Saturday 17 May: It’s time to think again about the purpose of a university education

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its commenting facility (now reinstated, but we prefer ours),
Intelligent, polite, good-humoured debate is welcome, whether on or off topic. Differing opinions are encouraged, but rudeness or personal attacks on other posters will not be tolerated. Posts which – in the opinion of the moderators – make this a less than cordial environment, are likely to be removed, without prior warning.  Persistent offenders will be banned.

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here.

523 thoughts on “Saturday 17 May: It’s time to think again about the purpose of a university education”

    3. G'donya Martin. I must admit that we do try to avoid bbc news and their opposite opinions.

  5. Good morning. I don't think i have sobered up from yesterday. Still, I managed to annoy a few people and i slept like a baby.

    1. Crying & shitting yourself?
      ;-))
      Morning, Phizzee. The old ones sre the best ones!

          1. My back garden is a sun trap. When there is no wind the temperature rises hotter than the Med. 30c yesterday. I was in my speedos. Drinking Gin.

    2. Trump knows his military can only fight one war at a time. And that promo video from China's AVIC featuring 24-7 unmanned production churning out hypersonic PL-15 missiles by the hundreds.. kinda woke everybody up. Well, except Labour.

      1. Oh hang on.. it's Ok a Sea Viper missile takes out supersonic target. One down.. 100,000 to go in the next hour. LOL

    2. Oh dear all those letters and figures is that what happened to M&S ? 🤗😊

    3. We suffered offshore when the big 2003 solar flare occurred. Without GPS we couldn't position our geophysical data. No work for 3 days or so if I recall.

      1. I was working on a gas terminal in East Yorkshire at the time, on a cathodic protection (corrosion control) survey. I had switched off the transformer which supplied power to the system the previous day in order to carry out some tests with the buried pipework de-polarised.
        I was shocked to find that the pipework was more electrically negative than the day before and spent all day and chasing any extraneous source of current which might have been affecting the system.
        Late in the afternoon, an on-site electrician, who was an amateur astronomer, mentioned solar flares. Bingo. The effect was quite startling particularly as I had never seen such a phenomenon before.

    4. There has been a lot about solar flares and the dangers thereof in the news. It has all started since the turn of the century – nobody talked about the dangers of solar flares before that.
      It may be pre-programming us to accept a few weeks without internet due to covid19 a solar flare, which would cause irreversible changes in the financial landscape. Purely due to the solar flare disrupting the internet and world trade of course, nothing to do with the behaviour of central banks.

      1. Spain came to a complete halt after the grid failure and noone can explain where the fault was because the Spanish government was to blame.

        When the World comes to a complete halt because of a solar flare the fault will remain with world governments for thinking that power and communications can be transmiited by electricity.

        Nelson used wind power to propel his ships and line of sight communication using flags – and yet he had to cope with doldrums and fog.

    5. Global warming: I hope the next one strikes Ed Millitwitt directly on the head. It won't fry his brain because he doesn't have one but it might seal his mouth and solidify the crap that comes from every orifice.

  9. Morning, all Y'all.
    Brilliant sun!
    Constitution Day here in Norway. Whole country celebrated – parades, flags, parties, marching bands. Looks like the weather is in hand, too!
    Gratulerer med Dagen, Norge!

      1. I agree with you…but he can't say that out loud in the MSM this morning.

    2. Did they campaign on re-entering the EU? I didn't notice. If not, then they are dishonest.

      1. Havent you noticed just how dishonest Labour has been since they have been in government. Dishonesty and incompetence is their DNA.

      2. Nor did they campaign on eliminating WFA for pensioners, or Vat on school fees, or paying Mauritius/China £billions to take the Chagos Islands off our hands, or anything else on their Commie agenda. It's what Trotskyists do.

          2. Slammers would and do, as an interim measure while they build up their own party. With their block postal voting they have managed to vote in one of their own who has ruined our London. They don't care what they destroy in this country. And the stupid, brainwashed, and moronic in our midst support it all.

        2. Sorry Citroen, I hadn't seen your post.. Trots and Slammers have some fundamentally unpleasant aspects in common.

      3. Hedgehogs in Regents Park and HS2. Says all that you need about the character of the man and the administration he controls.

      4. Did they campaign on cutting the Winter Fuel Allowance, on imposing punitive Inheritance Tax on farmers, on our paying £millions for the privilege of handing over our Chagos Islands territories etc. etc. etc.? The blatant dishonesty of Labour and its MPs has been in our faces for a long time. Perhaps they have adopted the taqiyya philosophy of that part of the electorate that they kow-tow to.

    3. What a horrible photograph to see first thing in the morning.
      If the people in Parliament and the sleeping lords can't stop this AH from taking the proverbial P*ss out our country, they need to move over and get someone in who can stop him.
      Even if it becomes physical.

    1. Marjorie Taylor Green (MTG) had the best retort to Nomates and her useless prattling, she simply told her to Feck Off. MTG must be doing something right, the Leftwaffe despise her.

      1. Congresswoman MTG can be very abrasive with her words and she leaves no-one in doubt what she means. A fellow ‘Southerner’ from the USA, Senator John Kennedy, gets his points across with a touch of humour but with the same effect. Our politics is lacking in both of these styles, it’s all rather grey and lacklustre.

        1. I laughed out loud when Kennedy referred to drugs as "the Devil's lettuce".

  12. Morning all 🙂😊
    Grey again I wish the sky would open up and dump its moisture. There's usually no hesitation.
    Today's headline is appt, in one month from now, I'll be in new knee Ver (snorbens) city hospital lining up for my op.
    Wonderful I can't wait. 🙂

    1. Crumbs – would you like some of my rain? It's been pelting down in Buenos Aires for a good 12 hours now (4.30 a.m. and still going strong)…

        4. Earworm pusher! 🤣🤣

          I can stand it against the window. I just get a little annoyed when it floods under the kitchen door. 🤪

        1. Ditto, the Costa Clyde continues another week of clear skies and light winds.

        2. The greenies claim it is because of cow farts but the real culprit is themselves. They emit ten times more noxious gases from every orifice than cows and camels.

  13. Good Morning!

    In his article There's nothing radical about Labour's immigration reforms Frederic Edward points out that the only thing that has changed is the rhetoric and that is only because of fear of Reform's surge in popularity.

    As the treacherous British establishment prepares to sell out British fishermen yet again, Graham Bedford reminds us of how important the fishing fleet once was and in his The Great Storm , reminds us of just how hard a life it was. Graham is researching his roots in the Grimsby fishing fleet, and also puts in a lot of unsung, unseen work for us at FSB, so please do support him by reading his short article and – especially – leaving a comment. He loves comments.

    Energy Watch: Over the last 24 hours: Britain's electric power was sourced from Gas, 16.7%; Solar, 12%: Wind 28.9%; Imports, 17.4%; Biomass, 4.1% and Nuclear, 17.8%. At 07.00 this morning imports, as 26.4%, were the biggest component.

    freespeechbacklash.com

      1. It’s not Federal Security Bureau (of the Russian Federation) Elsie.

        Free Speech Backlash.

  14. 405681+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    It looks very like the lab/lib/con coalition surrender monkeys are winning the eu re-entry battle leaving us with very little choice if we are allowed to have one in selecting our future masters, be it
    von der leyen or rmohammed.

    Was our heart really in "independence" the voting pattern coupled with treacherous rank stupidity over the last four decades shows us, in the long term, it never was.

    So, in regards to our current stance as a nation, whatever major change we make, can only be for the better proving the point that
    even those of the treacherous rank stupidity nature can be right at least once, in a very twisted fashion.

    David Frost
    Labour has spent 10 years trying to sabotage Brexit. Now it is finally getting its way
    Boris Johnson and I fought tooth and nail to liberate the UK from EU control – now Starmer threatens to undo all our

    1. I couldn't agree more Mr. Jones.
      I think you could probably add the UK armed forces to the list, definitely the RNLI.

  16. I haven't been following these matters closely but get the impression that Jordan Peterson has been a bit weird/off beam in the past year. However, I came across this youtube of a conversation with Douglas Murray. It's solid anti-Hamas/pro Israel stuff but lucid. Skip after 11:45.
    https://youtu.be/7DtijYgEf_A

    In Crawley
    14h
    Food for thought.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3bf97e6f88e9db6aa8314dbd5b76772874f294a65e02df683dbff477e48e0b98.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/33ad355dfbb870f4cd7b23c9d318a282e698ed17b146b36cd15e327f6c71d683.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a18bee1bac5ccbc266af6ab0c4f83152ca1d22aed84da7c133a167c6811d44c3.png

    1. Hamas built a military network under the feet and within a civilian population. Can anyone name me another military in the modern era that has done this?

  19. 405681 + up ticks,

    Tell me would it not be a prudent move as an anti treachery action, to build on a parallel running party to reform ?
    and may one suggest the Farmers Food & Freedom Party seeing as they have had a long term interest dating back to the FIRST HARVEST in the English food producing countryside.

    https://x.com/UnityNewsNet/status/1923638489884598632

    1. 405681+ up ticks,

      O2O,

      Too much trust in individuals and parties can prove lethal, put your trust in common sense and belly.

  20. She has unique expertise in…

    FCDO Minister Has “No Idea” What Her Own Multi-Million Pound Spending Announcements Are

    Jenny Chapman, Dodds’ replacement as development minister, was up against MPs this week at the International Development Committee. Apart from saying the UK wasn’t a “global charity” anymore internationally she raged against FCDO spending and its communication:

    “It’s not just a minister’s job this is everybody’s job…. we still are putting out press releases which are headed by X million pounds for X project. The public has no idea – I have no idea – whether that pound sign is next to something that’s a big number a small number, more than last time less than last time – don’t know what that project is. We’re talking to ourselves far too often when we ought to be talking about people and stories… we’ve got to when we say make the case it’s about yes identify where the need is.”

    A principled stance on spending announcements there as the FCDO prepares to cut its Official Development Assistance budget from 0.5% to 0.3%. Does Chappers realise what she herself has been doing in the last few months, though?

    In March FCDO issues a press release with Chapman announcing £10 million to support Myanmar. It had a quote from her promising the reader that: “This £10 million package will bolster [Myanmar’s] efforts.”

    In January Chapman welcomed £60 million funding for creative industries by saying: “The UK’s soft power is one of our greatest national assets. It is a celebration of the best of British, and a key driver of UK growth. Working with the GREAT campaign, this Council will celebrate and maximise our best assets to support the growth of the UK economy and the range of our international priorities.”

    In December she praised a £25 million commitment to developing countries that the government made at COP29, along with £45 million for the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, and the government’s £239 million deforestation commitment.
    In November, she announced £5 million to tackle child marriage globally.
    In October 2024, Chapman hailed a £15 million UK-Jamaica Violence Prevention Programme.

    A case of pots and kettles here as Chapman admits to signing off on hundreds of millions of taxpayer funds without any idea what the spending projects are. And attacks civil servants for her own announcements…

    May 16 2025 @ 15:46

    ************************
    Rogerborg ⬛🟧
    15h
    There is no "need" for us to give a single penny to Faraway People, whether they're here, or Faraway.

    Dasilva
    17h
    Has Jenny Chapman got any kids.
    Asking for a friend called vics

    Send in the Clones
    17h
    Jenny Chapman, all those happy carefree days in Darlington?
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f09db4c43c69d30171dc2860c42083d4922d80308e06febecf5581668d6a989b.png

    1. Imagine the media hysteria if Bojo had given a job to not only his mistress, but the alleged (cough) mother of one of his many children.

  21. Emily Maitlis doesn’t understand grooming gangs. 17 May 2025.

    Lowe has highlighted these cases and is crowdfunding an inquiry into the grooming gang scandal. Yet his attempt to uncover the truth about the identity of the men involved appears to have upset Maitlis.

    ‘Two-hundred-and-twenty-four white grooming gang suspects were found compared to 22 Pakistani suspects…Those are police statistics from the Times,’ she told Lowe.

