729 thoughts on “Thursday 16 January: Flybe provides a unique service that Britain cannot afford to lose”

  2. FYI the names of Down Voters are now Visible & here are some that have been identified as serial down voters on NTTL and all 10 are likely to belong to Pretty Polly.
    1) Pretty Polly @disqus_r2Mgo00diq https://disqus.com/by/disqu…
    2) Blue Rosette @SirHumphrey123 https://disqus.com/by/SirHu…
    3) Caroline @disqus_xXOfmpxD5V https://disqus.com/by/disqu…
    4) Disqus Poster @disqus_4w96H1cX7k https://disqus.com/by/disqu…
    5) J Bonnington Jagworth @jbonningtonjagworth https://disqus.com/by/jbonn…
    6) Florence in Florence @florenceinflorence https://disqus.com/by/flore…
    7) Elizabeth @disqus_r2NMdf5DxR https://disqus.com/by/disqu…
    8) Gail’s in the Dales @gailsinthedales https://disqus.com/by/gails…
    9) Lucinda @disqus_UgiiPQY3UM https://disqus.com/by/disqu…
    10) Fiona @disqus_atKFy3N7Up https://disqus.com/by/disqu…

    Now for the funnies.
    Almighty then…

    There was a small church in Texas that had a very big-busted organist. Her breasts were so huge that they inadvertently bounced and jiggled the entire time she played the organ. Unfortunately, she distracted most of the congregation considerably, both male and female.

    The very proper (and not nearly so blessed) church ladies were appalled. They insisted something had to be done about this or they would have to get another organist.

    So, one of the ladies approached her, very discreetly, and told her to mash up some green persimmons and rub them on the nipples of her breasts and maybe they would shrink in size. She warned her to not eat any of the green persimmons, “…because they are so sour they will
    make your mouth pucker up and you won’t be able to talk properly for a week!”

    The perky organist agreed to try rubbing the persimmons on her nipples.

    The following Sunday morning the minister got up in the pulpit and said….
    “Dew to thir cumsthanthis bewond my contwol, we will not haff a thermon
    tewday

      1. Mahatma, I scrolled down for quite some time, then gave up as it all seemed to be confusing gibberish to me. Oh, for a rejuvenation pill so that I could go back to the age of 7 and return to school to be given clear instruction on the basics of computing!

    1. I is all smoke and mirrors. The BBC just gets whatever energy is in that part of the Grid. It can go to a supplier claiming to supply Green Energy but what the BBC gets may have come from a coal fired power sstation

    2. Eddy, plenty of blowhards and those who believe the sun shines out of their arses employed by Al-Beeb.😎

    3. Every MP should be compelled to spend January and February each year in a shed in the remotest part of Scotland. He or she should be given all the electric things he/she wants such as a fridge, an electric cooker, an electric heater, an electric immersion heater, a computer etc. etc. He/ she should not be allowed to burn either wood or coal in a fire.

      His/her electrical power supply should only come from a solar panel and the sort of small wind generator that is commonly fitted to a small sailing cruiser used by a liveaboard.

      1. Morning R,
        Think people power,
        People power works via the
        ballot booth, proof being, look at the horrendous state of these Isles.
        Every action has a reaction, how about we try putting the country before the party when voting.
        Putting trust into a party that has shown allegiance beyond doubt to England / GB.
        What harm could be done that has not already been done tenfold over the last four decades.
        People power used in a common sense way, works.

      2. Wasn’t a “live aboard” a popular TV series set in and around the River Mersey, Richard? (Good morning, btw.)

      3. That’s the issue which a lot of our green elite overlook. Even if 100% of our electricity came from non-fossil fuels, it still leaves about 80% of our total energy which does come from fossil fuels.

        “Be practical, this day,” should be their motto.

  7. UK’s attempt to resettle refugee children from Syria to be rejected

    Syrian-Kurdish authorities responsible for Islamic State refugee camps are likely to deny any UK request to repatriate four British children

  8. David Van Day was formerly a member of the pop vocal duo Dollar was also a member of the 1970s vocal group Guys ‘n’ Dolls but is now A Conservative Councillor i Thurrock

  9. TV cameras to be allowed in Crown Courts in England and Wales

    TV cameras are to be allowed to film in Crown Courts in England and Wales for the first time.
    New legislation being laid before Parliament will allow judges’ sentencing remarks in serious high-profile criminal cases to be seen and heard by TV and online audiences.
    However, trials will not be televised as they are in countries such as the US as only the judge will be filmed.
    The judiciary, broadcasters and government have welcomed the move.

    1. So that each may have his 15 minutes of fame.

      Will the result be a series entitled “The Judge – and his silly rulings”?

    2. ‘morning Bill, the thin end of the wedge – they will be calling for more TV access within six months of getting this.

    3. Yay! Judge Jeffreys returns.
      “You are all condemned, for crimes against king and kingdom, to hang… to dangle until you are but dead, to be then cut down still alive, to have your entrails drawn out and thrust into your own mouths, to be further hanged, then quartered like the carcasses of beef you are. You number five hundred, but even if you were five thousand, the execution of this sentence would be just before God Almighty… and may He have mercy upon your souls.”

      Now would that count as a micro-aggression?

  10. Empty business rates relief ‘costs £1bn’

    Most of the empty premises are shops and that’s because we simply have to many shops

    Empty businesses cost taxpayers £1bn a year, prompting calls for urgent reform of the system.
    Some councils lose out on millions of pounds of potential business rates income through a tax relief on empty properties, BBC analysis shows.
    A local authority mayor in northern England said the money “added up to a lot” and the system was unfair.
    The Treasury said it would announce a review of business rates “in due course”.

    Rates do not have to be paid on empty businesses for three months, such as when shops close down or move.

    Andy Preston, independent Mayor of Middlesbrough, said: “There’s a window where we lose money and that adds up to a lot, so we’re doing everything we can to help make sure we can sustain businesses.

    1. Good morning Bill

      Most windy wet high streets are traffic free places .. car parks are usually in inconvenient places. Faffing around putting your car number in the parking meter( How many people can remember theirs) using a phone to pay for your parking , etc etc and lugging shopping back to the car can be an absolute nuisance.

      We have had a very wet winter, I am not surprised that high streets are failing .

      1. ‘Morning, Belle.

        The answer is to use supermarkets & shops with their own car parks. Goods from checkout into trolley, trolley to car boot. The only time I use a park-house is when I go to MK theatre, where my blue badge gets me a bay on the ground floor.

          1. …and local councils, and their useless, troughing councillors, still think and work in that era (without the then concept of honour).

        2. After visiting South Africa , they have some of the most glitziest modern secure shopping centres I have ever seen ..

          There were also some beautiful outdoor markets .. innovative , interesting and safe!

          Most high streets in our market towns are riddled with same old same old boring retail experiences..and the ultimate recycling shopfronts … charity shops , which seem to have the odour of other people’s lives.

          Even Waterstones has become soulless and irrelevant. Robert Dyas requires a quick glance into new gadgetry , and that’s about it.. how many cook shops do we need and strange off the edge clothing chains with funny names and creaky wooden floorboards .

          1. It’s the same in Australia. I generally have an aversion to shopping centres, but Warringah Mall in Sydney was a very pleasant exception.

            Well designed, well ventilated, numerous exceptional coffee bars, and with plenty of sitting areas for those with tired feet.

          2. I can imagine that your experience was similar to mine in SA..

            Customer orientated .. no yobbery , good security , no Musak , clean , good loos , lots of seats and air conditioned .

          3. My girlfriend lost her handbag (containing all her cash, credit cards, passport, keys, the lot!) when we moved seats from one table to another at an ope-air coffee shop in that mall (she left the bag on a chair!).

            As you can imagine, losing one’s whole “life” 12,000 miles from home was a tad more than scary, and she naturally panicked.

            I approached the staff, who told me they had found the unattended handbag, removed it from the chair, and placed it in their safe. Five minutes after this “loss” it was restored to its grateful owner.

  11. Scottish FA ‘could ban children heading balls within weeks’

    There is no real evidence to indicate any link buy never mind

    A ban on children heading the ball in Scotland could be in place in a matter of weeks due to fears over the links between football and dementia.

    1. I understood from the BBC radio 4 report this morning that Scotland already has a ban on heading for under 12 year olds. The ban is being considered for English children.

    4. “There is no real evidence to indicate any link”. Well, BJ, tell that to Colchester United footballer Bobby Hunt whose many years of heading footballs has now resulted in increasing dementia.

      1. Surely one needs to establish whether there is above average incidence of dementia amongst ex-footballers and then whether there are other factors the group have in common that might also predispose them to dementia.

        1. Bobby and other footballers have had and are currently undergoing extensive and continuing tests.

          1. Ernie Moss, Chesterfield FC’s record scorer, is in the same boat. After he retired he joined up with his mate, ex-Derbyshire and England off spinner, Geoff Miller, and opened a Sports’s shop in the town called, Moss & Miller.

            He had to give up when his dementia overtook him. Nowadays he can’t even recognise members of his own family.

  12. Morning all

    SIR – I will travel from Yorkshire to an important business meeting in Southampton later this month.

    By train it would take at least five hours each way, with several changes; by car it would require over 250 miles of driving and take at least seven hours. Both of these options are very stressful and neither would leave me with much energy to contribute substantially to the meeting.

    HS2 would be of no help whatsoever – travelling via London would only add cost and time, not to mention Tube travel between stations.

    A flight from Leeds Bradford airport, operated by Flybe (report, January 15), would get me there in just over an hour, and return me the same day at a civilised time. Flybe is an essential asset for British industry and should be treated as such.

    Judith Beeley

    Keighley, West Yorkshire

    SIR – If, when running my company, I had collected VAT from customers and then not passed it on to HMRC by the due date, I would have been prosecuted. The penalty ranges from a fine to imprisonment, or both.

    Rather than allowing Flybe to defer paying air passenger duty, the relevant executives should be prosecuted, the company liquidated and any proceeds used to pay off the outstanding tax liability. Or is the Government setting a precedent for the many small businesses that are prosecuted each year for not passing on VAT?

    Dr John Mitchell

    1. Beeley could save time, money & stress by attending her meeting as a member of a skype conference or similar..

      1. So someone wants to fly from Yorkshire to Southampton How many people will want to do that. . Leeds to Southampton might be unless than an hour in the air but allowing for betting to and from the airports and the check in times etc will be nearer 4 hours and what are the chances of the flight tine suiting the meeting ?. How many of these meeting are really necessary to travel to. Cheap high quality video conferencing is readily available

        1. I wouldn’t put my money on your …betting to and from… unless it was less than an hour!

          2. ‘Morning, George, I just have to have a go at the laziness of not poof-reading before posting!

    3. Good morning all.
      From York to Southampton by car would take about four and a half hours, plus a couple of comfort stops. If the meeting is IMPORTANT Ms Beeley should travel down the previous day, in case of climate activity. When you allow for travel to the airport, parking, check in, inspection and x-rays, hanging around in departure corridor, collecting luggage at the destination, onward travel to hotel, the flight option could easily swell to four hours. And as for ‘stress’, flying is life or death.

  13. Morning again

    Appeasing China

    SIR – The Government has form for putting commercial interests before honour and principle.

    In 2019, the Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China concluded that China is a “criminal state”, which, “beyond reasonable doubt”, has committed crimes against humanity and acts of torture, and that enemies of the state continue to be killed for their organs.

    The chairman of the tribunal, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who led the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, criticised the Government for failing to act, saying it had “sought to dismiss the allegations without making a judgment based on consideration of known facts and evidence”, thereby enabling it to avoid finding “an inconvenient truth”.

    The current Chinese government discriminates daily against the Uighur and Kazakh people, subjecting them to intolerable human rights abuses. It undermines the rule of law in Hong Kong and weakens its autonomy. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, it forces countries into such debt that they make political concessions to China.

    China’s values are wholly inimical to our own. Our Government knows this but continues to turn the blind eye that Sir Geoffrey referred to seven months ago. This must stop; no further appeasement of China should take place, least of all on an issue as deeply dangerous as Huawei. If the Prime Minister chooses in favour of China rather than the United States, we shall know the sort of unethical Government we will be lumbered with in the years to come.

    Brian Clarke

    London W6

  14. Momentum set to back Rebecca Long-Bailey as poll places her in lead

    Rebecca Long-Bailey is expected to win the backing of Momentum as a poll placed her ahead of closest rival for the Labour leadership, Keir Starmer.
    The shadow business secretary, who has been criticised for the slow start to her campaign, came out ahead of the shadow Brexit secretary based on first preferences, with 42% of the votes compared to his 37% in the poll, conducted by Survation of more than 3,800 LabourList readers .

      1. In truth, Mags, and Good morning, like most things nowadays I automatically think that the uproar over fracking is unfounded and a hysterical reaction to anyone other than those screaming, making money.

        It smacks of Snot Fair – the merry-go-round of the lefty, whinging, libtard snowflake.

