Saturday 18 March: The heat pump drive is the product of a half-baked energy strategy

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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538 thoughts on “Saturday 18 March: The heat pump drive is the product of a half-baked energy strategy”

  2. Good morrow, Gentlefolks, today’s story
    This may well appeal to those who’ve been involved with first-line aircraft servicing.

    For Airline Passengers And Crew

    Just in case you need a laugh:

    Remember it takes a college degree to fly a plane, but only an apprenticeship to fix one…a reassurance to those who fly routinely in your job.

    After every flight, UPS pilots fill out a form, called a ‘gripe sheet,’ which tells mechanics about problems with the aircraft. The mechanics correct the problems, document their repairs on the form, and then pilots review the gripe sheets before the next flight.

    Never let it be said that ground crews lack a sense of humour.

    Here are some actual maintenance complaints submitted by UPS’ pilots (marked with a P) and the solutions recorded (marked with an S) by maintenance engineers.

    By the way, UPS is the only major airline that has never, ever had an accident.

    P: Left inside main tyre almost needs replacement.
    S: Almost replaced left inside main tyre.
    *
    P: Test flight OK, except auto-land very rough.
    S: Auto-land not installed on this aircraft.
    *
    P: Something loose in cockpit
    S: Something tightened in cockpit
    *
    P: Dead bugs on windshield.
    S: Live bugs on back-order.
    *
    P: Auto pilot in altitude-hold mode produces a 200 feet per minute descent…
    S: Cannot reproduce problem on ground.
    *
    P: Evidence of leak on right main landing gear.
    S: Evidence removed.
    *
    P: DME volume unbelievably loud.
    S: DME volume set to more believable level.
    *
    P: Friction locks cause throttle levers to stick.
    S: That’s what friction locks are for.
    *
    P: IFF inoperative in OFF mode.
    S: IFF always inoperative in OFF mode.
    *
    P: Suspected crack in windshield.
    S: Suspect you’re right.
    *
    P: Number 3 engine missing.
    S: Engine found on right wing after brief search
    *
    P: Aircraft handles funny.
    (I love this one!):
    S: Aircraft warned to straighten up, fly right and be serious.
    *
    P: Target radar hums.
    S: Reprogrammed target radar with lyrics.
    *
    P: Mouse in cockpit.
    S: Cat installed.
    *
    And the best one for last
    *
    P: Noise coming from under instrument panel. Sounds like a midget pounding on something with a hammer.
    S: Took hammer away from midget.
    *
    And two I have actually been involved with
    P: Dirty rag in cockpit
    S: Dirty rag removed, washed, ironed and replaced
    *
    P: Bendix radio does not work
    S: PTR 170 radio removed: Bendix radio fitted and functionally tested

    1. The Dutch Farmers have to win this battle completely. Likewise the WEF puppets know that they also have to win if their project is to come to fruition. I was awake at 5:00 am this morning so played the Dr Peterson’s latest powerful YouTube video on this subject posted on here yesterday but reposted in case you missed it.
      Eva is a very bright young woman. Michael Yon is an ex-Green Beret and much travelled War Correspondent. Don’t be put off by the Poncho he is wearing – he makes a number of astute comments about the enforced reduction of Nitrogen Fertiliser which is going to have a major impact on World wide food projection over the next couple of years.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqHQN54XCL0&t=1573s

      1. The MSM are covering it, very ignorantly. Nitrogen, we are told, is a greenhouse gas.

        1. By volume, the dry air in Earth’s atmosphere is about 78.08 percent nitrogen, 20.95 percent oxygen, and 0.93 percent argon. A brew of trace gases accounts for the other approximately 0.04 percent. OMG! The entirety of Earth’s atmosphere is a greenhouse!!

      2. We all know what will happen though – the state machine, unhappy at the intrusion of democracy will set about doing whatever it wants regardless. It will ensure the new party will be stymied, hindered and frustrated while the statist, left wing will get fast tracked.

        This is how they work. Look at the UK and the state’s relentless assault on Brexit.

  6. ‘Morning All

    When an odious Tory MP crosses the House to cajole the opposition into

    boycotting a speech in the House of Commons by one of his colleagues and

    the same speech by an elected Member of Parliament is cancelled by

    YouTube, then we must come to the conclusion that Democracy in this

    country is dead.

    RIP Democracy which died in the UK on the 17th March 2023

    https://twitter.com/ABridgen/status/1636824545330905117?s=20

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/741e74e96e6634227a0750a9050a41d2131b425da10e85e88c583d9a857f15ee.jpg
    Gutless cowards can’t face up to what they’ve done….
    Edit
    https://twitter.com/nevenabridgen/status/1636831977411100675?s=21&t=NQcvHIgtYnsHL3O_tAROvw

    2. For some reason the Left hate discussion and debate. What Andrew Bridgen could do is ping Elon Musk directly and ask him if he could post such an issue on Twitter.

      I think MPs forget that there’s a much wider world out ther run by people with an agenda – which is odd, as the civil service is on the doorstep.

  7. Donald Trump: Forget Russia, our own politicians are a bigger threat. 17 March 2023.

    Donald Trump has said that America’s greatest threat is not Russia, but its own “USA-hating” congressmen and politicians.

    The former president, who remains the favourite to clinch the Republican nomination in the race for the White House, said in a video on his Truth Social network that the war in Ukraine is a “proxy battle” and there are more pressing issues at home.

    “The greatest threat to Western civilisation today is not Russia,” he said.

    “It’s probably, more than anything else, ourselves and some of the horrible, USA-hating people that represent us.

    “It’s the collapse of the nuclear family and fertility rates, like nobody can believe is happening.

    “It’s the Marxists who would have us become a Godless nation worshipping at the altar of race, gender and environment.”

    Ditto the UK! I have no fears of Putin but the leaders of the West are a different matter.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/03/17/donald-trump-forget-russia-politicians-bigger-threat/

    1. It is a real pity that unlike real Giraffes, the other two depicted aren’t mute….

        1. Labour’s response to the budget ‘We’d tax more, and remove the LTA allowance entirely. In fact, we’d just take everything you earn.”

  11. Ukrainian commander reveals true scale of losses – and pays the price. 17 March 2023.

    Ukraine has demoted a top battlefield commander after he admitted his unit had been decimated in fighting around the city of Bakhmut.

    The battalion commander, known by his call sign Kupol, gave an unusually frank assessment of Ukrainian losses in an interview from the front lines earlier this week.

    He revealed that all of the original 500 soldiers in his unit had either been killed or injured, a rare acknowledgement from inside the Ukrainian ranks, where losses are kept strictly confidential.

    The Ukrainian high command is at pains to present a positive spin on the increasingly bloody defence of the east of the country. US officials have estimated that the Ukrainian army may have taken 120,000 casualties compared with 200,000 by the Russian army.

    One suspects that this is just the beginnings of the truth!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/03/17/ukrainian-commander-has-revealed-true-scale-losses-paid-price/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr

    1. 320,000 casualties, plus thousands of civilians.
      Every single one a tragedy, brought about by politicians with bodyguards and a military-industrial lobby.

    2. Catchy tune. Listened to it early this morning when I was catching up on last night’s late posts, and have been humming it all morning.

  14. 372110+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Saturday 18 March: The heat pump drive is the product of a half-baked energy strategy

    It is just another segment of the deflection campaign while the political deceivers build up the foreign uprising material within.

    So now we have to many sheep in the nation park, they have to go
    could the real reason be, barracks are required ?
    put nothing past these political top rankers that still find favour with many of the peoples.

    They, the political shite wing of the WEF are going into anti Dutch mode seeing the success the cloggies have had ..in their fight to survive.

    The question one must ask oneself is ” do I support the cloggies
    in their escape to freedom” or do I support ” MY PARTY” as in
    the lab/lib/con coalition party.

    Ho the BLACK comedy, my sides are aching.

  15. The mother of 23 accused of being Vladimir Putin’s child-snatcher in chief. 18 March 2023.

    When Vladimir Putin was looking to appoint an envoy for children’s affairs a few months before his invasion of Ukraine, this junior politician from provincial Russia appeared to be a perfect fit.

    He needed a true believer – and somebody who would deliver on his ambition to abduct thousands of Ukrainian children and brainwash them into becoming Russian.

    He appointed Ms Lvova-Belova as the presidential commissioner for children’s rights in 2021.

    The idea that Vlad planned to “abduct thousands of Ukrainian children and brainwash them into becoming Russian” prior to the War gives the lie to this piece of defamation. This unfortunate woman is simply being used to widen the angle of attack on Putin. She doubles the amount of disinformation that can be produced about the necessary evacuation of these children from a War Zone. One only has to imagine the propaganda that would have resulted if the Russians had simply left them to their fate. If not killed, most would have starved in situ. What copy that would have made! There is no doubt that the Russians carried out a needful and humanitarian act here. That it is being used to demonise Putin by the MSM is an endorsement of it. The PTB are losing public support and the information war both.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/03/17/maria-lvova-belova-mother-23-accused-vladimir-putins-child-snatcher/

    4. Just posted this on Faceache:-

      ‘Ang on a minute.
      Ignoring the rights & wrongs of the Russian invasion its self, the children are in the middle of a war zone and, let us be honest, have been since the Ukrainian Azov Brigade fascists began shelling the Russian speaking areas of the Donbas since just after the CIA sponsored Maidan Putsch in 2013.
      Yet, the UN is saying that they should be left in the middle of fierce fighting?
      Could it be possible that they were moved by the Russians to avoid just that? But kidnapped? Hmm. Well, I suppose it sounds right to the propagandists of the NWO.

  18. Good morning, all. Yesterday’s light/rain drizzle morphed into heavy rain for most of the day. Today? Who knows? Off to the butcher’s and Lidl with breakfast to follow. Then…

    1. NOW you tell me, Korky! I spent a fair amount of time today making a new batch of Spaghetti Bolognese, when I could have driven over to see you with a jar of home-made marmalade to exchange for a full English! Lol.

      1. I needed to do something yesterday afternoon and so I made a batch of fruit scones – chopped dates and sultanas to be exact. You would have been welcome to have had one of those with some home-made redcurrant jelly. Sadly, no clotted cream.

