Sunday 16 May: Face-to-face GP appointments are vital – but they must be used wisely

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/05/15/letters-face-to-face-gp-appointments-vital-must-used-wisely/

678 thoughts on “Sunday 16 May: Face-to-face GP appointments are vital – but they must be used wisely”

  1. Morning everyone. In a world spiralling into madness and the Apocalypse waiting in the wings I can find nothing to comment on!!

    1. Morning!
      Dull day all round. Raining, so if I can be arsed, might do some sofa sitting later.

  2. Morning everyone. In a world spiralling into madness and the Apocalypse waiting in the wings I can find nothing to comment on!!

    Major incident declared after gas explosion in Lancashire. 16 May 2021.

    Lancashire Fire said on Twitter that units were called to a row of terraced houses on Mallowdale Avenue in the early hours of Sunday and that firefighters were searching a collapsed property.

    “A major incident has been declared after we (were) called to terraced houses on Mallowdale Avenue. It has been reported that there has been an explosion at a property and firefighters are searching the collapsed property,” Lancashire Fire said.

    Not exactly Gaza but any port in a flat calm!

    https://news.sky.com/story/major-incident-declared-after-suspected-gas-explosion-in-lancashire-12307699

    1. Apparently it was ok for Hamas to shoot 2 800 rockets into Israel, but “It’s war!” scream the media when the IDF blew up their offices! No report of death or injury in that attack, so one suspects they had a polite call suggesting they leave pdq before big boom boom.

      1. The West does seem to have a selective attitude to Muslims.
        Shouting from the rooftops about China’s treatment but strangely silent on Israel.
        Its not political ..is it?

        1. Was a big chunk of the Middle East not stolen from Europeans by arab types? Hence the Crusades?

          2. Thank you. I paid scant attention to history at school. One term was moderately entertaining. The history teacher described the Roman invasion of Scotland (aka North Britain). The legions fared badly in the rough terrain where the Picts set about them with broken bottles and bicycle chains. The teacher left to take up an appointment at an Australian University.

          3. Mr. Hogg, our History Teacher at Glendale in Wooler, asked the class a question, “What is the point of learning History?”
            After the usual 2 minutes embarrassed silence, I put my hand up and replied, entirely from my own thoughts, “If you know what happened in the past, you will have a better understanding of why things are as they are today. You will also have a better idea of what could happen tomorrow.”

        2. Isn’t there a chunk of Saudi known as the ‘Empty Quarter’ because it’s … well … empty. As in bereft of human beings and their activity.

        3. Considering Muslims are a funny lot why didn’t Israeli’s ask to live in, ohh, the South of France?

  3. BTSport are going great guns with their “Draw the Line” campaign against on-line hate.
    I feel like i’m missing out so i may have to get a smartphone!!

    1. BTL comments in the Mail are about 3000 to 100 in favour of the booing.

      1. Good. The Cultural Marxists might realise that they have misread the true feelings of the people.

        1. But it doesn’t matter what the people think or want. The state supports and endorses these wretched fools.

    4. ‘Some loud audible boos as the players taking the knee, before they’re drowned out by applause’.

      Wonder if the applause came via pre-prepared recordings controlled by the sound engineers?

      1. They had it all set up. For the last year televised matches have been broadcast with fake spectator noise. Only moderately good thing about it was that it drowned out the commentators.

      2. Almost certainly. They have been honing their skill recently because of the restrictions on gatherings. I listened to a Gardener’s Question Time some time ago which had crowds applauding and gales of laughter. I did wonder if they had plugged in the wrong tape.

      3. Loud and audible.

        Reminds me of Army lessons on Clansman radios when the instructor always used to say ‘You will hear an audible tone’. Being a lowly Lance-Jack attending the School of Infantry, I didn’t have the nerve to ask the difference between an audible and an inaudible tone.

        1. I was demobbed just as Clansman (and the SA80) was about to be introduced, so I used to play with the old Larkspur sets.

  5. Brief watery sunshine – won’t last.

    I do NOT believe that Our Susan went on a Freedom March yesterday. There is mention in the newspapers. It was all fake – including the photographs…

    1. Morning Bill! Sure did. I don’t know what the numbers were but we filled Regent Street from end to end. I saw one very puzzled looking Moslem woman. I think she’d joined the wrong march.

  6. For reasons which will be obvious to NoTTLers, I am quoting below one of the winning entries in a recent Spectator competition.

    In the comp, people were invited to supply an extract from a children’s book that is designed to explain economics to youngsters.

    ‘Deflation,’ said Eeyore gloomily.
    ‘Oh, do cheer up,’ said Piglet. ‘I say, haven’t your letters come on since your “A”.’
    Eeyore had spelt out QUANTITATIVE EATING in sticks on the grass.
    ‘It means eating too much,’ explained Owl.
    Everyone looked at Pooh.
    ‘Easing!’ said Piglet, jumping up and down. ‘Quantitative Easing.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Pooh.
    ‘Christopher Robin explained it to me,’ said Piglet. ‘It’s a party game. Everyone sits in a circle
    and one person takes everyone else’s pocket money. Then the others have to guess what happens next.’
    ‘What does happen next?’ said Pooh.
    ‘It’s a secret,’ said Piglet. ‘But everyone gets a prize of some more pocket money, to buy things with.’
    ‘What sort of things?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know’, said Piglet. ‘Just things. Balloons.’
    ‘Balloons?’ said Eeyore. ‘You know what the trouble is with balloons?’
    Everyone looked at Eeyore.
    ‘Inflation.’

  7. morning all, Sunday’s woke order of service. Professor Adekeye Adebajo [Nigerian] cites the Times Literary Supplement to make his point in the DT. Pan African thought or emotively wounded.

    SIR – I welcome the move towards more face-to-face GP appointments.