      1. It is only a poll but it does show a substantial majority for her. I think if she were to get 50% she wins but on the figures in the poll it would go to a second round which could potential change it. IT is clearly though between her and Starmer at present unless things change substantially during the poll

    3. Oh, goody – just what the right-wing need to ensure they stay in power for the next 15 years. I just hope they take the opportunity to overhaul all systems, clearing out all the dead wood and mind-sapping ideologies, that currently hamper any forward thinking and use of initiative.

      1. Morning NtN,
        You mean going on past performances & actions there will be a great deal of difference ?

    4. The election of Morticia Wrong-Daily will certainly sound the death knell of the Labour Party. Goodbye and bad riddance!

      Similarly the election of the communist, Bernard Sanders, will do the same for the Demotwat Part in the US of A.

    5. They did have one of the reviewers of the newspapers last night who pointed out that this was sheer propaganda posing as news. Not that we haven’t seen a lot of that recently. He added that the poll was of “LabourList” readers who are hard-core leftists who think that Jeremy Corbyn was not Communist enough.

        1. Yes, the point was that in a poll of all Labour party members it was Starmer who was well ahead. He said that very few Labour members had anything to do with “LabourList” and they were the extremists, even in the eyes of party activists. So it is no surprise that they want the candidate closest to Corbyn.

  15. Off to Kerala today for two weeks. See you soon.

    SIR – My late father was a civil engineer, and I may therefore have some tidy genes (Letters, January 15).

    At the supermarket I push the trolley while my wife puts the goods in it. As she is browsing, I rearrange the items into perfect order. It is self-defeating as it enables my wife to put more items into the trolley than is, I think, really necessary.

    Nigel Hawkins

    Braunton, Devon

    SIR – I think dishwasher loading (Letters, January 15) is very much a man thing. I am scorned when I attempt to load, but, strangely, am considered very qualified to unload.

    Judith Barnes

    St Ives, Cambridgeshire

      1. Morning T_B,

        Perhaps a letter on the virtues of emptying a bagless vacuum cleaner would do the trick.

        It would fit the apparent requirements for letter publication.

        1. Good morning vvof..
          Now that is a great idea ..

          If some one on here could draft me something , I will submit it , and see what happens..
          Perhaps my name is persona non grata with the DT?

          1. T_B

            Perhaps,

            SIR- I think the virtues of bagless vacuum cleaners is very much understated in today’s climate awareness emergency.

            It also has the added bonus of ease of operation, even my Filipino manservant carries out the task with ease.

            A win win for all.

            Regards,

            Ivor Notion,

            London

      2. Morning, Maggie.

        I have discovered that the reason a lot of letters don’t get printed is because they are not sent in the DT’s preferred format.

        It is important not to deviate from the letters’ editor’s arcane acceptance preferences, which are quite specific:

        SIR—In capitals followed by a long (em-rule) dash before the commencement of the subject matter.

        Write the topic, being careful to self-edit to ensure brevity (too many letters sent are long-winded and the necessary editing by the DT ensures the original message is lost), and don’t forget to add the previous reference matter (Letters, January 16) if it is in reply to previously published missives by others in a particular thread.

        Finally add your full name, full address, telephone number, and email address.

        Failure to follow these preferences will ensure you are not published.

        2. I don’t do that “SIR long dash” stuff, and some of my letters make the cut. And did I tell you about the time that David Twiston Davies called me to ask me to lengthen a letter? I did?

          1. I have never had a letter published when I have failed to precede it with an initial (and very antiquated) SIR.

          2. Gosh, there must be another reason why they’ve never published one of your letters.

          3. You evidently don’t pay much attention, Joey. I have, on average, three letters printed a year. Just ask the regulars.

    2. Judith Barnes “…very qualified to unload.” because that doesn’t require an engineering degree.

    3. Good Morning Epi

      Off to Kerala?

      I think there was a Fleet Air Arm Station there during WW2.. my late father used to mention Cochin , Kerala.

      Have a great holiday.

  16. Britain is suffering a productivity crisis

    But the politicians etc are in denial that mass migration plays a good part in the UK’s poor productivity. Why invest in training and equipment when you have an endless supply off cheap Labour. It does nothing for our productivity or manufacturing as it encourages just low margin low skilled businesses and jobs

    Now lets try and think? What happened over the last 10 years ?

    Far from Brexit damaging the UK economy it can potentially give it a big improvement if the government seriously controls migration. If they do companies will not have an unlimited pool of cheap Labour and will need to invest in training and equipment

    Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, said stagnant productivity since the financial crisis over a decade ago was the “single most pressing issue facing the UK economy.”

    He said the failure to become more productive was to blame for a “lost decade” on pay, with the average UK worker’s wages still worth less now after inflation than before the crisis.

    The failure to significantly increase output for every hour worked has limited the cash available for firms to expand, invest, hire or raise payouts to staff or shareholders.

    Official figures last week showed productivity levels edged up just 0.1% in the year to last summer.
    Gains are reported to have averaged just 0.3% a year in the 2010s, compared with average growth of 2% a year in the decade before

    1. Productivity comes from capital investment. We prefer to invest in real estate as a nation.

      Low skilled businesses generally are not low margin. For instance domiciliary care will cost you upwards of £20 per hour of which the carer sees just over £8. You need a computer, a phone and some social media skills to start an agency and can do it from home, you don’t even need an office.

        1. Working hard for pathetic money. solid 48 hrs a week of nights. 60 hours this week. Self-employed so don’t get NMW or any holiday and not paid enough to take time off. I hate it but what can I do.

          2. Wife is good, flat still on market. Dad is having a quad bypass tomorrow and a heart valve replaced but the success rates are so high I’m not worried by that. We’ve had a full ask offer but they need time to sell their place and we still are looking for somewhere. The wife seems set on the Beeston area.

  17. Food security plan after Brexit

    The 25% coming from the EU is slightly misleading as quite a bit of that 25% comes from countries outside of the EU but comes into the EU and is then reexported to the UK

    The UK’s food security is to be regularly assessed by parliament to ensure minimal disruption to supplies after the country leaves the EU and while new trade deals are sought.
    The commitment will be part of the biggest shakeup of British agriculture in 40 years and requires a regular report to MPs outlining supply sources and household expenditure on food, as well as consumer confidence in food safety.
    The move reflects concerns over potential disruptions post-Brexit, as more than a quarter of Britain’s food comes from the EU and nearly a fifth from other countries.

  19. Car parts factory Antolin Interiors to close Hartlip factory putting 300 jobs at risk

    Up to 300 workers face losing their jobs after a major employer announced it is to shut its factory.
    Staff at Antolin Interiors, which makes car parts for companies like Jaguar Land Rover have been told the site in Spade Lane off the A2 at Hartlip near Sittingbourne is to close.

  20. Shrewsbury maternity scandal: More than 900 cases of potential poor care identified at hospital

    But our NHS is the best in the world many will claim

    About 100 new cases of poor maternity care at a beleaguered hospital trust have been identified, bringing the total to 900, the government has revealed.
    The scandal at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals Trust ​- the largest maternity scandal in NHS history – is already under investigation and lawyers are preparing to act on behalf of families who say they suffered.

    Nadine Dorries, a health minister, told the Commons the total number of suspected cases now stood at 900. The previous known tally was around 800.
    A number of those went back 40 years, she said, adding that reviewing the hundreds of cases would take time.

    1. Morning Anne.

      Gosh, I hate to see food messed around with .. keep it simple .. and not covered in too many flavours.

      Sweet tasty grilled tomatoes on toast for me / or creamy mushrooms and grilled bacon.. .nice treat.

      All bran for breakfast today!

      2. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f24c58fb6e03639d7c1e87543f5b341e11fb4734f83caac0d976ac5a6f593c68.jpg
        This was yesterday’s delicious dinner that I discussed on here (before I was taken to task by this forum’s resident halfwit who told me that it was “nutritionally deficient”!). I shall enjoy a similar dinner today and rejoice in all the vitamins, minerals, iron and calcium that it provides for me.

        [Reminder: I eat my dinner at the historically traditional dinner time of noon—1:00 p.m. As our forefathers knew, it is much better to eat the main meal of the day at that time (Breakfast like an emperor, dine like a king, supper like a pauper) since the body has all day to properly digest it. Those eating heartily at night cause all manner of health problems for themselves. Schools still have dinner (not “lunch”) ladies!]

        1. My parents always had dinner at midday to one-ish and at around 5-6 pm it was tea, as in Afternoon Tea, then a late but light supper.

          In their case though this came about partly through tradition and also because when they were working they had a fish and chip shop which of course was open in the evenings. (Dad cooked in animal fat and point blank refused to change his ways. Mum complained but the customers didn’t.)

          I eat my main meal at 1 pm because I’m a lousy cook and the BBC canteen can do better. Need a new kitchen before I retire.

          1. Practice makes perfect, Sue. You know you can do it. :•)

            Dinner (the main meal) was shoved to the end of the day here in Sweden too as a result of the same changes in social and working practices. Here, though, it is more silly than in the UK. The word for dinner in Swedish is “Middag”, which means midday. Sensible since that was when the main meal was taken.

            When that main meal started to be eaten in the evening, in common with the UK they “migrated” the word commonly used for it. Now Swedes, ludicrously, take their Middag in the evening!

            Interestingly, the upper classes in the UK still call their main evening meal “supper”.

        2. This year we have had the very best ham ever.

          We bought the raw ham in November and immersed it in large scrupulously clean dustbin with water, a mixture of salts and juniper berries. We made sure it was completely immersed put the lid on the dustbin and forgot about it for six weeks. We then drained the dustbin of salt water and left the ham in clear fresh water for another week.

          We then took the ham out of the dustbin and boiled it in an industrial sized saucepan for a couple of hours. Caroline then took the skin off the ham, scored the fat, planted cloves in the diamonds and roasted the ham in the oven (only just big enough!). To finish off, in the last quarter of an hour or so of the roasting process, she painted whole surface with a mixture of mustard and honey.

          We enjoyed this magnificent ham on New Year’s Eve with lucky members of the family – Caroline’s sister and her new husband and and our son Henry and his girlfriend Jessica.

          We are still eating the ham which is as delicious cold as it was hot and Caroline has used the smoker she got for Christmas a few years ago to smoke some of it.

          https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f5155d64618bbb3da149bf8b9758d6b0ec18531f7b25d14c801d35112b622e79.jpg

          1. Are you trying to make me jealous, Rastus? Because if you are, you just succeeded. That ham looks sensational.

            I bought a hot-smoker some years back and I use it to hot-smoke, roast and barbecue. Last year, I bought a tiny cold-smoking unit, only 8″ square, which I fill with beech or hickory sawdust. This fits into the bottom of my smoking unit and smoulders for ten hours. I tried it out last summer with some home-cured streaky bacon (I left the back bacon “green”) and it gave a delicious result.

        5. Are those peanuts on the top left? That is not something that it would ever have occurred to me to add to those other foods.

    3. ‘Morning, Anne, “He added: ‘It’s not me being pretentious, it’s me being inquisitive and interesting.’”

      Oh, get me!

    4. “…Aikens himself thinks that, when applied to food, ‘pretentious’ is a word used only by the fearful.”

      Or it is a word used by those who were not born yesterday or who have more intelligence than a housebrick.

  22. When Harry & Meghan leave royalty behind what about poor Archie, can he come back if he wants?
    Who will remove the silver spoon?

  23. Welsh language music app Apton in call for public money

    The problem is their potential market is tiny

    The Welsh language music app Apton is “highly unlikely” to be able to carry on without further Welsh Government investment, its owner has said.
    Sain Records boss Dafydd Roberts said the app now had 3,000 users.

    In evidence submitted to the Welsh assembly’s culture committee, Mr Roberts said it was “difficult” to compete with major corporations like Spotify and Apple Music.
    Sain Records has already invested £100,000 in the venture with the Welsh Government contributing a further £30,000.

      1. Romans came across the Channel
        All dressed up in tin and flannel;
        Half a pint of woad per man’ll …
        Send ’em back again …………………

    1. Or wasted more than £12million of taxpayer cash by the Metropolitan Police who have spent it over the last 12 years on all expense paid holidays in Portugal looking for Madeline McCann instead of on train fares to Rothley in Leicestershire to investigate the only two suspects in her disappearance

        1. I hope Eeyore doesn’t start complaining about the number of e-mails he’s getting…

  27. Since Best Beloved has gone onto a very strict diet regime, I’m left to cook for myself so I’m off to do a bunch of stuff for freezing and later defrosting/warming for future dinners (while I watch the six o’clock news, George).

    2. Oh, bum, I’ve just been informed by BB that if I want to live, I should wait until after the cleaners have been and gone at 13:00 as I’d only mess up her cleaning before the cleaners!

      Ah, feminine logic – but I love her.

