Tuesday 11 January: Students’ lives made miserable by superfluous Covid restrictions

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 we prefer 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

706 thoughts on “Tuesday 11 January: Students’ lives made miserable by superfluous Covid restrictions”

  1. Morning, all Y’all.
    Dark, rain expected – on top of snow and frozen ground… bliss :-((

  4. Latest Breaking News – Greta Thunberg has called for a worldwide ban on circus clowns, on account of the size of their footprint.

  7. A big picnic party in the number 10 garden out in the open, out in the public eye, 40 people in attendance, but nobody noticed at the time.
    All we have is a leaked email.

    1. Is there not a policeman on duty outside No10, just outside the front door? That policeman did not notice a few dozen people turning up carrying bottles of wine and maybe some small boxes of canapes?

        1. Knock three times and ask for Bojo? (But seriously, armed guards at the front, and anybody can roll up at the back? A bit like the White House and JFK (without the charisma, of course.)

          1. The back is watched too. Not anybody can just rock up without being intercepted. But the watchers are not going to say anything about anything.

  8. Students’ lives made miserable by superfluous Covid restrictions

    Well let that be an early lesson for them about what happens when people go totalitarian and a bit mad.

  9. Police consider investigation into Downing Street ‘bring your own booze’ lockdown party. 11 January 2022.

    Scotland Yard’s announcement of a possible police investigation followed the disclosure of an email from senior No. 10 official Martin Reynolds inviting more than 100 Downing Street staff to a party in the garden.

    He wrote: “Hi all. After what has been an incredibly busy period we thought it would be nice to make the most of this lovely weather and have some socially distanced drinks in the No10 garden this evening.”

    And then, in a highly incriminating plea, he added: “Please join us from 6pm and bring your own booze! Martin.”

    Do as we say. Not as we do!

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/police-consider-investigation-into-downing-street-bring-your-own-booze-lockdown-party/ar-AASE72K

    2. Boris is waiting to see if he went or not.

      Fugging scum. Of course he went. What he means is can a weasel lie be fabricated to get him off the hook.

  10. Good morning all from a still dark Derbyshire.
    Currently dry outside with 3½°C on the yard thermometer.

  12. Good morning, all. Dark and raining.

    57 years ago today, I was admitted as a solicitor. Seems like yesterday….

        1. He became a lawyer the harder way. It’s a pity that such routes into professions no longer appear to be open to young people today.

    2. ‘Morning, Bill, 62 years ago, on January 28th, I was admitted as a Boy Entrant into the Royal Air Force.

  13. Morning all

    Students’ lives made miserable by superfluous Covid restrictions

    SIR – I am a student in my final year at Durham University.

    After being subjected to a testing regime comparable to vaccine passports last term (three months before the countrywide regime), this term we have the privilege of two weeks of mostly online teaching to look forward to, along with a cap of 25 people at university-organised social events. Yet again many of my fellow students and I are asking why we are being punished with Covid restrictions beyond the Government’s regulations, especially given the minimal risk that the virus poses to people our age, and the fact that most of us have already caught the damn thing.

    What are we paying £9,250 a year for? When will universities be held to account over the substandard learning experiences they are offering? Why am I allowed to mix with my fellow students freely in a club or a pub, but not in a lecture theatre?

    These are questions that the Government seems determined never to answer, as that would require a reimbursement of our fees and an acknowledgment that it has allowed the ruin of years of young people’s lives. I am just glad that I am set to escape this terrible university system at the end of this year.

    Emily Gordon

    Durham

    SIR – Have we now reached the point where the Covid testing policy should be reassessed?

    If people develop symptoms of a cold, they should simply be told to isolate at home until feeling better.

    Dr Mike Copp

    Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

    SIR – When Covid vaccines first became available, they were heralded for offering direct protection to those at risk, as well as indirect protection by reducing the virus’s circulation among the healthy young.

    Omicron has made the second of these redundant; boosted or not, many people will still catch it if exposed. Is there now any sense in the Government’s plans for mandatory vaccination among NHS staff?

    Richard Barber

    London W6

    SIR – Having dealt with many novel viral infections in animals and poultry during my career as a veterinary surgeon, I am increasingly frustrated by the figures given for Covid “cases”.

    Most of these are not cases of Covid but isolations of the virus which may or may not produce clinical symptoms. We are simply recording numbers of those who, according to a swab, have come into contact with the virus, and one would expect this number to increase as the virus becomes endemic in the population. It is not legitimate to use these figures as an indication of the seriousness of an ongoing pandemic.

    Mass testing may have been appropriate early on in the pandemic, but that moment has passed. It is time to abandon all testing unless the person is showing clinical symptoms.

    J S Brodie

    Newark, Nottinghamshire

    2. Certainly university has changed significantly since my time there. I didn’t find many of the seminars especially interesting or useful and lectures were a means to catch up on sleep. I remember one that was captivating, but only the one. It was far more ‘the Young Ones’ than todays Russian military parade.

      These days university is far more mechanistic, with expectations of student/teacher time.

  14. Morning again

    Colston’s removal

    SIR – How does Dame Esther Rantzen know that the Bristol public demanded the removal of Edward Colston’s statue (Letters, January 10)? I do not recall any mandate.

    Laurence Dooley

    Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire

    SIR – It is to be hoped that the Colston statue verdict will be another nail in the coffin of trial by jury. This is an ancient institution, but its antiquity should not blind us to its drawbacks. It was devised in a very different age to provide a safeguard for defendants when neither prosecutors nor judges were, as they now are, independent of the political authorities.

    The continued performance by non-professionals of this key role in the administration of criminal justice is anachronistic as well as expensive, cumbersome and time-consuming. It can lead, as the Bristol verdict shows, to capricious and irresponsible results.

    Any judge or magistrate who allowed politics or emotion to affect their decision in the way the Bristol jury possibly did would rightly be regarded as acting unprofessionally.

    We abolished juries for nearly all civil trials some 90 years ago, and the great majority of criminal trials are held before magistrates sitting without juries. The time has come to complete this process of reform.

    John Watherston

    London SW4

    1. It was devised in a very different age to provide a safeguard for defendants when neither prosecutors nor judges were, as they now are, independent of the political authorities.

      Well Mr Watherston. There has never been a time in the UK before the present when Judges and Prosecutors have been so subservient to the Political Classes.

    4. Mr Watherston clearly doesn’t do irony. The Colston verdict didn’t go the way he (the State) wished and should be overturned for a result the State/he would have preferred.

      I wonder if he would feel the same way if he was acquitted of a serious offence which would have resulted in a very long sentence but found guilty of a lesser offence. eg murder, where his plea of self-defence wasn’t accepted by the judge but was by the jury.

    5. I hope that Mr Blatherston never finds himself before a court on a dodgy charge – or accused of something which he knows absolutely that he did not do….

      What a wazzock.

      1. A nosy search on the web indicates that Mr Wazzockston was a practising barrister and that he served as Registrar of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Counsel, from 1998 until 2005, hence his CBE.

      2. A nosy search on the web indicates that Mr Wazzockston was a practising barrister and that he served as Registrar of the Privy Counsel, hence his CBE.

    6. Mr Watherston, the alternative is back door trials conducted by the state, for the state. Judges are as corrupt and wet as any jury.

    7. Well, I am glad to have seen these two contrasting letters. They do encourage me to think hard about the issue of jury trials …. I would certainly not like to see juries full of urban public-sector snowflakes like my next-door neighbour … unless I were a brown-skinned “refugee” having committed a heinous crime (common enough in my own country/culture), but. hitherto, rare in England.

  15. Drivers conditioned by the quirks of old cars

    SIR – My first car (Letters, January 10) was a 1936 Ford Eight shooting brake, which was being used as a chicken coop until I “rescued” it in 1956 for £2.

    The rubber gasket designed to stop water ingress around the handbrake was missing. Every time I drove through a puddle a jet of cold water shot up my left leg, causing me to flinch. Now, aged 82, I drive a Mercedes – but I still flinch whenever I drive through a puddle.

    David Clarke

    Wickham Market, Suffolk

    SIR – In the late 1960s my husband and I acquired an old Rover 3000, which developed a faulty battery.

    Once, after I returned to the parked car, it refused to start. A passer-by offered assistance; I responded with thanks, but said it wasn’t necessary.

    I opened the boot, where the battery was located, and with the hammer kept there for the purpose gave the battery terminals a hefty blow.

    The gentleman stood and watched as I returned to the driver’s seat, started the car and drove off.

    Susan Fleck

    Gretton, Gloucestershire

    SIR – In March 1942 my father drove my mother to hospital in a 1939 Flying Standard 9 to give birth to me and my twin sister.

    Three years later, the car suffered minor damage when our house was hit by a V2 rocket. Fourteen years later I passed my driving test in it. I believe it is still taxed, insured and on the road.

    Roger Gough

    Billericay, Essex

    SIR – My first car, in the 1960s, was a red Isetta bubble car, a remarkable machine for which a reverse gear was considered an unnecessary luxury.

    It also boasted a front-opening door. After twice parking it head-on against a wall, and unable to reverse or escape, I bought a motorbike.

    Cameron Morice

    Reading, Berkshire

    1. Passing your driving test in a v2 rocket is impressive. I didn’t know they had mirrors or indicators!

      1. They reached Blighty without Satnavs.
        Mind you, they didn’t have to worry about the northbound side of the A12 being jammed from Chelmsford to Ipswich.

  16. Omicron has humiliated Britain’s dismal lockdown establishment. 11January 2022.

    By rights, omicron ought to have humiliated the pro-lockdowners. Their apocalyptic narrative has spectacularly collapsed. Daily deaths remain relatively stable, at less than a sixth of the figure projected by some Sage modelling. Premonitions that the Johnson Government had “left it too late” to protect the NHS from the new wave have, so far, proved excessively doomy, with the number of Covid hospitalisations down roughly 33 per cent compared with this time last year. The Manichean fairytale of lockdown legends (Nicola Sturgeon) and libertarian villains (Boris Johnson) has broken out in unhelpful shades of grey, with Scotland’s Covid rate higher than England’s despite tougher restrictions.

    You cannot humiliate those who feel no shame! Extract truth from Liars who feel no obligation to it. Judging by personal observation Lockdown is already dead in the minds of those who are supposed to obey it.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/10/omicron-has-humiliated-britains-dismal-lockdown-establishment/

    1. “A Sixth”???
      Sage and the cretin Ferguson were predicting 6000 death a DAY
      Actual numbers?? 77
      In reality it’s over but the Globo’s won’t let go,it’s now they’re at their most dangerous as their desperation to impose their will looks lost

      ‘Morning Minty

      1. The desperation of the guilty is reflected in the evermore harsh conditions they are trying to inflict on the people. The vile untruths and threats made towards those who have rejected being jabbed being a case in point. If the inoculation programme is waning in sympathy with the potion then, as poppiesmum has commented, the protagonists have other tools in their box e.g. financial collapse.

    3. Extract truth from Liars who feel no obligation to it.

      Or from those liars with so much to hide.

      Our government and its agencies are replete with liars: those who know what is going on, only a few naturally, and with many whom I believe have supported the liars by repeating the lies for their own reasons e.g. party before anything else; career prospects or just because they have not bothered to think i.e. stupid by any measure. Any Tory politician or agent of this government who promotes the “vaccine”, mask wearing, restriction on movement etc is guilty of at least one of the foregoing, if not all. As for the Opposition…

      1. There has been no opposition since the ’emergency’ powers commenced in March 2020. The country has been run by a coalition government since then; Sir Keef and co have abstained on a few minor points but opposed nil, indeed he has decried the leniency of some of the measures…before backtracking, again.

        The ’emergency’ powers will end in March 2022, unless the ‘mood of the House’ decides to extend it, in the vain hope that the incoming legal tsunami will sweep others away before reaching them and their communist cabal of behavioural ‘scientists’.

        We’re going to need a bigger reel of piano wire.

  17. Census record errors

    SIR – Christopher Sabin (Letters, January 8) is not quite right to say it costs £2.50 to search the new 1921 Census database provided by Findmypast. Searching is free, but when you find what you want it costs £2.50 to see the transcription of that individual Census return.

    My initial experience of using this database has not been good. The first search did not find my father, and it was only by guessing the name of the family he was staying with that I found the correct Census page. His misspelt surname in the transcription had confounded my search.

    There were at least four obvious transcription errors on this page, so I invested a further £3.50 to view the scanned image of the original Census return. This proved to have been completed in beautiful copperplate handwriting, and there was evidently no real excuse for the errors. I have since looked at other pages and seen more obvious transcription mistakes. One had the sexes and occupations of members of the household mixed up.

    This experience, coupled with the fact that I have so far failed to find certain other relatives, suggests to me that this transcription of the 1921 Census is of very poor quality. The nature of some of the errors I have seen hints that the transcriber perhaps had a less than perfect knowledge of English.

    I have used the online feature to report the errors.

    Stephen J Rowe

    Shepperton, Middlesex

    SIR – It is a pity that the millions invested by Findmypast to digitise the 1921 Census did not pay for transcription by people who could read the joined-up handwriting on the Census returns and type accurately on computers with spell checking.

    Among several howlers spotted in just a few searches was the information concerning my great-grandfather, who worked in a brass foundry (transcribed as bean foundry) and lived in Havelock Street (transcribed as Havtock Street).

    Dr Peter Robinson

    Blackland, Wiltshire

    2. It’s really not worth bothering with the transcripts. I haven’t looked yet but I will do.

      1. It appears that they are only charging for perusal until the transcribing costs have been met, so it is probably prudent to wait, J.