    1. The BBC doesn’t care. To them, it is more important to force ‘the message’ than to tell the story. The depth and nuance associated with the original work is irrelevant, the real message ignored. The Left hate, unthinkingly. It’s very sad.

      Take this quote: “…The Empire was a horrible thing which involved a lot of British people going out and enslaving, pillaging and destroying a lot of cultures around the world. It was massively powered by greed,” he says. “If there’s anyone walking around believing that the Empire was a great thing they are clearly kidding themselves.”…”

      That man knows nothing about the Empire whatsoever. Ignorance is de rigeur for such people.

      1. Therefore we hate the left and do their job for them. Division accomplished. We should instead say we ‘feel’ for them, really we love them and offer to correct their mis-education. Or should that be dis-education. Or perhaps mal-education?

        1. No. Only the Left hate. +Most everyone else just wants to be left alone. The continual animosity, the relentless abuses the state and Lefties heap on normal people forces retaliation.

          They’re anathema. There is no way to tolerate them because their entire attitude is to subvert how normal people think and replace it with their own ideology. Only once you become them – blinkered, unthinking, mindless and vicious – are they ever satiated. Then they turn on themselves. As for trying to correct them, imagine you had a brick, and that brick was convinced it was a bubble. No matter what you say, regardless of the evidence, the facts, it believes it is a bubble. That’s the Left wing mind.

    2. The BBC doesn’t care. To them, it is more important to force ‘the message’ than to tell the story. The depth and nuance associated with the original work is irrelevant, the real message ignored. The Left hate, unthinkingly. It’s very sad.

      Take this quote: “…The Empire was a horrible thing which involved a lot of British people going out and enslaving, pillaging and destroying a lot of cultures around the world. It was massively powered by greed,” he says. “If there’s anyone walking around believing that the Empire was a great thing they are clearly kidding themselves.”…”

      That man knows nothing about the Empire whatsoever. Ignorance is de rigeur for such people.

    3. Quote:-

      The refreshingly diverse cast completes the picture: Brune-Franklin was born in St Albans to a Mauritian mother and English father, while Thomas was born in west London to a Jamaican mother and Dominican father. Period dramas have traditionally cast white actors in the belief that “olden-day” society was ethnically homogeneous. But Thomas points out that by 1760 there were 15,000 black people living in London, a reality not widely reflected in school history textbooks. “People are conditioned to see the world in a certain way,” he says.

    6. I try to look at both sides; without the Indian Mutiny (other names available), the Empress of India Act would not have been passed and the subsequent waves of emigration (from the Indian subcontinent) across the British Empire might not have occurred.
      But it’s more complex, I know.
      In any case, who watches the BBC?

      PS after 1857, legislation allowed Indian citizens to work in other British colonies and possessions.

      1. That doesn’t give the BBC carte-blanche (deliberate) to BAME-wash fictional Anglo-Saxon characters in a TV propduction of much-loved classic novel.

      2. That doesn’t give the BBC carte-blanche (deliberate) to BAME-wash fictional Anglo-Saxon characters in a TV propduction of much-loved classic novel.

    1. 372110+ up ticks,

      O2O,

      Witness WEF serpent in action slithering across the floor to clear the chamber during speech.

      1. As Paul Simon wrote in his song ‘The Boxer’:

        “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

        MPs are most reluctant to confront alternative points of view to their own.

    2. Sorry o1 Didn’t see you post as I was watching Dr Campbell’s video in its entirety.

  21. Good morning all.

    Dull damp mild day. 8c

    Nature is so predictable , the buds on the trees and shrubs are swelling , the lilac , azalea etc just know , but for the past few days the birds who are usuall attracted to the feeders haven’t been around very much .

    I loved this 1961 newsreel look at London .. What has happened to Britain?

    How can this country have changed so much so quickly?

    https://twitter.com/bo66ie29/status/1636509738878861313

    2. 372110+ up ticks,

      Morning TB,

      “How can this country have changed so much so quickly?”

      The party before Country voter has had major success in the killing of a once decent nation.

      Knowingly supporting / voting for a proven anti United Kingdom party is in my book treasonable.

    4. No doubt the aborigines in Australia had similar thoughts. I am relieved I’m on my way out and not starting my life’s journey.

    5. So nostalgic. Everyone so brisk, well ordered – a structured, cohesive society.

    6. The year I started work aged 15. All the women in skirts and dresses, clean shaven, smart policemen and all hideously white.

    7. They were citizens of one of the greatest countries that has ever existed. Now it is no more!

  22. ‘Morning, Peeps. It’s precipitating down here but may ease by mid-morning. At least my Forest duty should be relatively quiet today, leaving more time for litter-picking and dealing with the usual flytips…

    Today’s leading letter:

    SIR – Matthew Lynn (Comment, March 16) is spot on in his analysis of the heat pump fiasco. It is a perfect example of this Government’s half-baked policy-making.

    Where is all the electricity going to come from (not just to power the heat pumps, but also the electric cars we are going to be forced to buy)?

    The Government has shown support for small modular reactors, a sensible solution. But even on this it is dithering, opening up a competition to build them (report, March 16) when Rolls-Royce is ready to go.

    Alan Frobisher
    Ely, Cambridgeshire

    Unfortunately the Government is still firmly wedded to the insanity of Not Zero and therefore doesn’t understand the electoral disaster heading down the tracks when the majority finally awaken to its implications for life as we know it.

  23. “ SIR – Philip Johnston (Comment, March 15) asks why we are forced to pay for the BBC.
    For the price of the licence fee (currently £159) we get four entertainment television channels, a news channel and a Parliament channel, six national radio channels and a large number of local radio channels. This is a wide-ranging mix.
    Mr Johnston says he subscribes to Amazon, Netflix, Britbox, Disney and Now TV. I estimate that this costs him more than £500 per year. For this money he is not getting radio, or the diversity that the BBC’S television and radio output offers. In terms of value for money, the BBC wins handsomely. Stephen Eade“

    Mr Eade. It may be good value for money if you want to watch or listen to the BBC output. Many of us don’t but are required by law to purchase a licence in order to watch any live TV.

    Some of us like to watch other live TV but don’t want to break the law. What are we supposed to do?

    1. What 4 “entertainment channels” would those be, I wonder – wall to wall repeats, game shows and soaps? And the “news” channel is so biased it’s not worth listening to – opinion and censored facts.

    2. What 4 “entertainment channels” would those be, I wonder – wall to wall repeats, game shows and soaps? And the “news” channel is so biased it’s not worth listening to – opinion and censored facts.

    3. I shall be watching England playing ruby against Ireland this afternoon – but this will be shown by ITV not the BBC.

    4. Break the law but don’t get caught. There are no detector vans and the only way you’ll get caught is by letting the goons into you house or admitting your wrongdoing. They have no powers of entry, they are door to door salesmen trying to sell you a licence for which they get commission. You don’t even have to open your door or speak to them

  24. SIR – Dominic Shelmerdine (Letters, March 16) thinks Jeremy Hunt delivered the best Budget he could in the circumstances.

    However, these “circumstances” are the creation of successive Tory governments over the past 13 years – including the present Prime Minister during his time as Chancellor.

    George Kelly
    Buckingham

    Well done, Mr Kelly, for getting your letter printed. Mine said almost exactly the same but didn’t get past the letters editor.

    1. Our good friend Grizzly gets his letters published regularly but many of us are past our print by date!

  25. SIR – Just a month ago Tim Davie, director-general of the BBC (Letters, March 16), said that it was “truly amazing” that people were prepared to pay a forced licence fee (report, February 17).

    That the fee may now increase by a further £13 a year (report, March 17) simply confirms our inability to disabuse him of his arrogant self-delusion.

    Cameron Morice
    Reading, Berkshire

    I do wonder why the government has allowed this increase. Are they hoping for a slightly less hostile coverage during the run-up to the next GE? Bearing in mind the growing opposition to the very principle of the ‘telly tax’ I would have thought that the opposite should be the case.

    1. I should have read a little further:

      SIR – Tim Davie’s capitulation to the recent insurrection at the BBC means his authority has gone, and that renders his position untenable.

      He must therefore be removed from post and, as a first step, his successor must cancel Gary Lineker’s contract and sack every individual who refused to work normally last weekend.

      No organisation can possibly survive if the board and senior management fail to assert their authority – regardless of the possible short-term collateral damage.

      Michael Grayeff
      Edgware, Middlesex

      That’s more like it, Mr Grayeff! Davie has proved to be utterly hopeless when the chips are down and has forfeited any right to continue in post. Is the BBC Board asleep?

          1. Blair:

            The People’s Party, People’s Dome, The People’s lottery
            I am the People’s laxative so the People swallow me
            Pragmatic opportunity has given me success
            A sad girl died and so I dubbed her The People’s Princess!

    2. Especially as one previous agreement allowed the BBC certain advantages [described by the then DG as “a good deal for the BBC”] in return for which the BBC would fund licences for the over 75s – an agreement they reneged on.

    2. Good morning True Belle and everyone.
      Please do not believe everything you see in print.

      In France and most of the EU, people are obliged to have identity cards and to belong to a contributory social security system. That has a limiting effect on casual labour.

      However the UK allows unlawful immigrants to work in the black economy. And they do, driving private hire vehicles whilst using borrowed ID, working in herbal horticulture, living upstairs in ethnic restaurants, etc. The only exceptions are the breeding units, often known as crows, who stay at home and care for a future generation of benefits claimants.

    1. This should be broadcast and made compulsory to listen to, in every Sixth Form and every University in the country.

      A complete disgrace that the vast majority of MPs and the MSM are not even remotely interested.

        1. They won’t of course because that will deny them the excuse “they didn’t know….”

    2. This should be broadcast and made compulsory to listen to, in every Sixth Form and every University in the country.

      A complete disgrace that the vast majority of MPs and the MSM are not even remotely interested.

  28. Good morning all.
    A grey start with 5½°C outside and mist coming off the trees but clear at ground level.
    Drizzle forecast for later.

    To get a grip of this, we need to start in Westminster and bring in full Drug and Alcohol screening for MPs and Senior Civil Servants.