      1. Thanks Philip but…

        …I keep getting:
        404
        We’re sorry!
        We can’t seem to find what you’re looking for

        1. Grizz posted a vid yesterday on how to make great steak and kidney pie.

          Ingredients

          3kg of beef skirt

          900g ox kidney

          150g beef dripping

          900g field mushrooms

          450g sliced white onion

          75g plain flour

          75ml Worcester sauce

          50g English mustard

          38ml mushroom ketchup

          3 bay leaves

          2 sprigs of thyme

          1.5 pints Young’s Bitter

          500ml beef stock

          Fresh parsley

          Salt and pepper to season

          For the top

          400g self-raising flour

          200g shredded suet

          1 egg

          Fresh parsley

          Method

          Take the meat out of the fridge at least two hours before cooking and leave in a cool, dry place.

          Heat the dripping in a saucepan, then add the sliced onions. Cook
          until soft, but not coloured, then add the beef skirt and colour
          lightly.

          Add the plain flour then turn up the heat to brown the meat. Add
          the ox kidney and all other ingredients, except the beer and stock.
          Combine well.

          Gradually add the stock and beer then simmer gently until the
          meat is tender. Mix in the fresh parsley then transfer to a pie dish.
          Set aside.

          Sieve the self-raising flour into a bowl then add the shredded
          suet, fresh parsley and seasoning. Gradually add fresh, cold water and
          combine gently – avoid over-working the pastry. It’s ready when the
          mixture comes away from the sides of the bowl.

          Roll the pastry into a ball and cover in cling film. Place in the fridge for 30 minutes.

          Heat the oven to 200°C/ Fan 170/ Gas 6. Roll out the pastry until
          it’s around 1cm thick then cover the pie mixture. Brush with a beaten
          egg then place in the oven for 45 minutes.

          Leave to rest for 5 minutes then serve piping hot with creamy mash and plenty of gravy!

          1. Again, thanks, I’ll copy it and pass it to BB as I’ve yet to taste a better Kate and Sidney than hers.

          2. Since we (a lot of us) enjoy cooking, I’d like to share my cook-book with you.

            It is in WORD (.docx) and prints on A5 paper.

            As it is over 5 Mbs in size, you can download it from here (it may take time – be patient).

            I give permission for any NoTTLer who wishes to, to download it but the link will be deleted in 3 days time for security reasons. No, it’s not on my computer(s).

            I trust you will enjoy the results.

            EDIT; Now link deleted.

          4. I think that I downloaded your cookbook before Christmas because I wanted to see 2 recipes, bread ones I think, but I have had so many “novelty cookbooks” arrive over those months that I have not tried them yet. I tried to follow that link above and received a “400:Bad Request” message on one browser and a “Cannot reach this page” on another one, so it might be incorrect.

            Here is one of the several “TV Themed” books that I have picked up, which will probably be read but rarely tried:

            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8d903ca4c8d31b43daa749df030a0ca8f0821b6fb454cbd049bc433892286bac.jpg

          6. I needed to check my Amazon list, which is a bad sign in itself if I cannot remember the books that I have ordered, and I found 45 cook books listed. Around 1/3 of them were traditional historical cooking ones from the Middle Ages, or the Roman times, which can be justified, but I do not have the Nanny Ogg one. It will be ordered shortly now that I know that it exists.

            However, most of the books I have are fantasy related such as the Hobbit / Shire cook book, or the Deep Space Nine and Star Trek ones. Dining on Babylon 5 is a rare and fairly expensive one (£50) with the recipe for Spoo in it. These actually have recipes that work (mainly) and look suitably exotic after preparation.

            Even video games make them for those who survive in the radioactive wastelands where ingredients can be restricted.

            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ddcccb97f8d11f8d93a403479df42fa8ee6e1f11e310e79ca6ef048b3e17b993.jpg

          7. I didn’t know those books existed. Interesting.

            If you are a Pratchett fan his and Neil Gaiman series ‘Good Omens’ has started on iplayer. There is also a documentary about Terry’s life and death.

          8. Yes, I put up a message last night that they were showing “Good Omens” on BBC2 from 09:00 PM (part 1 of 6) and that it was good timing as I was about to buy the DVD to see what it was like. I have it on series link and will wait until I have all 6 of them and then watch 1 a night for a week.

          10. Meredith, mine is a bit more prosaic; here is the Forward:

            Hi, I originally started to put this together as a little present for a Swedish girl-friend of my then wife as I’d been told that she hated to cook – (can’t cook, won’t cook). It subsequently got out of hand and has expanded more than a little but I’ve tried to keep the recipes (relatively) simple.

            So, it is possible that, with a bit of practice, even those who do hate to cook may even find it fun – even cooking for one, though most of the stuff in here will be for two or more, but by freezing what is left, they will start to stockpile meals for the future that can just be defrosted and/or reheated.

            A piece of advice; don’t slavishly follow recipes – cooking is an art-form, something you may do or make, to give with love and, once you’ve tried a recipe, don’t be afraid to change some ingredients; experiment with your own recipes (some will be disastrous but nothing ventured, nothing gained). I’ve included some exotic meats such as kangaroo and ostrich which, should you ever see them in the supermarket and wonder if you could cook them, give it a try and be adventurous!

            Be aware, this is a work in progress and it will only stop being added to when I stop having the ability to add to it, which will probably mean I’m on my death-bed or have passed on!

            On a practical note, I have used a variety of measures throughout the recipes – it is either what felt right when I was testing them or the measures came with the original recipe – but I have included some pretty comprehensive conversion tables which you will find at the end of the book courtesy of Delia Smith .

            Now, just to keep the page numbers correct, I have included an “Addendum” at the far end of the book and it is here that I shall put new recipes or ideas that I come across or dream up without having to re-print the whole book – A5 size has been chosen for the whole book, as it is the nearest to “paperback” size. Occasionally those recipes in the “Addendum” will be moved to their rightful sub-section, the book will be re-paginated, the contents updated and the ‘Revision’ noted.

          12. The pie he made was for 6 people. Batch cooking is a good idea because you can freeze the rest of the meat in portions suitable to your needs.

  28. Happy Birthday Uncle Bill!

    Hope the holiday was good, the house sale is proceeding nicely and all’s well.

    1. White, pale, male and probably uninteresting.

      Yes, the lump is probably where Prince Phillip bashed him with a spoon, while telling him he is a waste of space!

      1. Morning Mabah.

        Glad you have seen the same … Perhaps a thwack with a polo mallet did it .. or , well any way, best not to discuss any further.

        1. Good morning, Truthful Verity

          How can the poor chap use the brains God didn’t give him?

  30. Good morning everyone. Just did the Sainsbury shop. Took ages as they have moved most products elsewhere. A lot of time wasted trying to find the veg I wanted. Also, empty shelves where there should be products I buy every week. Re-ordering popular goods isn’t rocket science!

    2. Morning DB

      I have noticed the same product shortages with Sainsbury in Weymouth .. and also Tesco in Dorchester.. Probably post Christmas and the bad weather have halted supplies .

      1. I mentioned before – the local Sainsbury has I think been deliberately run down over the last two years. There is no other explanation for it.
        This has been good news for the Local M&S whose food sales must have shot through the roof.
        Things go on behind our backs with these big companies that we know nothing about.

        1. There is no POST button on the reply space, for Joseph B. Fox below !!
          So you can make a comment but not post it.

    3. Gearing up to make a killing after Brexit

      Stage 1 create an artificial shortage. People start stock pilling

      Stage 2 Put Up prices after Brexit and keep low stock levels on the shelfs

    4. Good morning Delboy
      It’s all to get customers looking in places they wouldn’t normally look.
      Apart from pi$$ing off the customers it does likewise to the staff who are at the butt end of a move by some head office wallah who has never done the shopping.

      1. They’ve probably got the stock but the staff can’t work out where it goes because the customers keep on asking them.
        If it ain’t broken it shouldn’t be mended.

    5. It’s called marketing.

      Whilst you are searching for an item they hope you’re tempted to buy other products. It usually works.

    7. It’s called marketing.

      Whilst you are searching for an item they hope you’re tempted to buy other products. It usually works.

      1. Acksherly, it makes me bloody furious and I either walk out or find the stuff I need and won’t bother with anything extra.

  31. Jobs blow as vehicle parts factory gears up for closure with loss of more than 200 staff

    Closure plans for a large engineering factory at Sudbury are on track to be completed this year – with the loss of more than 200 jobs.

    Delphi Technologies announced plans to shut its Delphi Diesel Systems plant back in 2017 and says it remains on schedule to close it this year. Baby bottle making plant Philips Avent at nearby Glemsford, employing 425 staff including 50 temps, is also due to close this year – dealing a massive blow to jobs in the area.

    In 2017, 500 staff were still employed at Delphi, but many have now taken the enhanced redundancy packages on offer and left. In its heyday, it employed around 2,000.

    The American-owned conglomerate decided to move the manufacturing operation – which makes diesel fuel injectors and filters for commercial vehicles – to Romania. Labour costs there are lower

    A spokesman for Delphi Technologies said: “In mid-2017, Delphi Technologies announced the planned closure of the Sudbury site, following extensive consultation with employees and their representatives. At that point there were approximately 500 employees, around 60% of whom have so far taken redundancy packages.

    “There are currently just over 200 employees still working at the site and the closure process remains on track to complete this year. Discussions are ongoing in relation to the sale of the site and we are unable to provide further detail at this stage.

  32. The revision is one of a handful to the agriculture bill, introduced to parliament on Thursday more than a year after the previous government was forced to abandon the legislation amid Brexit turmoil.

    Other changes include a stronger emphasis on the soil, at risk from overuse, erosion and nutrient loss; farmers are to receive help maintaining healthy soils, as well as with improvements to the tracing of livestock movements between farms. There will be powers to regulate fertiliser use and organic farming after Brexit.

    2. Good morning, Sir.

      I am a “new” ID but I can assure you that I do not have psittacosis!

    2. If you have a policy to ignore rape of young girls by muslims, then you must be a strong contender.

      1. Morning KP,
        Many find the three monkey mode of voting via
        the polling booth gives personal comfort.

      1. Oceanic consultancy,
        I wonder how many lab/lib/con politico’s are
        dining at that particular trough.

      2. “Oceanic Consulting is Britain’s largest Ethnic consulting and promotions organisation. With over a decade of experience, we specialise in promoting campaigns and events to Britain’s ethnically diverse market”

      2. BoB,
        By the same token Mr Gerard Batten has been warning of the dangers of islamic ideology
        rhetorically & in book form since 2005.
        Only to be castigated & called
        a racist by legions of fools not
        only politico’s.

  35. Agriculture Bill: Soil at heart of UK farm grant revolution

    A promise to do more to protect the soil will form part of a vision for the UK farm industry being unveiled by the government later.
    Ministers have accepted that farmers need incentives to farm in a way that leaves a healthy soil for future generations.
    Soil protection has become a core issue of the Agriculture Bill that is returning to Parliament.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51128709

    2. Crop rotation and fallow fields is the answer. Not enough money in it now. This is where the subsidy should be paid. Not to large land owners being paid to do nothing.

  36. Have just scrolled down a little and seen the messages to Legal Beagle.

    I’d like to add my “Happy Birthday” wishes, have a good one Bill, and we hope to see you soon back amongst we Nottlers.

    1. I see she’s continuing with her Diana re-creation, the post-‘separation’ overseas tour. It is all so creepy. Is she eventually going for the tunnel?

      Look very, very carefully at the ‘Canadian’ photographs, ask yourself questions. Would women in a shelter allow themselves to be photographed in the first place? My feeling is they are all photoshopped, probably in a room in SoHo house and that she has never left the UK. It is all a huge con being played out on us, the long-suffering British public (although the con is not, and had not been, instigated by the Royal Family). One has to ask oneself just who would gain from the downfall of our Monarchy, who and what is behind all this.

      1. I think she wants out from all association with the “Firm” now that she’ll be set for life financially. Harry can choose, her way or the highway.

        I thought that the people in the photographs were volunteers at the shelter but I must admit I only gave the article a very cursory glance.

      2. That thought has crossed my mind.
        Why on earth would women in a refuge advertise their new address?

    1. “Luhut Pandjaitan, Indonesian chief investment minister, said having Mr Blair on the project – among others – would boost investment. He said: “We expected their presence would provide a confidence boost for prospective investors in the new capital.””

      That is a nice way of saying “Tony Blair is here, so the globalists are on board. You are guaranteed a high return on your investment, even if we need to tax our citizens for decades to pay you back.”

      That evil little man already has more chains than Jacob Marley in his near future. He will not be able to drag his ghost around at all at this rate.

    2. Hi Duncan,

      “The new capital will be built on 445,000-acre land in East Kalimantan, Borneo.

      Up to 1.5million civil servants are set to relocate to the area in 2024, at a cost of £26billion.

      The huge project will start next year.”

      In the time that it will take them to build a new capital we will still be having public inquiries about an additional runway at Heathrow!!

  40. Another two hours of my life wasted attempting to create a new avatar. I give up! Goodbye once again all NoTTLers. I shall return when I am able to create a new avatar; I may be away some time!

    1. EB, to create a new account you only need a different email address. Everything else can stay the same. What happened to the Third Man account? Did that lose votes too?