    However, there need to be fewer pointless ones for things like broken nails. If only those who genuinely needed appointments were seen, the service might be considerably less stretched.

    I think initial phone consultations can be a good thing, along with the use of 111 to triage A&E.

    Barbara Marshall
    Helmdon, Northamptonshire

    SIR – It is good to know that patients have the right to book face-to-face consultations with their GPs.

    Now all we have to do is get through to them on the phone or persuade them to respond to emails.

    Alan Quinton
    Eastbourne, East Sussex

    SIR – Following NHS England’s episode of common sense over face-to-face appointments, will it now consider abandoning the ridiculous 10-minute limit on consultations?

    Brian Lawrence
    Dover, Kent

    SIR – I am an orthopaedic surgeon married to a GP. She has by far the harder job. She is out of the house by 7.30 am and back at 7 pm on a good day.

    The work is no longer rewarding. The Government changes the rules often and the GPs have to take the blame. To make it worse, GPs get awful complaints and are often demonised.

    There are fewer GPs than before – many fewer per head of population than in other European countries – and they have to do more. They just cannot provide the unlimited service that everyone wants. No business could.

    Perhaps GPs are due some thanks before they are totally demoralised and even more of them quit.

    Peter Wade FRCS
    Kenilworth, Warwickshire

    SIR – Where I live, contacting the GP practice at all is a major challenge, with at least a 45-minute wait on the phone. NHS 111 provides a better service.

    The practice will only accept one problem at a time, using a random assortment of doctors, none of whom will have dealt with you before. There is no continuity, and the arrangements for talking to anyone in an emergency are unsatisfactory. I no longer see the point of primary-care medicine.

    Judith Scott
    Wokingham, Berkshire

    SIR – Upon ringing my surgery I was told that I was 17th in line. So I sent an email, to which I received the reply: “Book an appointment by phone”.

    D Bradbury
    Bristol

    SIR – Last week I contacted my surgery at 11.30 am. A practice doctor contacted me at 3 pm. By 5 pm I was examined by a hospital nurse. Thirty-six hours later I was fitted with a pacemaker.

    It is not all doom and gloom.

    Rev Martin James
    Chopwell, Co Durham

    Royal yacht costs

    SIR – I hope the Prime Minister reconsiders the proposal to spend vast sums on a useless floating palace for the Royal family (Letters, May 9).

    If he wants to honour the Duke of Edinburgh, he should name a new Navy vessel after him. And if there is £200 million going spare, put it towards helping the tenants in cladding misery.

    Kevin Platt
    Walsall, Staffordshire

    SIR – The suggestion that the new royal yacht should be a fighting ship is illogical.

    As a national asset for diplomacy, this vessel will make peaceful visits to friendly ports as part of our soft-power interactions. It will perform similar missions to less cuddly countries that we are trying to influence, or enable trade with the UK. It may also carry out oceanographic research in deep water.

    To arm the vessel (or indeed even to paint it grey) would negate all this. Furthermore, Britannia Maritime Aid is already seeking government funding for a multi-role training ship for the Merchant Navy that can deliver humanitarian aid and disaster relief, as well as performing soft-power tasks.

    Jonathan Powis
    Operations Director, Britannia Maritime Aid
    Swanwick, Derbyshire

    SIR – At £200 million, the royal yacht would be quite a bargain.

    For the cost of HS2, at £106 billion, we could build 560 royal yachts.

    Graham Saunders
    Buckingham

    SIR – With the greatest respect to Admiral Lord West (Letters, May 9), his assertion that only the Royal Navy should man the royal yacht, to provide “a particular cachet, smartness, efficiency and elegance”, is incorrect and somewhat insulting to seafarers.

    He must be aware that the Queen has chartered the small cruise ship Hebridean Princess for holidays in the Western Isles, and the Royal family was reported as having had “a jolly good time”.

    Both the Royal Fleet Auxiliary and the Merchant Navy are fully capable of operating and manning the royal yacht, at a fraction of the price needed for the Navy. We have the competence, the experience and the willingness to serve our guests in a manner they have come to expect. All the Navy needs to provide is a small detachment of Royal Marines to protect the Queen.

    Captain Peter J Newton
    Derby

    SIR – The Royal Yacht Britannia’s cachet was less to do with being crewed by the Navy and more to do with its unique, instantly recognisable design: the black hull, white superstructure and yellow funnels, and prominent masts from which bunting was stretched.

    Words that come to mind for Britannia are “classic” and “graceful”. These should inform the design of the new one, otherwise it may end up looking like an oligarch’s super-yacht.

    C A Anderson
    Selkirk

    Rainy day dining

    SIR – Your recent articles about the joys of al fresco dining in pub gardens reminded me of the time when my wife and I hired a car in South Africa and took “the Garden Route” from Cape Town.

    It was a bank holiday and the weather was “British”. I was amused to see a holidaymaker on a beach with his shorts on in a howling gale, trying to get a barbecue (braai) going. So it isn’t just us after all.

    David Daborn
    Weybridge, Surrey

    What Rhodes said

    SIR – Nigel Biggar erroneously accuses me of making up three quotes in a 2006 review of a book on Cecil Rhodes by Paul Maylam (The Cult of Cecil Rhodes) that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.

    He says that the first quote, “I prefer land to n——”, was in a fictional 1897 novel by Olive Schreiner. But two renowned Rhodes biographers, Professor Maylam and Antony Thomas, have attributed this statement to Rhodes, as did a 1956 biographer, Felix Gross.

    Professor Biggar claims that a second Rhodes quote, “The natives are children. They are just emerging from barbarism”, was “misleadingly torn from its proper context”. However, both Professor Maylam and the historian Stanlake Samkange confirmed these words as having been uttered by Rhodes in a racist July 1894 speech to the Cape parliament, which is available online.

