Sunday 5 July: At a time of crisis, the Church of England has favoured ‘woke’ campaigns over leadership

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/07/04/letters-time-crisis-church-england-has-favoured-woke-campaigns/

834 thoughts on “Sunday 5 July: At a time of crisis, the Church of England has favoured ‘woke’ campaigns over leadership”

    1. Morning all NoTTLers. Yes, I went to my two nearest pubs but just to check out their hours and facilities. The first one was rather abrupt and didn’t do food – a very rough clientele and landlady. The other one, where Annie and I met Korky (memo to self – must ring him later today) was quite the opposite. Very lovely, welcoming and helpful and with a great beer garden, food (restricted menu but they let me borrow a menu). Guess which one will get my custom when there is good weather later in the week.

      I got up at 7 am to feed Lucky and Stripey, my two “adopted” cats and to be “First!” today (I failed). Will now have a quick breakfast myself, then back to bed for a Sunday lie-in (a word the cats don’t understand). Play nicely, NoTTLers, I’ll look in again later today.

      1. If the conversation comes round to it, Elsie, let Korky know we are thinking of him & miss him.

          1. Thanks. I highlighted your “report” to make it easy for all to find.
            :-))

      2. Thanks, Elsie.
        Personally, I refuse to part with my hard earned cash to be treated like a plague bacillus.
        At the moment, I’m sitting back and watching.

        1. I am the same, Anne,
          Yesterday I was invited to a pub,
          I declined although I would like to
          have seen the friends, for the first time
          in more than three months, who invited
          me…….phone calls are all very well but
          not the same as human contact.

    4. No. Too much hassle. I drank at home (as I have been doing since the start of lockdown) 🙂

  5. “The houses now being built in our suburbs, unlike previous estates, tend to be lacking in bay windows. All too often their resulting featureless appearance makes them look as if their design was based on a drawing of a house by a young child.
    Sir Neville Trotter”
    I agree, although not being able to put Dame before my name I don’t know whether my opinion is worth as much as <Sir’s
    The worst thing about new estates, in my lowly opinion, is the lack of a front garden. The blocks now being built, with the front door on the pavement and with garages en bloc around the back look like barrack blocks.

    1. 320926+ up ticks,
      Morning SIADC,
      So the designer could have got it right in why should barrack blocks look like residential housing ?

    2. Good morning, my eldest and her husband has bought a lovely house recently. The house is perfect, the estate is awful. As you say front door no more than a metre from the road, the road barely 2 car widths, next to nothing in the way of visitor parking which means parking half on the road, half on the pavement.
      The planning department should hang their heads in shame for passing such an application.

      1. It’s all to cram as many houses as possible on to an area to maximise profits.

        1. The builders wish to cram houses in, the planners should reject such plans.

          1. I can only say that at parish council level we DO reject plans for overcrowded sites. The problem is, it then goes off to county and they pass it.

      2. They were busy throwing out my extension application for violating the “street scene”, when I live 200 yards from a lane, the nearest thing that approximates to a street, and for being out of keeping with the local vernacular in a neighbourhood that has everything from 1960s council house to 1000-year-old Grade 1 listed church, from makeshift tin shack to the largest medieval tithe barn in the country and everything in between. The experts declined to define the local vernacular in my village, but imposed their version of it none the less. They also insisted that one of my neighbours clad their Dutch barn conversion with timber, rather than agricultural corrugated sheets. It looks silly now.

        At the same time they turned down my application, they passed the demolition of the Edwardian stone-built former cottage hospital in the town of Great Malvern, a conservation area important for its Victorian and Edwardian architecture, and the replacement of the fronting of the local theatre, which is in keeping, with a modernist glass-and-concrete box in the heart of the Victorian town.

        The open sesame word is “Persimmon”, which will get the required permissions.

        1. The same happened to a neighbour, who lives in single storey ‘dwelling’ in an area with precisely two bungalows but a heck of a lot of two and three floor houses – many of them Victorian piles.
          His application to add another floor was turned down on the grounds that it disturbed the appearance of the road.
          He did get permission to spread out horizontally.

          1. We had a similar planning application come to us at the parish council. We all thought that the designs were actually an improvement on the existing property and supported it. County turned it down!

    3. It’s not ideal, but the garage block is not a bad design. Better than parking on the street, especially if you get a second parking spot in front of the garage door. It’s nice to have a front garden though, even if it’s just wide enough for a bin and a privet hedge to hide it.

      I miss chimneys on the sky line more than bay windows.

      1. 320926+ up ticks,
        Morning BB2,
        May one ask what use have troops for front gardens ?

      2. A garage (or 2) incorporated into the footprint of the house “guarantees” a space at the front & a small garden.
        In many cases it guarantees the 17 foot long x 8.5 ft wide has often been stolen from the groundfloor – the result
        are smaller public rooms and gone is the chance of a downstairs bedroom.

        A downstairs bedroom can often mean an older person can live on the ground floor when the stairs become an issue.
        A few years back it was mooted that Planning Permission would require the study/cupboard of today should be of the size to become potentially a bedroom rather than have just bedrooms on the upper floor. Builders do not seem keen – it would require bigger plots & fewer houses to sell.

        1. Some new houses are being built with the laundry room upstairs next to the bathroom. That is the best idea architects have come up with for a long time.

          1. But, but, but… As I said I am an owl and not a lark, so when I get out of bed in the morning feeling all dopey how would I prevent myself from climbing into the washing machine for my morning shower?!?!?

            :-))

      3. ‘morning BB,

        I’m lucky in having a garage with a drive. The drive can fit three cars, or two and a smallish one, and my garage is full of ‘junk’.

        Just around the corner there is a block of apartments that have parking bays around the rear. Because the idiots are too lazy to walk an additional twenty yards, (if that), we end up with two/three cars parked near the kerb. The rearmost one is about a cars length from the junction that everyone uses to enter/exit the estate onto the main road. Sooner or later there is going to be an accident with someone swinging into the estate being blocked by a delivery van/lorry suddenly exiting at the same time.

        Despite some friendly requests from a local area group they refuse to move their cars to the allocated parking. It is not a council ‘adopted’ road so has no yellow lines or parking restrictions.

        Hence I am not a fan of garage/parking blocks unless there is a way to ensure people use them rather than park dangerously (and selfishly). Developers, planning officers, councillors all live in a utopian World where everyone follows the rules, loves their neighbours and exercise self responsibilities and common sense.

        1. It is funny, isn’t it, that we allow £30-40,000 worth of car to sit and rust, tempting thievery on the driveway while we keep the junk safe in the garage.

      4. But they are not really garages, are they? Being not big enough to take any but the tiniest of cars, they are outdoor store cupboards.

        1. We tried to store the runabout in our friend’s garage. it just won’t fit. They’re designed for car specifications from the 70’s and haven’t changed. It’s wasted space.

      5. A new house has been shoe-horned into a gap in a road near me. It has a “chimney” which is merely cosmetic. It was applied to the roof in one prefabricated piece!

          1. I think a lot of new houses, cosmetic chimneys (to fit in with the rest of the houses in the street) or not, will not be much use when the power goes off.

  6. Exclusive: Clinton, Maxwell and the inside story of their trip to Britain

    The Throne Room picture of Maxwell and Spacey is a breach of protocol that few will want to excuse

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2020/07/04/TELEMMGLPICT000234379151_1_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqkUE_BTgBOQu3VWKvpDGX9eJuIVaCpI5ozSxbwBJXXMI.jpeg?imwidth=960
    Bill Clinton and Ghislaine Maxwell pose together for the camera as the pair prepare to board Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious private jet

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2020/07/05/TELEMMGLPICT000234345594_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bqd812aLihv0TyyyQ-F8Pe-hKi2sT3vi7ux2-RDZwC4QA.jpeg?imwidth=960
    Ghislaine Maxwell and Kevin Spacey sitting on the Queen’s thrones

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/04/exclusive-clinton-maxwell-inside-story-trip-britain/

    Lest we forget…
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2019/08/15/TELEMMGLPICT000206473864_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq9zvwL1Pm1eKCgAg6e5AQBhdaTrxQ4tFhb8cq5KsjOtw.jpeg?imwidth=450

      1. I believe it was 2002. Clinton and others had been swanning around Africa on the Lolita Express, stopped off in London prior to Bill going to Blackpool for the Labour Party conference.

    2. Bill Clinton was booked for a speaking engagement 2 weeks after T May at Brown Uni, Rhode Island in March.

      That looks like a pay off conduit running through the uni.

      1. Very few members of the MSM have ever understood just how completely evil Mrs May is.

      1. A portrait of Bill Clinton (artist unknown) that Epstein kept in his New York townhouse.

        1. ‘Morning Citroen1. Definitely odd/bad taste; If I had Epstein’s money that would definitely not be a ‘piece of art’ hanging on my wall. 😂

  7. PETER HITCHENS: We’ve all turned from normal humans into muzzled masochists!

    PUBLISHED: 22:56, 4 July 2020 | UPDATED: 22:56, 4 July 2020

    When this madness began, I behaved as if a new and fanatical religion was spreading among us. Be polite and tolerant, I thought. It may be crazy and damaging but in time it will go away.

    Now it is clear that a new faith, based on fear of the invisible and quite immune to reason, has all but taken over the country. And it turns out to be one of those faiths that doesn’t have much tolerance for those who don’t share it.

    My guess is that about 85 per cent of the population now worship it and will continue to do so. The rest of us are, as each day goes by, a persecuted minority, forced to go along with beliefs we do not hold.

    Its evangelists will not leave you and me alone, but constantly seek to force us to join. This is why I make such a fuss about the demand to make us all wear muzzles. This is not about health.

    There is simply not enough evidence to compel us to do so. It is an attempt to force submission on Covid unbelievers.

    That is why it spreads, despite the absence of any good case for it. In a creepy development, one of the most powerful scientific papers arguing against it, Why Face Masks Don’t Work: A Revealing Review, last week suddenly vanished from its usual place on the internet (I still have a copy).

    Scotland’s tinpot despot, Nicola Sturgeon, now demands that muzzles are worn in shops, as well as on public transport, north of the border.

    In Texas, of all states, the governor seeks to make muzzles compulsory in all public places. The tiny-circulation Guardian newspaper, which just so happens to be the house journal of the BBC, absurdly compares muzzles to seat belts (proven a million times to save lives, beyond any doubt) and demands in its main editorial ‘Cover your face’.

    The BBC is then careful to report this prominently. Do not be surprised if the Government soon follows. Yet, as the Government’s own documents and experts have repeatedly said, evidence for the usefulness of these muzzles is weak. The Department for Business and Enterprise says clearly: ‘The evidence of the benefit of using a face covering to protect others is weak and the effect is likely to be small.’

    This obsession with telling us how to look, and turning us from normal humans into submissive, mouthless flock animals all decked out in a compulsory uniform is, in my view, part of an unprecedented assault on our personal liberty in general. Stay at home. Stop working. Don’t see your friends or relatives. Submit, submit, submit. Get used to being told what to do.

    And we do it. I have begun to understand why the atrocious drivel of Fifty Shades Of Grey was so popular. It seems we really have become a nation of surrendered masochists.

    The decision to force poor Leicester back into the misery of total shutdown is an example of this. Craziest of all is the closure of schools in that city, when school-age children are barely touched by Covid.

    This must make plans to reopen schools in September even less likely to come true. Does the Government think the education unions won’t notice this panic-driven act and use it to keep the schools shut? Of course they will.

    I am pretty sure this has been done not because it’s necessary but because the hysterical would-be headmaster Matt Hancock wants to keep us under his thumb.

    Behave, he shrills, or the tuck shop stays closed. Leicester is like the poor boys who were caned by such headmasters to set an example to the rest.

    In this he is backed up by the increasingly uncuddly Premier Al Johnson, who hawks the myth that all these deprivations have reduced the incidence of the disease.

    ‘Do not undo the sacrifices you have made with reckless behaviour,’ says the man who has recklessly destroyed our economy and is clueless about how to rescue it from himself.

    The truth is there is still not one eighth of an ounce of evidence that crashing the economy and keeping us all at home saved a single life. Let us examine the case for this punitive closure of Leicester.

    First of all, there are these things called ‘infections’ which sound quite nasty. But what are they? How many of those who test positive for Covid-19 (in a test that is highly dubious) have no symptoms? The Government could not tell me.

    I suspect only a tiny proportion are seriously ill. As I keep saying, for most people the disease is a minor event. It is not the plague.

    Then there is the simple question: Are there more infections because we are looking harder for them? Well, I can tell you this. I asked for a list of testing stations in Leicester and the dates on which they opened.

    One opened on May 1. All the others – seven of them – have opened since June 18, the very period during which the supposed surge has taken place.

    It is, in any case, absurd to imagine that the people of Leicester can be confined in their city and prevented from venturing into nearby towns and villages to take advantage of the limited freedoms now being restored to us (such as they are).

    Even the petulant, petty Mr Hancock is not going to confine Leicester in a ring of steel, as if it were East Berlin in 1961 (though he may dream of such actions).

    This is about power and freedom, and has less and less to do with Covid-19. Soon, as the terrible economic consequences of Mr Johnson begin to become clear to all, this may be a lot more important.

    The latest crime? Making a cup of tea

    Many in the media treat this period as a bit of a joke, a light-hearted interlude and a spectator sport, like a holiday or a foreign crisis seen from afar.

    I don’t. It scares me stiff. I think something has gone wrong deep inside the workings of this country. A fire long smouldering below decks has now burst into the open.

    Let me share a letter I received from a reader: ‘I run a small coffee shop and when the state decreed, I reopened for takeaway (I was ‘allowed’ also by the local council to use a small area outside my premises for people to sit down and drink their takeaways). Occasionally, when the weather has been bad or someone with an infirmity hasn’t been able to take their drink away, I have let them sit inside.

    ‘This morning I was visited by the police and warned. I was informed that two complaints had been made against me for serving drinks inside the premises. All for making someone a cup of tea and being human enough to let them have it inside. Last year my business was burgled and trashed and drug dealing was going on in the park that my business overlooks. And what happened then? Absolutely nothing. This isn’t the kind of country that my grandfather fought to preserve.’

    At the same time, the political cleansing of our schools and universities continues ferociously. I hear confidentially of heavyweight intolerance of conservatives at Oxford, who have objected to the planned removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue there.

    Now I receive this from another university, where all academics have been ‘invited’ to an online ‘discussion’ intended to ‘disrupt structural factors that produce white privilege and systemic disadvantage…

    ‘We invite all staff to reflect on their identities and social positions, taking an ‘intersectional’ approach. Participants will be given an opportunity to share perspectives and experiences of institutional racism at work, including any recommendations for change, with the University’s senior academic leadership team.’

    I wouldn’t give much for the future careers of anybody who does not kowtow to this inquisition.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8490527/PETER-HITCHENS-Weve-turned-normal-humans-muzzled-masochists.html

    1. Yes utter madness,
      Especially now the lockdown is being relaxed and we see the insane measures people are expected to adhere to and try to scratch a living.
      All for absolutely nothing.

    2. The schools will reopen if staff are given notice that they will be out of a job if there is no-one to teach,

    3. “Scotland’s tinpot despot…” Excellent, and so accurate too.

      ‘Morning, Citroen.

    4. Of course, once we get to face masks the next step is head coverings.

      Then we’re halfway to no longer being British at all.

    5. Face coverings do not work. Masks do not work. Our politicians are not “following the science” as they claim. Surgical masks offer no protection at all, except to patients being operated on, as they stop the surgeon’s dribbling into open wounds. FFP masks are better. Only FFP2 and better offer any chance of filtering viruses, if worn properly. They don’t work for people with beards. Viruses can penetrate the body via the eyes. Home made masks, and scarves, don’t work at all.
      This is not about a disease that has virtually stopped.* It is about the exercise of power.

