be called up)

    2. They are certainly growing! They are looking less kittenish and more like young cats. Lovely markings.

  74. Stand by to clap for our “wonderful” NHS.

    Our dear cleaner Maureen – been with us for 33 years) has been off sick. Her daughter works in a care home and has caught the virus. So Maureen (though ill with – prolly – seasonal ‘flu) has to be tested. She and her husband followed all the edicts and were sent to Cromer (38 miles round trip) to be tested. Arrived there. It was very busy. Car park full.

    After 1½ hour wait – they were told that no further tests could be done. “Health and Safety rules meant that the car park was too icy for staff to come to cars and do tests”.

    Just imagine how they would have coped in WW2. “Bombs falling meant that it was too dangerous for people to be rescued”….

    The only good thing is that Maureen has been able to arrange a test at the local GP surgery tomorrow – YES – on a Sunday…

  75. 328300+ up ticks,
    Telegraph News Global Health Security Science & Disease
    Coronavirus latest news: UK becomes first country in Europe to pass 80,000 Covid deaths.

    So,
    They will swear in parliament on both bible & koran that this statement means “died from coronavirus and coronavirus alone was the cause of death” politico’s ( 650) & top medics
    a joint effort of reassurance, ALL, no abstainers.

    2. No-one also checking to see how many died with or predominantly OF COVID, or even of the flu. Apparently flu-related deaths this year are practically zip. Very odd. Given flu is around all year (I got it REALLY bad one September [and after getting a flu jab, admitedly the October before]), you’d think that more people would be getting it than apparently are. I mean, it’s not as though if you don’t get COVID, you don’t get ill at all.

      Given the 28 day rule (was 56) and the ‘incentives’ to GPs to ‘speed up the process’ on deaths certs to just put an assumption of a COVID death because of ‘certain symptoms’ reported is hardly an accurate way of compiling figures for a pandemic. To me, it looks like they’re doing this to justify the harshness of the lockdowns and other authoritarian measures, past present and future.

      Surely it would be so easy to be transparent about this, and yet the authorities and media both deliberately obfuscate and just go after those asking for genuinely bona fide, independently corroborated (not by another Quango but qualified scientists/medics who are skeptics) evidence and facts. That would easily meet our demands and show they were honest in their endeavours.

      2. 328300+ up ticks,
        Evening EA,
        I did say a month or so back that flu
        would read zero, there has to come IMO a point shortly when lack of regular diagnoses and treatment kills & goes on killing then the manipulation will be recognised for what it is.

  76. That’s me for this chilly but agreeable day. WHAT a difference when the sun shines; one can put up with a lot when a room is full of sunlight.

    I’ll join you tomorrow, all being well, after what promises to be a chilly night (again).

    A demain.

        1. Er, Sue, what is it (apart from an elephant of course!)? (I’m probably the densest person on here….)

          1. That was my first thought. Defo a heffalump but what to do with it. A pen holder apparently.

    4. I have two barometers the better more accurate of which is my cat Paris. Last night she slept under my duvet having entered head first and lodged herself in the nape of my neck.

    1. “I support science, just not science that disproves man-made climate change theories.”

      1. Well, we are being asked to support government policies all firmly following THE science.

  80. Smack forehead time again. On Ch 4 News there was a piece about students complaining they are still having to pay rent for rooms they can’t use and being ‘punished’ for something they aren’t responsible for. Any sympathy I might have for them evaporated when the final shot was of a group waving banners outside a hall of residence – without social distancing or face masks.

      1. Assuming they weren’t getting amorous it must be safe but actual safety and the Covid Cult are not easily reconciled?

      1. There isn’t one really – Morrisons do a nice fish pie mix, including fresh and smoked haddock, cod, salmon. I sometimes add some smoked salmon or prawns if I have some. Or of course you can buy the bits separately.
        They also do sachets of various sauces and and the fish pie one is better than anything I could make, and very easy to just open and squeeze.
        For the topping, as I dislike mash, I use two or three potatoes, sliced thinly, par-boiled and spread in one layer on top, with grated cheese to brown. Add pepper & herbs to taste.
        Stick in a medium oven for 20 mins- half an hour and serve with something green and a chilled white wine. NZ sauv blanc is my preferred at the moment.

          1. It undergoes a transformation when grilled on top of potatoes or lasagne. I’m not allergic to it, I just hate the taste of it when unadulterated.

        2. You might consider pastry as a topping, as I do. I resort to a mash topping when I’m feeling lazy or tired.
          My filling has cod/haddock, a little salmon (not my favourite fish), poached briefly in milk with a bay leaf, strained off to make a béchamel sauce, to which are added chopped tarragon, salt & pepper, chopped gherkins, chopped capers, prawns, scallops & 1/4’d hard-boiled egg.

          1. Yours sounds like a lot more work! I cut corners these days if the result is acceptable.

            I don’t make pastry any more, though I did buy a sheet of puff yesterday and made some more mince pies with it, as we still had some brandy butter to use up.

            I needed to go and get a prescription for OH, and he asked me to get some mince pies. There were none to be had, as all the Christmas stuff had been cleared out. There were no Chritmas puds left a couple of weeks ago, so I wasn’t surprised.

          4. If you look through yesterday’s posts, if you can be bothered, you’ll see my reply to Jennifer about the really disgusting ‘fish pie’ I was served up by you-know-who after I left hospital 3 years ago. It has made me very wary of fish pie ever since

          5. Found it – on Thursday’s page. I guess she thought she was looking after you. It does sound rather uninviting.

          8. & there’s me thinking that in Norway one lived on a diet of goat’s cheese & fish.

  85. Clive of India’s named dropped from house at his former school over links to British Empire

    The East India Company leader was expelled from Merchant Taylors’ boys’ school
    By Craig Simpson 9 January 2021 • 12:01am

    Clive of India’s name has been stripped from a house at his former private school over his links to empire, sparking warnings from professors about the “craven” trend of erasing history

    The Merchant Taylors’ day school for boys in Hertfordshire briefly educated the low-born Robert Clive before he was expelled for fighting.