    REVEALED: The blood-soaked Albanian narco gangs that mean people can get cocaine in British cities quicker than a Deliveroo pizza… and the trail of devastation left in their wake that should shame the middle class addicts who fund them

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11874061/A-special-Mail-investigation-unveils-blood-soaked-Albanian-narco-gangs-bringing-drugs-UK.html

    1. Lol NOW I understand why the jug-eared crisp salesman was getting his knickers in a twist about the boat people…

      1. Drugs give people the ‘munchies’ so then they stagger to the phone and order a takeaway with some Pepsi to drink and Walkers crisps for their children.

  30. A puzzled pensioner writes: Is there any independent, verified evidence that Putin has been “abducting” children from the Ukraine? I know we have seen photos of tearful women – but they, to me, are simply part of the endless propaganda.

    It occurred to me that Putin might have been asked by Russian parents of Russian children living in the east of the Ukraine to take their children to a place of safety away from the battlefield.

    Has anyone here any idea of the truth?

    1. They’re probably a lot safer in Russia than being shelled by the Azov Brigade?

    2. That the truth should be silent I had almost forgot.

      [Enobarbus: Antony and Cleopatra]

    3. RT reported very early on that there was an operation afoot to take women, children and the elderly to safe temporary accommodation in Russia and I’ve seen claims that greater numbers have fled in to Russia than to Poland. How does one verify any of it?

    4. I noted yesterday your point that maybe the children have been evacuated from a battle zone rather than abducted. I don’t believe anything written about Putin by the meejah.

    5. Ukraine would appear to have a history of child trafficking. Child trafficking for all sorts of reasons. This ‘Russian abduction’ seems to be a smoke and mirrors piece in order to obscure the fact 35,000 (35,000!) children were found in cellars in Mariupol, some of them dead, many of them injured in some way. Rumour has it they served the pharmaceutical and organ donor business and the drug known as adrenochrome. The extraction of this is horrific. Putin has been trying to return these children to their homelands, those that speak Russian have been returned to Russia. This is what the West is trying to hide – it is hard to believe, but this is big business. The West is trying to hide it by blaming their enemy of their own sins. Nearly all of what is happening in Ukraine the people of the West have no idea about.

          1. Indeed it does, but to quote from the wiki entry:
            Hunter S. Thompson mentioned adrenochrome in his 1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.[16] This is the likely origin of current myths surrounding this compound, because a character states that “There’s only one source for this stuff … the adrenaline glands from a living human body. It’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.” The adrenochrome scene also appears in the novel’s film adaptation.[15] In the DVD commentary, director Terry Gilliam admits that his and Thompson’s portrayal is a fictional exaggeration. Gilliam insists that the drug is entirely fictional and seems unaware of the existence of a substance with the same name. Hunter S. Thompson also mentions adrenochrome in his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. In the footnotes in chapter April, page 140, he says: “It was sometime after midnight in a ratty hotel room and my memory of the conversation is hazy, due to massive ingestion of booze, fatback, and forty cc’s of adrenochrome.”
            Adrenochrome is a component of several conspiracy theories, such as QAnon and Pizzagate,[17][18][19] with the chemical helping the theories play a similar role to earlier blood libel and satanic ritual abuse stories.[20] According to QAnon, which has incorporated and expanded Pizzagate’s claims about child sex abuse rings, a cabal of Satanists that rapes and murders children, using the adrenochrome they “harvest” from their victims’ blood as a drug[21][22] or as an elixir of youth.[23] In reality, adrenochrome can be synthesized, and can be acquired for research purposes by biotechnology companies.[24][25][26]

          3. On this one, all my instincts suggest that “the West” is fighting for the wrong side.

            Creating images about what is almost certainly a fiction is helping the people I regard as the bad guys here: Zelensky, the Bidens and their supporters.

            The Ukrainians sucking fluids from living children is so unlikely that it can only rebound on those accusing them of it.
            However, looking at it from the other side, whoever would have believed what Mengele was up to.

      2. I hope to fcuk what you wrote is some kind of misapprehension, PM. Reading that nearly made me sick… and please don’t elaborate, I’m not strong enough just now.

        1. I’m so sorry, I’ve known about this for some time, I couldn’t believe it but information has dribbled out from many directions. I do hope it isn’t true, I really do, but there are things that we (society) know about and have accepted under terms of “it’s a woman’s body, her choice”and “a woman’s right to choose” – bland statements like that to cover big business. Actually, I don’t accept these blandishments, they make me sick, they are a subterfuge. I am pro-life. In order to stop this society has to be informed.

      3. Precisely.

        Ukraine remains the most corrupt country in the world and its army comprise Nazi supporters. It is not a democracy as claimed but a fascist dictatorship propped up by the equally corrupt neo-cons in Washington, the Rockefeller and Rothschild central bankers and the corrupt Obamas, Clintons and Biden crime families.

    6. As always, Bill, the truth is the first and enduring casualty of war. Normally in a war there would be war correspondents but I’m not aware of any in this local conflict we should never have been involved in.

    7. I recall seeing photographs and news footage of tearful women clinging to their children in London when the children were being evacuated to protect them from the bombing, the evil dictator Churchill has a lot to answer for /sarc.

      1. Well, it was he who urged Chamberlain to declare war on poor, defenceless, innocent Germany.

        2. The single worst decision Churchill made was to suppress documentary evidence that the Duke of Windsor was a Traitor. He gave that selfish sod a free pass when he should have been hanged for Treason.

          Many lives of the former King’s countrymen were lost owing to his treachery including the lives of many in the British Expeditionary Force causing our retreat from Dunkirk.

  31. Britain is addicted to mass migration – and it is not racist to say this must change
    Ministers haven’t just lost control of the Channel: the huge scale of legal immigration is being allowed to continue with little scrutiny
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/17/britain-addicted-mass-migration-not-racist-say-must-change/

    My nomination for the RAY OF SUNSHINE PRIZE TODAY is Andrew Macswayed

    Here is Andrew Macswayed’s BTL post under Camilla Tominey’s article:

    You are on about this now ?
    The destruction of the UK as many people know it is not happening — it has happened.
    What you are seeing now is the bomb blast slowly rippling out.
    The destruction TOOK PLACE between 2000 and about 2020 .. but it happens to take a few years since it becomes apparent to the majority.
    It is becoming very apparent now,
    As services disintegrate, lying politicians head for the hills, education declines, foreign money gradually owns most big companies and inner cities and the best houses
    As the premier league becomes largely non English, as roads fall into decline and get over crowded, as production is all off shored, as tech is dominated by overseas service providers and phone makers, as the military shrink year on year and as prices go up
    As house prices in dollars decline, as media dumbs down, as minorities dictate the agenda, rule and govern, as christianity is overtaken and as accommodation costs spiral while declining in quality
    As rules are unenforced, as the police are good only for Tik Tok dancing and the civil service is just the last remaining trough for middle class nonentities to feed from ?
    As intellectual lightweights make policy, the news agenda is dominated by the Kardashians bottom, billions are wasted on slow train lines, second runways never materialise while leading hotels become asylum doss houses and borders are trampled on by Albanian thugs.
    This is where 20 years of lies and smugness has brought you.. look back on 2000 – 2020 and see it as one of the darkest double decades in UK history

    1. Mission accomplished for Blair, Brown, Cameron and his appendage, Clegg, May, Johnson, {Truss – who she?} and now the current anti-nationalist, globalist nonentity who was handed authority over the UK by the Tory cabal in the HoC.
      How proud they must feel!

    2. 372110+ up ticks,

      Morning R

      I beg to differ on one point, they ,the political top rankers never did “lose control” not even for a day, we are witnessing and, via the polling booth
      condoning orchestrated mass, morally illegal immigration.

    1. When I see a muslim gardening in a graveyard, or the littering chavs picking up their own waste then I will believe it. Until then, it’ll be challenged in court and stopped.

      One woman argued that the job was too far away – yet she had to interview for it, but didn’t have any intention of taking it up.

    2. It’s been the case for many years that people who refused jobs had their benefits cut. That causes outcomes and there are always examples of people who have died for one reason or another because of losing their money.

      Take the case in the news this week of the disabled mother of nine. The DWP is being blamed by the media for her death. She was not required to look for work but simply to attend reviews.

      1. Who coined the phrase ‘losing their money’? Why not “having benefits withdrawn”? It’s the taxpayers who are providing the handouts. The obverse of this myth is that my pension is not a ‘benefit’; it’s the crummy return of my contributions over the years.

          1. i think the majority of these cases are actually English. The invaders aren’t required to attend interviews or look for work.

    3. He’s a smug looking git isn’t he. The sort of face that needs a good slap.

    1. I expect the aged loon Pelosi thought that Lammy (I can’t see any police) was applying for a job as butler.

    2. If both @UKLabour and the Democrats win our elections in 2024, together we can seize a progressive moment on the world stage.

      Biden & Co have, in two years, trashed the US’s economy and if Starmer, Lammy & Co gain power they will complete the Tory’s destruction of the UK. In their world up means down, love means hate and progressive means regressive.
      Clearly, Lammy hasn’t heard of the impact that bullshit is having on the climate.

    3. Lammy knows nothing about any of those topics. As Pelosi is equally ignorant, what’s the real reason? Just a photo op?

      Both are racists – they hate white working people.

    2. How did he manage to reach such an ‘important’ position. He must be another pathological and habitual liar.
      Make some old fashioned wooden stocks and Lock him in.

    6. When meeting slimy bastards like that, one starts to feel sympathy for the bloke that offed Amess.

  36. England’s green and PLASTIC land: The new-build estate where the garden of every home is carpeted with fake grass that ‘poses risk to pets and children’
    EXCLUSIVE: Every home on new-built estate appears to have a fake plastic lawn at the front and back
    While low-maintenance, campaigners warn chemicals and plastics are dangerous to wildlife and children

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/article-11862873/The-new-build-estate-garden-home-carpeted-fake-grass.html

    1. Has anyone told “Just Stop Oil”? Ah no, of course they wouldn’t understand.

    2. Ironic isn’t it TB they moan every second of the day and night about pollution in the sea and are now polluting the land they expect us all to walk on.

