837 thoughts on “Saturday 18 January: The EU’s intransigence over free movement puts a trade deal at risk”

    1. You can tell there’s a frost without looking: things are moving so slowly on here because Nottlers are busy scraping the ice off their monitor screens.

  2. Good morning everybody

    SIR – The Prime Minister has wisely turned down the demand from Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, for yet another divisive vote on Scotland’s independence (report, January 15).

    When I joined the Royal Navy in 1963, recruits from Scotland were exempted from the educational test required of all others, since the Navy considered a Scottish education good enough to satisfy requirements. I’m now told by friends who have children and grandchildren in the Royal Navy that recruits from north of the border have to take remedial lessons in the evenings to bring them up to the standard required by the service.

    By concentrating so much on independence, the Scottish National Party has totally neglected all other aspects of governing – including education. The people of Scotland (and expats like me) deserve better.

    James A Dunbar
    Isle of Portland, Dorset

    Are there any aspects of life in Scotland that have improved since the SNP took the helm?

    1. SIR – New statistics show that university admissions for Scottish pupils to universities in their own country are in decline (report, January 13). This follows confirmation of systemic and worsening failures seriously affecting the quality of education and outcomes in primary, secondary and tertiary education, and also for disadvantaged children.

      The SNP-led, Scotland-only government seems determined to undermine what was considered to have been the best state education in the country and beyond.

      The UK government was responsible for education in Scotland from 1885 to 1999, through the Scottish Office. It increasingly appears that the way to reverse the appalling decline is for this Government to take back overall control of education.

      Ian Goodall
      North Berwick, East Lothian

      1. The introduction of comprehensive schools, starting in the 70s was the start of the educational decline. The drop in apprenticeships and technical schools was a bad thing, pushing non-academics into academic studies.

        1. ‘Morning, Horace, as with everything that these devolved assemblies and the wee pretendy Parliament touch, it seems to turn to dust. Education in Scotland as identified, the health service in Wales and the inability to run their organisation in Northern Island, all effectively highlight these costly failings.

          Close ’em all down and return power to Westminster with a smaller Commons and a hereditaries-only Lords and bring responsibility and accountability back where it belongs, while ending the troughing in the devolved gravy-trains.

          Rant over.

          1. MB had a Scottish cousin who I rated as no more intelligent than his half-English relative. (No bias on my part!)
            Scottish cousin went to Edinburgh university and became an Economics professor.
            MB, living in Essex, went to a secondary modern school and did his best.
            If the family had remained in North Berwick, I suspect MB’s life would have followed a similar pattern.
            But I am talking about the 1950s, before the SNP got its grips on power.

          2. The fact that your Bill ended up with a wonderful spouse and a love of “Home in Pasadena” by the the Temperance Seven is every bit as successful in life as his Economics professor brother. (Good morning afternoon to the pair of you, btw.)

        2. Yo HP

          The first Comprehensive Schools were opened in the mid 1950’s:- I know, I attende Foxford school in Coventry fron 1956 ’til 1961.

          Classes were streamed, according to subject and ability.

          1. I went to a Scottish High School in the late 50s/early 60s. I thought all schools were like mine – 1 Head, 1 deputy, 1 secretary – the school ran like clockwork – no indiscipline (the odd fight) – left aged 16.5 years old with 5 Highers to get to Uni. Most High Schools (Grammar in E,W & NI) were the same.

            It’s only when you see the poor performance of the school that now bears the same name you see the difference to what I experienced 60+ years ago.

            How things have got to this stage must be down to comprehensive education & the lack of parental control.

        3. But now we’d just give unemployed young people something to do.
          We’d teach them trades and skills.
          We might even teach them to read.
          The army never discharged anyone who was illiterate.
          We could make them wash.
          We’d give them a comprehensive education to make up for their comprehensive education.
          Call it “national service”.
          Send the young people out into the community services.
          With one policy, we solve our defence, educational and unemployment problems.
          This is wonderful.
          I see it all now.
          “A new deal for Britain – Hacker’s Grand Design.

          Ah Yes Prime Minister.

          The three lead roles have all passed away now with the death of Derek Fowlds. It feels unfair, as if something great has left the world.

          1. ‘Morning, Wibbles, so good you posted it three times?

            If you’re going to reintroduce National Service, do it properly, between 18 and 23 (deferred for University Students) everyone does at least two years in one of the armed services, being subjected in the first 3-6 months to rigourous ‘basic’ training.

            This will stiffen the back-bone and teach self-discipline – both characteristics sadly missing among the youngsters of today.

          2. Morning, NTN. In the modern military almost all the two years would be taken up by training.

            I joined the RAF in 1955 and commenced aircrew training. Twelve months to qualify in my aircrew trade. Three months to convert to the maritime role. Then three months to convert to aircraft type.

            I joined my first operational squadron after 18 months. Had I been a National Service entrant the RAF would have spent a fortune on my training and received 6 months of operational service.

          3. ‘Morning, Delboy, as a National Serviceman you wouldn’t be considered for aircrew because of (as you rightly say) the training and conversions required.

            I joined in 1960 as a Boy Entrant; only after 3 months in ITS (Initial Training Squadron – Drill and Bull unlimited) did I then start on another 15 month long, Air Radar Mechanic’s course which later required another year at RAF Yatesbury to convert to Air Wireless Fitter

          4. mstjbrown
            8th Nov 2007, 10:39
            How many of us were there ?

            I went to Hornchurch for pre-selection and was quickly wafted from Padgate to Compton Bassett for Air Signaller ground school. Then off to Swanton Morley for flying training in Ansons and then Percival Proctors. Off to St Mawgan for maritime reconnaissance traing in Lancaster MR3’s. Up to Kinloss for conversion to Lockheed Neptunes and finally to 36 Sqn at Topcliffe to see out the remainder of my National Service.

            All done in two years with a very high level of competence displayed by the various trainers.

            There were of course navs and pilots who also qualified during N.S. but I have rarely come across many others who had this very interesting way of passing their two years. The RAF was still a very big organisation then and many of the personnel were ex-WW2.

            After leaving I was recalled for reserve training twice – to trundle around in Vickers Varsities which enhanced my student income considerably.

            Things seemed very laid back at that time !

          5. As Delboy says, the time needed to train is vast. I’d just have people litter picking. They’re the ones who litter, after all.

            And start it at 10. It doens’t have to be military service. The intent is to serve your country, community and elders.

            And aye, the thrice post was an annoyance of the text area not showing the previous – apologies.

    2. From, reading a lot of the local Facebook comments, it seams their must be a lot of English Royal Navy rejects around hear.

      Morning zx.

        1. I’m extremely reluctant to criticise others’ spelling and grammar (glass houses, stones and all that) but some of what I see goes beyond the usual. “I should of (have)” being one such.

          2. “I mislaid my homework” only got us 50 lines at school, whereas “I lost it” got us 100.

          3. Our English teacher had a preference for plain, Anglo-Saxon words.
            Her loathing for pompous latin based circumlocutions was visceral.

          6. I think you mean “love-making”, Peddy. “Procreation” means creating a new person whereas the F word is just the means, not always successful, to that end.

          9. Trust you to remember that word, Elsie. Your comment reminds me of the English conversation lesson which Brian held in Sally’s room in “Cabaret”.
            Here are a few more for the same thing…

            Bumsen, Ficken, Flachlegen, Poppen, Vögeln.

          12. I corrected the grammar of one of the brats I work with. He then made the same mistake later.

            He misspelled my name and I said ‘that is not my name’ and he didn’t flicker to apologise. He would fail a year 3 literacy test. He’s 20, not 12. Four times his work was sent back for grammar and spelling errors. I assume he couldn’t tell where the problems were after the first rejection.

            Frankly, some kids need beating.

          13. “I mislaid my homework” only got us only 50 lines at school.

            See how long it take Grizz to come belching out of nowhere…

          15. ‘Grizz’ doesn’t belch any more. He’s on a carb-free diet!

            Which, for a plantigrade omnivore, is a sea change.

          17. The problem that we defenders of English now have is that if we draw the attention of a delicate offender to the error of their ways, no matter gently, someone comes along & knifes us in the back.

          19. Good morning Peddy

            Offender (singular); their (plural) ?

            (Sorry, I suspect I missed the irony.)

    4. No, quite the opposite. In most areas, things were already pretty miserable. The record of the Scottish Office, followed by a Labour led Scottish Government was dismal in every respect: infrastructure, support for business and industry, housing, planning. Education did best surviving into 80s.
      However the SNP Government is herding us towards all round depression.

      1. On my first visit to Scotland – and in North Berwick, the Frinton of North Britain – I was amazed to find apples being sold individually.
        During the subsequent fortnight, I discovered a rather different attitude to consuming fresh fruit from that in the soft south.

        1. Years ago, when my ex & I used to visit the nether parts of Britain, we would take great delight in standing front of, say, a butcher’s shop window & make loud remarks such as “Gosh, isn’t the bacon cheap here!” The looks from the locals were priceless.

          1. Peddy, you are a Bounder, a Reprobate and a Silly Sausage all in one! (Good morning afternoon, btw.) :-))

        2. You are surely aware that, up here, mutton pies are considered one of your 5-a-day?

  5. Well done to Ewan Somerville for getting this published

    Sheffield’s racism classes are an Orwellian attempt to silence my free speech as a student
    EWAN SOMERVILLE – 17 JANUARY 2020 • 8:00PM

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2017/03/14/JS93122896_Nick-Edwards_Protesters-rally-outside-the-National-Union-of-Students-HQ-in-London-th_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqwDgGh3pkom49KxtKngnUazFCz-CXoLiAuLtBSY0KYYg.jpg?imwidth=1240
    Protesters rally outside the National Union of Students HQ in London this Thursday from to urge revision of its safe space & no-platform policies, which have been used to restrict freedom of expression. They oppose all bigotry and hate but also defend free speech.

    I and other silenced students nationwide are setting up free speech societies on campus to re-platform the no-platformed

    Do you like sushi? Stop touching my hair! Why are you frying a banana? These are just some of the phrases we’re not allowed to utter at Sheffield University anymore. They’re “micro-aggressions” (subtly racist remarks), apparently.

    This Russell Group university is paying 20 students £9.34 an hour to be “race equality champions” and police their peers’ thoughts. They will teach classes that explain how to “lead healthy conversations” so we are not at risk of saying something that might offend. I began my politics degree at Sheffield hoping to find reasoned debate, and the embrace of opposing views. Instead, I entered an atmosphere rife with woke, intolerant, censorious anti-intellectualism.

    Vice-chancellor Koen Lamberts and the students’ union leaders behind these “micro-aggressions” classes are too immersed in virtue-signalling to realise their absurdity. I’m not a racist, but because I’m white, on campus I’m told I must need education to counteract my allegedly innate racist tendencies. But of course, by this flawed logic I’m unable ever to encounter racism because only discrimination against BME people is deemed legitimate.

    Offence is in the eye of the beholder, but Sheffield University sees it as a rule. It is as yet unclear how “micro-aggressors” will be identified or whether such allegations will warrant a disciplinary investigation, or indeed, which department will house the gulag.

    It’s a clever tactic by the commissars, sorry, university officials, to whip up a false sense of victimhood, then bring in Soviet-esque policies under the cloak of a knowledge hierarchy. The extent to which these students’ unions are really “anti-racist”, as they claim, was revealed when they wailed and protested over the EHRC report including a finding that nine per cent of White British students have experienced racism. That doesn’t fit the script.

    It is the latest in the march towards a toxic “cancel culture” at Sheffield University. When I unloaded my bags in freshers week three years ago, I sported a Jeremy Corbyn T-shirt. Now, that thought repels me. The campus zealots have put me off the Left for life.

    Shortly after writing in the Telegraph about my lecturers blocking students from crossing picket lines to attend classes in March 2018, I was hauled before senior staff members in my department and shouted at, told I had shamed the department. They later apologised, but it was a foretaste of things to come.

    My university announced compulsory climate change lectures for all students in September, the same month that bosses brought in gender-neutral toilets on SU club nights, without telling anyone the single-sex toilets had vanished. The students’ union organised meetings to shift from being “simply non-racist to actively anti-racist” in October – and banned white students from attending. I dared to challenge this screeching paradox and the mob pounced on me online. I expect pronoun lectures to pop up on my timetable next week.

    It’s a culture of compliance on campus where your voice is only permitted if you’re a self-identified minority, or politically correct. Most students can see the madness of the race equality champions and how pathetic this notion of needing a “safe space” really is, but are too afraid to speak out. A teaching assistant confided in me recently that he was being bullied by Marxist lecturers who had complained to senior staff that his views were offensive to them, and had rejected his “Tory” PhD thesis. He said he’s scared here on campus, but would never say so publicly.

    Our universities may still be revered the world over, but they’ve fallen into the clutches of mob rule. There is a glimmer of hope. Myself and other silenced students nationwide are setting up free speech societies on campus to re-platform the no-platformed; the accused “transphobes” and “racists”.

    I accept my university has cancelled me. But the prospect of the last vestiges of academic freedom crumbling in our seats of learning scares me more than Sheffield’s thought police will ever stifle us.

    1. Free Speech! Wow! They’ll soon shut them down. Antifa and Hate not Hope will be camped on their doorsteps!

    2. I aged with everything here – a well written, smoothly flowing piece…until the reflexive speed bump in the penultimate paragraph.

          4. I aged with everything here –

            But isn’t it the case that the more one ages, the more one agrees? Or disagrees?

  6. This is the beginning of the end of Vladimir Putin. TONY BRENTON. 17 January 2020.

    On reflection, this was ultimately more of a shock than a surprise. Putin likes grand gestures, and the factors behind Wednesday’s announcement have been accumulating for some time. There has been growing gloom in Russian political circles about the country’s zastoi (or stagnation), alluding to years of national decline. The economy has collapsed. Living standards have fallen. The ruling party, which faces an election in 2021, is mired in corruption and has become a national joke to the point where its members are refusing to take its label when they stand for office.

    Morning everyone. Putin does not like “grand gestures”. His geopolitical moves are minimalist and always far more effective than those of his western counterparts who are blundering incompetents by comparison. The Russian economy has grown six fold since he became President in 2000 and Russian reserves are greater than the country’s debt. Awara has recently run a comparison between US and Russian living standards and concluded.