    The East India Company clerk rose to become a notoriously wealthy military leader who led British expansion on the subcontinent, and was been blamed for mass famine and plundering.

    Clive House at the £20,000 per year school has now been renamed following a consultation with past and present students to avoid associations with the “foundation of Empire”.

    But professors and former pupils have cautioned against the “mindless attitude being taken towards the British Empire” by “pusillanimous revisionists”.

    Historians have also argued the self-made Shropshire lad Lord Clive is an inspiration unfairly maligned by his contemporaries and by history, whose name should be revered and not removed.

    Headmaster of Merchant Taylors’, Simon Everson, announced in a letter to old boys that: “Robert Clive has always been a controversial figure.

    “His actions in India were the foundations of Empire, but were also questioned by his own contemporaries

    “From this moment forward, Clive House will be renamed.”

    The new name will honour former pupil and Surrey cricketer John Raphael, who was capped playing rugby for England and died a war hero in 1917.

    Mr Everson explained that Lord Clive was “a chap who was at the school for one year and was expelled, achieved extraordinary things, but is certainly questionable”, whereas the Surrey all-rounder was “exemplary”.

    The head added that the decision to remove his name, while retaining a plaque dedicated to him, was made with the approval of current and former pupils, and school governors.

    But Cambridge historian Professor Robert Tombs said removing vestiges of Britain’s imperial past is an example of the “craven and mindless attitude being taken towards the British Empire by many public institutions”.

    He added that history is to help us understand the past and “not impose our own values on it”.

    Former pupil and Tory MP Lord Andrew Robathan said: “The school authorities should be ashamed of themselves. “Clive existed, a brave, successful and probably ruthless adventurer, perhaps corrupt, but in the context of the 18th Century.

    “He should not now be ‘cancelled’ by pathetic and pusillanimous revisionists.”

    Clive joined the East India Company in 1743 and after a failed suicide attempt went on to defeat Muhgal forces with company troops at the Battle of Plassey, allowing British expansion into Bengal.

    He amassed a huge amount of wealth and has been accused of plundering the population, and causing starvation in the region by mismanagement.

    His own contemporaries shunned him and he brought up corruption charges and later cleared before purportedly taking his own life at the age of 49.

    Historian Dr Zareer Masani has argued against the historical reputation of Clive as a brutal colonialist, and criticised the decision to remove his name from the school house.

    He said: “It’s absurd that people are now demonising him, he had mixed reputation in his time, quite unfairly denigrated by rather snobbish Whig oligarchy who though the as a kind of self-made mad for having made his wealth himself rather than inherited it

    “He is a model of someone who really pulled themselves up. We should be honouring people like this who made something of themselves.”

    Mr Everson the decision to rename Clive House was an “opportunity to debate rather than cancel” and a plaque would remain in place marking brief Clive’s presence at the school

    He added that pupils and focus groups agreed with the decision to honour Raphael.

    1. Why not rename every historically Imperialist establishment ‘Woke’? Woke House, Woke School, Woke College, Woke University, etc.

      2. True, but this does seem like a case of the school that at some point in the past, decided to try and make a link to a former pupil who attended for one year before being expelled.

        1. Please… “try to” not “try and” unless you are trying the link as well as making it.

          Sorry but it was a pet hate of my primary school teacher’s, and she passed it on!

          2. Thank you. I do try to improve my written English as best I can! A bug bear of mine is that when I was at school in the early 80s, the teaching of good grammar was largely absent.

          3. My primary school teacher retired at the end of the 1960s (at the same time as I moved on to a bigger school) and so although she didn’t spend hours hammering grammar into us, she did make a point of using good English and correcting our mistakes.

            I’m not a great stickler, but certain of her pet hates have stayed with me. That’s one of them. I glad you take it kindly, as it was meant.

    2. “… We should be honouring people like this who made something of themselves. ..”

      Not if they’re white and male. Then the state machine hates them.

      However, that leaves them the confusion of hating everything because everything around us was built by white men. Thus the Left, being incapable of building anything apart from outrage and spite, want to destroy everything and leave a wasteland suitable to their own self righteous ideology.

    3. My old school (and Sos’s). My head is in my hands. We all knew when I was there – in the 50s that Clive was a crook. So what?

      The other houses are named after important figures from the Middle Ages – most of whom undoubtedly had “odd” views – so they must all go, too.

      1. Crooks were rife in our past and still are. Land was handed over for ‘favours’. Rich landed gentry ripped off portrait artist, gardeners builders etc etc and people like Thomas Chippendale who died with about 60 quid in his bank account. And the families still boast of his wonderful product’s now worth millions they never paid a penny for. I wonder how many ‘land owners’ actually have legal entitlement to the expansive properties they say is in their families name ?

      3. I know. That’s why I posted the item. You are to report to the Headmaster’s study at 6:00pm this evening to receive your punishment of six of the best.

      4. Apart from a very brief spell playing Rugby for OMT, I have had no contact with the school since leaving and next to no contact with any of my contemporaries, except by accident.

        The story about Clive from my days was that he was expelled from the school, not for fighting, but for trying to burn it down.

        Andrewes should certainly be renamed; imagine a House being named after the man who oversaw the translation of the King James Bible. Obviously a committed proselytising Christian and that is totally unacceptable.

        These woke morons are pathetic.

        Why doesn’t anyone in power just tell them all to FOAD. Answer, because those in power are woke morons.

  86. Cooking Dinner, Tartiflette au Reblochon

    Ingredients

    30g butter

    500 g baking potatoes, peeled and sliced. Slice some halves for the dish edge

    300g lardons fumé (or smoked bacon, chopped)

    200g white onion, chopped.

    1 round of reblochon 240 g, cut in half through the middle and then quartered.

    salt, pepper

    A healthy glug (or two!) of white wine (about 60ml or so!)

    Method
    1. Preheat oven to 180°C (375°F). Butter a casserole dish and set aside.