    The thing about the Paki Rapists is that they are racist in intent. They are almost completely innocent of any offence outside their own ethnicity. The White Rapists are omnivorous and their motives internalised.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/emily-maitlis-doesnt-understand-grooming-gangs/

    1. So the police have chosen to only pursue a small number of Pakistani gang members but go after hundreds of white pedophiles who’ve never been gang members and when looked at per capita, even the numbers officially acknowledged tell a different story.

    2. Straight out of the BBC playbook on hostile "reporting"..

      "Absolutely not true", says Emily.
      "The 2023 report shows many more evil white people involved in grooming. Why do you only focus on the poor oppressed Pakistani Labour voters?
      "You have some very serious allegations made about you by fellow MPs.. that you are a racist, a bigot, clearly accepted cash from Russia.. many many people say you are a bad influence on children. The police have mentioned you several times in reports. How do you answer these allegations?" "I will repeat this question several times.. until you apologise".

      1. And I’ll take your apology as an admission of guilt and attack you further.

    3. I'm not a subscriber..
      As other YT podcasters have pointed out.. what differentiates the Pakistani rapists from other groomers is/was:
      Encouraged by the police..
      Protected by all the agencies..
      Covered up by the press..
      Covered up by the state..
      ..and the state will jail you for mentioning it.

    4. I'm not a subscriber..
      As other YT podcasters have pointed out.. what differentiates the Pakistani rapists from other groomers is/was:
      Encouraged by the police..
      Protected by all the agencies..
      Covered up by the press..
      Covered up by the state..
      ..and the state will jail you for mentioning it.

    5. Sorry, which towns did the white grooming gangs operate out of? I must have missed that.

      2. And which “black and brown” group aérea they racistly targeting?

    7. So that makes the Paki gangs OK, does it? There are more whites at it? What proportion of the populations are they?
      Chat GPT estimates 67 million people in the UK, of which 1.6 million are estimated of Pak origin. That's 2,3%, not the 10% if you use the Maitlis figures.
      Somewhat out of proportion, wouldn't you say?

  24. Labour has spent 10 years trying to sabotage Brexit. Now it is finally getting its way
    Boris Johnson and I fought tooth and nail to liberate the UK from EU control – now Starmer threatens to undo all our hard work
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/17/labour-sabotaging-brexit/

    Some tooth…. some nail!

    (Hens' teeth and rubber tacks?)

    Johnson, Gove and Frost feebly caved in leaving the door wide open and Northern Ireland is no longer a full part of the UK!

    BTL

    Democracy and what the people actually want are completely irrelevant when the politicians and the civil service are determined to thwart them.

    The weak Mr Cameron went to the EU before the referendum begging for concessions which would encourage people to stay in it. The EU told him to get lost just as they will always tell UK politicians that surrender is their only option and UK politicians lack the guts to stick up for their country.

    But there is no need for David Frost to be smug – it was his agreement – forced on him by Johnson and Gove – which caved in on Northern Ireland and British fishing waters.

  25. Labour has spent 10 years trying to sabotage Brexit. Now it is finally getting its way
    Boris Johnson and I fought tooth and nail to liberate the UK from EU control – now Starmer threatens to undo all our hard work
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/17/labour-sabotaging-brexit/

    Some tooth…. some nail!

    (Hens' teeth and rubber tacks?)

    Johnson, Gove and Frost feebly caved in leaving the door wide open and Northern Ireland is no longer a full part of the UK!

    BTL

    Democracy and what the people actually want are completely irrelevant when the politicians and the civil service are determined to thwart them.

    The weak Mr Cameron went to the EU before the referendum begging for concessions which would encourage people to stay in it. The EU told him to get lost just as they will always tell UK politicians that surrender is their only option and UK politicians lack the guts to stick up for their country.

    But there is no need for David Frost to be smug – it was his agreement – forced on him by Johnson and Gove – which caved in on Northern Ireland and British fishing waters.

    1. Where the hell did you find that tripe? All of it is complete bollocks. Where do I start?

      Humans, naturally, have one of the most acidic digestive juices in nature, even stronger than that of a lion. Your kidneys are not 'forced into overdrive' by your naturally occurring digestive juices. That is nothing more than Big Pharma telling you lies for their own agenda.

      Most people suffer from a plethora of illnesses, detrimental conditions, maladies and illnesses as a direct result of the crap they put into their gobs, and as a result of listening to idiotic 'nutritional advice'.

      The fact is that if you eat the natural human diet of fatty meat, fish, eggs and butter, you will not get acid reflux or heartburn. Other carnivores don't. It is only by eating the crap that you have been brainwashed into eating (by Big Pharma's partners-in-crime, the Global Corporations, who heavily fund all the 'research') that you get heartburn and acid reflux.

      Anyone still labouring under the delusion that humans are (and have been) omnivores has seriously taken that brainwashing to heart.

      Cut out the starches, the carbohydrates, the sugar, the alcohol, the cereals, and the ultra-processed crap (any 'foodstuff' with a list of ingredients on the jar, packet or tin is not food that is fit for human consumption!).

      Ask yourself this question: If nature gave me a highly acidic stomach acid, why would it make sense to 'neutralise' it with loads of bicarb?

      I put a quarter of a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda (a pinch) into my early morning drink of apple cider vinegar in warm water. I do not do it to neutralise my stomach acid, I do it to take away some of the sharpness of the vinegar. Nothing else.

      1. 405681+ up ticks,

        Afternoon G,
        Bare in mind I'm not the one who bakes savories & such on a regular basis.

        I would also say as one who kicks off the day
        with four eggs in some shape of form, followed by a sardine or braised steak lunch, dinner chicken fish ,meat , poultry, alternated throughout the week, in my case you are telling your granddad how to suck eggs.

        I also partake of apple cider vinegar WITH MOTHER

        After falling foul of one of the odious
        flu type man made, I'm sure maladies, I am slowly building back up to 50 squats / 50 wall presses in the morning, the same late evening I have been doing this for a couple of years and have now added resistance bands to my daily workout, YOU CAN'T BEAT GENUINE FODDER.

  28. I still prefer the DTL comments though!

    Celia Butterfield
    4 min ago
    Interesting read …

    Fury as Keir Starmer fails to vote to end migrant crisis | Politics | News | http://Express.co.uk

    Now we read and hear that he is on bended knee- his default position – to all people European begging to be their servant once again and please take everything I have to give but let me be your friend again, pretty please. It was bad enough with May not wanting Brexit and lying through her teeth; now with have The Man Who Would Not Accept ,then or now, openly tearing up Brexit to strew as rose petals at Ursula’s feet as she walks all over him: and he blushes at her smile whilst he smirks….

    Comment by Paul Butler.

    PB

    Paul Butler
    6 min ago
    I note that yesterday EP suggested that all these migrants could be employed as hod carriers or cleaners as it would fit into the skill set of speaking no English or having no recognisable education.

    Being a bricklayer, I can think of nothing worse than being lumbered with someone who has no skills and most probably not wanting to do hard work. Why on earth should I and others have to work with people that we do not want in this country and who will only drive down wages and standards. I would suggest Edwin take these people into his own home and teach them himself before he starts making plans for others.

    The tradesmen of Britain do not want migrant labour and were glad to see the backs of the eastern Europeans.

    Leave us alone Pugh.edited

    Electrician son says he is fed up with supervising foreign bods whose only interest is gaining a days pay in order to complete their own shoddy building practises in Accra or Lagos or Takoradi !

  29. Lisa Nandy’s Culture Department is facing the axe in Downing Street’s civil service efficiency drive, throwing her Cabinet future into doubt.

    The move would bring to an end 33 years of a standalone government department for arts and cultural matters, amounting to a major Whitehall overhaul.

    It would also leave Ms Nandy, the Culture Secretary who once stood against Sir Keir for the Labour leadership, out of a job.

    A decision would be needed on whether to create space for her elsewhere on the front bench. Currently there are no Cabinet vacancies.

    No 10 insiders believe the existing policy briefs that sit in the Culture Department could easily be moved into other departments. But it would likely mean some job cuts. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/05/16/lisa-nandy-culture-department-faces-axe/

    TruthOr Dare
    2 hrs ago
    Culture? There is no culture here it is multiculture, ie incessant warring factions. She is a worthless loudmouthed twerp.

    1. Does Starmer regard her as a threat?

      He is clearly learning lessons from Farage – as soon as Farage began to think that Lowe was becoming a threat he launched a sordid and vindictive campaign against him; and now Starmer wants rid of Nandy.

    2. ”But it would likely mean some job cuts”. I’ll believe that when I see it.

  30. From Coffee House the Spectator
    17 May 2025

    Coffee House
    Julie BindelJulie Bindel
    Why lesbians want out of the LGBT movement
    16 May 2025, 5:52am

    LGBT+ is an ‘inclusive’ way to represent all the different identities in the longer acronym, says the BBC. What nonsense: the reality is that while lesbians and gay men often get lumped together we actually have little in common. It’s time for lesbians to break free of the LGBT+ label.

    As the LGBT+ acronym has expanded to become more ‘inclusive’, many lesbians like me have come to feel less included

    As the LGBT+ acronym has expanded in recent years to become more ‘inclusive’, many lesbians like me have come to feel less and less included. The umbrella term takes in all manner of sexual and gender identities, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with being same-sex-attracted. As a result, lesbians have been sidelined.

    This isn’t a new phenomenon. When I came out in 1977, there were so few of us that we tended to stick together. But in LGB groups, gay men dominated in numbers – and in other ways, too. This meant that lesbians often got ignored, even if others within the gay community didn’t realise it. The pretence that we were all one happy family was set out in the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) manifesto of 1970: “We cannot carry out this revolutionary change alone. To build this alliance, the brothers in gay liberation will have to be prepared to sacrifice that degree of male chauvinism and male privilege that they still all possess.”

    Did these sacrifices happen? Not exactly. Bev Jackson, who served as the spokeswoman for the GLF, said she and the other lesbians became so sick of the sexism from some gay men that they soon split to form their own group, Women’s Gay Liberation. The organisation focussed on supporting the feminist movement in order to highlight the way that sexism impacted on women and girls in general, and lesbians in particular. They also organised protests, demonstrations, and community events to fight for lesbian rights and visibility.

    In recent years, with the LGBTQIA2S+ ‘community’ firmly in the grip of gender ideology, sexism has once again reared its ugly head – this time under the guise of transgender inclusion. Lesbians have been scorned and treated badly. We have been accused of bigotry and hatred because we don’t want to share female-only spaces with biological males. Even at Pride, we aren’t safe. At Manchester’s Pride event in 2018, there were loud cheers when someone with a microphone yelled out that protesters against the trans takeover of Pride should have been dragged off by their “saggy tits”.

    Perhaps it’s no surprise that many lesbians want an amicable divorce from gay men; we feel we’ve been bunched together when our needs are very different. It’s a relationship in which women are always going to be on the back foot, with men’s needs coming first.

    While it is true that gay men have been criminalised, and experienced hellish suffering and prejudice during the Aids crisis, lesbians have also had to deal with the sexism that has plagued women for centuries – including from gay men. There are shared goals common to lesbians and gay men. But there are also plenty of points on which we disagree, and, for reasons of self-interest, we are often set against one another.

    However there is, at the same time, a growing solidarity between us, because of the threat of gender ideology. Although they made a slow start, a number of gay men have been passionately supporting the rights of lesbians to assemble without the presence of so-called trans women. Thus far, the demands of genderists – those who think a person can change their sex – have mainly affected women. But, as gender ideology has swept across the western world, trans men have begun to pop up on Grindr and other dating apps.

    This situation has come to a head with the BBC show, I Kissed a Boy, fronted by Dannii Minogue. On the latest series of the show, one of the ‘men’ is transgender. ‘I‘ve been through 16 years of my life as a girl. It’s aged me, but in a good way,’ says Lars, who says they/them ‘felt like a gay guy trapped in a woman’s body.’