      1. Search me, Guvnor(ess). I only managed two posts I think under that title. When I post on here I am Elsie, when I post BTL on Telegraph articles my real name appears. The Third Man I seem unable to bring up, even when I try my hardest. As to losing votes, who knows!

      1. So do I, Rastus, just struggling to create a new identity with a corresponding new “photo”/picture.

      1. Nothing, Peddy (and Annie). But I was trying to create a new username with its own new “picture” (which I mistakenly thought was the meaning of “Avatar”) and not just a different picture for Elsie.

        In fact, I think the picture of me which adorns my posts is quite flattering!

        :-))

    4. Ahem – not to put too fine a point on it, but you don’t actually need a new avatar to continue leaving comments here. I still have “Upvotes” but my account was disabled by fake spam reports 18 months ago, and I can still comment on sites such as this. 🙂

      Whatever happens to your account, it won’t affect you here.

      2. Perhaps not, but attempting to create a new identity on here, despite all the very kind attempts to help me from so many NoTTLers, most certainly is affecting me – for the worse, mentally. Perhaps Meghan and Harry can visit and console me!

    5. To set up a second account with disqus or a new account
      whilst keeping this one ( you can have two accounts
      as long as they have different email addresses )
      Unless you want to delete this account then you
      can use the email address and password that you have
      already but if you did that you’d lose all your comments,
      others just have set up spare accounts with a different
      email/ gmail address .

      Sign up to a different or new gmail/ email
      Go to sign up for disqus .

      Give name and user name you’d want to use
      Give email / gmail address you are using
      Give password
      Chose a picture
      And press the sign up button.

      Then in about 10 mins go to your emails to
      and look for an email from disqus asking you to
      verify your account. Just press their email sent
      to you and then after that you can post .

      If you keep both accounts ( new and old )
      with your different email addresses you can keep
      them both logged on if you do so already.

      1. Ethul, I really do appreciate your desire to help me, but…

        What I was trying to do yesterday was to create a gmail address so that I could have two separate “identities’, i.e. Elsie and A. N. Other, just as many others do. (Polly Parrot has several, but all with the same name, so that when one is blocked she simply uses a secondary one). However, I endured such a hellish two hours attempting this “simple” process that I almost lost the will to live and left the site just to recover myself from a deep, increasing depression. In the end, I went to my bed and slept for hours until I awoke in a slightly better frame of mind.

        I certainly do not want to experience that again today, so I will give it a miss for now. I hope to return to your post at a later date when I feel up to risking another go.

        Keep well, O Saxon Queen.

        1. Yes okay then. But might i just say you will need
          two separate email addresses and they need to
          be on separate gadgets ( ie laptop and tablet )
          or on separate browsers ( ie Chrome and Firefox )
          or the emails will get confused.

          Keep well yourself too, I shall be having a rest from online
          for a short while again. I do take breaks from it
          to catch up with other stuff. I’ve a monachist course
          to start next week and I have a book to review
          as I promised a friend and some poetry to write .

          Take care. Anne and Mr Viking are very good at these
          computer things but if you want me to write that stuff up
          again then just give my notification box a tinkle .

          1. Thank you so much, Ethul, you are a very kind lady. (Said sincerely and not because you carry a sharpened sword in your handbag!)

            :-))

  41. Heyup All!
    After a pleasant evening, I’m home and sat with the obligatory mug of tea before getting the fire laid and sorting a few things out.

    The concert began with a talk on RV-W’s 6th and how different it was from his earlier works together with the influences on him.
    One thing that struck me was how much parts of the symphony could easily be taken as the work of Shostakovich.

    After the talk, we had In The Fen Country and then after the interval, the full 6th symphony its self. As it came to it’s very quiet close, I think more than a few in the audience came close to forgetting to breathe, it was so atmospheric!

  42. Criminal records scandal: police chiefs blame Theresa May. 16 january 2020.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bdd5b3423bc09476d6983bd1b89b8e54b83ce3be64a72f82369fc45e67985174.jpg

    Theresa May has been blamed by chief constables for botched police reforms that led to tens of thousands of alerts on foreign criminals being kept from their home countries.

    She is accused of “starving” the crucial police national computer (PNC) of money against advice from forces when she was home secretary, and instead pushing ahead with an ambitious and costly super-database to replace it that is now years behind schedule and millions of pounds over budget.
    Her decision is said to have led to serious problems developing with the “creaking” PNC – including its failure to send details of 75,000 foreign nationals convicted in the UK to their home countries, in a scandal revealed by the Guardian this week.

    Morning everyone. It’s quite possible, probable even, that May was an even more incompetent Home Secretary than she was Prime Minister. It is under her that police numbers were reduced to levels where the implementation of Law and Order became impossible and the remainder were transformed into a Rainbow/Stasi organisation more worthy of some Teletubbies Banana Republic than policing the streets of the UK. The real truth of her tenure will probably not emerge for another ten years by which time one suspects those of us on this blog will be long past caring!

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/15/criminal-records-scandal-police-chiefs-blame-theresa-may

    1. Morning Araminta.

      Unfortunately, and from top to bottom, well-paid incompetents are running the show.

      There was a comment yesterday on a local Facebook site from someone with insider knowledge of our local council, more or less saying that many within it aren’t up to the job.

      1. There was a comment yesterday on a local Facebook site from someone with insider knowledge of our local council, more or less saying that many within it aren’t up to the job.

        Morning Eddy. This is a phenomenon that is common to pretty well every aspect of life in the UK. We have raised a generation of useless indolents to whom responsibility is a burden, that regardless of its cash rewards, they are still unable to carry.

        1. ‘Morning, Minty, I was always taught that, along with responsibility came accountability; and that is the ideal that many (most) in authority, are very afraid of and always try (and too often succeed) in shifting the blame (and therefore the accountability) onto someone else.

          Accountability should be written into the job specification so that those in authority have no excuses when they (as they so often seem to do) cock-up big time.

        2. Basically, I suspect that the majority are no different to any other generation.

          I’m whizzed back to when I was an apprentice and remember a chargehand where I worked. It was said that he’d been promoted off ‘the tools’ because he was hopeless on them.

          One thing that has changed over recent years is the emphasis on a university education, with many organisations hiring people with very little practical work-experience.

          1. My son’s first work experience was at McDonalds as a schoolboy, sixth form student and university undergraduate. I know that one or two friends and family members sneered at his choice but the people who interviewed him for his sandwich year placement at firms looking for students studying technical subjects and after graduation for full time employment were always interested in what he had learned in the McDonalds workplace.
            The people interviewing him weren’t interested in his ability to flip burgers, cook fries etc. but why was he added to the training team when quite young and how did he cope; how did he view team working and how he dealt with awkward customers – he had a few choice encounters – i.e. the attributes that make you employable in a range of jobs. Now, he is a Senior Business and Systems Analyst with a large international investment organisation and making a good life for himself and his family.

          2. Good on him.

            I nip into Wetherspoon’s three nights a week for my last pint and can’t fault the youngsters who work there.

            As for “how he dealt with awkward customers”, my first pint is in a pub run by a lady in her early thirties. Not long ago, a big black lad was becoming troublesome and hurling abuse when she asked him to pipe down.

            Talk about David and Goliath, by the time she’d given him a 20 minute inoffensive talking to, he was eating out of her hand.

          3. team player. Any branch of McDonalds is a mixture of retail, admin and production, so I guess it is a good training camp. And not all McDonalds are equal. Of course, Burger King has a better product.

    2. As evidence mounts perhaps one’s opinion has to change: was May a serial incompetent or something more dangerous? Her sidelining of Davis and his team; her WA and the manner in which she ‘presented’ it to her Cabinet; these acts do not smack of incompetence but of ruthlessness in pursuit of what she wanted i.e. the UK becoming totally subservient to Brussels for all time.

      1. Morning Mekon. Though malice should not be discounted her record says stupidity is the most likely explanation though this of course does not deny the possibility that she was “Guided”.

        1. I do not doubt that she was the establishment’s appointee as PM to do their bidding re the EU along with Robbins et al. Perhaps her stupidity manifested itself in her belief that she could get away with it.

          2. ‘morning Hugh, why do politicians insist on honouring people that have failed in their duties? It is time the magic roundabout at the higher levels was stopped.

      2. I think stupidity and lack of imagination played the major part.
        But then I always like to think the best of people.

        1. Good morning, Annie. And – if you are reading this, Bill Thomas – a very Happy Birthday to you (and best wishes to the Most Recent).

        2. Morning Anne,
          I look upon as a reverse mousetrap as in everybody possessing a brain cell
          knew from the outset who done / was about to do the dirty treacherous deeds.

      3. Morning M,
        It was so obvious from the outset in my book, she & the wretch cameron had a fall back plan from the outset in the unlikely event of losing the referendum,and they did.
        You do not get treacherous politico’s of their nature without a fall back plan.
        The leadership farce the assassination of johnson by gove, leadsome quitting, all laying the path for mayday.
        The nine month delay was the clincher, the rest is history but for the final outcome, shortly.
        Sad to say it seems that many
        are at this final stage are depending on, wait for it, HOPE.

  44. Happy Birthday, Bill. We hope you and the MR are enjoying some southern sun today. You are missed by one and all – may there be a happy return.

    1. Afternoon JBF,
      Little changes, crime pays handsomely ,Nazi rocket scientist go to America,
      set a thief to catch a thief.

        1. JBF,
          Do you really believe he is in an empty pocket state ? because
          I most certainly don’t.

  46. Honest public discourse without the truth inversions/evasions of wokeness/PC/identity politics?

    Well, Sherelle Jacobs article on Manchester grooming attracted loads of comments (over 500) and the DT’s moderators were deleting a high proportion. Now they have simply removed all comments.

  47. Crowd funding for big ben bong ? take it out of the our input into the India space program.
    Get a fully 100% English patriotic co to do the temporary
    flooring for love of country AKA a labour of love.

  48. The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.”
    Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.”
    The English have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out.

    Terrorists have been re-categorised from “Tiresome” to a “Bloody Nuisance.”
    The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was during the great fire of 1666.

    The Scots raised their threat level from “Pissed Off” to “Let’s get the Bastards” They don’t have any other levels.
    This is the reason they have been used on the frontline in the British army for the last 300 years..

    The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from “Run” to “Hide”.
    The only two higher levels in France are “Collaborate” and “Surrender.”

    The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France ‘s white flag factory, effectively paralysing the country’s military capability.

    It’s not only the French who are on a heightened level of alert. Italy has increased the alert level from “Shout loudly and excitedly” to “Elaborate Military Posturing.”
    Two more levels remain: “Ineffective Combat Operations” and “Change Sides.”

    The Germans also increased their alert state from “Disdainful Arrogance” to “Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs.”
    They also have two higher levels: “Invade a Neighbour” and “Lose”.

    Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual, and the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels .

    The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy.These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish
    navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

    Americans meanwhile are carrying out pre-emptive strikes on all of their allies, just in case.

    New Zealand has also raised its security levels – from “baaa” to “BAAAA!”.

    Due to continuing defence cutbacks (the air force being a squadron of spotty teenagers flying paper aeroplanes and the navy some toy boats in
    the Prime Minister’s bath), New Zealand only has one more level of escalation, which is “Shit, I hope Australia will come and rescue us”.

    Australia , meanwhile, has raised its security level from “No worries” to “She’ll be alright, mate”. Three more escalation levels remain, “Crikey!’, “I
    think we’ll need to cancel the barbie this weekend” and “The barbie is cancelled”.

    So far no situation has ever warranted use of the final escalation level.

  49. Any NoTTlers heard of the ounce ?

    Neither had I.

    …..apparently it’s a snow leopard. (crossword clue)!

    5. Afternoon PT ,
      Only in a parliamentary context as in
      tons on treachery not an “ounce” of
      patriotism / honesty.

      1. What thou seest when thou dost wake,
        Do it for thy true love take.
        Love and languish for his sake.
        Be it ounce or cat or bear,
        Pard or boar with bristled hair,
        In thy eye that shall appear,
        When thou wakest, it is thy dear.
        Wake when some vile thing is near.

        (Oberon’s spell on Titania to make her fall in love with the first thing she sees – of course she sees the weaver, Bottom, sporting, the latest line in equine heads as arranged by Puck.)

  50. QT tonight, usual time…

    Summary
    The Buzzard presents the topical debate from Liverpool. The panellists are Culture Minister Helen Whately, Shadow Attorney General for England and Wales Shami Chakrabarti, Westminster Shadow Spokesperson for International Affairs Alyn Smith, Madeline Grant of The Daily Telegraph and actor and musician Laurence Fox.

    3. ‘morning Peddy, let’s hope someone asks the delightful Shami Chuckabutti how she missed any evidence of anti-semitism in the Labour Party?
      A good follow up would be “where you given a peerage by Corbyn as reward for your report ignoring multiple acts of anti-semitism ?”

      1. ‘Afternoon, Hoppy.
        That would have to be an under-the-radar sub-question, as the Buzzard would never allow it.

