Friday 5 May: It is Britain’s good fortune to have a monarch so dedicated to service

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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514 thoughts on “Friday 5 May: It is Britain’s good fortune to have a monarch so dedicated to service”

  1. Good morrow, Gentlefolks, today’s story

    Tracker

    A cowboy is walking down a dirt track when he happens upon a crossroads.

    Lying in the middle of the intersection, flat on his belly with an ear to the ground, is an Indian (Native man).

    The Pioneer’s curiosity gets the better of him, after a few minutes of staring he goes over to investigate.

    He no sooner gets there, when the Indian slowly raises his eyes to him and says, “Wagon come. Two families… Four men… and two women.”

    The pioneer is amazed! “Wow! You can really tell all that just from listening to the ground?!”

    “No! They run me over just before YOU got here!”

  3. 374212+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,
    Surely what first must be ascertained is whos side is charlie
    batting for and whos service HE is bending the knee in servitude to..

    He is going to rule over a nation that is nigh on handed over to foreign elements via immigration / morally illegal immigration through the treacherous actions of the political governing bodies
    lab/lib/con a WEF / NWO coalition and backed again by a multitude of treacherous dangerous idiots, FACTS.

    The flag waving along the Mall could very well be serving two purposes one being the royal seal being set upon WEF/NWO/RESET and goodby to England / Great Britain as many of us knew & loved it.

  4. Morning all, a bad day to come for the Cons with the local election results.
    Should anyone be surprised, only yesterday whilst speaking to a neighbour she told me of sitting on her sofa through the winter with a hot water bottle and a blanket trying to keep the energy bills down. People do not easily forget, nor forgive.

    1. 374121+ up ticks,

      Morning VVOF

      Sad to say ,i’m afraid they do, every election voting opportunity.

    2. Just wait for the General Election the main parties will be destroyed.

        1. Somehow I doubt it will happen, though. They seem to think that things will miraculously change without their having to change their voting habits.

      3. The result will be a coalition of Labour, Green and Lib Dem. The worst possible combination. We need a political revolution.

        1. If that’s anything like we have here, the watermelons get free rein to enact every daft proposal in their warped minds – it’s a real pain.

      2. If in the past she voted for one of the main parties then yes. Yesterday we had no elections but many other people did, and I think many of those feel the same as my neighbour.

  5. Good Moaning.
    Let’s hope Professor Pantsdown doesn’t get anywhere near this lab. Or any other professors with a taste for publicity.
    How long has this research been going on? Somehow the words “unlikely to be dangerous” are not reassuring.
    These bugs don’t appear to have done much for the Neanderthals.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/04/neanderthal-bacteria-back-to-life-science-first-antibiotics/

    “Neanderthal bacteria brought back to life for first time

    Scientists say the process may help to create new medicines with antibiotic properties

    By Sarah Knapton, Science Editor4 May 2023 • 7:00pm

    Ancient bacterial DNA from the teeth of Neanderthals has been recreated by scientists for the first time and used to bring back Stone Age molecules.

    Experts reconstructed the genome of a previously unknown Chlorobium bacteria dating from the Pleistocene, which was found in the dental plaque of Neanderthals, and seven Palaeolithic humans dating from up to 100,000 years ago.

    An international team of US and German researchers then spliced the sequence into living bacteria to see what would happen.

    They found the ancient genes produced a never-before-seen family of natural molecules which researchers have named “paleofurans”.

    Scientists are unsure what the molecules do but said the process may be useful for discovering extinct molecules lost to history that might be useful in medicine as antibiotics.

    Next step to test molecules

    “We deciphered a section of the DNA from an ancient bacterium and recreated it. This allowed us to generate the molecules that we termed paleofurans,” said Pierre Stallforth, professor of bioorganic chemistry, at the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research.

    “We presume that these compounds are signal molecules that the organism uses to ‘communicate’ with each other or to regulate specific functions of the bacterium. At this stage, however, we can only speculate.

    “The next step is to test these molecules, for instance if they have antibiotic properties.”

    Scientists are continually hunting in nature for bioactive molecules that can be useful for medicine or industry, and many are produced by microbes such as bacteria.

    Microbes are nature’s greatest chemists and among their creations are many of the world’s antibiotics and other therapeutic drugs.

    Bacteria have inhabited the Earth for more than three billion years, so experts believe it might be possible to find new potent molecules by searching in the past.

    Bringing back ancient bacteria or molecules has proved controversial. Some scientists believe that researchers should not be creating biological specimens that do not already exist in nature. However, the team said that they could not be sure the Chlorobium species they had discovered was actually extinct. The closest modern relatives are harmless bacteria that usually live in lakes.

    Unlikely to be dangerous

    Biosafety experts said that even if the bacteria themselves were revived they were unlikely to be dangerous.

    The team reconstructed the genome of the Chlorobium bacterium on a computer before engineering living bacteria to produce the chemicals encoded by the ancient genes.

    It is the first time the approach has been used to bring back the function of ancient bacteria.

    “This is the first step towards accessing the hidden chemical diversity of Earth’s past microbes, and it adds an exciting new time dimension to natural product discovery,” said Dr Martin Klapper, a postdoctoral researcher at Leibniz.

    The research was published in the journal Science.”

    1. 374121+ up ticks,

      Morning Anne,

      Peoples must face up to the fact these are tools that could be found in the political selective killing, toolbox.

    3. “Experts reconstructed the genome of a previously unknown Chlorobium bacteria dating from the Pleistocene … Bacteria is the plural of bacterium so not a … bacteria.

  7. The wind has dropped so will be able to spray the garden. The roses are infested with green and black fly so early in the season. The bees are all over the clematis this year.no spray for them of course.

    1. Firstborn’s bees are really active, despite the snow. There’s lots of trees with flowers just now, bees out in force.

    2. Had a wasp in here yesterday. It must have been about a foot long. Wings like a B52. I could even see the stinger missiles and gatling cannon

  9. Read for too long before going to bed so I’m off to grab more zeds.

  10. It is Britain’s good fortune to have a monarch so dedicated to service

    Only for those that want to do things differently

  11. I see the BBC is happy that voters have supported the WEF parties at the local elections.

  12. Rishi Sunak is making us ever more reliant on mass immigration. Fraser Nelson. 5 May 2023.

    So net immigration is expected to stabilise at an average 250,000 a year – the equivalent to a city the size of Stoke-on-Trent – for the foreseeable future. This will cover the impact of the 200,000 now expected to sign on to disability benefit each year. Politically, it marks a line of least resistance: welfare reform is a tough, thankless task. Economically, it’s eye-wateringly expensive. Socially, it’s no way to run a country.

    You can argue (as I do) that immigration has enriched Britain and that we have good claim to be the world’s most successful melting pot. But if we are to welcome two million more over the next five years, it raises certain questions – such as where they all might live. It strengthens the case for planning reform. At the last count, the new housing stock (200,000 a year) was barely enough to keep pace with net migration (500,000 a year). More homes will now, of course, be needed – so at very least, Michael Gove might want to stop vetoing new housing schemes on the grounds that he finds them too ugly.

    Two million? Even that will prove to be a wildly optimistic total. The Third World has heard that it is Open House. Very soon the numbers will become, even for this political class, overwhelming. We are heading for a crash that will make the Soviet Union’s debacle look paltry by comparison. The breakdown will be total. Health, Social Security, Policing; all will collapse. There will be troops on the streets to try and contain the disorder. The government of the day; it doesn’t matter who, will enact emergency and then panic measures to try and stem the breakdown. It will all be in vain. The Islamic Republic of Britain will rise on the ruins of what was once the Jewel in the Crown of Western and Christian civilisation.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/04/sunaks-making-us-ever-more-reliant-on-mass-immigration/

    1. Open house, free everything, better conditions than the natives. What’s not to like?

    2. So far these migrants have been young upwardly-mobile men with the drive to push through border security and the contacts in the legal profession to consolidate their position.

      Just wait when their extended families claim the right to profit from our generosity under rules set by the Global Algorithm. It won’t be just 500,000 a year.

        1. Ever more tax, ever more borrowing.

          We’re already well pas the Laffer curve. Sadly there are plenty of thick people who think companies are responsible for higher prices.

        2. I’ve always said that we can have our welfare system or we can have unlimited immigration. We can’t have both.

    3. We are not remotely reliant on massive, uncontrolled gimmigration. It does nothing for our country. The government uses gimmigration to say that GDP is up – when per capita it is down.

      What we have a mass of is welfare. Some immigrants are happy to do the jobs the locals don’t want to do. Partly because they can’t claim them, partly because they want to work.

      If welfare were removed, and people told to provide for themselves – and very, very few cannot – then we wouldn’t need gimmigration at all. The population would recover – as the freeloaders would leave, crime would massively reduce, the population normalise, taxes fall – as people would have no ability to force Peter to pay their welfare.

      1. Not so long ago, IT was going to replace all intellectual jobs, and robots (buses, cars, vacuum cleaners) all manual jobs.
        So, why do we need another load of uneducated hands to occupy the country?

  13. Morning, all Y’all.
    Sunny again, but below zero temperatures. Must he the result of a sunny night, and, of course, glowbawl warming.

  14. Good morning all.
    A damp drizzly start after a wet rainy night with 8°C on the yard thermometer.
    A dry spell forecast for late morning then more rain with thunder & lightening!

    1. It was raining when we left the theatre last night but seems to be drying up now.

    1. Good morning BB2 and everyone.

      Is pedantry an illness?

      I looked at Mr Middelkoop’s video and read the caption and then thought: “It’s electro-mechanical, not mechanical”. (unless the machine is powered by a mainspring)

  17. Good morning all,

    A showery start at McPhee Towers, continuing until mid afternoon then a pleasant evening, wind SSW, 11℃ risng to 16℃.