        1. The original images are usually much more interesting and not difficult to read. From what I’ve seen so far they are of high quality. I have a subscription but it doesn’t cover this. Will have a look soon but FMP no longer works on my laptop which is annoying.

  18. Good Morning all! Up here we await with bated breath the latest Covid pronouncements from our Dear Leader. Let us remind ourselves that the government has an overall majority and any opposition is always barking up the wrong tree.

    1. Considering Boris needs an inquiry to remember he was at a party breaking the covid rules he’d applied to us I really couldn’t care less what the hypocritical oaf says.

      I know that all government is, by default; corrupt. I accept that but this wasn’t money, it wasn’t a backhander, cash for honours, anything. It was supposedly a public health issue.

      He can sticl his parts up his backside.

  19. Good morning everybody.
    We Telegraph subscribers get a subtly personalised page created by little workers called alga-rhythms. Late last night I couldn’t resist clicking on a feature about Australasia, and here’s the byline:
    “Australian inspiration: Australia is waiting to welcome you back with
    open arms when the time is right – so take this time to dream of 11,000
    beaches, unique wildlife and beautiful, sun-drenched landscapes as you
    plan ahead for your next adventure Down Under”.
    “When the time is right”….
    Unfortunately I don’t believe that I will ever visit Australia, because it sounds like a good stopover on the way to New Zealand.

    1. It was never high on my travel list and has now gone altogether. For me it’s Africa every time.

        1. It is. Friendly people, good camps, knowledgeable guides and lots of wildlife. It looks as though I will finally get there next month but there are lots of hoops to jump through. No longer can you just book and go.

    2. New Zealand? Why on earth would you want to visit a couple of islands run by demented horse?

  20. The ‘Putin doctrine’ is an economic catastrophe. 11 January 2022.

    Countries that are drained of freedom are quickly drained of entrepreneurship and initiative as well.

    That would certainly explain the UK’s Economic Decline though not why Russia has a Space Industry, vast monetary and gold reserves; no debt worthy of the name and produces pretty much everything it needs for its own use!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/01/11/putin-doctrine-economic-catastrophe/

  21. Translating this medical, scientific, explanation into a motor car race, such as Le Mans 24hours, what they are saying is that some cars may be faster than others, go further than others, but none of them will finish the race. Place your bets…

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/59929638

    2. The journalist and writer of the article in your BBC link describes herself as a ‘Health and disinformation reporter’.

  22. “SIR – How does Dame Esther Rantzen know that the Bristol public demanded the removal of Edward Colston’s statue (Letters, January 10)? I do not recall any mandate.

    Laurence Dooley
    Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire”

    Tut, tut Mr Dooley. Ranter is a living saint – omniscient – and ubiquitous.

    She obviously discovered – to her surprise – that any bollox she writes to newspapers (and she irritates readers of The Grimes as well) will be published. And so keeps on and on. Perhaps she is really Ann Farmer….

    2. IIRC the statue was commissioned to commemorate Mr Colston´s generosity towards Bristol and its inhabitants. One solution would be for a different sort of Commission to investigate the current value of said generosity, and undertake to repay all that money to the countries of the West Indies; it should be a simple matter to raise a loan in the City of London that could be gradually re-paid by the local authority on behalf of the ratepayers.

      1. Those that pay the council tax are probably not the same people who wanted the statue removed.

        1. But they are probably the same people who quietly accepted their local police force standing by watching the statue pulled down.
          Living only 30 miles from Bristol, I have not seen or heard any rumblings from locals, radio or local news expressing anger or concern.
          Edit. Manners, good morning.

          2. Yes I saw the report, I also saw very little reporting in the following days criticising Avon & Somerset police and their lack of action.

          3. When the police were kneeling in frnt of the black looting mob I wasn’t ‘quietly accepting’ their surrender, I was damned furious. They should have been there, baton charging, stun grenades, tear gas, kettling the scum and beating them to the ground.

            There should have been lots and lots of blood as the looters were controlled and order imposed. How a tiny, uppity, violent effnik minority were allowed to do so much damage is unthinkable.

          4. We both know the police take their lead from those at the top, and that is where the sackings should begin.

        2. But they are probably the same people who quietly accepted their local police force standing by watching the statue pulled down.
          Living only 30 miles from Bristol, I have not seen or heard any rumblings from locals, radio or local news expressing anger or concern.
          Edit. Manners, good morning.

      2. Righto, well I want the Norweigians to pay me back for moving into Norfolk and Suffolk.

        Come to think of it, I reckon we’re owed a fair wodge from the Italians as well.

    3. I wonder whether Mr Watherston (letter further down) would be quite so keen on being tried without jury as I presume would be the case in France.

      However, from the tone of his letter I suspect in this instance he would be an enthusiast for such prosecutions.

  25. ‘Morning All

    #CovidClownWorld

    https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1480483557680324617?s=20

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/003b36c72dd5a48320dd36797b52019e86b13305651ae0bd579ae691d50b470b.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9e83c1c5d5640b84f5416c95dd442a51612cd0fc1748a16ff026a6e6c6027e0d.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/23cb06cd289011650695057abae42519feead223a6dc933583a1d5ac8db6c9b1.jpg

    Oof

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1116fca12b73a6283f9b317e1eac0c55d916a5947cfc40dd23afe8183aae988a.png

    1. Mrs Addams hits the nail firmly on the head. As Mark Twain may have said in 1906, ‘It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.’

      Or, reading through the same source…

      In 1647 Baltasar Gracian wrote, in his book ‘The Art of Worldly Wisdom’; ‘Every blockhead is thoroughly persuaded that he is in the right, and every one who is all too firmly persuaded is a blockhead, and the more erroneous is his judgement the greater the tenacity with which he holds it.’

      That certainly holds in both of my locals; I wander around mask and booster free, whilst my acquaintances fret about the latest pronouncement from Elsie McSelfie or one of her trained minions.

      It will be a long road back to ‘normality’ for some folks.

    1. 343984+ up ticks,
      O2O,
      He is that far right fruitcake ex leader of the real UKIP ain’t he Og, be telling us next that a continuing support / votes for the lab/lib/con coalition has brought about our near destruction of a once decent nation, WHERES HIS BLOODY PROOF ?

  29. As lateral flow tests are being discontinued because they are worthless, this presumably means that they have always been worthless. The time, money and man hours spent on these tests was a total waste, then?

  31. Interesting story from France today
    Apparently life assurance isn’t valid if you take experimental drugs and then die. Who knew that?
    When the family took it to court, the judge ruled that the death was suicide, because nobody forced him to take the jab, and the side effects have been publicised (have they?)

    https://ns2017.wordpress.com/2022/01/06/en-france-deces-apres-la-vaccination-dun-grand-pere-tres-fortune-ancien-chef-dentreprise-parisien-de-versailles-avec-assurance-vie-de-plusieurs-millions-deuro-pour-le-benefice-de-ses-enfants/

    Edit: how many of us have life assurances? I certainly do, to pay off the mortgage for my children in case anything happens to me. I certainly do not want to invalidate that. Another reason to add to the long list of why I don’t want to have the unnecessary gene therapy jab.

      1. Yes, I saw it just now. Why is air time being given to such nonsense? It can only be an attempt at intimidation.

    3. An elderly cynic writes. Nowhere in the “report” is the vaccine identified – nor the malady for which it was given.

      The old buffer might have had a jab of money glands.

      Until further and better particulars are produced – I do not believe that this case is covid related.

        1. And the plague has only been going for 22 months.

          It is FAR too soon for a French court case to be heard. They take years and years…

      2. Good points. But this ruling could perhaps also apply to the covid jabs – if the side effects are publicised? I certainly want to check with my life assurance company what they say about experimental injection damage.

        1. They’ll be (a) working from home and (b) unable to comment on hypothetical questions.

          1. My local agent is pretty good…his greatest asset is his “honest John” persona…it will be interesting to see what he says.

          2. I just called them, and apparently death from the corona injection is definitely covered in their life assurance. The clerk was able to tell me this off the top of her head, which means that it is a question has already come up. She didn’t know the answer to any other emergency licenced drug.
            The difference between the covid emergency licences and any other drug that is licenced for tests is not immediately clear to me. Another thing that we are just supposed to believe in and not ask questions, I suppose.

  34. For NtN

    There was a blonde who just got sick and tired of all the blonde jokes.
    One evening, she went home and memorized all the state capitals.
    Back in the office the next day, some guy started telling a dumb blonde joke.
    She interrupted him with a shrill announcement,
    “I’ve had it up to here with these blonde jokes.
    I want you to know that this blonde went home last night and did something probably none of you could do.
    I memorized all the state capitals.”
    One of the guys, of course, said, “I don’t believe you. What is the capital of Nevada?”

    “N,” she answered.

  35. For NtN

    There was a blonde who just got sick and tired of all the blonde jokes.
    One evening, she went home and memorized all the state capitals.
    Back in the office the next day, some guy started telling a dumb blonde joke.
    She interrupted him with a shrill announcement,
    “I’ve had it up to here with these blonde jokes.
    I want you to know that this blonde went home last night and did something probably none of you could do.
    I memorized all the state capitals.”
    One of the guys, of course, said, “I don’t believe you. What is the capital of Nevada?”

    “N,” she answered.

  36. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c13a42f22e2cdf84515c29eee2f709c4f205c3dd/0_0_1000_1500/master/1000.jpg?width=700&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=52b119d23edd6e478540564ebc4525a4
    ‘Mother and two-month-old baby Hoffmann’s two-toed sloths (Choloepus hoffmanni) that were rescued when their tree was chopped down with them in it. Miraculously, they survived the fall with only minor injuries and were re-released into the wild near Cahuita national park in Costa Rica.’

  37. The only positive thing about Esther Rantzen is that she used to have the excellent late, and much missed, Jake Thackray on her That’s Life programme.

    Rant – Zen?

    There is not much Zen in this odious woman’s Rants.

    Indeed, if Zen embodies a philosophy of peace and contemplation then this self-publicising old cow is nothing more than a bovine idiot – an Oxy moron!

  38. To NtN late last night

    Q. What does the receptionist at thesperm clinic say when clients are leaving?

    A Thanks for coming

  40. 343984+ up ticks,

    May one ask,
    In a wartime environment we are experiencing at this moment in time is there not a fringe party that should receive new bulk membership as a backstop to treachery ?

    I and many more UKIP called for this early post 24/6/2016
    to combat the “we won” now leave it to the tory’s (ino)

    I called for UKIP membership to be built on as a safeguard
    we are now witnessing the fallout from no attention being paid to that repeated cry.

    https://twitter.com/LSW12612672511/status/1480788990118793221

        1. I was amused by the M&S Christmas campaign this year where a little piggywig seemed to be prominent in the ads. I have no problem with it and when I last visited, the usual Arab immigrant who patrols the entrance to my local Simply Food pretending to sell ‘Big Issues’ was missing!

    2. that’s bad 🙁
      Hope he will be OK. If not, then it should serve as a grim warning to others.

    4. That is basically what happened to a friend just before Christmas he had not long had his booster had a massive heart attack and died of a stroke when he was taken into hospital.
      But still no connection mentioned to covid.

  44. Funny Old World

    ‘WTF were they thinking?’ Tories turn on Boris as he
    faces police probe threat after bombshell leaked email shows his top
    civil servant invited 100 staff to ‘BYOB’ bash in Downing St at height
    of Covid lockdown in May 2020 – and PM and Carrie ‘joined in’
    Every Time the Fataturk dithers on introducing more controls,vaxxine passports or social credit “controls” out comes yet ANOTHER party story
    Of course no senior MSM were present and they certainly never heard about it for two years(sarc)
    So why now?? Cui Bono??
    For me,BoJo wants to be liked,he hasn’t the balls to implement the full WEF that will take a Savage Jabber or a Grima Govetongue be very careful what we wish for folks

    1. I fear mandatory jabs for OAPs in Boris’s super plan for “freedom” due out in March.

        1. It wouldn’t stop at over 60s of course.
          Next year it would be over 50s, then over 40s etc, if people are stupid enough to accept it.

      2. Mandatory, but not necessarily lawful in the legal sense. But they may make life very difficult for us, deny access to the nhs etc. Let’s see what happens with the health workers.

        1. I read a post the other day that suggested that teh German government is going to be looking very carefully at how many people leave their health service after jabs become mandatory, to see whether it’s feasible to implement the same for teh general population.
          The UK will probably be doing the same. Every care worker or health worker who leaves, is striking a blow for all of us.

    2. The elevated Ruth Davidson was sounding off a few moments ago about the breaking of rules while the rest of us suffered the restrictions.
      Nobody is asking the obvious question – how did Johnson get to be PM?

      1. To me the obvious question is, if they felt safe mingling together without social distancing or masks, why can not the rest of us do the same? Why do we need restrictions at all?

        1. It has always struck me that if various politicians, rich bar stewards, civil servants and, of course, Ferguson are apparently happy to ignore all the rules that they have imposed to help us survive the killer pandemic, then they must feel that it isn’t, in fact, that dangerous??

    3. Fiddling at the edges of the cess pit, Every single one of the present cabinet are committing the serious offence of misconduct in public office. They are promoting the use of injectates on the people that are known to cause serious harm – both by the results of thousands of peer-reviewed studies and by the actual metrics that show large numbers of casualties. They are party to massive efforts to suppress the truth of the matter, and the truth of the fraud of the re-branded flu that has carried them this far into the violent war against us.