    People in Russia and developing nations often look with awe and envy at the United States salary levels, thinking that the comparatively high salaries over there means that people are affluent. But the problem is that the other side of the seemingly impressive nominal salaries is a punitively high cost of living. In many countries, like in Russia, you get the same standard of living for a fraction of the American cost.

    The ruling party, United Russia, is no more corrupt than the Democratic and Republican Parties! As to being a National Joke no country that harbours the Labour Party should badmouth anothers!

    https://www.awaragroup.com/blog/russia-vs-america-real-income-comparison/?fbclid=IwAR3BW2P3XtURZMRCmjEHXbBN5h54xWxzbYz2sqDJJI9FOJmmZEoDGojSNIE

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/17/beginning-end-vladimir-putin/

    1. Back in ’92, I discussed (via a dictionary) lifestyles in UK and post-Soviet Azerbaijan with a similarly aged Azeri technician. He was all agog about our affluent life in the UK, but when we compared costs as a %age of post-tax income he was better off than I was. So Awaregroup study rings true.

      1. Morning Oberst. I devised a method many years ago of comparing my earnings at the beginning of my working life with my then present circumstances. I did this by converting my wages into reality, namely how many of certain items could I buy at both times with my hourly rate. Depressingly when I allowed for certain factors outside of these choices there was very little difference over thirty years!

          4. It should be obvious to people that when they demand a pay rise costs will go up in order for companies to afford it, thus negating the benefit and instigating an upward spiral.

            Obvious to me, anyway, and to all of us on here.

          5. Some years ago, my brother was banging on about how expensive everything is, and how everyone needed a huge pay rise… Couldn’t see the flaw in his argument, even when pointed out.

          6. If people want a pay rise they should work towards a promotion or look for a better paid job where the higher salary is already part of the budget. Instead, they seem to want more money for doing the same thing.

          7. But that leads down the same path as paying people more for doing the same thing……it is just that they are prone today to job-hopping for better pay.

          9. Then, sir, you are an exception as many, many, many people of sub average intelligence (Lefties, basically) don’t understand that.

            These same people don’t understand that cutting taxes raises tax revenue. It’s sad really.

            When I come across someone who denies the basics, such as cutting taxes raises tax, not taxing companies creates jobs, a small state is a good thing and that classic, that trickle down economics is a ‘myth’, I despair and wonder if I am a bit special to realise how wrong they are and the societal economic reasons they’ve not seen these things.

        2. I seem to remember reading the economists do this as well. They work out how many hours have to be worked at the average wage to buy a large item such as a washing machine. That would work from the 60s to now, I suppose. Anomalies arise, as mobile phones which are totally unnecessary, in my view, now cost more than washing machines.

          1. I disagree the telephones are unnecessary.

            They’re as useful as shoes: if you put them on your hands, they’re pointless. Having found myself randomly wandering late at night having a map (the Ordnance Survey app maps are amazing) to guide you home is great.

            Being able to look up quiz questions for junior, to have the war queen ring up and say ‘I’m stuck at Waterloo, the train’s delayed’ after her ticket has gone up to 8000 odd and the trains are still rubbish and she’s still having to stand as all the seats have been pinched and listen to her to know I can put junior to bed is handy.

          2. The problem today is that we have moved into the era of “Confusopolies” so that prices are no longer competitive but as high as the manufacturers can make them:

            A portmanteau of confusion and monopoly or oligopoly, Dilbert’s author Scott Adams defines confusopoly as “a group of companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead of competing on price”.

        3. Morning, Araminta.

          At the start of your working life how many unproductive/economically inactive people were being imported annually and kept by the state? Creating a larger cake and dividing it by a stable, growth wise, population leads to a larger slice for each member; dividing that cake by a fast growing population that has a sizeable unproductive element means a smaller slice for all. No government wedded to mass immigration that includes a large unproductive element will admit that their policy leads to stagnation.

          1. And in Norway’s case, a 3 year rise in retirement to pay for it – so, work til you are 70, Mr & Mrs White Priviledge.

          2. Don’t forget Micron with his 10% imported unemployables…. no wonder he has some minor problems with his pension reforms.

        4. Remember the “Mars bar Index”? I remember when it was 4d and now its more like 240d or 100p…..

  7. Morning, Campers.
    A extract form Charles Moore’s article: so, yes, they DID know about the ‘Common Market’s’ trajectory.
    “When we entered the EEC in 1973, the then prime minister, Ted Heath, put on a black tie for a grandee dinner, sitting next to an applauding Archbishop of Canterbury. He made a speech about how we should now get rid of the old phrase “Common Market”, because Europe would be a Community which “will gradually extend until it covers virtually the whole field of collective human endeavour”.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/01/17/big-ben-must-bong-brexit-show-britain-isnt-ruled-bureaucrats/

    1. …the whole field of collective human endeavour”.”

      As many have suspected, the EU is the model for Star Trek’s, The Borg.

      1. Nahh. The Borg were honest and upfront about their intentions. The EU is underhand and deceptive.

        Hmmm.. now my head thinks about it – the Borg were a collective. Everyone worked together. The Eu wants people to obey, by force.

        The Borg was a decentralised structure (ignoring the queen larks) – the EU is centralised.

        The parallel works on a simple level but once you dig in to it, not really. The EU is simply communist Russia or Nazi Germany. A small, unaccountable, unelectable clique controlling others to do as they are told.

        You could fight the Borg because your own side didn’t like them either. In our environment the likes of Sourberry, Grieve and all the other sewage would be sabotaging the weapon’s arrays to ensure we were all killed off.

        1. EP over-estimated the intelligence and literary knowledge of the GBP in 1968. And under-estimated the mischief making abilities of the MSM and politicians.
          If he’d omitted quoting Ancient Roman poets, his message would have been heeded.

  8. From the following BBC article: Sainsbury’s named cheapest supermarket of 2019 by Which?

    “Which? only tracked stores that sell their full range online, so Lidl and Aldi were not included.”

    Meanwhile, Lidl, Aldi and all the other discounters are stealing a march on the majors who, no doubt, will read this article and go back to sleep.

    That said, they can snooze all they want as far as I’m concerned, since I have time to shop around and use the discounters to make substantial savings.

    1. ‘Morning, Eddy.

      & every time you flit like a butterfly from store to store you’re belching out carbon dioxide. 😉

          1. Usually muttering to myself.

            Morning Ob.

            On that point, I have a habit of reading out aloud what comes on the self-service checkout screens, or similar (and replying to the girl giving the instructions).

            I did it in Boots last week on their photo machine and I’m sure the bloke at an adjacent shelf was deliberately hovering and wondering whether to ring the men in white coats.

          6. ‘Morning, George, ” I’ve ever used one (nor ever will).”

            Quick proof-read required?

          7. Good grief, Tom!

            I can spend hours composing a carefully-crafted letter. I can then proof-read it a dozen times, carefully and slowly but, do you know, the very second I press the ‘send’ button, a huge glaring mistake will jump up at me and start sneering in my face!

            AAAAAGGGHHH!!!!

            Why does this happen to me? :•(

          8. You’re not alone – that’s why, if it were possible, to have some-one else proof-read for you.

            Peddy (and others) are good at this but only after the event!

          11. Snap.
            If you watch, the queues at self-service tills are often as long as at any human powered check-out.

          12. Morning NTN.

            Having been on a two-year course in how to use them, I’m now a convert. I seldom have much in my basket and find them quicker than the checkouts. I also enjoy the conversation with the girl giving the instructions (who seems to be the same one each time I visit the store).

          13. I use them if I only have a couple of items, but if I have a week’s shopping I prefer to go to a proper till with a person.

          16. And you don’t get the hurry-up from the till-jockey throwing your shopping at you or the evil eye from the impatient bu**ers in the queue.

            It’s also a handy way of getting rid of your loose change.

          17. I ask for

            Staff Discount
            To use Staff Canteen
            Invite to Staff Xmas Party
            Payment
            Staff Parking
            Help with packing

        2. Good luck with that.

          I drive in my deezul-powered car 6 miles & back to W/rose, where I do all my shopping, passing 1/2 dozen other supermarkets on the way.

          1. After moving here, all my car did was gather dust and bills so I got rid. I have a bus pass but rarely use it.

          2. I use my bus pass twice a week to go on the guided bus into Cambridge. Because of my arthritis I have to drive to the bus stop.

    2. I have to admit that when I read that headline I thought ‘bollards’. How full is a full range? Is it the 35 different types of tomato sauce schtick?
      To compare different prices, I use a computer; it’s called my brain.
      The memory section is good at remembering which supermarket sells what at a good price.

      1. Morning Anne.

        The other thing I noticed was “branded items”.

        It doesn’t take me to tell you that it’s a mug’s game to buy something to help a company pay its advertising bill when an own brand is just as good.

        1. The goods are produced by the same manufacturers.
          Tuesday morning expensive widely advertised brand.
          Tuesday afternoon, own brand with a slightly different finish.

          1. Own-brand are often previous yesr/ model tecnology, or lower quality ingredients.
            Here, compare Mutti chopped tomatoes with supermarket own. The Own have much less tomato (thinner, watery sauce) compared with Mutti, and almost no flavour.
            Duracell batteries are latest technolog, Own are earlier technology.
            Skoda are previous model VW technology.
            And so on…

          3. We looked at a Skoda recently and were told it had a mix of VW and Audi parts. It also had more features than the equivalent VW/Audi car. Mightily impressive.

          5. We looked at the Kodiaq. I thought it a very impressive car. Easy access, not through the top 😁, the best of numerous cars we’ve looked at. At 6’6” and with bad knees I will need, eventually, something higher than our current Passat.

          6. Just bought a 2007 Toyota RAV 4 (£4,300). Accommodates my 6′ 3″ frame and very useful in this rural area where the single-track roads flood at the drop of a raindrop.

          7. We went for an old Daihatsu Feroza ELII…. but what a game getting parts. Essential for the suma runs to the mountains.

          8. Q. How do you double the value of a Skoda?

            A. Fill the tank with petrol.

            There were loads more in the 60s and 70s.

          9. Nor I, Harry. As far as I’m aware (for example), the Tiguan, Karoq and Ateca are all made on the same Czech production line. There are minor differences in the recipe used for each, but most of the components have the same DNA.

          11. I buy Mutti tinned tomatoes and they are very good. Nearly as good, in fact, as my favourite brands that are available in the UK: Cirio and Tarantella.

          14. On the plus side, ALDI’s basic tomato and herb sauce is a better ingredient for lasagne than its more pricey competitors.
            And, to be quite honest, cars are now so over-designed that they have more to go wrong and are too expensive to repair.
            KISS.

          15. ‘Morning, Anne, and Aldi’s whisky and wine are cheaper so we do most of that (and other) shopping at Aldi but divert to Morrisons when we want ox-cheek for Kate and Sidney Pie.

            They seem to be the only supermarket (or butchers) who stock it. I understand that other purveyors of meat cannot have products from the animal’s head unless (like Morrisons) you rear and slaughter your own animals.

          16. Our local proper butchers have ox cheek.
            I tend to order it because I’m planning a good cooking session and I need pig totters to give it extra oomph.

          17. When Morrisons took over Safeways 9was it safeways?) I was surprised to see some rather curious meats on offer… scrag end of lamb comes to mind, pork knuckles it might have been…. this in a Surrey Town…. it didn’t last.
            But Lydl, on Rhodes, obviously consign stock so as winter approaches the shelves fill with thermal underwear, anti-Freeze, snow chains for your car etc etc. Perhaps some people buy them for the novelty or maybe they are returned? Who knows.

            The real problem with Lydl is the lack of continuity. Just when you find something you like they stop selling it. Meat salad (Fliesch Salat) and lemon meringue ice cream….. and we have to stock up on doggie treats when they are in stock because just as often they will be out of stock…..

          19. On spot.

            I was talking to a chap the other day whose wife shops at M&S and mentioned doing a job at a company producing cleaning products. On one of their machines were M&S canisters and also the manufacturer’s own brand canisters.

            Obviously, the content mix would be different but not as different as the prices would suggest.

          20. My experience is that there is a definite difference in quality between the branded items and supermarkets own brand. In some cases the difference in quality makes a world of difference.

          22. Go into Lidl – buy anything with with their De Luxe Range (premium Lidl) & you will not be disappointed.
            You will be impressed when you get to the till.

          23. And avoid some of their products like the plaque. Ice Creams good. Doggie treats good (so the dogs tell me, they are addicted to them) but we gave up on their processed foods. Tinned chopped tomatoes ok. If they do in-store bakery then the best Croissants available (on Rhodes. Otherwise The croissant shaped things they sell can catch you out by being bland and often filled with some disgusting filling. Something Lydl also does but we avoid).

            Once bought a Lydl (Red devil bagless) vacuum cleaner which we found described by one justified complainer as “The only thing Lydl sells that doesn’t suck”. It works, after a fashion, but we found ourselves spending more time cleaning the filters etc than vacuuming.

            Best comment was during the EU meat scandal when Arkle or Red Rum might be found in “beef” products. It was claimed by one humourist that Lydl renamed its beef-burgers “My Lydl Pony Burgers”.

    3. Nope. Nothing so far has beaten going into the Waitrose looking utterly dishevelled, having security approach and say ‘can I help you, sir’ (I really, really looked like a hobo) and then saying in my very best cut glass – yes, you can. My wife has sent me to get these things and I can’t possibly find them.

      Cue assistant helping me around and me pushing the trolley. OK, we almost certainly overspent, but who cares.

      2. Crafty.

        There’s one store in town where, no matter how obscure the item you want, they have it and whoever you ask will take you straight to the shelf, even when you’ve only asked for a pointer.

      1. Why then don’t you change you Avatar and name to: ‘dot com’?

        Good morning Paul et al….

    4. From several high speed ( 2 on diesel and 1 on horse poo amongst others ) spills as a lad I could have adopted the name of “BloodSpatteredKnees”

    6. ‘Morning, Stormy, thank you, now both my faith and eyesight are restored.

      By the way, does anyone know what has happened to Boot or has he now another avatar and a new name?