    Finally, Professor Biggar claims that the quote, “One should kill as many n—— as possible”, is “a mixture of distortion and fabrication”. But it is cited by Professor Maylam.

    Perhaps Professor Biggar should stick to his own field of theology and not wade into tendentious history.

    Professor Adekeye Adebajo
    Director, Institute For Pan-African Thought and Conversation
    University of Johannesburg, South Africa

    Vaccines in Spain

    SIR – You report on the difficulties that British residents have had obtaining vaccinations in Spain.

    This is not the experience my wife and I have had. We have received both our first and second doses, as have all the British residents in our town. In every case we were telephoned and told when to attend the local medical centre without even having to request an appointment.

    Each injection was administered by a nurse and took less than five minutes. A printed certificate of vaccination is available upon request.

    Lionel Anderson
    Peniscola, Castellón, Spain

    Local elision

    SIR – Mark Harries (Letters, May 9), discussing the use of the definite article in place names, refers to “the Wicker” in Sheffield.

    I have only ever heard it referred to as “t’Wicker where t’watter went over t’weir”.

    Davia Broome
    Longstone, Derbyshire

    Why imperial measures are best left behind

    SIR – Clive Green (Letters, May 9) wants to bring back imperial measures. I don’t think the millions who have been taught the metric system would thank him.

    I am 74 and have worked in metric managing a farm since the late 1970s. I can assure Mr Green that trying to do it in imperial would have been a nightmare: I know because that’s how we used to do it.

    Agricultural chemicals applied at ml/ha are much easier to deal with, especially when a high percentage of products are imported.

    Bill Harbour
    Faversham, Kent

    SIR – Mr Green is correct about the advantages of restoring imperial measurements.

    The abandonment of twelfths, sixteenths, eights and – most importantly – thirds for a system that favours just multiples of 10 has resulted directly in the barren brutalism that now passes for architecture.

    Bob Stebbings
    Chorleywood, Hertfordshire

    SIR – Mr Green is wrong to call for the return of Fahrenheit for weather forecasts and the use of stones and pounds in doctors’ surgeries.

    Neither is an SI unit and so neither should be used to covey scientific information. In particular, when calculating drug doses, doctors use mg/kg. Pharmaceutical companies give the information in that format; conversion is time-consuming and increases the risk of errors.

    If Mr Green wants to know his weight in stones and pounds, he can always buy a set of scales and set the units accordingly. As for the weather, I suggest he uses the Met Office app, which offers a choice of units.

    Dr P S Turnbull
    Alverstoke, Hampshire

    SIR – I was taught domestic science for two years at school and weighed everything in pounds and ounces. I still do so, much to my husband’s annoyance. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

    Jacqueline Davies
    Faversham, Kent

    Precious countryside sacrificed for homes

    SIR – It is not just in East Sussex that contentious housing projects are planned (Letters, May 9).

    In this hamlet in West Sussex, there is a proposal to build at least 3,000 homes on land close to Brinsbury Agricultural College (land presumably chosen for its agricultural qualities).

    This wonderful countryside, where skylarks and deer are common, will be lost for ever if the proposal goes ahead, and is a direct result of central government demands to build more homes. Unless there is a change of direction, the Tories will have problems in the South and South East.

    Raymond L Chick
    Billingshurst, West Sussex

    1. Mr Platt, why are you not blaming the government’s green agenda and the local councils – usually Labour ones, ones you no doubt support and elected – for their mistakes?

      Or perhaps, instead of whinging and whining about a man you no doubt hate for representing everything you lack, you could realise that providing means for the Monarchy is of benefit to the whole country, not just your pathetic, Labour voting clique.

      I find such Lefties disgusting as they support policies that make and keep people poor. People who work hard and deserve better.

    2. On metric – it is the least complicated and most straightforward scale going. It is base ten.

      It has not resulted in the dreadful architecture we have now – appalling architects and dreadful design has.

  9. Book of the Week: Nuclear Folly. 14 May 2021.

    The “main culprit” of the crisis was the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, said Jay Elwes in The Spectator. His “first error was to mistake the US president for a callow weakling”. “Don’t worry,” he assured the Cubans, “I’ll grab Kennedy by the balls.” A second was to underestimate how unacceptable America would find it to have Soviet warheads within striking distance of its territory. But the mistakes weren’t all on the Russian side. Wrongly believing the Soviet missiles weren’t battle-ready, Kennedy’s generals advised him to attack Cuba – a course which would almost certainly have prompted nuclear retaliation by the Russians. Instead, Kennedy decided to blockade the island: Khrushchev withdrew, and catastrophe was averted. (The US, for its part, agreed to remove its own nuclear missiles from near the Soviet border in Turkey.)

    Would you really want to read a book that makes such a questionable statement in the review? Would the Russians have sacrificed their own country for an island on the other side of the world? The end result would seem to say absolutely not! This also applies to the present. Would the Americans sacrifice the West Coast littoral and California for Taiwan? The relative values say not, but one suspects the deterrent is only in the doubt!

    https://www.theweek.co.uk/arts-life/culture/books/952829/book-of-the-week-nuclear-folly

    1. The only time nuclear weapons have been used in battle was when the target had a suicide policy. MAD breaks down.

      1. The MAD theory breaks down when only one side has nuclear weapons hence the reason smaller countries who disagree with US hegemony go all out to acquire their own.

        1. There is one nuclear-armed nation, and an important ally of the US, that has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has threatened another nation that is most definitely not an ally of the US, and has a somewhat barbaric domestic human rights policy. This pariah nation is now aspiring to acquire its own nuclear deterrent, which worries the rest of the world.

          It has been agreed by the authorities in the UK that it is a “hate crime” to name names here.

          1. “which worries the rest of the world.”
            Well the pro-US “rest of the world”..the others maybe not so much.