    With the big day in prospect tomorrow, you can always trust Dr David Starkey to broadcast the truth. He is a national treasure. (26 minutes)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEuMQ-RXdkw&t=2s

    1. He should have a right, a left, another right, another left, and an uppercut to finish him off. That would be divine.

  18. Good morning all,

    A showery start at McPhee Towers, continuing until mid afternoon then a pleasant evening, wind SSW, 11℃ risng to 16℃.

    With the big day in prospect tomorrow, you can always trust Dr David Starkey to broadcast the truth. He is a national treasure. (26 minutes)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEuMQ-RXdkw&t=2s

  19. MB and I have been saying this for about 40 years.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/04/schizophrenia-cannabis-use-marijuana-young-men-study/

    “Almost a third of schizophrenia cases in young men triggered by cannabis use

    Heavy use of the drug described as ‘a major public health issue’ despite an increasing number of countries embracing legalisation

    4 May 2023 • 8:19pm

    Young men with a serious cannabis addiction are at increased risk of developing schizophrenia, a new study suggests.

    Experts estimate that nearly one third of cases of schizophrenia in 21 to 30-year-olds were triggered by cannabis use disorder.

    Cannabis use disorder is thought to impact around 1 in 200 people, and relates to problematic cannabis use where people cannot control their intake and suffer withdrawal symptoms if they stop taking the drug.

    A new study led by Danish researchers analysed the health records of nearly seven million people over 50 years and found a strong link between schizophrenia and serious cannabis addiction.

    As many as 30 per cent of cases of schizophrenia among men aged 21 to 30, and 15 per cent of cases in 16 to 49-year-olds, could have been prevented by preventing cannabis addiction, they estimate.

    Health concerns ‘require urgent action’

    Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness in which people appear to have lost touch with reality.

    “The entanglement of substance use disorders and mental illnesses is a major public health issue, requiring urgent action and support for people who need it,” said Dr Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

    “As access to potent cannabis products continues to expand, it is crucial that we also expand prevention, screening, and treatment for people who may experience mental illnesses associated with cannabis use.

    “The findings from this study are one step in that direction and can help inform decisions that health care providers may make in caring for patients, as well as decisions that individuals may make about their own cannabis use.”

    In 2015, a British study estimated that around one in four new cases of psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia could be a direct result of smoking extra-strong varieties of cannabis.

    In recent years, many countries and US states have legalised the drug, leading experts to warn that serious psychotic conditions may also increase.

    “Increases in the legalisation of cannabis over the past few decades have made it one of the most frequently-used psychoactive substances in the world, while also decreasing the public’s perception of its harm,” said Dr Carsten Hjorthøj, who researches the link between schizophrenia and cannabis consumption at the University of Copenhagen.

    “This study adds to our growing understanding that cannabis use is not harmless, and that risks are not fixed at one point in time.”

    The authors called for further research to understand why young men seemed more vulnerable to schizophrenia from heavy cannabis use compared with women.

    The study was led by scientists at the Copenhagen Research Center for Mental Health at Copenhagen University Hospital, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, within the US Department of Health.

    The new research was published in the journal Psychological Medicine.”

    1. While I am quite prepared to believe this the correlation is not causation. It could be equivalent to saying that paracetomol causes headaches because the people who use it have headaches.

      Were these users showing signs of schizophrenia before they began puffing? If that is not included in the study, I remain uncommitted one way or the other.

      1. It certainly makes them apathetic and they sink into depression and then more drugs.

        1. Absolutely. It is harmful in more ways than the health of the individual – the criminality it drives is shocking and under-reported.

          But we need to report things correctly.

      2. Whether prolonged and excessive cannabis causes mental illness or merely exacerbates an existing condition is immaterial. Either was the cost to society is massive and needs to be tightly controlled and discouraged.

        1. I agree it is a harmful habit – both socially and personally – see my answer to Jules below.

          But it is absolutely endemic and a report which does not establish causality while it reproves use and implies causality simply sets up another bogey-man to attack ineffectively.

          If it causes schizophrenia, we need to know that rigorously, and why and how to avoid parallel substances that also do this.

          I take CBD oil for my arthritis. It is very effective. But if cannaboids are demonised without proper cause I may be driven to medically approved and incidentally more expensive treatments.

          After the past three years of medical shenanigans I am just extremely wary.

          1. I’ve never tried CBD oil and my arthritis is getting worse. Where do you get yours from and is it rubbed on, swallowed or what? Obviously doesn’t get dished out by the NHS.

          3. Thanks, I found that while searching. Do you use it, and have you found it does some good?

          4. I don’t have arthritis but i have used it when other pains were interrupting my sleep.

          5. I get mine from Holland and Barrett.
            There are creams which are inexpensive and vials with pipettes.
            These do appear dear but as you only need a few drops each day its not that much over time and the benefits are clear.

          7. I have to say I tried it and it did nothing to ease my arthritis at all. I found rosehip worked better.

          8. We’re all different. But don’t tell the Left. It’s probably racist or sexist of phobic or something.

          10. It is also possible you are eating something particularly inflamtory – maybe look at your sugar intake – including lactose and dextrose which are additives in a log of other foods.

      3. It is a difficult point.
        1. Do young males take greater risks than females?
        2. Do their minds and bodies react differently? It is becoming apparent that drug doses need to be adjusted according to the patient’s sex.
        3. Do those that become schizophrenic already have the gene and the cannabis triggers a latent condition?

        1. 1. Yes. See motorcycle riders, for example.
          2. Probably
          3. Dunno.

        2. All relevant questions that need addressing.
          I’ve known boys that smoked a lot without much harm besides apathy and others who smoke little and went round the twist.
          I also know one or two who smoked a lot and functioned quite normally.
          My problem is that medical research is set up to find lucrative solutions to problems.
          This does not eliminate results from credibility but they should require robust verification from people who stand to gain nothing either way.

    2. I had many psychotic unemployable clients when I worked at the Jobcentre. Most of them were addicts.

    3. In my misspent youth i had an occasional smoke at weekends. I watched as a friend’s personality completely changed from easy going to angry all the time. I believe there is a direct link.

    4. Our local Schizophrenic Society have just found out they only have half the number of members it thought it had

        1. That’s why Shakespeare wrote in ink. He couldn’t make his mind up which pencil to use.

          1. Ink? Shirley he used a word processor…{:¬)) Or got monkeys to type it up for him.

          2. Said Hamlet to Ophelia
            I’ll pen a line for thee,
            What kind of pencil shall I use?
            2B or not 2B.

  21. What Brian Jones mosses out is that, after dropping off the recipe to be made up by Messrs Lea & Perrins, the former Indian Veteran never returned to pick up his order.
    To this day his identity is a mystery.

    SIR – The simple solution to the unpalatable Coronation quiche (Letters, May 4) is to douse it heavily with that most British of condiments – Worcestershire sauce.

    William Lyons
    Lincoln

    Bryan Jones
    3 MIN AGO
    William Lyons, not sure how British Lea and Perrin’s Worcestershire sauce is considering it was first made from a recipe brought back from India. It was made at the L&P chemists’ shop in Broad Street, in Worcester, but tasted foul. Stored in the basement it had matured after many months and had become palatable.

  22. Did anyone watch the TV prog about the military tailors? Brilliant. These days it was SO good to see people for whom only the very best will do.

    And the presenter johnny did not intrude too much.

      1. Good morning, Robert. 95% thank you. The tablets are beginning to work.

    2. Good morning Bill

      So pleased you are feeling more comfortable today.

      Re the prog you watched last night, which TV station ?

      Moh ‘s RN uniforms were made to measure by Gieves and Hawkes.

  24. Fights break out between Russian and Ukrainian delegates at meeting in Turkey. 5 May 2023.

    Turkish parliamentarian forced to suspend meeting after both took exception to each other’s flags and insignia

    Hopes that the conflict between the two countries could be put aside were dashed, however, when a Russian representative took exception to his Ukrainian counterpart waving his country’s distinctive yellow and blue flag.

    Clutching paperwork in one hand he marched across the foyer, ripped the flag away and then marched briskly off. The Ukrainian representative objected and gave chase.

    Throwing punches he snatched the flag back. He was restrained by others present, who implored “no fight”. Somebody out of camera range shouted, “It’s our flag”. At the same event members of the Ukrainian delegation stormed into the meeting and unfurled their flag while a Russian delegate was speaking.

    What really happened here is that a Russian delegate Olga Timofeeva was giving an interview via her own smart phone with the meetings logo as a backdrop. The Ukie stepped into it and started waving his flag behind her. Another Russian delegate walked up and tore it down. Cue confused fight.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/05/04/ukraine-russia-black-sea-delegates-fight/

  25. Good morning all

    Wet and very wet here.

    I have just had an email from my younger sister , my siblings live in South Africa , they have lived out there since 1967.

    “For the English family, we have up to 10 hours a day with no electricity –
    called loadshedding – and our is expected at 12:00 tomorrow for two hours,
    just when the actual coronation is due to take place (we’re an hour ahead of
    you). It’s different in all parts of the country and a daily schedule is
    published which often changes at the last minute.”

    1. Coming here soon. We will, of course, be told it is our fault for not allowing the government to ‘do more’ (waste our money) on ‘climate change’.

    2. I don’t know how the SA economy is able to function under such circumstances. I used to work for a wealth management company in Southampton that was a subsidiary of an SA company whose computer centre was in Cape Town. The number of software deployment weekends that had to be cancelled due to power availability was absurd. Backup generators didn’t seem to be abler to manage the gaps adequately.

    3. How do they manage with pretty essential things, like refrigerators and freezers?

  26. SIR — The NHS is a monopoly employer of junior doctors. All have a set pay scale, so free labour-market forces do not apply, and there is an inequality of bargaining power. This, together with the vocational nature of medicine and the paramountcy of patient safety, has enabled the Government to adopt a “take it or leave it” approach for decades, such that junior doctors are now comparatively underpaid.

    It is hardly surprising that some prefer to leave to see how their talents are valued in private employment, or to work abroad (“Junior doctors lured to Australia with £130,000 a year salary and 20 days off a month”, report, May 4), leading to further reductions in the supply of NHS doctors.