  37. Rain, sunshine, rain… Must be an English Spring.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ae6f2984cc1168280ac7f1f7368e96523469db08d13a10527c094a6809416361.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/015f37a72619371b23f6c540b3f34f1fe672beca61f9cb911429f349b92ca11a.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/eab7d5e2252ad07bb3d1f4d2c2e1efdaffd1ff0e3ba5b8efd20f12aea29c3bb5.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/92038a82a617df93472d2100b1ed9fee1146c70a3ddf24941581bf41437a2f35.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fb9951223b40cca2a6a8a0448fbacf2b8616a62401ef2953f31b99696b40a832.png

    1. A long term solution would be to sack 70% of the civil service, scrap welfare and cut taxes to a flat rate of 15%. Are you willing to do that, Starmer?

  38. Morning all 😉 😊
    Had a late night last night. Child minding.
    Parents at a local quiz night. Raising funds for local school.
    It been chucking it down with rain and some slight flooding driving home after 11pm.
    Perhaps sun tomorrow, but forecast rain all next week. ☹ how awful.
    Heat pumps are inefficient, the hot water supply has to be topped up by an immersion heater at least once a day. But rather Typical of British information, never the whole truth.

    3. But but… feminists – no, radical feminists – eep telling us that women are the same as men and can do anything men can.

      Which gets a bit confusing when it’s a man pretending to be a woman competing against women. Crikey, the Left wing mind is complicated. The doublethink required is staggering.

  40. 372110+ up ticks,

    May one ask is there solid facts backing these “snatching” comments, because if not and in REALITY far worse happened and with an ever lasting fall out resulting in rotherham, covered up via police / council members and other supporting @rseholes.

    Dt,

    How Moscow grabs Ukrainian children and makes them Russian
    Adoption of thousands of children is being portrayed as an act of generosity that gives new homes and medical resources to helpless minors

    1. The orchestrated walk-out by the scoundrels of the House of Commons is a national disgrace.
      Please do not give your precious vote to those who are happy to stand by and watch mass deaths on their watch.

      Who are the MPs who listened to him? One was Christopher Chope I think – the other was a woman, but who?
      Also, of the three ministers on the front bench, two ignored Andrew Bridgen, and one (the middle one, another woman) turned her head to listen to him. Does anyone know who she is?

      2. Does anyone know which Tory scumbag MP walked to the Opposition benches and motioned them to walk out too?

      1. My pseudonym’s pseudonym, Percival Wrattstangler, sounds as if he should be let loose on them!

    3. They are such ‘vile pile’ of useless scum.

      Not the most recent debacle in the house of the lying bastards.
      Very low attendance when our mps were asked to vote on the illegal invaders.
      No show for the vast majority.

  42. For those of you who find arithmetic tricky, here is a helpful sentence from today’s DT (an article reporting that babies should be introduced to peanut butter to avoid later allergy):

    “Roughly two per cent of British children currently have a peanut allergy, equating to around one in 50.”

    Gosh – doesn’t that make it sooooooooo clear?

    1. Yet it seems to have been unknown when i was a child…… not that I ate peanut butter anyway.

      1. That’s the funny thing. We DID have peanut butter when I was a child. It was sold (of all places) in a kiosk at Paddington station. My mother would cycle there to buy it.

        No one died of this “allergy” for yonks. I just wonder what started it…

        1. Too many jabs when they were babies. Like autism wasn’t a thing when we were young, or ADHD. I remember one “backward child” and one “fat child” from my primary school.

          2. Many advanced readers are dyslexic. However, if you want your child to be let off, to get more time in exams then you have them statemented as dyslexic. Of course, this is most common amongst parents who don’t read to or with their children, who don’t help them with home work and so on and so forth.

          3. The best time of the day when our boys were little was bedtime and bedtime stories.

            Caroline would snuggle up with one boy in his bedroom and read in French, and I snuggled up with the other and read in English. When a book was finished we swapped boys.

            Both boys were fluent readers in both languages at the age of 4

          4. I loved reading the bedtime story to both boys.
            They had a bedtime choice: Stay up and watch xx programme finished, then bed with no story, or bed now with story.
            Got them used to choices and consequences.
            I loved reading the stories, sometimes turning the book upside-down, or reading backwards… was really upset when they no longer wanted a story. Cartoon books were less fun, as you have to follow the picture as well as read the text, and that’s not so easy.

          5. I used to read my son a bedtime story on the sofa when he was in his jammies and then he could go to bed and read for another half an hour. He’s another bookworm but having had Lit teacher/librarian for a mother and his wife’s a Prof of Medieval Lit…just as well.

          6. Might I enquire why French ? You’re English and Caroline is Dutch and I don’t believe you were living in England with your young family. Unless for just the joy of language.

          7. I didn’t read Norwegian stories, as I didn’t want the lads to learn my appalling accent.
            Fortunately, they didn’t.

          8. I understand the Norwegian language has a singsong sound to the pronunciation of words. You could have sung your lads Norwegian songs.. lumberjacks etc 🙂

          9. If I could sing… (another failure) – the intonation (quite Welsh, really) is the bit I struggle with, being too flat in my delivery and sounding like an Englishman.

          10. When I was very young my dad scoured London for just the right doll’s pram. Proud as punch on Xmas day the pale blue pram was presented. However, I had received a Playhour comic in my stocking and, according to family lore, that was all I was interested in.
            “Read it again,” was what I said over and over. Guess it began the habit of a lifetime.
            Poor dad, the pram ended up as a sort of mini wheelbarrow.
            I read all the time to my son and do now when the grand monsters visit.

          11. I used to get Playhour airmailed to Northern Nigeria. A real highlight when it arrived!

          12. My husband had never heard of it so I am glad to know that someone else remembers it!

          13. I’d not thought of it for what, 45-50 years, until right now?
            Thanks for the reminder!

          14. As children, we weren’t allowed ‘comics’ but, searching my Father’s ditty box after he’d died, we found copies of Wizard, Hotspur and a couple of others. I believe he intended writing for them, as they were not picture comics but contained written stories.

          19. That’s a few years ago now.
            I still miss my old man. Going through Mother’s house to clear it raised a lot of questions that I’d love to raise with him. It made me realise how little I knew him.

          20. They give all children who are in the bottom ten percent or so a dyslexia label, I was told.

          21. No – dyslexia is real. They would have been categorised as thick.

            My sister is dyslexic and wasn’t diagnosed until her last year in school because she is so intelligent she found ways around it until then. She can’t tell left from right, and words muddle themselves up in her head.

            I researched it thoroughly when helping her to reshape her life and study to become a physio. She got a first, while working at the same time. Definitely not idle!

          23. Ot was fascinating. I learned a lot. We settled on her making notes on tape rather than writing them, as her aural memory is so good, and I managed to source a prototype program showing muscles, insertions, movements from an American university, as dyslexics have difficulty translating 2D images into 3D. Felt good to be able to do something to help, as her confidence had been severely knocked.

          25. I’ve just been on Google to fact check you. I can’t find anything that supports your claim. Only joking

            Graphs show massive increases in autism over the years, especially since the US went vaccination mad with their kids. Dozens of jabs on their bucket list but, no sirreee, nothing to do with jabs. Where are we hearing that at the moment?
            Dr Andrew Wakefield was destroyed for suggesting that correlation. He’s being somewhat rehabilitated in the US, I believe.

          26. Don’t forget, the diagnosis manuals have also been revised, bringing many more people into the folds of, for example, mental illness.

          27. Quite so. But >200% increases?
            However, there exists a very strong correlation from the start of the national vaccination programme with the rise in diagnoses. Somewhere in-between?

        2. I have a theory, developed from observation of children I have seen with the allergy:
          It is surprising how many of these youngsters and youngish adults come from mixed race families either first or second generation.
          It may just be coincidence but there is certainly some sort of corelation..

          1. Not as such. But I ate peanut butter from 4 onwards. And then by the packet when we lived in Egypt. I was very keen on peanut butter when middle aged – until, idly one lunchtime, I read the nutrition label and found that what I was spreading on my toast was about half a day’s calories!

        4. We have had students on our courses with peanut allergies. One very aristocratic young lady had to carry an EpiPen with her at all times.

        5. I am not allergic to peanuts and I quite like peanut butter, thinly spread. However, too many nuts, of any variety, upset my stomach and so I tend to avoid them.

          1. “… too many nuts, of any variety, upset my stomach…”

            Then I suggest you stay away from NoTTL…!!

          2. I am limiting my time here;-)) Just wait until May arrives….”Here we go gathering nuts in May!”

        6. Sun valley in bottles. We used to have peanut butter as children. Supposed to be very nutritious, add a spoonful of Virol for completeness.

        7. Sun valley in bottles. We used to have peanut butter as children. Supposed to be very nutritious, add a spoonful of Virol for completeness.

      2. Vaccines have been introduced since then. I’m sure that injecting peanut oil into babies won’t cause any peanut allergies at all.

        1. Toast; buttered; slathered with peanut butter; damson jelly on top…… To die for (probably literally).

          3. ON THE CONTRARY – you have never tried our Damson JELLY.

            Grrrr.

            Quite different from Damson JAM.

          4. On the subject of jam, cheese and jelly that you mentioned last fruit picking/preserving season. I have purchased a jelly-bag of sorts, in Worthing of all places. I shall move to real jelly production this coming season.

  43. For those of you who find arithmetic tricky, here is a helpful sentence from today’s DT (an article reporting that babies should be introduced to peanut butter to avoid later allergy):

    “Roughly two per cent of British children currently have a peanut allergy, equating to around one in 50.”

    Gosh – doesn’t that make it sooooooooo clear?

  44. I had to laugh.
    There are revolving advertising billboards around here and there is a big campaign for fertiliser headed:
    “Vive la Merde”.

    On one of the hoardings that advert was immediately followed by one for Burger King.
    I suspect the person putting the adverts in has a sense of humour.

    1. 372110+ up ticks,

      Morning P,

      There is a reason for the “handstand” it’s his shift for having his arse used as an ashtray ,so you could very well be right, everybody has a use.

        1. Great thanks Sue, everyone enjoyed the meal of steak and Guinness pie and Baileys cheesecake and they were all bopping away. 😘 Journey back ok?