    2. There is a good film about the negotiations to stop the nuclear threat ,”Thirteen Days”. I found it an excellent film with Kevin Costner one of the stars.

    3. The Americans might retaliate against any attempt to add Taiwan to direct rule from China by invading Bermuda.

    1. Is that the punishment that makes buying a pair of gloves a redundant exercise?

  11. Jodie Turner-Smith on playing Anne Boleyn: ‘I should be allowed to tell this story’. 14 May 2021.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a8b1a3998166b57c02dac134adfee852f7a93cb3595813359ebdd32fb373bc49.jpg

    Jodie Turner-Smith as Anne Boleyn (opposite Mark Stanley’s Henry VIII): ‘We are in a time where we see that historically, actors of colour have been sidelined. They have not had the opportunity to be a part of storytelling.’

    That’s because the 34-year-old actress is about to star as the most famous of Henry VIII’s wives in Anne Boleyn, the hotly anticipated Channel 5 psychological thriller exploring the final months of the ill-fated queen. Jodie is the first black actress to play the role. ‘I found her endlessly fascinating, and playing her left so much room to interpret,’ she says.

    Since then she has married Joshua Jackson (yes, the teenage heart-throb Pacey from Dawson’s Creek), filmed action movie Without Remorse alongside Michael B Jordan and Jamie Bell while pregnant with her first child, and given birth last summer at the height of the pandemic. Next up she’ll be filming the lead in the IRA thriller Borderland opposite British-Nigerian actor John Boyega.

    Hotly anticipated by whom? The Cultural Elites have abandoned Reality!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/jodie-turner-smith-playing-anne-boleyn-should-allowed-tell-story/

    1. I was appalled to discover that the actor playing her brother George Boleyn was black. Why did the director not take the opportunity to sow diversity in Tudor families – by having a white bloke play the part?

      1. Morning Bill. It is being extensively advertised at the moment. I shall not be watching!

        2. I imagine they’re very proud of their woke fest, so are promotinng it – so the excuse can be – when no one watches it – that it was because of racist white mysoginists.

      2. Morning Bill. It is being extensively advertised at the moment. I shall not be watching!

      3. Warra about the Yellow, Light Brown, Blind, One legged, humpback actors/actresses/the inbetweenies

        Why are the BLM people getting all the cushty parts

        Let us have true equality

        1. I am reminded that the bame “Georgian” play series – (Bridgewater or suffin’) was hugely acclaimed when it was about to appear – but now, as the coloured dust has settled, most people (including bames) thought it was rubbish!

      5. Henry like his modern princely namesake was a ginger. It is only right therefore that they give him green hair.

    5. Why is it all right for blacks to play white rôles in plays and films; yet when any white individual wears clothing from another country or race they are accused of “cultural appropriation”?

      2. Morning Grizz. This is not about justice but appropriation. Like the victorious Vandals riding through the streets of Rome they think that all this will soon be theirs, but it will instead collapse into ruin!

      3. Morning Grizz. This is not about justice but appropriation. Like the victorious Vandals riding through the streets of Rome they think that all this will soon be theirs, but it will instead collapse into ruin!

      4. Yerss… just said the same to SWMBO.
        Answer came there none.
        Morning, Grizz!

    6. “‘We are in a time where we see that historically, actors of colour have been sidelined. They have not had the opportunity to be a part of storytelling.'”

      Could it be that blacks have been sidelined because there are no (few) black playwrights? They may have been shaking spears while Shakespeare was writing but could they even write at that time?

      1. I’m sure there were writing systems, and dramas too – the question is, where are they?
        Finding them and putting them on would be far more interesting than trying to shoehorn unlikely and unwanted diversity into our history.

          1. What, for writing systems? A city like the Great Zimbabwe, trading internationally, cannot possibly have existed without a writing system.
            From the deplorable Wiki “Two of those accounts mention an inscription above the entrance to Great Zimbabwe, written in characters not known to the Arab merchants who had seen it.”

            I will ask my Zimbabwean friend about traditions of drama and story-telling in her country.

            Incidentally, I note that the reference to Portuguese explorers being shocked by open evidence of homosexuality in the latter days of the Great Zim have been erased from Wikipedia!

    7. I pondered a little on this and one thought was if this was a radio play it would matter not one jot ( unless the actress had a broad Glaswegian or similar accent ), even so the TV version grates with me purely because of the previous xx years of appropriation/can’t act my colour POC activism, which its a shame because Jodie T-S may be an extraordinary actress.

      1. Accent never seemed to get in Sean Connery’s way for some reason vide playing a Spaniard (Highlander) or the King of England (Robin Hood)

      1. I believe they already had cosmetics. The goats and donkeys had lipstick and false eyelashes.

      1. There’s much that can and should be done to support the third world. The simplest is fair access to markets but the EU opposes that, so it won’t happen.

        In the short term, this racism has got to stop. Why should you be allowed to play a white queen? Would you be happy with Uma Thurman playing Winnie Mandela? You lot whinge about cultural appropriation – there it is! Stop proving your hypocrisy and double standards, accept that this is wrong.

        1. I think this Gentleman is a prime example of what is truly needed in the Third World:-

          Asfaw Yemiru, former street urchin who founded a school for disadvantaged children in Addis Ababa – obituary
          He started teaching street children under an oak tree aged 14 and persuaded Emperor Haile Selassie to grant him land to build a school

          By
          Telegraph Obituaries
          14 May 2021 • 4:35pm

          Asfaw Yemiru, who has died probably aged 79, came to Addis Ababa as a nine-year old street urchin but, through talent and initiative, acquired an education; aged 14 he started teaching other street children under the shade of a tree, and he went on to found the Asra Hawariat (“Footsteps of the Apostles”) School which, over the years, has offered free education to some 120,000 of the poorest children in the Ethiopian capital.