      *Up to date figures (4July)for Scotland:
      New cases: 11
      New Reported deaths : 0
      Number in ICU: 19
      Number in hospital :429
      Total confirmed cases 18287

      1. As I queued to get into the post office, a women came out with 3 children (yes, yes, I know; and she only went in for a book of 2nd Class stamps!). She and the children removed their masks, folded them and put them in Mummy’s hand bag – ready for next time.

    6. This morning I left a brief comment on the PH blogsite agreeing with what he had said but with the caveat that I sometimes disagreed with PH’s defence of Christianity. The comment was wiped. I don’t know if he missed it because there are so many comments to assess or whether he didn’t like any criticism of the nailed god; I’m hoping it was the former.

  8. ‘Morning All

    “AT LAST! Priti Patel to overhaul Tony Blair’s ‘soft’ UK asylum laws

    Home Secretary Priti Patel is planning to overhaul the asylum system to stop

    it being abused by “vexatious claims” championed by “lefty activist

    lawyers”.

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1305204/Priti-Patel-news-tony-blair-latest-asylum-laws-home-office-update

    Aye Right and I’ll believe that when the border farce taxi service stops running,too many word too little action
    Now about that Pakirape report…………………………

    1. I will do such things – what they are yet I know not: but they shall be the terrors of the earth.

      2. I think of her pronouncements in similar terms to St Augustine’s; Lord, make me a saint, but not yet.

  9. Poland’s president plans to forbid adoption by same-sex couples. 4 July 2020.

    Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, who is running for re-election in the conservative, Catholic EU member, said on Saturday that he wanted the constitution to explicitly forbid the adoption of children by same-sex couples.

    He said he planned to propose a constitutional amendment on Monday.

    The announcement marked the head of state’s latest reference to gay rights in the electoral campaign, after he stoked controversy by likening “LGBT ideology” to communism before the first round of the vote last month.

    Morning everyone. Poland, Hungary and Russia. The last bastions of European Civilisation. Who would ever have thought it?

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/04/poland-president-plans-to-forbid-adoption-by-same-sex-couples

    2. Hardly communism, but it is wrong. Once someone chooses to be homosexual they give up the ability to have children.

      The expectation that they can ‘buy’ a child is mere vanity.

      1. One still has the ability to create children, just not the inclination to mess with the other sex. Or – hold one’s nose and just get on with it.

        1. That’s no.173 in the Kama Sutra, I seem to remember. Then there’s no.174, hold each other’s nose.
          Morning hall.

      2. I don’t think many people “choose” to be homosexual. They might choose to give in to those tendencies rather than remaining celibate.

  11. So why is Boros wrecking Britain ?

    Pay offs from the NWO looks likely.

    1. See article in Daily Mail by a local muslim community leader who admits that there are illegal immigrants in Leicester who must work for £2 per hour. Even during lockdown. Presumably Priti Patel’s gang gets a cut.

      1. This is why normal people oppose uncontrolled illegal immigration. It most exploits those kept outside the law.

        But hey. The Left don’t sully themselves with such things as facts.

  13. Morning all.

    England fades….

    SIR – I cannot claim to be a regular churchgoer, even though I went to a school where we had a service every morning. The rhythm of the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version of the Bible became a thread along which much in life still resonates. In later life I have helped raise money for our small village church to allow it – as our only remaining public building now that the local pub, shop, and post office are gone – to remain a touchpoint for the community.

    The philosopher Roger Scruton described our village churches as follows: “The buildings that the Church of England maintains are not just symbols. They are part of our national identity. They define our spiritual condition even in the midst of scepticism and unbelief. They stand in the landscape as a reminder of what we are and what we have been; and even if we look on them with the disenchanted eyes of modern people, we do so only by way of recognising that, in their own quiet way, they are still enchanted.”

    Advertisement

    How ineffably sad therefore that the Church of England, whose response to the pandemic has been shameful, now finds itself forced to consider closing churches due to a death spiral of mismanagement, poor leadership, lack of moral clarity, and a disastrous record of financial management.

    When we could have expected leadership and positive thinking, we instead seem to be smitten with the religious equivalent of the “woke” campaign to rewrite history. If we are not allowed to learn from history, what hope do we have of learning from the life of Christ?

    Charles Barrington

    Woodbridge, Suffolk

    SIR – Our churches – foremost among them Westminster Abbey – serve, with their memorials and statues, as a unique repository of our national and local history.

    Why does the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby (“Welby is rewriting the principles that hold our societies together”, Comment, June 29), think he has the right to remove some of these at this time in our national story?

    Cdre Malcolm Williams RN (retd)

    Southsea, Hampshire

    SIR – I thought that the Church was there for sinners. I know that’s why Jesus came: not for good people, but for sinners. If that is so then perhaps we ought to leave all the wicked statues and memorials in our churches and cathedrals: to remind us that we are all as bad as each other.

    Jenny Wiberg

    Ventnor, Isle of Wight

    prayers at Westminster Cathedral

    Alone with God: prayers at Westminster Cathedral, where seats have been roped off to remind visitors to observe social distancing CREDIT: WILLIAM EDWARDS /AFP/Getty

    SIR – Kevin Fiske (Letters, June 28), who decries the Church of England’s response to the pandemic, should consider that it was not the Church’s decision to turn its back on its congregation. Rather, the Government ordered us to close the doors, leaving us to turn to online services as the only way to support our congregation.

    Interestingly, our church has seen about double the number of viewers of online services than we had attendees at physical services pre-lockdown. This pattern has been reported for most churches.

    George Ham

    Church Warden, St Lawrence Church

    Hungerford, Berkshire

    SIR – It is not only the Church of England that is in decline.

    I have worshipped at a Methodist church for 47 years, and for two decades I have been keeping records of membership for my own Methodist church in Nottingham. My graph shows that – should trends continue – by 2035 there will be no one left.

    This is a church that used to have packed congregations at Easter and Christmas, yet now struggles to fill half of its seats. The response to this pandemic has been pitiful, and only confirms my view that the dogma-riddled Methodist Church in England never managed to drag itself into the 20th century, let alone the 21st.

    J A Crofts

    Nottingham

      1. As I posted last week, not too difficult to follow the trail:

        Satan > Soros > Cameron > Welby

    2. If the Irish were Black, then every trace of Englishness would be erased by now, in on orgy of cancellation due to the famines and the troubles.

      What struck me when visiting Ireland in 2003 was the state of the ancient churches. Most were in ruins, and little more than piles of stones, with as much structural integrity and social relevance as Stonehenge. Contrast that with England, where pretty well every village has a 1000-year-old working monument in full repair and in regular use for its half dozen regular parishioners and trendy vicar, usually female and woke these days.

  14. SIR – John Caudwell (Commentary, June 28) thinks the Government should borrow to invest in Britain’s recovery. This raises three big questions.

    First, we have already borrowed up to the hilt to pay for the 2008 crash. Who is going to lend to a country that is effectively bankrupt? Secondly, why should we expect government investment to be any better now than it has been historically? Think of the HS2 debacle for just one example.

    Finally, when we have loaded our grandchildren (and probably theirs too) with debt, how will they cope when the next Black Swan appears?

    WG Sellwood

    Stafford

    A construction worker passes a hoarding surrounding the One Thames City development

    Giant infrastructure projects require large numbers of skilled workers CREDIT: Simon Dawson /Bloomberg

    SIR – While I applaud the Prime Minister’s call to “build, build, build”, I fear it will fall flat. There was a dearth of skilled builders in the sector even before the pandemic – and it takes at least three years for a person to progress from apprentice to craftsman.

    Boris Johnson should also be cautious about referring to the “New Deal” of the Thirties as a model for success. Most of the jobs created then were unskilled or low-skilled.

    John Landamore

    Lutterworth, Leicestershire

    SIR – The houses now being built in our suburbs, unlike previous estates, tend to be lacking in bay windows.

    All too often their resulting featureless appearance make them look as if their design was based on a drawing of a house by a young child.

    Sir Neville Trotter

    Newcastle upon Tyne

    1. 320926+ up ticks,
      Morning E,
      Someone should really inform Nev that troops have little use for bay windows.

    2. A New Deal making jobs for the semi skilled or unskilled?

      No. Certainly not!

      Rishi Sunak is hiring 4000 more civil servants.

      When you hire civil servants you are locked in to paying them for the next fifty/sixty years.

      You can’t fire them except for gross misconduct. The taxpayer is locked into paying them an index linked pension for the rest of their lives.

      Meanwhile around here the potholes get bigger, drains are blocked and police service has become negligible.

      Perhaps we need more semi skilled fixing things?

          1. I was referring to the extra 4000 snivel serpents. We have too many jobsworths already.

    3. It’s important to note that we haven’t actually recovered from the crash, let alone paid for it.

      Borrowing to get yourself out of debt is like lifting yourself out of a bucket by the handles. Yes, macro economics is different to household finances but not in every respect. The debt still exists as low interest rates, inflation and lower growth, all of which creates unemployment and welfare demands leading to more debt.

  15. Morning again

    SIR – The generation of electricity using the tidal power of the Severn Estuary (Letters, June 28) was examined carefully by the Institution of Electrical Engineers and the Institution of Civil Engineers in the Fifties, and found not to be economically viable when set against other available power sources.

    That remains the case.

    George Herrick ​

    Salford, Lancashire

  16. SIR – Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s adviser, may have his critics as he tries to reform the Civil Service (report, July 2) – but anyone who quotes Bob Dylan (“a hard rain’s a-gonna fall”) cannot be all bad.

    Graham Breeze

    Ilkley, West Yorkshire

    1. Some speak of the future
      My love she speaks softly
      She knows there’s no success like failure
      And that failure’s no success at all

      The cloak and dagger dangles
      Madams light the candles
      In ceremonies of the horsemen
      Even the pawn must hold a grudge
      Statues made of matchsticks
      Crumble into one another
      My love winks, she does not bother
      She knows too much to argue or to judge

      [From Love Minus Zero: Bob Dylan]

  17. Looping laces

    SIR – I suggest that Nicholas Crean (Letters, June 28), who finds that modern round laces come undone more readily than flat ones, adopt a change to his lace-tying technique.

    Assuming that he is right-handed, I am surmising that after creating a loop of the right-hand lace he then crosses the loop with the left-hand lace by passing it over the top. If this is so, he should instead cross the right-hand loop of lace by passing the left-hand lace underneath, before bringing it forward to pass it back down between the laces to create the second loop of the bow.

    Like any change, it will seem strange at first but will quickly feel quite natural. The reward: the laces will no longer undo themselves.

    Robert Roberts

    Summerhill, Wrexham

    SIR – I can sympathise with Mr Crean. I have a pair of moccasin slippers with leather laces; the left lace regularly unties itself, while the right rarely does. Why?

    John Crouch

    Crowthorne, Berkshire

    SIR – The excellent novel Sixteen Trees of the Somme, by Lars Mytting, describes the “Turquoise Turtlehead shoelace knot”.

    I Googled it and have been using it for a month with good results.

    Dr Andrew Hamilton

    Dibden Purlieu, Hampshire

    SIR – My father discovered the Blue Peter method while watching the television programme over tea.

    The method advocated is to make two bows, then knot one round the other as if one was using the usual method. My father swore by this technique into his nineties.

    Judith Young

    Bristol

    SIR – One method is to remove the laces and coat them in a shoe polish of one’s choice. Leave them overnight to dry (do not polish them), re-lace the shoes in the morning and step out with confidence.

    Mr Crean may have to repeat this task every so often.

    Leslie Bolton

    Stockport, Cheshire

    1. I’ve always tied my laces in the manner that Robert Roberts (who had most imaginative parents) does. The bow lies transversely across the shoes in a neat manner, unlike the standard way of tying (the “granny knot of bows”) where it lies longitudinally.

      I cannot wear uncomfortable elastic-sided slip-on shoes since there is no way of adjusting the tension as there is with lace-ups.

    2. Good morning, Epi.

      It is gratifying to note the ST Letters Editor
      has his finger on the pulse of the Nation.

    3. “SIR – I can sympathise with Mr Crean. I have a pair of moccasin slippers with leather laces; the left lace regularly unties itself, while the right rarely does. Why?” – it’s the Coriolis effect. If you were to go to Australia, you find the right lave will regularly loosen, and the left stay tight.

  18. Ross Clark
    The next culture war will be over climate change
    4 July 2020, 12:23pm

    It is steadily becoming clear where the woke brigade will go once the current moral panic over racism has run its course (which can’t be long, following the news that London estate agents have stopped using the term ‘master bedroom’ to avoid its connotations with slavery). A week ago Andrew Willshire wrote here of how the activist group Hope Not Hate has now decided that climate change ‘denialism’ is now a hate crime.

    Now comes another sign that climate change is becoming the next woke battleground. Earlier this week, an environmental campaigner, Michael Shellenberger wrote a mea culpa on the website of Forbes.com. ‘On behalf of environmentalists everywhere I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we have created over the past 30 years,’ it began. ‘Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.’

    Shellenberger, who has been campaigning against the destruction of the rainforest since the age of 16, has not given up his campaign. On the contrary, that is the very reason he has changed his mind. Previously, he worked as an advocate for renewable energy – persuading the Obama administration to invest $90bn (£72bn) into renewables, he says. But he has now changed his mind. He has calculated that at present, 0.5 per cent of land on Earth is used for the production of energy. If the world switched to 100 per cent renewables, however, we would have to use 50 per cent of all land on Earth for wind farms, solar farms, growing biofuels or forest plantations to feed wood-burning power stations and so on. The devastation this would cause has led him to the conclusion that if we are going to reduce carbon emissions the only practical way is via nuclear power.

    Now you may or may not agree with that conclusion. Personally, I have serious misgivings about using nuclear fission to provide the world’s energy needs, given the economic devastation that another Chernobyl or Fukushima would bring to a densely-populated country. Nuclear fusion, if we could get it to work on a commercial scale, would be a different story – although everyone has been promising that for the past half century, and there is a limit to how many billions you can throw at a technology in the hope of a breakthrough.

    Anyway, that is by the by. What is surely true is that the world’s future energy needs, and the extent of the damage wrought on the climate by man-made carbon emissions, are areas of legitimate debate. If you do disagree with Shellenberger, you have every right to do so. But that is not, of course, how woke politics functions. The aim now is not to engage with political opponents but to attempt to put them beyond the pale, to try to delegitimise their opinions by making out that they belong on some far-right fringe from which the general public needs to be protected.

    ‘I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people,’ Shellenberger wrote prophetically in his Forbes piece. Not half. His piece has now been taken down by Forbes. A US journalist who tried to find out why was issued only with the following statement: ‘Forbes requires its contributors to adhere to strict editorial guidelines. This story did not follow those guidelines, and was removed.’

    It is not hard to decode: a bunch of climate alarmists decided that Shellenberger is inconvenient to their cause and have tried to cancel him by complaining to the website – and the website caved in. Fortunately, Shellenberger has reposted his piece, so you can still read it here – and judge for yourself what ‘editorial guidelines’ Forbes judged it to breach (after initially passing it for publication).

    The attempt to classify climate change ‘denialism’ as a hate crime has been coming for quite a while. The very use of the word ‘denial’ is an attempt to put anyone sceptical of climate alarmism in the same pigeonhole as holocaust deniers. Incidentally, I recently wrote a novel, The Denial, about a meteorologist who falls foul of climate activists because he values observation over alarmist predictions. I intended it as a satire set in the near future, but by the time it is published in September it looks as if it may well have become the present.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-next-culture-war-will-be-about-climate-change

    2. YouTube took down Michael Mann’s latest documentary about renewable energy, and how it wasn’t the panacea that the Greens keep telling us it is. It was reinstated after a backlash.