    The public may be better served by striking doctors who show a desire for a safer, fairer, workable health service, than by doctors who choose to leave it.

    Dr Anthony Barton
    Solicitor and medical practitioner London N1

    Solicitor and medical practitioner, Tone?
    Is one stipend not enough for you, or do you take great glee at depriving another chap of a job?

    1. If doctors want to work in a market, with market wages then the NHS must be reformed to work that way. Instead of the state taking 12% of our income and 13 % of our employer’s contribution the public will have to choose from a range of private insurers, to present that when seeking medical treatment.

      They’ll find that health insurance is vastly cheaper than under the NHS, and then they’ll start demanding better outcomes. The idea of a waiting list is anathema in such systems.

    2. If doctors want to work in a market, with market wages then the NHS must be reformed to work that way. Instead of the state taking 12% of our income and 13 % of our employer’s contribution the public will have to choose from a rang of private insurers, to present that when seeking medical treatment.

      They’ll find that health insurance is vastly cheaper than under the NHS, and then they’ll start demanding better outcomes. The idea of a waiting list is anathema in such systems.

    4. My previous GP was a former barrister (in fact, quite embarrassingly when I went to see him for a – hem – rather delicately positioned complaint I found out that he knew my then boyfriend quite well. I said to him “well at least you can tell E. that you have seen parts of me that he never will”).

      He later became Westminster Coroner – it’s not that unusual.

  27. SIR — The NHS is a monopoly employer of junior doctors. All have a set pay scale, so free labour-market forces do not apply, and there is an inequality of bargaining power. This, together with the vocational nature of medicine and the paramountcy of patient safety, has enabled the Government to adopt a “take it or leave it” approach for decades, such that junior doctors are now comparatively underpaid.

    It is hardly surprising that some prefer to leave to see how their talents are valued in private employment, or to work abroad (“Junior doctors lured to Australia with £130,000 a year salary and 20 days off a month”, report, May 4), leading to further reductions in the supply of NHS doctors.

    The public may be better served by striking doctors who show a desire for a safer, fairer, workable health service, than by doctors who choose to leave it.

    Dr Anthony Barton
    Solicitor and medical practitioner London N1

    Solicitor and medical practitioner, Tone?
    Is one stipend not enough for you, or do you take great glee at depriving another chap of a job?

  28. SIR – After 23 years of being brought up in Lancashire (Letters, May 3), in 1971 I moved to the Isle of Wight.

    Fearing I wouldn’t be understood, I used my best newscaster English accent, only to be met with many comments such as: “You’re from up North, aren’t you?” Or even worse: “Are you from Yorkshire?”

    To rub salt into the wound, when I returned home for a holiday after six months I was told I was talking posh.

    John Preston
    Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire

    SIR – Bolton accents (Letters, May 3) must be very easily detected.

    In the 1960s I caught the train from Bolton to attend an interview in Manchester. The chap next in line to me started chatting and, before the usual “Where are you from?”, we exchanged a couple of sentences. He quickly interrupted: “You’re from Bolton, aren’t you? I can tell that accent.” It’s barely 15 miles to central Manchester from Bolton.

    Frank Curwood
    Lancaster

    I first came across the proper Lancashire dialect (i.e. not ‘Manc’ or ‘Scouse’) in 1981 when I first visited the gorgeous city of Lancaster. I was invited into the home of a lovely elderly couple and I remember sitting on their sofa, cup of tea in hand, mesmerised, listening to the old chap’s warm Lancastrian vowels. His “luke in a cukery buke” (“look in a cookery book”) has remained with me.

    2. Sunak will blame Boris, then Truss. He won’t accept responsibility. He won’t even understand why it is his fault. He will say that what they are doing is working, that he is marvellous and that we should hike taxes even more.

  31. Good morning Nottlers, it’s an overcast and breezy morning on the Costa Clyde. I’ve got five and a half hours of tarmac ahead of me as I head to Walsall for my former RAF buddy’s 60th bbq celebration, which is tomorrow. Today, being the Cinco de Mayo, we shall be having a glass…or two, of decent tequila.

    I hope your weekend will be as pleasant.

    2. Enjoy your reunion – ours are always great (but full of old people)

  32. SIR – Letters on how to drink whisky bring to mind Charles Ryder on a transatlantic liner in Brideshead Revisited, abjuring the proffered iced water for his whisky, and being given by the steward a pitcher of boiling water and a pitcher of iced so as to be able to add it lukewarm: “I’ll remember that’s how you take it, sir.”

    Nothing seems to have improved.

    Dr Julian Critchlow
    Ditcham, Hampshire

    “Pitcher”, Doc Julian? Are you sure?
    In the UK we have jugs. Would Evelyn Waugh really use such a blatant Americanism?

    Over to our resident Waugh correspondent, Rastaman, to elucidate.

    1. “Jugs” is the word in the text I have, Grizz.

      Was not Critchlow a Conservative MP, once? Ignorant now as he was then…{:¬))

      1. Thanks, Billy.

        I don’t know about him being an MP. A Google search has him as the head of a lot of obscure quangos with a finger in a number of pies.

        2. Good morning, Grizzly

          I always though the pitcher was the bowler in the American game of rounders which they call baseball.

          1. The difference between a bowler in cricket and a pitcher in baseball is the fact that a pitcher chucks the ball … something that a bowler is forbidden from doing in accordance with the laws of the sport.

    1. So Mike will be the first black trannie in the White House and the domestic decline and international warmongering will continue.

      1. That would give them eight more years to get the financial reset done, and then the people would be “allowed” to elect a regenerating Republican.

        I have never seen anything convincing about Michelle Obama being trans, so I think that is too serious an accusation to make about her.

  34. Ms Diane Abbott has been proved correct: there is indeed a hierarchy of racialism.

    “A ten-year-old pupil at Mill Hill School in Waterlooville, Hampshire,
    has allegedly been targeted with shocking racist abuse by children at
    school who call him “chocolate face”, sparking police action.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/04/police-market-town-primary-school-hampshire-race-row/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr

    Abuse, racist abuse, shocking racist abuse, etc.

    The BBC recently reported (or rather, did not report) on a court case in which the insults were too terrible to repeat.
    Whatever happened to sticks and stones?

    1. What I find odd is that 20 years ago this just wasn’t happening. We were, as a country, accepting of differently coloured kids and their parents. Many of us worked with them. It simply didn’t bother us. Now, 25 years later, and after a quarter of a century of massive, uncontrolled, unwanted, idle welfare grubbing useless immigrants being forced on us and now out breeding (at a rate of 5:1), of endless laws demanding we behave in a certain way, of pandering to the black looting mob… we’re returning to that racism.

      This lad shouldn’t be enduring this. It’s disgusting. It’s wrong, at every level. No, Mother, he shouldn’t be fighting back. He shouldn’t see it at all.

      But as the nation is now sick of being told to pander, is being overrun on a daily basis by criminal invaders such is only going to get worse.

      The Left have continually forced racism on us through promoting colour as a differentiator rather than – as the population was – ignoring it as irrelevant. Now we’re surrounded and are told we’re intolerant for raising the issue.

      1. I’m not sure that we are “returning” to racism, as we didn’t use to have it in the same way, as you say “it simply didn’t bother us”.

        That it bothers us now, is totally by design (aided and abetted by gullible/useful idiots).

        1. Yes, as the activists have made such an issue over it it has become one.

          A bit like a nice meal – you can choose to leave the cabbage and sprouts. When you’re force fed bricks it’s a completely differently world.

    2. -ist is used in place of -ism. It denotes a person who is an advocate or believer in a doctrine or practises an art, as in Calvinist, chemist, novelist, artist, royalist.

      “Later he was to become famous as a pacifist.”

      The idiotic terms, racism and racist, by dictionary definition show support for a particular belief, in this case race. It naturally follows that a racist is a supporter of race, but it does not define which race. It does not, however, state that is shows a hatred of (any) race.

      This is similar to how those other commonly abused suffixes, -phobe and -phobia are also routinely misused, especially in the news media. A phobia is a fear of something. Therefore a ‘transphobic’ would be frightened of transvestites, as opposed to hating them.

  35. Ms Diane Abbott has been proved correct: there is indeed a hierarchy of racialism.

    “A ten-year-old pupil at Mill Hill School in Waterlooville, Hampshire,
    has allegedly been targeted with shocking racist abuse by children at
    school who call him “chocolate face”, sparking police action.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/04/police-market-town-primary-school-hampshire-race-row/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr

    Abuse, racist abuse, shocking racist abuse, etc.

    The BBC recently reported (or rather, did not report) on a court case in which the insults were too terrible to repeat.
    Whatever happened to sticks and stones?

  36. Well, after an exciting evening and night I’m ready to face the day. Old man had an ECG at the hospital yesterday morning and took a copy of the readout to the GP at about midday. They’d told him that all looked fine. At 5pm he got a call from the GP asking about the result. You’ve guessed – the bluddy dragons on the desk hadn’t passed it on! She checked the printout, said there was anomaly and that she would then phone the cardiologist right then, and discuss the next step. True to her word, she phoned back at 6.15 and asked OM to go to the CAU at Forth Valley for more tests! Unbelievable! They appear to be operating 24/7!
    Anyway, he finally arrived home at 2.30am, and is still asleep! I haven’t told him that poor old Hector fell down stairs when he tried to get to bed! At least some progress seems to be happening!

    2. Oh dear, Sorry to hear that Sue hope he’s ok (and Hector of course) and the results are nothing to be concerned about. Give him my best

    3. Keep in there, dear. You are being a tower of strength for you all. xxx

    4. KBO. Isn’t it amazing that the envy of the world can fail at the most basic level – of a receptionist passing important info to the doctor. In any other business, the person would be sacked – or at least given a final warning.

      1. Astounding innit! And all this action occurred because he saw a different GP, who doesn’t just ‘treat and forget’!
        Thanks for the support!

    5. Sheesh. When our sons were running their company, they learnt to recheck almost everything.
      And that was in the private sector BC (before convid)!
      KBO, Mon Brave.