          There is no official record of his date of birth, but Asfaw Yemuri was born into a large family in a poor village in the remote Ethiopian region of Bulga, probably in 1941 or 1942. His father was a Coptic Orthodox priest. Much of his early childhood was spent minding his father’s sheep and goats, but when he was about eight years old the whole family made the trek to Addis Ababa, for Asfaw and his 11 brothers to be ordained deacons.

          Having glimpsed the opportunities city life might offer, Asfaw made up his mind to move to the capital and the following year, without telling his parents, he walked back to Addis, a journey of 75 miles. He spent his first 14 months sleeping in a churchyard, begging for food but often going hungry.

          One day, begging outside St.George’s Cathedral, a barrowload of oranges tipped over in the street. Quick off the mark, he scurried about, picking up the fruit for its thankful woman owner. As it happened she had been looking for extra domestic help and took him into her household as a general dogsbody.

          She allowed him to attend a local primary school, where he did brilliantly well, completing the first eight years of the syllabus in just two years. Eventually he won himself a free scholarship place at the General Wingate boarding school, run by the British Council.

          Soon after his arrival, remembering his own experience as a street child, he persuaded the headmaster to allow him to arrange for scraps left over at the end of school meals to be distributed among the children outside the school gates.

          Soon, however, as he recalled in an interview, “these ragged boys and girls began to ask for education as well as food” and, still in his first year, Asfaw began to put aside time on Sundays to hold classes under an oak tree in the local Paulos Petros churchyard: “I then altered this to teaching during the weekdays as soon as my own school day was finished, between 4.30 and 6.00.”

          Many of the children took shelter during the rainy season under the eaves of the church while others slept in the churchyard. Eventually, however, the church told Asfaw that the children would no longer be able to sleep under the church gallery, so he decided to look for somewhere to build a school.

          One day, early in Asfaw Yemiru’s final year, Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie paid a visit to the General Wingate School and, as Asfaw recalled: “I decided to chance the traditional practice of hurling myself in front of the Emperor’s car, with the hope that he would listen to me before I was hustled away by his bodyguards.

          “It wasn’t a good time to intercede because there had been recently an attempted coup and the bodyguard were taking no chances. However I lined my orphans up by the roadside and dashed out in front of the moving car. Fortunately it stopped and I was hauled up by the guards to speak to the Emperor.”

          Asfaw persuaded him to grant him 300 square metres of land up against the Wingate School wall. In the early days classrooms were built by the children themselves, using whatever was to hand – eucalyptus wood from the trees they had cleared, broken bricks from a local brick factory. The earliest classrooms had shelves which were used as bunks by the children until dormitories could be built.

          Initially the school filled up with the 280 children who had been Asfaw’s pupils in the churchyard, but by the beginning of the second year the classes were filled to overflowing and there were queues of people waiting for admission.

          The children were taught practical skills such as how to farm a plot of land, in addition to the Three Rs; corporal punishment was banned and the school was entirely free. It gained greatly in popularity when other primary schools in Addis began to demand that their children wear uniforms and pay for textbooks.

          Somehow, Asfaw managed to raise they money to expand, including from proceeds of plays put on by the children and a 335 mile sponsored walk, together with loans and donations from both foreign and Ethiopian well-wishers including Emperor Haile Selassie and the headmaster of the General Wingate School.

          In 1965 the school was given official recognition by the Ethiopian Ministry of Education and eventually Asfaw was able to build a second campus in Addis after Haile Selassie gave him land for the second site in 1972. This was an area in a forest which had to be cleared so that they could put up the school buildings.

          Asfaw Yemiru spent a short time in jail during the time of the Dergue, the Stalinist military junta that ruled Ethiopia from after the deposition of Haile Selassie in 1974, to 1987. But somehow both he and his school managed to survive the dictatorship and the long-running Ethiopian civil war, at the end of which the school compound was commandeered for use as field hospital for war-wounded and a transit camp for demobbed soldiers.

          Currently there are 885 children on the school roll, ranging in age from five to 14, the main target groups being the most vulnerable children ranging from orphans and street children, (housed since the 1990s with local foster families), to children from low income single parent households. Despite their disadvantages, the school regularly gets among the best exam results in Ethiopia.

          Asfaw Yemiru was never content to rest on his laurels. During the pandemic lockdown he was working on imaginative ways of carrying on the children’s education in households lacking home computers.

          He was seen as a national hero and today many taxis in Addis Ababa have his photograph prominently displayed. In 2001 he was awarded the World Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child, an award established by Sweden as a national millennium project which has been dubbed the Nobel prize for children.

          “People talk about basic needs, food and shelter,” Asfaw Yemiru said on being told of the award: “But for me, education is the key.”

          Asfaw Yemiru and his wife, Senayet, had two daughters and a son.

          Asfaw Yemiru, born probably in 1941 or 1942, died May 8 2021

          https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2021/05/14/asfaw-yemiru-former-street-urchin-founded-school-disadvantaged/

          1. Education is the first rung on the ladder out of poverty. Labour wants to destroy it.

    10. “‘We are in a time where we see that historically, actors of colour have been sidelined. They have not had the opportunity to be a part of storytelling.'” Couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that when most of the plays were written there were extremely few black actors of colour, could it? In Shakespeare’s day women were played by men on stage. It’s the way it was. In Rome, women couldn’t sing in opera on stage, hence you get countertenors (or castrati) playing women’s parts.

    11. “‘We are in a time where we see that historically, actors of colour have been sidelined. They have not had the opportunity to be a part of storytelling.'” Couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that when most of the plays were written there were extremely few black actors of colour, could it? In Shakespeare’s day women were played by men on stage. It’s the way it was. In Rome, women couldn’t sing in opera on stage, hence you get countertenors (or castrati) playing women’s parts.