          2. Surely not. Ogga is so nice to me now that she is blocked. Hasn’t said a wrong word to since. Indeed, i was thinking of unblocking her…. but would that be more like letting Genie (the real one, not Larry Hagman’s) out of the bottle or opening Pandora’s box but without the mitigating release of Faith hope and Charity? (The WWII Malta air defense contingent). (oops, according to wiki only hope remains when Pandora’s box is opened. I think I will leave well alone.)

  11. Spectator Life – CULTURE

    https://spectatorlife.imgix.net/content/uploads/2020/01/White-Priviledge-e1579261715750.jpeg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=900&h=600
    Credit: Guy Venables

    Word of the week: White Privilege
    Andy Shaw 17 JANUARY 2020

    Special benefits accrued by people who are not ‘of colour’

    Derivation
    ‘Critical race theory’ and ‘whiteness studies’ have proven, scientifically, that inequality stems from the persistent and unconscious racism of all white people everywhere.

    Oddly, opinion polls show that racist attitudes in the UK are at a historic low and that most people judge others by their character, not their race. This apparent dichotomy has been resolved thanks to the theoretical advances made by prominent Racism Experts, who are invited to discuss Meghan Markle on the television. They have measured white people’s brains and discovered that racism thrives at a subconscious level, specifically in the basal ganglia and cerebellum area of the brain – known as ‘unconscious racism’. Although some Race Expert activists have argued for the surgical removal of the cerebellum in white people, this is frowned upon in some quarters. The more moderate Racism Experts simply ask that, once-a-day, white people apologise to at least one person of colour for all the slavery up until 1833.

    The hard work of Racism Experts has ensured that we now judge people’s motivations according to their race. This is a great advance on the outdated notions of previous campaigners, such as Martin Luther King, who naively yearned for the day when people were judged solely by their words and actions.

    Use: “I may be an unemployed man from Newcastle, but I apologise for my white privilege, Ms. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown”.

    2. Scientifically proven I am privileged?

      Have you seen my tax bill?

      Thrives at a subconscious level. Good grief. No, it doesn’t. You’re deliberately interpreting the brain centre that recognises colour.probably because she’s a woman so of course we’re recognising different colours.

      Here’s a question: did any black people, Chinese folk, Japanese fellows get involved in the same study? As our brains are all designed on the same basis, with the same structure I’d bet you would also conclude that black people are racist as well.

      Such generalisations, such sweeping arrogant egotism is disgusting, offensive and abusive. The researchers should be ashamed of themselves.

    3. Hats off to Laurence Fox for taking a well-aimed swipe at the Race Relations Industry on QT this week.

  12. BTL comment from The Conservative Woman on cringe inducing sex scenes.
    You can highlight the different attitude by trying to imagine such a comment seeing the light of day on a website called The Labour Woman.

    “An oldie:

    Upon hearing that her elderly grandfather had just passed away, Katie went straight to her grandparent’s house to visit her 95 year-old grandmother and comfort her. When she asked how her grandfather had died, her grandmother replied, “He had a heart attack while we were making love on Sunday morning.”

    Horrified, Katie told her grandmother that 2 people nearly 100 years old having sex would surely be asking for trouble.

    “Oh no, my dear,” replied granny. “Many years ago, realizing our advanced age, we figured out the best way to do it was when the church bells would start to ring. It was just the right rhythm. Nice and slow and even. Nothing too strenuous, simply in on the Ding and out on the Dong.”

    She paused to wipe away a tear, and continued,

    “He’d still be alive if the ice cream truck hadn’t come along.”

  13. South Korea pumps £85m into Brexit Britain’s car sector

    SOUTH Korea has pumped a staggering £85million into Britain’s car sector less than six months after the nation became one of the first to agree to a trade agreement with an independent UK.

    Hyundai and Kia have pumped the millions into an electric car startup called Arrival in one of the largest investments in Britain’s motor industry since the June 2016 EU referendum. The move is a boost for the sector at a time when Brexit is just 15 days away, with the August agreement between the UK and South Korea taking place just one month after Boris Johnson became Prime Minister. Arrival will build electric vans at a number of locations in the UK.

  14. How can this woman who aspires to lead her party be such a blatant hypocrite without, it seems, having a morsel of shame?

    Reposted from very late last night.

    DT Story

    Labour leadership:

    Rebecca Long-Bailey says politics comes before her Catholic faith as she tries to extinguish abortion row

    Why pretend to be a Roman Catholic if you believe that abortion is not murder of the unborn child? You can’t have it both ways.

    I posted earlier that Blair also put the Labour Party ahead of his religious belief and said that he would vote for it if that was the party line.

    Are all Labour Party members who aspire to high political office sheer hypocrites?

    I am not a Roman Catholic but my wife is and her views on some matters is different from mine and I respect her right to her views. Also I do not agree with Jacob Rees Mogg on many things but I do believe that he is sincere in his Roman Catholicism and I do not think it is right for him to be pilloried and told he is not fit to hold office because he adheres to the tenets of a religion that has formed the ethical foundations and laws of the civilised world.

    1. I think a ‘woman’s right to choose’ should be seriously curtailed once she has made the choice to indulge in sex in relation to any resulting pregnancy.

    2. The logical conclusion therefore it that it is politically expedient to murder those that get in the way of personal aspirations.

      Interesting to see how far that proposition gets in a general election.

    3. Lefties are hypocrites.

      They choose one option for themselves (because it’s obviously better) then decry – and seek to deny – that same choice for others.

      This is why they so attack Jacob Rees Mogg. They hate that he has both prinicples and conviction to stand by them.

      1. No. Morticia Wrong-Daily doesn’t look well fed.
        Well fed up, but not one of life’s natural trencherwomen.

        1. I loved that series and have 4 or 5 cookbooks from it and from Clarissa Dickson-Wright. It brought to mind that old rustic wisdom:

          “Never trust a skinny chef.”

  17. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/65081f7e52d9c11ff3c13b971995a7f49ea4a51d9c389204855345dc8899d116.png

    My BTL comment:

    The main problem is that the sensible people of this country have remained sitting back in torpor whilst the invasive and cancerous tendrils of the Frankfurt School mob and the Common Purpose tendency have infiltrated every echelon of the education system to spread their poison.

    The ingenuous minds of the young have been atrophied by this malignancy and it is now time for common sense to fight back and destroy this festering pus from within.

    Direct action is required to rid the country of this cancer and this needs to be taken now. To vacillate is to surrender.

    1. I agree, although I would say that it is not just “torpor” but it is that the British are just “too nice.” It is hard for us to accept that the politicians at the top of the main parties could do this to our country, and other countries around the world. It makes no sense at all to us to bring in millions of people who belong to a certain group into our cities, towns and villages whose core belief is that we are dirty, evil and we must be converted or killed.

      We think “that could not happen here, our politicians would not allow it” and it is only now, as we are seeing the direct effects of this policy, that we are thinking the unthinkable. What is happening across the country is now so widespread that it cannot be hidden anymore, although the media are still doing their best by using terminology such as “Asian grooming gangs” instead of “islamic rape culture.”

      The hardest thing to accept is that the leaders from Tony Blair to Theresa May knew precisely that this would happen and did all they could to increase immigration so that it could happen faster. Boris has studied the history of the Ottoman Empire and also knows full well what islam means for a country. It remains to be seen if he will do something about it, or if he is in the same club as Tony, Cameron and May.

      Churchill knew the dangers of this cult and he would be taking some very direct action to protect the United Kingdom and our people.

      1. Churchill and any king, queen or political leader before him always had the safety of the realm at the forefront of their thoughts.

        Blair, May and the rest of the treacherous scum responsible for this capitulation would have been hanged, drawn and quartered (or, at the very least, shot).

      2. This is a tired tale but…

        I know a chap. His name’s Imran. I called him Immers, eeeeemmmmmmmrrrrrraaaaaannnnnn (with a nicely rolled accent) and he was, well, great. He put up with flak from us like you wouldn’t believe. Over his hair, his glasses, his shirts – all good natured as he was always impecably dressed and turned out.

        Found out he was a Muslim only when we did a bacon round. That spurred on even more jibes.

        Bless him, he was astonishing.

        While it is true in recent times that all terrorists have been Muslims, equally not all Muslims are terrorists. For every ranting yob screaming abuse at the returning soldiers so too were there Muslims handing out remberance day poppies.

        We are all of us individual, unique and must be treated as such. What we need to do is start talking about this problem. We need to stop being quiet and meek and stand up and say ‘why do some Muslims so hate this country?’

        However, we should also ask why some Lefties – all guardian columnists – also seem to hate this country yet comically those rich metropoles refuse to leave it, preferring to make this country like those failed ones they so admire. It is a paradox I do not understand.

        1. With respect, I think that anyone who repeats the line “not all muslims are terrorists” reveals a massive lack of understanding of real islam and what is happening in the world today. It is a statement that says “any other opinion that I have on this subject will be ill-informed.”

          When you can answer the question that you yourself ask: “why do some Muslims so hate this country?” Then you will show that you have learnt something about the topic. You will also be wise enough to know that you need to remove the word “some” from your question.

          Those people who call themselves muslims, who you think of as being “nice,” are not following the teachings of the cult and are not considered as real muslims at all by those who do. To summarise a lecture:

          “There were some very nice Germans in World War 2. Some helped to hide Jews and others and managed to get them out of the country to safety. So there were not very many actual true-believing Nazi’s there. Those people that were real ones though, were responsible for a war that murdered millions.”

          There are 100’s of millions of real followers of islam that want us dead. Far, FAR more than there ever were bad Germans. There can be no peaceful co-existence with someone who is willing to die to kill you, and who will rape your children because they are allowed to.

          I do not advise this following course of action, but you can put in the words islamic beheading on a search engine such as “duck-duck-go” and switch off the age-protecting filters. You only need to see a single clip and you will not sleep for a week, but that will show you the real islam that is in our country and the EU now.

    2. It’s become overt in the last decade, I’d say.
      I was at Brunel Uni in the late 1990s doing a Masters degree. Apart from the realisation that the uni was not going to fail me at the end of the course, short of me simply not turning up for the final exams, I didn’t come across any of this Marxist rubbish, but then again, I was only attending part-time. It seems to have reared its very ugly head in the last few years, especially since the 2016 elections. The Left has gone completely hysterical since then, describing anyone who isn’t far Left as a Nazi, or “white supremacist. Most of the new PC buzzwords can be traced back to 2012, I think. Before that, they were almost non-existent online or in the media.
      Unless you were a student at uni around then, you wouldn’t have really been aware of all this. The rest of us saw some idiot write some stupid leftist idea, think “idiot” and move on. No one took much notice of them. Now they’ve come out of the woodwork and are in everyone’s faces.

    2. Morning Plum.

      The question that needs answering is why most of our MPs are prepared to accept, without question, a deliberately inflated cost for the bonging.

      Why not a few Marshall amplifiers and a recording? Who’d know the difference?

      1. I suggested Mark Francois, strung up from the pointy bit with a harness and rope, doing the bongs with a lump hammer. Why worry about not noticing the difference between that and the real thing? They could sell the TV rights and cover the costs of that and even have enough left over to send him up a cup of coffee to refresh him after his exertions.

        However, the official price is what makes a job worth a few million at most into an exciting wealth-creating prestige infrastructure project worth up to £100 billion, and which might finance a few Premier League footballers with the trickle-down.

        It’s like a box of tablets that cost a fiver (and that’s including the usual 100% reasonable markup) being forced onto local surgeries for £220 by the Government because it’s good for the corporate lobbyists in the pharmaceutical sector, and helps prevent lawsuits from American competitors.

        When can we get Diane Abbott into No.11 to get the figures a little bit straighter?


        1. When can we get Diane Abbott into No.11 to get the figures a little bit straighter?          When you put the sign on the door that reads “1” and only “1” because that second “1” in “11” confuses her.

      2. You’ve just given me an idea, Eddy.

        I have a 200W Marshall amp. I shall download some bell pealings and play them (at volume mark 11) at 23:00 hrs on Friday, January 31, to remind the neighbours that they have a triumphalist Englishman in their midst, and that I am available to help them open discussions for Swexit! 👍🏻🤣

        1. I could do the same Grizz with my 1000W turbosound iP2000 column array speaker system and my 1000W Yamaha DXR12 system except my neighbours are so far away they wouldn’t hear it

          1. Even if I borrow my mate’s Fender Bassman and my brother’s Vox AC30, I still won’t get up to your volume levels, Spikey! :•)

          2. Some boy racer’s cars have audio systems that are capable of being heard in outer space. See if one of them will do you a favour perhaps. It might make a change from the godawful music they insist on playing. Mind you, you might need a pen and paper because I’m pretty sure their hearing must already be terminal. I am surprised there is no “‘elf and safety” regulation on car stereos…..

        2. Good idea. Get the kettle on since you may have many followers.

          Incidentally, my neighbours have a similar idea but can only manage potato peelings.

      3. Morning E,
        IMO as I posted yesterday,
        proving control of the herd, make the herd think they are contributing it helps cushion the
        realisation of the full contents of
        ” the deal” when known.

        1. Morning ogga.

          I also think it has a bit to do with “It’s not my money and now we’re elected, we have piles of dosh at our disposal”.

      4. Morning Eddy.

        They’re bad losers, any hint of success they can’t control drives them into panic stations.
        It’s Roundheads and Cavaliers all over again. I’m with the Happy Clappy Funsters…..

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

    Now for the funnies.

    The Cow, the Ant and the Old Fart

    A cow, an ant and an old fart are debating as to who is the greatest of the three of them…
    The cow said, “I give 20 quarts of milk every day and that’s why I am the greatest!”

    The ant said, “I work day and night, summer and winter, I can carry 52 times my own weight and that’s why I am the greatest!”
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    Why are you scrolling down? It’s your turn to say something.

    2. Most of those were banned on the old site but unfortunately we didn’t copy the list over. She’s been banned now.

      1. Thank you J, and Good Morning. I wondered if, by publishing that list daily, it had deterred the down-voters as well. I’ve suppressed the viewing of them (down votes), so I don’t know if it’s effective.

          1. Is Lycanthropy one of those things people can now self determine? and will be taught to kindergarten children?

    3. It is funny that since this list was published and that effing bird has gone, my loss of upvotes has stopped.
      I have not bothered to investigate, but I presume the downvoter was one and the same.