  37. Morning all 🙂😉
    Very grey in fact very dark it’s been just chucking down with rain. Oh dear.
    Oh I did eventually get a rather terse and arrogant reply yesterday to my previous email from cardiology. It tells me that I have to get in touch with the appropriate department to arrange my own appointment. Well we will see about that !

    1. Going on the principle of if you want something done, do it yourself, I’d say being able to arrange your own appointment is an advantage!

      1. I did try last week but got absolutely no where.
        I’ve just spent 3 hours writing emails and trying to ring people I was number 17 in the call queue………..

  38. Brace yourselves, the banking crisis is just getting started. 5 may 2023.

    If Jamie Dimon was pondering a career change as a fortune-teller, he’d be wise to stick to the day job. On the other hand, if someone of Dimon’s stature could be so wrong about the banking turmoil that continues to sweep across the US, a cynic might ask whether he was still the right person to be running one of the world’s largest financial institutions, particularly when that organisation is right at the centre of Government-led efforts to prop up the whole system.

    Having ridden to the rescue of California lender First Republic over the weekend, JP Morgan’s superstar boss had a message for financial markets: its shotgun takeover of First Republic heralded the end of the crisis. He should know better than to be drawn into the realms of speculation about things he has no control of but then Wall Street is so deferential to figures like Dimon that they start to believe they can walk on water.

    Still, the speed with which Dimon’s words have come back to haunt him comes as a shock. A mere 48 hours later, and it looked as though the game was up for yet another regional American bank – the fourth since the end of March.

    Yes it has all the reminiscences of 2008.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/05/banking-crisis-pacwest-jpmorgan-jamie-dimon/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr

    1. Jamie Dimon knows exactly what he is talking about, and this is another mainstream media keep-the-people-stupid article!
      Last year, Jamie Dimon warned that a hurricane was coming to the banking system. They appear to be trying to shut down smaller banks, because those are the companies that sponsor politicians, who would then lobby on behalf of the smaller banks against a central bank digital currency.

      It’s much worse than 2008. In 2008, the dollar died, and has been on life support ever since. We’re now coming to the end game, the point at which they can’t keep this debt system going any more. Hence the need for all sorts of convincing distractions – deadly plagues that can be used as a handy excuse for massive money printing and a stock market crash – CBDCs – wars – climate lockdowns to control the proletariat’s need for money etc etc.

    2. Americans thought they could escape the banking giants by putting their money into small credit unions and regional community banks. It looks now as if those independent competitors are being taken down one by one. They were always kept out of the Swift system so relied on the big boys to act as intermediaries in order to do international business anyway. The little people are to be left no alternative but central banking?

  39. The Tories are determined on achieving ‘Net Zero’ in the shortest time possible. Judging by the results of yesterday’s election they will be finished off much sooner than they thought possible. The only consolation might be that they begin to act on the stupid policies; mass immigration, EVs, 15 Minute cities, EU laws, support for EU and American expansion, and eco-nonsense, for a start.

      1. They will have lost one thousand or more seats yesterday and, if they don’t change, there won’t be an alternative.

        As an aside, the DJ Pete Murray has just been a guest of Wirsty Kark(sic) on The Reunion, forty years after his programme was dumped by the BBC for saying “A vote for Labour is a vote for communism. May God have mercy on your soul if you don’t vote Conservative”.

  41. Hahaha huge consequences for the Conservatives in local elections. Perhaps they should have taken notice and should stopped the boats.

    1. Colchester has remained the same.
      Although the Cons are still the largest party, the ABC Party will still be able to coalesce and install more planters and bike lanes. Oh, and strange large multi-coloured spots in the roads approaching schools.

  42. Well – that was painless. As the old oil tank has been cut up and removed (a very nasty job for the chaps who had to do it), we now have a larger and handy space to be refilled with stuff… We needed storage units. Looked on freecycle etc – zilch. So bit the bullet ad bought cheap and nasty ones from B&Q. They’ll do the needful. Went online last evening and ordered “click and collect”. Went in just now – and the stuff was ready and waiting on a trolley. AND – for some bizarre reason – buying this way they give a £5 price reduction. Can’t work out the logic…

    Just the ticket for the wet weekend ahead to sort out the tank room and get stuff back and out of the way.

    1. What storage units did you buy from B&Q?
      I’m looking for 2 or 3 basic shelves/cubes to store lever arch files in the attic.
      Cheap and nasty is fine; I don’t hang around in the attic to appreciate its aesthetics.

    2. Still bone-dry, sunny and clear blue skies here. This is tempered, somewhat, today by a biting sharp easterly!

  43. Between June 1961 and December 2012 there were five Archbishops of Canterbury: Michael Ramsey; Donald Coggan; Robert Runcie; George Carey and Rowan Williams. Each one averaging a (consecutive) ten-year period in office.

    Not one of them officiated at a Coronation.

    1. This reminds me of the story of the old crone in her 90s who was introduced to the new vicar.

      “I have lived all my life in this village and now, with you, I have seen 8 new vicars – each one worse than the one before!”

    2. I can’t help remembering the coronation scene in the Rowan Atkinson film “Johnny English”.

  44. Good morning, all.

    Remember these? Seems like an age ago but the odd, and they really must be odd, one pops up here and there.
    This one is Al-Beeb’s misinformation guru: probably photographed back in the day when thousands were dying in the streets and care homes were safe havens for the old, sick and immuno-compromised.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b4c24d511c75b849d0cf122e8df0e2834ed2be27a71347abafc4372bd6ad34fb.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1a0aa86f70b87cc607a1320bd7836474485798217a8ade64cab22bc0a20a3fac.png

        1. I think people like her are so stupid that they care more about belonging to the herd than about the truth.

  45. Every day at breakfast I announce I’m going for a jog, and then I don’t.

    it’s my longest running joke.

    1. Ogga does have a point.

      Morning Sue. Yes. That’s the reason I don’t get onto him. It’s unpalatable but it’s true!

    2. Ogga does have a point.

      Morning Sue. Yes. That’s the reason I don’t get onto him. It’s unpalatable but it’s true!

    3. Indeed.
      I just can’t sum up more than a faint nausea at this morning’s political news. About one in a hundred of those elected will have the smallest desire to protect their areas from the 15 minute city blight, and they will get the Andrew Bridgen treatment. Our country is a horrible, horrible place at the moment.

      1. Jill thelass wrote a comment yesterday. http://disq.us/p/2u5x2tz

        I sometimes find the negative comments too much, so I take a break every now and then!

        I know exactly what she means. It’s getting to me as well. I’m actually quite jumpy under a superficial calm and of course having had depression I recognise the lead up signs. I think that if it weren’t necessary that the truth should at least appear somewhere I would probably take a very long break myself.

        1. John Milton wrote L’ Allegro and Il Penseroso which reflect two different sides of human nature.

          ‘In contrast to its companion poem, “L’ Allegro,” which celebrates mirth, the beauties of rural scenery, and urban vitality, “Il Penseroso” invokes the goddess Melancholy and describes the satisfactions of solitude, music, epic poetry, tragic drama, and the meditative life in general.’

          Just as a valetudinarian – such as Emma Woodhouse’s father – enjoys taking a gloomy outlook on health and happiness so the homonymous P.G. Wodehouse celebrated joy, vitality and mirth.

          Jeremiah of the Old Testament was like Sergeant Frazer – a prophet of doom.

          1. Afternoon Richard. My own favourite, and whose name I originally intended to use, is Cassandra whose prophecies were always ignored. It is sobering to reflect that Homer was able to write about her and her condition 3000 years ago which tells you something of the perpetuity of human nature.

          2. Rastus, as I didn’t know the meaning of “hominymous” I looked it up in the dictionary (how old fashioned!) and found “homonymous” instead. I’m not being pedantic just wasn’t sure.

            Afternoon all btw.

          3. I stand and sit corrected – I am not Typo Tastey for nothing.

          5. Handel wrote a lovely setting for “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato”.

        2. Sorry to spread my negative feelings on this!
          I am normally more positive, because I do see an end in sight to this tyranny. And there is a huge gap between the tyrants’ plans and a successful implementation anyway. The opposition to 15 minute cities won’t come from the obedient little drones in the Council, it will come from ordinary people.

          1. Believe it’s already started, with vandalism of the blockades.

    4. Unfortunately, there were no elections for Oxford City Council…

    5. Unfortunately, many of our population ARE probably too stupid/dumbed down to have the vote. Or of foreign extraction with foreign religious or other motivating factors behind their votes. But we can’t do anything about it – the system rolls on.

      (Like the insults hurled at David Starkey for daring to say that Sunak came from a different culture to us and that this showed in the lack of government interest in the Coronation. No, Sunak is NOT as English as the next Englishperson, neither does he have the same moral and ideological background. And why should we “celebrate our wonderful diverse society”? Diversity has not made our society better, happier or more worthwhile. On the contrary.)

      Beam me back, Scottie.

  47. 374121+ up ticks,

    Local election results live: Starmer claims Labour on course for Commons majority

    The only difference the mentally retarded have voted for now is more, but a lower class, of paedophile if lab is in a p position of power.

  48. Simon Heffer: How Charles mastered the art of being King
    The Coronation is a moment of great significance for the nation, the institution of monarchy – and for our Sovereign himself
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2023/05/05/king-charles-iii-coronation-mastered-art-simon-heffer/

    This is an extremely premature judgement by Heffer! Give the chap a chance to show how bad a king he is – he has already made a start with a series of bad judgements about, global warming and the history of colonisation and slavery. He seems to be more in tune with the woke view that Britain is racist and should hang its head in shame than being a proud and patriotic head of its state.

    It will, to borrow the Duke of Wellington’s comment about Waterloo, ‘A damned nice thing—the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’ as to whether the monarchy will survive its latest King.