    3. As someone said to me recently, you can either have the area of a city block providing electricity to a country, or the area of a country providing power to a city block.

      1. ‘Climate change’ isn’t about ecology at all. it’s about power. It’s solely the effort of one side telling the other how they can live.

    4. Not only would we cover half the earth with it, we would also use half the earth’s resources to build the pointless things.

      No, nuclear is not the answer. Hydrogen is.

      As there are more people in an environment then yes, we generate more heat and worse, more waste. That’s what needs dealing with, the restoration of the balance of resources. The third world needs less and has a higher death rate. The first needs more resources and a lower population. The Lefty attitude of forcing more people into the first world is simply an ecological catastrophe.

    1. The lefties attacking him are interesting. They rather prove Lady T in saying when they attack you, they’ve no arguments left.

  20. Liberals are painting Charles Dickens as a bigot. But if he is, then so is Martin Luther King
    Rod Liddle – Sunday July 05 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

    Thank God — at last they have come for Dickens. What took them so long? A former Green councillor has been daubing graffiti on buildings in Kent that commemorate the author, calling him a racist. Give it a few weeks and he’ll be off every English syllabus in the country, and there will be no 90-minute all-star version of A Christmas Carol as the BBC’s lone concession to traditional yuletide programming.

    Good. I can’t watch A Christmas Carol without being gripped by an irrational desire to twist Tiny Tim’s callipers until he yells. Oliver Twist I would have happily drowned in a giant vat of gruel. I can’t stand Dickens. Exposed to him at too young an age, probably. At 14, reading the interminable Great Expectations, I had a fervent wish to escape from the world and maybe hide out, like Magwitch, in the marshes near Gravesend until something interesting came along (like the Bluewater shopping centre or Ebbsfleet international railway station).

    For a kid in love with literature, this seemed a failing on my part, so later I tried to read Bleak House. However, I noticed that after several sentences I had to stab myself in the arm with a pair of scissors to stay awake. There’s another slogan for the social justice warriors, then — “Reading Dickens makes people self-harm”.

    Dickens was opposed to black suffrage, it seems, and the axe is about to fall. Can it also fall, please, on the Regency period’s Barbara Cartland, Jane Austen? Mimsy, mannered chicklit. At least one writer, the Palestinian Edward Said, has reported that Austen was a supporter of colonialism and slavery. This is the first time I have ever agreed with anything Said said. I do so only out of a dislike of Austen’s novels and a feeling of sympathy for the millions of schoolchildren who have to plough through Pride and Prejudice and when they have finished are told, by their teachers: “And now, as a treat — it’s Hard Times!” Have you ever met anyone called Gargery or Jellyby? Or Barnaby bloody Rudge? On your bike, Dickens, and get Austen’s mug off those £10 notes too. Replace her with someone modern and relevant, such as Stormzy.

    The problem will come when they move on from Dickens and Austen, of course. Hell, just wait until they read Thomas Carlyle, or Friedrich Nietzsche. Luckily, the morons, with their blind agendas and cans of paint, have never heard of those writers.

    They must have heard of Karl Marx, though, even if they’ve never bothered to read him. You think Dickens was a bit iffy on race? Sheesh, wait until you’ve had a bellyful of good old Karl and his views on Bedouins, the Chinese, Islam and pre-capitalist societies in Africa. You would explode with outrage, you social justice warriors; you would be hammering away on Twitter with bleeding fingers. If we could put Marx in the bin, after reciting one of those very fashionable apologies for ever having liked him, it might spare the world even more misery than would be occasioned by the defenestration of Dickens.

    But then everyone and everything from the past must be excised from our minds if the progressive agenda is to be followed. An agenda that cannot understand that everyone from the past was a captive of their time and their culture, but that this does not mean that their existence, or their other achievements, were worthless.

    If the progressives can stick the boot into Gandhi for his fairly well-documented contempt towards black Africans, then they can surely consign Martin Luther King to the rubbish bin for his advice to homosexuals that they should seek psychiatric help. The poster girl for the post-colonialists, the nurse Mary Seacole? Oh boy, oh boy. She didn’t consider herself black. If references in her writings to “good-for-nothing black cooks” and “lazy creoles” don’t offend, then her disparaging use of the “n” word surely would. Tear those statues and plaques down! (Yes, I know you’ve only just put them up.)

    Poor Seacole was, like the rest, a product of a culture that inculcated views which today we might find a little, um, gamey. We could move on to later progressive heroes, such as the homophobic Che Guevara, or Haile Selassie, who presided over the torture and murder of his opponents and had little time for the pan-Africanism with which he is associated.

    All of them, every one, the lot, to be cast aside in an ahistoric frenzy of massed stupidity and ignorance. We should call time on this idiocy. But only after they’ve done away with Charles Dickens.

    Leicester City reveal new away kit

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Fsundaytimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Fb5e437dc-be01-11ea-a887-36f8a2091922.jpg?crop=1500%2C1000%2C0%2C0&resize=1022

    Starkey’s worrisome silencing
    Farewell, David Starkey. The irascible historian gave vent to some, er, questionable views on slavery (I thought he sounded, by and large, marginally in favour) and has resigned from Cambridge University and been sacked by Kent’s early learning centre, Canterbury Christ Church “University”.

    He won’t be on the BBC any more either, I’d bet, nor invited to write for the papers.

    I disagree with his views on this issue. But I’m not looking forward to a time when everybody employed anywhere shares precisely the same opinion, or says they do so as not to get into trouble.

    It has a certain whiff of totalitarianism about it.

    If he’s right-on, miss, get your Mace out
    British comedy is having its own little #MeToo moment. The darling of the BBC and Channel 4, Tez Ilyas, stood down from the Live Comedy Association after accusations about how he has treated women. A penitent (now he’s been rumbled) Mr Ilyas said: “Now is the time for personal accountability and I want to say, as honestly as I can, to any woman I have hurt with my previous unacceptable behaviour, I am truly sorry.” Cheers, Tez, much appreciated.

    Tez is a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. Harvey Weinstein and most of the rest of the US #MeToo villains were impeccable Democrats. Thing is, ladies — the more right-on a bloke tells you he is, the closer to hand you should keep your canister of Mace.

    Driving schools are back. Take care, pet
    Driving instructors are back in business. To mark their return a new study revealed that people who pass their tests on the first attempt are likely to have fewer crashes during their lifetimes.

    That’s me done for, then. It took me three goes. Failure number one came when the examiner pointed out, gently, that the correct response when cut up by an Audi is not to form your hand into a light fist and wave it up and down at the driver while bellowing abuse.

    Failure number two came when an attempt at parallel parking blocked a residential road for a good half-hour and almost wrote off a Nissan Micra.

    Despite this, I’ve had not so much as a speeding ticket in my driving career and I’ve only run over three cats. So much for studies.

    1. When free speech is eroded, and opinions are ignored in the UK, will there be a country who will welcome us , house us, heal us, educate us when life becomes impossible here?

        1. Let’s hope he doesn’t live as long as “President for Life” Robert Mugabe did.

      2. Hungary? Poland? They’re not going along with all this woke nonsense. They are Christians, and support families.

    2. Odd that no-one links Mulatto Lives Matter with Year Zero, and the environmentally-friendly recycling policies of the Khmer Rouge.

      1. I thought they already had.
        Dirty old man who encourages children to sit on his lap, tell him their deepest desires and then creeps into approx 3 billion kiddiewink bedrooms in one night.

    4. I’ve read Dickens. I decided to start off gently on one of the easier novels. I decided upon “A Tale of Two Cities”. There were some words on Page 1. They began, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, …”
      They went on from there. It seemed to me that the author was confused and indecisive.
      There may have been words on Page 2, and on subsequent pages, but I did not get that far.
      I preferred Dostoievsky, and Page 3.

    5. A whiff of totalitarianism? A whiff? It stinks so much you can smell the Lefty stench from Aberystwyth to South Australia!

      That’s the whole point. Silence every dissenter. Attack and destroy all those voices you hate. Make your voice the only one heard:

      OBEDIENCE IS NOT ENOUGH. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?
      It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.

      Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy–everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be
      no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.

      The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party.
      There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the
      process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.

      But always–do not forget this, Winston–always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever.”

  21. Getting messier in NYC…

    Nightmare in New York: How Covid-19, BLM protests and a liberal mayor are turning the city into a no-go zone as murders skyrocket, shops are looted and 500,000 middle-class residents flee
    *The number of shooting victims has gone up 51 per cent to 616 this year in NYC
    *In June, there were 250 shootings compared to 97 in the same month in 2019
    *Many blame New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, who has slashed police funding
    *New York state has suffered the highest coronavirus death toll in America

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8490367/How-coronavirus-BLM-protests-liberal-mayor-doing-Bin-Laden-never-could.html

        1. Never been to NY. Sounds as if I will be giving it a swerve.
          This reminds of the joke about all the violence and swearing in entertainment.
          Why bother when you can get all that at home?

          1. I once flew over NY in the autumn of 2001 when air tickets were cheap. The trick then was not to nod off, since dreaming of a street-level view of the skyscrapers made one quite relieved to wake up and still find the plane a safe distance from the hell-hole.

          2. I was there in March this year and just got out in time. The lockdown and flight ban started 2 days later.

    2. Too many Democrats in positions of power are siding with the protesters and rioters.
      Arrests have been made by the FBI, and those will probably be prosecuted.
      Arrests by local police has resulted in the offenders being released straight back onto the streets to commit further mayhem. Police have been told they cannot carry guns, or touch offenders that they need to arrest. They’ve been completely undermined by politicians, so the criminals are getting away, literally, with murder.

  22. Good morning, all. Bright and sunny but a gale blowing.

    Much better night – the new pills seems to be working – I hope I am not speaking oo soon.

      1. Cefalexin.

        I am also taking steroids for five days – to relieve the pain in the chest. So far – so good.

        1. Don’t go charging about too soon after you start feeling better, doing chores that really can wait.

          It would be a great shame to undo all your good work.

          1. No chance. I am being very idle – and even enjoying it – for a time, anyway.

            We did have a frightfully stressful and exhausting time between January and 21st March.

      1. Well with respect,….. he’s good at what he does, but let’s face it, there a lot of people who are good at their jobs but should keep the lid on the opinions in public. ‘Pop stars’ and many other zlebs. And Luvvies come to mind by the shed load.

      2. Complaining there is no opportunity for black kids to join and do well in F1….while sitting at the top of the F1 drivers’ pile.
        Kn*b

      3. A commenter in the Daily Mail pointed out that all Hamilton does is drive round in a circle. When he can reverse an articulated lorry through a small gap after dark in the rain, said the commenter, he would respect his driving skills.

    2. There are a lot of zlebs at large in the media who are quite obviously of mixed race. The fact that they never mention or consider implication of the lighter parent, is racist in its own right. And of course seriously maligns one other parent.

      20 years or so ago Germany imported thousands of workers from Turkey to work in their Automotive industry. After more recent developments in robotics the workers have become redundant. the Germans were hoping the workers and their families would return to the country they came from, but. The better life they lead was a dominant factor in the ‘workers’ staying on.
      I do see a connection between the modern convenience of importing less expensive factory workers and the cotton industries of the past.

    3. Good morning, my friend

      This needs stating over and over again and, as you know, I’ve been banging the same drum here for quite a few days.

      The hypocrisy of people like Hamilton is despicable and even worse is the fact that he is encouraged by the MSM and the loopy wokes.

      I repeat part of a post from yesterday:

      Since slavery and racial activism are the current media obsession should there not be mass demonstrations in Austria, the venue of the next F1 Grand Prix, about:

      i) The Holocaust;
      ii) Mercedes Benz using Jewish slave labour in living memory.

      A nice gesture would be for Lewis Hamilton to give all his winnings and earnings since working for Mercedes to the descendants of the Jewish slaves who were not slaughtered in the genocide and had descendants. Such an act might remove some of the accusations of hypocrisy that everybody should be levelling at him.

      1. The black racists are mindless group are NOT complaining about racism because such does not exist.

        They’re just the usual ranting anti social wasters wailing about wanting their own way. No one should give them a moment’s notice. It just indulges the ego of these looting, vandalising, idiots.

      2. The problem as I see it, with your proposal, Rastus, is that the slaves and Holocaust victims were Jews. That makes it all OK, according to the Woke and Labour party, as Jewish lives don’t matter – or, that seems to be their take on things. In any case, BLM isn’t about blacks or slavery, it’s about Marxisim and anarchy, so the more Lew-hatred and racial tension that can be stirred up, the better.
        In case the tone of voice doesn’t come through on the above paragraph, I am a strong supporter of Jews – and anybody else who is picked upon.
        EDIT: To my shame, I missed out that Russian PoWs were also used as slaves in Nazi Germany.
        Unlike black slaves in the US, both Jews and Russians were not seen as having any noticeable value, and so were worked to death. The same goes for PoW slaves worked to death in the Far East, by the Japanese.

        1. Your point about the workers being seen as not having any value seems to be appropriate when looking at the latest news from Leicester.

          Maybe they are not being worked to death but ignoring health rules to keep the sweat shop clothing factory going reeks of the same disregard.

          1. Same as the sweat shops in Bangladesh where workers (mainly disposable women) are either crushed or burnt to death.

        2. The Victim Industry never seems to get het up about the gypsies and homosexuals.
          Surely, they should worry about them as well.

      3. Good morning, Rastus.

        I think the main problem with Hamilton (apart from being an entitled and spoilt brat) is that although he is an excellent and sequentially proven champion driver of a fast racing car, he is a bit on the thick side away from all that.

        People who are cocooned within a single-subject environment (as he is in motor racing) are generally not well educated in the wider world. As such they provide rich pickings for those with malicious intent (e.g. the Lefty media and establishment). This means that those, such as Hamilton, who are not capable of thinking for themselves, provide easy prey to become mouthpieces for those pulling the strings.

        His void and vacuous utterances are more than ample proof that he has not done any research into … er … anything and, as such, his banal accusations of “racism” towards anyone or anything that his political controllers tell him to simply shows the world just how incredibly stupid he is.

        1. Contrast Hamilton with people like Stirling Moss, Jackie Stewart, Michael Schumacher etc. They were/are much more intelligent and articulate than Hamilton.

          1. As we can see by modern driving standards on our roads, any form of intelligence doesn’t seem to feature behind the wheel of a car.

          2. I often wonder whether some of those driving on our roads have actually passed a driving test (or if they got somebody else to sit it for them).

          3. It wouldn’t surprise any of us Conners it’s been a well known fact that fraudulent test taking has been going on for many years.

        2. I lost any admiration I might have had for Hamilton’s driving skills years ago when I saw pictures of him petting tiger cubs. Anyone who does that is an absolute moron and deserves nothing but comtempt.

        3. “People who are cocooned within a single-subject environment…”

          Cricketer Carlos Brathwaite (West Indies) says taking a knee is ‘cosmetic’ and legislative change is needed.
          “The biggest change needs to be legislative and needs to be the reprogramming of the wider society.”

          https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/53258227

        4. I’ve often wondered why these people who live in their own little worlds don’t have anyone in their entourage, who could advise them that they don’t speak for the rest of us. Hell, they don’t even think? the same way. He did have his Dad around for a long time, but they fell out and he seems to have become rather detached from the real world.

          1. The rise in his success as a driver was matched by the rise in his arrogance. He is a thoroughly despicable human being.

          2. Hmm. Arrogant, I agree but despicable I’m not so sure. Silly and badly advised.

          3. My accusation was based upon how his racing team-“mates” have regarded him throughout his career. Fernando Alonso, in particular, did not enjoy his company one bit when they were together at McLaren.