    Unsurprisingly, there has been a great deal of consternation at Lars’s inclusion. Would a gay man feel comfortable hooking up with them? Some are going as far as comparing the situation to conversion therapy. I can understand why. The concept of same-sex attraction has been chipped away at.

    Gareth Roberts, who wrote about I Kissed a Boy for these pages, told me he “had just assumed that gay men would look at what was happening to lesbians and say ‘No’ alongside them. But bog-standard male entitlement runs deeper than I thought”. As a result, it has taken gay men longer than us lesbians would have liked for them to see the problem with assuming that gay and trans rights are always compatible. Perhaps, then, if any good can come from this dire BBC show, it is that gay men are coming around to the concerns of lesbians. We have nothing against trans identified individuals. But it is high time to recognise that gay men, lesbians and transgender people are different.

    What’s the solution? I think we need an LGBT break-up: lesbians like me and gay men should go our own way, even if we remain comrades-in-arms on certain issues to protect the rights we fought long and hard for.

    As Dennis Kavanagh, founder of the Gay Men’s Network, told me: “We have come together in a state of emergency.” Now both groups can stop pretending we have anything in common other than being same-sex-attracted. But this doesn’t mean we can’t fight the good fight together. It’s so refreshing to have so many gay men on our side after decades of silence.

    Written by
    Julie Bindel
    Julie Bindel is a feminist campaigner against sexual violence. She is the host of The Lesbian Project podcast, with Kathleen Stock.

    1. "But it is high time to recognise that gay men, lesbians and transgender people are different." It took some lesbians long enough to recognise that heterosexual women and transgender cocks in frocks are different. Just saying.

    2. I can’t understand why so much time and energy is spent talking about such minority groups. If they want to be accepted then just act like normal people and get on with their lives instead of always playing the victim.
      I really don’t care.
      BTW. I only read the first few sentences and gave up.

    3. Oh Julie. Queen Victoria was right. Lesbians are a cultural fiction. A woman doesn’t have to like men in order to be a wife and mother. If a woman doesn’t have an orgasm during sex, so what. If a man doesn’t have an erection, natural procreation can’t take place. It isn’t a genetic problem for either but for the man it’s a tangible problem. For the woman, it isn’t.

    4. "As a result, it has taken gay men longer than us lesbians would have liked for them to see the problem with assuming that gay and trans rights are always compatible." typically for Ms Bindel she has a go at men setting up her usual grandstanding grievance. Both men and women have been pointing out the inconsistences of Gender-woo for years now. If Nottlers are not aware of Fred Sargaent he has been pushing back against this stuff for years now. His conversation partner here is a woman.

      https://youtu.be/0Lx7uRPsLRE?si=x0Joj2G2CiARuspZ

      Ms Bindel still doesn't grasp that the ideological stand point she starts from sets up what she is pushing back against.

  31. From the Telegraph

    America’s liberal media will pay for covering up Biden’s incapacity
    The fact that so many ‘serious’ US journalists denied what was obvious to anyone explains why trust in their reporting has collapsed
    Douglas Murray16 May 2025 4:54pm BST
    There are many causes of the breakdown of trust in Western societies. The breakdown of trust in politicians is easy to map. The breakdown of trust in scientific expertise can be pinpointed to a very specific moment – the Covid years. But the breakdown of trust in the media has been a long time coming and is already having long-term consequences.

    In the UK just 31 per cent of the public say that they trust the media. In the US it is 39 per cent. Into that gap of trust a lot of charlatans and know-nothings can now roam. But the old media – or at least much of the old media – only has itself to blame.

    Consider the story of the cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. The story was one that was obviously sensitive. Many people experience some similar signs of decline when – as Joe Biden did while president – they reach the age of 81.

    Some Republicans could sound exceptionally mean when they raised the issue. And yet the cognitive decline of a president is a serious matter. Especially when he is seeking re-election for another four-year term. But precisely because so many people have relatives who have experienced the same conditions, a lot of people could recognise the signs. Should a man who seemed to find it difficult to put a sentence together, remember key facts or even where to walk be running the free world?

    Several new books now lay bare part of the scheme by which people around Joe Biden sought to hide his decline from American voters. What is additionally appalling is much of the media was willing to go along with the façade that the Biden team tried to pull off.

    Only after having tried to hide him from interviews for months did the unavoidable presidential debate against Donald Trump in June last year do for Biden’s candidacy. There in the brightest spotlight possible the reality became unavoidable. With trailing-off sentences, lost trains of thought and much more, Biden was cruelly humiliated.

    The effect was compounded by the First Lady, Jill Biden, addressing supporters immediately after the debate. With her husband standing beside her, looking lost and vacant, she addressed him in the terms you might a child who had earned an ice-cream. “Joe you did such a great job” she said. “You answered every question. You knew all the facts.”

    Within days he was gone and Kamala Harris got the Democratic party’s crown.

    One of the new books that exposes part of what went on behind the scenes is Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, written by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. With scores of sources – largely anonymous – the authors try to uncover how a small group around the president tried to keep the seriousness of his decline from the nation and even from his own cabinet.

    But it is the collusion of the media which is most stunning. Questions asked by allegedly serious fact-finding journalists were pre-submitted so that Biden could read out an “impromptu” response off a teleprompter to the question offered up. In February 2024 Judge Robert Hur carried out his investigation in the misappropriated documents case. He concluded that Biden was an “elderly man with a poor memory”. The Democrat media promptly ignored or attacked Judge Hur. How could a press corps which as much as any other in the world buffs its self-regard with a claim that it “speaks truth to power” engage in such a cover-up?

    The answer in part lies in the fact that one of the authors of the well-received new book was himself seemingly part of the cover-up. Tapper was one of the many media figures in the US who tried to shut down discussion of Biden’s failings. In one especially memorable exchange from 2020 on his CNN show, Tapper was interviewing Lara Trump (daughter-in-law of Donald). He bounced off comments she had recently made saying that whenever Biden speaks you almost feel for him and will him to get the right words out. “How do you think that it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that”, asked Tapper with the utmost seriousness.

    Lara Trump pointed out that when she had made her remarks she had no idea that Biden had ever had a stutter. But suddenly the feelings of stutterers had to be protected at all costs. Lara Trump tried to explain that what she had been pointing to was nothing to do with a stutter but rather that President Biden was suffering “very clearly a cognitive decline”.

    This enraged Tapper who decided to end the interview early. “OK – I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline,” he said, deciding that the only thing worse than stutterer-hurting was diagnosing of illnesses from a distance. Something Democrats have done with Trump for more than a decade.

    To be fair to Tapper, he has now faced up to the fact that he could have done more in the Biden years to acknowledge what everybody else could see with their own eyes. His co-author has done this even more fulsomely. But the fact remains that a cover-up occurred. And it was one that could get exceptionally vicious.

    Not all of the American media engaged in the cover-up. The New York Post (for which I write a column) was one of the few outlets which identified what had been going on for years. But again and again the White House and the Democrat media tried to shoot the messenger.

    When videos emerged of Biden stumbling around, not knowing where he was going, most of the media tried to make excuses for the president – to say he was simply wondering whether to go and speak to that chap over there, and the like. They even covered up when Biden claimed to have just spoken to world leaders who were in fact dead.

    And that is when what Donald Trump calls “the fake news media” really went into overdrive. Videos like those that the New York Post wrote about were not able to be seriously contested. So the Biden White House decided to claim that even this footage – able to be seen by anyone – were “cheap fakes”. That is, videos which had been carefully edited in order to make Biden look bad.

    But the only cheap fake was the mission that the Biden White House and its amen chorus in the US media were engaging in. It fell apart on the presidential debate stage, when nobody could deny the problem any longer.

    But the bigger lessons seem not to have been learnt. If Tapper and his colleagues get away with a mere, “Aw shucks, yes, I should have mentioned that the president was unfit for the job – and we all knew it” then the public has even more reason to distrust everything that comes out of the mainstream media.

    That is obviously a disaster for the declining media. But it is also a disaster for society as a whole. Because the ability to have some trustworthy sources in the world does matter – and will matter an awful lot more in the years to come. The American media that helped Biden should take a serious and critical look at themselves – even though it’s not clear that self-criticism is something of which they are remotely capable.

    1. Indeed.
      I now question everything I see and read in the media, as to why are they putting it like that, is this dog-whistle material, how can I believe it – and find I use a lot more time in cross-checking the "facts" as best I can. Latest BS was the "Russian special forces massing on the Finnish border" – that wasn't a thing in the Finnish media, something you'd expect if it were actually happening. But it supports the global narrative that "Russia Bad", and so the western Press continue their propaganda.
      Joe Biden is fully compost mentis! You read it here first, folks.

  32. Good morning, chums. And thanks, Geoff, for today's new NoTTLe site. I seem to be spending a lot of time oversleeping these days. Then, when I get up, I tend to get distracted with lots of little jobs before I realise that I haven't posted on today's site. I hope you are all well.

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  33. Good morning
    Francis Hunt of Market Sniper fame is a great talker – this is long but entertaining.
    At 49 minutes, he starts talking about what a tokenised future will look like.
    This is known to be planned by the parasite class, but it needs an infrastructure like digital ids to be in place first.
    So under this tokenise everything future, if you want to buy a bicycle (his example) you first have to go online and buy the bicycle token before you can pick the item up. That way, there is a permanent record of who owns everything. You can't buy it or sell it on without permission (didn't Revelations have something to say about that?)
    It is worth not just blindly going along with all the digitisation!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUJ-taRslfQ&t=4673s

  34. From Coffee House the Spectator

    17 May 2025

    Coffee House
    Stephen DaisleyStephen Daisley
    Why I changed my mind about multiculturalism
    17 May 2025, 6:30am

    When Blackburn MP Adnan Hussain complains about an opponent believing ‘free speech means protecting the right to offend Muslims’, you feel an instinctive response gathering in your throat. You’re damn right it does. It means the right to burn the Qur’an, mock the Hadith and doodle cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed performing in a rainbow-flag hijab on RuPaul’s Drag Race. In a liberal society, people should be free to blaspheme against any and all religions, even pretendy ones like Anglicanism.

    Mass immigration plus non-integration have allowed enclaves of reaction to sprout up in Britain. In these parallel states, some migrants and subsequent generations live as paper citizens but do not subscribe to the cultural assumptions that have come to undergird British national life

    You should be free to tell Catholics they’ve built an entire church around one woman’s genius excuse for getting knocked up by someone other than her husband. Free to tell Jews that when a solicitor gives you the title deed to a piece of land it’s called conveyancing but when a voice in the sky does it it’s called schizophrenia. Free to take the mick out of whoever it is that worships that broad with all the arms. (Imagine her manicure bills.)

    Few things unite secular leftists, right-wing Tories, liberal proceduralists and Anglo-futurists like a Muslim seemingly questioning the permissibility of blasphemy. Progressives who ackshually away appeals to British values at any other time now proffer them as principles fundamental and inviolable. Reactionaries who ordinarily decry the coarsening effect of crudity and profanity jostle to devise the most obscene insults against Islam. Freedom of expression, all sides agree, is too intrinsic to Britain’s national story to surrender it to men like Adnan Hussain.

    But is it intrinsic? It’s impossible to divorce the history of England from the liberty of the person, which has expanded at times and contracted at others but where the rough trajectory has been towards greater licence for the expression of individual conscience, especially on the subject of religion. However, a nation is an ongoing conversation between the past and the present, and England in the present is a country in which the freedom to blaspheme against one particular religion is coming under increasing challenge.

    Hussain later clarified his remarks, claiming that he wasn’t objecting to the legality of offending religion, merely accusing the former Reform MP Rupert Lowe of a disproportionate focus on Islam. But free speech means you get to offend Muslims disproportionately or even exclusively if you so wish. There is no equality duty when it comes to heresy and, bluntly, if you mean to take aim at the speech-chilling power of intolerant religious crybullies, there is a pretty obvious candidate. It’s about time someone put the Methodists in their place.