    2. Add the sliced potatoes to a pan of salted boiling water cooking until just tender.

    3. In a large frying pan, melt the remaining butter and sauté the lardons until crispy (about 8 minutes).

    4. Transfer to a plate topped with kitchen paper. Add the chopped onions to the pan and cook until translucent.

    5. Add the wine to the pan, stirring until slightly reduced, season well with salt & pepper. Scoop out the potatoes and add to the sauce stirring to coat. Leave to cool.

    5. Layer half of the potato mixture into the casserole dish, sprinkle with some of the lardons, and then top with one half of the sliced Reblochon.

    6. Repeat the layers, ending with the other half of Reblochon and the remaining lardons (in the picture above the Reblochon was cut into strips to better fill the dish).

    7. Bake about 30 minutes in the middle of the oven until golden brown and bubbling.

    Tartiflette is great with a simple salad with a Classic French Vinaigrette.

    Bon Appetit!

        1. Thanks…Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom….

          The ‘Life’s Too Short To Cook’ Book
          £42.50 •
          OUT OF STOCK

        2. Thanks for that! Just forwarded the recommendation to a friend who’s contemplating making cheese from her goats’ milk.

    2. Thank you for that – I first experienced Tartiflette in the French alps, many years ago, with a green salad and a walnut oil dressing. It was delicious. I have taken a copy for future reference.

    1. Those already interned are quite literally following the guidance published recently on the BBC’s website to avoid contact sex:

      “The grave’s a fine and private place,
      But none I think do there embrace…..”

          3. I’m sure folk must tell you that every day Phil….The fine specimen bit (for the avoidance of doubt).

          5. A last walk up the College Valley to Goldscleugh and then up the Bizzel to stay there to feed the foxes & crows.

          6. What happens to Parsees who die in Britain?
            Are they returned to India for a sky burial?

          8. It’s not often I spell that particular mountain range (even though I passed the 11plus and was given Ed Hillary’s “Man of Everest ” as a school prize) so it took me a few seconds longer than you.

            Incidentally did you know that there’s grave concern that the Vultures that do the burial honours are in decline?

          12. For the uninitiated:

            IUPAC ID: 2-[2-(2,6-dichloroanilino)phenyl]acetic acid
            Formula: C14H11Cl2NO2
            Molar mass: 296.148 g/mol
            CAS ID: 15307-86-5
            Onset of action: Within 4 hours (gel), 30 min (non-gel)
            Trade name: Cataflam, Voltaren,

          15. Here you can get Ibuprofen gel 5% prescribed on the NHS from your GP. Much more effective & cheaper than over-the-counter Voltarol.

          16. Diclofenac raises blood pressure. Maybe it causes a similar problem with vultures.
            Neither my elder son or I can take it.

          19. It had been used as veterinary treatment apparently, and the vultures were clearing up cattle carcasses as well as humans exposed to the elements. Vultures are a necessary part of the ecosystem, but your arthritis treatment would probably not affect them in France.

          20. It’s a non-steroidal anti inflammatory and was used for widely in India because it was one of the cheapest options for treating their cows. It didn’t cause a problem to humans eating the meat (after the appropriate withdrawal period) but, of course, most cattle in India are not eaten.

            Nowadays the most commonly used veterinary NSAID is Metacam.

          21. I believe it was eventually banned in India, but not until it had caused untold damage to the vultures and the ecosysem, but hopefully they will eventually recover. Metacam is good – we’ve used it for hedgehogs and our cats.

          22. It’s banned (or at least off the market) here too.

            It took too long to realise why the vultures were dying but, of course, in other countries where it was used on farmed animals there were not anything like the same numbers of carcases left lying around. Most farmed animals, in most countries, end up somewhere in the food chain even if only for dog and cat food. We’re not even allowed to bury farm carcases that don’t go into the food chain, they all have to be taken away and disposed of away from farms. The Hindu attitude to cattle is unique, but though they don’t eat them, they do have a very large number of milking cows and quite a lot of draught animals too and all of those are simply left to the vultures when they die. That they are quite likely to be given veterinary treatment shortly before they die simply exacerbates the problem. That the move to take better care of those animals and give them a better quality of life would lead to mass toxicity in birds down the line was as unforeseen as it was unfortunate – as diclofenac (in small residual amounts) isn’t toxic to humans and vultures don’t usually need to come into the calculation for veterinary medicines. Fortunately newer drugs have proved to be less of a problem.

            I believe that vulture numbers in India are recovering, but it will take time.

          23. Griffons are making a comeback here, but should be safe.
            I’m due for the over-roasted, because I’m constantly beefing about things.

          24. I’m quite happy to donate my body to medical science. If nothing else, it should give a few medical students a good belly-laugh.

      1. The crematorium here has been hors de combat for months because a bit of it burnt down. Still makes me smile.

    1. It might, but it would mean reading the Guardian. I’ve had enough of big state rhetorical hypocrisy .

      1. It would and it’s always good to read media you disagree with. But, you miss my point which is that there are some here whose posts suggest they like this woman, are deep into these conspiracy theories and I really hope that this week’s events encourage them to step back and revaluate their views, because I honestly think they’re the ones who have been conned.

        1. I don’t read the guardian – or bother with it at all – because it’s full of petulant, hate filled idiots who really don’t know what they’re talking about – or, if they do, they’re so fanatically biased that reason and rationality has long left them.

          1. I think you’re describing many of the Guardian’s opinion piece writers with that comment (and I agree), but I think it reports the actual news accurately.

          1. I don’t rule out anything until the investigation mentioned in the Guardian report, has concluded. Unfortunately Del has opted to claim ‘murder’ without awaiting the investigation – I just hope he’s never served on a jury.

          3. Yes. George Floyd was killed and some police officers are due to be put on trial for murder. If they are convicted, I’d use the word ‘murder’ to describe his killing. The difference between me and Delboy is that I await the outcome of due process and don’t let my views get in tis way, which is why I really hope Delboy never served on a jury.

          4. That’s rather hypocritical, given from your own comments generally. I don’t see much difference between yourself and, say, Am F on the letters Page comments section on any issue that is vaguely political in nature.

          5. Since I have no idea who Am F is, I genuinely have no idea what you’re going on about. But as a new face on this forum perhaps you’d be so kind as to stop trying to suppress debate through personal attacks.