  12. Good morning all from a bright and, after last night’s rain, dry Derbyshire with 5°C in the yard.

    Picked up from a scan of yesterday’s posts from Mr. Stanier with a couple of BTL Comments:-

    The Church of England’s purging of school hymns is reckless cultural destruction

    New guidance instructing faith schools to abandon overtly religious songs is yet another lunatic assault by the C of E on its own heritage

    SIMON HEFFER

    It’s a long-standing joke that the Church of England exists largely to remove any idea of religion from our national life. The more the Church has sought to make its services more “inclusive” and “relevant”, the more Christians have converted to other denominations where they think things are done properly (notably Roman Catholicism), and the more those curious about Christianity have avoided the C of E.

    Confirmation of this absurd situation arrived yesterday in new guidance for faith schools from the Church, preposterously named a statement of “entitlement and expectation”. No, this does not refer to David Cameron’s catastrophic attempts to build a post-Downing Street business career, but what hymns should be chosen for singing in assemblies. The diktat has it that strongly “confessional” hymns are to be avoided because they may make children and teachers alike feel uncomfortable. They are said not be sufficiently “invitational”, which seems to equate Anglican worship with a cheese and wine party.

    Those of us (and I speak as an atheist) who thought one of the purposes of religion was to make people feel guilty about having done things frowned upon by the Bible, and to expect God to be both unhappy about our behaviour but to forgive us our trespasses, will wonder what is wrong with a little discomfort. Apparently, the halfwits who run the Church of England (and are running it into the ground) feel it is dangerous because “there should be no assumption of Christian faith in those present.”

    It is all, of course, about diversity: and the increasingly toxic idea that causing someone the mildest offence (such as assuming that someone in a Christian school might actually subscribe to Christianity) is equivalent in gravity to gratuitously amputating one of their limbs without permission or anaesthetic.

    In a Church of England school, it is surely a reasonable assumption that the children are there because their parents subscribe to the basic tenets of the Church of England and the Christian faith; and that the teachers are grown up enough to know what to expect when they sign up for such a job. The children, like generations before them, can like it or lump it until they reach the age where the law says they are masters of their own destiny. The teachers, having reached that age, if they feel the institution insufficiently diverse, should go and work somewhere else.

    Millions of us who found the Christian story somewhat far-fetched nonetheless went through our educational careers being culturally enhanced by the magnificent tunes that many of our hymns featured. The doctrine, except for the precociously devout, were neither here nor there. One obvious casualty of this bonkers pronouncement will be one of the most ravishing hymn tunes ever written, Repton – recognisable immediately from its opening lines:

    Dear Lord and Father of mankind
    Forgive our foolish ways!

    One can almost hear the squeals of anguish from the Church’s imbeciles-in-chief. Can we really be expected to tolerate being told that some of our ways might be foolish? And even if they were, why would it be God’s place to forgive them?

    That magnificent tune comes from Sir Hubert Parry’s oratorio Judith. In these culturally benighted times, when the nearest most children come to being inculcated with an idea of beauty is being force-fed pop music and the inanities of CBeebies, when otherwise would they have a chance not just to hear, but to participate in, the music of a composer so great as Parry? One must also doubt that they are encouraged to sing another of his majestic tunes, Jerusalem – which although not a hymn appears in most hymn books – given the entirely erroneous associations made for it with English nationalism and, therefore, colonialism, fascism, imperialism, white supremacy and all the rest of the largely imaginary components of our growing litany of cultural self-hatred.

    It is suggested, instead, that other favourites such as Kumbaya and Lord of the Dance – neither of which one could pretend has the slightest association with a high aesthetic or cultural enrichment – are perfectly safe, because they do not entail undue grovelling to the Almighty for real or imagined wickedness. It does not seem to occur to the those advocating this censorship that few take any notice of the words anyway, and that in life we all have to put up with things – including aspects of the Church of England – that we find tedious or that we disagree with; but that in putting up with them we are provoked to think, mature, and eventually form our own conclusions.

    The Church of England has done its best to desecrate – and I choose that verb carefully – its cultural heritage. Worshippers have been driven away by having to endure the Princess Margaret Bible and the Rocky Horror Prayer Book. Organs have been replaced by guitars and tambourines. It is as well the listing of buildings protects most of our churches, because one only has to see the vandalism done inside some of them by what modernising fanatics euphemistically call “re-ordering” to realise the scope such people have to destroy this vital part of our heritage if let loose on it. Think how offensive to parts of the “diverse” community the average church must be – all those crosses, angels, saints in stained glass and the very association of the Gothic style with Christianity.

    Taking an important aspect of the Christian religion out of hymns is not only theologically questionable, but it is certainly culturally destructive. Most of our greatest composers, from Tallis and Bach onwards, wrote the hymn tunes that children sing in school assemblies, and most children love singing them. Many tunes sung in the Church of England were pillaged by Vaughan Williams from old secular folk melodies, and recycled for the English Hymnal when he edited it in 1906: they are a vital part of our heritage, brilliantly preserved this way. Will O Little town of Bethlehem, originally a Sussex folk tune, survive the purge? Some extremist on the Church’s provisional wing can no doubt find an anti-diverse reason to hate it and have it banned.

    For years it has seemed that the culture of the Church of England as embodied in its buildings, liturgy and music is of far too great national and international significance to be left to the church to superintend. This nonsense about hymn singing finally proves the point.