    Whatever his intended point, Hussain would hardly be a lone voice for restricting freedom of expression when it comes to Islam. Labour MP Tahir Ali has called for laws to ‘prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions’. Fifty-two per cent of Muslims in Britain would like to see it become a crime to show a picture of the Prophet Mohammed. Prohibitions on blasphemy were officially removed from the statute books in England and Wales in 2008 but continue on a de facto basis for those who scandalise Islam or its adherents.

    A man who burned his own copy of the Qur’an outside the Turkish embassy in London was charged with ‘intent to cause against the religious institution of Islam, harassment, alarm or distress’. There is no law on the statute books of England that makes it a crime to harass an entire religion, but the Crown Prosecution Service was satisfied to proceed all the same. Only after an outcry did it quietly drop the invented charge and replace it with one of causing ‘harassment, alarm or distress… motivated by hostility towards a religious or racial group’.

    The police swoop in when a Qur’an is burned, but they are noticeably less forceful in suppressing intimidation of those accused of insulting Islam. After a religious studies teacher at Batley Grammar School showed pupils an illustration of the Prophet Mohammed during a 2021 lesson, crowds of Muslims protested outside the school gates and the teacher was bombarded with threats online. He was forced to go into hiding where he remains four years later. As far as the Khan review could establish, not a single arrest was made over the campaign of harassment against the teacher.

    Officers were similarly reluctant to get the cuffs out when throngs of Muslim men gathered outside British cinemas in 2022 demanding they pull screenings of the ‘blasphemous’ film, The Lady of Heaven. One cinema chain after another dropped the movie, wisely so given the apparent reluctance of the rozzers to protect them or their patrons.

    The following year the Old Bill got more involved when a 14-year-old autistic boy at Kettlethorpe High School in Wakefield dropped and scuffed a copy of the Qur’an as part of a prank. West Yorkshire Police recorded it as a ‘non-crime hate incident’ and dispatched a senior officer to the local mosque to criticise the boy’s ‘lack of understanding’ and give the imam his ‘really, really deep-hearted thanks… in regards to the tolerance and understanding shown’. Said officer remained there and watched as the boy’s mother — sporting a veil, naturally — pleaded her son’s case. When it comes to Islam and intimidation, police can’t decide whether to be hands-on or hands-off. (You’d have thought sharia-compliant policing would come down firmly on the side of hands-off.)

    Liberals, of which I am one, are currently in denial about two-tier policing but even when the weight of evidence makes denial no longer possible, it will not be as easy as calling for legislative or policy changes to right the problem. We will have to do something much more daunting: confront the tension between liberalism and multiculturalism. No, not ‘tension’. I used to say ‘tension’ back when I believed the two could coexist in one country. I was wrong, idealistically wrong — the worst kind of wrong. The word I’m looking for is incompatibility. English liberalism and multiculturalism cannot be reconciled and the continued attempt to do so only delays the time of choosing.

    Mass immigration plus non-integration have allowed enclaves of reaction to sprout up in Britain. In these parallel states, some migrants and subsequent generations live as paper citizens — voting, paying tax, collecting benefits, sitting on juries, and using public services — but do not subscribe to the cultural assumptions that have come to undergird British national life, including the rule of law, tolerance, religious pluralism and freedom of expression.

    By no means does this describe all migrants or all Muslims, but it describes more than we should be comfortable with. Nor does the fault lie primarily with those who come here. Uncontrolled immigration is not their policy, they only benefit from it. It’s not their fault they’ve never been told there is a distinct and virtuous British culture to which they must acclimatise if they wish to live here. It’s not their fault that the UK state addresses them as a community with sectional interests rather than as citizens with shared obligations.

    That is the doing of a governing class that prioritises the group over the nation, the universal over the particular, the legal over the political, and the modern over the traditional. Post-national managerialists committed to the celebration of every culture but their own. Their compassion heatmap is so far off in the distance it is barely visible. There can be no progress until this destructive and demoralising elite is replaced and with them their failed gods.

    The crisis in British multiculturalism is a crisis of identity and philosophy, one not created but merely exposed by mass immigration. It is easy to pinpoint the flaws in our multiculture but much harder to say what our monoculture would look like. What is lacking is a British civic religion. America is about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Australia is about mateship and the fair go. Canada is about peace, order and good government. What is Britain about? What are our common bonds?

    A country which has ceased to be conversant in its own culture cannot hope to manage the level of multiculturalism brought by seemingly limitless immigration. If we define Britishness along civic lines — and I believe we must — then everyone born here or who makes this their home has a say in articulating our civic religion. The greater the volume of immigration the more susceptible that civic religion will be to challenges from those who bring with them different cultural assumptions, be that about blasphemy and free expression, sexual equality and gay rights, or ethnic prejudices and religious sectarianism.

    Britain is a multiracial and multifaith success story, but it is a multicultural morass, because while individuals of all nationalities, ethnicities and religious affiliations can integrate into British life, insular and adversarial cultures cannot. Individuals and families may observe traditions, customs, festivals and practices foreign to the UK, they may express special affinity for ancestral lands, but they cannot live in cloistered cultures sealed off from the rest of British life and hostile to many of its precepts. Becoming British need not mean losing your cultural heritage but it must mean your cultural heritage being integrated into your primary identity as a Briton. That can only happen with government policies that compel integration, discourage sectionalism and control migration numbers to make this process manageable. Keir Starmer is beginning to speak in these terms but it is actions that count.

    Diversity can be a strength but it can also weaken cohesion and consensus. Those who would prohibit offence to Islam don’t need to get a majority of Britons to agree with them. They just need to get a big enough minority to make their view unignorable so that liberty is no longer inseparable from British identity and becomes one of several competing perspectives, all worthy of consideration in the making of law and policy. The British state already sides with its enemies as a matter of habit, it hardly needs any more encouragement.

    Free speech does and should protect the right to offend Muslims and every other religious or ideological category. Multiculturalism and mass immigration are not the only threats to a civic religion rooted in individual liberty but they embolden those with no apparent sympathy for Britain’s tradition of free expression. Forced to choose between a liberal order and a multicultural one, as increasingly we are, no British person would fail to choose the former.

    Stephen Daisley
    Written by
    Stephen Daisley
    Stephen Daisley is a Spectator regular and a columnist for the Scottish Daily Mail

    1. I note that Stephen Daisley gives examples of criticism of or insults to Anglicanism, Catholicism, Judaism and Hinduism but shies away from giving an instance of the same nature of Islam. I wonder why? Could it be because he knows he would not put his life in danger criticising the first four religions but he would be taking a grave risk if he were to do the same to the latter?

      1. But didn't he write "Free speech does and should protect the right to offend Muslims"?

      2. I hadn’t really noticed but I imagine he didn’t want to receive death threats or even be arrested for hate crime.

  35. With reference to our (eventful) trip to Cambridge on Wednesday – Evensong as very calming. The 1662 service BUT with a Janet and John bible for the two lessons. Very odd, that. The setting – Trinity College chapel was, as one would expect, magnificent. And, of course, the college buildings make for tranquillity Our chum's daughter is reading Russian and is finding it very hard going. But she will cope and survive.

    1. Even the expression “reading” Russian has been abandoned in favour of “doing”. Sad, isn’t it.

    2. A former girlfriend of mine read Russian and Economics at The London School of Economics.

      This led to her meeting and marrying the PDG of a very large international company and spending most of her time playing golf.

    3. Niece read Russian and French at St. Andrews. Spent a year in Kiev to become fluent in Russian….

      1. I told her that Michael Frayn did the same – and became a significant translator of Chekhov.

        She's never heard of Michael Frayn….(hold head in hands!)

  36. And another thing……

    I have come to loathe the word "agent" – as in, "All our lines are very busy but I will connect you to an agent as soon as possible" That from a garden equipment company – though it could just as easily have been a bank….or any other outfit.

    The word clearly derives from American usage. Well, they can keep it. What is wrong with: "clerk"; "salesman"; "colleague"…?? Grrr.

    1. Shirley an agent is usually an external representative, as in actor’s agents and Getty Images having a contract to sell BBC footage? They’re authorised to act as agents.

    2. I recall my own first encounter with that word …. about age 4 … "Dick Barton, Special Agent" …. God, Dick Barton was special ….

    3. Maybe it would be acceptable if you rang MI5: "I'm sorry Sir, Mr Bond is on holiday leave at present, but I will put you through to another agent." Lol.

    4. I loathe the empty, pointless and meaningless expressions, "All Time" and "World Class".

      When people rant on about something or someone the 'best' of 'all time' they invariably mean their personal favourites or within their own short lifespan. NOT from the 'big bang'.

      As for calling anyone 'world class', at any endeavour, it means not a thing and is beyond silly.

    5. 'Operative' would be even worse!

      What's wrong with dogsbody, lackey or factotem?

  37. It is not just the fact that the Pakistani rape gangs targeted white girls because it was easy for them, and no retribution followed. The girls were also tortured and treated brutally, not just raped, because they were white.

    1. We had a Corgi. One of his favourite games was to lie on his back and being slid on the vinyl flooring down the length of the Hall. When he reached the end he would race back and roll over for another go! And another! And another….

  41. Starmer is nothing if not consistent. Consistent in failing to live up to his awfully delivered rhetoric.

    "Smash the gangs" would be a great headline if there was any intention to follow through on the threat. Sadly, Starmer & Co, and that includes many within the Tories, LibDums et al. who want mass immigration. We cannot be sure why but there are a number of ideas doing the rounds and none have a good ending for the English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish and settled British of all hues.

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  43. After 104 years UK’s longest train route is cancelled for ever
    Few passengers stayed on board for the entire 13 hours and 774 miles from Aberdeen to Penzance, and it was hard to keep to the timetable

    With a muted fanfare the UK’s longest train rolled out of Aberdeen on Friday morning for its final sojourn down to Penzance, ending a service that connected both ends of the country for more than 100 years.

    The 8.20am CrossCountry train took 13 hours and 20 minutes, with stops at 35 stations along the way, to cover the 774-mile route. Passengers spent more than two hours of the journey in the stations.

    The service, which was launched in 1921, headed south through York, Bristol, Taunton and Truro on its way past some of the country’s finest landscapes, and arrived in Penzance at 9.31pm.

    Michael Cleaver, an enthusiast, was on board. “It’s the last train ever and it’s such a long route. It’s a route I’ve wanted to do for ages and this is the last ever chance to do it. I’m hoping it will be a bit of a party train all the way down to Penzance,” he said.

    “As with many enthusiasts, this is very much a bucket list item so when I heard they were cutting it back I thought, I’ve got to ride this when I still can, because it is one of a kind. I’ve got a book and a phone so I’m not too worried about getting bored.”

    Rail bosses said one of the reasons for ending the train was the difficulty keeping such a long journey on time. The fact that most customers made only short journeys along the route was also a consideration.

    From Monday the train will run as far as Plymouth, an 11.5-hour journey, and there will be connecting trains on the main line through Cornwall.

    CrossCountry class 220 Voyager train passing harbor at Cockwood on the Exe Estuary.
    The train passed through Cockwood in Devon and in future will end at Plymouth

    A CrossCountry spokesman said: “Amending our Aberdeen to Penzance service from May 2025 will mean a more efficient timetable for our train crews and a more convenient service for our customers, making a day trip from Bristol and the west of England to Penzance more viable. The new timetable will also deliver an additional service in each direction between Glasgow and the northeast of England towards Birmingham.”

    During the pandemic the Aberdeen to Penzance route terminated at Plymouth, and the full route was reinstated in May 2023. Most people who made the full journey were people with a passion for trains.

    CrossCountry confirmed the timetable as part of the rail network’s twice-yearly timetable reviews. From Sunday the new timetable will be in effect. An advance single ticket in a standard class cabin for the final trip started at £138.60 per adult.