    Percival Wrattstrangler’s BTL

    I am in favour of the monarchy but the current king lacks all common sense and good judgement. His treatment of two of his mother’s closest friends, Susan Hussey and Angela Kelly, show that he has a nasty mean streak and this mean streak does not conceal the fact that he is a thoroughly weak man as his inability to deal with his younger son shows.

    His obsession with the great Climate Change Lie and his cosying up to the WEF indicate that he will be incapable of keeping clear of politics as he should.

    As a supporter of the monarchy I hope that the institution will survive his reign – after all we have had bad kings in the past. However I cannot say I am over confident that it will.

    1. To be fair Rastus, I think the Angela Kelly thing was just pot-stirring by the Daily Mail. He has provided a house for her – he would be stupid not to. She’s 71, I really can’t imagine that she wants to spend any more time at work! And she knew in advance that her job was only for the lifetime of HM.

      1. Maybe MB and my antennae are too finely tuned.
        We do wonder if Kelly overstepped the mark and became too controlling of Her Maj. The Queen was old and lonely – a combination of convid restrictions and Prince Philip dying left her vulnerable. The appalling behaviour of Harry and Megain must have been a huge strain on her – particularly as we now know she was suffering from bone cancer.
        We always wondered about HM giving Kelly permission to write a book – even on such an anodyne subject as clothes. It could easily have led to ‘mission creep’ and the publishers would have pushed for ‘revelations’.

        1. I think AK had to be tough to do her job, i.e. protecting HM’s interests. In a very snooty court, as a working class woman, she had to keep her end up. The fact that HM trusted her (and she did have many other people around her to talk to and protect her interests), speaks in AK’s favour, I think. We can’t really know, but my gut feeling is that she is that rare person who is capable of being tough but honest.
          She did a wonderful job of turning an old lady in her eighties and nineties out with perfect style, time after time.

        2. I can’t help but sympathise with the late HM. I too am old, lonely and isolated so I wouldn’t be surprised if she was manipulated toward something she wanted. Companionship, Interesting conversation and a feeling of belonging.

  49. ‘Morning All

    That joke book gets about………

    Blast.

    Just spent £300 on a limousine and discovered that the fee doesn’t include a driver

    Can’t believe I’ve spent all that money and I have nothing to chauffeur it.

    2. Bloody science getting in the way of dogma.
      Will be totally ignored/buried by dumb politicians and the media.

    3. He’s made the classic mistake of bringing a knife to a gun fight. The Left *know* it’s a lie. They don’t care. Climate change is a tax and power scam. Nothing else. It is a con trick. They know it, we know it. It is simply another scaremongering tactic to force their ideology.

    4. I’ll have a little quibble about some of this. I am sceptical about any claims to have calculated with accuracy temperatures from the past where no meteorological observations are available. From historical records of human activity we know that there have been rises and falls in roughly 450-year cycles going back to before the Roman occupation but we cannot know with any certainty the magnitude i.e. we have qualitative evidence but not quantitative. The most important point made is right at the end, which is that meteorological records started in 1875 (in Greenland, presumably). No one should make precise claims for temperature variations on the basis records that go back only a century and a half.

    1. You’d think the Bud Lite fiasco might have given them some concerns, but it seems not!!

      1. The only conclusion is that they don’t want fighting men in the US armed forces.

        1. Fighting men belong in rubber dinghies – or in the US, walking across the southern border.

    1. I have been wondering where he has got to. Last commented on Friday 24th March.

      Horace is another that used to be prolific but has disappeared. Also much missed is Duncan.

          2. Oh Sue! I had Tressy! My grandfather made a fabulous wardrobe and my Mum, who was a great dressmaker, filled it with beautiful Dior inspired suits, a pleated kilt, trousers and tops – all Tressy-sized! And I’m so impressed you still have her in such great condition! ‘Her hair grows’ Do you still have the key?

          3. Wow! Yes (and the box) but something rattles in her tummy and the key no longer works.

          4. Ah! That would be the button you pressed to ‘grow ‘ her hair!

          5. One Christmas I played a trick on my youngest brother (he was about ten at the time). I had bought a ‘Tiny Tears’ doll for my infant niece; however, before I gave it to her I parcelled it up as a present for my brother. The look of confusion and anger on his face as he opened it was priceless. I quickly re-parcelled it for my niece and then gave him his proper present. This set the precedent for many years of practical jokes played between us over the years.

    3. Have just spoken to him. He’s fine. Wanted a rest. Coming to lunch soon.

      2. Thanks. Do you remember that small chain of restaurants that had one by the canal?

        1. Don’t remember. He’s probably going to come to the Crofton Beam Engines and we’ll have lunch at The Swan, Wilton.

  54. And the heavy rain has started, including hailstones!
    At least it stayed dry for my trip to Matlock!

    1. If we take culture as shared heritage, values and norms no, Sunak doesn’t share them. Nor does ANY MP. They have an entirely opposite view on this country to the citizen. Same for the civil service, same for Left wing hate groups like the fascist antifa, stonewall and hate not hope.

      Theirs is a bureaucratic perspective where statism must be applied to achieve personal end goals.

      1. 374121+ up ticks.

        Afternoon W,

        The whole / total /lab/lib/con current ukip are a lefties mass controlled / uncontrolled / paedophile umbrella coalition. The politico’s are less to blame the pays good & the hours ain’t bad, than the richard head voters who once again
        are revving up and going deeper into the shite.

        Surely the voting returns are showing it can only be the dangerous idiocy element and anti Brit foreigners who are voting for the coalition.

    2. They’ve turned it into being about race, but he is an international citizen with his foreign wife, billionaire in-laws and homes all over the globe.

      1. They turn everything into being about race – when they haven’t got any legitimate peg to hang their gripe on.

        Sunak will be off the minute he has achieved more WEF-instigated orders. Perish the thought that he and his family would actually suffer what he wants to inflict on us.

        1. That’s my feeling too. This is just a temporary assignment for the Sunaks.

      2. They turn everything into being about race – when they haven’t got any legitimate peg to hang their gripe on.

        Sunak will be off the minute he has achieved more WEF-instigated orders. Perish the thought that he and his family would actually suffer what he wants to inflict on us.

    3. Senior Conservative MPs accused the 78-year-old historian of making derogatory references to the Prime Minister’s Hindu faith and British Indian descent.

      It will come as no surprise (I hope) to Nottlers that he said nothing of the kind!

      1. Many of the critics of DS’s perfectly fair comments are – ehm – obviously of diverse descent themselves (is that because so may of them are in positions of power nowadays?) Others are just toadying tw*ts who are happy to run our country into the ground. They may glory in our wonderful diversity – it just isn’t turning out to be very wonderful for us and our country.

        1. Nice idea, William! Thank you, but I’m not very techie! And the grandchildren aren’t about! 😄

          2. Thanks William! I’ve done that and downloaded it but I don’t know where it is!!

          4. Found it! I have a new icon on my header! See phot above. Thanks again!

  58. Rain, hail and thunder and lightning here at the moment. Apple blossom at risk!

  60. Another conspiracy theory comes to life.

    On this weekends agenda at the liberal party convention in Ottawa is a motion to enforce fifteen minute city restrictions across Canada.

    Maybe enforce the limit there and then. Even if they lived in ottawa, half of the feckers wouldn’t be able to get home

  61. 374121+ u/p ticks,

    Condemned in four words ,

    Gerard Batten
    @gjb2021
    ·
    3h
    I am a life-long believer in the English Constitutional Monarchy. The Monarch is the pyhsical embodiment of the Constitution, & its defender – & thereby the ultimate defender of the People.

    King Charles has already nailed his colours to the WEF’s mast. The WEF, & the powers it represents, is the greatest enemy of people everywhere.

    Sadly, I won’t be celebrating tomorrow’s Coronation, & the Monarchy may struggle to survive the Woke Windsors.

    Great Reset | HRH Prince of Wales | WE HAVE NO ALTERNATIVE

    The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and o…

    https://gettr.com/post/p2g88xm5ecf

  62. My neighbour was hanging out some washing the other day when she heard a strange noise and saw something fall from a tree at the edge of my meadow. It landed with a large thud. She thought it may have been a bird but it turned out to be a large and very heavy birds nest. It looks like a magpie’s nest. There are four of them here as I write, stealing the cat food and squabbling amongst themselves on the front lawn.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bdb56957deffb9cbbaa747b7720eb1ed3ab274c238b81ba4e31265d8a67862a9.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/95bb290bb81f97465cecee5752227dd16cc0381be682f5b3815f5bb12491b6aa.jpg

    Placed by the tree it may have fallen out of, then next to some flower pots.

  63. Why I fled socialist Britain for the great state of Mississippi. 5 May 2023.

    Faced with natural disaster, Mississippians recognised it as such. There was no blaming officialdom or insistence that remote officials do something about it.

    Instead, ordinary people made extraordinary efforts to help those that had lost their homes. Churches rallied around. Civic clubs and others sent supplies to those impacted. One chap I talked with at the other end of the state told me how he had driven to the area affected, found a person who had lost his home, and made it his – and his Rotary Club’s – responsibility to rebuild it.

    My friend Douglas Murray once told me: “Americans don’t sit around waiting for the cavalry to arrive. They know that they are the cavalry – and act.” I did not understand what he meant at the time, but I do now.

    This sort of response was once common in the UK. It’s called self-reliance. Socialism has killed it off!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/05/america-better-than-socialist-britain/

    1. The frontier spirit lives – and is much maligned by the wokies? I just made the mistake of googling the original inhabitants of Mississippi. The offwiththeirgoolies, tapiocas and chihuahuas by the looks of it.

      “Up into the 1700s, local tribes included the Acolapissa, Biloxi and Pascagoula tribes on the Gulf Coast; the Bayougoula, Houma and Natchez tribes on the lower Mississippi; and the Chakchiuma, lbitoupa, Koroa, Ofogoula, Taposa, Tiou, Tunica and Yazoo tribes on the Yazoo River in the Mississippi Delta”.

    2. The same principle applies to defence – and the Second Amendment.
      Don’t look to the government to save you and yours, sort it out yourselves.

