833 thoughts on “Thursday 8 August: Victoria Tower Gardens is the wrong place for a Holocaust memorial”

  1. ‘Morning all. 31C and overcast forecast today. That means oppressive humidity. Hey Ho.

  2. To survive the new global Dark Age, Britain must leave the tyrannical EU, Sherrelle Jacobs. 8 AUGUST 2019 • 6:00AM.

    Brexit isn’t a leap into the abyss because the darkness is already here. Our elite is too blinded with anti-populist delirium to notice, but the world has plunged into a new “medieval” era that has nothing to do with the 2016 vote.

    Morning everyone. Sounds like my sort of thing! Can some kindly wealthy Nottler put it up so I can read it all?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/08/08/survive-new-global-dark-age-britain-must-leave-tyrannical-eu/

    1. The DT accepts any random email address provided you remove cookies each time.

      1. Here you are, minty. Squawk, squawk.

        Brexit isn’t a leap into the abyss because the darkness is already here. Our elite is too blinded with anti-populist delirium to notice, but the world has plunged into a new “medieval” era that has nothing to do with the 2016 vote.

        Since the Second World War, decrepit Europe has cowered behind the American soldier while chastising his choice of battles and choking ungratefully on the scent of his sweat. But the much-resented interlude of American supremacy has quietly faded into a half-imagined Arabian desert dream. Nor will China, the stillborn superpower, replace the US. Instead, in stirring parallels with the centuries that followed the Roman Empire’s fall, we are entering a fragmented and unpredictable Dark Age, where no single power reigns and smaller nations must carve out their own fates.

        The convulsions of violence that vibrate daily on our phones signal the increasingly frequent tremors of political earthquakes in East and West. It is tempting to view the white-supremacist shootings that have wracked the US in recent days solely as rampages of the mentally ill or mindless racist violence. The uncomfortable truth is that these are also frenzied orgies of malicious national grief.

        Trumpland is being slowly crushed by debt, a shrinking job pool and imperial overexpansion. And as the American Dream sours in the country of milky plenty, the two most potent ingredients of its mythology – inexhaustible bounteousness and rugged individualism – are curdling into racially tinged zero-sum competition and a taste for destructive vigilantism.

        Of course, it completely misses the point to blame the state of America on Donald Trump. He is the product not the cause of a disintegrating great nation. Boundless frontierism is seared into the American psyche. It drove the country’s first forays into the Wild Wild West, followed by its conquests against evil dictatorships and in outer space. But the impulse has ultimately left America near-bankrupted by the costs of its colossal army and struggling to defend its interests abroad. Perhaps one day, academics uncorrupted by high minded contempt for Mr Trump will coolly analyse him as the first American President who dared to discuss his country in the context of limits, however inarticulately, urging Europeans to shoulder more of the burden in international peacekeeping and vowing to build a Mexican wall.

        Meanwhile, more than 7,000 miles away, the Chinese Dream is also turning to dust. Protests raging in Hong Kong betray the unsustainability of the Chinese social contract, which demands unquestioning allegiance of all citizens in return for stability and a steady improvement in average wealth. Steroidic growth has already killed China’s hopes of being a superpower. It is condemned to the role of a vast chronically overproducing factory, haunted by its failed “ghost cities” and the graveyards of folded industry. Fraudulent national data will not be able to cover up the economic torments of its middle class and the country’s train-wreck of a financial sector for much longer.

        At this volatile juncture in history, it would be a cataclysmic mistake for Britain to stay in the EU. We must have a nimble and coherent approach to unstable, authoritarian China, which is yet to cement its place in the global pecking order. We also need a supportive and close relationship with the United States as it transitions from superpower to significant power. Clutching at Brussels’ stiffened petticoat as it conducts foreign policy in its usual imperiously brittle manner would ensure we achieve the opposite.

        Europe’s China policy is a disaster. While France and Germany are hawkish, southern states like Greece have signed contracts endorsing the Belt and Road project. Beijing’s primary strategy is to play European nations off against each other.

        But if the EU is divided over China, it is unified in self-destructive, pathological hatred of America. The fact that Brussels is plotting to build an EU army, even though it has spent years happily leeching off American defence money is deeply suspect. Is it really about nobly protecting the international community from Trumpian capriciousness, following the latter’s decision to ditch the Iran deal, as Macron intimates? Or are we witnessing Europe’s bitter “colony complex” collide with its darkest fantasies of empire, the result of years spent slimily sponging off America, while spitefully scheming to one day rip away the rug?

        The EU’s virulent anti-Americanism runs deep. Its conformist, sceptical, fashionably post-modernist elite abhor the liberty-loving, God-fearing good-v-evil Manichaeism of America. The grey suits who have drunk the Kool-Aid of bureaucratic union-building cannot comprehend the Levi-clad barbarians across the Atlantic who are so intoxicated with the notion of “freedom” that they won’t give up their guns, even at the risk of their own well-being. (A romanticism that perhaps traces back to belligerent, independence-loving British ancestors.)

        This cultural gulf could prove deadly in the coming Dark Age. Industries of the future like AI and biotech, which function based on the centralised processing of data, could offer a way for dictatorships unimpeded by the small matter of individual privacy to innovate faster than democracies. Will the EU feel tempted to try to compete with China by replicating its authoritarianism? We are already being treated to disturbing glimmers of the future, as the EU moves to compel internet providers to store data on customers for years, and make it easier for authorities to cross-check biometric data; it has also passed copyright laws that could turn the web into an instrument for surveillance and control.

        Ultimately, then, in this shadowy new age of doomed and dying superpowers, Britain has no choice but to light its own path.

        2. Thank you for that A. Ms Jacobs to some considerable extent reflects my own view of the Future. She must be the only MSM journalist who is even aware of these trends!

          2. OK, let’s discuss them?

            What are they, for you Polly? That we need to leave the EU is obvious, and she makes clear why the EU hates the US.

          3. It’s the globalism thing, abolishing nations partly through creating chaos in favor of world government.

        3. ‘Morning Aeneas and Minty
          What a bleak and compelling view of the future,the only thing Jacobs forgets to mention in her post Rome analogy are the barbarian invaders at the gates of crumbling civilisations
          Islam

          2. That the EU is a controlling authoritarian behemoth is beyond dispute as is its movement to become ever more so. Perhaps that is one reason for the EU’s, and May’s, apparent ‘love-in’ with the cult of islam, one of the most authoritarian pseudo religions ever conceived. As for the use of AI and data processing the Germans were well ahead of the curve in the ’30s and ’40s when they employed Hollerith machine data pocessing to enable the delivery of Jews, and others they deemed undesirable, to the extermination camps.

          3. ‘morning Korky

            The Pakiderm in the room is Islamic organised violence,since the
            Bradford riots of 1995 and 2001/10 the PTB have been terrified of the
            scale of civil disobedience that the Mosques are able to inflict at the
            drop of a hat,combine that with Moslem ghettos providing block votes
            that give Islam a political effect way beyond what it’s population %
            should have and you have a perfect storm of Islamic appeasment.

            It will only get worse,the barbarians are inside the gates,busily
            infiltrating every public and political institution bringing third world
            corruption wherever its tendrils reach and any attempt to push back
            results in fresh veiled (for the moment) threats of violence.
            In the end it will be submit or fight

          4. For a moment I thought Homer had nodded and Pakiderm was a mospront.
            Then the penny dropped.

          5. Morning Rik. The American Empires activities on its borders would be familiar to any inhabitant of Ancient Assyria or Rome! Even the symptoms are the same. Over extension and chronic debt!

        5. “Will the EU feel tempted to try to compete with China by replicating its authoritarianism?” It isn’t known as the EUSSR for nothing.

    2. Methinks Sherrelle Jacobs is really Rip van Winkle and has only just woken up!

  3. Good morning all.

    Bright & sunny start. It’s gonna be a pleasant 25C in Cambridge.

  4. New North Korean propaganda series fails to rally viewers. 8 AUGUST 2019 • 6:33AM.

    Anew North Korean television series has reportedly been panned by audiences as people grow weary of relentless propaganda.

    In Pyongyang, flatscreen TVs are widely available, as is an online app called Mokran, which mimics the global streaming service Netflix.
    But content is heavily censored and often didactic in nature, with story plots revolving around state-approved messaging.

    Sounds like the BBC!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/08/new-north-korean-propaganda-series-fails-rally-viewers/

      1. I can’t watch soaps Elsie. The relentless PC propaganda grates on my nerves!

        1. Moring Minty. I am off for the day so play nicely with all other NoTTLers whilst I am away.

  5. The Suicide Promotion Spot (aka “Business News”, which comes after Farming Today and before they bring on the feminist lesbians for their 20-minute hate around 7.30am) suggests that there is to be a currency war between the US and China, each trying to bring down their currencies in order to improve the prospects of their exporters as their leaders pile on the tariffs.

    The pound however comes ready-downed, and we need no more special measures to join in with this game. In fact, it could do with being a bit stronger right now. Interest rates 2.4% please?

    1. We can’t.

      Oddly Lefties don’t understand this despite it being obvious but if interest rates were to rise, the government would have to pay more to borrow the vast amounts it does.

      If borrowing costs rise, it either borrows less or taxes more. If it borrows less, it has less money to pump into the private sector to buy goods.

      Less demand means job losses, means more welfare and recession. If taxes go up the same happens.

      The solution is for the state to hack off an expensive, feather bedded limb, but it won’t do that. Borrowing needs to be reduced by cutting the waste in the public sector. As the public sector is 40% waste, that’s never going to happen.

      Thus interest rates cannot be allowed to rise while the government borrows at the rate it does.

      1. Less demand at the moment means fewer imports, since our industries are incapable of satisfying the domestic market as it is.

        You know what I feel about Government negligence in tackling the Laffer Threshold and modifying it so that revenue can finance public services without excessive borrowing.

        You are right about waste, goldplating and dodgy prestige megacontracts, but that sort of thing happens with the Right too, often with a few zeroes added to the public cost. HS2?

        1. HS2 is a public project, using public money – unless I’m mistaken.

          Cross rail was the project that brought in a lot of private investors and thus had to keep an eye on the books.

          The Left refuse to accept the Laffer curve yet whine about tax evasion. The TPA did a poll that asked if people wanted lower, flatter taxes. The Lefty rentamob sai dno. Obviously they want higher, less fair taxes, then. The ones that they then complain Amazon and the like avoid, yet Mr Bob on the cornershop are forced to pay.

          Sadly thta sensible poll dissolved into their usual ‘who funds you’ ranting. They’re never bothered about the IPPR or their own Lefty groups, are they?

          The tax pool should be a vast lake, at points very deep, at others very shallow. The government should take a tiny microcosm from that lake. Instead, it’s a well with big government dumping a huge bucket in many times over and the well slowly refilling. Soon, as money is mobile and governments forget this (except the EU because it wants to control everything and tax it to death) there just won’t be any made locally because no one wants the state to take more thna they earn.

          1. You still think the purpose of taxes is to give the government money to spend. It isn’t. The government can spend what it needs as long as the level of spending supports private sector activities rather than destroying them by crowding out. The main functions of taxation are to drive domestic demand for the currency, to alter behaviour and to keep a check on inflation.

      2. Bond yields are far more dependent on inflation expectations than the bank rate. There’s literally zero risk of a UK default. We are only borrowing 1% of GDP at the moment. That’s really not very much at all. The size of the national debt is immaterial, Reinhart and Rogoff was thoroughly debunked.

  6. Morning, Campers.
    A Spekkie article to go with your coffee or boot polish tea.

    “In the shadow of the Whaley Bridge dam

    Andrew Griffiths

    It was two days after the storm, or ‘extreme weather event’ as we call them now. I was trying to get into the Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge, which sits below a reservoir with a crack in its dam wall. The reservoir had topped over during the night and the build-up of pressure meant the wall was beginning to crumble.

    Fifteen hundred people in the town have been evacuated since the storm, with hardly even the time to pick up their keys. They have sought shelter in schoolhalls and with friends and acquaintances in nearby towns and villages.

    The world’s media quickly descended on the town and before journalists could even scribble down ‘closely-knit communities’, the newly-installed Prime Minister Boris Johnson was parachuted in. He had a ride over the dam in a helicopter, and visited bemused Whaley Bridge refugees in a Chapel school gymnasium, urging them to carry on demonstrating the good old Brexit spirit that had won us two world wars. Prime Minister Johnson was in his element, exuding and demanding positivity, as though that was all that was required to shore up the wall.

    The town of Whaley Bridge has been completely sealed off by road, and all the bridges along the River Goyt have been closed too. The water was running into the river as engineers raced to drain the reservoir before the next storms arrives – sorry, that should be ‘extreme weather event’.

    There was no one there to stop me getting into the town. The main A6, an arterial road, was deserted. The only noise was the distant chug of the chinook helicopter bringing in stone to fill the hole in the dam wall.

    It was the kind of quiet which disorientates. Curiosity made me wander through ginnels between the cottages. One cottage looked normal; a neatly painted black door with polished brass fittings, but with three tidy little sandbags at the bottom of the door. Another cottage lay behind a white picket fence with a window surrounded by hanging baskets full of summer bloom. There was an eeriness about it, but I guess that’s what happens when the existential threat of the climate emergency (as the fashionable commentators are calling it) is suddenly writ large in the form of 300m gallons of water about to fall on your head.