      Party politics is just what the Globalists like – divide and rule. Time to get real and understand this is now a binary confrontation – evil is the enemy whether it presses more Order or more Chaos. Was Stalin a Commy or a Fascist dictator – do we care?

      https://www.tarableu.com/links-here-to-1000-peer-reviewed-studies-that-say-the-jabs-are-dangerous/

    5. During the lock up a friend of mine was made redundant – he lost his job as the company he was working for folded. He tried to kill himself, so distraught was he. Never a particularly stable person, he’d just passed his qualification, had a new born child to support and couldn’t get through to the council for help.

      Then this bunch of turds sit, floating about in the garden, quaffing booze having a wail of a time.

      We’d vastly improve this country by removing Westminster and the entirety of Whitehall.

      1. Step-ladders, lamp-posts and piano-wire, all spring to mind.

        Westminster, be afraid, be very afraid!

      2. Step-ladders, lamp-posts and piano-wire, all spring to mind.

        Westminster, be afraid, be very afraid!

    6. My normally non-political hairdresser was discussing this matter with another client.
      At about the time these parties were taking place, she and her husband had to settle for a Golden Wedding celebration that consisted of guests peering through windows or small numbers sitting well spaced out at different times in the garden.
      She was not impressed.
      OK, being a Bolshie couple, MB and I wouldn’t have done that, but the constant need to be alert and practically speaking in whispers in your own garden would have cast a blight on the proceedings. I cannot forget my normally feisty cousin imploring us to keep our voices down when we had tea in the garden during the summer of 2020.
      The old GDR apparatchiks would have rendered speechless in admiration.

    2. You have not set up an effective system for reporting side effects from the vaccines and reports on side effects have even been deleted from your Facebook page. Doctors avoid linking side effects to the vaccine, lest you persecute them as you did to some of their colleagues.
      It seems likely that the whole covid exercise was well rehearsed and discussed long before it took place. No wonder they have hidden the pre discussions for more the 50 years.

  46. Another case of “But we already knew that!”

    Common cold might have given Britons protection from Covid before pandemic began

    Memory T-cells from colds could be the secret weapon against infection, study suggests

    By Sarah Knapton, SCIENCE EDITOR • 10 January 2022 • 10:10am

    Large numbers of Britons were already protected from coronavirus before the pandemic began because of previous exposure to common colds, a ground-breaking new study suggests.

    Researchers at Imperial College found that half of people living with an infected person in the second wave – before vaccines were available – were carrying high levels of memory T-cells from colds that may have stopped them picking up the virus.

    The study helps explain why some people never get infected, and also sheds light on why older people – who are less likely to pick up colds – are more susceptible, while children – who suffer many colds every year – are more protected.

    The T-cells target proteins found deep within the core of many coronaviruses and rarely change even when the virus mutates on the outside.

    The researchers believe that these core proteins could be used to create a universal vaccine that would fight all new variants. Current vaccines are based on the spike protein which sits on the outside of cells, and which is prone to mutating.

    Prof Ajit Lalvani, senior author of the study and director of the NIHR Respiratory Infections Health Protection Research Unit at Imperial, told The Telegraph that the protective T-cells were likely to be present in a large number of people.

    “It’s a good proportion of the population, a third in our study,” he said: “It explains the good outcomes or resistance to infection for some people.”

    He added: “It’s been a fundamental question since the start of the pandemic, why is there such a wide spectrum of outcomes in a naive population, some people in intensive care and dying and others not even getting infected?

    “So it was postulated that exposure to common colds may leave memory T-cells that would protect people even though they’ve never seen Sars-CoV-2.”

    Early on in the pandemic, studies showed that some people carried immune cells that could recognise Covid-19 even though they had never been infected.

    University College London even discovered that blood samples taken before the pandemic carried this immunity, but it was not known if it was actually stopping people picking up the virus.

    To answer the question, Imperial recruited several hundred households in London last winter before the vaccine programme began, and took blood samples to measure levels of memory T-cells from colds before waiting to see who caught the virus.

    During the study period 52 people ended up living with someone who tested positive for coronavirus.

    The researchers found that there were significantly higher levels of cross-reactive T-cells from colds in the 26 people who did not become infected, compared with the 26 people who did become infected.

    Prof Lalvani added: “We’ve finally reached the Holy Grail which shows that those who were exposed but didn’t get infected had these types of T-cells. These are people who would have picked up a cold, one, two, three years before and their immune cells were in a memory state.

    “Coronaviruses are a wide tribe, and these common cold viruses are quite far apart, yet even the T-cells targeting these distant relatives can cross-protect, so imagine if you took one of the core proteins of Sars-Cov-2 and put in a vaccine. The T-cells would cross-recognise variants which opens the door to a universal vaccine that will protect you against all current and future mutant strains as they arise.

    “Such a vaccine would not need to be given as frequently because the memory T-cells last longer than the antibodies. We’re in this awful position where we need boosters every three months, but with T-cells you could cut it down to every year or two years.”

    The study was carried out before omicron was circulating in Britain and before the vaccination programme began, meaning that most immunity is now likely to be from vaccine and past infection.

    It is also likely that memory T-cells from common colds have now dropped in the population because of many months of lockdown, social distancing and mask-wearing, which has seen respiratory viruses plummet.

    “You would expect if people have not recently seen the common cold virus they wouldn’t have had their usual bout of cold they would they would be more susceptible to more Covid,” Prof Lalvani added.

    Scientists also warned that not all colds are caused by coronaviruses, so people should not think they are necessarily protected if they have recently had a cold.

    Dr Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, said: “It seems unlikely that everyone who has died or had a more serious infection, has never had a cold caused by a coronavirus.

    “It could be a grave mistake to think that anyone who has recently had a cold is protected against Covid-19, as coronaviruses only account for 10-15 per cent of colds.”

    Commenting on the research, Mala Maini, professor of viral immunology at University College London, added: “T-cells recognise viral fragments once they have got into cells, rather than blocking infection as antibodies can, so it is likely that the household members testing negative in this study had a transient abortive infection that didn’t get picked up by PCR tests rather than completely resisting infection.

    “Just because somebody didn’t get infected once doesn’t mean their cross-reactive T-cells can protect them against more infectious variants so future vaccines that boost more robust and flexible immune responses are the key going forward.

    The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/10/common-cold-might-have-given-britons-protection-covid-pandemic

    2. My goodness! T Cells?! What are these newfound inventions of modern science! Why didn’t we know about these before covid!

      1. A high T cell count was needed to survive HIV/Aids. Yet another man made virus that got loose.

    3. Given that masks, sanitisers, social distancing and lockdowns ensure less human interaction, could we be doing more harm by reducing the likelihood that we get colds?
      This whole episode of Covid is ripe for numerous instances of the law of unintended consequences to come about.

  47. Foreign meddling behind Kazakhstan unrest, Putin claims. 11 January 2022.

    Vladimir Putin has claimed the unrest in Kazakhstan last week that killed at least 164 people was the result of foreign meddling, and said a Russian-led military bloc should take steps to ensure that future attempts to interfere in the region failed.

    Protests, which began over a sharp rise in fuel prices, quickly spread across the country, but were taken over by violent groups who stormed government buildings and the airport in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s biggest city. Widespread looting followed.

    Yes it has all the hall marks of Mi6/CIA though it was probably brought forward in response to the Ukraine crisis to compound Russia’s political difficulties!

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/10/foreign-meddling-behind-kazakhstan-unrest-putin-claims

    2. They denied that they had ever had “work” on their faces.

      They were also known to be serial liars.

    3. Weird – they were good-looking as young men – whatever posessed them to make themselves look like that?

      1. Re, document..
        So how was it possible for Novak Djokovic to have submitted a valid form by December 10, if his ‘qualifying’ infection (now over) was not first detected until December 16?

        1. Plum, I wish the media would pay attention to the lies they tell every day to manipulate the population, and the lies of our politicians and nhs.

        3. He submitted it later?
          The media is trying to portray him as a lone con artist and chancer, but reality is that he has a team of lawyers and assistants to check the rules and handle tournament entries. If recent infections don’t count any more in Australia, they should just change the rules and have done with it. As it is, they’re giving a strong impression that they just don’t want to risk a prominent jab refuser winning a major tournament.

  50. I read the following article and immediately thought Pot, Kettle, Black.
    Jacobs has sprayed her volley of criticism far and wide, SAGE, the Whitehall blob, quangos, politicians etc but no mention of the DT or indeed the Lame Stream Media and their involvement of project fear.

    Omicron has humiliated Britain’s dismal lockdown establishment
    Sherelle Jacobs 10 January 2022 • 9:30pm
    6-8 minutes

    By rights, omicron ought to have humiliated the pro-lockdowners. Their apocalyptic narrative has spectacularly collapsed. Daily deaths remain relatively stable, at less than a sixth of the figure projected by some Sage modelling. Premonitions that the Johnson Government had “left it too late” to protect the NHS from the new wave have, so far, proved excessively doomy, with the number of Covid hospitalisations down roughly 33 per cent compared with this time last year. The Manichean fairytale of lockdown legends (Nicola Sturgeon) and libertarian villains (Boris Johnson) has broken out in unhelpful shades of grey, with Scotland’s Covid rate higher than England’s despite tougher restrictions.

    Mr Johnson could not have asked for a more auspicious political moment to usher in a new phase of Covid, where we finally learn to live with the virus. His authority has to some extent been rescued, as he has been vindicated by his decision (or at least, that of his Cabinet) not to follow Ms Sturgeon into further restrictions over Christmas. While Scottish business leaders implore her to scrap curbs on restaurants, pubs and large gatherings, some figures in Holyrood are calling for a coherent national Covid response coordinated from Westminster.

    With Britain a closely-watched epicentre of omicron in Europe, the PM is well-placed to lead the rest of the developed world, too, as it comes to terms with the realities of endemic Covid. South Africa has done precisely this for low-to-middle-income countries. A relatively poor nation where three quarters are unvaccinated and a health system weighed down with the double burden of TB and HIV, it has none the less ridden out an omicron wave without having to cancel elective surgeries. Having opted for a curfew rather than a lockdown, it has lifted all restrictions apart from a ban on indoor gatherings of more than 1,000 people, and masks.

    Here is Britain’s chance to show that ageing but well-vaccinated Western countries with superior health services can do one better, avoiding seasonal restrictions altogether.

    A courageous leader would seize this moment to scrap mass testing (replacing it with regular testing for high risk groups like health workers and delivery drivers). At the same time, they would turbocharge Britain’s variant preparedness plan, announcing a new Porton Down-style complex to develop jabs for future variants (following the initial scramble to develop Covid jabs, UK Government investment in vaccine r&d has proved surprisingly modest). They would launch a revamped antivirals taskforce – dedicated to investment in the kind of treatments that, in combination with vaccines, can once and for all demolish hospitalisation rates.

    And yet I fear that none of this is going to happen – or at least that it will happen only the tentative, cowardly and piecemeal way we have got used to. Why? Far from being humiliated by the experience of omicron, the lockdown camp maintains a dismal grip on the debate. Ministers continue to indulge the scientific establishment’s groupthink on free mass testing, pouring cold water on suggestions that it might be scrapped even though only 18 per cent of people who test positive isolate properly. They show no sign of withdrawing masks in schools, despite a lack of robust evidence that the benefits of such a practice outweigh the harms. They appear to be edging towards shortening the self-isolation period to five days, but weeks after the US successfully did the same.

    Moreover, far from winding down, Project Fear is becoming institutionalised, as Public Health England’s replacement, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), is fashioned into a propaganda arm, pumping out worst-case scenario modelling to complement Sage. The basic elements that need to be in place to live with Covid – like an advanced bulk vaccine manufacturing industry, and a robust variant preparedness plan – are being held back by civil service red tape. Again, the question is: why? The answer: a combination of state incompetence and middle-class vested interests.

    Nowhere is the wicked problem of dysfunction clearer than with respect to the NHS. It does not seem to be being overwhelmed by omicron, so much as by a HR crisis, as sickness absences double. The unfolding logistical nightmare might have been alleviated if only No 10 had had the foresight to build up a reserve force of retired and medical student volunteers. So too the political posturing: for all the shiny announcements about NHS recruitment drives, the Treasury continues to block any attempt to work out how many nurses and doctors are actually needed. Canny hospital trusts, in turn, brief “scary” rises in figures, even when their critical capacity appears to be stable.

    Meanwhile, the Whitehall Blob has learned fast that a permanent semi-emergency affords it the best of both worlds. Dysfunctional bodies can dodge accountability. Take the UKHSA – an umbrella organisation that oversees, among other things, the calamitous test-and-trace system. It continues to operate in bunker mode, unable to confirm to Parliament things as basic as its objectives and aims, and how it measures performance. At the same time, bureaucrats can cling to procedure and undermine projects that threaten their groupthink. This appears to be particularly scuppering vital attempts to build up the UK’s vaccine manufacturing capabilities.

    All the while, pro-lockdown arguments are still being amplified by influential players. Covid has given a fresh lease of life to Britain’s dying trade unions. It has conferred new strategic power on the HR industry, which has been losing boardroom influence over recent years (ironically too subsumed in the paperwork of its own processes to impact real decision-making). Annual hibernations suit middle class professionals, a newly powerful swing voting force, as politics realigns, with owners and the working class on one side and the administrative bourgeoisie on the other.