          4. Alonso wasn’t exactly renowned for his Joie de vivre! In fact, one might almost call him a grumpy b*****d!

          5. It must be the sport (or at least, the overpaid modern version of it) that brings out the best in these people.

            The greatest ever exponent of F1 racing, the peerless Jim Clark, was a much more pleasant chap than modern racers could ever be. The same goes for Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss and a whole host of other great drivers from the past, all of whom would whup [the modern lot] to a frazzle* if they were given the same cars to drive in.

            [*A house point to whoever knows which book, and by which author, this expression (“Whup you to a frazzle”) hails from.]

          6. I think it’s the great god Mammon, Grizz! Fangio, Moss, Clark etc were amateur gentlemen with nerves of steel and a gung ho attitude. The documentary on Moss recently was excellent. Not a particularly pleasant chap, but absolutely determined!

          7. I don’t know about the book, but it was used in the film “The Searchers”.

          8. Well done, Conners. It was indeed in the text of Alan le May’s wonderful book The Searchers. The film of the book was spoilt, in part, for me by the insistence of the screenwriters in arbitrarily changing the name of the main character, Amos Edwards, to a silly and pointless “Ethan” Edwards.

          9. I suppose that individuals with so much cash will need to employ people to help spend it in one way or another. This will emphasise your position of power over others. How this might be revealed will depend on the individual.

            In contrast, us lot will hunt around for the bargain when we make a purchase, to minimise the impact on our finances. A humbling experience.

          10. I wonder how his mother feels about his criticism of whites. Does he mean all whites are to blame, or does he excuse his mother from it all?

          12. This is it. His mother is simply just his mother. And as such, compartmentalised by him.

          13. I’ve thought about that a lot. I feel sorry for her as she seems to have been marginalised. A bit racist perhaps?

          15. He did have his Dad around for a long time, but they fell out and he seems to have become rather detached from the real world…..
            His white mother never gets a mention……..
            Are you suggesting he might have a bit of a chip on his shoulders ? 😏

          16. “did have his Dad around for a long time, but they fell out and he seems to have become rather detached from the real world.” – reminds me of another very privileged and unbelievably rich person in (but saying she wants to be out) of the public eye, who claims to be black. Lack of male parent to give perspective, perhaps?

          18. Pumping out press releases daily to the tabloids, while taking them to court for releasing “private” information?

        5. “People who are cocooned within a single-subject environment…”

          Cricketer Carlos Brathwaite (West Indies) says taking a knee is ‘cosmetic’ and legislative change is needed.
          “The biggest change needs to be legislative and needs to be the reprogramming of the wider society.”

          https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/53258227

          1. I read Brathwaite’s comments in the ST this morning. I have a question for him:

            “Why are there no white cricketers in the West Indies’ international team?”

            The reason there are few black players in the English league is similar to why the West Indies cricket team no longer enjoys the same success as it did in the 1970s and 1980s. Young black men (from both the UK and the WI) are no longer desiring to play cricket. Most prefer to play football, baseball or basketball. If you can’t get them interested in the sport, then how are you going to increase the percentage of them playing in county cricket?

      1. Hijacking a colour (shade) to be symbolic of a human racial stereotype is as idiotically puerile as it can possibly get.

        Hamilton is not black. In fact he is not much darker in skin tone than I am. His mother is a caucasian (I refuse to use the term “white” since it is patently silly calling caucasians “white”, only albinos are that), and that makes him a half-caste, mulatto, half-breed, mixed blood, hybrid, or whatever piece of descriptive nomenclature for his racial characteristic has been “banned ” by the hard-of-thinking this week.

        Hamilton is not Black. He is not the Messiah. He is a very naughty silly Boy.

        2. Yes, you are right; we should use caucasian rather than white, but all the people fixated on race probably can’t spell caucasian, so need the shorthand of white.

          1. Caucasian is not a synonym for white.

            Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are dark brown, but they are also caucasians. Their racial stereotype is identical to that of western white Europeans.

  24. I suppose that no one will be allowed to be a “slave to fashion” any more…

    1. In that respect Bill, as longer hair has now become ‘the fashion’ we have all become slaves. 😄

          2. Enough pills in the morning, and you don’t need breakfast… I have 8, currently… who needs croissants and marmalade/jam?

      1. 6.00am – 2.00pm then home for some schlaff.
        Bad planning on my part, I also did a sixteen hour shift yesterday – it seemed a good idea at the time when I agreed to work the extra hours.

    2. There are lots of people these days that would love to be clocking on – at any time of the day.

      When I was a student (50+ years ago) I had many a job – the best were early starts and finishes at say 5am till noon
      Your student pals were probably just up at 11 ish & you had your shift done & some ££s due in your pocket at the end of the week.

      1. I agree really. Much as I don’t like getting up early, once up I think that dawn is the best part of the day. I wish I were a naturally early riser but I’m just not, however early I go to bed the night before.

        1. That’s reassuring, Stormy. I also am very much an “owl”, and in the mornings I really do struggle to get up early. I envy the “larks” and most days it’s only the cats that get me out of bed.

          1. Despite us ggetting up (usually) fairly early, barely a word is spoken as two zombie adults go through the balletic morning routine.

            We’re not grumpy or nasty, just not any use until the first pint of coffee.

          3. For me it’s self-induced guilt, Peddy. The cats don’t enter my house and tap me on the head to get me up. I just think of them waiting patiently at my back door hoping that their breakfast won’t entail a two hour wait yet again.

          4. Working 06:00 to 15:00 would suit me, but office hours are 8 to 4, so I’d be the only happy one.

          5. I am the same. If it weren’t for my dog insisting he needs to go out, I’d be still in bed at noon!

      1. I wish Disqus would decide who I am. I have two user names with three different avatars depending on which computer I use to log in.

    1. He sounds happier here; ‘In this sad time of the plague every thing else has conspired to my happiness and pleasure more for these last three months than in all my, life before in so little time. God long preserve it and make me thankful for it.’ 24 September 1665.

      1. We’ve now gone past the 3 months for a thread of RNA that does Mother Nature’s bidding.
        Remember the 3 weeks to allow the NHS to cope?

  30. Food fact: Once you unfold the foil covering on a Boursin cheese, it will never, ever again fit back in the box it came out of.

    1. Getting the cheese from the grooves is a pain, and wasteful. Haven’t bought any for a while, it’s very moorish.

        1. If our lovely Lab is a hundred feet from the fridge in the garden and i take a block of any type of cheese out of the fridge she is beside me in seconds.
          I would give a year of my life to have the sense of smell of our dog…. or maybe not.

          1. Why does their food have to be so pungent? It has a far stronger smell than human’s food even though they can smell 20,000* times better than us
            (*I made up this figure but I know it’s lots)

    4. It does if you eat enough of it. I find the same with Camembert in those round boxes

    1. Morning, VVOF.
      A Conservative borough councillor chum frequently remarked how the LibDums soured the atmosphere.
      Before they arrived, Labour and Conservatives would have a good old ding dong in the council chamber, stuff would be threshed out and then they would meet up for a drink afterwards. Everybody believed in improving the lives of Colcestrians, even if they didn’t always agree on the methods. Then the LibDums arrived and the whole business descended into a spiteful, point scoring ‘game’.
      And now Colchester sadly looks run down and tatty.

      1. Sadly Colchester could be replaced by too many other towns.
        When the Limp Dums are mentioned, my mind springs back to one occasion in particular, I was stood outside a pub having a pint before the rugby match when Wera and her chums came marching down the street chanting their desire for a “people’s vote”. In the spirit of banter, 30 odd rugby fans expressed their desire for Brexit. At this stage one of Wera’s chums stood before us with his finger under his nose and gave the N@zi salute.
        I considered him a very lucky piece of S**t not to find himself in A&E that day.

      2. 320926+ up ticks,
        Morning Anne,
        Falling in line with much of the country then.
        On a job down the quay we use to feed a mouse at meal breaks, years ago, probably it has blossomed into a full blown politico by now.

      3. Time to wheel out this one from the archives:

        In his diaries, the late Alan Clark had some thing to say about LibDems and it wasn’t very complimentary. Clark visited Truro in March 1990*. He thought it ridiculous that Truro should not be a Tory seat (it had been) but wasn’t impressed by the party’s candidate for the next election (Nick St Aubyn). However, he directed his ire towards the Lib Dems:

        “The trouble is, once they get stuck in, really stuck in, they are devilishly hard to dislodge. Their trick is to degrade the whole standard of political debate. The nation, wide policy issues, the sweep of history – forget it. They can’t even manage to discuss broad economic questions as they don’t understand the problems, never mind the answers.

        “The Liberal technique is to force people to lower their sights, teeny little provincial problems about bus timetables, street lighting and the grant for a new community hall. They compensate by giving the electorate uplift with constant plugging of an identity concept – no matter how minuscule – to which they try to attach a confrontational flavour: ‘Newton Ferrers mums outface Whitehall’ and a really bouncy and commonplace little turd (a big turd in the case of Penhaligon) as candidate and they’re in.”

        [* Matthew Taylor was the MP at the time. He had won a by-election in March 1987, keeping the seat held since October 1974 by David Penhaligon, killed in a car crash just before Christmas 1986.]

        1. Alan Clark was spot on.
          The one thing that unites Labour and Conservatives is a visceral loathing of LDs.
          (Until Labour gets a chance to be Cabinet Member for Dog Poo Bins with all the goodies that go with that post.)

  32. GOTCHA!!!

    Apropos the discussion on rodent damage in my kitchen t’other day, I have stripped out the cupboard above the air-filter and discussed having a new filtration system installed with the “glow-worm” (our local electrician).

    Last night I installed two mousetraps — baited with glued-on sunflower seeds — inside the cupboard. This morning one of the traps had done its job. The culprit was not a house mouse Mus musculus (nor a gang of them). It was not a brown rat Rattus norvegicus; a black (ship’s) rat R. rattus or (as someone postulated) a weasel Mustela nivalis.

    It was a humble wood mouse (long-tailed fieldmouse) Apodemus sylvaticus that had come (as suspected) alone, and it very quickly lost its appetite for sunflower seeds (and oil).

    Now that the location of its preferred place of access has been determined, future usurpers of a similar nature will be deterred by a blockade of wire wool cemented in situ.

      1. There wasn’t as much mess as first anticipated, (except for the carnage in the top cupboard). The hob unit is sealed and none of the oil penetrated that. Some of the oil dripped onto the kitchen floor and into a base cupboard unit but that was soon cleaned up.

      1. No, it was a trap that despatched it immediately. Putting it back in the field would not have been any good if it made a beeline back to the goodies.

        1. Depends how far afield you deposit it, and how quickly you can block the entrance.

          2. Wood mice are at the bottom of the food chain. They are food for a myriad of predators further up the chain.

            My mouse would have been eaten sooner or later. I just acted as an unpaid middle man.

          3. 320926+ up ticks,
            G,
            You would say that wouldn’t you, if you haven’t eaten it yourself and have binned it then that makes matters worse, depriving a myriad of hungry predators children a meal,
            POLICE BRUTALITY

          4. 320926+ up ticks,
            G,
            Try & keep in mind every mouse counts, we have enough problems so don’t go opening up a second front with yet another hickory, dickory, bloody dock & three blind mice scandal.

          5. I think the point it that the mouse might be frightened and suffer by being let loose in a place outside its own known territory.

            Edit – territory outside your house, that is!

          8. I’m all in favour of administering a quick death to rodents and other pests. I can’t be doing with poison or gassing.

          9. A vet told me once that it was more humane to kill a mouse than set it free a far enough distance away from one’s house for it not to come back. Apparently the mice will be on unknown territory and will be lost and prey to predators/traffic/whatever nasty is around. He had a service whereby if you caught a mouse in a humane trap and took it to him, he would dispatch it for free.

            Edit: P.S. He was a thoroughly decent man and I don’t think he dealt in selling live mice to snake owners…

          11. He killed them quickly, without pain. Some people don’t like the death-traps (I am one of those. Having caught a mouse in one once, which then squeaked when I thought it was dead, was horrible!)

          12. He killed them quickly, without pain. Some people don’t like the death-traps (I am one of those. Having caught a mouse in one once, which then squeaked when I thought it was dead, was horrible!)

  33. 320926+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,
    To my way of thinking for years the only successfully running all governance parties campaign, especially these last two decades, has been via the ballot booth one of submission, on ALL fronts.
    The campaign NEEDED the backing of the peoples & that has never been lacking given in the party before Country mode of voting.
    Nationwide peoples of power positions have been elected as with the
    local councils these Councils can also be fronts ( umbrellas) for mass uncontrolled rape / abuse so stitching up the electorate on a 24/7 basis
    would be done with ease.
    So in all honesty you the electorate, having seen the past pedigree of these governance parties are really getting what you vote for.
    By the by there are more bent tailors / paedophiles entering these Isles on a daily basis thanks to the govmenntal border controls / checks.

    1. Even Sunak and Brown (and Lamont, remember him?) will have their work cut out descending to the level of Osborne and Hammond.

      Magic Fairy economics and gangsta beneficiaries, along with corporate gigafraudsters.

      I agree with Sunak that money is best spent on keeping the beleagured honest industries that feed us and keep us sane in business against the odds, but first there has to be money, and robbing the honest to pay the crooks is hardly the way to go about it. It should be the other way round, but the Laffer Curve prevents this while we have useless regulatory institutions.

      1. Osborne and Hammond didn’t even get into the top 10. They may have filled the troughs of a few of your pet hates but they didn’t cause the structural damage wreaked under Brown and being wreaked by Sunak.

        1. Brown should be tried for crimes against the State. Devious, slippery, underhand, dishonest and a nasty person to boot.

          1. His one good policy was to keep us out of the Euro. Had we joined that, I don’t think we’d have voted to leave the EU. Ditto Soros, when he bet against us staying in the ERM.
            Karma is a bit** sometimes. 😁

          2. Yes, Brown kept us out of the € but for controlling reasons of his own, not for the reasons everyone else wanted nothing to do with it.

          3. A happy accident. If Blair hadn’t wanted us to join, we’d probably have been in, despite the evidence of the ERM. Brown so complicated the tax system it increased the rule book from about two inches thick to a foot!

    2. George, call me Gideon, Osborne (Dave, call me twatface, Cameron’s chancellor) is up there with the worst of them.

      1. I disagree, not in the same league.
        Mendacious and a promulagator of project fear but in terms of damage? No.

  35. Short of nuking Westminster, we need a modern Hercules to divert the Thames through Whitehall.
    And then turn our attention to every bloody town hall, county hall and anonymous office blocks containing the likes of PHE.

    Dan Hannan in the Sunday Tellygraff.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/04/state-will-never-improve-people-continue-hero-worship-employees/

    We can’t go into this economic crisis with an outdated, broken administrative machine

    Our public health institutions are failing, but as long as we clap for them, there’s no reason for them to raise their game

    The machinery of state is malfunctioning. Its pistons are rusty, its tubes and chambers leaky. Nannying, priggish and woke in normal times, government agencies turn out to be hopeless in a crisis.

    Last week, at Ditchley, Michael Gove made a beautifully crafted and intelligent speech about how to improve the performance of our bureaucracies. Although few took issue with his recommendations – better training, wider intellectual diversity, more transparency – many questioned why he was even talking about administrative overhauls during an epidemic.

    For an answer, consider how our executive bodies have acquitted themselves over the past three months. Look, for example, at the way they responded to the mass protests.

    For nine weeks, the lockdown had been strictly – indeed, officiously – enforced. The police ticked people off for sitting in parks, buying luxury goods and even, in one notorious case, being in their own garden. But when hundreds of thousands congregated in the name of Black Lives Matter, Official Britain applied very different criteria.

    BLM activists were indulged, not only when they ignored the social distancing rules, but when they attacked property. Who indulged them? Not the general public, which remained calmly and resolutely in favour of both social order and statues. Nor yet the Prime Minister, who likewise defended both. No, the special pass was issued by, so to speak, those in between. By BBC editors, police chiefs, university administrators, quangocrats – by, in short, that large class of people who are paid by the state without being answerable to the nation.