  64. ‘There should be no place in female sports for male-born athletes’
    From Austin Killip winning the Women’s Tour of Gila to the Kremlin drone attack – here are the most talked about news topics this week
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/05/no-place-in-female-sports-for-male-born-athletes/

    BTL

    At the beginning of each term at my boarding public school we had to have a check-up to see if we had any fungal infections such as athletes’ foot. This entailed taking one’s socks off and showing the school doctor and the san sister that all the spaces between our toes were free of fungus and then we had to take off our shirts and raise our arms to show that our armpits were also free of tinea infection.

    The final part of the test required that we undid our trousers, pulled down our pants and raised our scrotums to show that we had not been struck by the the dreaded tinea cruris, or even worse – thrush or VD. This inspection was, predictably known as the balls up.

    Before competing in sports events perhaps all the competing women should have to do what we did in order to show that there was nothing under their pants that should not have been there.

  65. Can somebody please explain the following? In the DM on the front page it has a snippet “I’m dating a man who earns ten times less than I do”. So, say she earns £500,000 as the example, how much does he earn? Is it one tenth or what?

    1. Afternoon vw. One assumes that she is numerically illiterate and that it is indeed one tenth.

  66. The BBC has again raised the issue of the relevance of the UK Monarchy.

    Surely it was all settled by the people back in 1646:

    Charles surrendered to the Scots in 1646 and was handed over to Oliver Cromwell’s forces and imprisoned on the Isle of Wight and then tried in Westminster Hall. On 30th January he was beheaded in Whitehall outside the Banqueting House..

    https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/royals/charles-i

    From then on, after the people trashed all the coronation regalia, the ceremonial pageantries were passed down through subsequent generations and exist to this day as a commemoration and reminder to us all what a silly King Charles I was after messing around with the business in parliament. 🤔

    1. King Charles I dissolved Parliament several times and decided to govern without it. Now if only the current King wasn’t in with the WEF, WHO, Net Zero etc, and had some common sense, that might not be unpopular at all.

  67. The BBC has again raised the issue of the relevance of the UK Monarchy.

    Surely it was all settled by the people back in 1646:

    Charles surrendered to the Scots in 1646 and was handed over to Oliver Cromwell’s forces and imprisoned on the Isle of Wight and then tried in Westminster Hall. On 30th January he was beheaded in Whitehall outside the Banqueting House..

    https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/royals/charles-i

    From then on, after the people trashed all the coronation regalia, the ceremonial pageantries were passed down through subsequent generations and exist to this day as a commemoration and reminder to us all what a silly King Charles I was after messing around with the business in parliament. 🤔

  69. Popularity is a strange thing. Often it is irrational and unfair. Most of us find some people attractive at first sight and others not attractive at all; it is not necessarily a physically empathic thing – indeed it may sound paradoxical but some unattractive people are more attractive to us than attractive people are!

    Poor old Charles – when he was a boy everybody preferred his sister, Anne (they still do); when he married Diana everybody preferred the Princess of Wales (they still do); throughout his adult life everybody preferred his mother (and they always will) and then, at last, he found a woman whom nobody liked.

    But after a few years people discovered that Camilla was a jolly and humorous woman and now everyone prefers her to her husband.

    Poor old Charles – he had a remarkable talent for making people always prefer someone else to him and there is probably absolutely nothing he can do about it.

    1. Well, he could stop being a bad science supporter, member of the WEF and generally ‘woke’ eedjit, and shouldn’t have married someone he didn’t want to marry. For a start.

    2. Charles is an idiot who thinks himself a noble king. He is a nincompoop, always was and always will be.

      His association with a medley of prize supposedly intellectual fools and undesirables speaks volumes. Jimmy Saville was a pal of his. Just bad judgement over and over.

      The climate bollocks and support of WEF condemn the clown to the circus of life. I have no desire to pledge allegiance to the oaf. He cares only about himself, the rest is a constructive pretence.

  70. So many people have no idea about what is being planned by their governments. Try telling them and be on the end of, at best, rolled eyes, or at worst, abuse. Believing that governments are there to help is a fallacy, that train left the station many years ago.
    Governments rely on the masses’ belief that they, the government, are benign and not capable of evil-doing against their own population. A great many people are in for the ultimate shock of their lives.

    PS Yesterday I spoke with a neighbour, she had no idea that the Dutch farmers were in revolt over forced farm closures or that France was in turmoil or of the rise in excess deaths here and around the World.

    https://twitter.com/DVATW/status/1654433229846331392

    1. The 10 most dangerous words in the English language.
      I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.

  71. A very agreeable two hours in the garden planting out broccoli. Warm and sunny. Now about to rain (again) for an hour or so.

  72. Three married couples sit on the council together where I live, a pair of Independents in Powick, near Worcester, a pair of Tories in Baldwin, near Stourport, and a pair of Greens in Malvern.

    WIth just four more seats to declare, almost certainly the Independent/Green Coalition will remain in control of the council. The council was reduced in size by the Boundary Commission, with the heaviest losses borne by the Tories and modest losses by the Lib Dems and Independents.

    The Greens have gained in number. This may be down to John Raine, a Green rightwinger who has made West Malvern a fortress, and is keen on sustainable business and has a background in criminology. About as far from woke theology as one can get. Also comfortably home is Martin Allen in Croome, a Falklands War veteran and the Green’s own “Retired Colonel”.

    Final result in Malvern Hills. From being the largest party, the Tories now have the same number of councillors as the Greens. Independent 14, Green 7, Tory 7, Lib Dem 3.

    1. Labour controls Telford again, with an increased majority. No elections in my area.

  73. Beautiful late afternoon sunshine now.

    I have been shopping , usual food bits and pieces .

    Popped into the Poundbury branch of Waitrose .. Grand Poundbury was too posh to put up the flags despite being the massive village being the invention of our new King .

    No overkill re the food goodies either . https://www.johnlewispartnership.media/news/waitrose/22032023/-headline-news–1

    A woman chattered to me , she hadn’t picked up a basket so she was balancing eggs, pizza fruit etc , and she nearly dropped the lot.. I suggested she popped the stuff in my trolley whilst she grabbed a basket .

    When she sorted herself out , she commented that there was not much razzmatazz in Dorchester and Poundbury , buntings and flags , that sort of thing .. I commented that our house had bunting and flags , but we were the only ones in our pleasant road who had put up the flags .. as a gesture .

    She then said in a very QE2 voice .. that the Royal family was no longer Tatler and the Field , but was now sadly resembling OK magazine celebs , the Royal mystery was no longer there , too much exposure has ruined the quality and dignity that our late QE2 seemed to portray.

    1. I just can’t think what might be standing there in a couple of year’s time…

          1. It is not illegal to catch a grey squirrrel but it is illegal to set it free.
            Removing its nuts could be a solution to the infestation by this invasive breed but that would be a bit of a grey area.

          3. I’ve shot a couple over the winter, with a .177 air rifle, but don’t enjoy doing it. The food they were taking was meant for wild birds, and the local population, of grey squirrels, is rising too fast.

        2. Just bear in mind that the grey squirrel did not invade this country. It, like many, so called invasive species, was not only invited, but transported here by Brits.

  76. Very heavy rain on and off most of the day, loud thunder cracking overhead.

  80. Par Four today.

    Wordle 685 4/6
    ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨
    🟨⬜⬜🟨🟨
    🟨🟨🟨🟩🟩
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. 5 O’clock Wordle! I got a par 4 today too.

      Wordle 685 4/6

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

    3. And me.
      Wordle 685 4/6

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

      1. We try to leave out cat fluff combed off the cats, for the birds. Very warming, that fluff is.

        2. I always scatter Spartie’s loose fur round the garden after I’ve brushed him.

        1. At Loch Arkaig! It was howling a gale and he just tipped off over the edge! He circled and settled back, and if birds can look embarrassed, he did!

    2. Why do they encourage black on black minorities to beat up on each other>

      2. Cultural habit. Who are we to criticise?
        We should just shut up and pay our taxes.

    4. They are dogs who don’t know how to behave. Usually, with dog you can train good behaviour through reward and consistency. These scum don’t deserve that kindness, so beat them until they’re cowed and keep beating them.

          2. Then here’s to you, Tom! Cheersh!
            (Good Polish pale beer, in a straight glass – sadly, the gin ran out a while ago)

          3. Whisky and ginger ale – otherwise Affligem Belgian Beer from the Beer machine.

          4. If I had any gin left, I could have an Elastoplast – gin & Ginger Beer, tastes like the elastoplast fabric strip smells.

          5. Never heard of it and I will happily take my whisky with either Ginger Ale or water.

          3. Having met you, Sue, I wouldn’t say mysterious, Just a lovely girl. I will be happy to meet you again, Sue.

    1. I thought it was casual dress? You need to iron your hoodie and polish your crocs!

  86. A nice story to balance all those pissing on the Coronation parade:
    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset-65500936
    Ms Cousens and Ms Tinsley have been camping out with their friends Jessie Young, 81, Eunice Hartstone, 79, and Shirley Messinger, 76.
    They travelled together with one large rucksack, a sun lounger, a gas stove and a trolley full of gin, wine and plenty of food.
    True Brits! A trolley full of gin! Keep on rockin’, ladies!

    3. Coronation Quiche tonight ala LotL. Lots of cheese including some blue cheese; spinach, spring onions and asparagus. Eggs etc and it was delicious; my husband is not a huge fan of quiche but has wolfed down a large portion and said it was wonderful. Very filling too.
      Am quite excited for tomorrow and hope it all goes well. (One never knows these days in this lawless land.)

      1. SWMBO makes superb quiche. Never any left over for tomorrow – even if she makes several at once!
        We’re out for dinner tomorrow evening, as it’s SWMBOs birthday on Sunday, and bookings were hard to come by.
        Nice, traditional Norwegian restaurant – gonna cost me a fortune, but she’s worth it!
        🙂

      2. Asparagus every time, don’t think much of broad beans in a quiche! Enjoy all the festivities tomorrow, I’m not sure if I will watch it live (5.30 in the morning, I need my beauty sleep) but doubtless will see it during the day, all tv channels seem to be showing it.