      1. As you can see from my Post to Ndovu, I am of a similar opinion and, like others, thank goodness that she is banned, even though I had blocked her for many, many moons.

  21. Could the plasticising of arid regions of Spain and other parts of Europe , with regard to their intensive new agricultural methods be partly responsible for some of the weather changes now being experienced by all of us?

    Has the EU created a monster?

  22. Today’s unpublished missive to the DT letters’ page:

    SIR—Why is everyone clamouring to toast in Brexit with wine. Surely such a continental beverage should be left on the continent.

    I shall raise a pint of excellent cask-conditioned English ale, and I would urge every Englishman and woman to follow suit.

    Cheers!

    A Grizzly B

    1. Just to get up the fishwife’s nose I shall raise a glass of single-malt to the same effect.

        1. ‘Morning, Harry, Heaven forfend, that’s almost like offering me Sun Tory or Jack Daniels!

        2. Or even Orkney whisky (Highland Park being a wonderful example).

          The population of Orkney and Shetland have declared that they do not want to leave the UK and if Scotland does, they shall remain.

          This would be good for the rest of the UK because most of the oilfields are in Shetland’s territorial waters. If the Shetlanders did remain, there’s not a damn thing that Wee Krankie’s Jocks could do about it.

          1. All of the Scots that I know are, without exception, sick to the back teeth of her and her independence aspirations.

      2. I initially thought of that; then I thought about the Jocks wanting to remain in Europe. That’s why I chose something English.

        [My brother was on holiday, in Brittany, a few years back when he got into conversation with a local. His initial greeting was held in contempt since he had called the man a ‘Frenchman’. The insulted man glared, beat his chest and declared, “NON! Breton!”

        After they’d made their peace the Breton chap said, “I live here and drink wine all the time. But on my ‘olidays, I go to England because you brew the best beer in the world.”]

        1. I think wee Miss Krankie is in a minority about remaining in Europe. I know the referendum shews that the majority of Scots were in favour of remaining but surely, in the three and a half years since, those types will have died or emigrated to England!

          1. Therein lies the danger. If the SNP were ever to achieve Independence, there would be an influx of the benefits population into Northern England, claiming grandfather’s rights or refugee status.

      1. …and now it costs you – for a fault-ridden operating system. I’ll stick with 7 for now.

        ‘Morning, Meredith.

          1. Not bad. I’m actually feeling quite good. I’ve been on a carb-free (and sugar-free) diet since the start of the year and I’m feeling much better all round.

          2. So am was I, Grizzly. I felt so great recently, after the General Election. Then I discovered I had Windows 10 – the effect is shattering! (With apologies to Smirnoff Vodka.)

            :-))

      3. Godawful operating system that should be thrown away.

        Here’s a trick you can try. Copy a file from or to a network drive and then try to do something else.

        It’ll stall. No matter how much horsepower either side has. Why? Because Windows, once you scrape away the concrete foot thick layer of pointless dialog boxes is exactly the same as it was under Windows 2000.

        It is NO different. More bolted on, like a Morris Minor being asked to drag a 737, but still, underneath, the same kernel, registry and, frankly, code.

        Type into the run box – which has now been hidden in favour of ‘search’ because Windows search could find an elephant in a small room, honest – control userpasswords2.

        Same dialog, same commands, same operation. I won’t upgrade because it’s rubbish. A useless, awkward, inefficient, slow, lumbering, hindering leviathan of interstitial boxes, spattered controls. It needs binning and starting again from a clean sheet, but Microsoft are constantly chasing other people’s profits. So frightened were they of losing Search to Google (guess what guys? You’re too late) that they spanked money on the waste that is Bing. They sacked all their testers, so there’s no QA. That’s right. You, the user are the tester. That’s why it deleted your data.

        Gah. Modern software sickens me. It’s all rubbish. Android is the icon and widget vomit of a bad night out and food poisoning combined, so fragmented, fiddled and bodged by suppliers. iOS is a mess, it’s very name annoying. All ‘apps’ are bloated, wasteful kludge of adverts and when they’re not they’re slow, with loading screens and obscure hand gestures.

        It’s a mess, and that’s sad. It didn’t have to be a race to the bottom, to release at any cost.

        2. In the begining you got your laptop and a stack of floppy disks and spent a day installing the O/S and the office programs.

          It worked quite well because:
          (a) it didn’t try to be all things to all people bloating your machine with stuff you will never ever use and
          (b) there was no internet so it had to be right.

          And when it came, the internet in its infancy relied on a telephone modem…. remember when you had to put your handset in a special box? You know, back in the days when if you wanted to use your mobile phone you had to look for the Rabbit ears signs?

          (Actually, the Lord Sugar machine, the AMstrad POW required you to load the software everytime you booted up and programing was rather primitive if you wanted anything other than a word processor and a Pin printer. But I do remember the Elliot 803 we had at college, a hand-me-down from ICI that you had to talk too via punched tape (7 hole?).

          Now, with the internet, they have a roll out date that they will meet whatever the state of the programming and rely on the “updates” to fix the more serious problems as they arise and it must be a sign that they no longer can rely on you updating …. a sign that they cannot trust their own programs anymore. I wonder if there ever was or ever will be a complete clean install of a functioning version ever again.

    2. ‘Morning, Plum, I hope you’ve kept for yourself, a path back to Windows 7.

      Just because Microsoft have withdrawn support, doesn’t mean it’s going to crash overnight or be a target for Hackers. I know others who still operate on XP quite happily. I shall keep with 7 until my computer(s) die.

      1. Morning nanny,
        I’m using Windows 7 here.
        I’m juggling with 10 on another laptop my daughter
        gave me for Christmas. She keeps asking me If I’ve sussed it yet!

        Jeez……I’ve only just unpacked it…!

        When I close WNDOWS7 it shuts down and puts more updates on. When I log on I have to use systems restore
        to get back in…..

          2. ControlPanel/Windows Update/Change Settings and in the drop down box which will currently show “Install updates automatically (recommended)” change to “Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them”

          5. Can you do that? I get regular start up problems with Skype wanting to auto update, I block it and Skype refuses to to work. This is a penricious new approach to making us use their latest updates with all the Windows terms and conditions, and who has a spare week to read them all and track down every link they now include? If ever I am forced to Win 10 it will be a nightmare turning off all their default settings which give them access to everything and the right to use everything they can find.

            But no, actually I will not go to Win 10, it is open source for me, maybe even Mac, if it doesn’t have the butterfly keyboard everyone appears to hate.

      2. My laptop still runs XP although my desktop runs Win 7 pro and I don’t intend to change.

      3. Sadly my laptop died when infected with a Windows update that put it into an “infinite loop”.
        I have been suffering with the dogs breakfast that is win 8, now 8.1, ever since.
        Sig other is still on XP but it is quite obviously in its terminal phase.

        1. ‘Evening JMW, a quick Google of ‘Buy Windows 7’ looks as if there are many inexpensive options available.

          Might be worth a try?

          1. There are a lot of sites with “how to keep windows 7 going after the end of support… as well.
            But when Win 3 etc met there end of life it simply meant that they would no longer invest in updates and fixes. but the support sites remained.

            The modern MS philosophy is to take down any and all help from the web even if it involves no humans. They really want to force you to buy the latets generation whether you want it or not and rely on the “Hobsons Choice” aspect . It really does need for a way to break the suppliers of laptops pre-installing this garbage and for alternative solutions to be more readily available…. but that means, as I am now embarking on, researching the range of open source options.

    3. The ultimate profanity for a Lady to say

      WHOOOOOOPS A Buttercup

      WE know what you really mean

    1. If possible perhaps all such armed chickens could inflict a similar fate on all those who think cock fighting is a good thing. Ditto dog fights, badger baiters etc.

    2. Actually, the irl is more amusing; it Reads “Spectator bleeds to death” and I held hopes of reading Guardian follows along with Huff Post CNN, BBC.

  26. COFFEE HOUSE – Dream on, Guy Verhofstadt: Brexit won’t be reversed
    Brendan O’Neill – 18 January 2020 – 7:00 AM

    Eurocrats still don’t get it. They still don’t get Brexit. They still don’t understand that us Brits didn’t vote for some kind of trial separation from the EU. No, we voted for a full and everlasting divorce. There’s no going back. We’re out (or will be soon) and we’re staying out.

    The latest EU bigwig to advertise his ignorance about Brexit is Guy Verhofstadt, the EU parliament’s ‘Brexit negotiator’ (that’s Eurospeak for Brexit wrecker). On the Today programme he said he agreed with Labour MEP Seb Dance, who said the UK is merely on ‘sabbatical’ from the EU. We’ll be back, said Dance.

    ‘I think that will happen, yes, [but] it’s difficult to say when’, said Verhofstadt. He said that in the ‘coming decades’, the ‘young generation’ will demand a return to the bosom of Brussels. ‘Maybe you will not see it in my life, but it will happen’, he said.

    There are two things to say about this fantasy of Brexit being reversed in a few decades’ time. The first is that it shows what a massive and positive impact the vote for Boris Johnson had in December. It really winded Remainer elites and their buddies in Brussels.

    After all, just a few months ago the likes of Verhofstadt were saying Brexit could be blocked entirely; prevented from happening; written out of history as if it were a minor embarrassing event rather than the largest act of democracy in the history of the United Kingdom.

    Who can forget when Verhofstadt traipsed around London with the Lib Dems, cheering their alarmingly anti-democratic proposal of stopping Brexit in its tracks. He even posed alongside their slogan ‘Bollocks to Brexit’, not realising or simply not caring, that to millions of Brits it looked like he was saying: ‘Bollocks to democracy. Bollocks to your political beliefs. Bollocks to the right to vote.’

    He ranted and raved against Brexit. He said it risked ‘bringing disaster upon [the UK], its economy, its citizens’.

    He said Brexiteers were the ‘real traitors’. (Funnily enough, that wasn’t condemned by Remain-leaning MPs who went berserk at Boris Johnson for saying ‘humbug’.)

    So the fact that Verhofstadt is now admitting that Brexit won’t be reversed in his lifetime is a kind of progress. It suggests the huge majority won by Boris, largely on the platform of ‘Get Brexit Done’, and with the assistance of an army of rebellious ‘red wall’ Labour Leavers, has knocked the anti-Brexit mob for six.

    It has shattered their anti-democratic dreams, for now at least. It has made them see what they should have seen more than three-and-a-half years ago: that British voters are serious about leaving the EU.

    It isn’t a whim. It isn’t a dumb idea implanted in our heads by rich, wicked demagogues, as some anti-Brexit snobs would have you believe. It is a deeply held conviction and one the government must act upon.

    Verhofstadt seems to recognise that. And so he has evolved. He has gone from grinning next to the insulting slogan ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ to hoping, a little tragically, that at some point in the future Brits will change their minds. Behind all the bluster, this is a man giving off all the vibes of defeat. And about time too.

    But the second thing to say about the idea that Brexit is a mere sabbatical is: ‘Dream on.’ Sorry, Guy, but even after your lifetime, Brexit isn’t being reversed. This is one of the clearest, most solid, most popular things Britons have ever voted for. It’s going to last.

    And it’s going to last partly thanks to people like Verhofstadt. And Jean-Claude Juncker. And Donald Tusk. These people don’t realise just how much their anti-Brexit and anti-democratic hysteria over the past three years has fortified us Leavers; how much it has convinced us we were right to vote out.

    Whether it’s Tusk saying there’s a special place in hell for Brexiteers who failed to devise a plan, or Juncker saying that lying is sometimes justified, these imperious bureaucrats have reminded us again and again of the sanity of Brexit.

    Verhofstadt played a key role here. His rant in the European parliament about the need for nation states to sacrifice even more sovereignty to Brussels had a huge impact on Brits. It went viral. The crisis in Europe is all because ‘member states are reluctant to transfer new powers and sovereignty to the European Union’, he said, furiously, sounding like an irate emperor disgusted by his subjects. That did as much as anything else to clarify to British voters what was at stake in all this: sovereignty itself; the right of the British nation and its people to determine their own affairs.

    So, no, this is not a sabbatical. We’re never going back. And we’re never going back because people like you, Guy, have made it clear what the EU really wants: to drain the lifeblood from democracy itself and make nation states subservient to the imperial whims of you and your colleagues. For that, if nothing else, we thank you.

    1. “…in the ‘coming decades’, the ‘young generation’ will demand a return to the bosom of Brussels.”

      There won’t be any ‘bosom’ to return to, apart from going broke for want of the British quidlets, the others will have realised that that ‘bosom’ is getting on their tits.

    2. “On the Today programme he said he agreed with Labour MEP Seb Dance, who said the UK is merely on ‘sabbatical’ from the EU. We’ll be back, said Dance.”

      Who knows what will happen in, say 50 years’ time? Provided the humans species haven’t destroyed themselves (and all other life forms) in a tantrum-initiated nuclear annihilation, the generation around at that time will have been progressively more mind-controlled by the decreasing educational standards that are evident today.

      Being coerced back into a lame-brained concept, such as the current EU, may sound as exciting to them as a day-trip to Bridlington was to my grandparents.

    4. Morning Z,
      He is telling falsies there, and going tits
      up on the returning to the bosom of
      brussels bit.
      But by the same token what implants
      has johnson agreed to in the “deal” and
      keeping close to his breast ?

    6. I apologise for sniggering, but this made me laugh:

      ” …Bollocks to democracy. Bollocks to your political beliefs. Bollocks to the right to vote.’ …”

      That is *exactly* what Verhofstadt and his ilk think. That’s why they are arch eurocrats. It is their entire reason for supporting the EU. Power without responsibility, control without effort and a complete obliteration of rights, freedoms and liberty.

    8. HSBC has started its TV adverts against Brexit again…so they obviously feel that the UK is just on a short sabbatical from the EU.

    9. Dr Steve Turley was having fits of laughter over Merkel’s interview in which she said Brexxit had some serious lessons for the EU to learn and then made some suggestions which showed she had not learned a single damn thing.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAtnd35PpT0

      (PS note that Google wouldn’t find this link for me but Duck Duck go did.)

  27. Was I dreaming this, or did BBC Radio 4 have a mixed race Pakistani woman on just now trying to persuade me that Slough and Luton were part of the proposed Chilterns National Park (without mentioning HS2) and that the only thing to address as regards nature conservation was to improve the racial diversity of conservation officers?