    The episode revealed how far removed our officials are from the country at large. Many of them have come to see “the inclusiveness and diversity agenda”, not as a complementary obligation, but as an end in itself. In their eyes, the purpose of a university is not to educate, but to have a representative intake; the role of a company board is not to maximise profits, but to meet ethnic quotas; the point of a film is not to entertain, but to provide opportunities for minority actors, and so on.

    Naturally, when the BLM protests began, they saw them not as illegal demonstrations but as a cry for justice. Grievances counted for more than public order. Feelings trumped facts.

    Oddly, “inclusiveness and diversity” does little for either inclusiveness or diversity. Public bodies exclude swathes of the population – hardly any civil servants voted Leave, for example. “Diversity”, in officialese, now means “people who look different but think the same”. Groupthink is never good for any organisation.

    If we were simply talking about woke quangocrats, the problem might not be so urgent. The trouble is that political correctness distracts our agencies from what ought to be their core functions.

    This is most obvious in the case of Public Health England, which spent years campaigning against pizzas and fizzy drinks, often wrapping its arguments in the language of identity politics, but which proved worse than useless when faced a genuine public health challenge. We are conflicted in our attitude to the administrative state. We say “let the professionals get on”; but when those professionals let us down, we blame the politicians.

    We cheer the NHS from our doorsteps, for example. We scrawl messages of thanks and stick them in our windows. Yet, at the same time, we complain about the slowness of the testing regime, the failure to provide enough medical gowns, the decision to send patients, unscreened, into care homes. We moan about how much better the Germans or the Norwegians or the Singaporeans have managed. But it doesn’t occur to us that we might learn anything from how they organise their healthcare systems.

    In order to maintain this contradiction, we engage in a language game. Whenever we want to criticise a failure of the NHS or PHE, we refer to them as “the government”, as in “the government is not getting enough protective equipment to front-line workers”.

    It is technically true, of course, that the officials who work in health procurement are state employees. But calling them “the government” is a cop-out. It suggests that, somehow, any problems are the fault of politicians – whose motives are never quite explained, but who are vaguely assumed to be malevolent. It lets us maintain a distinction between “the professionals” (pure, selfless, incorruptible) and “the government” (shoddy, dishonest, calculating).

    As long as we think that way, we give state agencies little incentive to raise they game. They might be staffed by the best, wisest and most industrious of people. But, being immune to public opinion, they are bound to underperform.

    This problem won’t be solved by appointing better officials – though that might help a little. What is needed is a radical diffusion and democratisation of decisions. Power should be shifted from unelected functionaries to elected representatives – whether by making quangos plead annually for their budgets before the relevant Commons committee or by transferring their function to local authorities. The competences that are coming back from the EU should not be hoarded in Whitehall, but passed down to county and metropolitan councils or, better yet, to private citizens.

    Plenty of politicians mull such ideas when they are in opposition, but they tend to be distracted in office, so the changes rarely get made. That, in large measure, is why we are in this mess. We can’t put reform off any longer.”

    1. I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. Ripley.

    2. ” Power should be shifted from unelected functionaries to elected representatives – whether by making quangos plead annually for their budgets before the relevant Commons committee or by transferring their function to local authorities.”
      Simplest solution, achieving all the above aims – privatise it, with competition. Then, each individual has the power to show their opinion, and the poor performers go to the wall.

  36. Over half of British Olympic and Paralympic teams at Rio 2016 fielded only white athletes, report shows

    A report has exposed a woeful lack of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) representation within Great Britain’s Olympic and
    Paralympic squads, finding that over half of the British teams at the 2016 Rio Games fielded only white athletes, with some of the
    worst-offending sports also receiving the most funding.

    According to the Summus Sports reports, a staggering 16 out of 23 Olympic squads and eight out of 19 Paralympic squads had no BAME
    representation at the Games four years ago.

    Now we need the following questions answered

    % of ‘white folk’ in teams from

    Jamaica, China, Japan, Pacific Islands, All African states etc ie the rest of the world

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/olympics/2020/07/05/half-british-olympic-paralympic-teams-rio-2016-fielded-white/

    1. That sort of statistic is idiotic. The entire point of athletic competition is that the best person wins in a level playing field.

      1. Yo wibling

        Except

        Hurdles, high jump, dressage etc

        But I know wht you mean

        1. Dressage does not take place on a playing field! It happens in a 60m x 20m arena. I know of no BAME dressage divi (male or female), but I did notice an article in Horse and Hound from some muslim woman claiming she is just a person doing what she loves (and wanting more minorities to take up riding). If she just wanted to be somebody doing what she loved, what does the ideology she supports have to do with it? To be fair, she wasn’t wearing a rag under her crash cap unlike the good and chattel who won the Goodwood amateur race.

      2. No, no, Goodness me, no! Sport is about giving non-Caucasians an easy route to loadsamoney.

      3. Just like business really although selecting the best candidate is no longer permitted.

      4. Downhill skiing isn’t very entertaining on a level playing field…
        I’ll get me parka.

        2. Reminds me of the Irishman who bought himself a pair of water-skis then went looking for a lake that sloped.

      1. I haven’t seen a medal-winning black gymnast, discus-thrower or show jumper yet. I wonder why?

          2. Where is Oliver Skeete now? He arrived amid a lot of fuss and then seems to have disappeared.

        2. Lots of gymnasts are black particularly women.

          Lewis Smith is a British medalist.

          Quite a few top ranked discus throwers have been black too.

          I don’t follow the show jumping but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some.

          1. What are all these sports that don’t have enough representation of diversity?

            I obviously don’t watch enough TV… :o)

          2. If there’s not enough diversity in sport it’s more than made up for in advertising

          3. I suspect most will be those requiring expensive equipment or facilities, sailing, rowing, archery, whitewater canoeing, trap shooting, and the like.

            In the same way that sprinters and distance runners who do well tend to be black, some sports appear to favour white people, swimming for example.

            I’m also sure there are many sports that just don’t appeal to certain “races” to do them at a high enoughlevel.
            Top class sport takes a huge amount of time and dedication..

          4. I quite agree with the points you make; just in passing though, a number of Indians are first class trap shooters; an Arab sheikh [and, yes, agreed, he does have the money for expensive kit, but it still took all the dedication you refer to!] won a gold medal for double trap and later coached our own Peter Wilson. I suspect there are other examples.

          5. There will be plenty of examples I suspect and there are always exceptions to the general rule, for example, although top level black swimmers are rare there was a man from Surinam who won a gold in the Butterfly.

          6. You’d think they would be world class swimmers with all those crocodiles in their rivers

          7. Give a crocodile a man and you’ll feed him for a day.

            Teach the villagers to swim and you’ll feed him for life?

          8. I wonder what would happen if some poor coloured kid turned up at a nice classy sailing club and expressed interest in learning about the sport. Would he/she receive any less encouragement than the average poor white kid?

            Until there is no barrier to entry, many of the sports will stay “in the family”.

          9. At a minimum he would get the same welcome as a poor white child.

            The only club I have belonged to ran open “taster days” regularly. They were not means tested nor were they only open to white British.

            It’s not a particularly expensive sport at the entry level and I suspect a club that found a child who showed real talent would be accommodated as far as membership fees were concerned.

          10. There was that black swimmer, Eric the Eel. I seem to recall he was cheered on in much the same way as Eddy the Eagle (in other words, he wasn’t any good, but people applauded him for having a go).

    3. This sort of thing does decent black or BAME people no good whatsoever.

      Once it becomes obvious that black and BAME people are being selected in sporting teams just because of their colour then they will lose more and more respect because, whenever people see a BAME person is any important job they will say to themselves that he or she is only in his or her position because he is not white.

      I predict that white resentment is on its way – and it will not be socially cohesive and will lead to real racial unrest.

      1. In a previous employer, they had a policy of promotong women ahead of men.
        The ladies I worked with, excellent engineers as they were, were furious. They wanted to be promoted because they were good at the job, and felt patronised to be promoted because they sat down to pee. SWMBO is of the same mind.

        1. That’s all very well if you have a boss who believes in equality of opportunity. Unfortunately there are some who don’t and so women would never get the chance, however good.

          1. I’m not qualified to comment about being a woman in a workplace, but from the comments by the female engineers, it seemed to be reasonably fair – inasmuch as not getting on with the boss gets you unpromoted.

      2. It is a matter of general employment policy throughout the UK that BAME and disabled people are given preference over Caucasians.
        Where is the white resentment?

      3. and it will not be socially cohesive and will lead to real racial unrest.

        That’s the whole point. It’s about tearing down the USA in particular, and the West in general.
        At least in the U.S. there’s someone opposing what’s happening there, i.e. Trump, although his legal powers are not as wide as people would like right now. In the UK, who exactly is standing up to all this nonsense, apart from Lawrence Fox, who has been silenced? I’m not yet seeing Farage entering the fray very much, though he has been highlighting the illegal migrant ferry service in the Channel. Boris is his usual self, i.e. unconfrontational, wishy-washy platitudes, etc. Maybe our political leaders really don’t understand what’s going on here, and think it’s just a passing far, rather than a serious attempt to undermine our country and the majority of the population.

        1. Socially cohesive and Trump do not go together.

          His speeches this weekend would have been good for a party rally but he was talking to the nation. In that context, fighting the destroyers should have been couched in a call to Democrat leaders to join him in a campaign to protect the countries history.

          Now that would have thrown the issue straight back at the other side.

      5. Yep.

        The black racist promotion, this enforced and stupid ‘white guilt’ nonsense will lead to real racism. As it is, enforcing all the diversity drivel does a lot of that already. racism will disappear when we stop labelling people by their colour. When we stop making a thing about it.

        However, while the Left can create a victim, they will.

        1. I alluded t’other day to a programme that was on the other night called The School That Tried To End Racism.
          There was one black lad, about 11 yo, a charming boy actually, whose mother had come here from Guyana fourteen years ago. He was complaining about the fact that there are so few black people for him to look up to. FCOL, he could ask his mother to take him back to Guyana if that’s how he feels.
          Then there were some mixed and Asian girls looking at fashion magazines complaining that all the models on the front covers and most of the pictures inside were of white models.
          The commentary then stated some stats to the effect of e.g. 90% of models photographed in magazines are white and so the black and Asian girls growing up don’t have anyone of their own race to copy.
          FCOL again. How many white and black models are there in Chinese or Korean magazines?

          1. I am beginning to notice the over-representation of bleks and asians in adverts and noting the products being advertised. I shall avoid them now because obviously they are not for me since I’m white and MOH is too. No sofas or Guinness for me, for a start 🙂

        3. Excellent…and it is difficult to tell the difference. Is that a North Korean seal perhaps?

      2. Not sure I want the slow hand clap – or indeed any sort of clap – from her.

    4. Never clap never kneel. They are turning people into drones that do what they are told without question.

          1. When I used to drive to Hull in the early hours of the morning, I used to think I was driving into Hell when I got to Goole. You could smell the sulphur ages before you got to it and then the sky was orange-yellow.

          2. Goole is a singularly gruesome place. It has a fairly decent pub, though, called The Vermuyden [named after Cornelius Vermuyden who came over from The Netherlands in 1626 to drain the flatlands of the Isle of Axholme].

          3. I never stopped, Grizz, just kept going flat out to get to Hull so I could catch up on a bit of sleep before my first lecture 🙂

          4. There’s a town near Trondheim, called Hell.
            I must have mistaken them.

          5. A nondescript suburb of Norwich is called Hellesdon. I used to sing Chris Rea’s Road to Hell but make it Road to Hellesdon whenever I drove through there.

      2. Glad I missed it. And will go on doing so for as long as this sickness continues.

        1. “Go woke, go broke” – an excellent principle. I’m much more selective how I spend my few kroner these days.

    2. ” A moment of silence on the grid to show support for anti-racism. All drivers take the knee apart from Verstappen, Leclerc, Kvyat, Sainz, and
      Raikkonen, Giovinazzi.

      All drivers wearing “End Racism” T-shirts, other than Hamilton, whose said “Black Lives Matter”. “.

      The multi-millionaire hypocrite just gotta be different.

      1. Jean-Pierre Jabouille (Frog). René Arnoux (Frog). Gilles Villeneuve (Frog-Canadian).

        The Frogs had it sewn up!

    4. So at least a few sensible enough not to want their mansions misappropriated by the Marxist hordes.

  40. DTStory

    Police contacted after Nigel Farage accused of flouting quarantine rules in trip to pub
    Kent police have been contacted after Nigel Farage posts a picture of himself enjoying a pint amid claims he should be in quarantine.

    No comments allowed – even on this in the DT which seems to be mounting a campaign against the free speech of its readers.!

    Of course Ed Davey – amongst the most odious members of the most odious party in British politics – ‘sneaked’ on Farage for political motives.

    But I wonder if Ed Davey would ‘report’ it if he came across a Lib Dem in flagrante sexually abusing a child?

    1. But he’s a Nit of the Realm – sorry, Knight of the Realm.

      As you were – I was right first time.

    2. I don’t want to diparage Davey but he’s a muck spreading spiteful little man with the morals of a snake.

      2. Don’t sit on the fence, wibbling! Get a look at the Breitbart take on the story!
        Manners! Good morning all!

  41. Nationwide applause to pay tribute to 72 years of NHS. 5 July 2020.

    A nationwide round of applause is set to take place on Sunday evening to mark the 72nd anniversary of the National Health Service.

    On the eve of the event, Britons observed a minute’s silence and lit a candle in memory of those who have died during the coronavirus pandemic.

    They did? It passed me by. Did any NoTTlers notice? Needless to say I shall not be participating in tonight’s Juche demonstration of Cultural Marxist solidarity!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/05/nationwide-applause-pay-tribute-72-years-nhs/

    2. And what about all those people who have died because they either couldn’t get treatment from the NHS during this lockdown, or we’re too afraid to go to get treatment? I don’t suppose the clappers will be thinking of them.

    4. #me neither. The sheep can clap – but they don’t safely graze.

      The eve of the event – oh the eve of the eve on the event. How ridiculous!

    5. And here am I waiting after ten days for my “urgent” X-ray. No clapping in this house…. Ever.

      1. I’m a NHS septic. Might be good for A&E, but what I’ve seen for other services, not something to be applauding.
        Hygiene especially. If you have been in a UK hospital and need to be admitted in Norway, you automatically have to be quarantined for MRSA!

        1. I had an operation in our local General Hospital. The ante-room to the operating theatre looked like a charity shop, but not so clean. shelves of stuff, boxes, soft toys, plastic bobbins, coffee mugs…

          2. A recent report regarding infectious outbreaks in our new Glasgow hospital, heavily criticised the doctors who had blown the whistle.
            The Scottish Government has just spent £1bn on two new hospitals that are not fit for purpose.

          4. Our local hospital does not even have magazines now, just a sterile barren institutional nothing.
            You have to visit someone in their office to see the clutter.

        2. “Might be good for A&E”: we have no choice. And indeed getting to see a consultant privately still involves getting past the GP socialised medicine barrier. Most of them don’t approve, even though theoretically they are in private business themselves.

          2. The practice I use is mixed. Fine if you get the right one, but some get very offhand when you suggest it.

    6. Much less expensive than bonuses all round though. The workers have done their bit, back to your corners where you belong.

      Ontario nurses just had a one percent pay raise with accompanying comments that they should appreciate having a job.

  42. In other news.
    The day of the week that we currently refer to as “Friday” is to be renamed. Apparently, the novel “Robinson Crusoe” is very well known. Even more so is the name of his servant (or slave) “Friday”. This name has been referenced in new terminology such as “Man Friday”, and “Girl Friday”. Expressions such as these perpetuate the image of the negro being subservient to the white man, and can no longer be tolerated. White calendars must be eradicated.