        1. I love broad beans but they have no place in a quiche.
          Join us all in a toast tomorrow!

      4. I went the frittata route and ignored the vegetables – bacon, sausage and sliced small mushrooms, crunchy salad with chilli flakes. Sausage rolls on the side.

  89. What did our parents to to avoid boredom before the Internet?
    I asked my 26 brothers and sisters, but they didn’t know, either.

  90. If there are any guitar players out there who want to know how to make their guitars sound better, stay tuned.

  91. Last night I watched, for the first time in 26 years, the 1979 film about the American soldiers in England during WWII, Yanks, screenplay by Colin Welland.

    There is a piece of music played in that film that has equally enthralled me and well as frustrated me (it isn’t listed in the film’s credits). A bit of detective work revealed it to be the first movement of Edvard Grieg’s wonderful Holberg Suite.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1wQ8ZMZq60

    2. Should have asked a Weegie, Grizz. They know every note of Grieg’s work, and every word of Ibsen. That’s about the limit of the culture here.
      Good, though, isn’t it?

      1. The Holberg Suite is one of my favourite works. Now I can hear it in my head.

  92. Somebody recently asked me what I do with leftover bacon.
    I’ve never heard of that kind of bacon. Is it new?

          3. Well, I’ve prayed for him (and the country – I suspect we’ll need it). Only 4 peers but lots of “deserving people” according to the Deputy Lord Lieutenant. Like Ant and Dec?

  93. Why I won’t be watching the King’s Coronation

    Activist Chantelle Lunt has no plans to tune in. The 35-year-old chairs the Merseyside Alliance for Racial Equality and says the monarchy doesn’t have a place in modern society.

    “This is a moment in time where we should be allowed to reflect on democracy in the UK and be allowed to vote about whether we want to continue having a monarchy.” [There are many subjects on which we should be allowed to vote. This is low down the list.]

    She sees King Charles III’s position as head of the Commonwealth as a relic of imperialism.

    “I have a lot of feelings about the legacy of monarchy and the history of the empire that was built on the backs of black and brown people. [The industrial revolution was built on the backs of white Britons. Read about the appalling conditions of the original working class and then apologise for your ignorance.] And I know along the way there’s been some apologies made but, in my opinion, not enough.”

    Chantelle will be avoiding all Coronation events and coverage in her home city at the weekend, as they will remind her “of something that has been imposed upon my ancestors.”

    ‘It’s a huge waste of public money’

    Oli in Stroud will not be following the events either.

    “I think it’s a huge waste of public money,” says the 51-year-old midwife.

    For Oli, a hereditary head of state is elitist and undemocratic.

    “You’ve got this tiny little band of elite at the top of our society that are thriving and then everybody else is scrabbling around trying to make ends meet and put food on the table,” she says.

    As an NHS worker, she says taxpayers’ money could be better spent. [Oh, the irony!]

    “The Royal Family have their own personal wealth and yet we, the taxpayers, are having to fund this parade in the middle of a financial crisis,” she says.

    Instead of watching, she will be on shift at hospital helping to deliver babies.

    To be fair, there are some almost normal people further down but it’s not surprising who gets top billing in BBC World.

    5. Of course the irony is that the real problem with Jug Ears (blame Rod Liddle) is his support for Chantelle and her ilk and the culture that produced them.

      1. Exactly this. They invariably work in the public or charidee sector, and the royals suck up to this kind of organisation like anything in the hopes of appearing to be close to the people.

    6. I got news for Chantelle Lunt, there is no democracy in this country, only an illusion of it. The never ending attempts to ignore the 2016 referendum and the imposition of Sunak over the wishes of his party members are just 2 examples of a farce being played out even now.
      Open your eyes Chantelle Lunt, try to see things as they are!

      1. Fat chance. They see things as they want to see them. I won’t be watching, but for other reasons.

        1. As will I. I think it was about a week ago I remarked that I noticed a distinct lack of election posters except Limp Dums when driving around the adjoining area. I asked the question how that would reflect come election day. It seems that in BANES only 3 out of 59 seats went to the Conservatives, quite a turnaround from just over 4 years ago when they had tenfold that number.
          I never remarked at that time that it struck me a lack of flags and bunting as well, much less than the Jubilee celebrations last year. People may well have begun to open their eyes to who is really running the country and how they are hand in glove with Charlie, Sunak and the others.

    7. Ha! I love being right.

      I said ‘black, ethnic dress, activist, public sector.’ Ding ding! Bingo! Ms Lunt, if this were a democracy you wouldn’t be here. Imperialismmy backside. You’ve never contributed a penny to this nation, let alone anything of value. If you don’t like Britain, leave.

      Go to those common wealth countries and see what Britain gave the world. See how damned amazing Britons are and when you’re done, come back and apologise on your knees for your ignorance, spite and stupidity then leave again. Permanently.

          1. From my past and lasting interest in Scandinavian dramas on TV, I belive I discovered the meaning of the C word.
            It comes from the Swedish word for customer/receiver. Kunde.
            It seems to fit the british pronunciation and apt description. 🤗

          2. Something not right today, my reply disappeared.
            I have a long term liking for Scandinavian dramas and on one on the series I believe I discovered where the C word came from. And how it originally became part of our language.
            Kunde in Swedish means customer/receiver. There were plenty of customers available when the vikings invaded.

    8. One cannot help but wonder about these negative attitudes why those two just do not go to back to there native countries and feel really so happy in their ability to identify how their virtue-signalling has f*cked-up the whole dialogue..

      B*lloocks

    1. It’s what I used to do as a campanologist at St Mary’s Bungay with a full peal of bells in the 1960s.

        3. I was going to crack a joke but see others have beaten me to it. Bells to that!

    2. We have two churches in the United* Parish with rings of six bells.

      Like everything else, the Fauxdemic buggered up the bell-ringing.

      We had an open day a few weeks ago, to encourage new ringers. Quite a few turned out. Unfortunately, in the process, someone rang the tenor bell without attaching the pull-off cord to its hook. The strike hammer was – if not broken – moved out of position. The clock stopped.

      I managed to persuade it to tick again, with some difficulty. The strike train was working fine, but not having any effect on the strike hammer. I couldn’t get to the upper chamber. I have a problem with ladders, and this is a vertical, steel one. The Rector has dodgy feet, but was able to see whast asppeared to be as broken lump hammer.

      The ringers have circled the wagons. They claim that everything is working normally. I’m certain that they’ve restored the strike hammer to it’s correct position, and breathed a sigh of relief that It wasn’t broken. But one thing defies explanation. I set the clock going, at exactly 2,30 pm. We repaired to the nearby Tea Room for a coffee, and sat outside in the sunshine. At 3 pm, the clock was utterly correct. As we stood up to leave, the clock said ten to one.

      This defies explanation. Turret clocks can’t run backwards, end of. We’ve requested an engineer to attend, but I have suggested that the Diocesan Exorcist might be a better option. I’m just glad I didn’t witness this alone…

  97. Been busy cleaning some garden chairs and large table for tomorrow’s street party. Looks like all of the garden furniture might get an extra wash. I’ll take a demijon of my home made cider to share. I don’t think I will be able to manage it all on my own. Its about 8 percent. Hic.
    Slayders folk, good night all.
    Have a lovely day tomorrow. 🥂🍾☔️👑🎶

    1. Nice! 8% is about right for cider. Especially if chilled.
      Enjoy, Eddy!

      1. And the Dutch and the French and the Spanish and the Italians and the Irish. They should all get out as soon as they can.

        1. This current version of the EU is an absolute disaster.

          The sooner it collapses, the better.

  99. Evening, all. Another busy day; coffee and cake at my usual church and a look round the magnificent flower festival on the Coronation theme, followed by coffee with a friend who lives next door to the church. In the evening I went to a Coronation celebration in my new, adopted church. Interesting (the celebrant was a Queen’s Chaplain, now re-appointed as a King’s Chaplain). The Deputy Lord Lieutenant gave an address extolling the virtues of KC3, which was only to be expected, but I had to laugh inwardly when she said he’d been patient and learned a lot during his wait for the throne. My view is he’s learned nothing – oh, and climate change got a mention, too – how KC3 was ahead of his time and we’d caught up. As one of my friends pointed out as we were enjoying the lavish spread afterwards, he’d only been concerned for the environment; the climate change scam came much later and she remembered the big thing in the ’70s was the coming New Ice Age.

    1. The world, I’m afraid to say is full of strange people and I wonder for our future.

      Thank God I have not much of future and will welcome death to take me away from this current madness.

      Am I silly for this view of my future?

      1. I think you are, Tom, but you are far from being a Silly Sausage. Just enjoy life as best you can and live in the now. Ignore the “strange people” (and you are right, there are a lot of them) and enjoy the good things in this life (there are many, including this site). Forget about the future. My grandmother had a small wooden plaque in her house which read: “Yesterday is past, forget it. Tomorrow never comes, why worry? Today is here, enjoy it.” Good advice to my mind. Sleep well, and see you in the morning.

        1. I can only try, Elsie. Thank you for good advice but I will still welcome the grim riper reaper when he arrives.

      2. I think you are, Tom, but you are far from being a Silly Sausage. Just enjoy life as best you can and live in the now. Ignore the “strange people” (and you are right, there are a lot of them) and enjoy the good things in this life (there are many, including this site). Forget about the future. My grandmother had a small wooden plaque in her house which read: “Yesterday is past, forget it. Tomorrow never comes, why worry? Today is here, enjoy it.” Good advice to my mind. Sleep well, and see you in the morning.

      3. It’s an understandable position, Tom. I suppose I’m glad I’m (relatively) old. I wouldn’t wish to start again, and I fear that the world of woke work would be immensely frustrating. Admittedly, I still work part time for the CofE, but – happily – at grassroots level, we have a Rector who is as just as unwoke and “far-right” (i.e. marginally right of centre) as I am. And he’s up to speed with all the issues of the day. I don’t have the likes of Welby breathing down my neck. Although his son turned up at a service a few months ago.