    Joseph Wyse
    16 May 2021 6:43AM
    I am an English Jew who, in the early 1960’s attended a Church of England school (founded in 1701) adjacent to a wonderful ancient yet still functioning Church (mentioned in the Domesday survey).The archaic majesty and poetry of the Anglican hymns that were sung, and the readings of the Collect, still bring tears to my eyes when I recall them, read them or hear them. I never felt any sense of compulsion from the school to embrace Christianity, and felt comforted by the decent and fundamental gloriousness of the English language, the beauty of the English Faith, and it’s interweaving with the long reach of English history. With this experience and upbringing in mind, I rather fancy that in the British isles, minorities of faith are safe to practice without censure, disapproval or compulsion, their own religions, non -conformisms, agnosticisms or atheisms under the canopy of the ancient Institutions of these islands and their ancient ways. I shudder to think how these same minorities would fare under any of the modern, baleful, ungenerous and fanatic guardians and ayatollahs of wokism and their ilk. Do not change anything, preserve the religion of England, the C of E, by law established !

    Flag12UnlikeReply

    Terry Dacktill
    16 May 2021 7:09AM
    @Joseph Wyse
    The CofE would not exist if Israel had not existed. The entire Christian faith is built on the Jewish foundation and Jesus did not change anything but rather upgraded the law of Moses to make it an internal rather than an external requirement. The Christian faith has been under attack since the day Jesus was crucified no less than my those who call themselves Christians but who do not follow Christ.

    And another thing, the “Jews” did not crucify Jesus. The human race did that as all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

    1. Christianity was the foundation of Western Civilisation! As it is progressively and deliberately destroyed we can see the whole superstucture, Art, Government, Law, collapsing into its ruins!

      1. Emmm, Agree to a point, but Christianity is underpinned by the Judaic traditions, themselves built on the even older foundations of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent Region.

    2. Christianity was the foundation of Western Civilisation! As it is progressively and deliberately destroyed we can see the whole superstucture, Art, Government, Law, collapsing into its ruins!

    3. In the Christian story of the Passion, the Jews represent all of humanity, and are therefore excellently qualified to unravel the mysteries of human nature. It’s what makes Jewish drama and humour so brilliant.

      It was Governor Pilate, anxious about the intentions of the mob, who arranged for the crucifixion of Jesus. The lads who actually hammered the nails in were only doing their job.

      1. The Pinners’ Guild, in the York cycle of mystery plays, perform the scene where Christ is nailed to the cross. This section of the passion is allocated to them because they made nails. It is mediaeval black humour; the actors dispassionately sort out the job as though they were hammering up a piece of barge board.

  13. SIR – Mark Harries (Letters, May 9), discussing the use of the definite article in place names, refers to “the Wicker” in Sheffield.
    I have only ever heard it referred to as “t’Wicker where t’watter went over t’weir”.

    Davia Broome
    Longstone, Derbyshire

    Yes, Davia. NoTTLers first heard that here, on this column, a week ago.

    1. mng Harry, Giro D’Italia’s on also [one of the few non US controlled sports]. DSTV here is awash with usual septic garbage WWE, NASCAR, Ancient Aliens and other variants of what they call sport and history. In other words where septics aren’t winning, it doesn’t exist

      1. I do get tired of listening to Merkin screech or moan on the TV. YouTube is my friend, when Nottl has gone all quiet.

      2. Trouble with the Giro is the camera work and the commentating. Oh, well, the Tour will be on soon.

  15. GooooooooooooooooooD Moaning & Happy Sunday all Campers Nottlers looks like I survived the night & the latest Ham-Arse 40+ rocket attack on Tel Aviv ( all were intercepted by the Iron Dome or fell in unpopulated areas ) anyway enough of my woes its a brilliantly sunny 24’C in Tel Aviv so enjoy some Sunday music: Sunday Morning Coming Down (American Outlaws: Live at Nassau Coliseum, 1990)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0ARfcJvJ68

    1. “Elf” mng, locals here soon off to their church to donate what they don’t possess and listen to some Tanzanian pastor waffling on. May have to hit the Alternative church at same time [Salama bar, restaurant] and catch up with “excommunicated” elders to get the real info what’s going on here. FYI, elders were regular church goers [to appease their better halves] but drew line in sand over Tanzanian pastor telling them not to drink but “save money and donate to God’s pocket”.

          8. well I am Bill, someone has to give diversity some credence and luckily, I’m way beyond locals seeing me as a novelty factor. Local elders know the rules if they order “White Cap beer” are told “why are you drinking Brown Chap, are you hungover already?”. Luckily no woke, aid type people venture in local bars, they stick to their enclave the other side of Thigiri Ridge

  16. The reason, that the imperial sytem will not be re-introduced, is that the UK education level is so poor,
    that school leavers have difficulty ‘doing sums’ to the base of Ten, ie the decimal system, let alone the myriad
    of parts of the

    Avoirdupois system:

    Pound Sterling

    Yards, feet and inches

    Pints, gallons

    which were second nature to all school leavers (and the country as a whole) until the 1970s Just
    look at the growth of the supportive education system (my B-i-L gives thanx) that teaches school leavers the
    basics of the Three R’s which mainstream schooling failed to do

    1. I am in that year that went through his entire schooling in Imperial and then went over to metric in the year of my GCEs. When I do work at home, I am happy with either, using whatever unit fits best.

      One mystery that you could help me out with is – what is the difference between a rod, a pole and a perch? They are all 5 1/2 yards (easy to do the sums if you know how), but why three distinct names?

      Edit – just spotted there are 4 rods, poles or perches in a chain. I wish they printed that on the back of my exercise book. A chain is 22 yards, so it makes the sums dead easy.

      1. Are you sure about the 5 1/3? I thought it was 5 1/2.

        I think the three names may be very old, depending where one came from.

        1. Corrected. I got confused with 16 feet for a while, but then remembered there are only 6 feet in a fathom.

        2. “Rod” comes from Old English; “Perch” from yer Latin. I always assumed that the word “Pole” was simply there to separate the other two!!