    1. I hope that his house sale went through smoothly. It can be good to have a break from being online, and I try to do it for a few weeks every year. It is refreshing to feel the wind whistling around you and the rain on your face, instead of looking at a computer for too long.

      Not now obviously with the weather outside, there are limits. We are forecast to have gusts of 52 mph by midday on the South coast of Cornwall, so I am not going anywhere today.

      1. As far as I am aware the buyers are now fully committed under the French system, so fingers crossed all will be well.

      2. If you look at houses for sale in France, a clue to the ownership is whether or not there is an electric kettle in the kitchen.

        1. ‘Morning, Tim, not just endemic in France, my German friends looked at our kettle and exclaimed “Mein Gott, eine bombe!”

          I’m sure Peddy will correct any misheard German.

          1. Your German is basically correct, but “Bombe” has a big ‘B’, as it is a noun.

            Kettles are seldom in Germany because most households have some sort of coffee machine & few drink tea.

    1. Good afternoon all….2 year old grandson here and sleeping like a baby, Mom off for a little shopping and I have my laptop back – free from Nursery Rhymes and Paw Patrol…..all is well with the world until the tornado awakens….xxx

  53. BBC TV News at One

    Rebecca Morelle, global science correspondent for BBC News, followed a piece by Sir David Attenborough who said that climate change had already reached crisis point – and that is after humankind has spent over twentyfive years just talking repeatedly about doing something about it sometime in the next thirty years.

    However Rebecca went on about the importance of CO2 emission targets to control global warming whereas Sir David was more worried about the dependence of animal life on O2 on our planet which is not an inexhaustible resource that we can just plunder.

    Should we more worried about Sir David’s revelation that our existence is due to our symbiotic relationship with plant life on this planet and that consequently we should think more about O2 being an exhaustible resource rather than emission of too much CO2 which plants are able photosynthesise to make up our depleted oxygen?

    1. AoE,
      I do honestly believe that the answer to many of our health maladies if not all,
      lies in the soil, that is to say, plant life.
      I do know that many of our problems if not all comes from political input.

    3. To be fair Attenborough has had a great privileged life creating more CO2 than most, he isn’t going to be around to live through the dystopia he wants to inflict on us all.

      1. He is a presenter and not a climate scientist. I would suggest that his opinions carry no more weight than mine, except that he is a national treasure and on the telly, and I am not.

    4. I have thought long and hard about this issue and debated at length and I honestly can’t see what we can do to slow the momentum. Climate change is an ongoing cyclical phenomenon. We can’t turn back time and reclaim a few years lost to the disgusting things we have done to our planet. That said…..it worries me not – what will be will be, we may not have helped matters but we sure can’t change things imo.

      1. The end result of all of this “man-made” climate change delusion is to drag down the developed Western societies and make a few people very rich in the process. When you have a technologically advanced, educated group of citizens in the West, it makes them much harder to control.

        If you want an easy life at the top of the tree, then you want poorly-aware slaves below you who are just grateful for the crumbs that you give them. You do not want a group of people who ask “What makes you think that you be should be at the top of that tree? In fact, why do we need that tree at all?”

      2. We could help in one respect
        as in “doing disgusting things department” in the future, & that is by quit supporting / voting for the proven”disgusting things creator politicians” in the, lab/lib/con pro eu coalition party.

    5. According to a scientist on Youtube we are at crisis LOW level of CO2 and that any further reduction of 30ppm is endangering life on the planet in that vegetation relying on it will die off taking the rest of life with it. Of course he has no financial interest in this climate change fiasco.
      When the dinosaurs were about the CO2 level was 7000ppm and everything survived (except the dinosaurs) and now the level is down to 400ppm.. Finally what part did humans and industrialisation play in the warming of the earth which ended the last ice age?

      1. CO2 was around 7000ppm at around 520 million years ago, i.e. during the Cambrian explosion, when life really got going.
        A scientist from UEA told me that the Earth was far too warm then, and “decided” that it needed to cool down, by sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere.
        The operative word that he used was “decided.”
        Another bod from UEA claimed that the reason the Earth hadn’t turned into another version of Venus back then was because the sun, ( bear in mind we’re talking about 500 million years ago, not 3-4 billion), was only 70% as hot as it is now. I don’t think so.

      2. We now know that as far as anthropogenic climate change is concerned, farmers are the main cause of this extincion level of global warming principally as a result of their livestock emissions.

        It follows then that the dinosaurs must have been the cause of their their own demise by virtue of their unmanaged digestive by-products.

      1. As far as Californians are concerned they should be more worried about the overdue major earthquake.

    7. Any ideas on how they measure the temperature of the ‘climate’. In a complex system such as Earth, it can not be an easy thing to do and with just one degree being what they are arguing about, there seems plenty of scope for error. In my verry humble opinion, of course.

      2. They take the hottest days in the hottest places and then tell us we’ve just had the “hottest year ever”.

        1. Yep, sounds about right. The school boy error they make is to plot the rise against a 100 years or so, the time line should be in thousands or tens of thousands of years. Someone posted a relevant graph on here earlier.

        2. The “hottest temperatures ever” are usually just hundredths of a degree difference via electronic thermometers, versus mercury thermometers. There are some claims that there’s not always a proper calibration between the two types of thermometer.

      3. Afternoon Kaypea – The one degree rise is since the pre industrial age which goes back to the 19th century or earlier.
        G Monbiot was on the BBC Radio 4 prior to the 1 o’clock news. He was lauding Greta and spouting his usual thoughts on Climate Change.

      4. Yes Kaypea, in scientific evidence any measurement should be acconpanied by the limits of accuracy of the measurement.

        I know that for some CO2 measurements they are made at the top of a remote mountain so that urban emissions don’t feature. However some of these temperature records are reported from massively concreted lower areas like airports.

        In the end it the PTB use whatever figures that suits their business.

        1. They used the tarmac at Heathrow and the botanical gardens in Cambridge to get the highest temperatures last year. Historically those places would have been countryside, so cooler.

      5. I agree. The effect of clouds, for example, i.e. temperature changes when clouds are present or absent. Temperature differences at different altitudes, different altitudes, etc, etc. I have no idea how they could come up with an “average global temperature” when there’s such variations.
        Which might explain why their computer models are so rubbish at predicting climate.

  54. I have just read Sherelle Jacobs’s excellent article in today’s DT. This was particularly well expressed and concise. I particularly enjoyed her observation:

    “Who needs to provide evidence when one is clearly right? Who needs to have a debate when the answer is decided? Instead of the End of History, we’ve reached the End of Reason.”

    Here is the full article:

    It is time to call out the intolerant woke’s racist double standards
    SHERELLE JACOBS

    Our conversations about racism have become fundamentally dishonest. From Megxit to Manchester grooming gangs, politically correct discourse has become prejudiced and toxic
    We need to talk about racism. With news items like Megxit and Manchester’s failure to crack down on grooming gangs not so much sparking debate as detonating ever-deeper dividing lines, that much is clear. It is true that a virulent strain of prejudice is itching undetected beneath the British social fabric. But not in the way that the virtue-signallers who have so energetically lectured the public this week on their “subconscious” racism would have us believe.

    A normalised bigotry is indeed hiding in plain sight. It conceals genuine injustices. Diagnosing it is tricky because it involves confronting human shortcomings. Like any self-respecting epidemic, it also has a chillingly sterile name: identity politics.

    Dictating that the most important thing about you is your race or gender, its most obvious manifestation is an infuriating “us versus them” narrative: all white people are racists and all ethnic minorities are victims.

    “It is not the job of black people and ethnic minorities to educate white people on racism that is perpetrated by white people,” activist Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu quipped on This Morning, in a Meghan Markle debate that has gone viral. She then went on to “educate” her audience at length, ironically railing against the “whitewashing” of unconscious racism and critiquing those who see the world “through the lens of white privilege” (as opposed to eyes, presumably owing to their bogeyman status).

    She also refused to give any concrete examples of racism against Meghan. In an attempt to cast a pseudo-light on white ignorance and bigotry, she breathtakingly exposed her own ignorance and bigotry about a country that is largely not racist.

    Which hits on the outrageous truth about identity politics: the retrograde movement does not help us address racism, because it renounces both dialogue and empiricism. Who needs to provide evidence when one is clearly right? Who needs to have a debate when the answer is decided? Instead of the End of History, we’ve reached the End of Reason.

    Far from being committed to understanding others, identity politics is obsessed with the self. Reflecting the cosmopolitan consumer’s spiritually desolate search for intellectually approved personal branding, it is little more than self-aggrandisement posing as self-awareness. But, perhaps most disturbing of all, it deems casual prejudice against “white society” as not only acceptable but positively necessary to fighting injustice.

    Hence Sheffield University’s unblinking decision this week to employ “race equality champions” who will tackle “microaggressions” on campus – like asking people where they are really from and striking up conversations with black students about holidaying in Africa.

    The tragedy is that the dominance of the woke politics peddled by the likes of Dr Mos-Shogbamimu and Sheffield University prevents us from having sensible conversations about real, everyday racism. Take the myth that black people are more predisposed to crime. Debunking this claim – as unscientific as it is unsavoury – would require anti-racists to acknowledge that black people are disproportionately involved in some crimes, and this fact cannot be batted off with “structural” discourses about victimhood. It would require them to explore how everything from nihilistic gangland culture to one-parent families and bad school discipline have played a part.

    Sadly, militant reductionists have no time for nuance.

    The scourge of identity politics also means that examples of racism against white people are overlooked. Take the child abuse scandal in Manchester. This week, a detective claimed that a grooming gang, predominantly men from Asian backgrounds, was free to roam the city and abuse young girls because police officers were told to “find other ethnicities” to investigate. This is disturbingly reminiscent of cases from Rotherham to Telford, where the abuse of white girls by ethnic minority males was ignored, as shrugging sexism collided with crushing political correctness.

    How did it come to this? Things looked promising when the baby-boomer generation, who grew up more accustomed to non-white faces than their parents, came of age. But then something interesting happened. Communism collapsed and the Left’s struggle shifted, for the sake of its own survival, from the collective to the individual. “What has to be done?” morphed into “Who am I?” The result is Manichaean navel-gazing.

    One particularly toxic subplot is the “medicalisation” of victimhood. It was, after all, a professor of counselling psychology at Columbia University, Derald Wing Sue, who invented the term “microaggression”. That he was partly inspired by RD Laing will surprise few familiar with the baleful maverick who famously asked whether mental illness is “a sick response to a healthy situation, or a healthy response to a sick situation”.

    And so here we are, stuck on a brain-tranquilising loop. It is like the Brexit debacle at its most febrile, but with even less sign of a solution.

    3. One wonders why such bigoted ignoramuses as Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu are even given a platform by the BBC, on the BBC.

      Oh, yes, it’s the BBC innit?

        1. Thanks, George but it doesn’t make it any better – the MSM are all infected with the same disease; I just wonder what they’re going to vent their spleen on after Brexit’s done, the Sussexs are toast and the Labour Party have elected another unelectable leader.

          C’est la vie, c’est la guerre, say no more!

    4. Excellent, as usual, but I had to look up a few things, such as “Manichaean” and “Derald Wing Sue”.

      However, looking up “Dr Mos-Shogbamimu” clearly showed one of the main reasons why education (or what passes for it these days) in the UK is beyond help: https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/10733046/piers-morgan-shola-mos-shogbamimu-meghan-markle/

      Those in charge of employing (and promoting) this type of cretin should be bullwhipped and sent to Rockall! No wonder the ingenuous minds of the younger generation are being systematically destroyed.

      2. Hi Grizzly, Piers has been hitting back at characters like Mos-Shagbommi quite forcibly recently. He has had a few lively exchanges with eco-loons, race-baiters, transgender disciples and those who insist on being ‘woke’.
        I hope it is the sign that things are starting to change and more and more people in the public eye challenge these lunatics.

        1. Hi, Hoppy.

          It is refreshing that he is not being held back by idiotic ideology, as they are over at the BBC. I’m quite warming to the dude these days.

      3. Ah yes, the good Dr – “An academic enthusiast, she has an Executive MBA (Cambridge); PhD (Birkbeck); LLM (London School of Economics & Political Science); MA (Westminster) and LLB Hons
        (Buckingham University)        .” She doesn’t seem to have time for a proper job except whinging about how awful it is to live in the UK – she should feel free to leave any time!!

    5. Strange that in an article criticising the dishonesty of pc discourse, Sherrelle J herself describes the “grooming” (euphemism) gangs as predominantly men of Asian backgrounds (euphemism). One certainly can’t accuse her of “calling a spade a spade”.

    1. It’s a bit like the anti-semitism problem. Everyone knows it is there, but nobody wants to admit it.

      1. T,
        As shown via the polling booth
        quite clearly time & again.

        The raped & abused child lived other side of town,
        not near us, until……………….

  57. Neath Port Talbot primary teachers ‘may need bodycams

    All this not disciplining children does not seem to be working out well. If they are behaving like that in a Primary School what will they be like when they leave school?