    It is a fearsome alliance, and one that only a small number of politicians have thus far been courageous enough to properly confront. But Mr Johnson may soon have no choice but to do so. The senior Tory backbencher Mark Harper has warned that “prime ministers are on a performance-related contract” and that Mr Johnson faces revolt if the last remaining Covid restrictions aren’t rescinded soon. The UK is running out of time to rid itself of the failed pro-lockdown ideology. Perhaps the Prime Minister is too.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/01/10/omicron-has-humiliated-britains-dismal-lockdown-establishment/

    2. My close neighbour and friend was all for lockdown until I told him that his share of government’s over-spending meant he’d effectively owed all his wages for the year. Then his employer’s business collapsed 6 months ago, he was made redundant and he’s not been able to get another job. Formerly apolitical, he now hates Johnson and Starmer with a passion.

    3. In fairness to Sherelle, she has always been a sceptic and on the side of freedom. But she is young and does need to keep her job, so omission rather than outright accusation is probably the only realistic option for her at the moment.
      I do disagree with her on regular testing – delivery drivers, forsooth!

  51. Why living with the virus means living with the unvaccinated too

    While the jab can make sense to those who are young, healthy or already had Covid, others won’t be swayed – and they aren’t going anywhere

    By Harry de Quetteville • 11 January 2022 • 5:00am

    No one much likes Novak Djokovic. Even when he wins, he loses, with crowds loudly willing his opponent on. His astonishing resilience on court is dismissed as robotic, his superhuman fitness a form of sneering at more frail, fallible mortals.

    That public antipathy may initially have blinded the world to the grotesque treatment he endured in Australia. One thing is certain, it would never have happened to Roger Federer. But there is something deeply chilling about the sight of a man deemed a political threat, on his own, being spirited away by the heavies at an airport. It is the kind of thing that happens to Alexei Navalny flying into Moscow, not the world No 1 tennis player arriving to defend his title in a liberal democracy.

    Yet his youth and fitness are a reminder of why some vaccine strategies have gone off the rails, not just in Australia, but in Europe too. For the evidence suggests that whether it is a young tennis player, or young drinkers out trying to enjoy themselves, the wrong people are being targeted by harsh vaccine restrictions around the world.

    Djokovic challenges a draconian Covid strategy down under that has governed life for countless months. It is, as Dominic Wilkinson, professor of medical ethics at the University of Oxford, points out, a strategy founded in the nation’s isolation, which has allowed it to pretend it can cut itself off from the pandemic. But as Wilkinson, himself half-English and half-Australian, also notes: “The difficulty was always going to be in sustaining that.”

    Like every other government, the Australian authorities are weighing up how to get back to normal life. Given we cannot eliminate the disease, the path to attaining this, says Wilkinson, is obvious: ensure enough people have enough immunity to prevent Covid posing a serious threat. “The question is how do you get from here to there?”

    The answer is building populations’ resistance through either vaccination or “natural immunity” – catching Covid and fighting it off. Or both.

    Djokovic argues that, having recently recovered from Covid, he benefits from natural immunity. But in a country where Covid has until recently been rare, and which has still recorded less than a million cases, compared to 14.5 million in the UK, natural immunity is dismissed. Vaccination is king.

    Even in the UK, where so many of us have caught the disease, this “natural immunity” defence is still officially considered suspect. Hence the Health Secretary Sajid Javid’s shock on being told last week by Steve James, an ICU consultant at Kings College Hospital, that James had not yet been vaccinated and did not want to be, because “the science is not strong enough”.

    It is easy to protest, as Dr Peter English, a former consultant in communicable disease control, did yesterday, that healthcare workers refusing vaccines are “irresponsible” because they risk both transmitting the disease to vulnerable patients and, potentially, falling ill and taking up an NHS bed themselves.

    Yet, on the risk of infection, as Dr Julian Tang, clinical virologist, respiratory sciences, at the University of Leicester, has pointed out, “natural infection with viruses generally provides longer lasting and broader immune protection, compared to vaccination”.

    And, on transmission, Javid’s own Department of Health has just released a study showing that while vaccines cut transmission for the original Covid strain, new strains see both vaccinated and unvaccinated people transmitting the virus at similar rates.

    This is, as Wilkinson is at pains to point out, not to suggest that immunity acquired from catching Covid is somehow preferable to getting a jab. The dangers of contracting Covid are far greater than any potential vaccine side effects. “I think there are strong reasons to have a vaccine for health professionals,” he says. “The question is whether it’s ethically justified to force people to have a vaccine if they have had a confirmed infection… because there is reasonable evidence that those who have had the vaccine and those who have had an infection have similar protection from infection and risk of passing on the virus.”

    Across the Atlantic, there are similar doubts. “If you listen to the language of our public health officials, they talk about the vaccinated and the unvaccinated,” Marty Makary, professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University told the British Medical Journal last autumn, in an article reviewing a host of studies that described similar protection from vaccine and infection-led immunity. “If we want to be scientific, we should talk about the immune and the non-immune.”

    It is a distinction certain to become ever more stark, ever more fraught, because of the increasing use of vaccine mandates around the world by governments, schools and employers – Italy is even banning the unvaccinated from ski lifts. Ignoring infection history also throws broader government vaccination policy, beyond vaccine mandates, into doubt, in the UK as much as in Australia.

    Here, young people have been targeted with measures requiring them to show proof of vaccination to enter nightclubs. As many in the industry predicted, it appears to be having little effect. Latest ONS figures show the highest rates of infection among young adults.

    Indeed, a year into the vaccination campaign, it is beginning to become clear who is most in need of jabs and boosters. And the answer is the same as at the start of the pandemic. Then policy was framed as if the virus did not discriminate. It soon became clear this was not true. The elderly and those with co-morbidities were very much more at risk. The same people, it seems clear, should be the focus of vaccination campaigns.

    Indeed, demonising the unvaccinated, notably the young and fit, is almost certainly counter-productive. In the first six months of last year, 67 per cent of the population received at least their first jab. Since then, however, only another 10 per cent have come forward, leaving almost a quarter entirely unjabbed. Discounting children under 12, not yet eligible for a vaccine, that leaves up to six million Britons unjabbed. Many are teenagers and young adults, up to a third of whom are not fully vaccinated.

    But in some areas, particularly in London, over a quarter of over-60s are not double jabbed. Ethnic minorities suffer disproportionately. In the latest ONS figures, the lowest third-dose and booster vaccination coverage was among Pakistani (42.2 per cent), black Caribbean (44.4 per cent) and black African (45.4 per cent) ethnic groups. Almost all white people aged 80 and above are fully jabbed, while only four out of five black people over 80 are, which a government report last month blamed for higher death rates among minorities.

    These are the groups that would most benefit from the protection of vaccines. Yet coercion is unlikely to change their minds. Indeed, it is a blunt tool. In the latest ONS survey, fewer than two in 10 of those hesitant to have a vaccine said needing one to work or go on holiday might make them change their mind. The most persuasive reason, for the slim minority willing to countenance it, was altruism – to protect others.

    These millions are not anti-vaxxers – militant, headline-hogging campaigners calling doctors and nurses administering jabs murderers. But they are damned by association, making many even more reluctant to come forward now.

    Some GPs, like Dr Azhar Farooqi, in Leicester, have realised a less confrontational approach is required. Having noticed that many of his highest-risk patients, particularly from poorer or ethnic minority backgrounds, were turning down the jab, he telephoned them personally for a reassuring chat. On the spot, 70 per cent changed their minds.

    It is the very opposite of the French president Emmanuel Macron’s decision to “p— off” the unvaccinated, making it increasingly hard for them to live without it.

    Indeed, insisting people take vaccines to protect themselves is not just of questionable effectiveness, it is also morally wrong, says Wilkinson. “It’s a bad ethical reason, it’s a paternalistic reason, it says government knows better than you what to do with your own health.”

    As a society we have chosen not to favour paternalistic health policies, on smoking or drinking, or obesity. Yet with the pandemic, he laments, such nuanced approaches have suffered. “Governments might prefer to keep things very black and white. You get the vaccine, or you don’t get in [to a bar or club, or country]. But ethics is not always simple and black and white. And if you’re restricting people’s freedom, you ought to do so on the basis of evidence and on the basis of valid reasons.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/11/living-virus-means-living-unvaccinated/

    1. Like every other government, the Australian authorities are weighing up how to make authoritarian decrees and restrictions seem to be completely normal. Fixed!

      1. Australian or Austrian? There appears to be more than homophonics at work here.
        No wonder I used to get the countries muddled when I was a child.

    2. Several downright lies in the above article. One is the line highlighted by Rose. Another is “As a society we have chosen not to favour paternalistic health policies, on smoking or drinking, or obesity”
      Smoking bans and taxes, tax on alcohol and sugar, constant media nudges – what are those if not a paternalistic government-knows-best approach?

    4. Hard, not to notice that, of the unjabbed, no mention is made of Muslims unjabbed.

      Could it be that the Muslim population are either NOT asked, or prevent any questions BEING asked?

    5. I should have thought that being young, healthy and/or having already recovered from the plague was a cast iron reason for having the jab NOT making sense!

    1. “I’m late for the stag do, must rush, oops!” Obviously the buck doesn’t stop here.

        1. 343984+ up ticks,

          Afternoon Anne,
          Have to ask the hunter that one, he had much closer contact by the sound of the oooff at meeting conclusion.

    2. Global events and the perpetrators roundly abused? What planet is this bloke living on?

      Muslim terrorist blows up a bus and kills a dozen people.
      The following chain of events starts up:
      The media report white, male Right wing mentally lone wolf suicide vest wearer has blown themself up on a bus.

      Not religiously motivated.

      Murderer unknown
      Killer identified as Abdul Bud Ding, an illegal immigrant and fervent Muslim.
      Police move to protect mosques

      Killer still reported as mentally ill lone wolf not religiously motivated.
      Witnesses report the man was looking for a loo and a snack bar.
      Media buries the story.
      BBC wheels on muslim to say that muslims are persecuted and should be given more tax payers money. Complaint made that this is just muslims practicing their own culture and that hindering it will bring reprisals.

      BBC tells us is all the fault of white men.

      A year later the terrorist attack is suppressed and ignored by the press, government and white men blamed.

  54. 343984+ up ticks,

    May one ask,
    We have criminals working in number 10, are the cleaners
    safe ?

    Illegal Migrant With Criminal Record Discovered at Swedish Prime Minister’s House… Working as Cleaner

    2. That is cruel and unnatural punishment.
      Force feed him Lamingtons and the UN will have to step in.

  56. Good Moa Afternoon.
    Thanks to my hairdressers’ valiant efforts, I am now temporarily restored to my former glory.
    If the rain can hold off until Spartie has had his walk I’ll be a happy bunny.

  58. A husband and wife were driving through Louisiana.

    As they approached Natchitoches, they started arguing about the pronunciation of the town.

    They argued back and forth, then they stopped for lunch.

    At the counter, the husband asked the blonde waitress,

    “Before we order, could you please settle an argument for us?

    Would you please pronounce where we are very slowly?”

    She leaned over the counter and said, “Burrr-gerrr Kiiing.”

    1. My wife and I had been to Boston Mass for the day, took the train back to Hyaniss station drove the hire car back to Falmouth, we drove into a ‘Burger joint’ to buy a take away, it went like this…….from the parking area and the Buzz remote. Yes, what would you like to order ? Two whoppers chips and salad please. You want whaaat ?? Two whoppers chips and salad please,…..again …….two whaaaat ?? (Too English). Okay,… two Whapppppppurrs chips and salad. As we picked them up the young staff looked as us both as if were were aliens. As we probably were.

        1. They must have understood chips. Good job i’m not a Kiwi. We still be sitting there.
          Another laugh was we went out somewhere else for the day as you do and left the do not disturb notice on the Hotel room Door. That evening were were in a local bar and some people sitting next to us were some the staff in the hotel. One of them said, And they were in there all day ??? And the other replied are they English ?? We finished our drinks and left they didn’t recognise us,……… but we didn’t want to hear any more.

        1. We went to a sea food restaurant on evening and the waitress was rather concerned that we had consumed two glasses of wine each, we explained we had walked to the Venue, something they don’t seem to do in the US. And half way through the meal, I had a sea food platter. She came a said, would you like ketchup with your fries ?
          There were so many clams and oysters etc in the huge dish I had no idea there were fries underneath.

  59. I’m surprised the Prof hasn’t been no-platformed.

    Masking children is illogical and irrational

    By restricting the activities of healthy young people we could be prolonging the Covid nightmare

    SUNETRA GUPTA • 10 January 2022 • 7:00am

    Any enlightened society supports a diversity of opinion on political matters, but we all tend to agree, generally, on a set of ethical principles and, even more closely, on the logical arguments upon which these are founded. This means that when a proposition can be dismissed on the basis of logic, there need be no further discussion of the ethics (where we may differ somewhat) or the political implications (where we may differ quite widely).

    The argument for masking children, or obliging them to be vaccinated against a pathogen that is less likely to kill them than many others in normal circulation, should have stopped at the level of logic rather than continuing into a debate over its ethical and political implications. Neither masks nor vaccines can reliably prevent children from passing Sars-CoV-2 onto others, and I worry for the unvaccinated grandparent in a multi-generational household who believes themselves to be protected because their grandchild is attending school with an unpleasant (and environmentally unfriendly) piece of material on their face. I remain convinced that many people (including my cousins in India) have lost their lives labouring under this misapprehension.

    There is now ample observational data to suggest that mask mandates do not work, and the few formal trials that have been conducted show no credible effect. The failure of the modelling exercises conducted by Sage and their satellites in predicting cases and deaths allows us to reject the role of such non-pharmaceutical interventions in driving the dynamics of spread.