    Sources said very few people actually made the entire journey.

    As an “express” service it was severely challenged, partly because of the long waits at a number of stations along the way, including 14 minutes at both Edinburgh Waverley and Bristol Temple Meads, and seven minutes at Birmingham New Street and Exeter St Davids.

    Matthew Penhaligon
    14 hours ago

    I did that route with my Grandparents and their car by Motorail. It was a very long journey but great the car came too!

    Reply

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    robert storey
    12 hours ago

    Motorail was wonderful.

    Trundling across the country with the family Viva on a wagon at the back was magical.

    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/transport/article/britains-longest-train-route-aberdeen-penzance-9gsmbkx89?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwY2xjawKVPphleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETByRGNuMldZTHVxRTN6TXFtAR7v8JW4TtI0IQOrnrSBwVXM87ZlvCcwymlwL7TM6bN0X_A8jCVo-GzWMjCXAQ_aem_8_SOfsIjEcYryz3nOdDZ6Q#Echobox=1747456831

    1. There used to be a similar train from Glasgow to Harwich (mainly for used by Scottish soldiers stationed in BAOR). That was killed off some years ago. Now you need to take three trains, travel via London – and be very well off!

      1. A BR initiative, surprisingly. There's a long history of trains from Harwich to the midlands and the north but the through service to Glasgow began only in 1982.

    2. In the '50's, when i was regularly using the Plymouth Liverpool service, via the old GWR line – up to Bristol, through the Severn tunnel, through the Welsh Border country to Shrewsbury, then Crewe and on to Liverpool, I am pretty sure that the Aberdeen – Penzance service was either non existent or was just a "through coach". In the late '40's, my father had used the Harwich – Liverpool service when he was transferred from Suffolk to Liverpool. Those old "boat train" services are long gone. In the case of the Harwich Liverpool service, tracks it used to run on are no more.

  44. A teacher asked his students to say what their dads do for a living; Little Willy said, My dad’s a stripper at a gay bar.
    After class, teacher pulled him aside and said, is your dad really a stripper at a gay bar? No, he said, he’s a reporter for BBC but I was too ashamed to say that. . . . There are a few exceptions though.
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  45. we were in Salcombe yesterday for 5; we went ashore and had a lovely meal at the Ferryboat Inn; back onboard by 8 – Salcombe in the shade by then but out boat in sunshine – and asleep by 9. We were up early – as we are; and had big debate as to what to do; wait for Salcombe to open or slip off to Fowey? We awe about an hour away from Fowey now…you knew we couldn’t wait, it’s not in our DNA. Anyway, we have the wind behind us but the waves are sending us all over the place. We are like an ostrich ice-skating.

    I need to look Galatea up, we have just passed it, we are still all over the place.

    1. Bon voyage! Have you a picture of the boat upon which you are sailing?

      I love Fowey.

      My parents had a house near Lymington and my mother's family home was in St Mawes so I made the trip between the Solent and Falmouth very many times on all our boats.

      My parents met each other during the Fowey Regatta week and I used to race my Enterprise dinghy there when I was in my teens. I then spent most of my summers in that part of the world either on Atahualpa, my parents' boat, our Hurley 22 Inca and then our Van de Statd 31 footer, Raua, in which I spent a sabbatical year sailing to the Caribbean and back.

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        1. Not really, Rastus…I think written early 1930s, I first read it in the 60s – as relevant today as it ever was.

          1. I was referring to Prospero's reply to Miranda's observation about the brave new world to have such people in it.

            Aldous Huxley borrowed the phrase for the title of his novel.

  49. Got it in three but it took a lot of searching for suitable words when the first letters were rejected.
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  50. Afternoon all from the members at the racecourse. First race isn’t due for a while so I am studying the form.
    As far as Blair was concerned the purpose of university study, apart from indoctrination, was. to massage the unemployment figures.

    4. Early 1980s, I could find no work, so took a MSc followed by aa Ph.D. Then been employed 100%, become a specialist, seemed better than being unemployed.

  52. 405681+ up ticks,

    The man is PUCKING CRIMINALLY INSANE as are those supporting him & his criminal cartel.

    He ring fenced his own pension was one of the nicer things he has done, making it untouchable.

    Dt,
    Starmer insists reset with EU will make people better off
    Prime Minister’s claim comes as Macron demands ‘hard link’ between fishing rights and defence in bid to secure greater access to UK waters

    The frogs ( french) never tire of stabbing us in the back numerous times a day, financed by the political criminal cartel
    through the dover invasion, government orchestrated, campaign.

  54. A bit too near the bone. You do not need to look.

    Vandalising a Falklands landing craft to make woke gestures is a disgrace
    Will gays and lesbians have actively campaigned for this? I seriously doubt it
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3627b39bfe3bd0b10590381e14fa1e01a402e27e8dc868ec9c49683fe0f0dcc7.png https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/17/vandalising-falklands-landing-craft-woke-disgrace/

    I always thought a rainbow-coloured en-smeared glans would be an appropriate symbol for gay pride.

  55. One of the most challenging organ pieces is Bach's Fugue a la Gigue which my organist FIL opted to have played at his funeral particularly as it demanded gig-like dancing pedal work which had become impossible for him to master at his age.

    I wondered if Megumi Hamaya had made a recording of this Gig Fugue and here it is demonstrating her admirable dexterity in footwork on the pedals.

    https://youtu.be/7MCS7r7PJs0?si=CNLof4TEGCANw9zP

    1. Good job!! I always liked 'seasonally adjusted figures'; just add some salt to pepper up the data and get the result you want.

  57. "A classic tactic of control involves fabricating an external threat, seemingly more menacing than the controllers themselves, who then position themselves as the populace's protectors."

    Noam Chomsky

    Global warming
    Ukraine/Russia
    Far right . . . Any others?

    1. "Pandemics" of course – the answer is world government via the vile WHO treaty.

      Money-laundering via barber shops, nail parlours etc. This is being allowed to run free so that restrictions on money can be brought in under the guise of "combatting money-laundering."

    2. Russia, in the form of the USSR, was (and still is) a real threat. Putin is determined to reclaim all the old USSR territory. He has said so publicly many times. Ukraine was supposed to be Step One in the plan.

      Trump is a real threat to the US, but only because he is determined to spend a lot more, at the same time cutting taxes, which will lead to a massive rise in the deficit. The US has already had its debt downgraded as a result. We need an administration to cut the deficit and balance the books – the only one in my memory to do that was Clinton.

      ALL the GOP presidents increased the deficit, which to me is totally counter to their claimed values of small government and less federal interference with people's lives.

  58. "A classic tactic of control involves fabricating an external threat, seemingly more menacing than the controllers themselves, who then position themselves as the populace's protectors."

    Noam Chomsky

    Global warming
    Ukraine/Russia
    Far right . . . Any others?

  59. Michael Deacon
    Donald Trump has set a trap for the Left… and they’ve just walked right into it

    This row over white refugees from South Africa plays straight into the President’s hands

    17 May 2025 6:00am BST

    Like their counterparts in Britain, America’s progressives usually clamour for their country to take in as many refugees as possible. It seems, however, as if they’re finally willing to make an exception.

    Because this week, Donald Trump granted refugee status to a grand total of 59 Afrikaners: that is, white South Africans. And his opponents are up in arms.

    Trump claims that, in South Africa, white farmers are “being brutally killed”, and their land “confiscated”. His critics have furiously dismissed this as baseless nonsense. According to Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat senator, Afrikaners “do not need” refugee status, and Trump is pursuing a “sick global apartheid policy”. Meanwhile, Sean W Rowe, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, said that in light of the church’s “commitment to racial justice”, it had refused the Trump administration’s directive to help resettle the white South Africans.

    In my view, though, the most eye-opening response came from Ashley Allison, who was a senior adviser in the Obama administration. During a panel discussion on CNN this week, she indignantly rejected Trump’s claims about the white South Africans’ alleged suffering – and said: “If the Afrikaners don’t actually like the land, they can leave that country. They can actually leave and go to where their native land is, which is probably Germany.”

    Sorry, did I hear that correctly? Is she saying that, if members of a non-indigenous ethnic minority are unhappy, they can go back to where they came from?

    If so, I must admit to being somewhat taken aback. Because it’s not often you hear that particular line of argument from someone on the Left. And it’s particularly unusual to hear it from someone who happens to be African-American.

    At any rate, even if Trump is exaggerating their plight, I can see why the Afrikaners might at least be feeling a touch nervous. In 2018, Julius Malema – the leader of the EFF, a South African communist party – said, “We have not called for the killing of white people. At least for now. I cannot guarantee the future…”

    Of course, since one of Trump’s first moves on retaking office was to suspend the US asylum system, his critics are perfectly entitled to highlight his inconsistency. But then, perhaps he’s trying to highlight their inconsistency, too. Making them rail against white refugees, so he can paint them as hypocrites.

    Well, if it is indeed some kind of cunning trap, they’re helpfully walking right into it.

    The trouble with Lineker’s logic
    Gary Lineker, the BBC’s chief political commentator, has warned the nation that if you’re “silent” on Gaza, you’re “almost complicit”. I hope I can reassure him that I for one have been far from silent. On the contrary, I have repeatedly said that every single death in Gaza is the fault of Hamas, because none of this would be happening but for a) Hamas’s mass murder, rape and kidnap of innocent Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, and b) Hamas’s continued refusal to release all the hostages it took.

    I’m sure Mr Lineker will thank me for speaking out.

    All the same, I’m not completely certain that I follow his logic. This is because, to the best of my knowledge, Mr Lineker has never shared his in-depth analysis of the ongoing slaughter in Sudan, the Second Congo War, China’s persecution of the Uyghurs or Isil’s genocide of the Yazidis – to cite just a few humanitarian atrocities that have been perpetrated in recent times. Does his “silence” on these atrocities make him “almost complicit” in them?

    Of course it doesn’t. That would be an absurd suggestion. Still, I don’t want to give the man ideas. If he suddenly fears that his “silence” on the atrocities in Sudan, the Congo etc makes him look “complicit”, he might start speaking out on them. And, without wishing to sound ungrateful, I think I’ve heard quite enough of his geopolitical analysis as it is.

    The Lorde moves in mysterious ways
    Whoever compiles the Pseuds Corner column in Private Eye is going to have a busy week. Because he or she is about to be deluged by entries – all of them culled from the front-cover interview with Lorde, the magnificently earnest millennial pop star, in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

    Some entrants will choose the passage in which she says, “I had this very acute sense that I needed to be alone to really meet myself.” Others will plump for the part in which she confides, “I have a huge problem with being able to feel that I am powerful.” Or the bit where she reveals, “You’re an artist all day, whatever country you’re in.”

    Personally, though, I would go for the following paragraph.

    “From there, she experienced what she calls ‘the ooze’: the act of letting herself take up more space in everything she does, whether physically or creatively. Doing so opened the floodgates to her own identity. ‘My gender got way more expansive when I gave my body more room,’ she explains.”

    I for one intend to follow Lorde’s inspiring example. The next time a woman on the Tube complains that I’m “manspreading”, I shall tell her: “I’m letting myself take up more space in everything I do. And anyway, I have to sit like this, because my gender’s expanding.”

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

    Magdelena de Caestecker
    7 hrs ago
    Afrikaners are not from Germany, they are from South Africa, and have been for many centuries. They have been in SA for longer than most black Africans apart from Hotentots. And they originally came from the Netherlands. The senior advisor in Obama’s administration was presumably a DEI appointee. Perhaps she is related to Lammy.

    Carpe Jugulum
    7 hrs ago
    Lineker's career is based on being able to kick a ball skillfully which, whilst possibly admirable, isn’t indicative of a towering intellect or a qualification for the role of sage. And being a bit of a simpleton certainly isn’t. Perhaps that is why he omits basic facts like Gaza having a border with Egypt and Hamas, who started the war with atrocity, choose to hide amongst those who elected them.