    Primary school teachers may need to start wearing bodycams to tackle an increase in violence from children, a councillor has warned.
    Steve Hunt, who is also chairman of governors for Blaendulais Primary School and a governor at YGG Blaendulais, said there were problems across Neath Port Talbot.
    He said there were increasing numbers of pupils with behavioural issues.
    In 2017/18, 528 pupils were excluded, up from 440 the previous year.
    Mr Hunt raised the concerns at a recent cabinet scrutiny committee of Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.
    “There’s increasing aggression towards teachers and teaching assistants in our primary schools,” he said. “This is quite alarming to say the least. I’m well aware of a number of cases personally.
    “We are getting to the point where in order to feel safe teachers may need to wear body cameras – like traffic wardens and the police – so they have got the evidence to support what they’re saying to officials and officers of the local authority.”
    He added: “There are children in schools that shouldn’t be in these schools – the underlying problem is the time it is taking for children’s assessments to be done.”

    1. It’s because, like most of Labour-controlled South Wales, the place is a shithole, now populated mainly by the feckless benefit-claimant.

        1. ‘Morning, Harry, I didn’t apply, I know they don’t like old white men – “‘cos we’s wacist, innit?”

  58. There seems to be a random Disqus problem. I try to make a reply to a comment, but there is no submit button to post it.
    But if I can’t reply on the board, if I find the comment on the poster’s profile, I can reply to it there.

    It is not related to the poster I am replying to – if he makes say six comments, only one of them will have this problem.
    Anyone else had this one ?

    2. Refreshing the page also will return your submit box…bit of a pain but hopefully it is a temp issue.

      1. Just had to do it here ! Yes, it works. But if you are replying to something half way down the page, refreshing brings you back to the top, and you have to try and find where you were…..!!

        2. In those circs., before refreshing I take a note of the nearest cartoon/photo/music piece as a ‘milestone’. Makes regaining my place much easier & faster.

    3. Not had that problem but Tuesday was a nightmare as I fought a battle on two fronts: first up was Disqus not allowing me to change passwords and get to my new ID and then messing access up my old ID. Second up was Opera not saving new IDs and passwords and the same with Chrome.
      I switched to Chrome because Opera started mimicking Firefox by jumping all over the page, especially when upvoting: I think that between them Chrome and its master, Google, have screwed up the password/ID saving feature on both Opera and Chrome. Late on Tuesday I returned to the fray and lo and behold Disqus behaved itself. Opera and Chrome are still playing silly-buggers with the password/ID saving.

      1. I only save my passwords in a password manager on my laptop. I do seem to have been logged out of my old id. Haven’t yet tried to get back in.

        1. Both Opera and Chrome have a password manager/auto fill facility and I’m sure that both were working prior to Tuesday – Chrome had pulled in a couple of my passwords after I loaded it. When I’ve got the inclination to play around again I’ll see if I can unearth the problem.

        2. I write my passwords down on a piece of paper in a notebook. To get to my computer, with the book on the shelf next to it, they will need to go through me first. If they manage that then I will have bigger problems on my mind than them accessing my Amazon account. 🙂

    5. I think the freedom to say what you want will end as the ” deep state” now understands that peope can actually find out what is going on for themselves. that will never do, so we will find the whole thing will slowly be controlled. it has started on youtube and facebook for sure.

      1. Glitches, bots and gobblers – what next. Disqus is like a box of chocolates…..
        you never know what you’re gonna get…..

    1. Just operating a full service company. Maybe the whisky manufacturers should go into the rehab business.

    1. Use straws and share a glass of wine between three people?

      This Professor Nutt seems well-named.

    1. “An “episode of alarm” was declared at the weekend”
      And I declare an extensive “bout of nausea” about all this scaremongering.

          1. As she was a Stern Gang terrorist, you will forgive me if I hold a different opinion.

          2. Having just read about this group it just goes to show that there are bloody stupid people who are born Jewish just as there are bloody stupid people who are born of all faiths. Trying to ally themselves with Nazi Germany against Britain because we were the greater threat… That is a Darwin Award winner right there.

            Still, those who survive live and learn. The idea of Jews fighting Christians at this point in time is not the wisest of moves with a far greater threat out there.

          3. Firstly she was an underground radio announcer & not a fighter ( read up on it ) and secondly the UK was in breach of its obligations under the terms of the Mandate given to it at the 1920 San Remo conference ( later confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922 ) to specifically create a Jewish state in the territory mistakenly labeled ‘Palestine’ which at the time of the San Remo conference consisted of both modern day Israel, Gaza , Judea & Samaria ( AKA the West Bank ) and modern Jordan, which was illegally detached from the Mandate & turned into an Arab state to reward the Saudi Bedouin thieves, rapists robbers & murderers whose sole contribution to the British war effort in WW1 was to blow up & plunder a few civilian trains on the Hejaz railway behind Turkish lines.

  63. Moh and I expressed our disgust and horror when we saw this bit of show biz gossip.

    Ant McPartlin ‘to give Lisa Armstrong £31 MILLION’ in divorce settlement: I’m A Celeb host to ‘hand over more than HALF his £50m fortune’ after split… but she claims figure is ‘nonsense’

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7892321/Ant-McPartlin-agrees-ex-wife-Lisa-Armstrong-31-MILLION-divorce-settlement.html

    Either the cretinous grinning individual has more brains than most of us , or showbiz rewards those with inane presentations and the whitest of teeth the best that TV can afford ..

    What on earth do these people do with all their money .. besides divorce of course?

    2. I fail completely to understand the popularity of Ant and Dec. They are not good looking, they are not witty, they are not funny, they have no charm or charisma, they are not talented, they can’t sing, they can’t dance, they are not sexy. They seem to me to be dull and banal.

      It is completely beyond my comprehension that they should receive such adulation. Please would a fellow Nottler explain what it is that they have ‘got’?

      4. Their presence and continued success is just another example of the slow—but incessant—deterioration of standards in all aspects of public life.

        Meritocracy, so despised by the Left, has been replaced by Moronocracy.

      7. “They seem to me to be dull and banal.”

        This is unfortunately their appeal to a sizeable number of people. There are many who like the reassurance of the mundane, the non-threatening, the unchallenging. The repetition of a “safe” TV show where you can almost cease higher brain functions for a while. It is a few levels above what we might call being asleep, but still conscious.

        We all have this to some extent. If I were offered the choice between a 7-day “excitement break with snowboarding, discos and mountain climbing with no ropes,” or a trekking holiday through the Lake District with just a tent or cabin and the hills and valleys around me, I would take the quiet option. 🙂

        Docility sells, as the size of Ant & Dec’s bank accounts testify. “Keep them sedated for an hour every week” could be on their billboards. It did bring back to mind a brief advertising campaign from 20 years ago that always ended with the words “Turn off the TV.”

        There was some controversy at the time in America, as the company had paid for the airtime but they were telling people to stop watching television. The stations refused to air them when they saw the content. Here are two that I found but only the 2nd one has the final words on it:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtAX0HfsBtk

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPtYgm5y_GM

    2. Yebbut! You’ve not told us how hot Greenland was just after the Big Bang, 37 billion years ago!

      I bet them polar bears were in their shorts then, eh?

      2. The polar bears were having the time of their lives eating all the penguins until the penguins said, “Enough,” packed their bags and buggered off to Antarctica. All the penguins have to worry about now are the cunning Orcas and the odd few thousand sea-lions thereabouts. Out of the pan and…

          1. I checked that sea lions preyed on penguins – I knew Orcas did- and the result listed leopard seals, fur seals and some others. Putting them all in would have killed the nonsense I was writing.😎

        1. Yebbut. I’m talking about the first Big Bang. You know, the one that didn’t get the coverage in The Guardian. :•) [sheepish smiley!]

    6. Hate to put a dampener on things, but how does that relate to global mean temperatures, given that Central Greenland occupies about 0.2% of the Earth’s surface area?

  65. REBECCA LONG-BAILEY, the pro-Corbyn candidate, is on course to become the next Labour leader, according to a poll published last night.

    If Labour members are voting for any of the five candidates on offer they are voting for oblivion.

        1. Baileys is a blend of Irish whiskey and cream – but if this Bailey is the cream of the Labour Party they are truly lost.

      1. Yes, we do, but I’m not sure there are any.

        If it’s any consolation, it’s just as bad in the U.S., and possibly worse.

        https://www.projectveritasaction.com/2020/01/15/expose2020-part-2-bernie-2020-field-organizer-kyle-jurek-there-are-things-that-are-more-important-than-the-rule-of-law-in-the-united-states-declares-that-his-views-are-shared/

        https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/01/14/sanders_campaign_organizer_free_education_gulags_needed_to_re-educate_you_not_to_be_a_fcking_nazi.html
        Sanders Campaign Organizer: Free Education, Gulags Needed To “Re-Educate” You To Not Be A “F*cking Nazi”

      1. “Is @RLong_Bailey really that stupid?”

        Yup. She’s a socialist. It goes with the territory.

  66. Oh well, daughter has returned and the little tornado will be awake soon. Nice to have a little oasis – a calm within the storm. Catch you later…..

    2. Harry plugs Meagain into Disney boss.

      Says: “If you think this is good, imagine what Uncle Andrew can arrange”

      2. He wa’s waisting hi’s time 11 year’s ago (the age of thi’s video) so he stopped doing the video’s, married Vicky Coren, and gave her a little Barbara.

        1. And mine and, knowing Bill, anyone who sent him one.
          If nothing else he’s courteous.

          And prompt with his bills. };-O

          1. Hertslass keeps a list of people who are available for contact. Or i could send him yours and ask for contact.

          2. OK, if I wanted to send Bill Thomas a brief and non-contentious but very private email, how do I do it without compromising my own details?

          3. I think that you reply to an earlier post by by Hertslass like a week ago and give her your details. Then delete the post after she has responded. Better to do it when she is commenting and you tell her your intention.

          4. That sounds straightforward but since a few weeks ago, I never get email notifications of a reply or upvotes. Of course, one can always go into “notifications” but I am not certain that I would notice something referring to a very old post. Would Hertslass see a “reply” to a two week old post?

          7. Yes you do see replies to old posts that will pop up in your notifications. If someone replies to a 5 day old comment you will be aware of it and you can reply back to them.

            Last week I had an upvote for a 2-year old comment on another site and the notification came up to let me know. That does not happen very often.

            (Edit – Forget this comment if you are talking about emails. I use a dummy email account for them on Disqus and only open the account every few months to delete them all. I just use the notification circle on Disqus to check messages.)

          8. There is a way for ANYONE to swap details in private. When the channel closures were announced, I gave an email address which is perfectly safe…..for folks to swap details who wanted to keep in touch. The email address is not private…it was created just for use by Disqus users and I am pleased to say, I managed to keep quite a few people together.

            If you want it and have permission from a second person to swap details…I can print it here. No problem.

          9. Thanks, Jenny, I can use a disposable email address but I am not quite sure how the exchange is initiated. If you can print the email address you have set up, do I send a message to that from my disposable email address and then you pass it on to Bill Thomas and, if he agrees, we can exchange directly?

          10. It needs the permission of the two people who want to email each other. A Disqus mod actually did this for others long before the channel closure which gave me the idea. So….you could send me your email address and Hertslass could also for example…..then I would swap them for you and no details would be on view except my temp address. Does that make sense? I would never put actual details on view – not even for a second.

          12. Precisely…….xxx Then both you and another party can be in touch via the address. I have posted this address on several sites and as I say, all okay and it kept many folks together which I thought was nice. It is no trouble to me.

          13. Sounds simple (for a simple man!). What is the temporary email address that I should send my message?

          14. Always let me know if you send me something as i don’t check it all the time and leave it closed.

          17. You don’t.
            Once it’s out there, it is free to forward.

            However, BT is very unlikely to compromise anyone who contacts him.

          19. That does not stop anyone who receives it from forwarding it.
            Yes, it might limit the “trail” but once in the system it’s open.

          21. Not at all.

            Once anything is put onto the WWW it can be forwarded, stored, tracked, traced and copied to anyone and everyone who is interested. It then becomes open to manipulation.

            The MSM and political parties employ people whose full-time role is to track back anything an opponent may have written and published on the ‘net. Ideally as a single sentence that can be taken completely out of context and used against them.

            One sees it all the time.

          22. I would love to be that interesting…..;-) Thanks Sos…..I have been lucky thus far with this….think it helped qute a few.

          24. I would be very surprised if he did any social media other than Disqus, but one never knows, may use it to contact his granddaughter.

          27. Some people were happy to be contacted by email, others just wanted to be able to make contact if necessary – but HL has the whole list.

          30. Hertslass has my contact details. I’d give you them on here but the pond life would also get them.

          31. Yes – I’m happy for us to be put in contact via HL – but it’s not a good idea to disclose email addresses here.

          32. Yes – I’m happy for us to be put in contact via HL – but it’s not a good idea to disclose email addresses here.

        1. He’s a relatively old man.
          Ding his dong, see what happens, and then answer your own question.

  72. And Brexiteers are being urged not to behave in a triumphalist manner over Brexit.

    But the Remainers are remaining mean-spirited, joyless and spiteful to the end:

    * No bongs on 31st January (Not even bongs with luminous noses)
    * No fireworks launched from the Thames to celebrate Britain throwing off the EU’s shackles.