    A man appeared down the end of the street. It was like a scene in one of those old 1950s disaster movies, where a neutron bomb had dropped and killed everyone but left the property intact, and you thought there was only one survivor, but then another person appears.

    His name was John. He was small, a wiry build, 70s, wore shorts and carried a rucksack, a look of the perpetual boy scout about him. He was heading for the canal.

    ‘Have you come from New Mills? [The next town along the canal]’ he asked. ‘Is it open?’

    ‘The bridges are both closed to traffic,’ I said, ‘But the shops are open.’

    ‘Good,’ said John, relieved. ‘I’ve run out of red wine.’

    John had lived in the town all his life and worked at the local factory. I got the whole story of the reservoir from him. He told me it had been empty in the past for seven years because they’d had trouble with the dam wall, but they thought they had fixed it. They don’t tell you that on the television news.

    John had made up his mind that there was no real danger. He thinks when they built the overflow in the dam wall about 25 years ago, the water got under the concrete shell, causing it to crack, but the clay core beneath is sound. As the helicopter came back with another load of stone to fill in the hole I hoped he was right.

    John sat on a bench and breathed deeply. He thought the town was lovely like this. It was like ‘a throwback to the 1900s’ he said, ‘It’s so quiet. You can just walk out into the street without worrying about a car hitting you, it’s lovely.’ John went off for his red wine, but I couldn’t resist one more look around the deserted town.

    Afterwards, I was walking out along the canal towpath and I met a couple walking. They looked old, tired and ill. They lived in Whaley Bridge, but had been locked out of their home the previous day. Their medication was still in the house. He was a diabetic who needed his insulin, she had come out of hospital two weeks ago after an operation to release fluid on her brain. Her medication was still in the house too.

    ‘We had a phone call leaving a message saying it is a red alert, get out as soon as possible.’ he said. ‘We are just desperately trying to get back in again, while it’s quiet.’ she said. Did I think they would let them in?

    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They should. There’s no one there to stop you. No one at all.’

    They went on, not as reassured as I’d wanted them to be. I’ve often covered accidents and disasters and there is always a crowd of people there, trying to get a better view, straining to get closer no matter how stupid or dangerous it might be, having to be held back by a cordon of police or stewards. This was the first time I had seen no one at all.

    Back in New Mills, the next town downstream, I called in the local bread shop. The woman behind the counter was apologetic, looking at the empty shelves in the window.

    ‘They’ve been panic buying,’ she said. ‘Because of this… dam!’

    She rolled her eyes then looked exasperated. That was probably as close as she had come to swearing in 40 years. ‘I wouldn’t mind but coming in this morning, all the roads were shut, so we were half an hour late. There was already a queue outside the shop. Then someone said: “Oh, a late start then is it?”’

    She tucked in her chin and stuck out her chest, she was full of indignation. Just down the road the river ran high under the bridge, kept in an artificial spate as it drained the reservoir. Meanwhile, 200 miles away in the south of England chalk streams are running dry through lack of water, and 5000 miles away in Siberia, an area the size of Belgium burns. You could have talked about the existential threat of climate change to the woman in the bread shop if you want, but I don’t think she would have had much truck with it.”

    1. Morning Anne.

      The other week, on one of my walkabouts, I bumped into a couple of chaps putting the finishing touches to a job. “When will it be open?” asked I. “Tomorrow,” said they, after which we had a chat about how it could have been completed ages ago were it not for some of the unnecessary specifications handed down from above.

      Sure enough, as the pictures in the local news indicated, the place was opened the following day and there the big-wigs stood. The two chaps who’d helped to do the job were nowhere to be seen.

      I thought about that incident when seeing the two dam experts, Boris and Jeremy, stating the bleedin’ obvious in front of the TV cameras.

      Where would we be without the big-wigs?

      1. May received stick for not immediately rushing to Grenfell Tower.
        For once she was right; there was enough to do without all the hassle of VIP visits.
        On this one, politicians cannot do right.

        1. Sometimes they can. Boris going was the right thing to do. Yes, he’s doomed to failure whatever he tried but doing nothing would have been heartless and, like him or loathe him he is at his best around people, in person, on the ground.

          When you hear him speak, hear him actually asking and knowing nothing he is engaging, warm and charismatic. He’s lethal like that.

          The bridge – the reasoning behind the engineering was probably obvious. If there’s a problem you don’t ask the manager, you ask the shop floor. Once with a problem getting one of our videos to distribution I was given lots of waffle by the promotions chap, the packaging fellow disembled and eventually one late evening when the cleaner came in she said ‘Oh, the internet went. I couldn’t get the pictures of my grandson on my telephone. I do them here cos it’s quick.’

          Bless her. Such a simple problem all overblown out of fear.

          1. Anne would make a good goalkeeper since it’s difficult to get one past her.

            On reflection, perhaps my criticism was partly aimed in the wrong direction and should have been aimed at a media which can’t resist getting the big-wigs in front of a camera, sometimes to the exclusion of those at the pointed end doing the work.

  7. SIR – The Archbishop of Canterbury has declared support for a proposal to develop part of Victoria Tower Gardens, beside the Houses of Parliament (“Welby supports Holocaust memorial plan”, report, August 3).

    It is excellent that so many faith leaders support an important memorial to the atrocity of the Holocaust. However, the proposal is hardly sensitive to the current park users who enjoy the green space, unrestricted views and the superb children’s playground, all of which would be reduced and restricted.

    The gardens also provide green space for workers enjoying lunch breaks and for visitors of all creeds who freely drop in, currently in the absence of any security.

    Diana Wethered
    London SW1

    1. Morning all SIR – Dr Gerhold’s objection to the site of the proposed Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre is misguided.

      We are witnessing a significant rise in xenophobia, nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism throughout the world. Governments have the power to control these abhorrent trends, and the nearer to the centre of government a reminder of historic disaster is placed, the more positive its impact.

      Neville Landau
      London SW19

      SIR – Dr Gerhold’s objection to the site of the proposed Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre is misguided.

      We are witnessing a significant rise in xenophobia, nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism throughout the world. Governments have the power to control these abhorrent trends, and the nearer to the centre of government a reminder of historic disaster is placed, the more positive its impact.

      Neville Landau
      London SW19

      1. Anti-Semitism is a disease of globalists and their Moslem tools, not nationalists and “racists”.

        1. It’s an essential of Islam which makes what politicians say about freedom to practice your own religion so foolish. Why should we encourage a freedom to conspire against us?

      2. Why is nationalism a bad thing? Why is xenophobia a bad thing when it’s a threat to your life? Racism exists because people like you keep telling us what we must believe, do and say and to whom all the time.

        A black man is not black to me. He’s a man. If he’s a berk, I’ll treat him as a berk.

        I remember once a black chap coming to buy Dad’s stereo. I opened the door and said ‘Come in, I’ve just put the kettle on.’ He stood there bewildered. I said ‘You’re Joe (I forget his name) for Dad’s boxes?’ He said yes, I said, well come in while I gather them together.

        The chap had been judged on benig black so was conscious of it. I DO NOT CARE what colour you are. Diversity is obscene as it forces us to look at colour instead of the individual and thus MAKES us discriminate.

      3. Putting up a memorial to the Holocaust and doing nothing about islam is a waste of time. Virtue signalling at its worst.

  9. Morning all

    SIR – If ever evidence were needed that politics is now about getting into and staying in power – never mind serving the interests of the people – then John McDonnell’s proposal not to block another Scottish referendum, and Nicola Sturgeon’s support for a pact with the Labour Party to keep the Tories out, surely prove it.

    Chris Allen
    North Walsham, Norfolk

    1. Morning E,
      Has C.Allen just realised,
      It is a political supporter / voter participant game been in play for years, AKA the “keep out, sod the consequences game”
      It is more addictive than crack, proof being what sane responsible person would continue over the years to follow the same voting pattern, when the odious results
      of said pattern can be witnessed on a daily basis.

      1. Victim blaming the lied to electorate for being lied to and for being too gullible / brainwashed to realise they are being deceived is a long way from providing a solution. Try blaming the source(s) of the lies.

        1. Listen up eds,
          When a man deceives me once it is his fault, when he deceives me twice it is MINE.

          1. You’d have to know that you’ve been deceived, agog1.
            The web / system of deceit being used against the Worlds populace goes way beyond one off lies and is the culmination of decades, possibly centuries, of development.
            Try facing the facts rather than twisting circumstances to fit your own
            2 + 2 = anything other than 4, TFH wearers confirmation bias.

            And your puerile threatening tone is totally unimpressive.

          3. EDS,
            You must surely be double thick if mass murder & and mass rape & abuse does not tell a person something is wrong, I am not interested in world affairs in so far as what is happening, only what is happening in this nation regarding these odious issues.

          4. Being doubly thick is recognising that the electorate is being duped, but blaming them for it rather than informing them of the deception.
            It is also more than a wee bit dim not to recognise that these isles are neither discrete nor immune from the odious issues happening on a Global scale.

          6. Do you actually believe that the electorate is made up from exactly the same personnel, indoctrinated to the exact same levels, as it was in decades past?

        2. I honestly don’t know what you mean/are alluding to/want to say.

          Could you put it more plainly for those of us in the cheapseat at the back?

  10. SIR – While not commenting on the suitability of the hairstyle worn by Rachel Swann, the Deputy Chief Constable of Derbyshire (“How can police who look like punks expect respect?”, Allison Pearson, August 7), I can’t help wondering whether a male police officer, of that or any other rank, would be allowed the same latitude with his hairstyle. I suspect that “short back and sides” is still the order of the day.

    Steven Field
    Wokingham, Berkshire

  11. When even pillars of the Establisnment like Charles Moore call out fake news……………

    “Who wrote ‘Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our
    country… creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations
    are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly
    over-harvesting resources… the next logical step is to decrease the
    number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough
    people, then our way of life can become more sustainable’?

    The answer, if media reports are accurate, is Patrick Crusius, the
    man accused of the El Paso massacre. The words appeared in his
    testament, entitled (in homage to Al Gore?) The Inconvenient Truth, which he seems to have put online before decreasing the number of people in America by 22.

    Who said, on Twitter, ‘I want socialism, and I’ll not wait for the
    idiots to finally come round to understanding’? Connor Betts, the man
    accused of shooting nine people, including his sister, in Dayton, Ohio.

    This week’s reporting of the two atrocities has painted Crusius as a
    white supremacist. This does not seem to be accurate. In his manifesto,
    he is against ethnic mingling and mass immigration, but his view that
    immigrants should be killed is based not on racial superiority theory,
    but on his sense that too many people pollute the environment of
    America.

    He despairs of persuading his fellow Americans to change their
    consumerist lifestyles, so he decides to attack the ‘invaders’ instead.
    As for Betts, the self-styled ‘leftist’, coverage has tended to slide
    past his political views. It is seriously bad that both cases have been
    so partially reported. If we are to work out the motivations of
    unhappy/trigger-happy young men such as these, shouldn’t we carefully
    expose all the preposterous justifications they make for their evil
    acts?

    Some of them — mostly to do with race — come from the right. Some —
    mostly to do with saving the planet from human beings — come from the
    left. Betts sounds like a potential Bernie Sanders recruit. Crusius
    seems closer to Extinction Rebellion than to Donald Trump”.

    Charles Moore’s Spectator Notes appears in this week’s magazine, out tomorrow.

    1. The press don’t report things that don’t agree with their party line.

      He was white, therefore he hated immigrants and was a far Right supremacist, racist etc. That is all they want to present.

      Of course, if he’s black and a drug dealer who stabs other black kids then he’s a gentle soul who has been failed by socety.

      The hypocrisy is astonishing.

  13. What happens when history is no longer taught in schools…………….

    “Two thirds

    of millennials favour “strong leaders who do not have to bother with

    parliament”, according to a poll revealing a sharp rejection of liberal

    principles.

    The report by Onward, the centre-right think tank, found that 66 per

    cent of 25 to 34-year-olds favour ‘strongman’ leaders while 26 per cent

    believe democracy is a bad way to run the country – and 36 per cent

    would support army rule.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/08/07/third-millennials-want-martial-law-66-per-cent-prefer-strong/
    Oh goody,what could possibly go wrong…………………….

    1. … Until they get a Trump or a Johnson.
      Then they’ll wish there was a Parliament.

      2. Johnson? “Strongman” leader? And we do have a Parliament. They’re the ones trying to stop the result of a democratic vote being carried out.
        And Trump has the Senate and House of Representatives.

  14. “Albanian

    criminals are using Facebook to counter immigration raids, smuggle

    illegal immigrants into Britain, set up fake marriages and scam English

    language citizenship tests.

    Facebook has failed to take any action against the site, called

    Albanians in London, which has 123,000 followers, and where the criminal

    schemes are publicly posted.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/08/07/albanian-crime-gangs-using-facebook-counter-immigration-raids/
    The problem isn’t bloody Facebook it’s our utterly useless police,judiciary,human rights lawyers and politicians,all it takes is the will to crack down on,arrest and deport these scum of the earth
    Taps foot,waiting

    1. If amateur paedophile hunters can catch child molesters via social media surely to God our professional police and border agencies should be able to do similarly with these criminals.