          6. I’m not supressing debate, nor am I making ‘personal’ attacks. I can legitamately ask you to give proven facts to justify or prove an opinion or give my own account of things or dispute yours.

            It just seems very odd how you came to find this forum and why you’d be here, especially when you don’t appear to read the DT Letters Page and the comments section below it enough to know who the ‘regulars’ are, especially the most prominent troll.

            Like Am F, you don’t appear to like starting a discussion about a particular subject or Letter, but often weigh in with inflamatory remarks and accusations about the person you’re replying to, as you just done to me above, perhaps because you haven’t read what that person is referring to in the DT.

            It’s not as though you could consider yourself the ‘Telegraph reader’ type, is it? I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to be a member of The Graun just to ‘debate’ its readership.

            Exactly how did you come to this forum?

          7. “Exactly how did you come to this forum?” I’ve already answered that question in my list of points replying to another comment from yourself.

    3. Forgive me for asking rather bluntly, but why DO you frequent a forum for ex-Telegraph subscribers, given you are obviously a Guardian-reading left-of-centre(at least) voter? For someone who apparently is still working in the NHS (but apparently at home), you seem to have a lot of time to troll here.

      1. Worth noting that although Guardian readers can – and often do – come to this forum to expound their left-wing views, the same courtesy is not extended to those of us of the conservative (small ‘c’) persuasion who visit the Guardian site.

        Should we visit the the Guardian’s “Kommentar macht frei” page, we find our comments deleted faster than a rabbit gets f**ked.

      2. 1. I have been reading the DT for most of my life and I was invited to join this forum because I used to post on the DT comments facility.
        2. I read the Guardian, BBC and Mail websites most frequently because all remain free to access. I read what I can on the DT, but I’m not a subscriber and get bored trying to hit ‘esc’ at exactly the right time.
        3. I usually vote Tory. The fact that I routinely get called a leftie here reflects the views of the majority here, not anything remotely close to typical categorising of political views.
        4. Someone posting views at odds with yours doesn’t equal trolling. This forum encourage debate,
        5. I don’t work in the NHS. I run a company that supplies services to the NHS and private health and care organisations.
        6. I work from home because there’s a pandemic and because I can.

        I hope that puts you and Phizee straight.

        1. Not really – given you don’t appear to know or read the Telegraph’s articles or many other regular reader contributors. I don’t ever recall seeing you on any of the comments areas, and I’ve been a regular there for nigh on 20 years.

          You say you vote Tory. Frankly, given your views – and I’ve now read every post from your (apparent) second incarnation here (why did you leave the first time, I wonder, presumably after changing your handle as well – given more than one regular replied by saying ‘oh it’s you again’) don’t tally with a Tory voter, but a blairite Labour or Lib Dem voter. Thus far I have yet to read one post of yours that would be considered ‘conservative’. Tories aren’t regulars on the Graun.

          So you provide the NHS and other healthcare providers with supplies. I wasn’t aware that this makes you an expert on frontline services working in hospitals. You’ve admitted you don’t work in horpitals – at least I have as part of my job over many years, and can see what happens on the ground – including speaking to staff – admininstrative, facilities management and clinical. Getting something second or third hand – often rumours or agenda driven rubbish that cannot be verified is vastly different from things you can see with your own eyes as they happen.

          Rather a poor attempt to try and portay myself and others questioning your motives and experience, as personal ‘attacks’. I’ve seen many a troll on the DT comments areas, so I know what they’re like.

        2. For some reason, my response didn’t go through. I’ll try again.

          It ‘doesn’t put me straight’ either. You, by your own admission, don’t work in a hospital on the front line, so at most you get your accounts second hand. At least I in my career worked on projects that took me inside hospitals, seeing A LOT of the bad stuff that went on and talked to many staff members of all hues about it, sometimes as they happened. I don’t think saying you work with NHS logistics is something to crow about at the moment, given how badly they’ve been faring.

          You say you ‘usually’ vote, Tory, but from your comments on this forum, I just don’t see any evidence of conservatism in you. Blairism, yes. And, to me, what you’re doing is trolling, especially as (from looking at early posts of yours and others’ responses) you appeared to delete your old account, then re-appear under another name, but regulars still appeared to realise it was ‘you’.

          I was a Telegraph online subscriber for around 20 years, and don’t recall you featuring in the comments sections, unless it was under another name. You profess to be a regular there, yet don’t appear to know much about who writes for the paper or regular reader contributors (good and bad), especially on the Letters Page and comments area below.

          Sorry, but not very convincing, and I’ve seen and dealt with my fair share of trolls of varying shades before – including a good number on the DT, some even who work for foreign ‘agencies’.

          1. “I don’t think saying you work with NHS logistics is something to crow about at the moment”. I don’t work with NHS Logistics; I’ve never stated that I do.

            “At least I in my career worked on projects that took me inside hospitals”. As does mine, normally, when we aren’t all trying to do as much as possible from home.

            “…but regulars still appeared to realise it was ‘you’.” No, I stated that it was ‘me’ by using the same name.

            “You profess to be a regular there…”, no I said I previously posted there.

            You need to re-read posts carefully before you go down some really daft conspiracy theory bollox.

          2. You said you read the DT for many years. Non-subscribers even before last March were very limited in the number of articles they could read each week.

            What trolls did is stay on one article per day – normally a contentious issue or a tickerfeed on an important/contentious issue and then ply their trade all day – sometimes with a hundred or more posts.

            As I said – as someone who read many artlces a day over my 20 years of subscribing there, I don’t recall you under that name there. Perhaps you were under a different name.

            Nice try at gaslighting me at the end, but I’m a thorough person by my nature. Also rather hypocritical of you to effectively swear at me at the end after crying ‘personal attack’ before.

          3. I don’t have to explain anything to you; I’ve tried to be nice and answer your questions, but all you do is ignore my replies and start throwing around silly ill-disguised allegations. I’ll happily engage you in debate about serious subjects, but I won’t continue this exchange because you are becoming some sort of online stalker.