    1. On the contrary. As Friday is named after the Norse/Germanic goddess Frigg or Frige, all people of non-Germanic/Norse ancestry should stop culturally appropriating it and find their own word, e.g. POETS day.

        1. ‘Person’ is a bit of a stretch. Frige was a mythical goddess. But her worshippers would not have considered her to be anything other than themselves in appearance i.e. white.

    2. Erm, the fact that servant Friday was about to be killed and eaten by his fellow blacks is, of course, irrelevant.

      1. Yes, it is. What has logic to do with any of this? XR, BLM, everything Green, are the ravings of lunatics. Lunatics heading up Lynch mobs.

    3. I’m beginning to think it would be simpler to invent a new word to describe people with dark brown skin, rather than re-write the English language to remove all references to the “B” word.

  44. Good morning, lovely Nottlers!

    Usual apols. if you have seen this before (that’s the trouble with not keeping up to date on here) but I thought this letter from an anonymous doctor in Leicester shows quite well how we are being manipulated. Whether by design or sheer incompetence is down to individual conjecture. Based on all that I’ve read I believe it’s a combination of both – design by the ultimate manipulators and crass stupidity, useful idiocy and a**e-covering by those lower down (including those in Cabinet, various quangos etc.) From Lockdown Sceptics via Independence Daily.

    Here is the precis: link at bottom for full letter, which is well worth reading:
    .
    Got a good piece for you today. It’s by a doctor who works for the hospital trust in Leicester. They’ve called themselves “Dr Q” because doctors are under strict instructions not to talk to the media, but Dr Q has provided me with proof that they are who they say they are. Here are the opening three paragraphs:

    I’m a doctor at University Hospitals Leicester NHS Trust. We have about 2000 inpatient beds across three main sites and serve roughly 1 million people in Leicester city, Leicestershire county and Rutland. Leicester is a multi-cultural city and 36% of our 16,000 health care workers are from BAME backgrounds.

    Many of my colleagues are angry and confused about what is happening nationally and particularly in Leicester and Leicestershire. We are reminded daily that we are not allowed to speak to journalists or on social media, which is why I am stringently anonymous and more vague than I’d like to be here. I love being a doctor, and I risk suspension for speaking out.

    I’m going to use Public Health England’s own numbers for this analysis (found here) and I’m going to explain why I think the conclusions they (and the politicians) have drawn are wrong.

    Dr Q goes on to explain that there is no evidence of any increase in the rate of infection in Leicester based on Pillar 1 data – tests administered to inpatients by hospital staff.

    By May, positive cases averaged around 10 a day and deaths were continuing to fall. In late May, we started swabbing every single admission to the hospitals, and this is where things get interesting. I work in a department that isn’t respiratory medicine. This means that the patients who are in our area are there for other health issues that are not caused by COVID-19 (think surgery or mental health). Of those we swabbed, just 1% tested positive and all of them were asymptomatic. That rate has been steady since May 23rd. I believe that our patients are representative of the rate in the UK population and, for what it’s worth, it’s the same story in Manchester, Leeds and Guildford, where I’ve been comparing notes with colleagues. Unpublished data shared on an open forum from Leeds, Manchester, Sussex also confirms this – 1%, all asymptomatic when testing positive. These patients have, almost without exception, not developed any symptoms, although some have had household members with a cough.

    So why the panic? Pillar 2 data. But there’s a problem with Pillar 2 data.

    The point of “Lockdown” has always been to ‘flatten the curve’ in order to ‘Protect the NHS’. Given we were coping on March 31st, when we had nearly ten times the number of positive cases in hospitals, with relatively little access to testing, we are certainly coping now. The issue and alleged cause of the “Local Lockdown” is our Pillar 2 numbers. These are the community tests outsourced to private companies. There is no guarantee that these tests are all taken from different people (unlike the Pillar 1 data, which is cross checked against a unique patient identifier). In fact, the Government accepts that the number of Pillar 2 cases is not the same as the number of people with COVID-19 because Pillar 2 data includes people who’ve been tested more than once – often because they have to re-test before they’re allowed back to work.

    In other words, the “evidence” that cases are increasing at a dangerous rate in Leicester – or were, since even the Government acknowledges that even Pillar 2 data show the number of cases is falling now – is unreliable. And Dr Q doesn’t even get into the problem of false positives with PCR tests.

    Dr Q points out that even if we decide to accept the Pillar 2 data at face value it shows the average age of all these newly infected people is 39, so there’s almost zero risk of them dying from COVID-19 anyway. And he/she highlights the sheer lunacy of closing schools, given that almost no children have died of COVID-19 across the United Kingdom.

    But here’s the best part – or, rather, the worst part. Matt Hancock’s track-and-trace Johnnies have only managed to track 11 of the estimated 900 new cases in Leicester. Eleven! I’m fairly cynical when it comes to the DHSC’s track-and-trace capacity, but 11? That’s quite something.

    Anyway, this is great whistleblowing piece which this courageous doctor has written at some personal risk. I’ve given it a slot on the right-hand side under “What Percentage of the Population Has Been Infected?”

    Worth reading in full.

    https://lockdownsceptics.org/2020/07/03/latest-news-66/

        1. And doesn’t it pee off the “great & good”!
          Good afternoon, by the way.

        2. Trump was fortunate picking this prospective treatment from mnong the mass of snake oil that was floating around at the time.
          it is shameful that the Democrats automatically went down the trump bad route with their unhealthy obsession.

          3. Oh come on. Tthere was almost no medical opinion supporting this drug, the medical profession were repeatedly cautioning against the drug and its potential dangers. The government medical experts did not support his optimism.
            Either he took a completely unsupported leap of faith or there is another group of supposed experts that we have not heard from. Neither is particularly acceptable behaviour for a US president.

            Why are we arguing, covid19 is 99% harmless or so Trump said this weekend. That must be the informed opinion you refer to, it certainly isn’t what doctors are saying in Texas.

          4. Sorry, this is not true. The drug showed good results very early on. The tests were not formal and controlled, that’s all.
            I’m afraid once Trump mentioned it, TDS took over, and there was a lot of cautioning against it, and then tests that administered it in different ways from how it was recommended, and then concluded that it killed people, and stuff like that.
            Trump has a non-precise way of talking, that allows his critics to pull apart everything he says and distort it to sound stupid, but he’s usually close to the mark.

            As for the bat clap being 99% harmless, the death rate is very low in most areas (normal bad flu year). It’s now known that in some areas (Wuhan, northern Italy) it appears to have a higher death rate. There are several theories about that – perhaps Texas is one of these areas.

        1. Don’t know about the gin, I use it with only a little bit in as one of the constituents of Pimms. But I do note that Schweppes version does glow blue in sunshine, so it must still contain an appreciable amount of quinine.

  46. Zoopkeeper dies at Zurich zoo after being mauled by Siberian tiger. 5 July 2020.

    Zoo director Severin Dressen said that the five-year-old tiger, named Irina, had no history of violence. “Our full sympathy is with the relatives of the victim,” Mr Dressen said, adding that the keeper had been a long-term member of the zoo staff.

    No history of violence? It’s a tiger!

    I know what they will do here. They will murder this animal which is guilty only of being true to its nature.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/05/zoopkeeper-dies-zurich-zoo-mauled-siberian-tiger/

  47. CALLING ALL NOTTLERS:

    Just to let you know that I have had a chat with Korky just now. He is keeping himself busy, has joined my local U3A (which he didn’t know I was a member of) in order to keep meeting people; he can get a little low when he is on his own and thinks of his loss. I told him I thought that was a good idea.

    The funeral is set for Wednesday morning, so do think of him at 10.15 am that day. I told him that we all send him our best wishes and miss him. He has apparently clicked on to the NoTTL site on just a couple of occasions to see what “the usual suspects” are up to, but is not ready yet to re-engage and post anything himself.

    Take care of yourselves.

    Elsie Bloodaxe (Mrs.)

    3. The first year is the worst; all those anniversaries, birthdays, “this time last year” etc etc.

      And as a very wise NoTTLer told me four years ago – “You don’t get over it; you just get used to it.”

      1. Thank you, Rik. He is a very good and decent guy, and I am proud to call him a friend.

    7. Thank you very much Elsie! I’m sure that Korky will be in all our thoughts on Wednesday and he will receive a lot of virtual hugs!

    8. I am staggered by the large number of upvotes for my post. Clearly, Korky the Kat is a much-loved member of the NoTTLers brigade!

    9. If you think it appropriate to send flowers, Elsie, I’d be happy to forward you a contribution by bank transfer, if you would organise at your end.

      1. That’s kind of you, Herr Oberst, but I think that Korky would wish to keep the funeral an intimate family affair. I have already told him of the affection in which he is held by all NoTTLers and for that he is very grateful.

  48. SIR – Abigail Butcher writes (Features, June 28) that she doesn’t like people touching her dog.

    This works two ways. Some owners get very snotty when I tell a dog to go away after it has jumped up and plastered me with muddy pawprints and drool. Please, dog owners, don’t let your dogs touch humans.

    Marina Lamming
    Chippenham, Gloucestershire

    Good job Abigail Butcher doesn’t have a cat (think Mrs. Slocombe)

        1. Chippenham Junction heading off towards Cambridge via Newmarket on the Haughly Junction to St. Ives Line.

        2. Google earth only recognises the two nottlers have identified (nor does it offer in the search any other Chippenhams outside of the UK either).

      2. Maybe Ms Lamming thinks Wiltshire is too common and she wants to be in the royal county.

        1. Perhaps she lives in an outlying village just over the boundary. Maybe somewhere like Marshfield, which has a Chippenham postcode, a Bath dialling code, and is in South Glos.

  49. Tonight we shall be eating rather large salmon fillets with mint and feta cheese,
    served with baby roasted rosemary potatoes and peas.
    Traditional English food as yesterday we had Southern Fried Chicken and Louisianna Cunjun
    potatoes in honour of my Texan chums. No pudding mind you, just had a large slice of
    Chocolate cake with afternoon tea.

    1. ‘allo, Ethel.

      Is Feta traditional English food?

      I shall be having the 2nd 1/2 of my chicken Provençal followed by gooseberries & cream.

    3. Fillet steak (not sure whether inner or outer) for us. Spuds & veg, and some Chianti.

  50. The Salisbury poisoners: retracing the steps of Sergei Skripal’s would-be killers. GQ. Luke Harding. 2 July 2020.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6e2b993f7ddd171c14e806ed13cde889284268debe0352384cfcc06d86b7d617.png

    This particular article is actually an extract from Harding’s new book Shadow State. This excerpt doesn’t extend far enough to cover his description of what he says is the modus operandi of the attack on the Skripals but yours truly has tracked it down. For such an important part of the story this takes him a mere one hundred and fifty words in two paragraphs. Let us look at them.

    According to police, the assassins headed toward Skripal’s home: redbrick, 1970s built, semi-detached. The most likely route would have taken them through a covered and densely tree-lined footpath and into a suburban avenue. Skripal’s house was around the corner, up an incline to the right. There were roses in his front garden; behind, a meadow of brambles and hawthorn. From the upper floor you could see Salisbury Cathedral and its spire.

    The house had a porch. One or both of the killers headed toward it, detectives say, stealing up the driveway. The killers applied novichok to the door handle. Mission done, they left – apparently unobserved. CCTV recorded them again at 1:05 p.m. on Fisherton Street. Heading toward the train station. Their body language was different: they seemed relaxed, insouciant, Mishkin grinning and making a joke. By this point they were behaving like the day-outers they would later claim to be.

    I suppose the first thing to do is set the scene. Christie Miller Road is actually three roads. A straight section with two side roads all going under the same name. The Skripal’s lived on the main road, in the cul de sac at the far end. Their house, which is the left half of the large semi- detached one in the photograph, faces directly down the road and can be seen from anywhere on it. At the time of Harding’s description there were no roses nor a front garden. The area in the front of the house is a hardstanding to accommodate two cars. Neither is there a porch as such, more a portico designed for architectural purposes than protection from the elements. The Cathedral cannot be seen from the house since it faces the wrong way.

    These are in themselves minor matters; they simply tell us that Harding has never visited Christie Miller Road or enquired too deeply into it. We can see this more clearly in his account of the supposed events. According to this the “killers” or “killer” walked (stole) up to the front door, an open area which can be observed by any curious child, pedestrian or window from the houses on the right; past Sergei’s BMW (he and Yulia were at home) at 12 o’clock on a Sunday lunchtime in England and were not seen by any person or captured on CCTV at any time. The front door itself had a central glass panel and was flanked by two half glazed panels. Just a shadow would have alerted the Skripal’s that someone was there. What would they have said if he had opened the door or more likely pressed the alarm on his phone? Run away? They would have been caught within the hour! All this is utter nonsense of course. No one with an ounce of common sense would have attempted anything of the kind!

    Harding does not attempt to tell us how the “killers” applied the Novichok to the door handle. Probably because it is literally unimaginable. Just how do you go about applying the world’s deadliest chemical to a domestic door handle without a hazmat suit? A scent bottle spray? This stuff kills by a sniff. The only authenticated account we have of exposure was a researcher whose suit developed a crack in the neck covering and was only saved by urgent hospital treatment and blind luck. He never fully recovered.

    Whatever happened to the Skripal’s we can be certain of one thing. This account wasn’t it!

    https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/shadow-state-extract-salisbury-poisoning

    1. It also seems that Harding has never heard of the English expression, “railway station”.

    2. OT. If I remember my few words of Russian correctly, this item ties up with Grizz’s travails.
      Mishkin is Russian for mouse.

      2. Misha (a diminutive of Michael) is the name usually given to bears, Teddy being so American.

  51. Here’s one for you.
    Just typed “bollocks” into Google, and it offered translation. So, the Hindi, Latin, Ibo, Hausa, Italian for Bollocks is, apparently, well, bollocks.
    How uninventive.
    The Finnish looked like how you might spell a stifled sneeze…

    1. Boyfriend: “Well, it was after she asked me if I wanted something for the weekend!”

    2. Boyfriend: “If you had bothered to tell me that she was a deaf and dumb nymphomaniac whose father owns a pub we’d never have shacked up and you would not have been dumped.”

      Girlfriend: “So, it’s my fault is it?”

  53. My local botanic garden, of which I am a member, is re-opening , but only to members. Not only that, we have to pre-book to control the ‘vast’ numbers expected. But when I go, it’s always a last minute decision, heavily weather dependent. So I won’t be going until it opens properly. For similar reasons, my shopping trips are kept to an absolute minimum, a quick in and out to a supermarket, and will remain so until the nanny state removes the restrictions.

    1. Hear, hear +++++++++
      In fact, I gave myself a sore eye by using out of date make-up. Shopping is such a bloody chore, that I’d rummaged around and found some half-used eye shadow in a drawer rather than face the shops. Lesson learned.
      Nipped to Boots, made use of their 3 for the price of 2 offer and stocked up for several months. A pox on them.

      1. Mine is all years old…. I simply don’t use it often enough. I haven’t had any problems…..yet.

      2. Sorry to hear that, Annie. What I have always done since an early age is smear myself with vanishing cream before bed every evening and now I don’t need to use any make-up at all; my beautiful looks are still as soft as when I was a teenager.

        :-))

      3. I can’t remember the last time I used any sort of make-up, apart from moisturiser. No need for lippy if you don’t go anywhere!

          2. Were you there too? Hans Place? The tenant of the flat is dead now of course.

        4. I can’t be doing with lippy – icky, slippy stuff, I’ve always had an aversion to smearing myself with even the tiniest bit. As far as I’m concerned the eyes have it!

          1. Haven’t bothered with either for ages! I always found mascara irritated my contact lenses. Not that i wear those now, either.