      1. ” Sarge what’s it to be today”
        “Well,son we can either go chase down some psychotic drug crazed armed Albanian gangsters or police the mean streets of Twitter”
        “Twitter for me please Sarge”

      2. It is a question of will.

        Also, sadly it is entrapment, the deliberate baiting of a criminal to commit a crime will have them let off sooner than you can blink.

        Of course, were that criminal to, on picking up package that is blatantly not their be accidentally blown to bits by the landmine underneath it… oh well.

        1. A friend of mine told me that when he was doing his National Service in Namibia,if they came across any SWAPO arms caches, they would jigger the fuses in any grenades they found so they would explode as soon as the pin was pulled.

          Made sense to me …

    2. Facebook are quick to take down any account that says anything vaguely positive about Tommy Robinson. If they can’t communicate it makes life more difficult for them. It won’t stop them, it it would be a start.
      But as for the authorities: Yes, you’re right. If the Telegraph knows and writes an article about it, what on Earth are the authorities doing? Why aren’t they dealing with it?

      1. Apathy, isinterest, fear of diversity legislation.

        Harriet Harm to Man did no end of damage with her vicious, spiteful ‘equalities act’.

  15. Good morning all,

    I don’t like to put stuff like this on here but….

    Policeman is fighting for his life after he was repeatedly stabbed with a machete in a ‘sudden and brutal’ attack before fighting off the knifeman with his Taser
    Officer was stabbed after attempting to stop a van in the Leyton area of London
    Driver in his 50s failed to stop but then got out of the van and stabbed officer
    Policeman used his taser despite having been stabbed by the alleged attacker

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7336081/Policeman-fighting-life-repeatedly-stabbed-machete.html

  16. In case you didn’t already know this little titbit of trivia….

    On July 20, 1969, as commander of the Apollo 11 lunar module, Neil Armstrong was the first person to set foot on the moon.

    His first words after stepping on the moon, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” were televised to earth and heard by millions.” but just before he re-entered the lander, he made the enigmatic remark – “Good luck, Mr. Gorski.”

    Many people at NASA thought it was a casual remark concerning some rival soviet cosmonaut., however, upon checking, there was no Gorski in either the Russian or American space programmes.

    Over the years, many people questioned Armstrong as to what the – ‘Good luck, Mr. Gorski’ statement meant, but Armstrong always just smiled.

    On July 5, 1995, in Tampa Bay, Florida, while answering questions following a speech, a reporter brought up the 26-year-old question about Mr Gorski to Armstrong.

    This time he finally responded because Mr. Gorski had died, so Neil Armstrong felt he could now answer the question. here is the answer to “Who was Mr Gorski?”

    In 1938, when he was a kid in a small mid-western town, he was playing baseball with a friend in the backyard, his friend hit the ball, which landed in his neighbour’s garden by their bedroom window.

    His neighbours were Mr. and Mrs. Gorski. as he leaned down to pick up the ball, young Armstrong heard Mrs. Gorski shouting at Mr. Gorski, “Sex you want sex?! You’ll get sex when that kid next door walks on the moon!”

      1. Sometimes worth repeating, especially at a 50th anniversary, for those who might not have heard it.

        I like to contribute a little spice of humour into what may otherwise be a dull day.

    2. And a bit of trivia about trivia, namely where the word comes from.

      In ye olde Roman times, the PTW would post notices at road intersections,i. e. where three roads met, hence tri via

    2. If it has a womb, it’s a WOMAN, no matter how they dress it up. To give birth it has to be impregnated with male sperm from a MAN.

      Funny old thing, this NATURAL world.

      1. To be fair, any man donating sperm to filth such as this despicable pair deserves all he gets.

      4. One day we’re going to ccept that being gay means you cannot have children. It’s not a have cake and eat it, there’s a choice made that gives up other choices. You can’t have it both ways.

      1. Rather a surfeit of panzers and ‘master race’ arrogance. The modern panzers may be
        unserviceable but the arrogance…

  19. The very first step that the scumbag Marxist revolutionary, John McDonnell, takes towards insurrection, or mounting a coup in the UK, should be met with immediate and lethal force.

    I volunteer to be the one to spread his disgusting countenance and warped mind far and wide over College Green. Just provide me with the means, Boris.

    2. I don’t really understand his logic.

      The public voted to leave the EU in a free and fair referendum.
      He wants to stop brexit because he doesn’t like it.
      To stop this democratic result, he wants to remove the government using a no confidence vote – ignoring that the people do have confidence in the party they elected.
      When that unwarranted, anti democratic no confidence vote doesn’t look like it could achive his aim of stopping the democratic vote he intends to appeal to authority to get his man in.

      That same authority that is the bedrock of democracy.

      I am completely confused. He wants to appeal to the establishment to legitimise his own dismissal of it.

      Is he mentally ill, stupid or just another Labour moron? Why is he allowed to sit in the commons? Why can we not remove him, and any other nutter we choose to?

  20. Good morning all. I had a bit of a lie in this morning.
    106 comments loaded up and, as yet, no screen flickering.
    See how far I get before it goes tits up.

    1. I cleared a number of cookies from my cache, yesterday, and it seems to have done the trick for me.

        1. Americans call proper biscuits “cookies”. They also have something they call a “biscuit” but it is nothing more than a bland disc of dough (a dry dumpling) which they have a propensity for pouring gravy over!

  21. Sharp rise in women caught carrying knives

    In my view the police have lost control of the streets of London. Many areas of London re unofficial no go areas for the police so crime is allowed to fester and grow in these areas. Unfortunately I don’t see things getting any better in fact I think it will get worse. The messages the police are putting out is they want to wash their hands of knife crime and to pretend it I a health issue. The other issue that comes into ply with it is drug related crime and the mental health issues that come as the result of taking drugs

  23. Sir – Fiona Douglas (Letters, August 5) recalls using an empty gin bottle to hold milk in the Fifties. I seldom hear mention of reusing glass, yet of all the materials available that could be reused several times, it is surely the best.

    Until relatively recently, milk was delivered in glass bottles that were washed and reused endlessly. Currently, used glass containers are deliberately broken when collected by dustcarts or when put into bottle banks, and are then crushed before being melted down and remoulded – into bottles and jars.

    It would be a mammoth task to arrange for glass containers to be returned to their original fillers for reuse, but what a saving of energy it would produce.

    David Whitaker
    Alton, Hampshire

    Time was when every household in the country possessed a bottle brush. It is now frowned upon for people to recycle glass jam jars but I do this all the time to provide clean and strong receptacles for containing home-made jams and marmalade.

    1. It’d be one of those EU rules that prevents us from using such receptacles for fear of contamination.

      No one wonder why the use of glass for milk faded out at the same time the EU pushed it on us?

    2. We have lots of uses for glass jars as well as some of the sturdier plastic containers. We also get our milk in glass bottles which are rinsed after use and picked up by the milkman.

    3. Not to mention any man cave would be incomplete without glass jars to store spare screws,nails and other widgets

        2. I have lots of tins, plus wooden boxes, glass jars, Tupperware® tubs, and compartments in workshop drawers.

          I still have trouble, at times, remembering where things are!

          1. All my tins are labelled with Dymotape – my problem is remembering what I was looking for

      2. With the screw-top lids of the jars screwed onto the underside of the top shelf on the wall so the jars don’t take up storage space or get in the way. When you want a nail or cross-head screw you just unscrew the relevant jar from its lid.

      1. Good morning, Rastus.

        Don’t forget the damson crumbles, the prince of all crumbles. Damsons also make a very fine wine.

        3. Sauté some chopped garlic in a little oil, add some plum jam and some dark soy sauce and you have a delicious Chinese plum sauce for use with roast duck or pork.

        4. Damsons have great flavour. So do greengages – reines Claudes in French which are equally prolific this year. As are the mirabelles – small, bright yellow plums which have rather less flavour but are great with cardamom.

          Have you ever tried Delia’s damson chutney? I’m tempted to make it this year but don’t know anyone who can tell me if it’s any good! https://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/international/european/british/spiced-damson-chutney

          1. The recipe seems reasonable. I’ve made similar, although I add curry powder. It was fine. The ones to which I added port were a bit better.

          2. Thanks for that, Caroline.

            My friend has damson trees and had a glut of the drupes two years ago (but a poor harvest last year). I’m hoping that he has another bumper crop this year.

            I might have a go at that chutney and if it’s successful I shall report anon.

          3. Plum Rum: plums steeped in dark rum, and a little sugar, in a Rumtopf for a month, makes a wonderful winter warmer in the same manner as sloe gin or cherry brandy.

    5. With all the untamed yobs stalking the estates, glass bottles would merely be regarded as weapons or ammunition.

      1. Why? We use lots of glass bottles and they do not to seem to be the weapon of choice. Knives and machetes, on the other hand…

        1. Glass bottles on doorsteps being hurled for the fun of it.

          My children lived on what most would regard as a pleasant suburban road.

          Anything left outside was subject to theft or vandalism of a type we very seldom saw when I was their age.

          Look around: litter, gratuitous vandalism, smashed bus shelters, upturned bins, drug-use residue all over the place. Times have changed and not for the better.

          1. Not everywhere. Forty years ago you had to watch out for your milk being nicked on the doorstep, and not just by tits.
            while things have become worse, as you say, it does not have to remain that way. If we had a police…ah.

    6. Actually a detailed analyzes show that plastic containers are better than glass, With glass you would have to retuned them to the shop and many will probably get broken. They would then have to be cleaned and sterilized and sorted and then transported to the right processing plant for refiling. It is simply not viable. Glass is also heavy and bulky and increases distribution costs and fuel consumption. Remember as well with plastic containers most people by 2 pint or 4 pint containers with glass it would be 2 bottles or 4 bottles

      It is just about viable for doorstep milk delivery’s. Whilst glass seems sensible when looked at comprehensively it is not

      1. Bill, there you go again. I have asked you to demonstrate what you say, by providing a comprehensive end-to-end costing of glass bottle recirculation compared to the use of plastic from oil well to land fill. You haven’t.
        Breweries recirculated beer bottles for decades while making their owners very rich. Given the centralisation of breweries and other producers of drinks (lemonade) the use of glass bottles would create opportunities for local bottlers to set up bottling plants and distribute locally.
        The benefits to the economy would be unbounded, as would the improved greenness of everything.

        (And no, Bill, the streets would not be covered with broken glass. They weren’t in the 50s so why should they be now?)

          1. Yes. If it worked in the past it can work. Plastic is cheaper because much of the cost is picked up by taxpayers, not producers, and so only indirectly by customers.
            I think that the greens are loonies and that we have no influence on global warming. I also think that we should be looking after the planet as if it is the only one we have. Even in precis form my notions on this run to several pages.

      1. Click on it and it will enlarge. It is our much missed good friend, JDavidJ, who was a stalwart for years on the old DT letters forum.

          1. I think the Stig has invited him (and a few others) on a few occasions but to no avail.

          2. I’m using an iPad- no mouse. If I ‘click’ on the touchscreen it certainly does open in a new window, but at the same size! Expanding the image makes it blurred and illegible.

          3. In the new link try CTRL Shift and + simultaneouly while hovering your mouse over the “dark” bits rather than the writing.

          4. Yes, I know how to do it in a Windows environment but I’m on an iPad- no CTRL key and no mouse!

          5. Can’t you spread your finger and thumb on the screen (opposite movement to a ‘pinch’)? It works on my iPad mini.

  26. Hmm.
    Just tried posting this onto the Letters Page only to see it vanish into the ether:-

    Am I the only person who considers that Rachel Swann’s appointment as Deputy Chief Constable of Derbyshire has all the hallmarks of being part of the same Common Purpose Diversity Tick Box Exercise that saw the appointment of Cressida Dick to head the Met?

    1. Ah! This one succeeded, looks like they objected to the name of the current head of the Metropolitan Police:-

      Rachel Swann’s appointment as Deputy Chief Constable of Derbyshire has all the hallmarks of being part of the same Common Purpose Diversity Tick Box Exercise that saw the appointment of the current head of the Met.

      3. Rachel Swann’s immediate boss, the current chief constable of Derbyshire, Peter Goodman, has TWO Common Purpose “degrees”.

        They are breeding a new generation of “police” that bears no resemblance to those who resided in Butterley Hall when I worked there.

    2. Robert Spowart?? I can see that comment on the letters page. It’s the first one to appear.

      1. Any relation to Spowarts shop at Newbiggin Bob? I used to go there when I was a nipper visiting my cousin at Dixon’s Corner

        1. I didn’t realise there was a Spowart’s shop in Newbiggin!
          I remember Sewell’s the chemist.

          1. I’m struggling to remember the location, just that I recall the name in connection with a shop that we went to. It was a name I’d not come across before (or much since). There was a girl with that name who went to the same club as us in the early 70s, I recall. Dark hair. Initial ‘L’. I think of Spowart as a Newbiggin name from my younger days.

            I think it might have been the corner shop that was a post office/ bucket and spade/ windbreak shop on the other side of the road from the railway station, across the small park, located to catch day-trippers on the way to the beach, but I could be wrong. We used to go there for fishing hooks and lines and packets of foreign stamps.