    This is not Left Wing, nor even environmentalism, but a sort of faux-Left beloved of Right Wing BBC metropolitans.

    Tomorrow is Sunday, so I expect to be lectured once more that all there is to religion is to promote homosexuality and gender diversity. That is the enlightenment for the weekend then.

    1. I heard it too, but when the virtue-signalling bolleaux of ‘diversity’ was raised, complete with a moan about volunteers being mostly white/male/elderly, I turned it off.

      Have you also noticed how at least one item about climate change is now included in just about every BBC TV News broadcast? Word must have gone out to all editors to ensure that this happens. They are clearly besotted with the subject – that and Mr and Mrs Sussex, of course.

      ‘Morning, JM.

      2. “Have you also noticed how at least one item about climate change is now included in just about every BBC TV News broadcast?”

        Radio 4 has been reporting this week from towns and cities that are ‘going carbon neutral’. Their presenters and reporters treat the idiot politicians and campaigners with the kind of reverence that one might expect to be given to someone who had discovered a cure for cancer. Rarely a serious or awkward question asked.

    1. T,
      Of course they will celebrate, we are eliminating the opposition to their
      ( islamic) take over of the UK.

    2. Small Heath mosque, the subject of Channel Four’s Undercover Mosque investigation.
      The front part was a library and the rear part of this complex was the public swimming baths where I learned to swim.

      Small Heath is lost and it makes me sad.

  29. Forget staying close to EU after Brexit, chancellor tells business

    One of the toughest messages from the government so far

    Sajid Javid, the UK chancellor, has delivered a tough message to business leaders to end their campaign for Britain to stay in lock-step with Brussels rules after Brexit, telling them they have already had three years to prepare for a new trading relationship.
    In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Javid quashed any prospect of the Treasury lending its support to big manufacturing sectors — which include cars, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, and food and drink — that favour alignment with EU regulations.
    “There will not be alignment, we will not be a ruletaker, we will not be in the single market and we will not be in the customs union — and we will do this by the end of the year,” Mr Javid said, urging companies to “adjust” to the new reality.

  30. Just got back from my weekly cuppa and chat with my neighbours.

    She raised a good point – since most of us wouldn’t hear Big Ben live, why not all the church bells in the land?

    2. E,
      As in a prior post of mine saying ALL the churches that are still operational,
      plus the remains of the RN and any trawlers,other river craft sounding horns, hooters, bells etc,etc, nation
      wide to be heard over 13.18 m on a bearing 116.52 degrees.

      1. I heard that a local Lib-Dem complained that the noise would upset the elderly, to which the reply was that they were the ones who voted to leave in the first place (so the Lib-Dems told us).

    3. I made a similar suggestion just below, but seems to have been ignored……racists you all are …:-)

    4. Half the country will be awake at midnight, scratching their heads, and wondering if they will survive without the EU.
      Boris seems O.K. at the moment, but so did Mugabe for his first couple of years,

      1. Thanks.

        Since most Brexiteers within earshot of Big Ben will no doubt be merry at best, a recording would suffice.

        Also, since our parliament has made us a laughing stock over the past year or so, another wheeze wouldn’t be much of a problem. In fact, it could well bring us some much needed publicity and highlight or sense of the ridiculous.

  31. Apropos the down-vote debate recently, I have just re-activated Chrome’s ability to shew down-votes and have just as assiduously checked every post.

    Not a down-vote to be seen. Let’s hope we can keep it like that – if you really, really feel the need, at least have the courtesy to tell the poster why.

    1. I’ve noticed that. Maybe the downvoting system is broken, so I’d better test it:

      Netanyahu is a vile tyrant, a born-again lackey of the Third Reich, and Corbyn (ooh!) is right about the Palestinians – Hodge and Co. are wrong to suggest that this freedom fighter for the oppressed has an antisemitic bone in his body.

      That should get them coming. If they’re not in double figures by tea time, then the system is broken and we might need something stronger. I might try a spirited endorsement of Greta Thunberg next…

      1. It’s been 12 minutes and no downvote to be seen. Where are you all, you dopey lot? [Just one upvote – Grrr!]

        1. Thinking about it. The pro-anti-semitism doesn’t bother me, but if you do the same about Greta you won’t know what’s hit you.

        2. Jeremy the only dopey one on here right now is you, dopey enough to post on Discuss Disqus thinking that CaliCheesyFeet ( a Transgender male less popular with posters than the Black Plague ) is actually going to help you!

    2. Down votes were made visible by Disqus, 3 or 4 days ago.
      It’s now possible to see them and who made them in the same way as viewing who made upvotes.

    3. With the down voters names exposed the serial downvoting trolls like the paid Soros shill Polly the demented Parrot are banned & any new ID they make also gets banned quickly !

      1. Why do you think that she was a “Soros shill” – all she ever seemed to do was criticise him and blame him for just about anything that happened in the world? I always thought that she was a paid Russian troll.

        1. Happy Saturday Enri, its a game she played, her cover story, a university student who was pro-Tory yet despised Tory leaders and policies & was all the while busy serially down voting our posts on here, probably for a number of years whilst down votes did not display, knowing that there is an accumulative damaging effect on a users reputation status. Once the down votes started showing from October 2019 onward she continued down voting but now targeting specific posters like Bill Thomas because of his anti-Islam posts ( Mr. Rashid, Slammers etc ) and finally a few days ago when down voters names became visible she must have realized the game was up & made a last ditch effort to down vote a group of posters including me using at least two newly created accounts . She was always at odds with core posters on here & less popular than a STD, but kept on posting because I believe that she is a paid Soros shill who specifically targets posters who oppose multiculturalism & Islam

          1. Thanks for that explanation. I myself did not follow the downvoting story – I got into the habit of not bothering with them because, on the old Daily Telegraph forum, I could not see downvotes using Safari on an IPad. Perhaps I will pay more attention in future! Your comment “less popular than a STD” is a great line. Enjoy the rest of Saturday or is it now Sunday where you are?

          5. Silly me, it ends I have now discovered when three stars can be seen in the evening. That probably gets a bit difficult these days with all the missiles being fired towards Israel. I wish you Shavua Tov, then.

    4. Oh, the poster who downvoted me the other day told me in no uncertain terms why… he resented (a) being told he was wrong and (b) being given a grammar lesson.
      But in the interests of harmony I gave him one too. Mutually assured down voting seems a good idea to me.

    2. I was in the barf after my darnce when this girarfe walked in. It so made me larf.

      What’s the problem with that?

      The Northern accent.

      Aye up me ducks, Bob of Bonsall ‘as got the trots.

      Nope, doesn’t work for me.

      I agree about Victoria Wood though.

      1. Bob never gets the trots.

        He drinks eight gallons of tea a day (from his favourite bucket).

        N.B. Bob is also a Geordie. Why-aye, hinny, though but! Divvent drop your prottle on the proggie mat and eat up yer scran (stottie cyeks, ‘am, an’ pease pudd’n).

          1. Oh, shit, shite, bugger and damn!

            I’ll buy ye a pint o’ broon, next time I sees ya, man. :•)

    3. Interesting. Whenever I contact or am contacted by a call centre I get either a Scots accent (great idea: smart phones should automatically produce subtitles in plain English) or a Sub-Continental” accent. Usually someone in India claiming to be Jeremy or Jack. This can be a source of confusion since so many non-Brits have a British “stage name” they will give you which might be easy to pronounce but does not promote trust.
      But interestinbg that there is a call cnetre in the UK but not interesting enough to join Cellnet.

  33. After describing the lab/lib/con as a mass uncontrolled
    immigration / paedophilia umbrella coalition party and
    being roundly castigated for such a description may one ask was the post’s not fact ?
    But for the Jay report these odious issues would still be continuing with establishment employees aiding & abetting.
    PC / Appeasement are a nasty pair of killer / rapist / abusers.

  35. OOOFFF!
    I do not want a night like that again.
    Serious abdominal discomfort woke me at midnight, tossed & turned until 2 until I had a couple of spells of vomiting.
    Not nice!
    Had a drink of water about 7ish and brought that back up.
    Obviously food poisoning of some sort, but I’m feeling better now and am about to risk a mug of tea!

    4. There’s something nasty going around! Tiredness and disturbed sleep is one of the symptoms.

    5. Anyone you ate?
      Just take it easy for the whole weekend; longer of necessary.
      Those trees won’t grow that quickly for a few days.

    8. Anyone you ate?
      Just take it easy for the whole weekend; longer of necessary.
      Those trees won’t grow that quickly for a few days.

          1. Yup. Ken Unwin, Tommy Hoggett, Keith Wigmore, Pete Brunton, Alan Watson, Russell Woolley, and Dave Nicholls. All top-rate bobbies and very nice lads.

          4. One of my former partners for Bridge joined the Met. He took a couple of us for a tour of his old beat which he patrolled single handed at night with nothing but a police whistle and truncheon. His beat included the area where the Krays operated….

          6. No too many years have passed – I should have mentioned my friend was patrolling at the time the Krays were operating. We did stop for lunch in The Grapes. That was interesting as the staff had to put planks in place across the back door to stop the Thames coming in at (very) high tide!

          6. I’ve noticed that the years that go missing from the Sig Other’s true age seem to end up being credited to some other lady not popular with her at the time. This often manifests itself in the sort of “She’s showing her age, isn’t she.” or “She’s not looking too bad for her age” which prompts the straight man (me, often) to ask how old is she then? and that’s when some fictitious age is assigned. What gives this away is that, unless one of them lives in a black hole where time progresses at a different rate, I cannot reconcile the age difference increasing year by year with any know physical phenomenom especially as neither has admitted to a birthday beyond a certain number. The sig other, for example, has been 50 for a good few years now.

          7. My OH only admits to 42. He’s still 5 years older than me, though. My kids are older than he is.

      1. Here’s another one. This one involved me talking my way into a house where a disturbed teenaged girl was threatening to kill herself with a carving knife. I managed to convince her to let me in (but no one else). I then spent around half an hour calmly chatting to her and she eventually handed me the knife. Whilst this was going on my inspector turned up and wanted to take charge. I was getting irritated by his constant ramblings on the radio so I contacted the radio room and said (over the radio): “Will you please tell Inspector S****** to F*** OFF! He is aggravating a situation that is already under control.”

        I fully expected a confrontation when I came out and handed the girl over to Social Services but I was pumped up, primed and ready. In the event all I got from the inspector was a sheepish grin and a weak “Well done!”.

        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e6461c8f3cb4c634c07cc202f8e5f66ad8080eaa01cec438c749197ccebd6ce8.jpg

      1. And theres the rub, Merry Mac.

        We all pounded beats in those days and got to know the public. Any toerags acting up would be grassed-up (by pissed-off citizens) and then they were dealt with by force of personality. Not once in my career did I wish for a firearm.

      2. I do hope the cop moved over to the bloke with the microphone and made him remove his face mask for identification.

          2. No, the Cressida’s of today are more likely to write to the Home Sec in self praise and take all the credit due to their superior management.

      1. Well, we had the Jamaican Ellis family. Everard (I kid you not) Ellis was an accomplished flasher who always got caught. His brother, Jarvis, also flashed but was not so good. Jarvis was also a failed burglar. The youngest brother, Mark, was a dangerous little so-and-so. No flashing or burgling for him—he was too clever by half—but he caused many other problems.

        This was all a shame because their parents were lovely, god-fearing, immigrants of the Windrush generation who respected the police (I always got a lovely, but sad, welcome from them whenever I visited them, usually to arrest Jarvis).

        As for “Peaceful” citizens. No.

        1. As a former multi-generational South London born Plonker I can affirm just how un-peaceful and un-law abiding the Afro-Caribbean community of South London was from the 1950’s onward & still is . Within less than 2 decades of the Windrush invasion all my relatives & close boyhood friends became part of ‘White Flight” out of the capital to safer parts of the UK. None of our offspring have been born in London for decades & for them especially the younger ones London of today is a foreign country, violent, dirty, overcrowded and more akin to a 3rd world slum than the capital of a Western democracy !

      1. Thanks, but it was in a previous life. I were nobbut a sprog.

        Before I got corrupted on NTTL. ;•)

    1. The police officers concerned should be charged with Perverting the Course of Justice – maximum punishment, life.

      1. Evening JtL,
        All concerned should be done for collusion as in aiding & abetting & in my book, any that supported knowingly via the ballot booth the
        parties in governance overseeing the cover-up.
        Compensation to the victims must surely be paid then take it from the membership / voters
        of the guilty political party.

    2. Afternoon TB,
      I think that was the same mob that solved all the fish that were belly up dead in Dover harbour.
      They laid the blame on, wait for it,
      …………..Jack the KIPPER.

    3. The person that suggest they were killed by poisoning would be wide off the mark. It would almost impossible to do so for starters

  41. The DT asked me to identify some small birds on the Yard feeder from a rather rubbish smart phone pic.
    Turns out they were Long-tailed Tits, 4 of them.

      1. Had up to 10 flitting around my fat ball feeder this winter, but only 5 or 6 this afternoon. Prettiest of the tits IMO and very agile.

    2. I had 10 or 12 Long-tailed Tits on the nut feeder earlier tis week. I haven’t seen them since!

      1. We mainly get Coal Tits and Blue Tits, but the main feeders are only really visible when sat on the “throne” in the bathroom with the window open.

  42. Courier fraud: Victim ‘cried for days’

    How do people manage to fall for such an obvious scam ?

    “I couldn’t believe I could lose £4,000 as easy as that. It was terrible”.
    Carol Norton is talking about the moment she realised she’d had thousands of pounds stolen from her and her dying husband.
    She’d become a victim of courier fraud.

    It is when fraudsters convince often elderly, sometimes vulnerable, victims to take cash out of their bank account and hand it over to criminals posing as couriers or police officers.

    In Carol’s case, she was convinced she’d been called by genuine police officers after being told to hang up and immediately dial 999.
    The thieves kept the line open and in the few seconds between when she hung up and picked up the phone again, the line did not disconnect.
    That tricked Carol into thinking she was speaking to an emergency operator when in fact it was another member of the gang.