    1. ” No bongs on 31st January ”
      That is unacceptable discrimination against all the British Citizens in London from Bongo-Bongo land.

  74. May one ask, this celebration party on the 31st Jan is it
    to celebrate total severance in an orderly polite manner
    as required by the peoples, or what exactly ?

    1. The future arrangements have not yet been agreed, but we leave on the 31st and enter a transition period which gives time to change the procedures for trade etc.

      1. Evening KP,
        May one ask, on who’s word do we have it that
        arrangements have not been made ?
        As with the law in many respects time spent in remand acts as time served so a potential felon can walk.
        We as a nation have done near four years should we not be looking for compensation
        at least, & not walking but running, no ties on the 1st Feb ?

        1. I can not claim any expertise here. But there was May’s WA which did not pass on 3 occasions, then Boris renegotiated and produced a slightly amended agreement. But with the house as it was, nothing was passed into law. News concerning the WA has been non existent since the election and can only hope that the team has met with the EU with renewed confidence of gaining descent terms. As a WTO default now exists, I believe that we have a stronger hand. Evening.

          1. KP,
            There again that dependency on “hope” since
            the 24/6/2016 the whole of the brexitexit has been mainly running on hope, never a positive
            statement made as in ” we are leaving on the
            …… with no ties” “we are telling brussel”
            “we are demanding from the eu” ” touch our fish & you have had your chips”, nothing so positive.
            To my mind we have 650 ALL round
            political appeasers.

      1. JBF,
        I my book hope is certainly not a hook I would hang the fate of a nation on, or to leave as a legacy for the future inhabitants of these Isles.
        To my mind what has left us with a great deal of dependency on a very fickle commodity such as hope, has been the continuing pattern of, vote in to keep out, regardless of consequences, party first & foremost.

    3. All very well, but she could have explained contractions better & she left out the case of singular nouns ending in ‘s’ (including proper nouns).

      1. Luton and Dunstable is horrible, our satnav took us through the back streets, it was like downtown Karachi, everything and everywhere going to rack and ruin, awful, just awful. My daughter-in-law would call it social deprivation, I call it an area whose inhabitants have no (and do not want) a stake in their environment, no interest in it whatsoever and no pride in how they live. Ditto Bradford, equally as awful, another satnav misadventure.

        1. Ahhh , now I understand .

          Has it turned into a 3rd world hovel.. sounds like it . There are areas in Britain that are declining, nothing to do with poverty … it is called inertia .. and arrogance .. not high grade migrants , but a peasant culture . What on earth is happening here in Britain.. it is becoming a real mess.

        2. Blair, Brown, Cameron, J.Smith, H.Harman should all be forced to live there for a year.
          Feel free to add any other names you consider suitable.

        2. His dislike of the peas resulted from seeing the Luton locals spitting at the troops after they returned from Iraq. When I say locals…. those who now infest.

      3. I drove through it a few years ago, trying to get to the M1. Unfortunately, the M1 was blocked by an accident and I had to crawl in traffic through the town.

        Dear God….

    3. I fear the constable will be prosecuted for unlawfully racially targeting this poor van driver.

      2. They dont seem to have considered that it is nigh on impossible to charge millions of cars

    3. Many vehicles in the sales list erroneously purport to address the issues of global warming.

      As senior citizens we might just as well invest in a mode of powered transport that doesn’t even require a driving licence:

      https://youtu.be/YamiV2DR_r8

    4. And then there’s the Vauxhall Corsa E advert – “petroleum back in the ground where it belongs” – presumably no petroleum derived plastic anywhere in the car, and as for their claims of range on one charge – never seen so much small print flashing across the screen!

    5. HI TB, I always like to find the actual figures when A statistic is shown as a percentage. Pure electric car registrations rose from 15,510 to 37,850 (+ 144%). This is out of total cars registered being 2,311,140 equating to 1.64% of total cars registered.
      Let’s spend £Billions on repairing the road network before we squander it on a small minority of road users first.

    6. It’s hard to believe anyone would encourage the use of a fuel for which there is an inadequate supply chain – and of course no money earmarked to solve the problem.

      Much the same here, by the way.

  81. I note that Prince Andrew is possibly going to lose his armed protection officers.

    Whilst I can see the economic reasons for that happening I fail to see why the information should be plastered all over the newspapers so any would-be assassins can be given the heads up.

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/prince-andrew-losing-armed-guard-jeffrey-epstein-downgrade-a4336021.html

    Unless of course hidden figures would like to see an Epstein.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7894685/The-burst-capillaries-Epsteins-eyeballs-pathologists-say-suggests-murder.html

      1. Hi Tony I believe that you have been a naughty boy on here & upset some veteran posters by grammar policing NTTL. Whilst most on here are very well educated & university graduates we do have a few un-hedumekated slobs like me on NTTL but even I know not to take my fellow Nottlers to task if they fluff their P’s & Q’s so in future please please be nice to all – except for Polly & Gedore / John Drake the Soros Shill Team on here.

          2. LOL! I have a device that gives upvotes… called my right index finger. It works to do a couple hundred at a time. Before it goes numb or the screen just doesn’t respond to it’s touch. Then I break and comeback later to do some more. That’s the way it works! 🙄

    2. I am wondering whether he had armed protection officers with him on his trips to the notso Virgin Islands ?

      1. I’ve always presumed that his close protection detail could confirm his alibis and if he is telling the truth they would have said so, I think their silence is honourable either way, but I should have thought that if they could have they would have spoken out in his favour.

    1. My cat is ignoring me. I took her to the vet today for a blood test (thyroid check up). She’s not a happy pussycat right now….

          1. Always tea with breakfast, me duck. Coffee (which must be made in an espresso machine: nothing else is acceptable) is only taken at 1300hrs in my gaff. :•)

          5. Nowadays, nothing is allowed to be down to personal preference, there is always some jackass telling you how you should lead your life.

          7. One of many, but it’s not just cooking.

            I suspect that my tastes are dissimilar to most on here.

            I’m afraid that I get very fed up with dogmatic “this is the only way to do it” posts.
            My wife is a superb cook, my sons are also exceptional, one has even won a significant amount of money on TV doing so and has even published a cookery book that won awards.

            They all do their own thing, none of them tell anyone else that their way is the only way.

            I can cook too, and I like my versions.

            Each to their own, but please don’t tell me that “your” way is the “only” way.

          9. I don’t know, Jack. What’s “Nescafé”? Is it some new-fangled Frankenstein substitute for proper coffee? :•)

        2. Not so true any more, I would say. When we used to go back on visits, we would usually eat breakfast either in a hotel or a roadside caff. Coffee drinking seemed to be a more common than tea in general.

          Going back to my youth, there was a place near the factory which served delightful bacon sarnies, along with big mugs of coffee made with milk.

          3. When I were nobbut a lad, there were coffee bars that made the most delicious coffee. I was completely stymied when I went home and tried to replicate this wonderful beverage (and failed miserably) with a jar of instant “coffee”, a pan of hot milk, and a whisk!

            It was years later that I discovered that those old coffee bars had espresso machines, but these fell into disuse when café owners got lazy (and more penny-pinching) and just used instant coffee instead. It wasn’t until the renaissance of proper coffee shops in the late 1990s that decent coffee (again made with espresso machines) started to proliferate on the High Streets.

            In those long, interminable, years of the dark ages, I just drank tea.

          4. It must be over a years since I last had a cup of coffee!
            I agree about instant coffee though, revolting stuff!

        3. When I looked at that sign I automatically assumed it was somewhere in America not England. In any case, I am English and I always have a strong cup of coffee first thing in the morning. Tea is for later. Lunchtime or afternoon tends to be my time for it.

          The occasional Matcha Tea can be anytime as the desire takes you. 🙂

          1. In a number of jobs I had, years ago, they invariably served coffee at the morning break and tea in the afternoon. I know that is a tradition but I’ve always preferred (and wanted) it to be t’other way round.

        4. Hi Grizz, I always start the day with tea for the first 3 or four mugs and then progress to coffee until the evening. My partner insists on a cup of tea in the morning and then only drinks coffee (if she wants a hot drink) for the rest of the day unless she eats certain foods.
          Bacon & eggs, fish & chips and beans on toast all Require a switch from coffee to tea. It has taken a while for me to master her foibles but has been worth it 😃.

          1. I can’t drink any caffeine-loaded drink after 5:00 p.m., Hoppy, or I can’t get to sleep.

            Bacon & Eggs? Fish & Chips? Beans on Toast? Proper food, that! :•)

    2. There have been several postings over the past few days pleading with Uncle Bill to return to this forum and wishing him well (all of which I secretly endorse). I’m not sure if that strategy will work.

      Were we to post lots of messages saying how relieved we all are to see the back of him and how blissfully peaceful and harmonious the site has become since his disappearance he would back in a flash just to annoy us (although he would see through such a ruse in a couple of nanoseconds)

      1. He’ll have had quite a few emails today to wish him a happy birthday

        – maybe he’ll return in his own good time.

  88. EU Withdrawal Bill

    Comes back to the Commons on the 22nd to review the Lords amendments

  89. DM Story

    Meghan Markle drops into another Vancouver women’s group to discuss ‘climate justice for girls’ – as charity boss reveals duchess’ assistant sent ‘mysterious’ email asking if she could make ‘impromptu’ visit

    She clearly loves making public appearances but wants to do so in her own name rather than as part of the royal team and choose her visits to give her maximum woke-cred.

    If they decide to remove the titles of Duchess and Royal Highness then perhaps she can be called her Soiled Wokeness instead.

    2. What on earth is “Climate justice for girls” when it’s at home? Do they live in a different climate from boys?

    3. It looks like all the photographs are photoshopped to me. She has a very thin face in the parka snowy photographs, she looks ten years younger, and a much weightier face in the women’s refuge photographs….. and whoever allowed full face photographs of women in a refuge, for heaven’s sake? I would have thought this was a complete no-no. Black and white photographs indicate photoshopping (b&w are easier to photoshop). I suspect they were all photoshopped in the UK. The media should have to certify that all info presented to them is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth otherwise it is fraud perpetrated upon the British public and should be treated as such.

      And the latest outrage sounds to me like the revenge of a woman scorned.

  91. From the Grauniad:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/29c18f5293ef3ff47fb8e16661d9176ed70233dd1fe995ef2a528073b54746e9.png

    An attack motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation is a statutory aggravating factor. But the judge, Recorder Anne Studd QC, can also find that hostility to Jones’s political views is an aggravating factor, although it is not defined as such in law,

    Another case of a judge making up the law on the hoof. “Hostility” to left-wingers may become a hate-crime now.

      1. Only if they are a member of a “minority” group, or to the left of the political centre.

    2. It will be poetic justice if someone slagged off by Jones sues him, using this as a precedent.

    3. Judges making up “law on the hoof” has been with us a very long time, Duncan. It is called “case law” and it is as potent as statute law or common law.

        1. Yes, it only generally comes about after appeals to the higher courts, especially when the current law cannot define the particular aspects of the case in question; therefore a ruling has to be made.

          1. ‘Afternoon, Grizz..

            I understand the principle of precedent but surely the judge’s job is to interpret and define existing law not invent new offences to be added to the criminal code, as this report seems to suggest.

            If hostility to lefties becomes a crime, I worry that now, in the twilight of my years and after a lifetime of exemplary conduct, I may become a repeat offender.

          2. Greetings, Duncan. You are perfectly right in what you say. That report makes for grave reading. As you point out, no judge can make up a new offence to suit their own agenda as this report seems to indicate. Anyone being a ‘victim’ of such a judge’s warped (and highly illega) decision should immediately file for appeal.

          3. If it comes to actual thought-crime and being arrested for telling the truth and doing what is right, then I might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. In the sombre words of Marge Simpson:

            “Your Uncle Arthur used to have a saying: “Shoot em’ all and let God sort it out.” Unfortunately, one day he put his theory into practice. It took 75 federal marshals to bring him down. Now, let’s never speak of him again.”

            “So Bart, listen to the words in your heart and not to the voices in your head. Unlike a certain Uncle on that cold September morn.”

    5. He has a kinder face

      The kinder face you want to slap and take that supercillious grin off it

    6. I suppose it won’t work the other way, though? Hostility towards right-wingers (you and me) will be encouraged. Oh, for a return to the sanity of the 1950s when God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

  92. A Premium article just waiting to be finished…

    Hopelessly out of date and ruinously expensive: Tory knives are out for HS2

    FRASER NELSON

    ill there ever be a better time for Boris Johnson to take unpopular decisions? The Labour Party lies in ruins, seemingly determined not to learn the lessons of its election defeat. The Conservatives are at his feet, unable to believe the size of the majority he won. His Cabinet meetings have become a chorus of sycophancy, with even the Prime Minister looking bored by the various declarations of admiration. He will perhaps never have as much personal political power as he has now. The question facing No 10 is what he intends to do with it.