            I remember Sewells. Copper sulphate and stuff to replenish the contents of our useless chemistry sets.

          2. That was my cousin Linda. She also worked as barmaid in the Coble on the Quay Wall.
            She lived in Northumberland Avenue until just a few years ago and after my Aunt Alice died moved to Long Park where she still resides.

          4. Directly opposite the station was Memorial Park, but that sounds like Crackett’s newsagents on the road leading down to the top of the Middle Shelter steps.

          5. Crackett’s! That was the one.

            Spowarts must have been somewhere else in teh area (Middle corner of Meldon Terrace maybe?) I’m 99% sure there was one. I’ll make inquiries.

      2. I presume that is the edited version that left out the name of the Met’s Dutch Dam.

    2. The teeth win.
      Looks like she’s being permanently prodded from behind and not expecting it.

  30. More beneficial and much cheaper than HS2. Boris can save a lot more than £39,000,000,000 here.:

    Just 48 hours before the conclusion of the Conservative leadership contest, Allan Cook, chairman of HS2, wrote to the government to confess that the costs of the project could rise from the current projection of £56 billion to as much as £86 billion. Given that Boris had already announced that he is to review the project, it was pretty much akin to a condemned prisoner writing a letter of confession.

    The Prime Minister is not fond of doomsters and gloomsters who pooh-pooh things for the sake of it, and as we know is partial to the odd vanity project. More-over, he seems as fond of trains as he is of model buses. But he could do us all a favour by ditching the wretched HS2 and replacing it with a far cheaper and more practical alternative — a project which actually offers something to the communities which have been fighting the high speed link and which, while speeding up and improving rail links from London northwards, would also release billions of pounds for much needed improvements to public transport between and within northern cities.

    That alternative is the little-known Great Central Railway. This ready-made high-speed line takes almost exactly the same route between London and the Midlands as HS2 would. It sits there, its viaducts and bridges unused, begging for trains. It did once have them — at one point it had the fastest expresses in the country. Opened in 1899, it was the last and the best–engineered of all the main lines in Britain. It was built with the vision of operating 125mph expresses, and used a ‘continental loading gauge’ — which means that, uniquely for British lines, the wider trains used in mainland Europe could be run along it.

    The Great Central was one of the many casualties of the Beeching closures of the 1960s, yet it remains almost totally intact. A few agricultural buildings have been built across it, but otherwise its line remains clear — a recently-built housing estate in Brackley, Northamptonshire, respectfully leaves its course as an undeveloped green corridor, just in case. There is a question of what would happen at the London end — whether to share existing tracks to Paddington or Marylebone, or to tunnel to Euston. But for much of its length the Great Central could be reinstated with little earth-moving, tunnelling and without the need to demolish residential properties or foul sites of special scientific interest.

    The reopening of the line has, indeed, already been mooted. Between 1996 and 2003 a private company, Central Railway, did extensive work on reinstating the line as a goods and passenger route. At the time when the project was dismissed by the Blair government in 2003, its cost was put at £8 billion — and that included upgrading and reopening sections all the way to Liverpool. The project then briefly resurfaced again in 2013, when Ed Miliband’s Labour looked at it as a cheaper alternative to HS2.

    The Great Central fulfils all the main objectives of HS2 without the excruciating cost, the environmental objections and absurdities of the latter project. True, no train on the Great Central is going to reach 225mph — the projected speed for HS2. A maximum line speed of 140mph is more realistic. But then no one has ever explained why a compact country like Britain needs the fastest long-distance railway in the world, other than for the purpose of national willy-waving. International experience suggests that high-speed railways transform the market for travel between cities — knocking out airlines and creating a substantial new market for day-return travel — when they reduce journey times to below about two and a half hours.

    Yet the cities which would be linked by HS2 — London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds — already are within this travel time. Small reductions in travel times have to be weighed against other factors. As HS2 trains would require advance booking and not be available to passengers who want to turn up and go, there is little point in shaving 20 minutes off your journey if you are then going to have to turn up at the station 20 minutes earlier to be sure of catching the train on which you are booked. HS2 would only really be justified if the new lines went on to Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow, but it doesn’t.

    Meanwhile, the disadvantage of running trains at 225mph is that they can’t stop very often. As a result, HS2 misses out the towns which are most in need of regeneration: Stoke-on-Trent, Coventry, Leicester. Derby and Nottingham would be served by a station between the two — requiring a long tram ride to the centre of either. In Birmingham, HS2 trains would terminate at a new station, Curzon Street, rather than New Street, where all the connections are to other towns in the West Midlands. As for East Midlands airport — that is the most ludicrous situation of all. Which other country would burrow a high-speed rail line under the runway of an international airport and not have a station there?

    A reopened Great Central line, by contrast, would plug much more naturally into the existing rail network. Moreover, it would allow two new stations to be built at important locations — at Brackley, a growing part of Northamptonshire which has not had a rail service since the 1960s, and at the intersection with the old Oxford to Cambridge line, itself the subject of reinstatement proposals. The Oxford to Cambridge corridor has been proposed as a growth area for development in decades — why not put a high-speed rail station with connections north and south bang in the middle of it?

    The main job of the Great Central line would be to create extra capacity between London and Rugby, to relieve pressure on the West Coast main line. North of that point, there are fewer capacity problems because the West Coast main line splits, one section going to Birmingham, the other towards Stafford. As for the billions saved by not building HS2 — just a fraction of the money could transform public transport in northern cities. The proposed three-line Merseytram, abandoned in 2005 after a disagreement between the Blair government and the Merseyside authority over who would underwrite the financial risk, was costed at £325 million, less than 1 per cent of HS2. The similarly abandoned Leeds supertram was similarly costed at £500 million.

    In backing a new Transpennine line, Boris has signalled he understands where investment is most urgently required — between and within provincial cities. He can find the cash — without abandoning the need for an extra north-south inter-city line — by reviving a forgotten gem of Victorian engineering.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/there-is-a-far-better-option-than-hs2-and-it-already-exists/

      1. Perfectly possible.
        The new line at Rugby could take the form of a tunnel to link up with the WCML and then the Coventry line could be quadruppled to take the extra traffic as they did a few years back with the Trent Vally Line North from Rugby.

        The trackbed of the GCR could then be reinstated as far as Leicester where it could link in with the Midland Main Line.

    2. The true costs is even high as that figure does not include the rolling stock and I think some of the costs have been hidden in non HS2 budgets

    3. It is not part of TENs and would prevent EU officials having their trainset to move themselves from one function to another and to move the bodies of the starving poor across the country in their thousands quickly to the incinerators/renderers for others to eat when the great communist utopia comes about.

      1. Ahem,I think you mean easy troop transport for the internal repression force AKA the EU Army

        1. That as well.

          It’s all a sham and a con to get the Eurocrats a train set. For whatever reason, commies love their trains.

    4. “The Great Central…remains almost totally intact.”

      That’s stretching a point rather (BoB will understand the pun). Much of the course remains intact but all of the stations and most of the underbridges have been demolished, including a substantial viaduct at Brackley. As the article states, the only really useful section is from London to Rugby but connecting this section to the WCML at Rugby is not a simple task and would require four miles of new railway. Indeed, the whole project would be a new railway but without some of the problems of land purchase.

      The route through Leicester and Nottingham is lost but only duplicated the Midland line anyway.

      1. The old Great Central line was the last mainline built and was built to a very high standard. I think it was also built to accept the European standard loading gauge, Building 4 miles of track is not that difficult in itself, It depend on if there is a suitable route. If not tunnel could be considered if the ground conditions are good. It gets difficult and expensive if you have to go through rock

        1. “Building 4 miles of track is not that difficult in itself…”

          Indeed not but these projects are presented simply as the relaying of track and the installation of some signals. It would be a big undertaking but much less so than HS2 and far more useful.

          The ‘continental loading gauge’ myth must be dealt with as well. The Berne railway conference of 1912 agreed on international standards but that was 13 years after the opening of the GCR’s London Extension. This was built to a more generous loading gauge than many British railways had been but was still not as tall and wide as the Berne standard.

          1. In my experience when I’ve been involved with road building projects, the big costs aren’t in the land or long sections of road, but in bridges and underpasses. You can get a very long stretch of road for the same money as a single bridge.

            I imagine that railways would be no different in that respect, although land costs will be a lot higher because although the land take is narrower than for a road, you can’t skirt round built-up areas as easily and they finish up having to pay a lot of compensation to properties and villages standing on the planned line.

            It won’t take many bridges or tunnels to be built, or housing estates on the line of the old railway to make the ‘benefit’ of having long sections of the old trackbed still in place look like chicken feed.

          2. I think they recovered at least one or two of the cross rail tbm’s. Providing soil condition are good it might be cheaper to tunnel 4 miles. A lot depend on what is in the way of the 4 miles and if building a new line you really need to go straight rather than go around obsticles

          5. Even in the less ‘heritage sensitive’ 1970s, the demolition of the viaduct was controversial. And it took some doing – the piers didn’t break up into handy piles of loose bricks as expected (to be used as hardcore) but great chunks which had to be attacked with drills before being carted off.

            A few miles north, Helmdon viaduct (9 arches) still stands and further north again, the shorter Catesby and Staverton viaducts. Beyond that, Willoughby (Braunston) viaduct has also been demolished.

          6. There isn’t very much built on the route. Brackley station has some industrial units on, as does Woodford, but apart from those sites very little else has been developed and as far as I know no housing other than a few dwellings at Lutterworth and a new estate at Brackley which is very close to the formation. A short stretch in Buckinghamshire has national grid power lines running along it.

          8. It is remarkably intact but that’s because south of Leicester it passed through open countryside for many miles. The only sizeable town was Rugby, where some of the route has been lost. However, we are assuming that any rebuild to connect up with the WCML wouldn’t use the old course through the town.

          9. That’s the sort of thing I had in mind. If it avoids towns then new properties in teh route aren’t so much of a problem, but crossing new countryside involves all those road crossings, which these days of no more at-grade (level) crossings on roads, however small, would have to be expensive, very expensive, bridges, whether under or over the roads concerned.

          10. The GCR has gained a near mythical status, almost a land-based ‘Raise The Titanic’!

  31. There is very little parliamentary time left between now and October the 31st
    The commons is in recess until September . It is in recess now until the 5th of September and then returns for a few days before going into recess from September 14th until 9th October. They then sit for a few weeks before going into recess again from 7th November until 13th November. They then manage to get in about a months work before their Christmas recess from 21st December until January the 8th
    ( I could not find the exact recess date for the Autumn sessions so have used last years, They should be similar).

      2. I wonder if she has a pretty face.

        For me the face is the most important thing which makes a person either attractive or unattractive

    1. Malcolm Rifkind? If I were a Tory grandee, I’d sue Apple for linking me with him.

    2. Queenie should have been noisy when she was being pushed around.. and what happened to her Coronation oath ?

      Did it just fizzle out ?

      Obviously she’s not from Texas.

      1. The idea of Her Majesty in a giant stetson firing Smith and Weston’s into the air is comical. She has vastly more class than that.

          2. HM can be whatever she wants and win, provided she’s on the side of majority public opinion.

            After all, if she’s not Britannia’s guardian.. who is ?

            “All it takes for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing”.

  40. It’s all gone very quiet on the Aut’s yachting trip,I see comments on other blogs that she flew to NY after all
    Tell me it ain’t so,not Greta Thunderinghypocrite

  41. Good morning, all.

    Reading through today’s posts, I noticed that some folk have been having problems when posting comments in the DT’s Letters column, if those comments contain Cresssida Dick’s full name. I tried it myself and on clicking the ‘Post’ button, my post vanished instantaneously. I tried again, this time omitting the surname ‘Dick’ …….. Lo and behold, success!

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/55aeecf5cf02538f1b056e679b53382df8af02b20e7a4c9f5d0f6f594447c536.png

    2. Has your post caused any whaling(sic) and gnashing of teeth amongst the snowflakes?

    4. You tell ’em Donnch, laddie. :•) You might also have mentioned Derek of that ilk,
      known to most of us as Fish from Marillion.

      [Good afternoon, by the way.]

    2. I see Bob has already tweeted a reply, asking if there’s an equivalent White Labour PLP….

  43. What is so religiously right about replacing a green public park with a slab of brutalism?

    The Holocaust Memorial should be put in Golders Green, as a celebration of the contribution Jews make to their host nations. Tourists and pilgrims encouraged to go there and enjoy salt beef and matzos and chicken soup, listen to Klezmer music and discuss the mysteries of life with a resident rabbi. Turn a negative into a positive.

    “They tried to wipe us out. They failed. Let’s eat”.

        1. Morning, Elsie. It is seventy years too late.
          The time for any form of memorial behemoth was c.1950 at the latest.

          1. Fair enough, Annie. Must go now, or I shall be late for my SAD (Special Adventure Day). Toodle-pip!

        2. Why should there be? We were not participants in it either as victims or perpetrators!

          2. I don’t think so. It is accurate. Hollywood, that is the film industry, was controlled by Jews, so they could easily get their chosen narrative published and viewed around the world. There is now only one acceptable narrative. Historians and anyone else that disagrees with it can be jailed. The other point is why was there so little resistance to being decanted from houses and put into lorries to go somewhere? Krystallnacht was surely a clear warning?