    But rather than reviling and ridiculing these modellers, we should ask them to accept the alternative scenario (based on sound well-established principles of epidemiology) where the waxing and waning of herd immunity plays a central role in how the virus spreads. This would not only resolve a long-standing (but polite) argument between myself and Neil Ferguson, but clarify that the last thing we should be doing is subjecting children to these grotesque measures. Indeed, our only way out of the epidemic is by permitting herd immunity levels to be constantly topped up through the infection of those who are not vulnerable to severe disease and death.

    But what if it had been the case that vaccinating children under the threat of keeping them out of school, slapping masks on them, forcing them to shiver in “ventilated” classrooms and eating lunch in the cold, depriving them of extra-curricular activities and the like, actually worked to protect the vulnerable rather than potentially increasing their risk and prolonging their exposure?

    This is where we move into the ethical mantle from the logical core, and may expect some disagreement between those who (like myself) prioritise the well-being of children and young adults ahead of those of us who have already had a large portion of our allotted cake (as the scientist Paul Dolan would call it). The idea that I might not be able to tolerate a small risk of dying from a respiratory illness in order to teach my students – or indeed cause any disruption at this tricky time in their lives – is morally repugnant to me. But I understand why others feel differently.

    Opinions become even more diverse as we move from the mantle of ethics into the outer crust of politics in this planetary cross-section of human attitudes. Not everyone may care that restrictions which disrupt school attendance have devastating consequences for children from poorer backgrounds, compromising both their current safety and future prospects. In many regions of the world, the closure of schools has spelled the end of freedom from a brutal existence and I was saddened to read that many Indian states are going down this route now that cases are inevitably rising again.

    Ultimately, the argument for imposing restrictions upon children should die within the logical core we all share as international participants in the culture of enlightenment (lest anyone see it as a European construct): there is no rational case for them. Banning singing lessons on the basis of the simplistic notion that singing causes the virus to spread further is as much a failure of critical thinking as it is of the moral and socio-political imagination.

    Sunetra Gupta is professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/10/masking-children-illogical-irrational/

  60. I’m surprised the Prof hasn’t been no-platformed.

    Masking children is illogical and irrational

    By restricting the activities of healthy young people we could be prolonging the Covid nightmare

    SUNETRA GUPTA • 10 January 2022 • 7:00am

    Any enlightened society supports a diversity of opinion on political matters, but we all tend to agree, generally, on a set of ethical principles and, even more closely, on the logical arguments upon which these are founded. This means that when a proposition can be dismissed on the basis of logic, there need be no further discussion of the ethics (where we may differ somewhat) or the political implications (where we may differ quite widely).

    The argument for masking children, or obliging them to be vaccinated against a pathogen that is less likely to kill them than many others in normal circulation, should have stopped at the level of logic rather than continuing into a debate over its ethical and political implications. Neither masks nor vaccines can reliably prevent children from passing Sars-CoV-2 onto others, and I worry for the unvaccinated grandparent in a multi-generational household who believes themselves to be protected because their grandchild is attending school with an unpleasant (and environmentally unfriendly) piece of material on their face. I remain convinced that many people (including my cousins in India) have lost their lives labouring under this misapprehension.

    There is now ample observational data to suggest that mask mandates do not work, and the few formal trials that have been conducted show no credible effect. The failure of the modelling exercises conducted by Sage and their satellites in predicting cases and deaths allows us to reject the role of such non-pharmaceutical interventions in driving the dynamics of spread.

    But rather than reviling and ridiculing these modellers, we should ask them to accept the alternative scenario (based on sound well-established principles of epidemiology) where the waxing and waning of herd immunity plays a central role in how the virus spreads. This would not only resolve a long-standing (but polite) argument between myself and Neil Ferguson, but clarify that the last thing we should be doing is subjecting children to these grotesque measures. Indeed, our only way out of the epidemic is by permitting herd immunity levels to be constantly topped up through the infection of those who are not vulnerable to severe disease and death.

    But what if it had been the case that vaccinating children under the threat of keeping them out of school, slapping masks on them, forcing them to shiver in “ventilated” classrooms and eating lunch in the cold, depriving them of extra-curricular activities and the like, actually worked to protect the vulnerable rather than potentially increasing their risk and prolonging their exposure?

    This is where we move into the ethical mantle from the logical core, and may expect some disagreement between those who (like myself) prioritise the well-being of children and young adults ahead of those of us who have already had a large portion of our allotted cake (as the scientist Paul Dolan would call it). The idea that I might not be able to tolerate a small risk of dying from a respiratory illness in order to teach my students – or indeed cause any disruption at this tricky time in their lives – is morally repugnant to me. But I understand why others feel differently.

    Opinions become even more diverse as we move from the mantle of ethics into the outer crust of politics in this planetary cross-section of human attitudes. Not everyone may care that restrictions which disrupt school attendance have devastating consequences for children from poorer backgrounds, compromising both their current safety and future prospects. In many regions of the world, the closure of schools has spelled the end of freedom from a brutal existence and I was saddened to read that many Indian states are going down this route now that cases are inevitably rising again.

    Ultimately, the argument for imposing restrictions upon children should die within the logical core we all share as international participants in the culture of enlightenment (lest anyone see it as a European construct): there is no rational case for them. Banning singing lessons on the basis of the simplistic notion that singing causes the virus to spread further is as much a failure of critical thinking as it is of the moral and socio-political imagination.

    Sunetra Gupta is professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/10/masking-children-illogical-irrational/

    1. He probably misheard, it was Midsomer Murders and they wanted clues on how theirs are solved.

    1. Too much inbreeding? – But on the bright side same sex unions may reduce this problem.

    1. There’s a poster all over the London Underground of a group of kids standing in front of a rubbish dump. It’s supposed to be making a greenie point about recycling, general wastefulness, or some such but what strikes me is the state of the kids – dishevelled, messy and badly dressed. If you look closely they’re clean but still, anyone from the 50’s would assume they were strays and living on the dump.

  64. ‘Stop lying Boris!’ Johnson dodges Commons grilling after email shows his top aide invited 100 staff to ‘BYOB’ bash in Downing St at height of Covid lockdown in May 2020 – but No10 says Martin Reynolds WON’T be sacked and row was IGNORED at Cabinet meeting.
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html

    “The raging ‘Partygate’ row was not even mentioned at Cabinet this morning, according to No10. Mr Johnson is also sending a junior minister to field an urgent question in the Commons this afternoon, rather than facing a grilling himself.”

    What exactly did Boris Johnson claim he admired about Winston Churchill? I think it was his judgement, decisiveness, oratorical powers and leadership?

    Boris Johnson has none of these things himself – his main characteristics are sheer funk, incompetence, passing the buck and craven cowardice.

    1. At this point I don’t even care about Partygate.
      I just want a PM who will lead us out of this mess. Getting rid of Johnson is unlikely to bring about any improvement. We gain nothing by allowing him to slither off to his fat retirement and his next divorce. It’s more punishment for him to have to stay in office.
      Anyone who didn’t realise at the G8 last year that there were rules for us and other rules for them must be extremely naive, especially as there have been hundreds of photos since then of unmasked rich people being served by masked lackeys.

      1. I agree with your last sentence. What bothers me is that very few people are thinking “if they can do without the restrictions so can I”.

        1. There’s a bunch of Northern pupils will contradict you, VW. Refusing to mask up in class… Excellent!

        2. Those photos of masked people serving unmasked people make me furious. Masking is such a denial of humanity.

          3. One of those fine ladies looks a bit like Anneallan of this parish. Been living a double life Miss Mitty?

    4. I’ve got a boat… and in case a lady wishes to know, I wear size 12 boots which I always take off at night! 😉

    5. I’ve got a boat… and in case a lady wishes to know, I wear size 12 boots which I always take off at night! 😉

  66. White House press corps resorts to desperate measures with press-shy President. 11 January 2022.

    The 79-year-old president has conducted far fewer press conferences than five of his immediate predecessors in his first year in office and has given less interviews with the media than the six presidents who served before him.

    Biden ignored shouted questions from reporters on the White House South Lawn on Monday morning.

    There’s probably been no leader as useless as Biden since Blind King John of Bohemia at the Battle of Crecy!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10387479/Reporter-holds-handwritten-SIGN-try-response-Biden-ignores-questions.html

    4. He won’t be taken for a fool, and good for him.
      Our government is disrespecting all of us with their lies, but particularly over the vaccine mandate for the armed forces who are prepared to lay down their lives in defence of our country. Not for Pfizer profits or Schwab’s great reset or bankers’ messes.

    2. Like my Retriever Fred waiting at the door and whining to go out. You went and opened the door and he just stood there or stepped out for three seconds and came back in.

    2. Crewe Arms pub….half pint of some sort of beer and that on the juke box. Music is so evocative.

    2. That would be funny if it wasn’t true. Still, it’s what happens when you have PPE graduates making technical and scientific decisions.

    1. Fauci reminds me of Bill “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Clinton

    3. https://twitter.com/michaelwags/status/1480925067500470281?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1480925067500470281%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefaultf%3Dnottlt_i%3D205120https3A2F2Fnttl.blog2F3Fp3D2051t_u%3Dhttps3A2F2Fnttl.blog2Ftuesday-11-january-students-lives-made-miserable-by-superfluous-covid-restrictions2Ft_e%3DTuesday201120January3A20StudentsE2809920lives20made20miserable20by20superfluous20Covid20restrictionst_d%3DTuesday201120January3A20StudentsE2809920lives20made20miserable20by20superfluous20Covid20restrictionst_t%3DTuesday201120January3A20StudentsE2809920lives20made20miserable20by20superfluous20Covid20restrictionss_o%3Ddescversion%3D4474eb952b0ac3bafd98c3224c1d140c

  79. Alea jacta est: Mother has a place at a residential home for dementia, in Penarth. Looks a nice place – https://www.parksidehousepenarth.co.uk/ – located where a few years ago she was looking to buy an apartment, although as a Dementor, she won’t be allowed out alone. Not that she can walk far, anyhow.
    Her house needs cleared and sold, to pay the £800 or so weekly fees.
    To some extent, beginning of a relief that the uncertainty is reduced, to the other I guess I was hoping illogically that she would be returning home at some point, and that life might return to some semblance of normal for her – and us.
    I’d still like to take her to lunch at the Blue Anchor in Aberthaw. Last time we were there was in the summer of 2019. Never expected it to be the last time.

    2. I do hope it all works out for her and you. You have had a worrying time over the last several months so maybe some of that will ease now.

    3. Good to know, Paul, my first wife’s Grandmama was in a home in Penarth but that would be late 70s or early 80s. We would take her out in her wheelchair for a perambulation along the high cliff paths and organise ‘Granny Races’. She loved it.

    4. A sea change, but you had to take a decision by the sound of it. Who knows what the future will bring?

    5. So sorry Obers, but also pleased for you and your Mum. Sad because she isn’t able to look after herself, but it must be a relief to know that she will be safe and cared for when you cant be there. Just make sure to get her to The Blue Anchor, and enjoy your family lunch!

      1. Probably, Conners. There was no alternative. Kept her at home as long as was possible, but in the end, she couldn’t cope without constant supervision. That made the decision a no-brainer, really.

        1. You can console yourself with the fact you kept her at home as long as was possible. I eventually had to admit that I could no longer cope with caring for MOH. When I confessed it, the (male) nurse who was at the meeting immediately confirmed it and said that I had done very well to cope as long as I had. I should imagine guilt about admitting to failure is pretty common.

    7. You have done amazingly. That situation is difficult enough when the patient is nearby, let alone on the other side of the North Sea and when travel is made nigh possible by government hysteria.

      1. The travel has been the big challenge. I’d have willingly let airlines and car hire companies have my money by frequently flying over to sort things out face-to-face, but that’s been either impossible, or close to. Very stressful.

  81. To keep warm this winter, the government recommend hugging pets, doing star jumps and eating porridge.

    I tried it.

    The dog went mental as his head hit the ceiling and my breakfast’s all over the walls.

  83. The joy of cold houses. 11 January 2022, 1:05pm.

    Both my husband and I grew up in large, freezing houses when winters were truly cold and we had to regularly chip the ice off bedroom windows in the morning. We would feel a sort of moral victory over the elements and a delight in whatever warmth we might find, perhaps crouching over a tiny fire or leaning up against an Aga. My youth was chilly and happy. So winter, thrust whatever you like at me — I will survive.

    Children are easy to indoctrinate too. We told them that people who lived in warm houses got colds (none of us ever did) and were slightly soft and puny, poor things. And we taught them that the real pleasure of food lay in the fact that it was hot: not only did it fill you, but it warmed you through and through. Wretched lot, most people never knew the delight of holding a hot bowl of soup in your hands and that tingly feeling you get when your fingers thaw.

    I would like to strangle this woman with my bare hands and then peg her out on an iced up rigid washing line by her ears in January/February. I was brought up in a Council House with no Central Heating. After hearing the shout “SCHOOL” I would pull my clothes into bed with me and warm them for ten minutes before pulling them on under the covers. They would, on good day, be warm enough for the second call and then it was a matter of leaping out of bed, sprinting downstairs and huddling and shivering over sticks in the grate that were just coming to life. You had to put off any overnight urge to go to the outside toilet until the last possible minute since it was colder than the inside of my present freezer. Only the presence of an old Hurricane Lamp that my Father had installed to prevent the pipes freezing made it bearable. Bring on the mythical Global Warming!

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-joy-of-cold-houses

      1. I lived in a cold house. It was horrible. I was ill all the time. I missed a quarter of my schooling because of bronchitis and similar. It was horrible.
        The prescribed school uniform was neither waterproof nor warm. There was no comfort at all until the summer came.
        Cold does not make you strong. Gloating about the cold is daft, although at least she does not mention having to live off gravel (and lucky to get it).