  90. Evening, all. Just to cheer you up on this bitterly cold day, here is a list of the potential killers in the “deal” Bojo made with the EU:

    £22 Billion still has to be paid to the EU as part of the so-called Divorce Bill – this money will be paid over a number of years until around 2060. There has been no comment on his from No 10! This money will even contain 10 billion to pay for the pensions of EU officials including Michel Barnier, Jean Claude Juncker and former commissioners like Lord Peter Mandelson. The ‘Gravy Train’ really does never stop!

    Northern Ireland remains under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and will be forced to follow EU rules. This clearly and deliberately separates Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom.

    Our fishing waters are still compromised – with a five-and-a-half-year Transition Period created and full renegotiation scheduled for the end of this time. What is of great concern is the fact this renegotiation is tied to the trade deal as a whole, therefore if the UK does not hand over an acceptable level of access to our waters the EU can implement compensatory tariffs on UK Goods – or in extreme scenarios, they could terminate the entire Trade Agreement.

    Many fishing disputes are still left unresolved. The EU is currently rejecting a wide variety of UK-caught fish and shellfish if they do not have the right certificates. This is ridiculous, as French vessels are catching the same products right next to UK vessels, so this is a deliberate frustration, particularly by the French. It appears even fish need passports now!

    Financial Services are excluded from the Agreement completely. This means the UK’s biggest export to the EU has to rely on ‘equivalence’ rulings to continue to work. The EU can withdraw ‘equivalence’ by giving only 30 days’ notice. It is ridiculous this trade deal helps the EU’s biggest export to the UK – goods, but leaves the UK’s biggest industries in doubt.

    There is potential for a lack of agreement over Financial Services to result in the UK sticking too closely to the EU and becoming a ‘rule-taker’. This is something even the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, has said must not happen, urging the Government to ensure the UK is free to ‘break away from Brussels’.

    This Agreement creates huge swathes of new bureaucracy, including 19 joint EU/UK separate sub-committees which have the power to make binding decisions on both the UK and the EU. Decisions must be unanimous, but they are legally binding and require NO VOTES in Parliament. Hardly Sovereign decision making!

    The UK is still able to sign up to EU programmes if it wishes to, potentially opening the door to ‘Remain’ ministers and civil servants selling UK Sovereignty down the river over the next few years – all without any votes in Parliament. This could get even worse if the next General Election result returns a ‘Remain’ Government.

    The new Agreement restricts the UK from offering shipbuilding contracts to only UK companies – meaning we will still be unable to kickstart the UK economy by giving our full support to a ‘Build British’ campaign.

    There are multiple 4-year renegotiation periods in the Deal which pose a threat of the entire Agreement being torn up and replaced by a potential new ‘Remain’ Government which could take power in 4 years’ time, after the next General Election

    This courtesy of Get Britain Out.

    I always felt it was a bad deal.

    2. “I always felt it was a bad deal.”

      Always? That doesn’t ring true, Conway.
      The ‘Deal’ was cobbled together on Christmas Eve.

      Your post looks like a ‘cut and paste’ job; who is the author?

      1. Get Britain Out as I posted at the bottom. “Jayne Adye, Campaign Director – and the Team at Get Britain Out.” It was an email I received.

        Always in the sense that I didn’t trust Bojo to get us a good deal and certainly not the EU to play fair. I think I am on record as having written that on more than one occasion. I am of the belief that we should have just walked away, traded on WTO rules and then, when they realised how much they needed us, made a proper, mutually beneficial deal rather than their punishment version.

    3. Why the Brexiteer MPs, almost to a man, supported the UK side of the deal I don’t know unless, which is quite probable, Boris with held some of the adverse details from them. There’s plenty in that list which should not have been accepted. Even the summary 191 paragraphs had a lot of that information in it so the MPs have no excuse. Nigel Farage has a lot to answer for as he was pleased with the deal.The PM is destroying this country in the most cruel, thoughtless way. We left the EU at 11pm on 31 December 2020 with No Deal ratified by the EU and looking at the detailed assessment of conditions above PM Johnson should have walked away from the negotiating table.

      1. 328300+ up ticks,
        Evening C,
        Because they are ALL in it together.
        “nige” covert tory coxswain.

      2. Boris did not submit to an interview with Andrew Neil, the most forensic of inquisitors as Rastus has occasionally reminded us all.

        Boris has an element of cowardice in his disposition and gives way very easily to charlatans and shysters as with the supposed Covid crisis, preferring dodgy pseudo-scientific posturing to accredited clinical, immunologist and epidemiologist advice.

        I suspect that Boris and Hancock are also susceptible to bribery.

        1. Yes – I banged on about Johnson’s cowardice in not allowing a proper scrutiny of his May rehash surrender WA and his evasion of the Andrew Neil interview.

          I was right to make this point repeatedly but, tragically, to absolutely no avail.

          To quote Don McLean’s song:

          They would not listen, they’re not listening still
          Perhaps they never will

          The remainers are probably having a good gloat now – and who can blame them?

      3. Boris did not submit to an interview with Andrew Neil, the most forensic of inquisitors as Rastus has occasionally reminded us all.

        Boris has an element of cowardice in his disposition and gives way very easily to charlatans and shysters as with the supposed Covid crisis, preferring dodgy pseudo-scientific posturing to accredited clinical, immunologist and epidemiologist advice.

        I suspect that Boris and Hancock are also susceptible to bribery.

      4. Certainly Owen Paterson wouldn’t vote for it because of the position it put Northern Ireland in (he was at one time Secretary of State for Northern Ireland).

        1. Why on earth did the Conservative Part choose the Buffoon to lead them rather than Owen Paterson?

          I would say Conservative Party RIP – but the party deserves to die but not to rest in peace.

      5. For the same reason none of them really think about anything. These are not specialists. They’re popularity contest winners.

        That’s why it was pushed through: meet the deadline, get agreement, job done: hide the detail. Sadly it’s been how politicians have worked for decades. They’ll slip endless reams of Eu law into our own by the backdoor now.