          3. You have made so many really fine postings here that, frankly, I am amazed. It is an incredible example of false logic. Although I am not accusing you of such, you have set out a prime example of anti-semitism.
            Your last post is unbelievable.You have no experience of life in a police state, but surely you have read about it.
            Why do you by inference approve of holocaust denial ?

          4. Well that’s me told. My comments are objective and accurate, are they not? I cannot have any control over what you may infer, that’s up to you.
            Is it not self-evidently the case that no historian who wishes to have a career in academia, to get his work published, or to teach history, can ever question certain aspects of certain histories? That is not denial, it is an observation. A comment on what is perhaps the most thorough censorship that there is. Is that not so?

          5. I understand your train of thought and if you look at a different matter with the same eyes, it it very often impossible to question accepted knowledge of our hereoes and heroines. If someone came forward with reasonable proof that on that famous occasion, Roger Bannister ran the mile in not one minute but in ten, nobody would listen and certainly not publish his findings. We have today questioners as to whether the Americans really did land on the moon.I’m sure they did, and I am sure that for whatever reason they should be allowed to question it. That’s life.

            Sometimes perfectly well meaning people come to very wrong conclusions, and the best way to lose a friend is often to tell them that they are wrong. A shame.

            Incidentally, you said ” Hollywood, that is the film industry, was controlled by Jews, so they
            could easily get their chosen narrative published and viewed around the
            world ”
            Can you do me a similar statement please, only substituting for Jews, the Church, and especially the Roman Catholic Church, in relation to anti-semitism ?

          6. Of course. The Church controlled lots of things, approved beliefs, including aspects of science at various times and in various places. So what?
            However, if we are going to use terminology that is a lift from the “Political Correct Dictionary of Bad Things”, we won’t be shining any lights on anything.
            What is the definition of anti-semitism, for example?
            1st entry on Googling
            ” Semite /ˈsiːmʌɪt,ˈsɛmʌɪt/
            plural noun: Semites
            a member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs.”
            Oops, that’s the ba’ burst right there. We cannot logically describe anything as anti-semitic unless we include Arabs, then? Logically, or indeed lexicographically.
            It is a word like”gay” transmogrified into something else. So maybe rephrase your question.

          7. OK, if you want to be linguistically correct, use the expression ” Jew-Hater ” instead. I always thought that the expression ” anti-semite ” was a euphemism, myself.

          8. Well “Jew-hater” is pretty specific. But I have, I’m afraid, lost the thread.
            If you are accusing me of being one, you should cite some kind of evidence. It should be factual. If you can correct me on facts, please do so. When I am wrong I readjust. If I have expressed an opinon, please remind me, and of the context.

          9. I have already said, at the beginning if you look back, that I am not accusing you of anyything.I am trying to explain that I think that your thinking has led you to some wrong conclusions.
            Alas, I have found a brick wall and am banging my head against it.
            Let’s go away from this one and chat a about something more pleasant !

      2. The Kindertransport memorials at Liverpool Street Station are enough.

        p.s. I doubt the Jews thought the Christians who took in their children were guilty of any form of cultural superiority.

      3. My late father who entered Belson at the end of the war would agree with you

    2. Virtue signalling over seventy years later.
      We all know about it.
      Morning, jeremy.

    4. Good Afternoon Folks,

      I loved the suggestion that the memorial should be sited in Lambeth Palace. Of course that would mean that the Arch Bish would have to open the gardens to the public!! Wow!

  44. Plant-based diet can fight climate change – UN

    This is largely another myth. Plants needs lot of water and lots of land and lots of insecticide and fertilizers as well as heavy diesel powered machinery. If they believe their own climate change theory water will become increasingly scarce . They also seem to be under the misconception that plants do not give out CO2

    1. I suspect they are passing judgement based on the habits of US-style intensive ranches, with the cattle kept in huge sheds, fed on soya meal grown on cleared rainforest, pumped with hormones and antibiotic growth enhancers, and producing vast lakes of slurry that get into the water table. Of course these are environmentally antisocial.

      Mixed farms on pasture, that used to be common in the UK until we felt we had to adopt American ways, offer wildlife habitat through stockproof hedges and insect food through the manure, which also improves the natural fertility of the soil. Meat and wool is a byproduct, and there is very little of a pig that is not used.

      Compare that with cleared and drained monoculture prairies, sprayed ten times a year, clear harvested, ploughed up and with substrate for inputs, rather than a living soil. Greta, be very worried about what you wish for.

    3. The amount of CO2 emitted by plants at night is tiny compared to the amount of O2 emitted. Plants are overall a net sink for CO2. It’s mostly transformed into sugars.

      1. The ultimate product of rotted plant material is humus, which locks carbon in the soil providing an excellent medium for future growth. I despair when folk who are supposed to know better put garden waste on bonfires.

    4. What the hell is ‘CO2’?

      Carbon Dioxide is CO₂. Water is H₂O. Sulphuric Acid is H₂SO₄. Full digits are no substitute for proper subscript when writing about chemical formulæ. If books and newspapers did it your way (which makes no sense) then you would soon start whingeing.

        1. I have a character map for every type of symbol imaginable. All I do is select the character and double click on it. One day Billy Goats might get wise to this and bring a similar one out for his silly backward Microsoft system.

      2. I would venture to suggest that about 90% of computer users do not know how to “produce” a subscript, just as similar numbers do not know how to produce accents, a circumflex or any other not-on-the-keyboard symbol.

        I have mellowed, in that as long as I can immediately understand what is being conveyed, I don’t worry too much about the details any more. If I did, reading almost any newspaper would drive me nuts.

        1. Qŵèrtŷüìôpłkjhgfdßsæźxçvbñm’¿Ws. All sorts of special characters on an iPad keyboard but I can’t find anything that tells you how to enter a subscript. Any ideas?

          2. Yes, that is in Pages, the Apple equivalent of Word, but that does not apply to editing items in Safari or other web browsers.

        3. I have no problem with accents (I use them all the time). To add sub or super scripts I have to type into Word first and then copy and paste. It’s too much bother.

    1. Like the doctors that wanted to blow up Glasgow Airport?
      (Lord love us, but Basu is in charge of anti-terrorism?)

      1. It’s either ignorance in which case it is deplorable and means he is unfit for the job or deceit which means he is a Muslim and well versed in the art of deception permitted by his faith.

    2. But but but, aren’t we constantly being told that the immigrants are highly skilled professional people who make a huge contribution.
      Does this mean that their off-spring become useless and deprived in isolation?

    3. Well it is strange that Hindu’s and Sikhs don’t seem to get involved in knife crime, How does he explain that?

      1. All male baptised Sikhs carry knives. A ‘kirpan”. It is one of the symbols of their religion. Who cares? I have felt threatened in London, and I have been threatened in London, but not by Sikhs. Perhaps they do not get involved in knife crime because Sikhs and Hindus take a more relaxed attitude to conquering the world?

    4. That woman from ‘The Times’ on with him was the most dreadful Remain Snob and an utter lefty with it.

      1. I was about to type the same comment as you. I have not heard such a wall of pro-eu lies from one person in 6 months. “The eu has always been an open and democratic institution” for example.

        I needed to start pressing the fast-forward button because she would not stop. She was allowed to talk for 4x as long as Brendan was, and when he tried to reply she constantly interrupted and talked right over him. Dreadful female and typical Remainer.

        After looking her up to see who she was before being at the Times, I discovered that she worked for the Guardian and the BBC for years. Which tells you all you need to know about how honest she is.

        1. That would be the open and democratic institution which ignored referendums in Denmark, France, the Netherlands (twice) and made Ireland vote again because it didn’t like the result, I take it?

    3. Make the most of it. ” Isle of Man ” is unacceptable. The name is to be changed to ” Isle of Gender “.

  48. Firefox tells me there are 345 comments. Chrome tells me there are 1261 comments. Refreshing doesn’t change anything. What’s going on?

      1. Possibly. It’s a bit confusing. I selected Thursday and have a picture of Tower Gardens ……. ah! Comments have changed to 349. Thanks, sos.

  49. Good morning, my friends.

    Here is the article by Sherelle Jacobs in today’s DT:

    As the world turns medieval, clinging to Brussels will only spell our demise
    Brexit isn’t a leap into the abyss because the darkness is already here. Our elite is too blinded with anti-populist delirium to notice, but the world has plunged into a new “medieval” era that has nothing to do with the 2016 vote.

    Since the Second World War, decrepit Europe has cowered behind the American soldier while chastising his choice of battles and choking ungratefully on the scent of his sweat. But the much-resented interlude of American supremacy has quietly faded into a half-imagined Arabian desert dream. Nor will China, the stillborn superpower, replace the US. Instead, in stirring parallels with the centuries that followed the Roman Empire’s fall, we are entering a fragmented and unpredictable Dark Age, where no single power reigns and smaller nations must carve out their own fates.

    The convulsions of violence that vibrate daily on our phones signal the increasingly frequent tremors of political earthquakes in East and West. It is tempting to view the white-supremacist shootings that have wracked the US in recent days solely as rampages of the mentally ill or mindless racist violence. The uncomfortable truth is that these are also frenzied orgies of malicious national grief.

    Trumpland is being slowly crushed by debt, a shrinking job pool and imperial overexpansion. And as the American Dream sours in the country of milky plenty, the two most potent ingredients of its mythology – inexhaustible bounteousness and rugged individualism – are curdling into racially tinged zero-sum competition and a taste for destructive vigilantism.

    Of course, it completely misses the point to blame the state of America on Donald Trump. He is the product not the cause of a disintegrating great nation. Infinite frontierism is seared into the American psyche. It drove the country’s first forays into the Wild Wild West, followed by its conquests against evil dictatorships and in outer space. But the impulse has ultimately left America near-bankrupted by the costs of its colossal army and struggling to defend its interests abroad. Perhaps one day, academics uncorrupted by high minded contempt for Mr Trump will coolly analyse him as the first American President who dared to discuss his country in the context of limits, however inarticulately, urging Europeans to shoulder more of the burden in international peacekeeping and vowing to build a Mexican wall.

    Meanwhile, more than 7,000 miles away, the Chinese Dream is also turning to dust. Protests raging in Hong Kong betray the unsustainability of the Chinese social contract, which demands unquestioning allegiance of all citizens in return for stability and a steady improvement in average wealth. Steroidic growth has already killed China’s hopes of being a superpower. It is condemned to the role of a vast chronically overproducing factory, haunted by its failed “ghost cities” and the graveyards of folded industry. Fraudulent national data will not be able to cover up the economic torments of its middle class and the country’s train-wreck of a financial sector for much longer.

    At this volatile juncture in history, it would be a cataclysmic mistake for Britain to stay in the EU. We must have a nimble and coherent approach to unstable, authoritarian China, which is yet to cement its place in the global pecking order. We also need a supportive and close relationship with the United States as it transitions from superpower to significant power. Clutching at Brussels’ stiffened petticoat as it conducts foreign policy in its usual imperiously brittle manner would ensure we achieve the opposite.

    Europe’s China policy is a disaster. While France and Germany are hawkish, southern states like Greece have signed contracts endorsing the Belt and Road project. Beijing’s primary strategy is to play European nations off against each other.

    But if the EU is divided over China, it is unified in self-destructive, pathological hatred of America. The fact that Brussels is plotting to build an EU army, even though it has spent years happily leeching off American defence money is deeply suspect. Is it really about nobly protecting the international community from Trumpian capriciousness, following the latter’s decision to ditch the Iran deal, as Macron intimates? Or are we witnessing Europe’s bitter “colony complex” collide with its darkest fantasies of empire, the result of years spent slimily sponging off America, while spitefully scheming to one day rip away the rug?

    The EU’s virulent anti-Americanism runs deep. Its conformist, sceptical, fashionably post-modernist elite abhor the liberty-loving, God-fearing good-v-evil Manichaeism of America. The grey suits who have drunk the Kool-Aid of bureaucratic union-building cannot comprehend the Levi-clad barbarians across the Atlantic who are so intoxicated with the notion of “freedom” that they won’t give up their guns, even at the risk of their own well-being. (A romanticism that perhaps traces back to belligerent, independence-loving British ancestors.)

    This cultural gulf could prove deadly in the coming Dark Age. Industries of the future like AI and biotech, which function based on the centralised processing of data, could offer a way for dictatorships unimpeded by the small matter of individual privacy to innovate faster than democracies. Will the EU feel tempted to try to compete with China by replicating its authoritarianism? We are already being treated to disturbing glimmers of the future, as the EU moves to compel internet providers to store data on customers for years, and make it easier for authorities to cross-check biometric data; it has also passed copyright laws that could turn the web into an instrument for surveillance and control.

    Ultimately, then, in this shadowy new age of doomed and dying superpowers, Britain has no choice but to light its own path.

      1. In fairness to Richard, there are a fair number of postings to read through and this is his and Carolyn’s busy time of year.
        It’s jolly impressive that the change of venue has gone so seamlessly.