        1. The ice patterns on the bedroom windows in the morning did look nice though! Didn’t see them again until fractals were imaged.

        2. ‘Afternoon, Horace, “…people who lived in warm houses got colds (none of us ever did) and were slightly soft and puny,”

          Does that adequately describe you and yours?

          1. It wasn’t warm, but I was certainly soft and puny. On the other hand, my frequent fist-fights with the local tuaregs did toughen me up bit.

          2. We lived in a freezing between-the-wars house in Yorkshire, I remember the beautiful fern patterns that decorated the windows after a night’s frost, and walking to school with the snow coming over the top of my wellingtons. Central heating? What was that? It was a bowl of porridge to see you through the morning. The immune system does not work efficiently when the body is cold, I was frequently away from school with upper respiratory tract infections, I was away more often than I was there. And I agree with Horace, the school uniform was not suitable for the sorts of weather we had to endure oop north.

          3. …and you guys, Mum, including Grizzly George, refer to us as Soft Southerners.

            Check Norfolk and, despite its name, it isn’t oop north.

          4. Essex during the war suffered from the cold; it was deemed “south”, so only got the southern coal ration, but there was precious little between it and Siberia when the wind swept across the North Sea!

          5. My mum always got up first on winter mornings and had a blazing coal fire burning in the living room before the rest of us stirred. I recall sitting close to the fire and being too hot at the front and freezing at the back. Mum would slip our clothes under the bedclothes before we got up.

          6. I remember, when we were ill and had to stay in bed, my mother would take smoking and fiery coals from the kitchen fire and bring them up to the fireplace in the bedroom on a coal shovel. .

          9. Whenever I have been to London, not often I must admit during the winterest of winter months, I have always found London extremely cold, far colder than Cambs. In Cambridgeshire the problem is the cold wind, in London the cold air seemed to settle around one like a freezing shawl; there was no movement of air, the cold was simply there, all-pervasive wherever you were. I think this is because London is situated and sprawls within a shallow basin. The cold air pours and sinks into the basin and settles, there is no breeze to refresh.

        3. Before I emigrated to the US- CT in fact, I had read novels about the Puritan settlers of the Bay Colony, Plimoth Plantation and the first settlers in CT itself. Never gave a thought to the winters.
          Our first winter there was an eye opener- very cold indeed, ice and heavy snow and it was like that pretty much every winter. My thoughts went back to the Puritans- how on earth did they manage? Many did die but they were so unprepared with their insubstantial English clothing and “houses” full of gaps in the wall and heated only by a small fire.
          They did learn however, those that survived, and there are several houses in Farmington CT that are 17th century and look very solid and secure.
          Never mind the religious aspect, they earned my admiration for surviving those first winters in dwellings that were basically simple shelters. Brrrrr!

          2. Not sure about that Mola. I think their religious beliefs made them quite circumspect but it’s also possible that things did go on. Places like the remote mountain areas all over the US certainly did lead to dubious activities.
            I was shocked to discover that there are many, many undocumented people, no, not immigrants, but people who live in remote areas in the Appalachians for example. Births and deaths are not always recorded and as most of the householders are well armed, the authorities tend to give them a wide berth.
            Where the Appalachian Train starts in GA is called Blood Mountain…

        4. 343984+ up ticks,
          Afternoon HP,
          You had a school uniform ? we use to have anchor
          tattoos seared into our arses from dads naval greatcoat.

      1. Beat you! It has just crept up to minus 23 here, it was around -27 earlier.

        To think that it was above zero and raining on Saturday afternoon!

          1. I was in Oulu for a week one winter, it was wonderful weather I think, it was only light for an hour or two every day.

    3. Sorry, Minty, but my memory wanders to the Spectator version. Born and brought up in the wilds of Norfolk, we survived despite the ‘lazy’ East wind.

      So called because, despite its cold, it never went round you but preferred going straight through but, as your original author states, “We survived.”

        1. We had a small gas fire in the living room. I never got the benefit as my three older brothers sat right in front of it.

      2. #Me too. We had frost on the inside of the windows and any water in a glass on the bedside table froze solid. It didn’t encourage leisurely dressing – it was leap out of bed and dive into one’s clothes (often sneakily put under the bedclothes to warm up before they were donned!). I don’t recall going down with illnesses (apart from whooping cough, caught in hospital when I had my tonsils out) as a child. In fact, I never had the normal range of childhood illnesses (chicken pox, measles, mumps, etc).

          2. My three year old and three month old had it too. Very painful and left me with deep depression.

          3. I got it when I was 26 and contracted encephalitis. In Raigmore hospital, Inverness I was in an isolation ward next to the nurses rest room and there was a small curtained window through which they could observe me.
            When the time came to my discharge there was a lot of curtain flapping as I started to get dressed.
            They has sewn up the bottom of my trousers and were laughing themselves silly watching through the curtain.

      3. There was a wind like that the day we went to my uncle’s funeral in north Essex. Truly bone-chilling.

    4. I grew up being fed this central-heating-is-for-softies line too. I get a childish satisfaction every time I open the door to my house and feel warmth inside. We don’t have central heating, but we do have heating that warms the cottage.

        1. That’s impressive!
          I have to light the woodstove and boil a kettle to have coffee in the morning now, but that is only because I want to keep the electricity bill down! Due to get the annual statement and estimate for next year any day now….I’m bracing myself.

          1. Have a large glass of something strong close by. We’ve committed to a tariff 2.6 times our current one.

          8. My electricity bill (I don’t have gas) is about £20 higher this month (and has been steadily rising since I was forced to switch to monthly payments), despite my trying to cut down (and I don’t use electricity for heating at all, apart from running the pump to circulate the water in the radiators).

          9. I have a friend in the energy game. I told him our new tariff is double what we were paying. He tells me I have done a good move. If he is correct, I dread to think what he expects energy to cost this time next year.

          10. Looxury!

            The woodburner stays in overnight. And we have the AGA. Have avoided CH so far. When the sun shines, the south of the house (which has a ground to roof window) gets nice and warm.

            When I bought my first house in 1968, there was no CH; no double glazing. A puny fire in the sitting room which never warmed anything. An “Ideal” boiler in the kitchen which ALWAYS went out. The mortgage was half my take home pay. Ice formed inside the windows. After a year, we bought (on HP) four night storage heaters – which helped.

            Our firstborn grew up to be tough. Now aged 56, he wears shorts even on the coldest day!

          11. Ours isn’t sealing properly at the moment, so it goes out at night. I need to buy some of the fireproof rope that fits round the edge of the door. I did get some, and fitted it, but the one I got was too small. Very annoying. It fits inside, but not tightly enough.

          14. I think you should judging by what I an reading. Visit other people and use their warm houses.

    5. Then of course there were the luxurious items such high level single bar electric heater in a bathroom which coupled with single glazing did no more than warm one’s face

      2. We had an ancient paraffin stove which sucked all the oxygen out of the air very quickly and made me feel faint on more than one occasion.

        1. MoH had a great aunt who lived in a two up two down fridge on the edge of Dartmoor. She cooked all her meals oh her paraffin stove. I was always impressed how she managed to keep her fire going in the front room with just three small lumps of coal burning at at time!

        2. MoH had a great aunt who lived in a two up two down fridge on the edge of Dartmoor. She cooked all her meals oh her paraffin stove. I was always impressed how she managed to keep her fire going in the front room with just three small lumps of coal burning at at time!

        3. And a ‘Tilly’ lamp with a reflector… We’ survived without the house catching fire.

        4. And a ‘Tilly’ lamp with a reflector… We’ survived without the house catching fire.

      4. Afternoon Stephen. I’d forgotten about those bathroom heaters. Jumping out of the bath, wrapping a towel around you and runnning downstairs to dry yourself in front of the fire. What fun!

    6. I grew up in a pre-war maisonette with rusty window frames and a coal fire. My mum used to warm her shoes in the open gas oven before putting them on. I put my school clothes under the bedclothes to keep them warm enough to put on. There was ice on the inside of the windows.

      I used to get ear infections, bilious attacks, grumbling appendix……… apart from that I was pretty healthy. I had whooping cough, measles and chicken pox. My tonsils got the chop when I was six, and appendix when I was ten.

        1. There are easier ways of getting a frizzy hair-do.

          Did she try other forms of manipulation too?

          1. Just 99% loopy, but she’d had a tough life during the war. You never knew if you were going to get a hug or a whack.

  84. The joy of cold houses. 11 January 2022, 1:05pm.

    Both my husband and I grew up in large, freezing houses when winters were truly cold and we had to regularly chip the ice off bedroom windows in the morning. We would feel a sort of moral victory over the elements and a delight in whatever warmth we might find, perhaps crouching over a tiny fire or leaning up against an Aga. My youth was chilly and happy. So winter, thrust whatever you like at me — I will survive.

    Children are easy to indoctrinate too. We told them that people who lived in warm houses got colds (none of us ever did) and were slightly soft and puny, poor things. And we taught them that the real pleasure of food lay in the fact that it was hot: not only did it fill you, but it warmed you through and through. Wretched lot, most people never knew the delight of holding a hot bowl of soup in your hands and that tingly feeling you get when your fingers thaw.

    I would like to strangle this woman with my bare hands and then peg her out on an iced up rigid washing line by her ears in January/February. I was brought up in a Council House with no Central Heating. After hearing the shout “SCHOOL” I would pull my clothes into bed with me and warm them for ten minutes before pulling them on under the covers. They would, on good day, be warm enough for the second call and then it was matter of leaping out of bed, sprinting downstairs and huddling and shivering over sticks in the grate that were just coming to life. You had to put off any overnight urge to go to the outside toilet until the last possible minute since it was colder than the inside of my present freezer. Only the presence of an old Hurricane Lamp that my Father had installed to prevent the pipes freezing made it bearable. Bring on the mythical Global Warming!

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-joy-of-cold-houses

  86. 343984+ up ticks,

    This political treacherous mess of a party is unelectable along with the tory’s (ino) party, one reason jointly is if the electorate want their children to go through childhood as virgins they steer clear of the close shop coalition in the polling booth.

    As with treacherous treasa the johnson is in rapid burn out mode as pilot of the eu semi reentry missile, building on the “deal” as a umbilical cord.
    The decent peoples of these Isles are fighting on numerous fronts against, the lab/lib/con / the french & brussels.

    https://twitter.com/BeardedBob7282/status/1480902534550241280

      1. People like her are necessary, though. If one is in doubt over a certain topic of importance, just listen to what they say – then adopt the opposite point of view.

        1. I used to use Barometer Obama in that way whenever I needed to know what to think about any US issue.

  87. Today’s R4 news bulletins have featured the No.10 garden party. One of them included a brief extract from an interview with a woman whose father had died from Covid. No other information was given about the circumstances (they can probably be found in one of the longer news programmes) but it doesn’t matter much because this was an illustration of how the debate is now conducted. Dump the data, dig away at the emotions.

    My contempt for Johnson increases with each day that passes and I’m not excusing him here but this was just one more example of how the BBC presents the crisis. Another is the article on its news website (referenced on here earlier) in which it attempted to discredit the anaesthetist who dared to challenge the brave Health Secretary engaged in his heroic fight against the virus. Toe the Ofcom line, even it means siding with the hated Tories.

    “My dad died of cancer because the NHS was shut.” Will that interview take place? If it does, will the interviewer will be less sympathetic: “Sacrifices are necessary in a crisis, aren’t they?”

    I really want to stamp hard on something and break it…

      2. ‘Choose any one from the Cabinet … :-)’

        … One does not need to ‘choose’, …

        we are so overcome by these ‘HMG’
        officials, be they of whichever party;
        we are completely ignored by them.
        We are less than nothing to these
        parasites, who suck on the teats of the
        taxpayer …

        I detest them!

        ‘

    3. While the “party” is, on one level, trivial and irrelevant, on another it is important for two reasons.

      First, they were brazenly doing things that you or I would have been heavily fined for. They made the law and broke it without a qualm.

      Secondly, it shows the utter contempt that the “ruling class” has for 60 million (plus) “little people”.

      I hope the whole thing brings this charlatan and his useless gang of crooks to their knees and out of government.

      1. Hear hear.
        I’m sick to the back teeth of all the elites to whom none of their rules apply.

      2. Indeed, BT, but I’d like to hear the BBC and the public questioning the measures as much as the breaking of them.

        1. The public do. And are dismissed as foam-flecked etc (see that brave consultant who challenged the spamhead slammer. He is being vilified by fellow doctors.

          The BBC/MSM are as guilty as BPAPM and his gang. They are much of the problem; they have lost their way and forgotten that a free press is supposed to challenge, question – not supinely reprint government propaganda.

          1. One problem is that the “free press” are raking in the dosh from all the government advertising propaganda!

          6. The press toe the political line to stay cushy with the politicos.

            The 3rd estate is only such when it suits them. Same for charities. All statist opposed to the public.

  88. Evening, all. Had a busy, but quite productive, day today. As for the headline, it isn’t only students’ lives that are made miserable by unnecessary Covid restrictions.

    1. I did a bit of shuffling about of one of the compost bins & the oil drum incinerator and general tidying up the “garden” so I could move the cement mixer along to above where I’m going to be using its output.

      Then did a meal for the DT and S@H for when they got home from work.
      Tipped a jar of pasta sauce into a pan, added some tomatoes that were almost ready for chucking out, some noodles & a sauce from yesterday, a few sliced olives and some tinned garden peas from t’other day.
      Then added half a dozen short shelf life Co-op hotdogs and put some 4 day old Co-op finger rolls into the Rayburn to crisp them up a bit.
      All in all a fairly quick and easy meal that went down very well.