    “I had a phone call from someone who said they were the chief fraud officer at my local police station,” she said.
    “They said someone had tried to use my card details to spend £600 in Birmingham and were worried someone at my local bank was passing on customers’ details, so would I be willing to help them in an investigation?”

    Carol felt a sense of public duty to people she thought were the police and agreed. The fraudsters instructed her to go to her local bank and withdraw £4,000 in cash.

    About 20 minutes after she returned home, someone else arrived. “I saw somebody walking up the path and I had to give him a password which I’d arranged with someone I thought was a police officer,” she said.

    “He took the money and as I saw him walking away I saw him get into a taxi and then I thought something was wrong because undercover policemen wouldn’t be using a taxi.

    “So I ran next door to my daughter and told her what happened, and straight away she said ‘you’ve been scammed’.”

    1. There was a well educated person on the BBC Radio 4 Money Programme at noon today who fell for the scam several times in succession giving £10000 several times until his bank stopped his account. I think the bank paid him back if I heard correctly. I don’t think even I would have fallen for that.

    2. Two scumbags tried similar on my mother. Delivered a sofa that matches her new stand-me-up chair. Came back a few days later to get paid, took her to the bank to get the money (£6,000) but the bank called the police. Big fuss, police action against the scumbags and the company. She still has the sofa. And the money.

      1. I have an unfeasibly sharp machete hanging near my back door. Any twats coming to my house will be given a view of it.

        1. Machete? How VERY uncivilised.
          I’ve a long handled billhook at one door and a short handled at the other.
          Plus a rather nice and VERY old rapier behind the door into the kitchen that is NOT intended for doing kebabs on a barbie.

          3. I bought the machete, around 30 years ago, because I couldn’t find a decent scythe or billhook, at a price I could afford, when I was a licensed bird-ringer with the BTO.

            I needed to clear a patch of scrub (of approx 200 sq yards) of a load of Rosebay Willowherb so that the ringing group could erect some mist nets. When the clouds of fluffy seed from that rank weed hit a net, they ruin it and make it visible to the birds.

    3. Best advice for seniors (like many of us here – unfortunately), in fact almost for everybody, is to not answer the phone. We screen all calls by letting them roll to the answering system. The majority of callers hang up when they hit the recorded message. If it’s important someone will leave a message. If we recognize the calling name and number or the voice leaving a message, only then do we pick up.

        1. In theory our phone company catches them – but it doesn’t. By far the biggest current “scam” here is “spoofing” the Caller Id fields to show a local number but usually with a fake name. These calls can originate anywhere – a lot from India. They get into the actual phone system by using VoIP and then via a gateway (like Skype calls) then show up with “fake” credentials. a different name/number combo every time. Almost impossible to predict.

          Scarily enough, the software for anybody to do this from their PC is widely available – and dirt cheap.

  43. Subject: : Fascinating…Railroad Gauge

    Railroad Tracks

    The U.S. Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches.

    That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used?

    Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates designed the U.S. Railroads.

    Why did the English build them like that?

    Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

    Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then?

    Because the people who built the tram ways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

    Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

    Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.

    So, who built those old rutted roads?

    Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.

    And the ruts in the roads?

    Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels.

    Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

    Therefore, the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

    In other words, bureaucracies live forever.

    So the next time you are handed a specification, procedure, or process, and wonder, ‘What horse’s ass came up with this?’, you may be exactly right.

    Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses.

    Now, the twist to the story:
    When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, you will notice that there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank.

    These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah.

    The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit larger, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

    The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.

    The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses’ behinds.

    So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world’s most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse’s ass.

    And you thought being a horse’s ass wasn’t important!

    Now you know, Horses’ Asses control almost everything.

    Explains a whole lot of stuff, doesn’t it

    1. Prodnose writes: in fact, Stephenson’s original gauge was 4′ 8″, but he added a half-inch for greater flexibility. But here’s the great unanswered question: why did Brunel choose 7′ 1/4″? I mean, whats with the quarter-inch?

      1. Brunel wanted the drive wheels to run on the outside of the locomotive and the carriage wheels also. This would have added stability and increased efficiency.

          2. No mystery. The gauge was increased from 7’0” for the same reason that standard gauge was increased from 4’8” viz. to give extra clearance after track testing.

          3. In Ireland, standard gauge is – and was always – 5’3″ …

            Except for the West Clare Monorail :)) !

      3. It was originally 7′. Brunel added the 1/4″ to help get around sharp curves without a lot of wheel and track wear.

        That’s a Michael Caine moment – Not many people know that…

      1. As I recall, ‘the pieces’ were sealed with ‘O rings’; defective O rings were the cause of the of the Challenger disaster in 1986 …

  44. A Belated Merry Christmas!

    Christmas Cake Recipe – for those of you who can’t remember last year’s cake recipe. (Not sure if this is Jamie Oliver’s or Gordon Ramsey’s)

    Ingredients:

    * 2 cups flour
    * 1 stick butter
    * 1 cup of water
    * 1 tsp baking soda
    * 1 cup of sugar
    * 1 tsp salt
    * 1 cup of brown sugar
    * Lemon juice
    * 4 large eggs

    * Nuts
    * 2 bottle wine
    * 2 cups of dried fruit

    Sample the wine to check quality. Take a large bowl, check the wineagain.

    To be sure it is of the highest quality, pour one level cup and drink. Repeat.

    Turn on the electric mixer.

    Beat one cup of butter in a large fluffy bowl.

    Add one teaspoon of sugar. Beat again.

    At this point it’s best to make sure the wine is still OK.

    Try another cup… Just in case.

    Turn off the mixerer thingy.

    Break 2 eggs and add to the bowl and chuck in the cup of dried fruit.

    Pick the frigging fruit up off floor. Mix on the turner..

    If the fried druit gets stuck in the beaterers just pry it loose with a drewscriver.

    Sample the wine to check for tonsisticity.

    Next, sift two cups of salt. Or something.

    Check the wine. Now shift the lemon juice and strain your nuts.

    Add one table.

    Add a spoon of sugar, or some fink.

    Whatever you can find. Greash the oven.

    Turn the cake tin 360 degrees and try not to fall over.

    Don’t forget to beat off the turner.

    Finally, throw the bowl through the window.

    Finish the wine and wipe counter with the cat.

    Take a taxi to Tesco and buy cake.

    Bingle Jells

    2. Now this is a real Christmas cake recipe that I used for last Christmas. I thoroughly recommend it. It came out almost like Christmas pudding, and I served some of it to my Muslim friend instead of tiramisu which the rest of us had, and which has alcohol in it, of course. I didn’t tell him about the Cointreau in the cake, a) because I forgot, and b) because the alcohol would have been cooked off.

      https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/uk/christmas/christmas-recipes/a549672/spiced-orange-christmas-cake/
      Spiced orange Christmas cake
      “Packed with figs, apricots, sultanas and Cointreau, this Christmas cake only takes 15 minutes to prep. Make sure you leave the fruit to soak overnight”

      I also added some chopped dates, pecan and walnut pieces to it.
      Save this and try it next year. Or frankly, whenever you like. A cake is not just for Christmas….

      1. It’s from Revelations.

        So I looked, and beheld, a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death, and Hades followed with him. And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, with hunger, with high pressure, and by the beasts of the earth. Rev, 6:8

        5. This doesn’t surprise me, Minty. Every time I stop using my built-in microwave, the display says “End time”. Perhaps Siemens know something we don’t?

    3. Don’t tell me, it’s all because of Brexit …………… and Brexit is causing Catastrophic Climate Change…. expect a Greta Thunderstorm imminently .

    5. “close to the all-time record of 1053 millibars which was set in 1902. ”

      So in 1902 it was weather, but in 2020 it’s “climate change emergency catastrophe!!”

  46. As I have said before, (but elsewhere?)Whatever we choose or buy we consciously or unconsciously use the five category method.
    This involves assigning every single property or feature or condition to one of five categories.
    The first category is the “Must Not Have” features. there may be a long list of them but the presence 0of even a singe one is cause to reject that product (or trade deal).
    The next category is that of the “Must Have” properties. The properties essential to the product or deal delivering what we need. In this case we short list only those products which exhibit all of these properties. It is not good enough for one or two to be missing as their absence defeats the purpose.
    Once these two categories are defined such as in preparation for a trade deal then one can negotiate the final elements. But if the UK makes clear at the outset what we insist is included and what must not be included, and the EU is unhappy then we simply exit under WTO terms which are certain to be better than any deal which violates our preconditions of mut have and must not have features.
    The third category is for all those features or terms where we say “So what, or We don’t care about those things whether they are in or out. ”
    The next two categories are the ones where we can negotiate our way to a mutually acceptable deal.
    The first of these are the “Nice to have so ;long as they don’t add to the cost too much” features and the last category is the “Avoid if possible but we can live with them if we have too” features or conditions.

    It is here we prioritise these features and where we can negotiate to find the best combination. Ideally we will have none of the Avoid if possible features and as many nice to have features as possible. But this is where the choices are made.

    What we need to identify is who has the most need of this deal and who has the most to lose and at this time, especially as we can default to an acceptable set of WTO terms, the ones who are on the sellers side are the EU. They need us to agree a better deala than WTO.

    Most important is that we do this in the right order. Sort out the Must have and Must not have conditions at the start. If there is no agreement on these, then wlk away. It is a waste of time to discuss the other conditions if we do not satisfy the initial conditions.
    One thing we can probably be sure of is that this will not be how the UK or EU approach this. If the EU can focus on a lot of irrelevant or compromise conditions to begin with and get the Uk invested in the work done to achieve those they will be less inclined to stand on the red lines of the Must Have and Must not haves. get those agreed first or walk away.
    Of course, one reason why the EU will prove obdurate is becaause where most bilateral trade deals can be concluded in a year or two EU trade deals can tak decades and agreeing a quickie deal with the UK simply is not acceptable to them and they don’t want other countries taking advantage and a quickie would be a bad precedent..

      1. No, that’s the sig other. I’m the one who orders what’s on the menu. she’s the one who makes that woman in “When harry Met sally” look like a good customer. We once went to an Indian restaurant her choice, only for her to want non-indian food….. and I have to be alert to whenever we are near an open shoe shop….. in the Twilight Zone it will be me in the hardware store terrorising the assitants and wanting to try each and every power tool they have and then not buying while she stands outside for hours on end slowly wondering how much of her life is spent just standing round waiting…. but only in the twilight zone. I have to make do with abandonning her and the trolley at the biscuit section in Lydl while I have a moments faux pleasure looking at whatever junk they are selling as poer tools this week.

        1. Ok, Makita and Dewalt are better, but I bought a decent SDS drill there a few years ago, and for diy the stuff is more than adequate, with a 3 year guarantee.

          1. I bought a set of saws (my early experience) that are complete junk. The router I bought is pretty good and, as you say, OK for a bit of DIY. Some of their odd-ball tools are absolute junk… a set of hole cutters that I can’t be bothered with… when I tried them they just spun uselessly without cutting anything.

            So it is pretty much a gamble.
            Of course, in Lydl you have to read labels very carefuly… labels that might seem to imply good old renowned german engineering but read carefully they identify a german company but the box says made in PRC or it will say tested and calibrated in Germany… but made in PRC. I know a couple of German companies badly bitten by their experience with Chinese Joint ventures and tend usually to avoid anything PRC unless it is sme absolute junk and I don’t care. But anything more I steer clear. Well, try. A Fridge (not Lydl) made in PRC is not like a German designed and manufactured product, the Chinese seem to change the plastics used in the bottle shelves and salad tray from something that is fit for purpose to something that doesn’t like the cold or carrying any weight.To replace a bottle shelf costs half the price of a new fridge. Sig other spent the money on superglue instead (she loves super glue, her cure for everything).

  47. The world has gone officially Mad

    Calls for (Coventry ) councillor to resign over ‘homophobic’ comments – as council distances itself from row.

    Councillor Glenn Williams, an Independent for Bablake, sparked a row after telling a full council meeting that Coventry schools should teach “traditional family values” and “not how to be promiscuous”.

    He also described a video of two women kissing as “pornography”, and said he was “not very comfortable” when talking about children being given advice on how to come out as LGBT.

    https://www.coventrytelegraph.net/news/coventry-news/calls-councillor-resign-over-homophobic-17582648

    1. Morning OLT,
      When in point of fact they should make him head of council in preparation for the return of sanity.

      1. I do not think that there will be a return to sexual morality until another incurable disease, as AIDS was, turns up and scares everyone stiff.

    2. Sorry, must disagree with that last little bit.

      If some child decides that it wants to start following the alphabet way then surely some form of counseling is desirable.

      However, it should be unbiased and even guide the child towards reflection and reconsideration, not automatically pushing the kid towards chopping off their bits.

  48. Be!ieve in the Science
    Australian floods

    Using the generalised combustion equation below, we can see that nature’s tendency to create fires by burning hydrocarbons is counterbalanced by putting water into the atmosphere which then falls as rain to put the fires out:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/13ea514ce9743755d55d24ace87ea2fb0d1a19f8ba61ae2c371a9bc89f163ac2.jpg

    Good example of nature’s use of feedback to self-regulate the earth’s climate.

      2. I do respect peoples beliefs but after two Margarita I follow the Red Dwarf bible. You only live once…or twice..or erm…

  50. Laurence Fox is currently newsworthy. It may amuse that Talking Pictures tv is currently showing ‘The Magnet’, an Ealing comedy made in 1950 and starring his father, James Fox, aged 11…

  51. Why I’m mourning Lee Child’s retirement. Sam Leith. 18 January 2020.

    There is mourning in my household, as in many households, this morning at the news that Lee Child – the bestselling thriller writer, from whom we have been able to expect a new Jack Reacher novel every autumn – is laying down his pen.

    All characters eventually run out of steam. It is the way of things. Child has done particularly well though the first ten or so are his best!

    https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/01/why-im-mourning-lee-childs-retirement/

    1. I’ve read them all but glad in a way he’s quitting. I think old JR had run his course. Good light reading.

    3. Why do most writers, these days, insist upon having a leading character named Jack (or Harry)? Is it because they lack the imagination and wit to think of an alternative?

      Every film or play on the telly has to have a random “Jack” character in it. This is beyond tedium.