          1. Duh. NOTTL has moved and the change has been a success, as the number of postings has proved.

        2. Good morning Anne

          Have just taken the students to Dinan for the market where they will have to practise their French and their haggling skills on the market stall holders. Let us hope they are better at negotiating than our wretched politicians.

          I must now prepare the lunch before going to collect them in 90 minutes time. A very good group this week – keen to learn, well-mannered and interesting and interested.

  50. A chicken factory has ended production ahead of its permanent closure, meaning 400 jobs will be lost

    Poultry giant 2 Sisters Food Group is closing the site in Witham, Essex, but said 102 jobs had been redeployed to sites in Norfolk and Suffolk.
    The closure has been described as “sad” by the district council and local MP Priti Patel said it had caused anxiety for staff and their families.
    2 Sisters, which supplies chickens to most of the UK’s major supermarkets also owns Fox’s Biscuits and Holland’s Pies.
    The company said a skeleton team of 12 would stay on to decommission the factory until October.

    2. ” local MP Priti Patel said it had caused anxiety for staff and their families.”

      Man bites dog-

      ” local MP Priti Patel said it had not caused any anxiety at all for staff and their families who were quite relaxed about it.”

  51. OK, I need inspiration. I can access nttl.blog, but I always have to log in. Once logged in, if I refresh the page, I have to log in again – the standard little login box pops up every time. I checked yesterday that the Disqus cookie was there – and it was. I cleared cookies and cache, and relogged in with email and password. Same issue.

    But, if I go to actual disqus.com, I am straight in, no log in required.

    Running OSX/Safari.

    Answers please, on a plain postcard to…

    1. I had that login problem running with both Opera and Firefox on a PC. Geoff thought that an ad-blocker could be the culprit and by refreshing Firefox and playing about with cookies/security and changing from AdBlock Plus to uBlock I solved the problem. I will continue to try and make Opera work as well as Firefox by tinkering with its security settings. If you have an ad blocker I’d advise you to look there first.

      1. I discovered that my phone was set to “Prevent Cross-Site Tracking” on Safari. Once I switched that off, the login situation resolved itself.

        1. The security on Firefox allows different settings for trackers but I can’t at this moment remember Opera’s take on them. I’ve set my bocking to Standard on Firefox, if I up it to Strict then problems arise. I do not like third party cookies being enabled but I do have my browsing record etc completely cleared when I close the browser.

        1. I have uBlock now and no problems: Opera has a built in ad blocker and I didn’t bother playing around with it once uBlock cleared my login problem.

  52. A lot of arm waving and politicizing around the shootings in the US. The Texas shooter published a manifesto ahead of time. The arguments he used will be familiar to many, though his actions are clearly indefensible. He is BTW, facing the death penalty, this being Texas.

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/has-anyone-actually-read-the-el-paso-manifesto

    About the only thing one could blame Trump (and the Republican party as a whole) for, is their 100% opposition to any form of gun control. That’s the NRA lobbyists doing their job.

    2. Luckily of course there have never been such shocking events anywhere in Britain or Europe thanks to the strong laws in force there.

      1. It’s quite a few years since nutters like Michael Ryan and Thomas Hamilton went mad in the UK and shot lots of innocent people.

        The most recent ones have been members of the R o P.

  53. Hmm. Just tried posting a response to a post and I get a red banner telling me this ‘You must authenticate the user or provide author_name and author_email’.

    Now having to log in again.

    Hick-ups.

  54. SIR – Why the fuss about the green credentials of Mcdonald’s straws (report, August 6)?

    Why not just ditch the straws and drink your shake like a grown-up?

    Georgina Johnson
    Ringsfield, Suffolk

    No, Georgie. Milk shakes are a kiddies’ drink. “Grown-ups” drink cask-conditioned ale; single-malt Scotch whisky; cognac; wine; tea; coffee; cocoa; and water.

    1. Never had a milk shake since I was about 12 and I was a few years older when I last used a straw.

  55. The British are risking hunger through the decimation of their staple diet of fish and chips.

    That is unless we can master the art of staring down seagulls:

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2019/08/06/staring-seagulls-best-way-stop-stealing-chips/

    We look forward to further research from Exeter on how to stare down extinctionist rebels who are frightening us by suggesting we might not even survive after sorting out the gulls:

    https://metro.co.uk/2019/08/07/fish-and-chips-at-threat-from-global-warming-10534004/

    1. One solution comes to mind but the extinctionist rebels probably wouldn’t taste very good, even battered and deep fried with chips.

      1. “…the environmentalist lobby claimed that the concert would cause earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes, irreparable damage to the atmosphere and all the usual things environmentalists go on about. However a representative of Disaster Area met with the environmentalists, and had them all shot.”
        -HHGTTG

        Douglas Adams being well ahead of his time once again, in his direct approach to life, the Universe and everything. A tad harsh, but a world without their constant whining would be a more peaceful place.

    2. North sea cod is no long on the Red lit as stocks have recovered, When we leave the EU and don’t have the rest of Europe plundering our fish stocks should be plentiful

      2. They landed/obtained some massive cod in Newhaven last week. We have some wonderful cod loins in the freeezer from them. Also there are some very large plaice being landed but only small Dover Sole. Lemon sole is out favorite.

    1. It will not do a lot if the dam overflows again. Water is powerful stuff it could easily shift those sandbags

      1. Water isn’t ‘powerful stuff’. Gravity is.

        The only power water possesses is if it has sufficient hyraulic head, or force resulting from a release of that hydraulic head. That’s why dams for power generation are high. You could impound the same volume of water, given the right topography, over a larger area with a lower dam, but you would have much less energy to release. The formula for Potential Energy is MGH – mass x gravity x height. All three are essential, take any one of them out and you have no energy. If the head (the height between the top of the release and the bottom across a barrier or in a pipe) is zero you have no energy. If it’s only a few inches, then that energy is small enough to be held by the inertia of a sandbag. The energy measured as Kinetic Energy is at the bottom of the fall, not the top. Half the mass times the square of the velocity. If the velocity is low, the energy is the square root of bgger all. Literally.

        If the water level in the dam were to increase to say an inch or two, maybe a little more (a phenomenon known as ‘reservoir lag’) above the level of the lip of the slipway then a line of sandbags of say a foot or two high along the lip above the damaged section would be more than enough to divert any flow to pass over the undamaged section. The hydraulic head would be only an inch or two. It’s matterless concerning the effectiveness of the sandbags at diverting or holding water whether that inch or two of head is on the lip of a dam or on a residential street.

        In any case, they are diverting flow around the dam and it’s almost empty, so it would take a very strange set of circumstances for it to fill to overflowing again.

        1. Good explanation. It also covers the reason that tidal lagoons don’t work as hydro-electric power stations.

          1. Yes. The same applies to those who think that just because they live by a river they can drop a dynamo into it with a water wheel attached and light up their house and half the street. The equipment costs more to install and more enegy to make than the paltry output will ever recover.

          2. It can be done, but you would not expect to get much more than enough to run your fridge & freezer.

            When you consider the huge waterwheels used to drive the machinery in the old mills with little more than a few feet of head, we could do a lot more with it, but as you say, at what cost?

          3. And they had to impound the river behind a dam about 10 feet tall, backing up the river for some distance, like the ones at Bothal or Morpeth, which I’m sure you’ll remember, then building a sluice channel alongside to give them the head and importantly, the volume they needed to turn those paddles. They knew they couldn’t just drop a paddle, turbine or anything else into the normal flow of the water and expect it to work.

            I went back to Bothal a year or two ago for the first time in ages. They’ve breached the dam at Bothal that provided motion for the sawmill, wiping out our old swimming hole above it, as part of the flood prevention scheme on the Wansbeck. That dam was having an influence on the escape of water all the way back to Morpeth several miles upstream.

            That’s a lot of dam for one small timber sawmill. It’s significant that when electricity became available for the saws the mill went over to it and the waterwheel never turned again, even though it was in place and paid for.

            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5234989c4c8e551af129f933ba9e8375fc628b9a747e409ccaf071fa68f5ea34.jpg

          4. “The equipment costs more to install and more energy to make than the paltry output will ever recover.” Why, that’s almost like wind turbines.
            The river, at least, is mostly constant.

        2. This is fantastic stuff and I have learned something. Thank you.

          I watch a blog by a fellow called SciManDan as I was researching for a book and while recently he’s just bashing flat earthers he does have sound scientific prinicples. That lead me into trying to read his books about physics in the book club – I don’t have the time to read them, but I’m only a book behind (Oxygen, the moecule that made the world) at the moment.

          Reading and learning from you folks is great.

    2. I don’t think anyone has claimed that it’s been repaired yet. But the levels are now way down, it’s been drained as it has several times in the past.

      1. Morning J,
        They are in the process of making a set of strong
        braces for the Dutch boys knees & they are also
        working on a medal design for the boys digit, the most likely one coming from parliament is a
        clenched fist showing a raised middle finger to be shared by the nation.

    4. Morning PT,
      Dutch boy on 7 X 24 hour shifts until financial aid is sent to us from overseas for a permanent fix.
      Old cloggie is in for one hell of a shift.

        1. Morning R,
          That will, this day & age, not be tolerated, you fly in the face of PC / Appeasement.
          Bloody funny, more of the same please.

  59. Just had to reload the page again to stop it jumping up & down.
    Following instructions from SaH The Elder, I’ve just cleared the cookie cache so will see what that does.

  60. Three people pulled from water near Clacton Pier

    Quite how people get themselves into trouble there who knows. The beaches there are pretty safe and the sea shallow and no nasty currents

    Three Helicopters seems to be an extreme over reaction. There are two lifeboats based no more than a mile away and another one at Walton although unless it was high tide it would not be able to get close to shore

    https://www.clactonandfrintongazette.co.uk/news/17824838.emergency-services-called-serious-accident-clacton-waterfront/

    1. Three people hurt including two little kiddies ( sounds like Guardian report from Syria or Gaza ) plus apparently a fourth person
      who they stopped looking for.
      I hope they all end up allright. Thanks due to our emergency services……

  61. Due to a declining Workload the EU have decided to close the Commons down and move it to Brussels. An unfortunate side effect of this is most MP’s will become redundant

        1. I think your belief is well founded.🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾🍾😳

  62. It’s taken the DT a while to comment upon it…

    The BBC’s Brexit coverage is fatally devoid of context and balance

    TELEGRAPH VIEW

    Consumers of the BBC’s news output have been assailed in recent days with stories about the looming calamity of a no-deal Brexit. From the morning Today programme on Radio 4 yesterday and then throughout the day on the news channel, the broadcaster’s reporters and specialists conjured up a picture of a country ravaged by food shortages and struggling to obtain vital medicines.

    Larry Summers, a former US trade secretary, was given top billing this week for saying that a deal between the UK and the US was virtually impossible and that if it did happen it would be to Britain’s great disadvantage. Less prominence was given to coverage of the 45 Republican senators who have pledged all the help they can provide Britain in the event of no deal.

    In a letter to Boris Johnson, they said: “We will work with our administration, your government and our friends in the EU to minimise disruptions in critical matters such as international air travel, financial transactions, and the shipment of medicine, food and other vital supplies.”

    One of the authors, Tom Cotton, senator for Arkansas, was interviewed; but why was Mr Summers’s gloomy prognosis seen as more newsworthy than the more upbeat assessment of current members of Congress?

    The BBC has a perfectly legitimate function to inform and report on what is by any measure one of the biggest events in modern British history. But context and balance are important, indeed a requirement for the Corporation, yet both appear to be absent in its approach to Brexit. The BBC should take care to avoid causing unnecessary alarm and anxiety.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2019/08/08/bbcs-brexit-coverage-fatally-devoid-context-balance

    1. How anyone can watch any news on the BBC is hard to understand. I see clips on line and it is just lies.

      1. Maybe some of the previous and following programmes are better. BBC News makes a good toilet break.

      2. Apparently the BBC has received £millions from the EU in grants over at least a decade.

        1. And Gary Lineker has received £millions in grants from BBC licence-fee payers over at least a decade.

      3. I heard the Summers interview and commented on here. There was no mention in the report that he was appointed by the Democrats 20 years ago.

      1. Looks as though Climate Change preserves us. The second picture is 1,000 years later.

    3. Does any sane person seriously think the UK will disappear into a black hole post-Brexit?

      Of course the US and the EU will want to sell us their goods and will want to buy what we offer. Why wouldn’t they?

      I’ve yet to see any BBC programme which gives us the positives of Brexit or tries to provide any answers to the many problems we’ll face when we do leave.

      I don’t like to wish my summers away but roll on November.

      1. I have yet to see anything on the BBC that remotely resembles balanced report. It is all so totally biased and full of fake news

      2. Brexit and Climate Change are given almost identical treatment.
        BBC says Brexit is calamitous and we need to ignore the most democratic vote in Britain’s history despite us all knowing the consequences of our vote.
        BBC says Climate Change cannot be challenged because we will only give news of what might happen if we don’t tax everyone to the hilt.
        Neither subject has any balanced argument allowed

        1. I ignore both subjects these days.

          Brexit because my mind was made up when the referendum was announced and climate change because, when push comes to shove, very few people will want to give up the trappings of modern day living – least of all the energy-guzzling BBC.