  89. That’s me for yet ANOTHER grey, soulless day with rain followed by drizzle. They SAY it will be sunny for the next few days. I bet they are lying.

    Stated the new puzzle – done most of the edges – though I know there are errors in the pitch black pieces at the foot of the puzzle! The MR, with her bright eyes, will sort that out. Nice looking challenge.

    Have a jolly evening.

    A demain.

    PS I was expecting a parcel to be delivered by Parcel Farce today. Didn’t come though they e-mailed me to say that it was in Norwich at 5 am today. All the other couriers which supply delivery details actually do what they say. But a state outfit can’t manage that. I expect they blame covid…

    1. The gang of six.
      All English as far as the BBC is concerned, no doubt.
      The Italians will be described as refugees.

        2. Lovely chaps – confused by unknown local customs; loved their Nans (all 16 of them) to bits. Always had a cheeky smile for the neighbours….

          6. Dear Uncle Bill, ….
            Your reverential response quite
            unnerves me! I may be old but
            I ‘ent that old,,,, If you doubt me
            please check with Phizzee… !!

    2. I don’t want to. I want these scum to be kept out of this country. I want our justice system to feed these muslims into a woodchipper, heels first.

    3. Allegedly. The oldest of the group was twenty at the time, and the others were scarcely older than their alleged victims.

  91. HAPPY HOUR- Looks like it’s all over folks, bar the sneezing!

    Common Cold Provides Protection Against the Chinese Coronavirus
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1e1c2262af081befb7af6e226f5ec3fb6f5c14d09be7b876ebadec78705619cc.jpg

    https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/01/11/common-cold-provides-protection-agasint-chinese-coronavirus-study/
    A landmark study led by Imperial College London researchers has found that people who have recovered from the common cold are more likely to avoid being infected with the Chinese coronavirus.

      1. They are not run by “our” envy-of-the-world NHS, remember. They won’t be overwhelmed!

    3. Covid-19: Do many people have pre-existing immunity?
      BMJ 2020; 370 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m3563 (Published

      17 September 2020

      )
      Cite this as: BMJ 2020;370:m3563

      It seemed a truth universally acknowledged that the human population had no pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2, but is that actually the case? Peter Doshi explores the emerging research on immunological responses

      Even in local areas that have experienced some of the greatest rises in excess deaths during the covid-19 pandemic, serological surveys since the peak indicate that at most only around a fifth of people have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2: 23% in New York, 18% in London, 11% in Madrid.123 Among the general population the numbers are substantially lower, with many national surveys reporting in single digits.

      With public health responses around the world predicated on the assumption that the virus entered the human population with no pre-existing immunity before the pandemic,4 serosurvey data are leading many to conclude that the virus has, as Mike Ryan, WHO’s head of emergencies, put it, “a long way to burn.”

      Yet a stream of studies that have documented SARS-CoV-2 reactive T cells in people without exposure to the virus are raising questions about just how new the pandemic virus really is, with many implications.

      Not so novel coronavirus?
      At least six studies have reported T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to the virus.5678910

      In a study of donor blood specimens obtained in the US between 2015 and 2018, 50% displayed various forms of T cell reactivity to SARS-CoV-2.511 A similar study that used specimens from the Netherlands reported T cell reactivity in two of 10 people who had not been exposed to the virus.7

      In Germany reactive T cells were detected in a third of SARS-CoV-2 seronegative healthy donors (23 of 68). In Singapore a team analysed specimens taken from people with no contact or personal history of SARS or covid-19; 12 of 26 specimens taken before July 2019 showed reactivity to SARS-CoV-2, as did seven of 11 from people who were seronegative against the virus.8 Reactivity was also discovered in the UK and Sweden.6910

      Though these studies are small and do not yet provide precise estimates of pre-existing immunological responses to SARS-CoV-2, they are hard to dismiss, with several being published in Cell and Nature. Alessandro Sette, an immunologist from La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California and an author of several of the studies (box 1), told The BMJ, “At this point there are a number of studies that are seeing this reactivity in different continents, different labs. As a scientist you know that is a hallmark of something that has a very strong footing.”

      Box 1
      Swine flu déjà vu
      In late 2009, months after the World Health Organization declared the H1N1 “swine flu” virus to be a global pandemic, Alessandro Sette was part of a team working to explain why the so called “novel” virus did not seem to be causing more severe infections than seasonal flu.12

      Their answer was pre-existing immunological responses in the adult population: B cells and, in particular, T cells, which “are known to blunt disease severity.”12 Other studies came to the same conclusion: people with pre-existing reactive T cells had less severe H1N1 disease.1314 In addition, a study carried out during the 2009 outbreak by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 33% of people over 60 years old had cross reactive antibodies to the 2009 H1N1 virus, leading the CDC to conclude that “some degree of pre-existing immunity” to the new H1N1 strains existed, especially among adults over age 60.15

      The data forced a change in views at WHO and CDC, from an assumption before 2009 that most people “will have no immunity to the pandemic virus”16 to one that acknowledged that “the vulnerability of a population to a pandemic virus is related in part to the level of pre-existing immunity to the virus.”17 But by 2020 it seems that lesson had been forgotten.

      RETURN TO TEXT
      Researchers are also confident that they have made solid inroads into ascertaining the origins of the immune responses. “Our hypothesis, of course, was that it’s so called ‘common cold’ coronaviruses, because they’re closely related,” said Daniela Weiskopf, senior author of a paper in Science that confirmed this hypothesis.18 “We have really shown that this is a true immune memory and it is derived in part from common cold viruses.” Separately, researchers in Singapore came to similar conclusions about the role of common cold coronaviruses but noted that some of the T cell reactivity may also come from other unknown coronaviruses, even of animal origin.8

      Taken together, this growing body of research documenting pre-existing immunological responses to SARS-CoV-2 may force pandemic planners to revisit some of their foundational assumptions about how to measure population susceptibility and monitor the extent of epidemic spread.

      Population immunity: underestimated?
      Seroprevalence surveys measuring antibodies have been the preferred method for gauging the proportion of people in a given population who have been infected by SARS-CoV-2 (and have some degree of immunity to it), with estimates of herd immunity thresholds providing a sense of where we are in this pandemic. Whether we overcome it through naturally derived immunity or vaccination, the sense is that it won’t be over until we reach a level of herd immunity.

      The fact that only a minority of people, even in the hardest hit areas, display antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 has led most planners to assume the pandemic is far from over. In New York City, where just over a fifth of people surveyed had antibodies, the health department concluded that “as this remains below herd immunity thresholds, monitoring, testing, and contact tracing remain essential public health strategies.”19 “Whatever that number is, we’re nowhere near close to it,” said WHO’s Ryan in late July, referring to the herd immunity threshold (box 2).

      Box 2
      Calculating the herd immunity threshold
      In theory, outbreaks of contagious disease follow a certain trajectory. In a population that lacks immunity new infections grow rapidly. At some point an inflection in this growth should occur, and the incidence will begin to fall.

      The 1970s gave rise to a theory that defined this inflection point as the herd immunity threshold (HIT) and offered a straightforward formula for estimating its size: HIT=1−1/R0 (where R0 is the disease’s basic reproduction number, or the average number of secondary cases generated by an infectious individual among susceptible people). This simple calculation has guided—and continues to guide—many vaccination campaigns, often used to define target levels of vaccination.20

      The formula rests on two assumptions: that, in a given population, immunity is distributed evenly and members mix at random. While vaccines may be deliverable in a near random fashion, from the earliest days questions were raised about the random mixing assumption. Apart from certain small closed populations such as “orphanages, boarding schools, or companies of military recruits,” Fox and colleagues wrote in 1971,21 truly random mixing is the exception, not the rule. “We could hardly assume even a small town to be a single homogeneously mixing unit. Each individual is normally in close contact with only a small number of individuals, perhaps of the order of 10-50.”

      Nearly 50 years later, Gabriela Gomes, an infectious disease modeller at the University of Strathclyde, is reviving concerns that the theory’s basic assumptions do not hold. Not only do people not mix randomly, infections (and subsequent immunity) do not happen randomly either, her team says. “More susceptible and more connected individuals have a higher propensity to be infected and thus are likely to become immune earlier. Due to this selective immunization by natural infection, heterogeneous populations require less infections to cross their herd immunity threshold,” they wrote.22 While most experts have taken the R0 for SARS-CoV-2 (generally estimated to be between 2 and 3) and concluded that at least 50% of people need to be immune before herd immunity is reached, Gomes and colleagues calculate the threshold at 10% to 20%.2223

      Ulrich Keil, professor emeritus of epidemiology from the University of Münster in Germany, says the notion of randomly distributed immunity is a “very naive assumption” that ignores the large disparities in health in populations and “also ignores completely that social conditions might be more important than the virus itself.” He added, “Tuberculosis here is the best example. We all know that the immune system is very much dependent on the living conditions of a person, and this depends very much on education and social conditions.”

      Another group led by Sunetra Gupta at the University of Oxford has arrived at similar conclusions of lower herd immunity thresholds by considering the issue of pre-existing immunity in the population. When a population has people with pre-existing immunity, as the T cell studies may be indicating is the case, the herd immunity threshold based on an R0 of 2.5 can be reduced from 60% of a population getting infected right down to 10%, depending on the quantity and distribution of pre-existing immunity among people, Gupta’s group calculated.24

      RETURN TO TEXT
      But memory T cells are known for their ability to affect the clinical severity and susceptibility to future infection,25 and the T cell studies documenting pre-existing reactivity to SARS-CoV-2 in 20-50% of people suggest that antibodies are not the full story.

      “Maybe we were a little naive to take measurements such as serology testing to look at how many people were infected with the virus,” the Karolinska Institute immunologist Marcus Buggert told The BMJ. “Maybe there is more immunity out there.”

      The research offers a powerful reminder that very little in immunology is cut and dried. Physiological responses may have fewer sharp distinctions than in the popular imagination: exposure does not necessarily lead to infection, infection does not necessarily lead to disease, and disease does not necessarily produce detectable antibodies. And within the body, the roles of various immune system components are complex and interconnected. B cells produce antibodies, but B cells are regulated by T cells, and while T cells and antibodies both respond to viruses in the body, T cells do so on infected cells, whereas antibodies help prevent cells from being infected.

      An unexpected twist of the curve
      Buggert’s home country has been at the forefront of the herd immunity debate, with Sweden’s light touch strategy against the virus resulting in much scrutiny and scepticism.26 The epidemic in Sweden does seem to be declining, Buggert said in August. “We have much fewer cases right now. We have around 50 people hospitalised with covid-19 in a city of two million people.” At the peak of the epidemic there were thousands of cases. Something must have happened, said Buggert, particularly considering that social distancing was “always poorly followed, and it’s only become worse.”

      Understanding this “something” is a core question for Sunetra Gupta, an Oxford University epidemiologist who developed a way to calculate herd immunity thresholds that incorporates a variable for pre-existing innate resistance and cross protection.24 Her group argues that herd immunity thresholds “may be greatly reduced if a fraction of the population is unable to transmit the virus.”

      “The conventional wisdom is that lockdown occurred as the epidemic curve was rising,” Gupta explained. “So once you remove lockdown that curve should continue to rise.” But that is not happening in places like New York, London, and Stockholm. The question is why.

      “If it were the case that in London the disease hadn’t disseminated too widely, and only 15% have experienced the virus [as serology tests indicate] . . . under those circumstances, if you lift lockdown, you should see an immediate and commensurate increase in cases, as we have observed in many other settings,” Gupta told The BMJ, “But that hasn’t happened. That is just a fact. The question is why.”

      Possible answers are many, she says. One is that social distancing is in place, and people are keeping the spread down. Another possibility is that a lot of people are immune because of T cell responses or something else. “Whatever it is,” Gupta added, “if there is a significant fraction of the population that is not permissive to the infection, then that all makes sense, given how infectious SARS-CoV-2 is.”

      Buggert’s study in Sweden seems to support this position. Investigating close family members of patients with confirmed covid-19, he found T cell responses in those who were seronegative or asymptomatic.10 While around 60% of family members produced antibodies, 90% had T cell responses. (Other studies have reported similar results.27) “So many people got infected and didn’t create antibodies,” concludes Buggert.

      Deeper discussion
      T cell studies have received scant media attention, in contrast to research on antibodies, which seem to dominate the news (probably, says Buggert, because antibodies are easier, faster, and cheaper to study than T cells). Two recent studies reported that naturally acquired antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 begin to wane after just 2-3 months, fuelling speculation in the lay press about repeat infections.282930

      But T cell studies allow for a substantially different, more optimistic, interpretation. In the Singapore study, for example, SARS-CoV-1 reactive T cells were found in SARS patients 17 years after infection. “Our findings also raise the possibility that long lasting T cells generated after infection with related viruses may be able to protect against, or modify the pathology caused by, infection with SARS-CoV-2,”8 the investigators wrote.

      T cell studies may also help shed light on other mysteries of covid-19, such as why children have been surprisingly spared the brunt of the pandemic, why it affects people differently, and the high rate of asymptomatic infections in children and young adults.

      The immunologists I spoke to agreed that T cells could be a key factor that explains why places like New York, London, and Stockholm seem to have experienced a wave of infections and no subsequent resurgence. This would be because protective levels of immunity, not measurable through serology alone but instead the result of a combination of pre-existing and newly formed immune responses, could now exist in the population, preventing an epidemic rise in new infections.