        This is why our system of government simply does not work. Why does PHE waste so much public money on a sugar tax campaign? Because it knows it can get it pushed into statute. New tax good! Wail politicos. In a democracy, they’d present it, we’d shoot it down and politicians who supported it sacked.

    4. 328300+ + ticks,
      Evening C,
      We in the real UKIP, through a sh!te storm of slings & arrows tried to warn of what has come to pass, all we received in thanks was castigation / treachery.
      The three party ie lab/lib/con coalition party
      put us and kept us in the position we find ourselves today.
      The party before Country voting brigade have hurt a great many innocent peoples,
      and done untold damage to the people / Country no doubt of that.

      1. He could claim he had “delivered Brexit” – and because it was so last minute it didn’t get the scrutiny it should have had.

        1. Maybe the last minute dealwas well planned after all.

          Like delivering bad news on Friday afternoon.

          2. Something my boss in Sweden used to do on a regular basis, or just before a holiday. Bloody bitch.

        2. Which is what many of us feared as soon as the ‘deal’ or total surrender was announced.

          At least everyone knew that May was an evil traitor and were not surprised by her treachery. That Johnson pretended to champion a proper Brexit when he was eager to betray us makes him all the more despicable and contemptible.

        1. ah but was it better than Mays fudge? I remember fishing and Northern Ireland being so contentious during her efforts.

          1. It was essentially May’s deal with a tweak here and there – much as the Lisbon Treaty was the Constitution with a tweak here or there.

      3. 328300+ up ticks,
        Evening R,
        The “deal” is a strong future latch lifting link.
        We in real UKIP wanted total severance.

    6. Set against all that. we have a return to the primacy of English Common Law, if there are any professionals left who understand what this is. Most are breathtakingly stupid, and the more they are paid, the worse they get.

      What this means is that anything is legal until someone stops us. The question we must ask therefore is no longer whether it complies with directive, but rather what they will do about it if we choose to ignore it, or impose our own regulation.

      1. In theory, Jeremy, but so many of the legal profession have been brought up on EU law and don’t understand precedent. The police and MPs also have the continental mindset of “if there isn’t a law to permit it, you can’t do it”.

    7. Many of us said we were dubious about the deal the moment Boris Johnson’s horrible display of hubris and vain bragging!

      And what was that idiot Farage doing saying it was a good deal when he had not even had time to scrutinise it.

      Traitors or morons?

      And what do the so-called champions of Brexit such as Grease Slime, Mark Francois and and Steve Baker have to say about it?

  91. In an article about school truancy’s being on the rise and drug gangs taking advantage:
    […] “And that is not to point a finger at their parents, but if you are a single parent on a zero hours contract, struggling to stay alive and having to work all the hours God sends, you don’t actually know that your son is not going to school.
    You don’t actually know that they are on-line, being contacted or being lured or groomed by all sorts of people”
    Well now, if I were ‘working all hours God sends to stay alive, I don’t think I would spend a chunk of my pay on broadband.

    1. Wouldn’t the school have contacted the parent notifying them that their little tike wasn’t in lessons?

      1. Likely not. My experience of that is schools do bugger-all, certainly not calling the parent when there’s an unexpected absence, so you can do something about it.

    2. It’s not the broadband connection to the house, it’s the cursed smart phones that are the problem. My older children were teenagers when smart phones came in. I delayed them having them for as long as possible. When they’ve got to share one computer in the sitting room, you’ve still got control. My daughter said that she saw teen culture changing as younger teens came along who had had smartphones as their first phone and knew nothing else.

  93. Cooling down this afternoon – now just passing -17C.
    Glass of wine & the Curd Nerd (aka Gavin Webber) making Parmesan on Youtube TV.

  94. 328300+up ticks,
    Farage: Lockdown Britain on Verge of Becoming a Police State.

    Was this the same chap that in the age of delays
    in the ( mayday era) did he not support a delay being extended ?

    He must have been listening to my butcher / baker who voiced the same, weeks ago.

  95. Rejoice, rejoice…

    From the DT:
    “Boris Johnson has appointed Kwasi Kwarteng as the new business secretary, replacing Alok Sharma.

    Mr Sharma will become the full-time president of the COP26 United Nations climate summit, where he “will solely focus on driving forward coordinated global action to tackle climate change”, according to a statement from the Prime Minister’s office.

    Mr Sharma had been performing both roles, but the Government has come under increasing pressure to show its commitment to tackling climate change by making his new job a full time role.

    Mr Kwarteng – MP for Spelthorne since 2010 – will be only black politician in the Cabinet.

    His career has spanned roles across the Government. From 2010-2013 he worked as a member of the Transport Select Committee, before joining the Work and Pensions Select Committee until 2015.

    From 2016-2017, Mr Kwarteng joined the Public Accounts Committee and in 2017 was appointed as parliamentary private secretary to the Chancellor.”

    Before becoming an MP, he worked as an analyst in financial services. He read classics and history at Trinity College, Cambridge.

    1. We are soon going to hear a lot more about this COP26 nonsense, and none of it is good. It’s going to be wall to wall Great Reset shoved down our throats.
      Prince Charles is going to make an appearance, I think, as part of his role of useful idiot for the WEF. Look on the WEF website, he’s all over it.
      This latest evidence of his tiny intellectual capacity is turning me from a life-long pro monarchist to a republican.

        1. The head of the UN’s climate committee admitted that it is about controlling people, not about climate change. Charles is getting involved in the Great Reset.
          I suppose one can argue that it isn’t treason as they don’t plan to unseat the Queen, but they certainly plan to eviscerate our country as we know it.
          Still, as long as Charles still has his helicopters and fast cars, I suppose all will be well.

      2. I prophesy that he won’t make King.
        HM will give up when Phillip is buried, and hand over to William. Charles is too weird and too old to start being King.

        1. I think he does a lot of the background duties that his mother used to cover. But even if he does become King, it can’t be for long.

        2. Must be tough on Charles.

          All of his contemplates have retired from their jobs and are now collecting money from the government for their retirement. Charles is still sitting there waiting for his time to start working.