          1. To Buckie was fine – the Moray Firth coast is lovely. We left about 5 and hit torrential rain around Huntly which lasted until we got to Dunblane! Finally got home about 8, to be greeted by 2 squeaking cats, who apparently hadn’t been fed since we left! 😘

          2. To Buckie was fine – the Moray Firth coast is lovely. We left about 5 and hit torrential rain around Huntley, which lasted until we got to Dunblane! Finally got home about 8, to be greeted by 2 squeaking cats, who apparently hadn’t eaten since we left! 😘

  46. Remember Mr Gove telling us that we should always have things repaired rather than buy new in order to save the planet?

    That is all very well but – with call out charges, labour costs and the cost of spare parts – buying new rather than repairing old is often the better solution.

    Our four year old washing up machine seems to have died. It may have a minor fault which a crafty electrician armed with a screw driver will be able to come to the house and repair in five minutes – in which case it will cost at least €80 – €100. But of course the machine will still be a four year old machine with no guarantee.

    If the machine needs some new pieces in it and the electrician has to order them and then come out for a second visit or take the machine back to his workshop this could make the total bill come to €200 or more.

    We can buy a new machine guaranteed for repairs, parts and labour for 2 years for €240.

    What would Mr Gove advise?

    1. He would say spend your money fixing your machine. If it were his money for his machine he’d buy a new one.

      When I had a fault with mine a while back the engineer on the phone said ‘we can replace the belt, but the other components are still 7 years old.’

    2. Had the same dilemma myself a few years ago, Rastus.
      The solution was to research the problem in YouTube, who provided a video of how to solve it, plus the list of parts neede, and how to get at the fault (not obvious – how do you open the box, for example?). Superb! Spares from Bosch overnight, fixed in an hour or so – and call-out fee was then £80, then hourly rate & parts (£46). Kept the old machine going for quite a while, so we did. Just search on the precise machine name and type, with a brief description of he fault, so “Bosch 8301 heater trips” and you should get a few helpful hits.

      1. But – Paul – you are an engineer. Such things come naturally to you. Most of us – well me, anyway – are completely useless with our hands and couldn’t mend anything, let alone follow a youtube telling us how to do it….

    1. Problem is, they will say yes. Or, more likely, give a canned response that doesn’t answer anything except the commitment to taking ever more of your money to waste.

      A better selection would be:

      Given you believe in net zero, MPs salaries should be donated to fighting this.

      When will planning laws change to accommodate the necessary housing changes – much bigger houses, thicker walls, much more green space for a much reduced population as a result of net zero?

      How do you equate massively increasing the population – and immediate welfare demand and energy use, paid for by the tax payer – with forcibly reducing the UKs energy emissions?

      How far backward along the Kardashev scale do you believe you the UK should be forced to meet net zero? Will politicians set an example by giving these up first?

      Of course, they won’t answer, but it just exposes the hypocrisy that is the green scam. It is, and always has been merely a method of robbing the worker of his money.

      1. I would add, “Why were you not present in the HoC when Andrew Bridgen had an important announcement to make concerning the Covid Vaccines?”

  48. Broken promises on immigration have led to a Brexiteer exodus from the Tories
    Voters do not want “control” over our borders, they want lower numbers. The Conservatives must stop gaslighting their own voters
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/broken-promises-immigration-have-led-brexiteer-exodus-tories/

    I tried to put this up as a BTL comment but it was too controversial and off message for the DT to put it up! Free speech at the DT is anathema.

    Richard Tracey
    JUST NOW
    Reply to D Walker – view message

    Message Actions: THIS COMMENT HAS BEEN REMOVED

    We don’t just need a replacement of the Conservative Party but we also need a replacement of the Reform Party which backs the Conservatives’ lunatic Net Zero policy and refuses to investigate the evidence of serious problems arising from the Covid vaccines which the un-whipped Andrew Bridgen is trying to bring to MPs’ attention?

    1. Well done. I was happy with a par 4 today.

      Wordle 637 4/6

      🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜⬜🟨🟨⬜
      🟨🟩⬜⬜🟨
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

      1. #MeToo; happy with a Par Four.

        Wordle 637 4/6
        🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
        ⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
        🟨🟩🟨⬜🟨
        🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. Just a birdie for me. Took me a while though.
      Wordle 637 3/6

      🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜🟩⬜⬜🟨
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  50. Ukraine’s Death by Proxy. Chris Hedges 15 March 2023.

    U.S. love of freedom only extends to people who serve its “national interest.”

    There will come a time when the Ukrainians, like the Kurds, will become expendable. They will disappear, as many others before them have, from our national discourse and our consciousness. They will nurse for generations their betrayal and suffering. The American empire will move on to use others, perhaps the “heroic” people of Taiwan, to further its futile quest for global hegemony.

    China is the big prize for our Dr. Strangeloves. They will pile up even more corpses and flirt with nuclear war to curtail China’s growing economic and military power. This is an old and predictable game. It leaves in its wake nations in ruins and millions of people dead and displaced. It fuels the hubris and self-delusion of the mandarins in Washington who refuse to accept the emergence of a multipolar world. If left unchecked, this “game of nations” may get us all killed.

    Though Hedges has had a long and distinguished career he is a little intense for most people. He is in his way an ideologue though opposed to Washington and its Hegemonic ambitions. I prefer the truth, that way you don’t need to defend the indefensible or support the opposite for the sake of it!

    https://consortiumnews.com/2023/03/14/chris-hedges-ukraines-death-by-proxy/

    1. Have you noticed how the jolly Sunday magazine-type articles featuring mercenaries in Ukraine having a boys-own time of it have all vanished? Earlier today, someone posted estimated casualty figures that were hoorendous, and commented taht there was no official information. Well, harking back to working in Libya where the watchword was “Pay attention to what’s not said, and how it isn’t said”, I began thinking about how one might find indicators as to how the war is going, and came up with the “jolly” mercenaries… who don’t seem to be mercenaring any more.

      2. Probably plenty of secretive types still out there, working quietly according to plan.

        A bit like SOE in WWII (sorry Tom, that was the Special Operations Executive in World War 2); its main role seems to have been as a distraction, to protect personnel from other groups.

    1. Following the link, Eddy, and I get:

      Forbidden
      SES-0203 Categories=TRY_AGAIN Message=’Your session ed950fcab9db44dcb81040e1cf50f603 expired. Please start a new browser session.’ exceptionID=-1586341742-29647046 SESSION_EXPIRED: null com.openexchange.session.expiration.reason: nosecretcookie

      1. I’ve been trying to post is for ten minutes, it was an email I can’t copy it ill type it out and post it

        1. Highlight it all, then copy (Ctrl + C)
          Open WORD, select NEW then Paste it (Ctrl + V).
          Now using the same commands, you can paste it here.

          1. No! Not word, just use notepad. Word will preserve all the appalling line breaks. Notepad being 7 bit won’t.

          2. It doesn’t Tom work I can’t even slide it across, I use to be able to do all sorts of thing like this on my PC but it seems to have developed a mind of it’s own recently.
            I’m getting rather fed up with it.
            I might have to contact ‘the fixers’ and have a word with them.

    2. As it says ……

      This is a must read.
      In 1991, at the end of Desert Storm, a 19 year old US Army Cavalry Scout Private who has just spent 8 months at war, sat out on a street at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, he sat on his duffle bag with his Battalion around him for four days waiting for the buses to come and take him and his colleagues to the King Fahad airport so they might go home. Unfortunately, the politicians of the day never planned for how to bring so many soldiers home after the war had ended, so there was ‘a shortage of planes’. Politicians are great at talking, but terrible at doing. Finally the buses came and took the young man and his colleagues to the airport. The aircraft that were waiting were from Tower Air. The owner of Tower Air had volunteered his aircraft and staff to bring the soldiers home for the cost of the fuel only. Happily the young man arrived home just in time for the Easter weekend 1991. Spending that time emotionally healing with his friends and family.
      The owner of the Air line Was no less than Donald Trump. At least he was loyal to the soldiers and was respected for what he did.
      Any questions ?

      1. Trump did not own Tower Air, the story is false.

        He did have a more limited Samaritan role with Trump shuttle, helping move infantrymen around the US.

        1. Oh no, I get these stories from a good friend I have known for years.
          I’ll have to tell her she won’t like it.
          But he did help out which is useful.
          Thanks for the info, Sam (Samantha) will be horrified. 😖

    1. Is it the car? I say that ignorant of the season. Formula 1 got boring when it was just driving around in circles all the time.

      I admire the technology and watch the briefings (I especially like the bandwidth and telemetry back office systems) but not a lot else.

  54. This will be a lot more entertaining than Credit Suisse…

    Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell resigns as SNP chief executive

    Mr Murrell, who has led the SNP for almost 25 years, said in a statement that he would step down ‘with immediate effect’

    By Daniel Sanderson, SCOTTISH CORRESPONDENT
    18 March 2023 • 12:04pm

    The Happy Couple
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2023/03/18/TELEMMGLPICT000325487885_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfyKvq_nGV8CVExf4qSbkzM.jpeg?imwidth=680
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/18/nicola-sturgeons-husband-peter-murrell-resigns-snp-chief-executive/

    ****************************

    Some vivid BTLs

    1. No longer even a party for the dimmer ‘Scottish’ people.. More immigrant placings…

      1. Which reminds me, as John Lewis sinks, alongside Sharon White, she has now appointed ‘Nish Kankiwala’ to work alongside as ‘chief executive’…

        1. Just as well Rev.Spooner is no longer with us with a surname like Ms Kankiwala…..

          1. There are plenty on this page who will step into Spooner’s shoes. No names mentioned.

        2. The best thing since sliced bread? Perhaps he’ll use his loaf.

          https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/RG-image-2.jpg

          “A controversial appointment
          Kankiwala’s appointment is a bold move from the Partnership, which has been criticised for the lack of retail leaders amongst its senior team, with some attributing this for its current woes.

          White spent her career in the civil service and was chief executive of Ofcom before she joined the Partnership.

          Meanwhile, recently departed Pippa Wicks spent most of her career in consultancies as a turnaround specialist before a brief stint as Co-op’s chief operating officer.

          Kankiwala, who was most recently chief executive of Hovis, does not fix that problem.

          He has spent the majority of his career in FMCG, beginning his career at Unilever before heading up Burger King’s international operations and later becoming the president of Pepsico’s soft drinks business in Europe and Africa.

          As revenues continue to decline, its hard to understand why the Partnership has not brought a retailer in to lead its turnaround.