    People are free to moralise and apply guilt to others, to do so requires both intellect and knowledge. Mr Lineker lacks both.

    James Baker
    6 hrs ago
    Reply to Carpe Jugulum – view message
    Footballers are employed by a side, to beat another side.

    As the name of his company implies: Lineker knows he made his career hanging around the goal posts for easy ‘tap ins’ for his side. I’m not sure he scored ever from outside the box (I’m not sure he could).

    He’s now making a nuisance of himself with easy, ill considered,‘tap in’ opinions for the side he’s chosen. The rights and wrongs of the situation are irrelevant to him.

    1. You would thank that Ashley Allison might have known the Boers originated in the Netherlands not Germany, but hey, ho, ignorance is bliss I suppose. Equally, GW Bush could not find Iraq on a map on TV after he ordered it to be invaded. Mind you, that probably applies to most here in the US, and with the distortions in education in England, it's probably headed that way too.

      Jill always put her knowledge of geography down to being a keen philatelist when she was a child. A good map on the wall showing "all the pink bits" as they were referred to in Hope and Glory.

      1. I think a map is a very important tool in children’s education. We always had a world map on the wall when the girls were little. And a globe!

          1. I know! Exciting isn’t it! But I also know where Kamchatka, Irkutsk and Ural are and various other odd places! The map, and playing Risk!

          2. If you know where the Urals are (i e in Western Russia) you are one up on Cameron who thought the EU should stretch that far.

      2. When we spent time in Oz back in the late 1980's, we ended up taking a balloon ride out of Alice Springs over the MacDonnell Ranges. The operators were from South Africa, and in chatting they made the point that majority rule would lead to a breakdown in law and order and a lot of anti white violence, so they had up sticks to Oz. And in that era "necklacing" was common in SA inter tribal disputes. And of course they only had to look at when happened in Rhodesia to know it would not end well.

  60. Wow! Scorching out there! Can’t do much in the garden in that heat, so it’s time for tea and a bikkie!

    1. or an iced G&T, same up here but there's a strong wind keeping the temp down 😘

      1. I wish, Spikey! I actually bought a zero alcohol G&T can in Aldi, and whilst it was very nice, it’s all the calories and none of the fun!🙄😘

          2. OK. Trouble is, non alcoholic versions of drinks really don't taste like the real thing. Tried multiple no alcohic wines over the years and none of them were actually drinkable. An American brand, Taylor, used to do a very pleasant low alcohol dry white wine, but no more apparently. All the NA reds I have tasted have been sweet and nasty.

          3. But I can dream! To be honest, I’m quite happy with tonic water over ice!

        2. Non-Alcoholic gin is foul. There are some really nice tonics around nowadays, which I find do the job very well on their own. Or, of you can tolerate a smidgeon of alcohol, a couple of drops of Angostura bitters liven things up no end. Cheers!

    2. This is the sort of decadence that brought the Roman Empire down Sue.

    2. He has dead eyes in the first picture.
      Doesn't look trustworthy and definitely isn't.

  62. He hates the British that much even his rentboys are foreign.

  64. Beebsplaining
    3h
    Riddle me this What will happen first….
    🤔 Labour Dartford councillor will have his trial
    🤔 pixie's Southport "rapid 3 month inquiry " will actuly report something
    🤔 Rayner will build 1 house
    🤔 tulip will be extradited
    🤔 1 nonce ring enquiry will take place
    🤔 First 1000 dhingy in a day arrive
    🤔 Lineker is sacked
    🤔 2tier Rodney will answer a question at PMQs

  65. It appears that Esther Rantzen is trying to stay alive long enough for the State to be able to kill her.

          1. The mouth still moving unfortunately, Alec…probably with a ciggie dangling from one corner. ‘morning xx

  66. That was two interesting hours work. We were given a haxnicks net that fits over a box frame. Frame lost. So I carefully measured – 4 pieces of plastic waste pipe – 4 x 160 cm; 4 x 120 cm; 4 x 100 cm. All cut. Perfick. To assemble, I used 3-way corner fittings for garden frame construction. Only maddening thing – the corners are 19 mm; the interior diameter of the waste pipe is 21.5 mm. So lots of tape used to make corner A fit pipe B. etc etc.

    When finished, the MR got out the netting and we did a trial run. Frame too big.

    It was then that I realised my measuring error. Each 3-way corner adds 2 cm to the length……..

    Just wasted half an hour cutting 4 cms of one end of each of the 12 pieces of pipe…..

    Will finish tomorrow. Or it will finish me.

      1. Different sort of error. Nowt wrong with the measuring. Just failiure to take account of "extra" length.

          1. Look here, you woman, you – the measuring was perfect. Simple failure to deduct 4 cms. Grrr!

          6. Don't let it get to you, Uncle Bill, they were only teasing. Everyone on this site loves you to bits.

  67. Village fete successful .

    Reflecting the closeness of the inhabitants, families , related families , generations of them .

    Many aged oldies , ladies serving teas coffees soft drinks and home made cakes , jam , loads of hellos, jollity , ice cream , lace makers, ancient craft , hurdle making, birds of prey , metal detectors , and artifacts , fossils , wood turning , sea shanty singers , an organ, old books , carved walking sticks , ride on miniature railway, weapons and aircraft bullets that have been found , ~Spitfire doing a circuit or two , amateur dramatic society and all the interesting things a village reveals .

    On another note , my sister messaged me again from somewhere over Africa, en route to Cape Town .. phones on aircraft .. and photos , whatever next .. she is flying KLM, she will be landing in about 3 hours I think . Long trip eh?

    2. Insufficiently diverse, no doubt.

      It will be banned for being too quintessentially English.

  68. Gosh, glad you enjoyed my short account Sue, the only people who were missing were thirty somethings and older children .. I expect they were doing other things .. You can please some of the people some of the time , but not all of the time .

    1. I expect you’ll be missing your sisters now they’ve gone back. My sister and BiL go back on Monday to Athens, but we’ll see them tomorrow for lunch. I know it’s not as far as SA but it might as well be! We’re going over in November for their Golden wedding. Where did all those years go?

      1. Youngest sister 11 years age difference and younger sister 4 years age difference ..

        I am their elder sibling , younger one has a twin brother , he has just become a grandfather of twin boys .

        My father was a twin, had a twin sister, my grandmother had a sister who had identical twin sons .

        My youngest sister .. I suddenly found she had a lot of similarities to me re cultural likes and dislikes .. totally opposite to younger sister who could be bordering on some sort of clever syndrome Autism .. and life hasn't been that easy , ever.

        Having said that it takes all sorts , and she is a whizz kid / fastest shorthand / crossword/ typing/ GK/ and the rest .. one has to be on ones toes!

        1. Did you enjoy their company on the visit? Not all just hard work organising beforehand, and catering and food etc while they were with you? They live so far away you must wonder when you'll see them again.
          I'm glad you found some common likes and dislikes and got to know your youngest sister better. There seem to be a lot of twins in the family.

  69. Rupert Lowe

    ·
    For a young mother to be imprisoned over one stupid social media post, soon deleted, is sickening. We're releasing violent criminals early and failing to jail paedophiles, yet we can find room for Lucy Connolly? An evil misuse of the justice system.
    Let her go home.

    1. "We" aren't doing those things. Starmer is, and has directed the judiciary accordingly. Talk about prejudicing someone's trial – except that Lucy Connolly was obviously persuaded by a useless lawyer to plead guilty, giving the judge carte blanche.

      1. It is both telling and appalling that a PM in a supposed "democracy" is controlling the actions of a politicised judiciary.

  70. Wordle No. 1,428 4/6

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

    Wordle 17 May 2025

    A mature Par Four?

    1. A pleasant birdie here.

      Wordle 1,428 3/6

      ⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    2. Everybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, pickin’ it ‘an chewin’ it, chewin’ it. A bogey.

      Wordle 1,428 5/6

      ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜⬜🟩🟩⬜
      ⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩
      ⬜⬜🟩🟩🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    3. Par again

      Wordle 1,428 4/6

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

    4. Very fortunate par here – I'll take it!!

      Wordle 1,428 4/6

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

  71. The wild flowers, just Joey (bottom), and my new clematis (fourth down) are doing well: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b8357ec4edd862553de4c527928d1c3721074713cddd3d083204ed65b6001971.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a73a082d9e63053a2b9871447775b29fa990ef0467929ade7b456b58d1ad3ecf.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8a16994ded954291a473869abed0bade8f5d70f210e250a84612fb430658dd10.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6996d789e54a3b019bbd10452f01da635c10f7dcb4e195f58c746aff41bbb4ee.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b461595dc0b7a32a0c5aebea934cd4638eeacbd363645cacff84fc8a201bb284.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e9cecab866f73daabfe1f3dbe46c92f085f23b6cec8250f2bcf5ce81a01344fe.jpg

    1. My photo skills are not a patch on yours.
      I thought we had a zero on bee orchids this year, but I've spotted a few.
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9b184896a8e29c21bc9990b11b19ce318488ba905fe1d29e8af06c6c65f57872.jpg A Lizard
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a456ba8ec007f15490937efbbbe5c2ba34451ccf44c37d9ddccfb528e6cc345f.jpg A white
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b6f769afa4a23597986940ce1e28f7227eeb81491f37b4d7ba7bd1bb06292cd3.jpg A chlorophyll free one, not terribly pretty but very interesting
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8e1d36e5920e7f623c2565c34f38e89761cb330db6c033df9eb8b4e25f476c54.jpg

        1. I love the orchids, the garden is almost overflowing with them.
          In a good year I might spot a dozen bee, but I suspect "bee" is too general as I have seen many different bee-a-likes.
          The Lizards number in the 20's.
          The Whites in the picture number in the teens, but I have a few different types that appear later in the season.
          The brown ones are now approaching the 100 mark. It was those that finally had me "tracking" the many different funghi around the garden as a hint for the next years round the garden orchid hunting.
          Some of the early marsh(?) and tongue orchids number in the 100's if not 1000's.
          If we lived in the UK, I am convinced our home would be designated as a SSSI; not just for the orchids but the great number of wild creatures. We may have more different types of snakes, amphibians and other reptiles in our 6 acres than there are the UK.
          The insects would make an entomologist drool and the different birds would even impress Grizzly

          3. Not been there. Know loads of Brits relocated . Attractive region. Your life looks idyllic.

    2. All crying out to be drawn and/or painted….great photos, all look top condition 🙂

  72. Brian Glanville is no more. I used to read his articles even though I cared neither a jot nor a tittle for wendyball.

    That's two great journalists gone in a week, the other one being Andrew Norfolk.

    1. It is 23 years since I last walked into a Starbucks. I asked for a coffee and they gave me a mug of hot milk. I asked for another 'shot' of espresso in it and it still looked and tasted like hot milk. I shall never return.

  74. Watching the Cup Final with grandson in his City (De Bruyne) shirt. Half-time, things getting a little fraught…….

  76. Why does everyone on this forum keep talking about (and complaining about) the 'heat'.

    Please send it my way if it's too much for you. I don't have any!☹️🥶

    1. It’s 20 degrees in London and there were people in Oxford Street this afternoon dressed for the beach. Or the desert.

    2. It's been very sunny the last few weeks but with a cold north or north east wind most of the time so it certainly isn't hot here.

    3. Because it’s Scotland in May, and our garden is way ahead of my BiL in Athens! He was thrilled to see ours! My daughter and I had a dinner Al fresco in Glasgow at 5.30 last week and when I take naked cat Dobby out into the garden I have to keep him in the shade! Not just amazing but a real joy! And I’m wearing shorts!

    4. I don't, I've been at a local primary school fete all afternoon I really enjoyed sitting outside in the sunshine enjoying the live band and meeting people I haven't seen for a long time. And watching all the children enjoy being there.
      And I won a Lovely 75cl
      bottle of 6.5 % cider. Three tickets for one pound.