        3. Charles can be very good at the diplomatic stuff, but he’s mixing with the big boys now, and he’s not in their league.
          The monarchy worked when it confined its attention to its own subjects, and didn’t sell them down the river to a bunch of foreign billionaires who regard us as little more than ants to be obliterated with an ant spray if they want.
          It has passed its use-by date.

        4. ♫ “Up on the hill
          We’ve built a fine windmill
          So we can chill
          While cook stands cookin’
          There’ll be no better scenery
          Than on my carbon-free centenary
          At our Highgrove greenery home” ♫

        5. Unfortunately it is Charles’s birthright. I don’t think the Queen can ‘Will’ the succession in quite the same way as, say, Balmoral.

    2. Alok Sharma has been pretty uninspiring as business secretary; let’s hope he continues to be equally useless in his new role.

        1. They are already – mostly yellow. Shít scared to do the right thing in case the woke mob turns on them and calls them names.

        2. And the Air Force; in my latest (not recent as I haven’t been able to access any since the original lockdown) Air Force News, virtually every page seemed to have a blik or be praising bliks. Today I got the latest Air Mail (RAFA magazine) and the cover headline was “how the RAF is becoming greener”!

    3. are you sure you have a conservative government? That sounds like the type of appointment that Trudeau would make.

      1. I like to point out to my Labour supporting friends that it is the Conservatives who have by a far the best record of promoting minorities and women to the great positions of state. Aside two women PMs (Labour hasn’t even elected a female leader yet), Boris has presided over the most diverse Cabinet ever, Disraeli was of Jewish origin, the first Asian and Jewish senior Cabinet Minsters were Tory, and I suspect Heath was the first gay PM.

        1. Although there were strong women candidates, the Canadian conservatives have missed several opportunities to elect a female leader at both federal and provincial level.

          What fools, not only would we have strong leaders it would have been quite a “so what” to Trudeau when he spouts his feminist mantra.

  96. Due to a reduction in malevolent spam traffic, links are no longer pre-modded before they show.
    Thanks for the flagging, folks. I think we saw them off!

    1. For now…….apparently quite a few forums were targeted, mainly conservative-leaning, and across Europe as well.

      1. I ban the Disqus name, email & IP address. A pity you can’t see the whole IP address, it’s difficult to find where they come from.
        The link premoderation seems to be the key, as is paranoia. Eternal vigilance is not enough! But with a good team of Nottlers, we seem to be relatively OK.

        1. Yes – it’s important to ban all three. I had a look at DS -the last to be banned, and he had also posted on a pro-Trump site.

    2. The original meaning was positive. I have never seen it used in the negative sense.

      surpass (v.)
      1550s, from French surpasser “go beyond, exceed, excel” (16c.), from sur- “beyond” + passer “to go by” .

      1. I tried – unsuccessfully – to post an answer eight times ! Then it was posted twice. This nonsense has been happening around this time for the last few evenings.

        Disqusting …

        2. It chucked a wobbly in that manner for me this time yesterday – it kept saying I’d posted something twice, but it hadn’t been at all. Eventually after logging out and in again afeter leaving it for a while, it worked as normal again.

          I blame gremlins. Or Russian bots. Or Brexit. Disqus’s owners called ‘Zeta’ are based in Silicon Valley, so maybe we’d better watch out.

      3. How about ‘passes’? To me ‘exceeds’ implies the number quoted is a static target, like speed limits.

          1. If you pass an exam, and your marks exceed a threshold, you might be awarded honours, and your performance might surpass that of your contemporaries.

          2. If you pass an exam, and your marks exceed a threshold, you might be awarded honours, and your performance might surpass that of your contemporaries.

    4. Having read that headline again, it is completely off the mark. If you interpret “as” to mean “because of” it implies the death toll goes above 80,000 because the police promise tougher action. Alternatively it could be read that the death toll goes above 80,000 at the time the police promise tougher action. Irrespective, it is a clumsy composition.

    5. I don’t think it only applies to beneficial matters. You see it in grim reports – death toll surpasses……..

    8. I think that what it is, is that the headline writers are scratching around trying to make today worse than yesterday.

    9. Surpass: vb – to exceed or be greater than; to be better than; to do better than before.

      I don’t think it is usual to use it as an adjective.

      Edit – I have just corrected myself – adj – incomparable or outstanding.

      So there we have it 🙂

      1. Yes indeed, SiDc; ‘surpass’ implies a desirable result, an achievement:

        “… cures surpassed expectation”, in contrast to:

        “… deaths exceeded worst fears”.

      1. How many were caused by putting COVID infected people into the same establishment as those without COVID?

      1. OK thanks, just me then – tricky chap english, also I don’t know if you are implying or inferring anything there ( (c) Wilt via Tom Sharpe)

          1. Has your accent changed? At one point while living abroad, mine acquired a distinctly South African twang, so I was told. I purchased a digital radio in order to listen to Radio 4, and regain my neutral BBC English voice.
            Boy was that a mistake!
            The digital radio lasted for about half an hour of the screechy Today programme.

          3. At the end of only three weeks in Oz, I was talking Strine 🙁 I’m afraid I have a deplorable tendency to absorb any accent I spend any amount of time with. Can be tricky if I find myself unconsciously imitating people I’m with. I suppose it’s what makes me a good linguist, but it’s definitely one for the awkward stakes.

          4. I spent a week with a South African couple on Rhodes. After they left, it took me a while to shake off the accent.

          5. Yes, apparently I speak with a lilt, as if I were Welsh. So I’m told, by “real” English. Look you.

      1. The appropriate word in that headline would be ‘exceeds’.

        The use of the word ‘surpass’ – implying achievement – reveals a bizarre and weirdsome editorial viewpoint.

    1. Sell her home, pay a grand a week each to get ourselves into a ‘care’ home and you’ll get a jab in ten minutes.

    3. Following on from my earlier comment re veracity.

      This is the logical culmination of the way the MSM treated Trump and his family, reflected back on the Democrats.

      It is disgusting, but the more one fights dirty, the dirtier the fight becomes.