      1. The name Jack can lead to problems. ‘Young Timmy helped his Uncle Jack off a horse’.

    4. Agreed re the first ones.

      Of the writers of that genre I think my favourite has to be Gerald Seymour

        1. I loved some of Geoffrey Jenkins’ books, sadly they don’t seem to be around in bookshops these days (mind you, there aren’t that many bookshops). I seem to recall “The Watering Place of Good Peace” was rather good.

        2. I shall look out for them, I don’t think I’ve read either, although Jenkins rings a faint bell.

          If you want to go back many years I recommend Anthony Price.

    5. Yes, the first few were the best but I gave up as they became so formulaic. Perhaps he will find another character to write about!

      1. They all had an unexpected twist and the books were very easy reading, even if some were very “dark”.

        I think my favourite was the one where his brother died over the forgeing of $100 bills, a clever plot.

  52. Eleven days ago (Jan 7) one of the most talented and most accomplished rock drummers—Neil Peart of Canadian band Rush—died at the age of 67 of brain cancer. Tributes have been posted, in proliferation, all over the internet, and obituaries have appeared worldwide and in all British broadsheets and tabloids … except for the Daily Telegraph!

    The DT posts obituaries of all manner of obscure people, most of whom no-one has ever heard of, but when someone from a popular genre dies, it seldom meets the DT’s approval for publication.

    Shame on the obituaries’ editor of the DT.

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

    2. From Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph:

      Rush didn’t chase fame, hits or groupies – yet there will never be a better rock band

      Eighteen-minute songs, 40 million sales, 250 shows a year… Following the death of Rush drummer Neil Peart, Ian Winwood celebrates the extraordinary legacy of every rock star’s favourite group

      Such was the secret appeal of Rush that in the summer of 2008 the band’s three members were invited onto American television for only the second time, 33 years after the first. Appearing on The Colbert Report, the show’s host, Stephen Colbert, posed a question to his Torontonian guests. “You’re known for your long songs,” he said. “Have you ever written a song so epic that by the end of the song you were actually influenced by yourself at the beginning?”

      The death last week of Rush’s drummer, Neil Peart, from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, has extinguished the slim chance that the band might once again make music, epic or otherwise. Three years after their final concert, in 2018 guitarist Alex Lifeson told the Toronto Globe & Mail that “we’re basically done,” but admitted that the possibility of seeing “three of us” onstage again was “possible.” Not any more.

      For a body of supporters whose fanatical attentiveness is rivaled only by the ‘Deadhead’ army of the Grateful Dead, the loss is severe. As Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters said as he and Dave Grohl inducted the Canadians into the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame, in Cleveland in 2013, “Neil Peart inspired a generation air-drummers for decades to come.”

      “To me, they remain one of the top bands in the world,” Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins once said. “Now whether some guy at Rolling Stone believes that or not is completely irrelevant. Because at the end of the day rock is a people’s game, and the people have… consistently voted for them.”

      Despite its comedic qualities, the question posed by Stephen Colbert was miscast. At the time of the group’s appearance on his show, Rush had been free for almost thirty-years of the virtuosic prog-rock straitjacket they had stitched for themselves on albums such as 2112 and Hemispheres. Eighteen-minute tracks that occupied an entire side of a studio LP had been replaced by more economical songs such as The Spirit Of Radio and Tom Sawyer; technically dazzling, sure, but no longer determined to chase every idea into a maze. “All this machinery making modern music can still be open hearted,” they sang in what would prove to be a portent of the records to come.

      It was an approach that served them well. With 19 studio albums to their name and 40 million sales to their credit, Rush leave behind a body of work that features elements of hard rock, prog-rock, electronica, synthesized pop, and even hip hop. Many of their songs are delivered in time signatures that seem to have been written in morse code. Piled high, they are the work of an incorruptible band that answered only to themselves.

      “There’s no such thing as ‘that doesn’t suit Rush,” said Peart, on the 2010 documentary film Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage. “Those words have never been uttered.”

      Neil Peart was invited to audition for Rush in 1974 after being approached by the band’s management while working at his father’s tractor-parts company in St Catherines, Ontario. He arrived for his try-out in a Ford Pinto with drums wrapped in bin bags sticking out of each window. Bassist and vocalist Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson laughed at the sight and assumed he was a hick from the country. The laughter died as Peart counted the three men into the first song of a career that would endure for the next forty-one years.

      “He sat down behind this kit and pummeled the drums, and us,” Lee told the journalist Michael Hann. “I’d never heard a drummer like that, someone with that power and that dexterity. As far as I was concerned, he was hired from the minute he started playing.”

      Peart’s first concert was in front of 11,000 people at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh on a bill topped by Uriah Heep. Rush toured in a car and supported everyone from the New York Dolls to Rod Stewart. Even then, their behaviour differed from other rockers of the day. After appearing 50 times as special guests to Kiss, Gene Simmons said that “in rock’n’roll even an ugly bastard like me can get laid, but none of the Rush guys ever did it.”

      “I think we were better at persuading women to keep their clothes on,” Geddy Lee once told me. “Our music always was more of a player’s music, so we attracted fewer women and more players. We were wishing there were women at the shows, but unfortunately they were hard to find.”

      As the band’s popularity blossomed with albums such as Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures, Rush began filling the largest indoor venues in North America and Europe – four nights at Wembley Arena here, three shows at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto there – with hordes of swivel-eyed constituents. It would be unkind to describe these conventions as a gathering of geeks – perhaps less so given that I became one of them – but in time a number of these admirers would pay their respects to the band in a way that the mainstream music press and American television had thus far failed to do.

      Trey Stone and Matt Parker doffed their caps by having the characters in their cartoon series South Park play a version of Tom Sawyer (Rush duly repurposed the scene for use at their own concerts). In 2003 the comedian Jerry Stiller helped the Canadians celebrate their thirtieth birthday by appearing in a film clip for use on the subsequent R:30 Tour.

      Seven years later, the trio appeared in the hit comedy I Love You, Man after the film’s director, John Hamburg, convinced them that he was “genuinely a fan.” The band have appeared on the TV show Freaks And Geeks, while references to their music have been dropped like calling cards on programmes such as Archer, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Frisky Dingo.

      Few groups were more fluent in comedy than Rush – who else would play in front of a backline comprised of three rotisserie ovens, complete with rotating chickens basted once a show by a roadie dressed as a chef? – but beneath the wrapping this was a deeply serious band. The listener might not at first have guessed this from couplets such as “hey baby, it’s a quarter to eight, I feel like I’m in the mood,” recorded with original drummer John Rutsey, but change was soon to come. Not long after he joined the group, the task of writing lyrics was handed to Neil Peart.

      Despite a strenuous application, his early-day efforts were not always successful. The lines “the men who hold high places must be the one to start, to mold a new reality closer to the heart” bear a deference to hierarchy that is hardly the stuff of rock’n’roll. The wonkily allegorical The Trees, in which a newly unionised forest is undone by “hatchet, axe and saw,” holds those with power in even higher regard.

      Things improved. On the timeless Subdivisions, Peart spoke for many young Rush fans in describing modern life as being “detached and subdivided in the mass production zone,” a suburban landscape that has “no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth.” On the underrated Roll The Bones, the drummer even had a stab at the meaning of life – and of death, as it goes – with the words “why does it happen? Because it happens… why are we here? Because we’re here.” Rush’s lyrics may be somewhat overlooked, often unfairly, but Peart’s devotion to them was total.

      “Any activity in which I developed an interest became a positive obsession,” he wrote in his well-judged memoir Ghost Rider: Travels On The Healing Road. ‘This has been true of playing the drums, reading every great book ever written, writing lyrics, writing prose, cross-country skiing, bicycling, and motorcycling.’

      But Neil Peart was best known for his drumming. A startling talent from the off, he regarded himself as a work-in-progress even while others gazed in wonder. After performing with the Buddy Rich Big Band in New York in 1994, he enlisted the services of jazz-giant Freddie Gruber in order to master new techniques. He would later write that he ‘followed his [Gruber’s] guidance to the extent of changing just about everything I had done before, in 30 years of playing.’ The search for perfection was a demon that never slept.

      This attention to detail, this precision, did not go unnoticed. At Rush’s final concert, four revered drummers gathered in Los Angeles to watch Peart’s peerless playing for the last time. Seated in the ninth row of the ‘Fabulous’ Forum were Taylor Hawkins, Tool’s Danny Carey, Jon Theodore of Queens Of The Stone Age, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith.

      “I spent my sophomore year of high school in the parking lot smoking weed and listening to 2112,” Smith told the writer Philip Wilding. “I do believe it’s a prerequisite for all rock drummers to go through a Neal Peart phase.”

      Such esteem impacted on Neil Peart’s sense of himself not a jot. Writing of his own relentless exactitude, he revealed that ‘when a particular show fell short of [my own standards] I felt deflated and disgusted with myself, while if I played well enough to meet that benchmark, it was only what I expected of myself – nothing to get excited about.’

      In the spring of 2011, I watched Rush perform live from a seat in the front row of the 02 Arena in London. Standing at the barrier that divides a band from its audience, I watched as Neil Peart powered his way through songs such as Marathon and YYZ with a metronomic delicacy that was a wonder to behold. The idea that, unbeknownst to the 17,000 people watching, the man playing just feet in front of me might have been having a ‘mare is incredible. The notion that he might have left the stage feeling disgusted is even more so.

      Prior to their performance, I met Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson at a “meet and greet” that was free of charge to everyone invited. A more convivial occasion than this description suggests, it was understood by all that Neil Peart would play no part in the gathering. He also declined to grant interviews to the press. A private man in all but name, the drummer refused to shake hands with the arena-level cult stardom he had acquired from his band’s adoring audience of women and men (mostly men). He visited their cities only to play music.

      “I was the world’s biggest Who fan as a kid,” he said in Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage. “I never dreamed of trying to find their hotel room and knocking on their door, or interfering in their lives in any way. I love being appreciated, being respected is awful good, but anything beyond that just creeps me out. Any sense of adulation is just so wrong.”

      He once wrote that “touring could be a long, relentless grind, exhausting and soul destroying. And that only refers to the onstage time”. Driven by dreams of perfection and bolstered by the love of his band mates – the three members of Rush remained friends until the end of his life – Peart’s relationship with music was often ambiguous. Despite his tenure with a group that earned its audience by playing as many as 250 concerts a year, there was much about a life in music that he could do without.

      For a time, he did. Following the death of his only daughter, Selena, in a car accident in 1997, and the subsequent death of his common-law wife from cancer just ten months later, Neil Peart absented himself from Rush for almost half a decade. So profound was the dislocation that both Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson believed that the final trumpet had sounded on their three-man band. “Consider me retired,” he told them at Selena Taylor’s funeral.

      The drummer returned for the Vapor Trails album of 2002, and reacquainted himself with life on the road with a shorter-than-usual sixty-six date tour. Arriving in Britain for the first time in more than a decade, two years later at Wembley Arena he was afforded the kind of welcome that could only have been bettered by the appearance onstage of Jesus Christ.

      During his hiatus, Peart learned to accommodate his terrible grief by riding his motorcycle for 55,000 miles on a trek across North and Central America. On the first leg of the journey he was pulled over by a police officer on the North shore of Lake Ontario. Looking at his license, the cop arched an eyebrow and asked his quarry if he was a musician. The answer he received is truer now than it was then.

      “I used to be,” said Neil Peart. “I used to be a lot of things.”

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/neil-peart-rush-tribute-life-career-influence-best-albums/

      1. Funny, but I read the paper version of the DT cover-to-cover and I didn’t see that. Was it in the paper version or just in the online version, which I don’t see?

          1. I’ve just been back and checked and as I first said, neither Neil Peart’s obituary not any reference to his death, whatsoever, has appeared in the paper version of the DT, which is a travesty.

          2. I agree, but I also agree with the BTL comments that say the article was rather better than most obituaries. The Guardian produced an obit but it was rather brief.

            I was lucky enough to have seen Rush six times…

        2. It wasn’t in the tablet edition. The tablet edition is an abridged version of the paper, they even omitted a letter of mine in the tablet edition recently. I pointed this out to them and it was added retrospectively!

          1. I’ve not seen any letter printed from a chap called “Harry Kobeans” (or even “Haricot Beans”). :•)

          4. I have his e-mail address and ‘Harry’ is a member of my funnies group. we are currently running short of funnies but I hope to see it lift-off again shortly.

          5. 5.Like

            An elderly man visited the doctor for a checkup. “Mr. Smith, you’re in great shape,” said the doctor afterward. “How do you do it?”

            “Well,” said Mr. Smith, “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and the good Lord looks out for me. For weeks now, every time I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, he turns the light on for me.”

            Concerned, the doctor found Mrs. Smith in the waiting room and told her what her husband had said.

            “I don’t think that’s anything to worry about,” she said. “And on the bright side, it does explain who’s been peeing in the fridge.

  54. HAPPY HOUR – Worth a mint!
    Super-rare 22-carat gold coin sovereign featuring Queen’s uncle Edward VIII sells for £1 MILLION.
    Edward VIII broke with the tradition of the monarch´s heads facing in opposite directions, because he preferred his left profile

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a8ba78446d1223358b31dc8cf1068f8444795cde4edda8aabc7f5c7f6ff5646b.jpg
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7898205/Rare-Edward-VIII-sovereign-sets-new-sales-record-1m.html

    3. He would appear to have one of those “overly wonky” faces, with one side much more compacted than the other. But he was the King and not many would have met him in person. Surely he could have faced the normal way and said “tart it up a bit” or just reversed the image and pretended that his left side was his right?

      I wouldn’t imagine that very many people would walk up to him and complain about it to his face, that is if they could recognise him at all.

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/30678ef3447248d48b3685885313ced4d525ce827179d0f7489320d46d5aabe2.jpg

          2. I normally like Walken but I thought he was totally wrong in that role, possibly because I’d read the book a few times – the film ruined it, in my view.

          4. Each to their own! As me old Mum said – “It’d be very boring if we all thought the same”.

    2. Thanks for posting. A great improvement on radio 3’s Saturday night opera. Have been listening whilst scrolling through all today’s comments and have just come back to where I started as it is ending.

        1. Evening C,
          She may be ugly and a lesbian, how about
          handsome & straight &
          supporting / voting for parties time & again that unleashed these rape /abuse cretins upon us.
          The in-actions of these parties via PC / Appeasement has damaged / mentally scarred kids for life.