    5. 27C and bright sunshine here – and still warming up. House closed up and A/C set ready to go. Currently nice and cool sitting under a large ceiling fan.

      Hard to belive it absollutely tipped down with rain yesterday – and Thursday.

    1. That's interesting.
      Perhaps, he really is deluded.. and has zero self-awareness.

    4. I think the same lawyer, when DPP, defended some of those accused of grooming. Possibly 2008/9?

    1. It’s been a while since I saw the rigid face mask but yes, there are plenty fully covered.

  80. We went to a lovely choral concert this afternoon in a local church. Quite well-attended but not as packed out as the last one. OH now watching the CF.

  81. See bigots.. Emily was right. All the locals know each other and are not an island of strangers.

    Daily Mail runs a story from Nelson, Lancashire.

    Tariq Hussain admits he doesn't speak the foreign language of English. Speaking in his native Punjabi he confessed: 'I don't watch the British news because I don't understand it, so what's the point?

    'All my work involves dealing with local people.. Pakistani people and my friends.. they are all Pakistani so I don't need to speak English. If I do, I get somebody to help me.'
     https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0f309639d78241ba601c36a81d5e39d309a967cd7c3ea4ee009f2881b82d8509.jpg
    No racial tension. Everyone just gets on fine.
    ਅੱਲ੍ਹਾ ਦੀ ਉਸਤਤਿ ਕੀਤੀ ਜਾਵੇ

    2. There are many people in Brittany who speak English but cannot speak French and don't even try to do so.

      1. Rude.

        I am approaching fluency after a year and three quarters here. Couldn't live without being able to make people laugh, for a start. 🤣

  82. 'Tis the modern way. I was amused, while sitting in the undergraduates' bar at Trinity on Thursday to see several young men take their exquisite – and expensive – water "bottles" from their rucksacks, have a tiny sip then laboriously replace said bottle.

  84. That's me gone for this sunny but cold day. Dry, of course. We do need rain.

    Driving to Cambridge, we listened to Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time" about Copyright. This most esoteric (and dry and boring) of legal subjects was made lively and fascinating by his three contributors – each an expert.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002c3bm Well worth hearing.

    Have a spiffing evening.

    A demain

    1. One of the very best programmes on the radio, in my view.

      edit for description.

      1. Agreed. God help us when Melvyn snuffs it – some diverse wanqueur will “jazz it up”….

        I was absolutely enthralled by the conversation between real, world class, experts.

        1. Totally agree.
          And it’s the same almost every programme.
          And what I really like about it is that they get people with different “takes” who debate lucidly and without any rancour.

    2. One of the very best programmes on the radio, in my view.

      edit for description.

    3. Copyright is a fascinatingly modern concept. If I can find my login details (which I’ve not used for years – I’ll have made a note but Lord knows where) I’ll have a listen.

      1. I shall have to go and have a sniff…
        MOH’s roses are mainly David Austin and they all scented.
        I’m afraid daughter’s rose however has no scent at all but what do you expect from a Woolworth’s rose?

        1. Should have purchased 'Arthur Bell" from Woolies @ £1 each. – a profusion of yellow roses with a heavenly perfume.

  87. Afternoon, Nottlers. Today I have been mostly sitting and doing nothing while nursing a Bucket O' Gin hangover after listening to the hockeyball-on-ice on the radio last night. That is all.

    3. A little too much red wine at lunchtime here… my excuse is low blood sugar and unusually sunny weather.

        1. Lowest ever measured before breakfast today.
          Normally very resistant to alcohol, after decades of training. Half bottle of gin – no worries. Today, 3 glasses red… I was bad. 🙁

          1. Lowest ever measured before breakfast today.

            What? Your drunken-skunk reading?

    1. Makes sense. It's the easiest way to enter the country without scrutiny or the requirement to show papers.

        1. Right – I mean why bother going to all the trouble of having to falsify a background story with a believable paper trail, and producing a fake passport – when you can just turn up, play dumb, and wait to see where in the UK you get placed. Then you call your drop number on a burner phone, and the embassy drops a bag full of cash at a pre-determined location.

          Not exactly Operation Mincemeat is it?

    2. Was the "foreign intelligence service" the current British government?
      Sorry, just spotted the word "intelligence".

    3. Well, it helps that they don't have to pretend to be British citizens. Once they leave their allocated hotels they just blend in with the local Islamist Jihadis.

    1. Sorry mate, I'd like to chat but I've got to practise my scales on the old trombone.

  90. Afternoon, you bastard.

    I'd make the font smaller but I don't know how to.

  92. A quick "good evening" from a hotel on the outskirts of Auld Reekie.
    Good journey; lovely weather. Stonking breakfast at an OK Diner on the way up. (Crap Merkin coffee but lots of it.)
    Which lead me to wonder how on earth the Americans eat so much.
    Sonny Snr and I are having a snack dinner a good 9 hours since we last ate. Simply because we think we ought to have something before we kip down.

      1. Visiting grand daughter now her exams have finished.
        She actually wants to see the old bat.

    1. It may have its roots that far back but copyright as we know it is 19th century. Thomas Carlyle and his circle knew that their work was being widely copied and sold and there were no royalties so they lobbied for change.

  94. Good story, that. One of our intelligence successes. cf General Patton’s phoney army in Kent.

    2. As a kid, The Newhart Show and Hill Street Blues were the only nights I was allowed to stay up until 11pm.

      Take that, kid sister! :blows raspberry:

  97. Remember your first old grass mower.. did any of you have a push along simple Qualcast .

    I remember very well cutting the grass when Moh was away when the boys were little .

    Everyone had one of those , and then the luckier ones had old motor mowers or electric mowers ..

    1960's/70's mowers .

    The strange thing is , I cannot remember my parents mowing , or Moh's parents but I can remember the sound of old motor mowers being used to cut tennis courts at school .

    I love the smell of cut grass.

    The warm weather has slowed down the growth of the grass in the garden , so Moh is fairly happy about that ..

    Suffolk Punch and a Mountfield , if one doesn't start, the other does .

    1. My Grandfather had one. Old cylinder mower, made stripes on the lawn.

      1. I have recently bought a Cobra push mower for when Miliband finally puts the lights out permanently. At least I'll be able to cut my lawns.

    2. Having grown up in the poor part of Grasmere, I remember our very first grass mower.

      His name was Ted.

    3. Yep had one of those.

      Sold on eBay for a lot more than my Suffolk Punch motor mower

    5. First house had a pocket handkerchief garden so I went to a second hand shop to see if they had some shears. I was asked what I wanted them for so I said: "To cut the grass" . The chap said: "We haven't got any shears but we do have this little electric lawn mower for £3" … Bargain it lasted a few years and when it died I cut off the electric cable and wired in a 13 amp rubber socket to use as an extension lead for the next 20 years!

    7. Yes we had a Qualcast I use to love cutting the grass sloping as it was but it was almost Wimbledon.

    8. My first mower was Qualcast push mower that I bought from an early Asda store in Preston for £7.50

    10. We have an old electric powered mower which we inherited from father in law. It's old but still works ok. At home with mum we had an old push mower. Later an electric one – it was blue. Never had a big petrol mower though.

    11. Hasn’t the cool weather slowed down the growth of the grass as well.

  100. From https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/17/now-even-greenpeace-is-worried-about-north-sea-oil-jobs/
    Now even Greenpeace is worried about North Sea oil jobs
    We are told net zero will create employment, but there’s no sign of it happening
    Even by the standards of Greenpeace and Unite it was a very odd protest. A coalition of 60-plus environmental and union groups staged a demonstration outside Parliament this week demanding a huge programme of government spending to help North Sea oil workers laid off by the closure of the fields.

    But hold on. Weren’t we told there were going to be lots of well-paid green jobs? Surely the workers made redundant on the rigs can just get one of those?

    There is just one problem. It is becoming painfully clear that the green jobs revolution promised by Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, is a self-serving fantasy – and tens of thousands of genuinely well-paid jobs are being pointlessly sacrificed.

    In a week when the legislation to create Great British Energy, the Labour Government’s state-owned renewables champion, was finally passed through Parliament, we should all be welcoming the wave of green jobs that are about to be created, along with the lower energy bills that should be coming our way very soon.

    “As part of our Plan for Change, this will make us a clean energy superpower and help bring down energy bills for good,” argued Miliband as the legislation was passed. Well, perhaps. It seems, however, that no one got around to telling all the workers in the North Sea who will soon be losing their careers.

    As the bill was passing through Parliament, a group of protesters gathered outside to demand that as well as the £8bn being spent on GB Energy, another £1.9bn of taxpayers’ money should be used to create new jobs for all the people about to be laid off from the oil and gas rigs in the North Sea.

    “Offshore workers have risked life and limb and suffered long stints away from their families to keep this country moving and it’s time the Government repaid their sacrifices with an industrial strategy that puts worker justice at its heart,” according to Greenpeace.

    Seriously? Green campaigners are worried about workers on oil rigs?

    For years now we have been lectured on how the transition to greener energy would create lots of jobs. Now we are being told that everyone laid off in the traditional energy industry will be unemployed if the Government doesn’t step in to help them.

    In reality, the contradiction only makes sense when you realise one very simple point: these supposed well-paid green jobs don’t actually exist.

    Sure, there are jobs that can be labelled as green if you don’t mind twisting the definitions a little. The Office for National Statistics had a stab at calculating how many last year, and came up with what it admitted was an “experimental” figure of 639,000 across the whole of the British economy, a surprisingly small number given there are 34m jobs in total.

    There are extra jobs being created putting up the wind turbines off the Yorkshire coast – at least when they are not cancelled, as the huge Hornsea 4 wind farm was earlier this month – plus installing solar panels in supermarket car parks and putting up all the extra pylons that will be needed to secure the grid against blackouts.

    But any reasonable calculation of the total has to factor in the job losses in the North Sea, as all the people who used to supply the country with conventional fuels. Even more importantly, it has to factor in all the job losses in manufacturing as whole industries get wiped out by sky-high energy prices.

    Even the climate change groups protesting this week agree that 227,000 jobs have been lost in the last decade in fossil fuels. Likewise, it is estimated that 600,000 jobs have been lost in manufacturing in the UK over the last decade, and if we attribute at least half of that total to energy costs (which, if we are being honest is probably an underestimate), that means another 300,000 have been sacrificed to net zero.

    Add the two figures together and more than 500,000 jobs have been lost, meaning that only a little over 100,000 net green jobs have been created.

    Even worse, many of those are simply installation work for technologies such as heat pumps. All they do is simply replace existing work in traditional engineering. If a plumber switches from installing gas boilers to heat pumps he might be classified as moving into a “green job”. But that doesn’t mean any extra employment has been created.

    The blunt reality is this. Ed Miliband, along with the climate commissars around him, have been peddling a lie. If there were genuinely lots of well-paid green jobs, we would have seen evidence of them by now.

    Instead, we are now in the absurd position where climate groups such as Greenpeace clamour for one round of subsidies for green energy and then another round to help all the people who lose their jobs as a result. It is a never-ending cycle of more and more government spending.

    We are lectured endlessly about how transitioning to nett zero will create lots of employment. But there is no sign of it actually happening.

    Sure, we can all argue about whether climate change is an emergency, or whether it is a problem that can be solved fairly easily with better technology. We can also debate whether the UK really needs to be a world leader in reducing carbon emissions, given that we account for less than 1pc of the global total.

    But there is no point in kidding ourselves that the transition is going to make us richer. Right now it is becoming painfully clear that it is throwing lots of people out of work – and there are very few genuinely new jobs being created to compensate for that.

      1. The SNP still do! Since allowing Grangemouth to close they’re determined to get 3000 ‘Green’ jobs into the area!! They’re bonkers!

      2. The SNP still do! Since allowing Grangemouth to close they’re determined to get 3000 ‘Green’ jobs into the area!! They’re bonkers!

    2. "Sure, we can all argue about whether climate change is an emergency, or whether it is a problem that can be solved fairly easily with better technology. " Or we can face up to reality, which is that the climate has always changed, always will and it has more to do with the sun than any man-made activity.