    4. But Joe says:

      “I’m proud of my son”
      “We have great confidence in our son”
      “He’s a grown man, he is the smartest man I know”
      “Hunter probe is ‘Russian misinformation’”

      And Joe is going to be the next President of the United States? God help us!

      1. I’m very slightly amazed that having been a fan of Westerns most of my life. And the fact that there are millions of loaded guns in the US. Just how much longer are these obviously crooked people going to get away with all this ridiculous unscrupulous political nonsense.

      2. The media are still pretending that the Bidens are a respectable family. That’s not the least disturbing aspect of the whole story.

    5. Very distressing.. I wish I could unsee that. But at the same time we need to know. Poor little mites.

      1. I think your sentence is incomplete, and, inthe interest of deterring others and protecting children, it should finish (in this case):

        , drawn, and quartered.

        1. No! He should be drawn and quartered before he is hung.

          (This is one of numerous photos showing what an evil person he is).

          2. Well I wasn’t being 100% serious, but I do think deterrence is a very worthwhile objective.

    7. I thought that he was just into corruption and bribery, just like any other person in the political sphere.

      If it is true Biden has another problem on his hands, everyone will demand to see him blast Hunter into some prison hell hole for a long break. There is at least one sick animal out there, it could be Hunter or it could be some sicko that put that picture together.

      2. Who will demand that Hunter faces justice? Nobody – the swamp is too big to be drained. Nobody’s asking what Bill Clinton was doing on Epstein’s planes either.
        They will just say the picture was fake, whether it is or not.

        1. And thats the trouble, no matter what verification is done:
          Half will say fake picture and believe that the right will do anything to hurt Biden, The other half will say its true and decry corrupt dems.

          Its only a very small third half will hold judgement until facts appear.

    8. If that isn’t true, whoever concocted it needs to be imprisoned for a very long time.

      If it is true, he needs to be imprisoned for a very long time.

    9. I was going to ask you to put in a warning, as I also clicked on it last night without realising it was child pron.
      More than disturbing.

      1. Goodnight Conway. I have found the last few days bruising if I am honest. Folk I thought were supportive of a free commentary have shown disdain for me and sided with crackpots. I hope matters improve.

        To be labelled as having ‘mental problems’ was about the most insulting comment I have endured. I can deal readily with the Cochrane and Jennifer SP types whose main aim is to disrupt and cause disharmony but that particular comment from someone I trusted pierced my heart.

        1. If anybody on here has mental problems, corim, it’s me! Yesterday I was totally depressed. Today, as it’s been sunny and I went out for a long walk with the dog, it’s been a bit better.

        2. 328300+ up ticks,
          Evening C,
          Sad to say it is a trait of those supporting the ersatz tory party in a party before Country regardless of consequence manner.

        3. I know you mean me – and my comment was intended as supportive rather than as an insult. Most of us have suffered with problems of one sort or another, throughout our lives and I have certainly suffered from depression at times in the past.

          To have mental health issues is not a criticism, merely an ackknowledgement that good (or bad) health can take many forms.

          So please accept my apoloogies for upsetting you, which was certainly not my intention.

  103. A busy month for birthdays so please excuse me posting the updates. And please let me know if you have anything you would like me to add to the list:

    Some people have pointed out the errors and omissions in this list. Please let me know if there are any errors or omissions below so I can try to correct them:

    02 January – 1947 : Poppiesmum
    07 January – **** : Lady of the Lake
    08 January – 1941 : Rough Common
    09 January – **** : thayaric
    10 January – 1960 : hopon
    16 January – 1941 : Legal Beagle
    18 January – **** : Stormy
    23 January – 1951 : Damask Rose
    27 January – 1948 : Citroen 1
    10 February -1949 : Korky the Kat (Dandy Front Pager)
    11 February- 1964 : Phizzee
    22 February- 1951 : Grizzly
    24 February- 1941 : Sguest
    28 February- 1956 :Jeremy Morfey
    29 February- **** : Ped
    05 March—– 1957 : Sue MacFarlane
    08 March—– **** : Geoff Graham
    26 March—– 1962 : Caroline Tracey
    27 March—– 1947 : Maggiebelle
    27 March—– 1941 : Fallick Alec
    19 April——- **** : Devonian in Kent
    26 April——- **** : Harry Kobeans
    24 May——– 1944 : NoToNanny
    08 June——– **** : Still Bleau
    09 June——- 1947 : Johnny Norfolk
    09 June——– 1947 : Horace Pendleton
    23 June——– **** : Oberstleutnant
    25 June——– 1952 : corimmobile
    01 July——— 1946 : Rastus C Tastey
    12 July——— 1956 : David Wainwright/Stigenace
    18 July——— 1941: lacoste
    19 July——— **** : Ndovu
    26 July——— 1936 : Delboy
    29 July———- 1944 : Lewis Duckworth
    30 July———- 1946 : Alf the Great
    01 August—— 1950 : Datz
    03 August—— 1954 : molamola
    10 August—— 1967 : ourmaninmunich
    18 August—— **** : ashesthandust
    19 August——- 1951 : Hugh Janus
    04 September- 1948 : Joseph B Fox
    07 September- **** : Araminta Smade
    11 September- 1947 : peddytheviking
    12 September- 1946 : Ready Eddy
    13 September- **** : Anne Allan
    15 September- **** : veryveryveryoldfella
    26 September- **** : Feargal the Cat
    30 September 1944 : One Last Try
    07 October—– 1960 : Bob 3
    11 October—– 1944 : Hardcastle Craggs
    25 October—– 1955 : Sue Edison
    12 November- ***** : Cochrane
    01 December– 1956 : Sean Stanley-Adams
    06 December– 1943 : Duncan Mac
    10 December– **** : Aethelfled
    16 December– **** : Plum
    21 December– 1945 : Elsie Bloodaxe

    (E&OE)

    1. And people wonder why there is enthusiasm for shutting down parler on the part of the MSM.

      1. This was posted a few days ago and I and others thought that the police might have been taking the old boy through the angry crowd to a place of safety, rather than arresting him. I haven’t seen any news about him being charged.

Comments are closed.