    2. Lordy, but it’s complicated over there. Here, you want to go out to dinner, you book (or not) and roll up to the restaurant, eat, pay & go. You don’t have to register, or owt daft like that. Just try to maintain 1 metre separation. What are your lot on, FFS?
      EDIT: And you can just walk into a pub and have a beer.

      1. Book I suppose, but pre- in the sense that you can’t just turn up and hope for a ‘slot’.

    4. Lordy, but it’s complicated over there. Here, you want to go out to dinner, you book (or not) and roll up to the restaurant, eat, pay & go. You don’t have to register, or owt daft like that. Just try to maintain 1 metre separation. What are your lot on, FFS?
      EDIT: And you can just walk into a pub and have a beer.

      1. I rolled up to my local last night. Pretty quiet for a Saturday. Many people stayed away. Good chatting to people. We all know each other. The landlord confessed at the end of the evening that we should have all entered our details in the book by the door. Never mind.

        1. That doesn’t match the Daily Mail reports, they had their normal bank holiday spread of drunken exploits.

      2. It’s probably to do with the terms of their public liability insurance, same as the dentist problem.

      3. We just turned up at a restaurant yesterday for lunch. No booking, just ordered from a restricted menu then sat outside on their dock for our meal.

        Almost everyone pays by credit or debit card nowadays, as the conspiracists point out, they can track us already.

      4. “And you can just walk into a pub and have a beer.”

        Lucky you. Whenever I ask the local Skånese about pubs, all I get in return is a glassy-eyed, dropped-jawed stare of confusion!

        1. Lots of bars, not so many pubs here.
          It’s about the only thing I miss about the UK – pubs and pub culture.

          4. Been a while since I was last in Whitby. they would likely chase me away if I viisited, due to the beach water engineering episode mid 2000s… Firstborn & I built a series of dams on the sand to hold back the stream (on the s side of the harbour entrance). The beach dried out, and many people came & set up their camps… then the head of water became too much, the dam burst, and about 50 people were suddenly flooded. They were, inexplicably, cross. I suspect it went down in Whitby history as the “Great Beach Disaster of 2005”.

          6. There’s a very good one opposite Doncaster racecourse. Generous portions, nicely cooked (in fat) and reasonable prices.

          8. I thought you were going to set up Grizz’s Fish & Chippie – some time ago you mentioned that the locals really like your F&C. Could have been a nicelittle sideline (if kept within tight parameters to suit your convenience – pre-orders only, perhaps?)

    5. 320926+up ticks,
      Afternoon J,
      I do believe that many are confusing a nanny type state
      with a dictatorial type state.
      We are at the moment suffering the latter via envelope
      pushing politico’s & politic power players.
      I see them ( politico’s ) currently as political shepherds
      after having an in-depth chat in Latin with the milkman, as one does about C ovid.

    6. It’s the booking in advance that puts me off, too. If I want to go somewhere I don’t want to have to plan it days in advance and then be tied to a deadline to get there at a specific time. I spent my entire working life like that and now I’m retired I want some spontaneity. They are allowing owners to go racing again in limited numbers, but the restrictions are such that I shan’t be applying for a badge until things ease up. Having to get there only 30 min before your race and have your temperature tested twice before being allowed in, not being able to go into the parade ring or the bar, having nowhere to meet the trainer and then having to go home doesn’t appeal to me at all. That’s not racing as I know it.

  54. Trawling my small collection of quotations, I found these two that seem apposite:
    Samuel Adams: “If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms.Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
    Winston Churchill: “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, it’s also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

  56. Nigel Farage tells Lib Dem boss to ‘get a life’ for contacting cops over ‘flouting quarantine rules’ with pub pic. Sun. 5 July 2020.

    Mr Davey accused the Brexiteer of flouting coronavirus quarantine rules and said he had shown a “flagrant disregard” for the safety of others.

    Having been told about the complaint to Kent Police by Mr Davey, he replied: “Sad Ed Davey. Needs to get a life.”

    Yes!

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/politics/12036073/nigel-farage-tells-lib-dem-boss-to-get-a-life/

    1. Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life ..
      And thou no breath at all?

      King Lear when he has his beloved dead daughter, Cordelia, in his arms..

      Frankly I place Ed Davey in the animal category. It would have been better had he never been born!

      1. You rotten spoilsport, Richard. I’ve never read King Lear and now I know what happens to his daughter. (I really did not know that.)

        :-))

        1. When I was in the university theatre group, they had no end of trouble getting a girlie to play Cordelia; they all wanted to play Regan and Goneril.
          Nowadays, all it would need would be a chap to release his inner girlie streak and the role would be filled.

          1. Why would they want to be a former American President or a Social Disease? (I told you I had never read King Lear, didn’t I?) :-))

          2. “… they all wanted to play Regan and Goneril.”

            What? No one wanted to play Carter?

          3. If the Nottlers’ amateur dramatic society puts on West Side Story I suggest Grizzly auditions for the part of Officer Kropke

          4. ♬“Gee, Officer Krupke, I’m down on my knees; ‘Cause no one wants a feller with a social disease…”♬

          7. Filmed just down the road from where I lived!! But not a lot of people know that!

          8. Filmed just down the road from where I lived!! But not a lot of people know that!

          9. My ex-wife (who came from Durham) told me she was standing on the long curved section of Newcastle railway station whilst the scene from Get Carter was being filmed there. She thought she would appear in the final cut but ended up on the cutting room floor instead.

            [My initial reference to “Carter” was of George Carter, Jack Regan’s sidekick in The Sweeney.]

        2. “Much Ado…” is on BBC4 at 21.00 – unfortunately set in 1918, so it will be another travesty.

    2. Hamilton is on his way to alienating his peers – and his employer – nous verrons …

  59. BLM activists very heavily armed with automatic rifles and far right groups
    came together in Richmond park to support the 2nd ammendment looking like
    ridiculous mini commandos. It’s very sad that only guns unites them.

    They have a firebrand President who might be correct in what he says but
    he’s not a calming and reflective President of an entire country, only whoever supports him .
    Domestic terrorism isn’t peaceful protest but this
    seems to be playing into the hands of Joe Biden’s hard Left handlers-
    Communism that’ll bow down to anarchists.
    Sadly whoever wins the election in November, the US is most certainly heading towards
    another civil war.

    1. Its gone past calming down trump should have acted sooner. You have to fight for peace.

      1. Trump cannot act, he has to work through state governments and that requires the leader to work with others that may not agree with him.

        That is the way the US is set up it prevents a rogue president causing too much damage.

    1. And, Norway’s oldest functioning brewery, Aas, is pronounced exactly like ‘orse, not arse.

  61. We are out for a coffee tomorrow morning at Church Lane tea room in Seaford. lunch in Eastbourne on Tuesday and out for an Italian meal on Thursday. The new dishwasher is delivered on Friday.

    1. I hope you make her comfortable. I’ve heard there is not much room for rest on those slave ships. Loosen her shackles a few notches so she can curl up in the corner.

    3. I hope you make her comfortable. I’ve heard there is not much room for rest on those slave ships. Loosen her shackles a few notches so she can curl up in the corner.

  63. Having purchased a couple of cars from Motorpoint over the years I take an interest in how well they shift stock over a weekend. Prior to lockdown the company had around 6,000 vehicles on its books and would regularly sell around 500 – 600 per week. With lockdown sales dropped off and for the past couple of weeks the company website showed around 3000 vehicles in stock. However, this weekend it appears they have shifted around 400 vehicles. It will be interesting to see how things pan out over the next month or so as an indicator of things returning to normal ….(or not….)

  64. Spoiler alert: except that someone’s probably beaten me to it.
    That little Shit Hamilton came fourth. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.

    1. Maybe all that extra virtue signalling baggage he is carrying is weighing the car down. Certainly a dark day for Hammy.

      1. I think I side with Bernie Ecclestone for the first time on the Hamilton affair. Some half caste, identifying as black but with a Caucasian mother denies his white heritage. He instead panders to ‘Black Lives Matter’, a Marxist ideology posing as representative of those suffering from oppression by whites but which in essence wishes to destroy our democracy and way of life, using malevolent blacks as useful idiots.

        There is stupid but in Hamilton’s case the self righteousness is blinkered by false ideology, ignorance and a complete lack of self awareness.

        Hamilton has enjoyed an almost perfect route to the top of F1, unhindered at every stage by his supposed ‘blackness’ which, frankly, nobody ever noticed until the git started wearing blood diamonds on his ears and ranting about his Caramac colour and clearly imagined ‘disadvantage’.

        If Hamilton was disadvantaged at any point in his career I just wish someone would similarly disadvantage me.

    2. I agree with the sentiment.

      Unfortunately he has the best car so will
      most probably restore his position at the front in quick time.

      I rather hope that those F1 fans who would normally turn out at Silverstone waving Union Flags and Hamilton stickers will cease to do so. Give the runt a lesson.

    4. Big shit, Annie. He may be able to drive a racing car well but he isn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. As a tax exile he pays not a penny of his £40m p.a. to the taxman so in my book he’s the enemy. After BLM I’ve completely lost what little interest I had in him.

  65. Evening, all. The Connemara was on song today (clearly got out of his stable the right side with his brain engaged). Did some very nice canter transitions and he was even quite supple – he can be very plank-like. Thanks to Elsie for the update on Korky.

  66. USA.

    The MSM keep reporting that ciovid deaths are increasing.

    The truth is.

    “Yesterday just 254 people died nationwide of the coronavirus, down 92.4% from the peak daily death rate set on April 21st. Covid deaths have now declined for ten straight weeks. Yet most in media are ignoring this in favor of fear porn. Read & share:”

    Some on here claim the same as the MSN. It is fake news it is just not true.

    2. Wonder if he ever stops to consider what people might make of him? Does he imagine – maybe – to a person, the cry is “What a wonderful, principled human”, or could he possibly consider that some (many?) might have harsher opinions?

    3. Black = perpetual victim.
      Difficult to recognise that tosser as a perpetual victim, but hey, what do I know?

      1. He complains that people say he’s “not English enough” – maybe that’s nothing to do with his colour, but the reports that he lives in Monaco and doesn’t pay tax here? Just sayin’

          2. Most people just want a quiet life and can live with their identity without wanting to be perpetual victims.


  68. Yet again, the hard-Left has infiltrated a protest movement and ruined it
    It began with a tragic event that deserved protest; it ended sad and ludicrous, and predictable

    JANET DALEY
    4 July 2020 • 1:00pm
    Janet Daley
    Hands up everybody who was shocked to hear that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement had been taken over by the hard Left. Can I see some BBC researchers waving at the back of the room? Welcome to the world as some of us have known it for a long time.

    The hard left didn’t infiltrate the BLM movement. They were the movement. It was a couple of self-proclaimed Marxists who started the BLM movement, which is a newer version of Black Power, Black Panthers, etc. It was based on a lie, that Michael Brown was shot after he’d surrendered and put his hands up. It continues a lie that innocent unarmed blacks are hunted down in the streets by racist police, etc.
    The hard left had merely been waiting for the right moment and opportunity. They’d already said they’d burn down cities of Sanders didn’t get the Democrat nomination.
    No comments allowed under the article, unsurprisingly.

    1. Was just about to post the same comment as you under that ridiculous Janet Daley piece! Some people just can’t accept that they were wrong about BLM from the start!

  69. Not everybody needs to go to university, and the Tories should say so#

    Neither young people nor society benefit from the explosion in courses. Ministers should champion alternative ways to get ahead

    SIMON HEFFER – 5 July 2020 • 11:00am

    Our society was once packed with people whose inability to attend university stifled their potential. Now, the reverse is true: the latest figures show that 50.2 per cent of 17- to 20-year-olds in England have had higher education. Sadly, many have studied courses of little intellectual value at institutions undeserving of public subsidy. Many who can obtain a degree only by studying a substandard course are wasting their own and the state’s money by spending three years at university.

    The lowest-ranked university in England, Ravensbourne University, London, offers degrees in Advertising and Brand Design, Digital Photography and Fashion Promotion. The next lowest, Suffolk, offers Event and Tourism Management. These are aptitudes far better learnt on the job, or as apprenticeships. When realistic tuition fees were introduced – now £9,250 a year – one hoped the market would work, and people would see that spending £27,750 on a pointless degree was not worth it.

    Sadly, the decision by the Major government to abolish polytechnics – which embodied a valuable concept of mainly vocational education – and call them universities raised expectations unrealistically. New institutions created new courses and provided posts for some poor teachers; and they produced graduates many of whom will never find a career commensurate with what they had been led to believe were their intellectual achievements.

    A civilised society should consider it a basic human right that anyone whose intellect would be developed by a traditional, rigorous university course, whether vocational or in the humanities, should be able to study such a course and, if hardship prevents this, to receive state assistance. But public money should not be spent on courses replicating what used to be in-work training or apprenticeships.

    Not long ago, even serious professions – solicitors, accountants and surveyors, for example – qualified by working for established firms. This should happen again. The state can set an example. Our nurses and police were well trained before someone decided the former needed degrees and the latter would benefit from them. Many civil service positions could be filled by people learning on the job.

    Society will always need people who have learnt the skills of thought and analysis implicit in the rigorous education leading universities provide; but what those of less stature too often offer is essentially a confidence trick on the students and on the taxpayer. Universities, existing as they do largely as a branch of the welfare state, draw their teachers predominantly from the Left, who inculcate their students with their own values.

    Proper reform would confront this systemic failure. Instead of complaining – as he recently has – that universities should admit more disadvantaged students, the Education Secretary should apply himself to ensuring a high-quality education for those who need it, and serious training programmes for those who do not. Then we really would offer our young people the start in life that is best for them.
    *****************************************************************************
    BTL:

    Carpe Jugulum
    5 Jul 2020 12:39PM
    The idea of policing as a degree occupation is one of staggeringly moronic stupidity. I was a police officer for thirty years, twenty-five of those as a detective. The majority of truly talented thieftakers I met during that period were officers recruited from trades and the armed forces. Officers who were comfortable dealing with threats, not assignment deadlines.

    I have spent the last fifteen years teaching chemistry and biology in sixth form colleges and am familiar with how students select degree courses. I have yet to meet a strong student who was even vaguely attracted to one of the policing degrees on offer.

    Policing degrees invariably attract weaker students, many of whom end up with a borderline useless degree when they fail to get past recruitment. That is not efficient, it is not effective and it is very far from fair.

    Making policing a degree occupation deprives policing of the practically minded officers it needs and increases the number of woke uniform bearers who think it a good idea to kneel in front of rioters and protestors.

    Whatever those creatures are, they are not police officers.

    Brian Fullerton
    5 Jul 2020 12:46PM
    @Carpe Jugulum

    Dito nursing

    1. UKIP advocated far fewer students going to university and an increase in apprenticeships and sandwich courses.

    2. Brian Fullerton sounds as though he knows what he is talking about, which ensures that nobody will listen to his views.

    3. To join the Police in Norway, you need to graduate from the Politihøyskolen – a three (?) years degree course, covering law, citizens rights, psychology, physical techniques and fitness (you’ll not see a copper here who looks like they prefer pies to work), prevention, detection, control of crime & more. They also get paid reasonably. They then work the beat as a constable, before moving to specialisations. Result is that they are effective coppers – clear-up rate is good, they are pleasant and polite to deal with, flexible. How, I believe the police in the UK used to be in the past.

    4. Policing degrees invariably attract weaker students, many of whom end up with a borderline useless degree when they fail to get past recruitment. That is not efficient, it is not effective and it is very far from fair.

      That’s probably where Dame Richard Cranium got her degree.

  70. That’s me for the day – a slightly better day. I remain uncharacteristically hopeful.

    Anyone wanting an unexpected good read: “Gorleston” by Henry Sutton. Available in paperback on Amazon and e-Bay.