    2. She is one of those people who will watch the United Kingdom and all of Western Civilisation burn to the ground in order to build their Brave New World out of the ashes. This is the bland, mundane, ugly face of modern evil where children are expendable.

        1. She should have been sacked years ago after one of her operations killed an innocent man!

      2. MM,
        These odious issues have been going on for years under the
        governance of the lab/lib/con
        parties, these parties have always found support & votes from the electorate does this not make one think that the three monkeys are very active in the polling booth.

    5. Gasps of incredulity.
      Totally unfit for purpose.
      Is that her reason for not doing anything.
      Is there any way of dispatching her back to obscurity without some golden kick up the a*se.

  59. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have walked away from the monarchy, issuing an unprecedented statement that outlines how they will “no longer formally represent the Queen”.

    Harry and Meghan will stop carrying out royal duties from the spring, will stop using HRH and will repay the taxpayers’ millions spent on their Berkshire home.

    The announcement marks the conclusion of talks about their future with senior members of the family and royal aides.

    2. I’m pleased that HM has acted so swiftly and decisively. It’s the right decision in my opinion.

      2. It was the right decision as far as it goes, but still rather vague. What’s decisive about “Spring 2020”? Beginning of Spring? Early Spring? Mid-spring? End of Spring?

    3. I am sure all his ex- Military chums will think the same as most of us…Lead by the crutch.

      2. I read somewhere recently that the male of the species has enough blood to satisfy both the brain and the penis but only one at a time.

    4. Are we going to miss them? I think it is very sad and unfortunately predictable.

      I hope Meghan is proud of herself.

      1. I think most people will be glad to see the back of her. Harry used to be very popular, but you can go off people. The Royal family and the British people have made her very welcome, but she’s thrown it all back.
        It’s certainly nothing to do with racism, but everything to do with hypocrisy.

        1. I wonder if they ever stopped to think? Did Harry not think about whether she was suitable? He had some lovely English rose girlfriends, but they knew what marrying into the Royal family would entail.

          4. I said the other day that she’s a third rate actress who got lucky. He’s still emotionally that little boy of 12, walking behind his mother’s coffin.

          5. The problem with severe trauma is that it does keep you locked, frozen emotionally in that age when the event happened, and you do not progress beyond it. Goodness knows how generations before us coped as their lives seem to have been full of traumatic events: war, death from disease, mothers dying in childbirth – hence the development of our unemotional ‘stiff upper lip’, I suppose.

          6. People were able to rise above it and move on – as he had, until she came along and picked away at him.

        3. I think he was one of my favourite Royals……the writing was on the wall however with his choce of partner, love really is blind.

          1. I’ll give it five years, when he realises he’s lost his family, his friends, the respect of the people.

  60. Putin, a criminal and incompetent president, is an enemy of his own people. Simon Tisdall. 18 January 2020.

    And speaking of poison, who doubts that Putin and his henchmen were behind the unpunished attempt to assassinate Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury and last year’s murder of a Chechen separatist in Berlin?

    This single paragraph puts the rest of this third rate propaganda in perspective. Anyone who believes the UK version of the Skripal business is either a Fool or a Troll and quite possibly both. It simply cannot be true. It is a nonsense from beginning to end. The “Chechen Separatist” was actually a murderous thug who met a deserved end, though this was almost certainly at the hands of his own countrymen!

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/18/putin-criminal-incompetent-president-enemy-of-his-own-people-russia

      1. Yes I’m hoping tomorrow will also be a sunny day, as I will be out again picking up ancient artefacts from a muddy field and it’s pretty cold on the fingers if they are all covered in frost.

          1. Most of the finds are prehistoric flint tools, burnt flint, pottery, tile, sarsen stone quern fragments and other odds & ends. We haven’t found any treasure as commonly understood, though one of the team did once spot a fragment of Bronze Age bronze dagger, which is the closest we’ve got. Most of the team look forward to findiing really nice flint tools like this arrowhead: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c712b6761276c883ad1d953fdf347f3c1a99d399f6690abe54025b419d33a707.jpg I think flints are aesthetically very pleasing.

            We are really trying to identify settlement sites and areas of activity. The present field has a lot of Roman pottery, so probably a small Roman farmstead somewhere in the area.

          2. These are all treasures…..history fascinates me and I love to think about the circumstances when something was used. Ancient Romans and Egyptians are particularly of interest to me. Backbreaking work I would imagine to go digging, but the find must outweigh that.

          3. It’s very easy for the fascination to pall in modern day commercial archaeology, which is why I do this at weekends with volunteers – to remind just why I wanted to be an archaeologist.

          4. There is something almost magical / mystical about holding something that was fashioned by other hands 2,000+ years ago. Especially if you find it where it has lain for all of those years.

    2. From wikipedia:

      Dinesh Joseph D’Souza (/dɪˈnɛʃ dəˈsuːzə/; born April 25, 1961) is an Indian-born American author, filmmaker, and conspiracy theorist, often described as a far right political provocateur.

      Yep, that’s him.

      1. Bill, the gobble-knobber Clinton, hatched August 19, 1946 is an American onanist, best known for supporting Arkansacide in potential whistleblowers.

  64. Does anybody think that HM realised that the country was not thrilled with Meghan? And Harry, by extension?

    1. I suspect that there is still a lot of sympathy and support for Harry, less so for the parasite.

        2. He was doing well with the Invictus Games and his support for people with disabilities. Then she came along.

        1. When she announced her pregnancy at Eugenie’s wedding – I think people have known since then what she is.

          6. Good heavens… she must have been on some one’s radar for a while to be so closely examined like that.

            Very interesting article , thanks for posting .

  65. Speaking as someone who likes submarines, but who would need to be darted and tranquillised to go on a cruise liner, I will leave you with some Star Wars humour for a Saturday night.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/64cad6305c202fdba29e00e12234f48dba27140aaf1a7ce6a700fbc12502878e.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c182d475f1184ce6fa1198e90e0c8b2e66ef47716873b6f532fe0f460447e34d.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c1cdd12a635f4fc46d78db5c3171b0cb229aeff77d78754adb0ac6d347eba666.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e3c345a7d05697eac9107f7248549df3373aa97c50c159dc88b6419bb2c235d9.jpg

      1. Many years ago, we were in Central Australia when it became known that the local Aborigines had won the McDonalds franchise. Our Aussie friends reckoned that meant they would start serving Wichetty grub burgers.

  67. Ah the media will be all over the demoting of Harry and Megan and will be looking for any excuse to say it is racist even though there i no racism involved.

      1. I expect Philip will be confined to quarters until it all blows over, or we might get the real feelings of the RF.

  68. Now that he is no longer an HRH and will surrender a chunk of income, how long will she want to stay with him?

    1. The Sussex’s will make a mint in the USA. They could promote something as quintessentially English and simple as tea and cucumber sandwiches and still make a killing.

      That sad bitch the Duchess of Pork was feted over there. All it takes are a few appearances on Oprah Winfrey, a few interviews rubbishing President Trump and eulogising the Obamas and Clintons and their stage is set.

      Of course eventually it will all come to grief. It was ever thus and thankfully remains so.

          3. You never ever spoke in such course language.

            Looking back …i can see why there is a possible disqus blanking of intemperate words. Probably

    3. Vacancy for Prince. No experience required , Must be able to cope with the media.
      Must be able to start soon. Preferred if first name is Harry as that will avoid the cost of new stationary

  69. Obtaining Settled Status

    It seems the system is very simple so only those with unusual circumstances might run into difficulties. One such situation appears to be if two Married EU national apply for settled status and they have children born in the UK. Now technically this children are not British.. Ho it works with them I do not know. I guess they could get settled status after 5 years but that seems a strange way to go about it. Perhaps the parents have to get settled status first and then apply for the children. This is one for the lawyers

      1. Even in my heyday…on MDMA i would have smashed that face in with a baseball bat. Still took the chips though.

      2. Hat….I have never been violent. But sometimes one does feel like giving giving someone a slap. Any advice?

          1. Probably not the best advice for me. I would make Jeremy Bamber look normal. I know,..very bad… but you haven’t met my elder sister….Mary.

  72. I would like to pose a question… Why, now, do the survivors, relatives, friends of GrenFell receive millions in aid when the same is not offered to all those young white girls family mutilated at the Ariande Grand concert that is now promoted by Emimen.?

    1. Simples, because AG concert murders were mainly white, and Grenfell was all the fault of whitey, apparently.

      1. Makes sense. Hopefully more of these so called popstars take their concerts to Yemen to get down with the people.

        Hiya…what’s for dinner?.

  74. Press release on TV on the agreement for Megxit. Wow, Kudos to our great Queen. If she had been in charge of Brexit, we would be out and would have dictated the terms of our exit.

        2. Megan is just another rich bitch now and I don’t want to read any more about what she is up to.
          Long live the Queen !!

    3. Rumours that the Queen has arthritis in the fingers of her right hand, from having to change her will every five minutes.

    4. They should have had, at an absolute minimum, to agree not to “monetize” their titles. None of this “copyrighting” the Sussex name. Personally, I think they should have lost their Duke and Duchess titles as well.

    5. All credit to her.. Brilliant woman .(The Queen)

      The Megane hasn’t even got British citizenship .. so where does the baby fit in now.. and is this a tax fiddle ..

      Repaying the money for Frogmore cottage will be a doddle for them .

    6. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex also said they intend to repay £2.4m of taxpayer money for the refurbishment of Frogmore Cottage, which will
      remain their UK family home.       The question is – how??

      1. Maybe HM will AirB&B it if they want a room. Trash will not be seen here again unless there is some benefit for her. Interesting that HM said that Meg had integrated into the family quickly….. not mentioned is that she has rejected the royals and the British people even quicker.

        1. I seem to recall at the time of the marriage, Harry was said to be worth around £20M and Meghan around £5M.

  79. Just thinking, it would have been wonderful to see what TW3 would have done with the Harry and Meghan story. Or even I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again – they had fun with Anne’s wedding.

    1. Mornflake Scottish Jumbo Oats, made with Channel Island Gold Top milk. A couple of slices of toast, from home made (well, breadmaker) sourdough malted loaf. Tea.

      Ezekiel can wait until Evensong…

    2. ‘Evening, Mags, we have our own spelt and I’m experimenting with some of the breads in the cook-book.

      Best Beloved will probably stump up Eggs, Bacon, Mushrooms and Black pudding. Can you wonder that I love her!

      1. Moh had kippers for breakfast this morning.. He has been belching kipper smell all day..

        I knew that would happen.. our innards alter as we get older,

        1. I might have lived in Black Pudding land for some years, but it never appealed to me in the slightest.

        2. Smoked haddock is the fish for breakfast never herrings. Bacon and tomato for us tomorrow.

          1. At least haddock doesn’t stink the place out, unlike kippers.

            I used to dread hotel breakfasts where some selfish oaf would order them.

          2. Aberdeen kippers for breakfast at the Central Station Hotel in Glasgow, after the sleeper from London Euston, is a memory not forgotten.

            Edit: 1973-1975.

          4. No need to walk past the table, the whole place reeks of them.

            On the other hand a nice serving of smoked haddock is highly enjoyable.

          5. Some years back we stayed at a hotel in Sidmouth. Haddock and poached eggs or kippers both on the menu. And the bar full of people like the Major from Fawlty Towers.

            As they used to be on the old Manchester Pullman, which was always a pleasant journey.

            — Jack.

          6. Aberdeen kippers for breakfast at the Central Station Hotel in Glasgow, after the sleeper from London Euston, is a memory not forgotten.

            Edit: 1973-1975.

          8. There is nothing selfish or oafish about choosing kippers from the breakfast menu in a hotel.

    3. Oh you exaggerate, you get two loaves for £21.

      If it is delivered from Virginia, do you think that they will arrive fresh?

    4. Breakfast tomorrow depends on if I’m still shitting through the eye of a needle!
      Other than water, fruit drink, tea and two oatmeal biscuits I’ve had nothing.

      Still, look on the bright side, it means I’m getting rid of the Christmas excess a bit quicker!

      Good night all.

      2. Ate a load of xylitol-sweetened pudding. Gut badly affected. Blowing off like a trombone and gurgles like an avalanche of boulders, so much sympathy, Bob.

    7. I still have a bag of Spelt flour in the cupboard and will make my own before ordering that online. 🙂

      If anyone would pay that for a loaf, then they must have more money than sense not to buy the basic ingredients and make it themselves.

    8. I make a spelt/wholemeal (50/50) loaf for the family which doesn’t toast as well as my white bread, but sliced thinly makes a wonderful sandwich.

    1. I’s funny how these people seem to have adopted the “just one drop of black blood” theory of what makes a person black. Which of course was the old US Southern States/Confederacy’s test in the day’s of slavery. You would think the descendants of slaves, of all people, would not use that same standard to label themselves “black”.

  82. Having just checked on Mediafire, I’m delighted to see that 13 NoTTLers have taken the trouble to down-load my cook-book.

    I shall happily entertain any feedback (good or bad) but it’s good to know that curiosity is still alive and well

    1. It concerns me that you are concerned about a free download. I did download it and then sort of filed it. Are there any particular things in that huge file that may blow my mind.?….speaking as someone who has always been in the food industry.

          1. Good to know, Paul, I value your feedback apropos that given for Not A Bad Life.

            The next is still a work in progress.

          2. Tom, you now have one extra download. See my post in reply to Paul for further information.

    4. Could you perhaps give your recipe for fruit crumbles on the NoTTL site? I tried to log in but, whilst my email address was recognised the password was not. And I don’t want to spend another two hours trying to log in, failing, and then going to bed fuming!

        1. Thank you, Herr Oberst. That’s exactly what happened to me so where on earth the “Write your password here” window appeared from I have no idea. I found the download I had carried out and was able to open Tom’s book, which looks very good. Unfortunately, no crumble recipes, but he does say he has recipes for kangaroo and ostrich. I was wondering if I might try to incorporate those into my crumble recipes, but I suspect that if I tried the ostrich crumble it would quickly run out of the kitchen and if i made kangaroo crumble it would also soon hop off! :-))

          Seriously though, like you, I’m looking forward to studying the book in more detail tomorrow.

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