  63. Delingpole on the rustlers

    “Who is responsible for this carnage? There have been few arrests,

    still fewer convictions, but the police do have their suspicions. Last

    year, nearly 10,000 sheep were stolen by livestock rustlers in England

    and Wales but this only resulted in one charge by the police. ‘These are

    horrific crimes being carried out by an organised gang of criminals who

    appear to have an operation with an outlet to sell this illegally

    slaughtered and stolen meat,’ said a spokesman for NFU.

    The people committing these crimes don’t seem much troubled by the

    prospect of being caught. ‘We found all sorts of clues they’d left

    behind,’ says John. ‘Fag ends, fag packets, energy drinks. They clearly

    took their time and were in no rush. Well it’s not like anyone was going

    to stop them, was it? Maybe six men and a dog in the dead of night, all

    armed with sharp knives…”

    ’https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/08/a-gang-of-sheep-rustlers-is-stalking-the-county-who-will-be-the-next-target/
    Now let’s think,we have one group that are quite fond of “daggs” and ~travel around the country a lot and another group that operate a lot of restaurants which don’t use much pork or beef but do use a lot of lamb..A marriage made in Hell

    The police seem to have major problems policing either group,no wonder it’s on the increase and there are bugger all convictions

    1. Alan’s Snackbar is a major importer of sheep as long as he can rustle up the business.
      It is however necessary to mention the destination of the sheep before dispatch.

    2. All the above is so very reminiscent of decades of ignoring the goings on involving young girls in many towns and cities across England. Plenty of evidence and testimony but the crimes ignored by all the agencies that could have put an early stop to it.

      1. KtK,
        “Ignored” regarding this odious issue in my book could very well be put down as aiding & abetting,
        according to the Jay report was not rotherham covered up for 16 plus years ?

    3. There seem to be far too many privileged groups that are immune to arrest and prosecution for the blatant criminal activity in which they indulge.

      But on the plus side, this does free-up the police to pursue really important matters, such as ‘hate-speech’, ‘thought-crime’ etc. etc.

      We sleep soundly in our beds because ‘woke’ men stand guard online, ready to visit punishment on those who would offend us.

      1. “We sleep soundly in our beds because ‘woke’ men stand guard online, ready to visit punishment on those who would offend us.”
        As long as it won’t snap their stiletto heels or chip their nail varnish.

    3. Weather forecast not so good for balloon flying on Fri and Sat. But I suspect that beer sales in the area will rise without the assistance of hot air.

    3. Rory Stewart never learned to turn out like last from his 5 minutes in the army. What a dip.

    2. They have slipped up there and are not properly attired where is all the LGBT face paint etc

  68. number of political parties are looking to work together to form ” A National Dictatorship Government”

    1. You have been supporting / voting for one for decades if you are a lab/lib/con pro eu coalition party member / supporter / voter.

      1. Now that we have a new site, Ogga, do you think you could possibly post something differnt? We’re rather tired of that message.

        1. Afternoon N,
          In all honesty I am also rather tired of having to put out the same post after witnessing no change in the voting pattern, and having to live daily with the
          odious consequences of that said voting pattern.
          But until things show change via the ballot booth then the followers of submission parties I feel must be challenged.

          1. Only a fool would keep voting for a party that has zero chance of power and self destructs every few years.

            Bleat all you like about the lib/lab/con but if you really wanted change you would become an acivist within a party that actually stood a chance of power or being the power Broker. Even the DUP recognises that.

          2. Very same could be said about the current lab/lib/con coalition party and the trail of destruction they ie members, supporters, voters have left in their wake, the innocent witness the fall out of it daily.
            Only a dangerous fool would vote for more of the same again & again.
            .

          4. You’re preaching to the converted here – go and post on the BBC “have your say”.

          5. N,
            Believe me I am very sad to say that the “conversion kit” has proved to be a failure and this is shown at every voting opportunity, it is still a case of party before all else, is it not ?

          7. N,
            I do know that, that is not the point the point is I do find it unbelievable that peoples go to the ballot booth and still kiss a lab/lib/con candidate,party political agents that have turned this once decent nation into a land of crap as seen on a daily basis.
            Who are these people that on a regular basis
            that support / vote for this proven politic sh!te
            again & again ? someone is.

          8. No matter how often you victim blame the electorate for being lied to, it won’t alter the fact that the perpetrators of the lies are the guilty ones who need to be brought to account

          10. Which loops it straight back to the fact that the electorate is lied to and you victim blame them for being lied to. Directly analogous to blaming girls for falling victim to the grooming gangs.

          12. But ogga, you are to an extent preaching to the converted here. We already are, very many of us, Leavers, and intelligent as well. Proselytising doesn’t belong here, it belongs where people are to be converted (and arguably need to be converted).

          13. Evening HL,
            Tell me then will the voting pattern change ? this is not only about Brexit it is about
            supporting / voting for the very parties that have turned a decent country into a sulphurous, heaving mass of crap as seen and witnessed on a daily basis.

  70. Tens of thousands quit Labour in first membership drop under Corbyn

    The figure is still significantly higher than the membership of the Conservative Party, which is thought to be around 160,000.
    Labour saw more than 300,000 members join the party following the election of Mr Corbyn in 2015 and party rule changes brought in by his predecessor Ed Miliband.

  71. With regards to my earlier postings concerning Derbyshire Police’s DCC and BTL response on the Letters Page:-

    Tony Storey 8 Aug 2019 1:02PM
    @Robert Spowart
    I note a rebuttal was swiftly in place

    ‘To achieve chief officer rank in the police requires intelligence, well‑developed leadership skills, ambition and a proven track record in policing’

    At one time, this was certainly the case, but no longer. Now, a senior Police officer must check all the requisite diversity boxes, and have an unnatural affinity for kissing butt. I note a female senior officer, Superintendent, was recently directly appointed to role – no previous policing experience, while another, a female ACC was promoted to role after being in the police force for 7 weeks.

    It must be clearly visible to all that ‘intelligence, well-developed leadership skills and a proven track record’ are no longer fundamental requirements, given the abysmal performances of the of Messrs. Duck and Basu of The Met.

  72. Brexit Party fails to win any seats in first council elections

    I had not a clue they were fielding candidate in local elections. Where is the publicity. It is something Nigel used to be good at but the Brexit Party has gone almost invisible, It’s Web site is little more than a fund raising page and they still apparat to have no national or regional organization

    Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party has flopped in its first attempt to win council seats The Brexiteers stood in by-elections for two wards in Leave-backing Gloucester and trailed in third and fourth places.

    2. Local elections are tough for new parties. Apathy reigns supreme in them and only the diehard turn out to vote . Unless there is some huge local issue you can campaign on . The only way to win is to have a really good local organization that can get out and canvass

      Full Results

      Gloucester – Barnwood

      Lib Dems 676 (46.5 per cent, +15.1)
      Conservatives 496 (34.1 per cent, -6.0)
      Brexit Party 152 (10.5 per cent, +10.5)
      Labour 64 (4.4 per cent, -6.9)
      Green Party 59 (4.1 per cent, -1.3)
      UKIP 6 (0.4 per cent, -11.2)

      Gloucester- Podsmead

      Lib Dems 203 (30.0 per cent, +30.0
      Conservatives 200 (29.6 per cent, -18.5)
      Labour 122 (18.0 per cent, -33.9)
      Brexit Party 111 (16.4 per cent, +16.4)
      Green Party 29 (4.3 per cent, +4.3)
      UKIP 11 (1.6 per cent, +1.6)

      1. Were there postal votes ? I just cannot believe that the Conservatives did so well, after the way they have behaved.

  73. Bookmakers are taking bets on what the Government will ration first after Brexit

    Bookmakers Paddy Power are offering odds on what will be rationed first after Brexit.

    The betting firm are offering 12/1 that food rationing will be officially introduced by the end of 2019. And they’re taking bets on what household items will be restricted first.

    Fuel is the favourite, at 4/1, followed by Milk at 11/1.

    Avocados are in third place at 13/1.

    Further down the list, a white wine clampdown is 33/1. Gin rationing is priced at 50/1 and chicken at 66/1.

    Paddy Power are offering 11/4 on KFC having to shut down UK branches due to a shortage of chicken.

    1. What?

      No avocados?

      That’s it. I’m changing my mind. I want to stay in.

      (I ‘ve had avocado a couple of times. Greasy things. I don’t understand the fuss about them)

      1. Why Fuel? Very little comes from the EU. It is mostly a tiny amount of electricity via the interconnects

      2. Most chicken is UK sourced. I don’t think we source much chicken from the EU at all, Most imported chicken would be in imported processed food
        WE might import dried milk for mass catering and we do import cheese from the EU and some dairy products

      3. It appear we will be ok for Mars bars

        Bottom of the list are Mars Bars at 150/1

        1. Do we have our own spaceport ready yet? Last I heard it wasn’t finished. It won’t help much anyway. Travel time to A’Mhoine Peninsula in Sutherland from London is around three weeks. Travel time A’Mhoine spaceport to Mars is 9 days and four hours.

    6. Oddschecker
      “Brexit No Deal Brexit? / No (Withdrawal Agreement is ratified, Article 50 extended beyond 2019 or Article 50 revoked) 3/5

      / Yes (UK leave the EU in 2019 without Withdrawal Agreement in place) 6/4

    1. Their reply is a bit illiterate.
      Are the first five words a question or a statement?
      A semi colon after ‘account’ would help

      Is there a group recognising the hard work white MPS do?

      1. Are the first five words a question or a statement?

        They can only be an Antipodean Interrogative.

        A semi colon after ‘account’ would help

        A full stop is called for.

  75. Life can have it’s little oasis of vicarious pleasure, one such is sharing a caravan holiday with the grandchildren and introducing them to Roquefort and Boursin to their enthusiastic approval

        1. My 2 were tucking into escargots at that age, much to everybody’s amazement.

  76. Something which crossed my mind as I was tucking into my really excellent Tuna Carpaccio at lunch time was, do Muslms eat fish/shellfish?

    If so, how is it killed & prepared halal-wise?

          6. No, I wrote ‘mine’ first & amended it to ‘mein’. Mein Bestes (neuter) means ‘my best’.

        1. And toilet rolls are no longer Haram. Which is good of course because now they have another source of carbohydrate.

    4. Most of these food rules appear to be health related back then in Muslim counties most of which are hot seafood could go off quickly and with health care tc back then you could die

    5. I don’t know but I suspect not.

      Big Mo stole most of his “stuff” in the Koran from the Jewish and Christian traditions. He plagiarised left right and centre and claimed it as his own. He then added his own special mixes of poison to justify his activities.

        2. Where is our friend Delboy to remind us that the world is our homard, crayfish or langouste.

          6. Wenn man das Vermögen hat, sollte man es bis zum letzten Instanz einsetzen.

      2. Reminds me a bit of Philip Larkin!

        They pass on all the faults they had
        And add a few more just for you!

      3. How do you know Mo was big? He might have been a runt with small man syndrome and perpetually angry!

        1. Grizzly – It is slightly suspicious that Mo didn’t want any other men to sleep with his wives after he died. You suspect that it might be in case they had become accustomed to a mouse-sized undercarrage, and he did not want word to get out.

          1. As you raised that point, it looks as though he enjoyed his shellfish by spearing the bearded clam.

  77. Sadly a girl has died following the incident in Clacton

    It is difficult understand how it happened it is a very safe beach and the sea is shallow and there are no real currents to speak off and around the time the incident was reported it was low tide. I can only assume they swam a long way out and got into trouble. It is always sensible to swim parallel to the shore

    https://www.clactonandfrintongazette.co.uk/news/17825400.14-year-old-girl-dies-three-people-pulled-sea-clacton/

  78. Euston delays: Thousands stranded as all services suspended

    Something is very wrong with the railway signalling systems when they fail so frequently . Signally is service critical and safety critical so should be design to be highly reliable and with inbuilt redundancy so that no single failure brings the system down

    It appear to be poor design possibly as a result of penny pinching. Most of the time it seems to be the line signed equipment that fails indicating it has not been designed for the very harsh environment it operates in ie rain, dust and dirt extremes of temperature, and vibration

    All services in and out of London Euston station have been suspended due to a signal failure, stranding thousands of passengers this afternoon.
    All trains departing Euston, London’s fifth busiest station, are currently showing as delayed or cancelled.
    National Rail said there is a fault with the station’s signalling system, which is expected to disrupt services until 8pm this evening.

    Trains have also been cancelled at other stations around the country, including Manchester, as they are unable to travel to Euston.
    Customers for stations to Watford Junction can use their ticket on Chiltern Railways, London Northwestern, London Underground, Thameslink and Southern services.

    1. It is more total nonsense . Are they seriously trying to claim that cows produce more CO2 then all the cars buses and lorries and planes in the world as that is pure fiction and what about the CO2 produced in cereal crop production which is huge and that ignores the little matter that most will have to be imported from the other side of the world

      1. Self-aggrandizement about Global Warming is the latest self-promotion game for loud-mouths.
        The media have to print everything they hear.

          5. Indeed it was, but sausages used to be sold in links, generally eight to a link and one link to a pound.
            It was quite a skilled job to fill the skins from the mincer and ensuring the weight was never less than a pound but also not much over.