    Good description of a certain type of wild Nottler – with a very neat twist in the last two pages.

    A demain

  71. Sir David King appears on SKY News every hour in recent days; he is vehemently critical of the government’s handling of the Corvid Pandemic.

    He wears a big chip on his shoulder; who stepped on his ego?

    Scientists or politicians?

  72. In relation to former Prime Minister May’s $1,250,000 free to attend US speeches…..

    ”Is there anything else to which you wish to draw my attention, Mr Holmes ?”.

    ”To the curious incident of the dog, Labor, Inspector Gregory”.

    ”The dog, Labor, did nothing, Mr Holmes”.

    ”That, Inspector Gregory, is the curious incident”..

  73. Once upon a time I was in favour of the Union and very anti Scottish independence.

    After the last independence effort, I changed my mind. If we get out of the claws of the EU I would now be pleased to be shot of Scotland.

    They will try to join the EU, so we need to be absolutely certain that all illegal immigrants arriving via the EU can be deported straight to Scotland.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8491589/New-poll-Majority-Scots-favour-independence.html

    1. If the Scots vote for independence, then that’s what they should have.
      Border. No money transfer. Customs. No representation in Westminster. Trade agreements can be negotiated, naturally, as with the EU. All the advantages and disadvantages of independence. After all, NTTL was solidy out of the EU, and if Scotland wants out of the UK, the English should not stand in their way, but wish them well.

      1. Will the Scots argue that a hard border is not needed between Scotland and England?

        That would be an interesting twist on Irish border discussions.

      1. I’m not sure.

        England could go the Switzerland route. Get rid of the deadweights of Scotland, Wales and NI and let them become Utopian socialist paradises.

        Just be sure to set it up so that Scots, Welsh and Norns did not automatically get English citizenship and the crooks and ne’er-do-wells could be deported.

        England on its own would almost certainly not elect any more Labour governments.

          1. Indeed, if all the tiny little Glasgow constituencies with 15000 people were gone from Parliament.

        2. If women didn’t have the vote we probably wouldn’t elect any more Labour governments.
          I mean of course, you probably wouldn’t elect any more Labour governments.
          Be worth losing the vote for that!

    3. Prior to my visit to Scotland just over seven years ago, due to all the political whinging I was of a mind that Independence for Scotland couldn’t come soon enough. However, as a result of that visit meeting dozens of friendly and very hospitable Scots I came to the conclusion that both our nations would probably be worse off if the Scots finally voted for total independence from the the rest of the UK. We have so much shared history (both good and bad) and a shared Monarchy. Should the majority of Scots determine that they truly wish to be totally independent from the rest of the UK, I hope they would have the good sense to retain a Constitutional Monarchy as the alternative forms of Government seem to me to be far worse.
      I also hope that in any negotiations with a prospective independent Scotland, Westminster won’t descend to the EU style of negotiating which virtually everyone on this forum condemns utterly,

        1. If anointed he should get on like a house on fire with the House of Windsor!

          1. Penalty for bigamy is two mothers-in-law…
            Edit: Hoi! My avatar has been bleached out.

      3. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
        We really mustn’t allow the Fishwife to achieve her goal through sheer nastiness.
        And by We, I mean the English and the North Britons. We have a long history behind us; our joint fates were intertwined for hundreds of years before 1603. This should not be destroyed by one spiteful woman and her bilious followers.

        1. I think the point about Nicola is to work out who is behind her.

          There’s evidence to show it’s the Open Society machine.

          That would explain her damaging UK destructive policies.

      4. Nothing wrong with Scotland and the Scots (occasional bad weather excepted); it’s the SNP and its leaders which are the problem.

      5. I used to be at one with your view.

        Too many years of Krankie and the sheer unpleasantness of the last effort persuaded me to change my mind.

      6. I’ve only been to Scotland twice, but I’m afraid I didn’t have very good experiences either time. The ex-pat Scots I know have all been great, but they’ve left!

    4. Don’t you think the illegal imms thing will work the other way round? Despite Nicola begging them to stay, and saying how privileged she feels to share Scotland with them, they will all be over the border as fast as they can leg it.

        1. Why limit yourself to one country, when you can buy two fake IDs in Greece and get bennies on both sides of the border?

      2. But if you set up the English law so that all illegals get sent straight back to where they come from?

        Easier by coach to Scotland than boat/plane/train to France.

        1. Pah. It would be a competition to attract them from either side of the border.
          Now if we had a real government, I’d agree with you!

        2. Easier still to put all the illegals in connected leg irons, then attach the front one to a lorry and drive gently (or faster if complaints occur) up to Barlinnie.

    5. My sentiments exactly. My only reservation is how much England will have to write off or otherwise hand over. I’m hoping the BoJo gives the tinpot despot a bloody hard time. No more propping up her socialist paradise either. Bring it on!

    6. Remember – most Scots voted to stay in the Union. You don’t hear from the silent majority, only the annoying minority.

      2. Indeed, but the latest polls (yeah yeah, I don’t believe polls either) appear to be reversing that result.

        1. Exactly, you all want to remain in the EU as well. Or at least that is what our CBC copied from a BBC news report.

          1. I will watch the EU Scotland negotiations with bated breath.

            They’ll lose fishing, oil, the pound and win freedom of movement but with Schengen, the Euro and all the debt that comes with it. Oil reserves will be shared.

      1. I’m younging (opposite of ageing) – at least, mentally. Physically, I’m scrap.

        1. I have a box of it.
          About Kr 400,- for 3 litres. Red colour, comes also in white.
          Drink that and you feel youthful again – until tomorrow, anyhow!

    2. If it’s not staged, it quite romantic really.

      Now if only they would keep the requisite 3 feet / metre/ six feet / whatever todays distance is apart.

    3. I think they are searching for his Viagra that he accidentally dropped in the water……

    4. Those people are assassins. The ‘sticks’ are actually the snorkels of their victims.

      1. Damn, damn. I was going to write, “How long do we have to hold these snorkelers down to kill ’em. Wilfred?”

  75. LAST POST

    Perhaps when wanqueur Hamilton has learned to read, someone could show him the manifesto of the marxist BLM movement.

    One of the first capitalist enterprises to go would be billion pound motor raciing.

    1. I’d also suggest someone teach him about the real history of slavery.

      1. Or just tell him to stop using his high profile to make ignorant and inept statements which are most likely to alienate him from normal people. The guy is not even black but half caste. In addition he is paid for by Mercedes Benz whose historic record is not good when it comes to the employment of slave labour as also applies to Boss, Krupp and Siemens (to name just a few).

        The blacks he purports to support would rob him blind and likely either shoot him or else cut his throat.

          1. I thought you’d gone to bed.

            You’re not doing your health any good by overdoing anything…

            Nightnottle usually raises your blood pressure, you’re self-harming.

  76. Good night all.

    Watched the Alan Cummings version of “Cabaret”, then a good stage version of “Evita” on Youtube.

    1. I went to see Evita on stage in London when I was with some student friends. It was very good.

      2. I believe that it would still be running had it not been for the Falklands invasion. “On this night of a thousand stars”, written to represent a third-rate entertainer, is in fact rather a good song. And “Good night, Buenos Aires (Star Quality)”, knocks “Don’t cry for me, Argentina” into a cocked hat.

      3. I believe that it would still be running had it not been for the Falklands invasion. “On this night of a thousand stars”, written to represent a third-rate entertainer, is in fact rather a good song. And “Good night, Buenos Aires (Star Quality)”, knocks “Don’t cry for me, Argentina” into a cocked hat.

    1. Can’t help you, John, since I possess neither tumble dryer nor dishwasher.

      I dry clothes on a washing line in summer and on a clothes horse before the radiator in my large conservatory in winter.

      I wash up using hot water in the sink, washing-up liquid, sponge pad, dish brush and lots of elbow grease; then dry on a couple of clean tea-towels. That way I get exercise and my glassware cutlery and crockery (always in that order) are back in the cupboards and drawer in a fraction of the time that it takes to fanny about with a dishwasher.

      1. I never dry. Wash in detergenty water (painfully hot), then rinse with same hot water & stack to air dry. Put away about 1 hour later, once the coffee has settled.
        That way, the teatowels can be used as oven cloths.

        1. Same here. I read long ago that teatowels were a major home for household germs. Probably if one is going to dry up, one should use a freshly laundered teatowel every time.

          1. I stack my freshly laundered tea towels after they are washed and dried. At the end of the day, the used tea towel is put to one side ready for the next laundry session, and a new tea towel brought out for the following day.

          2. I think we’ve become immune to our own germs. Probably when we get back to normal socialising, we’ll be going down with all sorts of bugs.

      2. I use both. The dishwasher goes on once a day. And the tumble dryer is used when it is not fit to peg out. I was brought up with drying washing in the house and I do not like it.

        1. I HATE houses where the radiators are lagged with wet textiles, sealing the heat in and making the whole place damp. Ugh. We use a tumbler and dishwasher (tablewear only, pans done in the sink).

        2. I dry my washing on a sheila maid above the Rayburn. No need for a tumble dryer. I do have a dishwasher.

      3. We do both – or rather OH does the sink part. I load the dishwasher and we only need to run it twice weekly (late at night)as we have enough crocks and cutlery for a few days and we use the same mugs all the time. all the clean stuff is there and dry, ready to put away on Mondays and Fridays. That pattern only gets interrupted if we have visitors.

        I don’t have a tumble drier, though, as I prefer to hang the washing outside if I can.

    2. My ‘White Knight’ tumble dryer has served me well for twelve years, Johnny …

    3. Following on from Hardcastle, public libraries may have copies of Which – Salisbury library used to, but I haven’t had need to find out recently whether libraries still subscribe. It may be worth checking whether the main public library in you area has it, before subscribing yourself.

    5. Siemens. You do not have to install a hose to the outside but do need to empty the water tray and remove the trapped lint every time you use it.

        1. We had a Bosch for about 20 years, I liked it.
          Now a Samsung that needs reset frequently (so often that I wrote the sequence of rest actions on the wall next to it). Not impressed.

  79. Just had a long call to my batty schoolteacher friend in Darset. She was horrified that the last deadline for BREXIT (remember that?) extension has passed, the Covid deaths in New York are all Trump’s fault, Lockdown should continue (too many cars, too mush shit & rubbish at Dordle Door), and aren’t the BLM demos good?
    Some re-education helped with the BLM, Brexit is a non-starter, and I tried to explain the separation of powers in the US between states and POTUS.
    God, it’s depressing. Like talking to the BBC/Guardian, it was.
    A final glass of wine, then bed.

    1. Trouble is so many non thinkers think like that. They appear to have no logic or reasoning power.

      1. They just accept what they are told, no independent research – even though it’s so easy with the web.
        Sad, really, that so few are critical. This lady has a biology Ph.D, too.

    2. OB

      During the hot spell of weather, we had half f Leicester and Derby down here visiting Durdle Door , thousands of them , many using disposable BBQs, leaving rubbish everywhere and using the countryside as a giant loo. We have a small county hospital , an enormous retirement belt of people, loads of agriculture and the army bases (RTR) and ape rescue etc .

      Bringing Covid down here would have slain everything in its path, and we can’t have the army flattened like ninepins . We have had too many cars , we were still technically on lockdown .. , the rubbish was disgraceful especially for a UNESCO world heritage site , so your friend was correct .

      Why were you being dismissive of your friend , as you are perched in your Norwegian eyrie , you have no idea how fraught the atmosphere down here was .. None of the visitors took any notice of speed limits and they all drove extremely flash cars , fantastic cars, so they must all be pretty wealthy young and arrogant Indians/ Pakistanis.. I don’t know who they were , but they were here , and in their thousands !

      1. That was just one of the things his loopy friend went on about. It’s clearly touched a nerve with you and I sympathise. I’m lucky that I live in a lovely part of the world, but it’s the countryside, rather than the coast, and diversity doesn’t seem to like visiting it 🙂

        1. It certainly did touch a raw nerve with me , our villages were gridlocked for a couple of weekends , it was really terrible . We live in a lovely part of the country , but these day trippers were setting off from home at 5am in the morning so we were told , just to get down here.

          Our local council knew where these visitors had come from re their discarded rubbish and shop receipts!!!!

          Camp and caravan sites have opened up, and so will hotels not before too long . Social distancing isn’t working , and people are genuinely fearful.

          We have all see the horrible photos of intubation and being treated on ones stomach , the appalling problems with breathing in the early stages , and that itself should not be dismissed lightly .

          We all had the feeling that this pretty part of Dorset would soon resemble a giant petri dish , just similar to how the holiday cruise liners became !

          Thank you for being understanding .

          Goodnight.

          1. You have to remember that even in the cruise ships where Covid 19 was found and people were quarantined, not everybody got it and few died of it.

          3. That’s the problem with project fear. They have gone out of their way to terrify us and it’s no surprise that it’s working.

          4. Belle, the virus is not coming to kill you. Your old man plays golf enough to be fit. Stay calm and have a glass of sherry, I know you’re not a drinker, think of it as medicinal.

          5. Golf isn’t what it should be. Small restrictions but they just upset the flow of the game. Don’t touch the flag, don’t get too close and don’t shake hands just tap your putters together. It’s like a geriatric Morris dance!

          6. Only 13 deaths on the Diamond Princess – pretty low rate when you consider the age profile of most of the passengers.

      2. It is no consolation but we are finally getting one back on the townie invaders. What a beautiful day to run the ferry at half service and adjust the work schedule on the bridge repairs to slow traffic flow.
        After their relaxing retreat to the country, tempers are at breaking point and beyond as the visitors wait impatiently in traffic jams to go back to their cosmopolitan lives.
        Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of arrogant self important persons and the sunny 30C temperatures can’t have helped them keep calm..

        No covid cases here since mid May, we will see how things go after the flood gates were opened.

    3. I’ve made ‘friends’ with a local English ex-pat couple who moved to Sweden in their late 60s because it is a “socialist paradise”, neither of them having any previous connection to the country. The bloke is OK, he was a woodwork teacher and we just chat about woodworking and gardening. His wife, though, is a dyed-in-the-wool Pinko. I’ve warned her that I don’t want to hear her rants on socialist claptrap. So far she has behaved herself.

      2. She was once a candidate for the position of Mrs Oberstleutnant. I’m rather devatated. And she works for herself, with her own business. I thought she was brighter than that.

  80. I leave you with different take on the Powers That Be may be using anti-white sentiment (amongst other woke madness), from Taki

    THE BROWNING OF AMERICA’S YOUTH
    US Census data from 2019 has established that for the first time in this creaky old Republic’s history, most people age 16 and under are nonwhite and Hispanic.

    Although white non-Hispanics accounted for close to 90% of the country’s population as recently as 1960, last year’s data shows that quotient has plummeted to 60%.

    Whites are also older on average than other Americans, with a median age of nearly 44 compared to 32 for blacks and 30 for Hispanics.

    This wouldn’t be much of a big deal if, say, all those nonwhites hadn’t been trained since birth to despise the very idea of whiteness. But they have, and our creeping suspicion is that the Powers That Be want young nonwhites to revolt when asked to pay off the pensions and Medicare for aging [sic] whites—which is convenient for the Powers That Be, seeing as how they’ve already looted all that money.

    https://www.takimag.com/article/the-week-that-perished-94/

    Good night all, and sleep well

    2. Oh dear HL

      Rather similar to the weather in the States what they have , usually appears here before too long .. this taking the knee is an absolute joke .

      I can’t believe the government and police and all the other so called public sector wokers haven’t dismissed the stupidity of everything .

      We are not living up to our percieved national image anylonger .

      Where are our lion hearts!

      1. 320926+ up ticks
        Evening TB,
        Sad to say,
        Proven to be suppressed via the ballot booth.

      2. Good morning Belle.

        I guess our nation is not what it was, having been diluted for decades both physically and morally.

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