        I don’t exactly welcome death, but I accept it will come in due course.

        Hang on in there, Tom. We’ve lived in arguably the best time ever. Now we’ve lived in extremely interesting times (like the Chinese curse) for several years. I expect it can only get worse. Until it gets better.

        I’ve joked in the past that my Siemens built-in microwave at the last place seemed to be telling me something – each time it finished, the display read “End time”.

        I’m not your average happy-clappy, Evangelical God-botherer. Just a not-very-religious Anglican. But tomorrow, our King will take part in an utterly religious ceremony, watched by half of the planet. Considering he is fully onboard with Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset”. which has no place for religious faith at all, I can’t work out whether KC3 in an utter hypocrite, or just not very bright.

        I don’t think this will end well.

        1. I don’t think it will end well, either. Charles does not have his mother’s deep faith which sustained her and kept her on the straight and narrow. I was told today that our Bishop (Chester) has been shortlisted for Welby’s job. I’m not surprised; from his first address I thought he was wet and woke.

        2. It’s cognitive dissonance Geoff. KC3 just doesn’t realise he’s out of step with the people. And he’s not very bright and quite possibly a hypocrite as well.

        3. Sorry, Geoff. I’m agnostic, I believe in all and nothing, and fear that my next life might well take me into the realm that I don’t wish my grandchildren and great grandchildren might to have to inhabit.

          Is there another world of eternal nothingness?

          If so, I’d go there in a heartbeat but I think I have a future in putting it all right.

          How, I don’t know but I hope I shall be shewn.

      4. I remarked to a friend today that I’m glad I’m old and I shan’t have to put up with the mess they will make of the country in the future.

        1. Depends, Connors, upon your future beliefs. See my other, earlier posts.

  100. I’ve neglected this in past eventides but just let me say…

    Goodnight and God bless, Gentlefolks and I hope to be in contact with you all in the morning’s light.

      1. …and ‘Goodnight’ to you too, Geoff.

        I need ‘deep’ sleep. I’m bushed.

      2. …and ‘Goodnight’ to you too, Geoff.

        I need ‘deep’ sleep. I’m bushed.

  101. AP does go on a bit here but she makes an important point about the naffness of the People’s Oath. The ‘mastermind’ who came up with it was, according to a BBC report this afternoon, one Justin Portal Welby, rather overstepping his authority, with KC3 presumably distancing himself from the bish of the ArchBish.

    Off with his head, Charlie!

    I love the monarchy…but the Coronation pledge is a step too far

    The only oath us Britons will utter during the Coronation will be of the four-letter variety, after being asked to do something so naff

    ALLISON PEARSON • 3rd May 2023 • 10:00am

    I am a monarchist (“the worst system of government – except for all the others that have been tried”, to adapt Winston Churchill’s droll take on democracy), but I will not be standing or sitting in front of the telly on Saturday swearing allegiance to the King. No siree. It’s enough to make you choke on the broad beans in your Coronation quiche.

    According to the mastermind who came up with “Homage of the People”, those watching the ceremony are invited to chant aloud, “I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.”

    Don’t they realise we’re British? We leave that kind of guff to the Americans. Anyway, what’s wrong with a cheery, “God save the King!”?

    The only kind of oath punters in the nation’s saloon bars are likely to utter during the Coronation will be of the four-letter variety on account of being asked to do something so naff.

    Talk about a gift to Republicans. Imagine the joy at Channel 4 when they realised they could show footage of viewers staring silently at the screen, cringing inwardly, while running the helpful caption: “People snub new monarch.”

    Perhaps the idea appealed to His Majesty because scrapping the Homage of Peers, when the royal dukes used to bend the knee and pledge fealty to their sovereign, somehow feels more “inclusive” and modern if you let everyone participate. Unsurprisingly, an online poll for ITV’s Good Morning Britain found that 85 per cent of the population’s reaction was a firm, “Include me out”.

    Our late Queen would have known instinctively how badly that kind of forelock-tugging, ever-so-‘umble-yer-Majesty stuff would go down with her fond but reliably stroppy subjects, I think. The British combination of a monarchy and a democracy is a curious one, and quite possibly indefensible, but we’re happy with it as long as they don’t draw too much attention to the feudal malarkey or let Prince Andrew out more than once every five years. (Delightful pictures of Princess Charlotte on her birthday always most welcome, however.)

    In a new poll on the royals by Lord Ashcroft, well over half the United Kingdom said it would vote for a constitutional monarchy, with less than a quarter against. Two thirds agreed that “the Royal family might seem a strange system in this day and age, but it works”. The current set-up was widely seen as “an asset for the UK” although 73 per cent agreed that “the Royal family needs to modernise to have any chance of surviving”.

    Personally, I’d be wary of too much “modernisation”. The King should resist advisers who are far too quick to concede to the woke mob (see poor, loyal Lady Susan Hussey, despatched with unseemly haste because of a flimsy charge of “racism”). Tellingly, the survey found that most Britons do not think King Charles should apologise for the royals’ historic role in slavery and colonialism. Even a third of republicans said he “should make no such apology”. We don’t want a craven, crawling Crown, thanks, awfully.

    As the late Anthony Sampson, author of Anatomy of Britain, observed: “Once you touch the trappings of monarchy, like opening an Egyptian tomb, the inside is liable to crumble.”

    Charles should listen to his excellent sister. The Princess Royal just told an interviewer for Canada’s CBC News that a slimmed down monarchy is “not a good idea from where I’m standing”. Blessed with her late father’s trenchant common sense, she pointed out that the plan to reduce the number of working royals was originally proposed “when there were a few more people around”.

    Quite. With the Duke of York banished for bringing the institution into sleaze and Prince Harry and She Who Must Be Obeyed in self-imposed exile, having extinguished all the affection people were so eager to offer them, the Windsors are definitely running low on ribbon-cutters and potential colonels-in-chief. Unless they rope in the Queen’s Jack Russells.

    It’s evident that most Britons will have warm feelings towards Charles on his big day. But many are likely to be struggling to keep the barbecue alight (rain is predicted; of course it is), at the same time keeping one eye on events in the Abbey, hooting at some of the more bizarre outfits and peculiar prelates while Prince Louis is gleefully escaping and making a beeline for Grandpa King.

    Forget Homage of the People. We will show our support in our own reverent, irreverent British way.

    You know, I thought there was widespread apathy towards this Coronation until I realised something. The reservoir of national feeling has been drained dry. First, by that incandescent Platinum Jubilee, full of joy and sorrow because we knew, secretly, that we were saying farewell to the best queen a people ever had. And then by that sublime funeral which showed the nation straining every sinew to be the best version of itself, for her. No need for the Archbishop to instruct us to “pay true allegiance to Your Majesty”. Elizabeth II had earned it and we paid her back.

    We still mind the gap. How could we not? Will Charles III be able to fill it given time? Too early to say, but when the organ strikes up on Saturday and the choir starts to sing Hubert Parry’s “I Was Glad” the ecstatic blast of sound will take your breath away. Vivat Rex. God save the King!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2023/05/03/king-charles-iii-conronation-pledge-homage-to-the-people/

    1. Rod Liddle nails it.

      We are all expected to swear our pledge of allegiance to our new King: ‘I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law – so help me God.’ To which I can only say: ‘Up yours, jug-ears.’ I wonder how many people will do it? Perhaps 25 per cent of the population? I might have sworn a pledge of allegiance to his mum when she was alive. But then she never felt the need to ask for one, did she?

      1. I did swear allegiance to HMQE2 and was glad to do it – for Queen and Country. The country is no longer the one I was prepared to defend and the King seems to have learned nothing during his long wait for the top job.

        1. I agree. I won’t be pledging allegiance to anyone tomorrow. I won;t be watching the Coronation (live, at least), since I have no TV licence.

          I haven’t even looked to see what time the bunfight happens. I’m sure I’ll be able to stream the event, long afterwards…

          Mostly, I’m going shopping, early. Despite the fact that the trains are running a Sunday service….

          1. I too, with no TV and no extra tax, will not be watching – maybe. online with GBNews but not the British Bashing Corporation.

          2. We have an event to welcome the swifts but it looks like being a washout.

      2. I took that oath way back in 1960 when I joined the RAF but today I rescind and abjure it.

        This King (WEF and all that) doesn’t deserve my allegiance to an alien authority.

  102. Yo, Peeps,

    In the process of Spring Cleaning, I re-connected the Sub-woofer to my LG sound bar. So, to test it, I connected my phone. It has every CD I’ve ever owned, plus many downloaded tracks. I started with “A”. I’m now into the “B”s.

    Since I’m listening to tracks alphabetically, I’ve just heard Backyard by Natasha Bedingfield, followed by Balulalow by The Oxford Choir, followed by two versions of Bat out of Hell by Meat Loaf. I’ve now moved on to Be Thou my Vision…

    It’s an ecletic mix, which I heartily recommend…

  103. Another great evening at the Everyman- this time Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia – and it was superb. Never heard it before . Young singers with lovely voices

  105. This DT article is sheer bollocks. Charles cannot give a flying f*ck about the future and that of the monarchy.

    Neither will his woke son.

  106. Now I really must go to bed.

    Many thanks to those of similar thoughts.

  108. Regarding the local elections it is just deja vue to me. Every few years we have the same meaningless rotation between the three major parties. Do any of these useless party idiots have any idea as to what we face as a sovereign nation?

    I very much doubt it. We are installing a cretinous Woke king and his wretched entourage and are requested to pledge allegiance to an idiot. Get stuffed. And stick your climate change hoax and other silly prescriptions where the Sun don’t shine.

  109. Although it was 11 o’clock (23:00) last evening when I went to bed and have now slept for 7+ hours, I still feel knackered.

    I can see that I’m going back tout suite.

    Very shortly after Geoff does his stuff.

Comments are closed.