      But they were all quick to note that this is speculation. Formally, the clinical implications of the pre-existing T cell reactivity remain an open question. “People say you don’t have proof, and they’re right,” says Buggert, adding that the historical blood donor specimens in his study were all anonymised, precluding longitudinal follow-up.

      There is the notion that perhaps T cell responses are detrimental and predispose to more severe disease. “I don’t see that as a likely possibility,” Sette said, while emphasising that we still need to acknowledge the possibility. “It’s also possible that this absolutely makes no difference. The cross reactivity is too small or weak to affect the virus. The other outcome is that this does make a difference, that it makes you respond better.”

      Weiskopf added, “Right now, I think everything is a possibility; we just don’t know. The reason we’re optimistic is we have seen with other viruses where [the T cell response] actually helps you.” One example is swine flu, where research has shown that people with pre-existing reactive T cells had clinically milder disease (box 1).121314

      Weiskopf and Sette maintain that compelling evidence could come through a properly designed prospective study that follows a cohort of people who were enrolled before exposure to SARS-CoV-2, comparing the clinical course of those with and without pre-existing T cell responses.

      Understanding the protective value of pre-existing SARS-CoV-2 T cell reactivity “is identical to the situation on vaccines,” said Antonio Bertoletti, professor of infectious disease at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. “Through vaccination we aim to stimulate antibodies and T cell production, and we hope that such induction of immunity will protect … but we need a phase III clinical study to really demonstrate the effect.”

      German investigators came to the same conclusion, arguing that their T cell findings represented a “decisive rationale to initiate worldwide prospective studies” mapping pre-existing reactivity to clinical outcomes.31 Other groups have called for the same thing.6

      “At the start of the pandemic, a key mantra was that we needed the game changer of antibody data to understand who had been infected and how many were protected,” two immunologists from Imperial College London wrote in a mid-July commentary in Science Immunology. “As we have learned more about this challenging infection, it is time to admit that we really need the T cell data too.”32

      Theoretically, the placebo arm of a covid-19 vaccine trial could provide a straightforward way to carry out such a study, by comparing the clinical outcomes of people with versus those without pre-existing T cell reactivity to SARS-CoV-2. A review by The BMJ of all primary and secondary outcome measures being studied in the two large ongoing, placebo controlled phase III trials, however, suggests that no such analysis is being done.3334

      Could pre-existing immunity be more protective than future vaccines? Without studying the question, we won’t know.

  92. Not only is Boris the Twerp a liar and charlatan, he is also a wuss. Sent a minor flunkey to stand in for him in the HofC. Start counting down until he says he’s self isolating as he’s got “covid” again.
    God, he makes my stomach turn.

    1. His wife is a conniving little minx .

      She is the great persuader , did she send that email… I am so certain he was led like a donkey by her .

      She has no principles .. she found it so easy to unzip him , she didn’t put the country first .. He is a loose cannon that didn’t need encouragement .

  93. Joining in on the cold houses meme below.
    Good grief!
    I thought Nottlers were made of sterner stuff.
    What a lot of wimps there are, hiding amongst the gritty ones.

    };-O

    And being a stirrer of course. };-))

        1. 1987 winter, the whole flat froze solid. Had to go to work for a dump – amongst other things. Kettle took ages to boil, too.

    3. I am cunning. The heating comes on at 21’c for an hour, precisely. It then drops to tick on again at 18’c.

      So far, it hasn’t.

          1. Ah, that’s a different question.

            Yes, I think we need something. A revolution may be a bit extreme but we certainly need a good clear out.

    2. The buffoon being hammered in the DT BTL comments, below is one such example.

      He HAS no credibility.
      At the time of the garden party he had sanctioned and was running a PsyOps campaign intended to scare the bejesus out of the population so they would comply with the ludicrous “rules” he and SAGE put in place.
      He and the rest of the party-goers obviously didn’t believe a word of what they were telling us…… basically they were lying, or were party to lies, about the lethality of the virus.
      If they had genuinely believed that groups of up to 100 people mixing were potentially deadly for them and their families THEY WOULDN’T HAVE DONE IT.
      So ….
      There’s the arrogance, hypocrisy and entitlement of an “elite” who make one set of rules for the peasants and have a completely different set for themselves.
      And there’s the LYING about the lethality of the virus which they knew only affected the very frail and those with co-morbidities.
      And there’s the utterly disgraceful PsyOps campaign which has ruined the mental health of millions.
      He has to go.

        3. The counter argument is someone worse than him could replace him. Let’s have performance pay for all politicians, they could repay monies to the country for poor performance. That should help pay the bills.😃

      2. 343984+ up ticks,

        Evening VVOF,
        The whole political shIte shebang (650) has to go unless the peoples want regular repeat performances.

  96. Bugger.
    Went to respond to Oberst’s post on his Mum and got white bloody screened.

    Dr. Daughter & boyfriend have just bought a house in Newcastle that belonged to a gentleman who’s moved to a nursing home.
    Complete with furniture and his belongings, including not only his old clothing, but his late wife’s!

    His daughter now lives in South Wales and wasn’t interested in taking anything away, so Dr. D & BF have bought and moved in to a fully furnished house and are going through everything, deciding what to keep and what to get rid off and have already sold several items on E-bay.

      1. You mean put the house on sale “As Is”?
        It would certainly give a young couple a good start with decent furniture!

        1. Might suit someone wanting it to rent out, as well.
          Sell/chuck all the clothes, and you’re good to go.

          1. Before you do.
            Get a local auction house to take a look, you might be pleasantly surprised.

          3. Dr.D & BF are having fun listening to his record collection.
            They’ve dug out & played a Nina & Frederick LP!

  98. The public won’t forgive food shortages

    Major questions about the Government’s farming reforms are yet to be answered

    GEOFFREY CLIFTON-BROWN

    I am one of the few farmers in the House of Commons, so I have been well placed to examine the Government’s plans for the post-Brexit future of farming. The Public Accounts Committee, of which I am deputy chair, investigates the value for money provided by Government projects. Today, we are publishing our report into the Government’s flagship Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMs).

    At the centre of ELMs are changes to the mechanism for distributing funding, previously done via the EU’s CAP payments, to a system – due to launch fully in 2024 – where farmers will be paid for environmental and productivity improvements. The Government has stated that all the objectives of ELMs will be delivered for just over £2 billion, a target declared ambitious by the PAC members during the hearing.

    There are three components to the project: the Sustainable Farming Initiative (SFI) for all farmers to be paid to manage their land in an environmentally friendly way; the Local Nature Recovery Strategies for more complex projects; and the Landscape Recovery for large-scale projects such as peatland restoration.

    Due to the natural cycle of animals or plants it can take 2 years or more for the farmers executing the schemes to implement them, so timely information is vital. Much of the information concerning how these schemes will operate is coming out very late for farmers to implement.

    Another problem is the average age of farmers – 59. I know from my own farm that my son, who is in his 30s, is far more adept at adopting new technology and innovation is central to the success of the scheme. The third aim of ELMs is to help young people who wish to enter agriculture.

    As the report makes clear, without subsidies farms in England make an average net profit of just £22,800 a year. There is a real fear among small and tenant farms that many will go out of business and the average size of farms will increase. ELMs should have a part to play in protecting small and tenant farms.

    This scheme will require a significant amount of land taken away from agricultural use. Officials are very clear that ELMs will promote increased efficiency on the remaining land, but they were not so clear on the amount of food that will need to be imported as a result. I do not think the public will thank us if, a few years down the road, there is either a big increase in prices or, worse, a shortage of food. We need to get to a point where we produce more than 50 per cent of the food that we eat in this country. The officials and panel experts we interviewed avoided the question of whether ELMs would result in more imported food and consequently Britain effectively exporting environmental problems.

    All in all, many farmers are going to need to generate greater returns if they are to survive – whether from Government schemes, increased productivity or higher prices from the market.

    Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown is deputy chairman of the Public Accounts Committee

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/08/public-wont-forgive-food-shortages/

    1. Both food shortages and energy shortages equate to price increases. When will the PTB come to terms with reality, or is it already too late?

      1. 343984+ up ticks,
        Evening M,
        “To terms with reality” is not part of their ongoing agenda, the time the fools sorry peoples realise this they will have resorted to cannibalism.

        1. Having spent a long time at sea, the inner thigh of a tubby person is the tenderest bit of flesh.

          So I’ve been told.

      1. History ALWAYS repeats itself
        The ‘minders’of our waterways decided that toads etc were more important than irrigating farm land, getting rid of flood water or
        maintaining the way of life in Flood Plains
        Result, The Somerset Levels were wiped out, farms flooded. houses lost, animals drowned

        But Whey Hey, the frogs and toads live on

    3. There are major advances in agriculture enabling higher production of the foods we need. I am not referring to GM crops but new techniques such as vertical farming where plants are grown on racks in massive greenhouses. We see similar innovations in the UK with the tomato greenhouses in Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich.

      Farm yields have increased enormously per acre with the advent of new technology from soil agronomy to better land management.

      I bemoan the loss of our market gardens and hope that these will eventually be restored. Our orchards were eviscerated by EU regulations and over the years we were left with a choice of tasteless imported Golden Delicious or Braeburn apples imported from New Zealand.

      Likewise having farm product determined by subsidy has left us with fields of wheat, barley, rapeseed, beets and not much else. Hops are now imported from abroad, Vietnam I think, which is ludicrous.

    4. There are major advances in agriculture enabling higher production of the foods we need. I am not referring to GM crops but new techniques such as vertical farming where plants are grown on racks in massive greenhouses. We see similar innovations in the UK with the tomato greenhouses in Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich.

      Farm yields have increased enormously per acre with the advent of new technology from soil agronomy to better land management.

      I bemoan the loss of our market gardens and hope that these will eventually be restored. Our orchards were eviscerated by EU regulations and over the years we were left with a choice of tasteless imported Golden Delicious or Braeburn apples imported from New Zealand.

      Likewise having farm product determined by subsidy has left us with fields of wheat, barley, rapeseed, beets and not much else. Hops are now imported from abroad, Vietnam I think, which is ludicrous.

    2. The only time Mongo pulls on his harness is when we’re waiting for Junior at the end of school. When he sees or smells him there’s this almighty surge and this great beast hurtles towards Junior.

  103. We’ve just watched a fascinating film on Prime Video, Mr Jones, about a Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, who ventured to Ukraine in the early 30s and exposed the famine caused by Stalin. He was castigated for his revelations but stuck by his guns.
    If you get the opportunity I recommend it to you. It’s a very dark piece of true investigative journalism.

  105. I have already been approached by firms offering to extract cavity wall insulation from the walls of my house that was built in 1976 – but I don’t have it! . I always understood that building regs for cavity walls precluded anything that could bridge the wall in the cavity so I was never persuaded to take advantage of Government insulation subsidies. The cost and consequences of removal of retrofitted insulation are looking quite alarming.

    This is starting to look like as big an issue for the Government as the removal of retrofitted external insulation from high rise buildings like Grenfell. There are also an emerging signs that there could be good reasons not to use Government grants to replace gas boilers in some properties by retrofitting heat pumps as the results could well be counterproductive when installed inappropriately.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/news/article-10390579/Botched-cavity-wall-insulation-ruining-homes-causing-damp-mould.html

    1. Our house has solid walls so no cavity and no insulation. My previous house was a middle terrace and our neighbours had their cavities done at the same time as we did – I don’t think we had mildew problems like the woman in the article.

      1. We built an extension to our house. The external walls are 50 cms thick and made up as follows: 25 cm stone work attacked directly with wall ties to hollow breeze blocks 10 cm wide, followed by 5 cm air cavity, followed by 10cm wide solid breeze block faced with a coat of plaster. The house stays warm in winter and cool in summer and as it all sits on high quality damp coursing there is no damp. The roof is lined with rock wool.

        1. The cavity walls developed in the sixties were designed to have narrow ventilated cavities. If you fill such cavities with moreorless any material there will be transference of moisture bridging at low level usually by saturation of the fill material from ground water.

          The principal problem with early cavity construction was that of rotting wall ties, ties supposed to tie the external and internal leaves if the cavity wall construction.

          Nowadays such ties are stainless steel and cavities wider, often filled fully with insulation and sometimes partially filled but with a ventilated space between cavity insulation and external leaf.

          I prefer solid construction for reasons which would take me many pages to explain.

        2. The original part of our house is built into the hillside so is partially underground and faces southwest. The modern part is northeast facing one side and cold. It was no surprise to find no cavity in the extension but we’ve learnt to live with it.

  106. Today I have been “busy doing nothing”, so was unable to wish you all a good morning, and now it’s too late to wish you all a good night. So I’ll see you all tomorrow.

    1. I’m busy doing nothing working the whole day through
      Trying to find lots of things not to do….

      From A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Movie that is- book by Mark Twain.

      I’m with you Elsie;-)

      1. Not a brilliant movie, but a wonderful song. And the film includes the fabulously gorgeous Rhonda Fleming.

  107. Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab – but feared debate could hurt ‘international harmony’
    Emails to Dr Anthony Fauci show ‘likely’ explanation identified at start of coronavirus pandemic, but there were worries about saying so

    Sarah Knapton: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/11/scientists-believed-covid-leaked-wuhan-lab-feared-debate-could/

    The whole of the Covid nonsense has been based on lies and keeping the public in the dark about the truth.

    2. Fauci seems to be the embodiment of evil – and all the millions of deaths worldwide can be laid at his door.

  108. To sleep, perchance to dream…I would rather not dream these days but sleep would be nice. Will try soon.
    See y’all tomorrow.

Comments are closed.