          “They need someone at the helm who understands retail,” said Detail Executive Search managing director Paul Meechan, explaining he was flummoxed by the announcement.

          “If you’ve got a business that isn’t doing great in retail, you bring in the best retailer you can afford to get it sorted.”

          2. “…criticised for the lack of retail leaders amongst its senior team…”

            And they thought that’d work? Dear life. They hired a black woman who’s bounced around the civil service, never accomplishing anything, never being really responsible – moved before such could come about – and installed her in John Lewis and now it’s failing, as was obvious to every single person on the sodding planet.

          4. Thought i’d heard somewhere SV Bank was full of “diversity” (sic) at senior management level but none of them knew anything about banking…

            For the second time tonight i should read the thread before i post.

            Still, great minds think alike.

          5. Thought i’d heard somewhere SV Bank was full of “diversity” (sic) at senior management level but none of them knew anything about banking…

            For the second time tonight i should read the thread before i post.

            Still, great minds think alike.

    2. No longer even a party for the dimmer ‘Scottish’ people.. More immigrant placings…

  55. This will be a lot more entertaining than Credit Suisse…

    Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell resigns as SNP chief executive

    Mr Murrell, who has led the SNP for almost 25 years, said in a statement that he would step down ‘with immediate effect’

    By Daniel Sanderson, SCOTTISH CORRESPONDENT
    18 March 2023 • 12:04pm

    The Happy Couple
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/politics/2023/03/18/TELEMMGLPICT000325487885_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfyKvq_nGV8CVExf4qSbkzM.jpeg?imwidth=680
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/18/nicola-sturgeons-husband-peter-murrell-resigns-snp-chief-executive/

    ****************************

    Some vivid BTLs

      2. Don’t forget the Middlesex Regiment. Just think how popular that would be today….

  57. It’s already hard to face underrepresentation in the workforce. A swath of global layoffs is making it harder for people of colour.
    Underrepresentation, fewer pathways to success and a lack of institutional support: these are some of the setbacks people of colour have experienced, and continue to experience, in nearly all industries. BBC Equality matters

    . . . but more than adequately compensated for by mass overrepresentation in theft, sexual assaults and stabbings. Who says we are a biased, divergent nation?

    1. BBC now using Americanisms. It’s ‘Swathe’ not Swath. And ‘People of Colour’ are Blacks and Browns with the odd Yellow.

    2. What a load of utter rubbish. White people are about 11% of the global population, so a small minority. The balance of power is shifting towards India and China which are not white countries. Yet fools continue to spout this carp.

  58. Here’s fun. My council tax bill has arrived. When I bought my flat in ‘94, it was band B and I protested and got it down to band A. The present bill is for exactly what they wanted to charge me when it was in the higher band.

    1. Our council tax has increased by the absolute maximum allowed without referendum every year without fail. Services have declined. Council salaries, though, have gone from 40,000 – over paid, but acceptable – to over 250,000.

      There should be absolutely no tax increases allowed – of any level – without referenda.

    2. Ours has a £750 surcharge for the Khunt (apologies for the language. It’s a filthy word which i only use in relation to politicians who deserve it).

  59. Is this the man in America turning the Ukraine war for Vladimir Putin? 18 March 2023.

    But what does Mr Carlson’s stranglehold over the GOP spell for its future?

    With both its main 2024 candidates dissenting from current US policy in Ukraine, a major faction within the party is now breaking with Washington’s bipartisan consensus.

    While mainstream Republicans continue to chide the position held by Mr Trump and now Mr DeSantis – who boast about seven in 10 GOP votes between them – there are signs it is an ascendant one.

    Some of the more extreme voices in the party who share Mr DeSantis’ view, including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, are regulars on Mr Carlson’s segments on Russia.’

    Let us hope that Mr Carlson’s view prevails!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/03/18/tucker-carlson-man-america-turning-ukraine-war-vladimir-putin/

    1. Tucker is walking on a tightrope on a number of issues. He has a huge following and that probably saves him from the wrath of the owners of Fox.

      Senator Lindsey Graham is a RINO and a hawk. I can’t repeat what Stew Peters thinks and says of him.
      RINOs + Democrats = Uniparty = Deep State.

  60. Blimey: it’s all kicking off in North Britain.
    The Pied Piper is sweeping through Holyrood.
    As has been pointed out, the rats would be leaving the sinking ship if the ferries had actually been launched.

    1. Home Office revenge for Brexit. They don’t care. To them, the end justifies the means.

  62. Looks like the SNP are doomed, they’ll soon be less rare then the Dodo

  63. 372110+ up ticks,

    May one ask,
    A pertinent question would be would you trust your children’s safety to President Putin or the rotherham authorities ?

  64. Imran Khan’s house raided by police using bulldozers and tear gas as shots fired from roof. 18 March 2023.

    The 70-year-old opposition leader has also claimed that his removal from power was part of a conspiracy by his successor, Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif, and the United States. Both Washington and Sharif’s government have denied the allegations.

    Almost certainly true!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/03/18/police-use-bulldozers-tear-gas-break-imran-khans-house-shots/

          4. That’s where we started this innings…

            I suppose you and a third man might help.

  65. Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell resigns as SNP chief executive. 18 march 2023.

    Support drained away from Mr Murrell after even staunch party loyalists turned on him over the treatment of Mr Foote, a former editor of the Daily Record.

    Mr Foote, who was the SNP’s head of communications and research at Holyrood, was a well-liked and widely respected figure who ferociously and publicly denied a report of a mass exodus of 30,000 party members in February.

    However, the SNP was forced to publish its membership figure on Thursday following pressure from leadership candidates Ash Regan and Kate Forbes. The SNP had repeatedly briefed that it had around 100,000 members, but it confirmed on Thursday that only 72,186 were eligible to vote in the leadership contest.

    Just in case you were wondering what the Haggis Bashers were getting worked up about!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/03/18/nicola-sturgeons-husband-peter-murrell-resigns-snp-chief-executive/

  66. 372110+ up ticks,

    If this be the case then bring the general election forward to next Thursday 23 /3/2023

    If the voting pattern is unchanged then hand the Country over to the muslim brotherhood on Friday and stop ballsing about.

    Con-Servatives: UK Net Migration to Remain in Hundreds of Thousands Despite Tory Promises

  67. Scotland 26 Italy 14 but my word they made hard work of it with the game not won until the last minute. Italy could have sneaked it. What a finish.

    It must have been the pink jerseys.

      1. Sorry. Didn’t think. I tend to isolate myself from all communication in such circumstances so I can’t hear the result before viewing.

        1. You are forgiven. But – with live sport, a lot of NoTTLers do record to watch later and don’t expect to see results here – at least until much later in the day (or the next day).

          Just saying.

          1. I was going to joke that you must be pleased that England are 156-nil up, but have thought better of it.

            Spoiler alert. I don’t even know who England are playing, but we are meant to be good at rugby aren’t we?

            (Stands back to await uproar).

      3. Lol! (This is the guy that called Plod a pleb when Plod wouldn’t open the gates at Downing St for hos bike, isn’t it?)

        Edit. I really should learn to read the whole thread before wading in…

      4. Lol! (This is the guy that called Plod a pleb when Plod wouldn’t open the gates at Downing St for hos bike, isn’t it?)

        Edit. I really should learn to read the whole thread before wading in…

    2. Idolaters abound within our political class. That’s a major problem for the people. Whatever is the attraction?

  69. The US was prepared to bomb the Middle East into shape. In Ukraine, it seems no less self-serving. 18 March 2023.

    In global affairs the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Yet policies must be judged on their consequences. US strategy since the 1970s had been to keep Moscow out of the Middle East. The calamitous invasion and occupation of Iraq proved an invitation for other powers to enter the region. By 2016, there was a Saudi-Russian oil partnership, Russian support for the Iranian regime and a Russian military presence in Syria. In that year, the US had a choice of electing a confront-China candidate, Donald Trump, or a confront-Russia candidate, Hillary Clinton. It is now led by a president, Joe Biden, apparently willing to take on both giant rivals at once in the belief that the US can be safe only in a world of like-minded democratic states. The Manichaean quality to American foreign policy enunciated so clearly in Bush’s rhetoric has not gone away.

    The capricious and self-centred nature of American power is well known to friend and foe alike. The US was prepared to split with old allies to bomb the Middle East into a shape that suited it. Washington had little time for French and German diplomatic protests against the illegal nature of the Iraq war. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. The political system planted in Iraq by Washington has intensified divisions and made it practically ungovernable. While Iraq’s oil has flowed on to world markets, about $150bn has been corruptly siphoned off. A token number of US troops remain to keep Islamic State at bay, but the real power in Baghdad runs through Tehran. Iran’s allied militias have the casting vote in Iraqi politics. The US could write off the failure of Iraq because a shale oil and gas boom made the country an energy superpower.

    This article is an oddity for the Guardian. It is a look at the geopolitical realities of the world shorn of its propaganda babble about Freedom and Democracy.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/18/middle-east-ukraine-washington-iraq-kyiv

    1. It is now led by a president, Joe Biden, apparently willing to take on both giant rivals at once in the belief that the US can be safe only in a world of like-minded democratic states.

      Translation:
      Woke dictatorships

  70. The US was prepared to bomb the Middle East into shape. In Ukraine, it seems no less self-serving. 18 March 2023.

    In global affairs the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Yet policies must be judged on their consequences. US strategy since the 1970s had been to keep Moscow out of the Middle East. The calamitous invasion and occupation of Iraq proved an invitation for other powers to enter the region. By 2016, there was a Saudi-Russian oil partnership, Russian support for the Iranian regime and a Russian military presence in Syria. In that year, the US had a choice of electing a confront-China candidate, Donald Trump, or a confront-Russia candidate, Hillary Clinton. It is now led by a president, Joe Biden, apparently willing to take on both giant rivals at once in the belief that the US can be safe only in a world of like-minded democratic states. The Manichaean quality to American foreign policy enunciated so clearly in Bush’s rhetoric has not gone away.