    His stated mission is to get Brexit done, which will keep him busy this year – but now is the time to kill off expensive bad ideas. He has started to draw up a hit list. He might do away with Police and Crime Commissioners introduced by David Cameron. He fought the election criticising the “austerity” policies of his predecessors…

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/16/hopelessly-date-ruinously-expensive-tory-knives-hs2/

    1. What is the answer to HS2 ? The idea is fine, but the mind boggles, if that is the correct expression, at the amount of money involved and the time to take to completion. Something to keep the contractors busy until the year dot. I feel uneasy about it. What do you think ?

      1. HS2 to Birmingham is unnecessary – and a bit silly as it would end east of the city centre and any saved time would be lost actually getting into the centre. Extra capacity could be straightforwardly added by upgrading the ex-Western region, currently mostly Chiltern (and under utilized) Birmingham-London line. Used to carry as much traffic as the existing route from Euston. Electrify it and add trains as needed.

        A cost effective but bigger project would be to bring the ex-GC route up through Rugby to the north back into life. Work needed but nothing like building a whole new TGV type line. Chunks of it are still in use.

        — Jack

      2. I would suggest high speed rail is good for big distances. Continental Europe, fine. A small crowded island with a hundred mile run To Birmingham, absolutely not. The savings in time do not justify the cost. The journey time should also include an allowance from home and to final destination, the few minutes saved are insignificant in a working day.

      4. The idea is crap.
        The main initial push for it was the WCML becoming congested South of Rugby.
        That could have been relieved by the upgrading of the Chiltern Line via Aynho and the currently single line between Northolt Jn & Old Oak Common, part of the former GWR Direct Birmingham line upgraded to link in with Crossrail.

        Later plans could have been reinstating the Great Central, initially to Rugby, linking in with the Rugby-Birmingham-Stafford lines via a new section to Hillmorton, just south of the town, then carrying on North to Leicester and linking in with the Midland.

        Other than the link to Hillmorton, the bulk of the trackbed is already there.

    2. … He fought the election criticising the “austerity” policies of his predecessors.

      But for a great many Conservatives the biggest target of all will be HS2, which is easily the most expensive project in Government. And one that, most believe, is already dead in the water.

      Much has changed since a starry-eyed George Osborne first stepped off a bullet train in Japan in 2006, vowing to bring more high-speed rail to Britain. His idea never made much economic sense. Its main purpose was political: Osborne disliked the idea of being seen as a hatchet man, forever cutting back public services.

      He wanted a massive construction project that would allow him to talk about building a brighter tomorrow. HS2 gave him a good story to tell. It was, without doubt, a staggeringly ambitious project and – best of all – the bills would start to land long after he’d left Downing Street.

      So it has proved. The estimated costs of the first phase alone (the London to Birmingham leg) have more than trebled. The whole project was originally priced at £34 billion, but it’s now looking at anything up to £108 billion, depending on which report you believe.

      The latest independent assessment suggests that, for every pound spent on HS2, the public could get as little as 60p back, making it a licence to burn money. “The investment case was weak to start with but has now almost entirely collapsed,” says one minister who tried to persuade Theresa May to downgrade the project. “We have been too embarrassed to admit it.”

      Johnson has no such qualms, and the sums are being done in No 10: by its calculations, £6 billion a year could be released by either scrapping HS2 or finding more sensible ways to proceed. Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, is already reviewing its future.

      When he arrived in the job, Mr Shapps discovered that his officials had deep concerns about its soaring costs. He commissioned a report on its future, but thought the first draft was overly optimistic and sent it back for revisions. One of those on his inquiry, Lord Berkeley, was so shocked by what he found that he has released his own assessment, saying that Parliament has been misled about the project’s true costs.

      It is now the most expensive rail project on earth, yet it would do nothing for the vast majority of rail journeys. Its critics have been written off as the sort of Nimbys who oppose any modernisation. It’s quite true that most great leaps forward in UK transport have had their detractors, but HS2 doesn’t even offer a leap.

      Even if it all goes ahead as planned, we’d end up with the kind of technology that first saw the light of day in Tokyo in 1964 – hardly cutting-edge for Britain in the 2030s. Nor is it clear how all this would help the North, given how high-speed rail can help big cities suck even more wealth out of smaller ones.

      A consensus is now forming inside Government about what to do next. First, the London leg of HS2 would be downgraded with cheaper, less disruptive ways found to improve links to Birmingham. Trains with more seats and carriages might be brought in, for example, and if this means extending platforms, so be it.

      Money saved would be used to relieve the (many) bottlenecks elsewhere in the rail network. One senior Tory thinks this could cut the HS2 bill in half. The high-speed element also looks set to be ditched: 225 miles per hour was never necessary to cover the short distances between British cities.

      But improvements north of Birmingham would stay on track – albeit in a modified form. The east-west connections would become the main focus, with up to £15 billion spent on a Manchester-to-Leeds connection.

      This was not the original HS2 plan, but some diplomatic language could be used to present this as a modification of the project rather than its abandonment.

      Ministers are still very interested in improving links between northern cities and smaller towns, improving east-west transport, electrifying lines and buying new trains. But not many of them think the best way to help Northerners is letting them come to London a little bit quicker.

      A backlash would be guaranteed. The HS2 gravy train has been running for years now, with lots of well-paid consultants lobbying hard for its completion and persuading local authorities that this is the only way to secure decent investment.

      Perhaps the toughest political problem for No 10 will be handling Andy Street, the Tory mayor of the West Midlands, who is up for re-election in May: his critics will be keen to accuse the Conservatives of abandoning Birmingham. No 10 might think it safer to beat a quiet retreat from HS2, “delaying” the parts of the project earmarked for the chop.

      Mr Shapps certainly has no end of demands on his department’s money, with new Northern Tory MPs crying out for better transport links. He also has laughably ambitious “net zero” carbon emission targets to hit, which will mean installing more motorway charging points for electric cars – and a new outlook for transport in general.

      Work on HS2 has barely started, and the project already looks hopelessly out of date. Most Tories think that it’s doomed, at least in its current form. If the Prime Minister agrees, he’d best not lose too much time in saying so.

      1. It never even attempted to link London with the real ‘North’. From my part of England, Birmingham is in the southern midlands and Leeds and Manchester are in the north of the midlands. It takes me about two and a half hours to reach Leeds on the A1 And a damned sight longer to reach Manchester. Leeds is almost half way to London from me. It’s not in ‘The North’

        These tossers in London don’t even know their own country’s geography.

    1. Yew still up? Nearly the witching hour… and I’m abed in Schweinfurt, home tomorrow.
      Nighty night, Belle 😘

  94. A Telegraph headline asks “Who could replace Sandy Toksvig on Bake-out?”
    Am I alone in thinking one of Gwyneth Paltrow’s candles would be a suitable candidate.

    3. “Who could replace Sandy Toksvig on Bake-out?”
      Thankfully, that whole sentence is meaningless to me.

      1. I have a personal grudge against Toksvig as she ruined The News Quiz and QI for me when she became the host , I’ve heard of Bake-Off but I’ve never watched it.

  95. Good night all.

    QT: Fox’s opening quip was a good one.

    If anyone got shredded it was Chuckabutty.

  97. Embarrassing. Bbc News showing that controlled burning of bush by Aussie fire fighters can prevent the spread of the wild fires. Who’d have thunk it?

  99. EXCLUSIVE: ‘Meghan can finally breathe!’ Friend reveals Duchess can now do what she pleases without needing permission, felt living as a royal was ‘soul crushing’ and didn’t want Archie growing up in that ‘toxic environment’
    Meghan Markle feels she can now breathe since quitting as a senior royal, a friend told DailyMail.com
    They explained Meghan didn’t want Archie raised in such a ‘toxic environment’
    The friend said: ‘She told us [her friends] that her soul was being crushed and that the decision to leave was a matter of life or death. Meaning the death of her spirit’
    They added: ‘She felt she couldn’t be the best mother to Archie if she wasn’t being her true, authentic self’
    The Duchess is now in Canada with Archie and was seen on Tuesday making a surprise visit to the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre in Vancouver
    Harry made his first major royal engagement on Thursday – possibly his last – before he’ll reportedly join Meghan and Archie in Canada in the coming days

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7895209/Friend-reveals-Meghan-Markle-pleases-without-asking-permission.html

    Did that silly bint say TOXIC… What is the Markle family life if it isn’t TOXIC.. Everything she seems to touch I am sure she contaminates!

    1. Did no-one warn her what marrying into the RF involved? On second thoughts, they probably did but she saw it as a meal ticket.

    2. ‘Toxic’ – my goodness!!!! She needs to think again abut Canada….not sure they want her either.

      ”One of Canada’s biggest newspapers has slammed the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s decision to leave the palace, saying the country “cannot become (their) home”.

      According to an editorial in The Globe and Mail, Harry and Meghan’s decision to step back from royal duties and move to Canada would impinge upon the “Canadian monarchy”.

      “Our royals don’t live here. They reign from a distance,” the editorial says.

      “A royal living in this country does not accord with the long-standing nature of the relationship between Canada and Britain, and Canada and the Crown.

      “This country’s unique monarchy, and its delicate yet essential place in our constitutional system, means that a royal resident … is not something that Canada can allow.”

      1. We don’t want her!

        After the initial gushing by the media about ‘Canadians are looking forward to the pair living here’, opinion pieces have started moving towards that shown in comments on articles and are now cautious about the pair arriving.

        Sparkles insistence that this is only a temporary home until Trump is no longer Pres is not enduring them to the locals.

        1. No we don’t…I was willing to give her the benefit at first – but my goodness, was I wrong.

    4. Toxic? Who does she think she is? None of the others have complained. Did she ask any questions, before grabbing her royal perks and privileges, about what to expect as the downsides of the arrangement?

  100. I am fleeing for the night now. I did not look for any animal pictures as I found an odd website that had some funny, but slightly dark Sesame Street cartoons. I thought that I would share a few. Have a good night. 🙂

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c48a135588172fdadf11f0771e341d5b402c387e303b18108736e94f94cbfd39.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2f5cdf00b5bb3380f7c95a9b79f47e3a9feb5e3924f2ced4c9feafdaddc197b5.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/06271e7bf2f661d0fc0c373f5daf21c31b43061d6ac90e1f571bbd34b1876f02.jpg

  101. The constant emphasis of the MSM on the Harry & Meghan shenanigans is getting me down.

    It is obvious to me that Meghan wishes to mirror the life of Diana, waltzing through cleared minefields, disingenuously supporting poofs and lesbians (in order to court Elton John), supposedly empowering women of colour and an assortment of delinquent wogs, rubbishing the British Empire and blaming it for the subsequent gross incompetences of the succeeding blacks, pretending to care about minority groups whilst using these folk for photo sessions and associated feel good publicity.

    Edit: Jackie Kennedy was pictured sitting on the white marble bench seat in front of the Taj Mahal. Either side of her, not featured in the photographs, was and remain scenes of abject poverty. Diana repeated the performance to great acclaim in her dissing of Charles. Even William and Kate copied this nonsense performance.

    Evens that Harry and Meghan will be constructing the same shot shortly.

    Worst of all using the Royal platform to gain preference wherever they go. Quite sickening.

    2. They lost heavily and need to go away, lick their wounds and preferably commit suicide before someone shoots them.

      Traitors all and good riddance.

  103. More bullshit from Sir David Attenborough. This prize fool actually started life as a Trophy Hunter.

    The Global temperatures were higher in Roman times two thousand years ago.

    South East Australia is on fire because the Greens stopped the clearance of debris on the forest floor combined with the abandonment of traditionally enacted deliberate fires, known as burn-back, and the clearance of access ways through the bush to enable access for fire fighting vehicles and other heavy equipments in the event of quite normal annual forest fires.

    Many fires have been started by green arsonist activists promoting their stupid climate change agenda. These morons care nothing for ecology or the protection of human life. They believe themselves to be right and such protesters will step outside of the law to reinforce their agenda, twisting the truth.

    You all know it, we know it and I imagine the rest of the World knows it too.

    1. Attenborough’s arctic programmes telling the tale of polar bears dying because of the loss of ice (and of walruses committing suicide by throwing themselves off cliffs “in despair”) have been proved to be hysterical lies:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IatVKZZcPG0 Attenborough and the walruses: the making of a false climate icon

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6bcCTFnGZ0&list=WL&index=57 Polar Bear Scare Unmasked

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VwzUBc1rsc The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8fZG1WnwMs&list=WL&index=64 Purged Over Rising Polar Bear Populations

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6bcCTFnGZ0&t=17s Polar Bear Scare Unmasked Again

    2. “This prize fool actually started life as a Trophy Hunter.”
      Which fool? Not sure if we’re talking about the same bloke, unless you’re talking about insects perhaps.

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