    3. Judging by what we have seen around the Baltic there are quite a few “green” jobs available – making, storing, moving and assembling the giant turbines that will eventually become a hazard to both wildlife and shipping. Equally obvious is the fact that none of those jobs will be in the UK!

    4. Yes thousands of green jobs have been created in China who sell us the wind turbines – bird choppers – and solar panels to cover fertile farm land.

      Climate change is the biggest con going that is probably making many politicians, of all flavours, vast sums of money for selling their souls.

      Despicable beyond belief.

  101. Talking of lawns, from my age 4 to age 19, my family had a back yard.

    2. Our back yard was half and half soil and concrete and I guess the soil half could have been grass but my parents preferred roses.

  102. From the Telegraph

    There’s more to university than the promise of a well-paid job
    It gives you a last shot at making a gang of friends, before you move into the more fragmented social milieu of work
    Jemima Lewis15 May 2025 6:01am BST
    When I was 18, doggedly indolent and on course to fail all my A-levels, my father staged an intervention. Lowering himself onto his knees before me like a supplicant monk, he knitted his hands together in prayer. “All you have to do,” he begged, “is enough revision to scrape through these exams. And then you can spend three years at university doing absolutely nothing.”

    It was a brilliantly effective pep talk at the time. But no part of it rings true today. My eldest child is 17, and weighing up possible degree courses. To get into a Russell Group university, he will need a fat bouquet of A-grades: there can be no question of cramming, bluffing or scraping through. Once in, he will have to pay £9,535 a year in tuition fees, which is hardly conducive to relaxation. Undergraduates have become much more serious-minded and diligent since the introduction of student loans in 1998. A good thing, no doubt, except that their virtue is not being rewarded.

    The so-called “graduate premium” – the difference in average salaries between people who attended university and those who didn’t – has been shrinking for decades, and now seems to have gone into reverse. Nearly three-quarters of new graduates earn less than £29,120: the median salary for people aged 22 to 29. Even three years later, they lag behind their peers who went straight from school to work.

    Some degrees are more valuable than others: the boring ones. Computer science, business, maths and economics are the top salary-boosters. Whereas a degree in philosophy – my son’s chosen subject – is likely to shave a couple of thousand a year off his starting salary. A responsible mother, in fact, would be on her knees begging him not to get into university. And yet, for reasons of nostalgia more than common sense, I can’t help wanting him to have those three years between school and work. Not just the extra education, but the extra time.

    I want him to experience the luxury (which it really is now, almost to the point of decadence) of playing at being a grown up, among your peers, far away from home. Even though my years at Newcastle University were just as academically idle as predicted, I acquired skills and memories that set me up for life. How to pay a bill, how to live with other people, how to make friends with boys. Time was so abundant that it ceased to feel progressive and became more like a soft, settled atmosphere: one composed of my flat mates’ voices, the smell of old cigarettes, a strip of sunlight moving across the bedroom ceiling.

    And parties and drugs and snogging too – all of which was instantly anecdotalised, so that we often seemed to be laughing at our misspent youth even as we were living it. University is such a generous interregnum. It comes just at the right moment, when you are composing the internal mythology that will sustain your self-image. It gives you a last shot at making a gang of friends, before you move into the more fragmented social milieu of work. None of this shows up on the fiscal balance sheet, of course. In terms of earning power, it is nothing but a waste of billable time. Worthless, and yet – I still believe – infinitely precious.

    2. I am proud to say that I have SIX O-Levels.

      Didn't damage my glittering career.

      1. Many of my contemporaries left school with "O" levels and then served five years of articles to become chartered accountants or solicitors; others did "A" levels and served 4 years of articles while those with degrees did 3 years of articles.

      2. I have four Os and two As. I don’t think there’s anyone left at the Beeb who knows that I don’t have a degree. I’ve been doing my job for so long that how I got there (typing test/clerk/secretary/learn from the execs I worked for) is long forgotten.

        1. I have 9 O Levels, 3 A Levels, S Level French, Use of English, two bachelors degrees, one degree equivalent (Institute of Linguists) and two Masters degrees. One of these days I'd like to complete the set and get my PhD (the second Masters, an MPhil, was the result of having to pull the plug on my PhD).

        2. I did O levels in 1964 and passed except for maths. I did A levels in 1966 and failed Latin, passed English and French with low grades. Later , in my thirties, I learnt German, passed O level with an A and A level with a B. I went to work after O levels and then got married too young. My boys did better than I did – they got their degrees and the elder one bought his house 30 years ago. The younger one has just bought his house in Switzerland. They both work in IT.

          1. A bit harsh. It's the old "gold standard" A level that is today's degree equivalent. There was a huge row some years back when one of the universities was found to be using old A level questions in their Mathematics finals.

      4. I had 2 A levels in English Lit. and History how many o levels I cannot remember or how many ULCIs ping i had a ULCI in Oral English.

      5. Did it involve polishing up the handle of the big front door?

        I got 8 O's and the requisite 3 A's. Left school and went off to learn engineering the hard way — took one of the then fairly new Dip Tech courses at the first of the British Colleges of Advanced Technology. Could not start for a year as I was only just 17 when I left school.

        The Dip Tech was a real grind – a 4 year course of 2 terms per year of literally (like school) full time lectures and labs, no punting on the Cam or any of that nonsense, and one term per year (and all "vacations") learning the realities by working for my sponsoring company – who wonderfully paid for everything. And paid me a (measly) salary at the same time. Full time development engineer job at 22, married at 23, house bought at 24. Kids a few years later. Going to youngest grandchild's university graduation ceremony this week. Surprisingly, it is her and not either of her two brothers who has completed a STEM degree.

      6. I’m proud to have left school 4 days before my 15th birthday and started work 1 month later. Started as an office boy in export department, promoted a year later to export invoice clerk and in March 1964 was promoted to trainee distiller for making gin and in the October was promoted to distiller aged 18.
        In all future employment I was promoted and had a successful working life and an extremely happy marriage and family.
        I don’t think there’s anything I would change in my life. Happy and contented.

    3. The best thing we did for our boys (now aged 31 and 29 respectively) was to pay their tuition fees and living expenses at university so that they entered the world of work completely free of debt.

      Since leaving university each one has been employed in well paid jobs, each one has bought his own home, one is married the other is engaged and best of all they are financially completely independent and since starting their working lives they have not asked for a penny piece from us.

      One is an aerospace design engineer; the other writes sophisticated computer programs.

      1. Certainly young people have been severely punished with university fees and the high living expenses. We used to employ young British graduates and as long ago as the early 90s I remember how burdened they felt with university debt
        In Spain my daughter studied engineering and my son went to a state drama school, lived at home with reasonable fees.Now pushing forty they have the advantage of successful careers and prosperous family life.
        What has been done in England in Wales to young people beginning their professional lives is truly appalling.

      1. Well, isn't there something awfully queer about these young men setting fire to Starmer's House and car? It doesn't smell right …

        1. "So, as PM and under 24×7 protection I decided to shag a couple of Ukrainian rent boys. As you do. Should I:

          (a) Pay them cash.
          (b) Put it on expenses with the credit card for the travel points.
          (c) Have them taken out by 5 as a domestic intelligence threat.
          (d) Not pay them, and wait till they try to burn down my house with all the publicity that entails.

          For fucks sake.

          1. Your final sentence may or may not be prophetic. I believe there is a court injunction being sought. May I add that Keir Starmer seems, on the basis of his election campaign and events since July a brazen liar. I for one, would gladly see him rot in solitary.

  105. We've had a busy afternoon with our four grandchildren, a school fete on a playing field and playground. It
    is quite a large area for us oldies to cover when keeping them under control.
    I'm not suggesting that the parents could have done more. But only two of them were available and able. But I did catch the sun today. And enjoyed every minute of it all.
    A good band if a tad loud. Nice to hear two female singers in harmony. Unusual for a band.
    I had a nice chat with some of them during a break. It seemed they only did requests if they were asked for. ….and Old Ronnie Scott Joke.
    Also watered all of the garden plants.
    So Popping orff very soon, good night all.

  106. See! You must have been doing something right! Good for you! Have a great time and enjoy the weather!

    1. What a man's man he was. Would that I could ever look that good.

      RIP, fella.

      1. He had a much older friend who saw himself as a mentor (my grandfather had died when my dad was a teenager) I have his name……… he eventually went to work for him and they fell out – my uncle said "he picked Peter's brains"…. my mother thought perhaps he'd leave something in his will for me but of course he didn't. My father kept all his letters.

        2. (male) friend of mine once remarked…don’t make friends with another couple, first off the two women fall out, then one woman falls out with the other woman’s husband, then finally the two men fall out and everything’s finished. I just think it’s all a waste of energy, never really understand some folk. Can happen online too.

      1. No – but that pic was taken in France in 1946 – he went on an assignment to Bordeaux as an honorary RAF officer, to recover an engine of a crashed plane. He also was asked by a widow to find out what happened to her husband who crashed in that area during the war. I don't know whether he was able to set her mind at rest.

    4. So sorry to hear that.
      My dad would have been 121 today. Born in 1904.

    5. Phwoar, Ndovu! What a handsome man! He died just before I was born. How fragile we are.

    6. 39 is no age… I'm sorry that you grew up without him. And that he didn't experience your growing up.

  108. I'm still friends with some old friends from school. We used to be friends as two couples, but we both got divorced…….. the men were still friends after that. We all went on holiday together to France one year but that did get a bit fraught at times.

    1. I’ve always tended to be a loner, I like other people and most seem to like me, just don’t get too close :-DDD

        1. Another thing we have in common apart from diverticulitis:-) I’m an only child, my mum the only mother who always worked, I was left with grandparents until my grandmother started with Parkinsons. Local library nearby, I went in there a lot could read quite well age 3, eventually given a card pre-school, and allowed to take out more or less any book.

    2. WWe Have found that it us better to go on holiday with other couples where they are maybe in the same city so you can get together – but certainly far enough away to not see each other every day.

    1. When does his case come up in court (the customer that is, not the shoplifter).

      1. I've never ridden one, Conners, but he does look super comfortable, like a giant pony, doesn't he?

        1. They were draught horses; bred with no feather to speak of because of the soil in Suffolk.

  114. True, And draught horses tend to have whacking great heads, which is not ideal for a nice light ride. But i do know people that ride them and swear by them,

    I remember taking husband around various French studs (curiosity) and he just couldn't; believe the sheer heftiness of some of the breeds. But of course. it being France, they were breeding for meat as well as work.

      1. Again, I know those who swear by them, particularly big heavy men and especially for hunting.. I was really very annoyed when my disabled son was deemed too heavy to ride his extremely stocky four-square cob by the RDA. and told to get a taller horse. (which he wouldn't have coped with)

    3. La chevaline. First saw these butcher shops in Geneva. Swiss in-laws took me and their daughter to a restaurant that specialised in horse meat. I walked out when I discovered the whole effing menu was equine.

  116. Well, chums, it's almost 11 pm so I'm now off upstairs to bed. Good Night to all of you. Sleep well, and hope to see you all early tomorrow morning.

    4. Grattis på födelsedagen, Dukke. Hope it's a rather special day and that you get spoilt rotten!😘👍🏻🥂🎂😊

  120. 405698+up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Forget about a uni. education, the park public toilet freak sold the peoples a pup decades ago, education,education,education, shortly education will be FULLY in the hands of the mullahs.

    If by now you have not given the Tillers of English soil a very serious coating of looking you really do deserve ALL the imams can serve up

    Political assassination rhetorical continues among the leading politico's as does the now larger boats coming in daily,the need to touch down on the near death corpse of old England is most urgent in Calais

    Saturday 17 May: It’s time to think again about the purpose of a university education

  121. It appears that the Mexican military training ship is being towed backwards. Someone didn't do their homework on the bridge clearance requirement

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