    The capricious and self-centred nature of American power is well known to friend and foe alike. The US was prepared to split with old allies to bomb the Middle East into a shape that suited it. Washington had little time for French and German diplomatic protests against the illegal nature of the Iraq war. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. The political system planted in Iraq by Washington has intensified divisions and made it practically ungovernable. While Iraq’s oil has flowed on to world markets, about $150bn has been corruptly siphoned off. A token number of US troops remain to keep Islamic State at bay, but the real power in Baghdad runs through Tehran. Iran’s allied militias have the casting vote in Iraqi politics. The US could write off the failure of Iraq because a shale oil and gas boom made the country an energy superpower.

    This article is an oddity for the Guardian. It is a look at the geopolitical realities of the world shorn of its propaganda babble about Freedom and Democracy.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/18/middle-east-ukraine-washington-iraq-kyiv

  71. The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places, the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from the Consulate at Bergen Norway.
    Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
    Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.
    Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
    Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
    Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
    Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coast cities uninhabitable.
    * * ** * * * *
    I must apologize. I neglected to mention.
    This report was from November 2, 1922, as reported and published in The Washington Post 95 years ago.
    This must have been caused by the Model T Ford’s emissions or possibly from horse and cattle flatulence.

    1. Thank you, Spikey.
      Nicked for Ar5ebook
      Their ‘fart checkers’ claimed it had been altered.

  72. O/T. I was up very late last night. I couldn’t put my book down. I was reading Chef Anthony Bourdain’s book ‘Kitchen Confidential’. Quite riveting for someone interested in the trade. There was one story that had me laughing like Mutley. Couldn’t breathe and tears streaming from my eyes.

    He said his friend Dimitri was stripped naked in the kitchen. Covered in fake blood and then wrapped in cling film. In the dank cellar they deposited him in the chest freezer arranging his limbs into improbable positions.
    Then they called the manager asking him if he knew of Dimitri’s whereabouts as they hadn’t seen him in hours. The manager said no he hadn’t seen him.
    They then told the manager they were short handed and could he please help them out and get a box of shrimps from the freezer.
    A single light bulb in a gloomy cellar above the freezer.
    Bourdain said they had to bring him around with amonia.
    The manager left soon after never to be seen again.

    I laughed so hard i almost wet myself.

    1. Every one in our government is a liar.
      Most of the top brass in Whitehall are liars.
      Most of the sitting pms were absent when the vote was held on the stopping of the illegal invaders.
      I heard a serious Pleading request for donations for the RNLI on the radio yesterday. I doubt if they’ll have any money at all soon.
      Two things from that I will never vote for my mp again. He wasn’t in Parliament that day.
      And I will never make another donation for the RNLI.
      The lying has to stop.

  75. Thumbing my nose to all twits re books….Matilda, Roald Dahl, is on at 5. Shall watch it for an hour and turn to Neil. I think I will order Revolting Rhymes and The Enormous Crocodile to read to the grand monsters next time they visit. And if they have been edited- watch out for a south coast eruption.

    1. I expect the referee will be happy with his nice ‘Bung villa’ in the Western Cape.

  78. Why slavery reparations are a terrible idea. Spiked. 18 March 2023.

    To see how destructive identity politics can be, how toxic and divisive, look no further than San Francisco’s crazy reparations idea. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors appointed a panel to consider whether reparations should be paid to the city’s black residents for the historic crimes of slavery and racism. The panel decreed that, yes, they should be. Every eligible black citizen of San Francisco should get $5million each, it said. They should also get $97,000 a year for the rest of their lives and be able to buy homes in the city for $1. Incredibly, the Board of Supervisors is seriously considering the recommendations rather than hurling them into the trashcan of crackpot ideas that deserve not a split second’s contemplation, which is where they should be.

    Every member of the Board of Supervisors accepted the plan on principle. All 11 of them. No decision has been made on exactly how and when the city will fork out financial compensation for historic moral errors – that will be a far longer process – but the board believes that it should happen. That potentially hundreds of millions of dollars should be taken from some taxpayers and handed to others for past events that not a single living soul had any involvement in.

    California used to be the richest State in the Union. Its GDP was greater than that of the UK. People dreamed of going there. It’s now a basket case. Its government was captured by the Wokeys and since than it’s been downhill all the way. It’s streets are camping grounds for illegal immigrants. It’s working population is moving to Texas. It used to be said that if you looked at California you could see what Britain would be like in another ten years. That at least is still true!

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/17/why-slavery-reparations-are-a-terrible-idea/

  79. One for Oberst…

    Went to the doctors yesterday because I keep thinking I’m a wigwam and sometimes a teepee.

    Doc says I need to try to relax, I’m too tense.

    2. Any transexual wishing to date what they were is homosexual.
      That’s as in same not as in man.
      Female to male trannies wanting to date women are lesbians, male to female trannies wanting to date men are gay.
      These mentally ill deviants should be dating each other and leaving the rest of the population out of their liaisons.

  84. That’s us on the way out to dinner – Italian, local place, good food & tolerable prices.
    Slayders.

    1. Enjoy ! I went Spanish today. Mussels. Garlic prawns. And as i was wearing my James Bond replica jacket i had 2 dry Martini’s. £47 !

  85. OOPS! I’ve just realised that I forgot to wish you all a good day, chums. I am now about to watch MONDO CANE on YouTube, but hope not to forget to wish you all a good night and the best for a good night’s sleep later on.

      1. Phil. I am making a pavlova. What is the secret to stop it from collapsing when cooked? I have been making them for years, but large pieces always, always shear off and the top collapses inwards. Where am I going wrong? The completed examples I see always look wonderful! I stick the pieces back on with cream. I am making it later this evening to take to our younger son’s tomorrow, where I will add the whipped cream and cherry compote. I would be grateful for any assistance!

        1. There are so many factors. It doesn’t really matter if it cracks. As you know, faults can easily be disguised and your guests will love it anyway.

          The freshest of egg white.
          Don’t over beat.
          After adding the sugar and beating it in test a little between your fingers. If it feels grainy it won’t work.
          You need a crisp outside and a slightly softer middle.

          As far as collapsing is concerned………..Do thinner layers and stack them. After all it is a show stopper. Go large !!!

          1. Thank you, my egg whites (Waitrose) bought y’day, Leghorn Whites!- are fresh and ready to go.

          3. Brilliant.

            I have made for friends huge pavlovas but i did find stacking was the best way to go. Two feet wide on some occasions. A whipped cream won’t make it collapse. Though the cream does need to be sweetened or have a nice vanilla flavour. The beauty of it is if you are prepared it can be assembled in minutes. A very good strawberry sauce or other soft fruit passed through a fine sieve served in a big jug makes people/guests feel there are extras !..and extras always impress.

          4. Extra, extra, read all about it.

            We went to a French wedding where the traditional “spire” cake was brought out to great applause, it must have been two metres tall.
            As the porters lowered it to the table they managed to get the centre of gravity slightly wrong, and the whole thing collapsed in very slow motion.
            The silence was deafening but then people started to smile and then laugh and the bride and groom joined in.
            All’s well that ends well.

          5. I did outside catering events including weddings. A rather posh one at Winchester. Fantastic marquees by a lake. Walking across the …let us call it a floor… the top tier of the wedding cake fell off and rolled across the floor in front of the top table. I calmly picked up the offending article making sure i made eye contact with no one and placed it on the table. (i didn’t even attempt to blow the fluff off).

            I don’t believe it suffered any damage anyway because the bride and groom had much difficulty in getting through the icing with a blooming sword !

            As we were packing up at the end of the night all our gear, we noticed that the free Bar had gone off early. We did them all a favour by relieving them of the trouble of carrying back all the Champagne and assorted bottles of booze. Every little helps !

          6. What means “Over beat”?, and how do you know when you’re getting close?

          7. Now you just stop that smuttiness !
            I am talking about the handling in the proper manner of er eggs. Gentle strokes. Don’t go full on top speed until the end……………..Then add the sugar !!!

          8. I was after cooking advice. Recipes are full of things like “… add water a bit at a time, just enough but not too much…” which is no help if you don’t know what “enough” is.

          1. That was my intention…. as well as going soggy there may be too much sliding around in the car, the road across to B’wade suffers from subsidence and is potholed.

          2. When you get your meringue to the right consistency you can just tub it up. Whipped cream in a big piping bag. Fruit cut and turned at the ready. Fruit sauce bottled and ready to go. If you really want to impress or kill them have a big jug of single cream ready to go. I have never heard anyone say no.

            You might suspect i have had a career in outside catering. :@)…and occasional murder.

        3. In addition to my addition !!!

          Turn the compote into a sauce that people can add once you have constructed your tower block of meringue and whipped cream. #Don’t try this in a hot summer !

          1. Yes, I was concerned that the compote might be too drippy, I’ll sauce it (drain it and cornflour the liquid?)

          2. Absolutely not !…Don’t thicken with cornflour…arrrgghhh !

            Just gently reduce on a low heat until it becomes a little glossy and sticky.

          3. Will do… I am not all that keen on cornflour but……! I used to reduce apricot juices in France to go with an apricot (straight off the tree) compote made by my own fair hand with a little sweet white wine of the area, it was delicious.

  87. Well, am I enjoying the shemozzle north of the border.
    Harking back to my youth, it’s panning out in satisfactory episodes like the Profumo affair.

    1. Something is afoot, Watson. Will we get to the bottom of it? Wee Krankie and dubious husband…Hmmn, now what could they have been up to?

    2. If you get a minute, Anne go and check out some of the comments on the National! The poor, deluded, and vicious souls are convinced that Humza Useless is a Murrell sock puppet, and that the 30,000 votes that are in Bute House garage, will see Independence to fruition! It’s hilarious!

  88. I forgot the green dye for my Prosecco cocktail; Ireland have won the Grand Slam, the Championship and the Triple Crown …

      1. It’s a great shame that as the draw stands, the Micks and Frog match won’t be the final.

      1. On the basis of the last couple of weeks France appears to be the classier side with the most entertaining rugby.

        The refereeing decisions have become a farce and the matches ruined by sending offs for not doing very much.

        1. It’s elf and safety dictating the rules now – they’ll be wearing body armour next. I say make rugby interesting…..play it on concrete

        2. Today’s was just a bodily clash, it was the result of a follow through. Not at all intentional. It’s a tough game rugby.

        1. But that was not dangerous behaviour! I’m not really a blamer of refs, but in the case of Jaco Peyper I’ll make an exception! I have never seen him ref without bias and today was a complete joke. Steward had nowhere to go after a knock-on and Keenan bent into him. I won’t be watching any more.