          6. Ah !! Happy memories !! The days when we had a butcher at the end of the road, and not just a packet from Sainsbuy;s.

          7. Indeed so.

            And you are old enough to remember when Sainsbury’s was just that kind of shop, where you chose over the counters and the butchers cut the meat of your choice.

            In fact you are probably old enough to recall when the choice was limited by the rations available to your mother on her weekly shop.

          8. The grocer always had a chair or two on the customer side of the counter so that old Jeanie could sit while the grocer rushed about, cutting cheese, weighing tea into brown paper bags etc.

          9. I don’t think there was a Sainsbury’s, but there were many butchers of course.
            And I remember ration books. I suppose you remember clothes coupons as well.

            It is strange how much we remember from our childhood days.

          10. The cold. Hours standing beside my mother queuing for everything; meat, bread, greengrocery all in blistering cold.

          11. Sitting, bored, in the Electricity Board office on Saturday morning while my parents went through their bills before writing a cheque.

          12. Colchester Sainsbury’s used to be magnificent shop on the High Street. The tiling in it was awesome; fifty shades of green if I remember rightly.
            Best of all, the assistants used to chop great slabs of butter into the weight you requested. I reckon all that slapping it around with wooden paddles worked out a lot of repressed aggression.

          14. My mother had a set of those paddles which she used for producing fancy pats of butter in the guest house.

          15. Not to mention the beefy carcases hanging around the butcher’shop shoulder to shoulder, occasionally touching one’s own shoulder whilst waiting in the queue.

          16. sosraboc – We have an excellent butcher here who sources all his meat from local farms and still makes / sells his own sausages in links. 2 years ago I asked him for 3 pounds of a certain cut of meat and he came out of the chiller with what looked like 1/4 cow on his shoulder. He laid it down, chopped it, weighed it and wrapped it right there in front of me.

            I had not seen that before. He also makes the tastiest burgers and sausages that I have ever eaten as well. Local skilled professionals – you cannot beat them.

          17. I’ve worked in the trade a few tmes.

            We had a village butcher and that’s where I learned how to prepare links and generally chop things up.
            I would have been early teens.

            When I was a student, 20/21 in summer vacation, I worked as a porter/humper at an abattoir, extremely hard work, very long hours and not pleasant.

            I can picture precisely how your butcher brought up the quarter and then carved it. Even now I suspect I could do the carrying and knife-work, it’s all in the technique. The forequarter was a shoulder/neck lift, the leg passing across the chest the rear quater was much harder and required getting more of the weight across the shoulder girdle and down the spine. Never, ever, try to twist when carrying; you could do some serious damage to yourself!!!

            Great times and an insight ino what the “real world” does for a living.

      1. Close, Hat; but no cigar.

        Their economy will be taking a bit of a knockwurst once the UK leaves
        the EUSSR & they will have to be bailed out by the other 26 EUSSR states.

    1. I can better that with just half a can of baked beans, just saying 😒💨

    3. The western establishment has done sweet FA about population growth for decades (indeed, they have underwritten it), now they tell us we’re killing the planet through our consumption.

          7. You’ve answered your own question.
            What makes you think it was ever alive, it’s a Zombie

        1. Zebra Crossing so traffic stops, but not the bloke on the bike.

          Now about the ability of the police to plan for things…

          1. Summer of heartache for me…. goodbye and fare thee well, first love.

            Edit: Decades later -yes, it took that long – I thought, ‘and bloody good riddance.’ One does heal eventually.

          4. If that was in Sweden, oh, dear. Swedish women are all tall and bony. And they don’t have hearts,

          5. Correct & they have disgusting table manners, yawn widely without covering their mouths & are extremely assertive.

            At that time I was at school in England.

    2. The zebra crossing’s not even in the same place as it was in 1969 is it? I read ages ago that it had been moved, but there were still clots holding up the traffic for their holiday selfies.

  86. Bob of Bonsall, I’ve made some inquiries and it seems that I’m suffering from false memory syndrome. There was no shop or business of that name in Newbiggin. I got in touch with someone I know from school who lived in Newbiggin until he grew up and left for university and he put out feelers.

    No-one could recall any such shop and he’s just sent me a message to say that your cousin no less had confirmed to him that there were none.

    The name still has that familiarity for me from those days though. Maybe I met with some of your family or maybe even you yourself when I was messing about with my cousins in Meldon Terrace, or on the Spital Carrs turning over stones, or maybe even fishing for young podlers at the Needles Eye on a handline bought from Crackett’s

      1. We had a mutual friend that lived there. Peter Thompson. No 29. I knew him from later days at Ashington Grammar.

    1. I have stockpiled a dozen tins of w/rose’s cassoulet for the winter. It’s really good stuff.

      Correction: it’s a baker’s dozen ‘cos I bought one for this w/e.

      1. Cassoulet, ugh, all those beans. Sort of baked beans in a sausage stew. Not a pretty sight or taste, sorry Peddy, I cannot stomach it (as sampled in Carcasonne).

        1. Chacun à son gout. In fact the w/rose version is much better than the version I bought from the annual French market here in Hunts.

  89. Despite Brexit (and summat to cheer up a railway guy living in the Matlock area [George Stephenson finished up in Chesterfield] ):

    Fears over the damaged Whaley Bridge dam this week haven’t left the people of Derbyshire with much to cheer, particularly during unwanted visits from the Labour leader. At least they’ve now got some positive economic news that Derby-based train manufacturer Bombardier have won a £2.34 billion contract to make trains for the Cairo monorail, beating off Pharoah-cious competition from Chinese and Malaysian firms. Remainers still in de-Nile while Bombardier’s own Project Fear warnings get confined to the tomb of history…

    It comes less than a week after Hitachi Rail announced a £400m investment in their County Durham plant. The good news just keeps Tutan-khamin’…

    https://order-order.com/2019/08/07/derby-trainmaker-wins-2-3-billion-cairo-monorail-contract/

        1. Well now, that opens a can of worms. I think you have just indicated which one will be in which boat.

      1. The King’s Cup, a historic trophy first presented by King George V at Cowes’ Royal Yacht Squadron in 1920.

        1. Bera Grylls’ team won. Mr G has spent a fair amount of time upon the Solent, so he has a bit of experience.

    2. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, & some have greatness thrust upon them”. (from memory)

        1. I’ve read & seen several of Shakespeare’s plays in German, e.g. Julius Caesar, but I don’t recall “12th Night”.

          1. Why see them in German – unless to see how the Germans simply don’t get Shakespeare’s (and the English language’s) nuances.

          3. Don’t be silly. If you can read the Swedish above you will know that I lived in Germany for 16 years.

          4. I just read it. Easy to translate without without knowing Swedish. But this is an English site and you are irritating the natives.

          6. If you speak English dialect, eff off and go home to bed. Leave us to talk about Brexit in English.

          7. My, my, aren’t you just a little ray of sunshine. Und ich glaube, daß jeder hier außer Dir die Nase gestrichen voll von Brexit hat.

          9. Aha, vill du böria med et samtal på skandiinaviska, Paul? Tyvärr är det dags att gå till sängs får mig.

      2. Change great to mediocre, and greatness to mediocrity and much of modern life can be explained.

      1. I believe she was in “Desperately Seeking Susan” with Madonna. As I never watched the film, I never did discover whether or not either of them looked in the fridge!

        :-))

          3. That took me back almost 30 years. I was a fresh-faced 20 year-old driving home from work with this bluff old cove who had been in the Army all of his life. This song came on from the tape I was playing and he sat upright and started making “turn it up!” motions with his hands, so I did.

            There we were, sitting in almost stationary traffic on a road called Longwall Street, with the windows down and “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” playing. When it finished he said “That is how it is supposed to be sung.” Happy days. 🙂

    4. What a tw*t. If she feels so bad, why doesn’t she devote her life to helping the people that she thinks she is depriving?

    1. Was this the one written in English that (1) you enjoyed, (2) I suggested might be something by Agatha Christie and (3) you refused to tell us the book’s title until you’d finished it? If the answer is “No” can you please tell us what the English thriller you so enjoyed was?

      1. Die Antwort lautet “Nein”.

        It was “Widow’s Revenge” by Lynda la Plante, which I got in w/rose for £4.99. Good holiday read. I withheld the title to avoid spoilers.

        I don’t remember your mentioning A.C., Elsie…

        My Siggi Baumeister is one of the Eifel series in German.

          2. Eifel series; a towering achievement. Good grief, Peddy, I think it’s about your bed-time!

            :-))

          3. Doh! At 300 pages it’s one of the thicker ones, so if you lay them all side by side on the table it towers above the rest.

          4. Not really, you have to lay them one of top of the other to achieve that effect!

            ;-))

        2. July the 13th, Peddy. I suggested that the book you were reading might be Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little Indians” and warned you not to be deceived by the process of elimination. You neither uptick nor replied to my post, which suggests that you didn’t notice it at the time.

          Anyhow I am off to bed now, see you (and all NoTTLers) tomorrow.

  94. Not a meat eater… but as a vegetarian it’s easy to see tax on carnivorous consumption as a sharp prong of global control..

    1. I saw all the reports earlier on. I could have sworn that he was a British citizen.
      His mother swore that he was a good boy and had never done anything wrong in his life.

    2. Not being charged with a motoring offence? I thought that’s why he was pulled over?

  96. Okay, so signing off for now…

    Next time you see some intergovernmental UN inspired craziness, just ask….

    Does it lead to global control ?

    Bet the answer is…

    Yes ! 😊

  97. Ok peeps. First to reply gets a £5 postal order.
    Name five plays by yer Shakespeare that begin and end with the same letter (Henry IV, Henry V etc don’t count.)
    3… 2… 1… Go.

    1. Antony & Cleopatra, Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest,Henry the Eighth.

      1. Third begins with an A and I said the Henry’s don’t count. Good try tho’.

    3. There are only four on the official list, plus Midsummers Night Dream without the A -http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/plays_alpha.php

    5. I’ve misled everyone – it should be four (unless we can count Simon of Athens sic)

  100. Good night all, having spent most of the day clearing and sorting the garage, I am knucking Fackered.

    Jusqu’à demain matin

    1. Years ago I got told off by my dental nurse in So’ton for telling a rather respectable lady patient that I was ‘feeling knackered’. I always thought it was a ref to an old horse going to the knacker’s yard until she put me right.

  101. A couple of weeks ago I decided that the radio/CD player in the car was past its best by date. It was installed with the car some 17 years ago and the CDs were now skipping. I did considerable research, looking for the simplest replacement I could find. I found the ideal model, on clearance sale at a national company. I looked to find which of their depots aid one and found one in Lanark. I phoned them up to make sure. Not only did they have one but it was ex-display so it worked and was offered to me at £25 less than expected per their adverts.
    As another errand took me to Glasgow I told them I’d take it. I drove to Glasgow via Lanark, collected it and went home. I’d arranged for the garage to fit it the next day which they duly did. They were busier than expected and did not tune it.
    I sat in the car with the radio manual and tried to make sense of it. These multi-purpose knobs baffle me. Tuning was always going to be difficult as we can only receive about five stations. I gave up.
    I tried again today. I was better positioned and there was less sun glare on the screen so I could actually read it. Twenty minutes passed. There were unexpected things coming up. Eventually I noticed that the model number on the radio was not the model number on the manual. I checked the box. It matched the manual. So. The radio in the box was not the same as that named on the box and all the associated materials. Never mind. I downloaded the correct manual and started again. It works! The actual radio is a more expensive one than that I thought that I was buying. I might have twigged when the garage owner mentioned that it had Bluetooth, etc etc, none of which I paid any attention to, as I don’t know what that is. It also has DAB, although we don’t have that here.
    So should I tell the supplier? It is a two hour trip to Lanark and they have probably adjusted their stock etch they no longer show that item. I have paid for installation, so there is no financial reason either way for going back, especially as they do not have the original one I thought that I was getting. The manager checked it into the box at the time of sale. He noticed nothing amiss either. Sleeping dogs.

      1. Very much so. I feel sure that they don’t want to know – I wouldn’t in their place. They would have to find the correct radio, move it to Lanark, uninstall the new one, replace it, and pay for my time,
        and then sell the new radio without box or documents, wherever they are!

        1. Cover yourself by telephoning the store, leave a detailed message with the NAMED manager etc, so that some youth is not wrongfully dismissed. If they want it back, explain that they will have to pay for a new installation and then collect the radio, etc. Keep a note of the manager’s name.
          Their incompetence is not your fault, but your honesty would help them with their stocktaking.

    2. It’s all this modern computer stuff that gets us. Years back you could have asked for help from Sir Alan Tuning.

          1. Actually the verbs to lie & to lay are also closely intertwined in both Swedish & German. I’m often having to correct students.

    4. 17 years old ?

      Sounds like you need one of those smart new plug in electric cars which does a huge 100 miles a go..

      Before you have to wait 8 hours for your next charge up.

      From a bargain £30,000…

      Goldfinger’s UN, and Greta, would be so pleased.. 😊

      1. It belongs to the Sultana. I am allowed to wash it, sort it, polish it and take it to the garage when required. It is very nice.

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