        2. It’s hard to know the best way forward, but I would send the player off, but allow him to be replaced after a 10 minute lapse.
          The exception I would make is for those such as the NZ tip tackle on O’Driscoll, where the intention was clearly to eliminate him from the match and the series.

  89. I’ve just paid £14 for Oxo cubes!
    The stock market’s gone crazy!

    Far too many people on the gravy train

        1. My dog is a very atypical Labrador. She doesn’t seem to realise that her job is to save me from getting the vacuum cleaner out. Crumbs remain on the floor.

          3. Our poor old Lab us not well she has a large tumour at the front of the roof of her mouth. Unfortunately it can’t be operated on. We think we will have to have her put to sleep. She’s 13 in July.
            And is one of the nicest ‘people’ I have ever known.
            She is dripping blood and can only eat chicken and boiled rice. She will sadly missed.

          4. The vet has just spotted a lump in the roof of our Lab’s mouth. She will be having an x-ray and biopsy this Thursday. She will be 12 in August. We could find ourselves in the same position as you. My wife said some time ago that she wouldn’t want her dog to suffer, but the decision will be heart-breaking when it has to be made. I wish you and your Lab all the best.

          5. We love our dog it’s so hard to watch her suffering. She just lays on her bed nearly all day.
            I was wondering if the dog food has caused this. It’s not easy to understand exactly what the hard biscuit type food is actually made of.
            She also has a lot of fat lumps under her skin.
            Sad times. 😔

          6. Fat lumps under the skin are very common. Amber (our dog – a fox-red Lab) has had them for a few years. The vet says they are nothing to worry about, unless they grow much larger.

      1. If it was really down to the nitty-gritty, I suspect you would extinguish any fire in your pants through natural excretions!

        1. You are probably right. I keep a small bucket by my bed to cut down on the cost of the laundry. My problem though is to stop Harry drinking it before i can empty it in the morning. Any suggestions?

          1. Get a plastic tinkle bottle with a lid on. My husband has one to save him trying to get to the loo in the night. Really useful and easy to clean and keep nice.

          2. Keep it next to your glass of water on the bedside table and just be careful you drink the cooler one.

    2. On my first flight (2005) after many years, returning from Venice alone I watched this little pantomime in the same queue that I was in for London Heathrow. A muslim mother, with six of her (adult) children just ahead of me. By adult I mean 18-28. Her three girls were crying, imploring her – her three sons were reassuring her, patting her. I watched in tired fascination, I was on autopilot having been up early to travel south from Austrian border. It came to Mother’s turn to hand over her documents. She had to submit, I think, probably to a body search and was taken away by two female ‘border force’ type women. The queue continued on through security and her children (if all of them were hers) melted away. The remainder of the queue boarded the plane and we waited for take-off. And waited and waited. For an hour or so. We heard thumps and bumps from below during this time. I realised later that the search was probably on for this woman’s luggage – during the time we were waiting there was no sign of her appearance for this flight. With hindsight all somewhat unnerving. Nothing like that has happened since.

      1. Always worse in retrospect, but it would be interesting to know what it was all about.

      2. I remember in the 80s when your fellow crewmembers could carry you up the steps of the aircraft and buckle you into your seat and be awoken mid flight by a stewardess asking if you would care for a drink, sir.
        And no, I wasn’t the pilot.

    1. Fentanyl or mRNA who can say……………I prefer MDMA. At least i get to dance all night and get a shag at the end. Erm..

  92. This story about Trump being arrested next Tuesday…
    there are now memes circulating saying “If they arrest Trump, we should all pull our money out of the banks and make them crash!”

    Cynical me thinks that if the banksters KNOW that the system is about to crash because they have printed too much unbacked worthless “money” and played silly games with ridiculous “financial products”….then what better way to divert blame than to make a big story about arresting Trump and then blame Trump supporters for causing a bank run and subsequent bank crashes?

    At all costs they want to avoid people blaming the ones who are really responsible for the corrupt system crashing.
    Just a thought.

      1. As conspiracies go, it wouldn’t be a particularly complex one, nor would it be unprecedented. They are always putting up distractions in the media, and this stinks of distraction, especially if it comes with a handy little bank run on which to blame the next crash.

        1. The Democrats will do anything to avoid the true blame and their followers will just agreeto anything they d cide to do.

          1. The top Democrats are a nice little cabal of gangsters (see Biden, Hunter; laptop), but they don’t control the money – that is done by the Federal Reserve – not Federal, and no reserves. It’s a private bank, owned and run by Wall Street bankers, and it prints the money and controls the interest rates.
            America is owned and run by a ring of bankers, and that has been the case since 1913 when it was founded, in a VERY shady way.

    2. I’m keeping an eye on the £ vs $ vs €, and for the last month I’m seeing absolutely nothing occurring.

      1. They are all falling at the same rate!!

        Inflation at the moment isn’t rising prices, it is falling purchasing power.

  93. “The evidence is in. Lockdowns kill people – and the more you lock down, the more you kill”
    The leaked WhatsApp messages show that we have been governed by petty, frightened men who valued appearance over substance

    Daniel Hannan : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/18/evidence-lockdowns-kill-people-lock-kill/

    BTL Percival Wrattstrangler

    Some might claim that you can say the same about vaccines – so why did all the MPs leave the House of Commons and refuse to listen to Andrew Bridgen’s evidence?

      1. Snobbery is just as bad as inverted snobbery and vice versa!

        I used to like Hannan but I went off him not because of his social status but because he lost the plot and became very muddle-headed about Brexit.

    1. ‘a banking contagion which I’ve named ‘Covid Interruptus23’ as it results in total withdrawals….”

      1. I’ve just made my maximum withdrawal of £300 this evening and will probably do the same in the morn’s morn.

        And continue until I’ve emptied the account.

          2. Actually, it was the Battle of Britain memorial at Capel-le-Ferne which highlighted it. It used to belong to one of their sponsors.

  95. Enid Blyton books hidden ‘under the counter’ as libraries fret about offensive language

    Classic stories treated like ‘contraband’ with verbal trigger warnings to prevent readers stumbling upon ‘outdated’ words and phrases

    By Craig Simpson 18 March 2023 • 4:58pm

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2023/03/18/TELEMMGLPICT000329282980_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=680
    Enid Blyton’s books are loved by many, but libraries in Devon have taken to hiding some of her best known works

    Enid Blyton’s books are beloved by millions, but borrowing original versions of her works from the local library might now be a job better suited to the Famous Five.

    The author’s works are being treated like “contraband” by librarians, with uncensored original versions stashed in an off-limits storage space to prevent the public “stumbling upon” language that is “outdated”.

    Only recently edited versions of the author’s works, which have had potentially offensive terminology removed, are publicly displayed across Devon’s public libraries.

    Readers who specifically request original versions of titles like the Famous Five are cautioned about their content with a verbal trigger warning.

    Should readers request Blyton’s original editions – which are catalogued online – there is “an informal warning system to remind customers of the language contained within the old edition.

    The library policy has raised concern among free speech advocates that classic texts are being treated like “contraband” and “under-the-counter” merchandise.
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    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/18/enid-blyton-books-hidden-counter-libraries-fret-offensive-language/

    Miss Winter
    4 HRS AGO
    Very frightening indeed. I imagine one of the cardinal sins of Enid Blyton is she often referred to ‘mother’ and ‘father’ in her stories of innocent childhood days.
    Frankly these libraries don’t deserve council funding they are not fulfilling a public service but are actually simply indoctrinating people with their censorship policies.
    Stuff libraries – buy unadulterated second-hand books so you can enjoy Enid Blyton as she was meant to be enjoyed and then we can all have a jolly good time!

    Karen Moore
    4 HRS AGO
    Phrases such as ‘Shut up’ and ‘Don’t be an idiot.’ have been changed. I suppose it was felt to be upsetting to idiots.

      1. Joking apart, molamola, Noddy was “corrected” several decades ago when the Naughty golliwogs were changed to Pixies. And this was whilst Enid Blyton was still alive.

        1. Problem, hic, with Pixies is that they often get pixellated and then they go out like lights.

    3. I never liked Blyton’s books because they were daft. Malory Towers books were OK but the rest were rubbish. And I do not mean because of the woke BS.

      1. I enjoyed Malory Towers but I much preferred Gwendoline to Darrell and that was very clearly not intended.

      2. I do remember reading my sister’s, “In the Fifth at Malory Towers.” but not quite understanding it’s subtleties- I was about 12 at the time and didn’t begin to understand ‘gurls’.

        That was what growing up was about, in those halcyon days.

        1. I read the Just William books and, despite being a very naughty primary school girl, it gave little insight into little boys. I loved the books though.

      3. I don’t think she was a very nice person. There was one book she wrote, that was set in modern times and tried to be realistic – and it does show her as rather nasty and judgemental. Probably typical views of her day, eg that single mothers shouldn’t go out to work because it turns their children into neglected latchkey kids, which is true but she just criticises them with a bit too much relish.

        She herself once said that she only accepted criticism of her books from people under ten – i.e. she knew they were daft, but they were intended as childhood fantasies. I loved them as a child – as childhood fantasies, they have never been bettered. Simplistic, but giving children adult powers in a safe world.

  96. Evening, all. What a strange day it’s been; I sat out to eat breakfast in sunshine – 16 degrees C! When I took the dogs out it was sunny and 18 degrees C. I got halfway round the walk and the heavens opened! I was only wearing a lightweight coat and the dogs were naked because it was so warm. Needless to say, we needed to dry out afterward. As for the headline; I suspect someone, somewhere, is making a lot of money out of the useless heat pumps.

  99. Goodnight and God bless, Gentlefolk.

    I’ve drunk myself into an an oblivion in the hopes I might sleep.

    Bis morgon fruh.

    2. Excellent! As an older lady now- that would be me and my stick!! Well done that woman.

    3. Absolutely perfect! Something to be watched every morning, over breakfast! Good on her – nice kick, BTW!

  101. Looking forward to bed but also dreading it- can’t sleep on my right side. Going to call hospital Monday to see if I can see another doctor. I can’t go on like this.
    Thank god for Pinot.
    Goodnight Y’all.

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