          1. Wasn’t Pole referring to the artisan using these things to build with?

      2. Rod, old English measure of distance equal to 16.5 feet (5.029 metres), with variations from 9 to 28 feet (2.743 to 8.534 metres) also being used. It was also called a perch or pole.
        See https://www.britannica.com/science/rod-measurement
        Edit: The word rod derives from Old English rodd and is akin to Old Norse rudda (“club”). Etymologically rod is also akin to the Dutch rood which referred to a land area of 40 square rods, equal to one-quarter acre, or 10,890 square feet (1,012 square metres). It also denoted just one square rod, or 272.25 square feet (25.29 square metres). The rood also was a British linear unit, containing 660 feet (201.2 metres).

          1. I have a copy of the 1967 CRC Haandbook of Physics & Chemistry, a Church Bible-sized tome full of… well, stuff. It has pages on weird outdated units and their conversions to more familiar units. Good for a laugh, once you’ve finished reading the telephone directory. It’s also got a lot of useful standard integrals and differentials which are easier to look up than actually doing the calculus.
            Morning, Sos.

          2. Base 60 (still used in time today) is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,10,12,15, 20 and 30. When one considers weeks, it brings in 7, and seasons bring in 13.

            Base 100 is divisible by 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50 and that’s it.

          3. Those old boys knew what they were about.
            The old £ was similar. Easily divisible many ways

          5. I loved making the distinction between the florin and the half-crown. They subdivided quite differently. The guinea was another way of bringing in seven, although though it was originally intended as an easy way to price something – one pound for the product, and one shilling for the merchant. The baker’s dozen was another quick way of slipping in another divisor.

            I often reflect on the 20p penny. This makes the smallest unit of currency, the farthing, worth 5p, which is about the smallest coin with any real worth today. Just imagine everything priced up that way, and money makes sense again.

          6. I thought the baker’s dozen came about because of the Draconian punishments for selling short weight for bread and the extra one would ensure the baker was safe.

          7. And the guinea came from auctions, where the extra shilling was the auctioneer’s premium.

          9. We have proper gallons, not those short-changed things they have in America. With their quart, you may as well have a litre.

        2. Spare the rod and spoil the child! And never let him perch 5 feet up on a pole.

      3. Just think of a quarter of the distance between the “clicks” on an old railway track …. That’s the easiest way!!

    2. And U.K. shoe sizes go up in Barleycorns (1/3 inch), so that each shoe size is 1/3” longer than the previous ones. Children’s are built on a last of a hand (4”/12 barleycorns) + size x barleycorns eg child’s size 6 is 4” + 6 x 1/3” = 6”. Adults’ shoes start at 25 barleycorns (8 1/3”) for size 0 and increase at a barleycorn per size. Note that these are last sizes, not foot lengths. Typically the last needed is 2 barleycorns longer than the foot length (that child’s size 6 and last of 6” would be suitable for a foot length of 5 1/3”).
      https://youtu.be/icyPFsIcAV0

      1. Hard sums, for shopkeepers etc were done using a Ready

        Reckonerhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_reckoner

  17. Translation

    A Mafia Godfather finds out that one of his accountants has screwed him for three million bucks.

    This accountant happens to be deaf, so the Godfather brings along an Attorney who knows sign language to translate. The Godfather asks the underling, “Where is the 3 million bucks you embezzled from me?”

    The interpreter Attorney, using sign language, asks the accountant where the 3 million dollars is hidden.

    The accountant signs back, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

    The Attorney tells the Godfather, “He says he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”

    That’s when the Godfather pulls out a 9mm pistol, puts it to the accountant’s temple, cocks it and says, “Ask him again!”

    The attorney signs to the underling, “He’ll kill you for sure if you don’t tell him!”

    The accountant signs back, “OK! You win! The money is in a brown briefcase, buried behind the shed in my cousin Enzo’s backyard in Queens!”

    The Godfather asks the interpreter, “Well… what’d he say?”

    To which the Attorney replies, “He says you don’t have the balls to pull the trigger.”

    1. I’ve a couple of hours before it starts here so will be getting my arse into gear & putting the shiplap on on the side of the carport!
      I’m soaking the ends in the last bit of creosote I’ve had lurking since before the stuff was banned.

      1. I think if you chat up a friendly local farmer you can still access supplies.

        1. S@H is palls with a couple of farming lads so I’ll have to ask him.

  20. David Miliband’s charity offers unpaid internships but he took home over £700,000. 16 may 2021.

    The former Labour MP David Miliband is facing criticism after it emerged that the charity he runs, for which he was paid more than £700,000, is offering unpaid internships at its headquarters in New York City.

    Miliband, the chief executive of the refugee charity International Rescue Committee (IRC), has previously been labelled “million-dollar Miliband” after his pay packet rose to $911,796 in 2019, then worth more than £700,000.

    You want to become rich? Start a Charity saving stray cats in Downtown Baghdad! The Inland Revenue will be banging on your door within months!

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/15/david-miliband-charity-unpaid-internships-international-rescue-committee

    2. mng Araminta. Please note IRC = Idiots Running in Circles. IRC do absolutely nothing except put woke morons on gap years, the chance to build up their CV to sit in an airconditioned office in a foreign country, play Suduko and complain when their holiday flights are delayed.

        2. It must be horrid for either of them to be married to the other one.

    3. Quite a lot lower.

      It is reported that Bill Gates gave a generous gift to The Telegraph.

      Since then not a single word has been printed connecting Bill Gates with Epstein.

      Hmmm! What a coincidence.

      1. The Daily Telegraph has little more integrity than the rest of the gutter press.

    4. Complete with unedited typos. Are they trying to emulate the Graudian? They’re succeeding.

    5. Let hope GB News that starts before the end of this month can do what is needed.!

    1. Morning Korky, if the people keep voting for him and his party, he will keep screwing them over. Time we had a real alternative worthy of our support, the problem is I don’t see one.

  23. A child has died and 4 people have been injured in the Lancashire explosion. Sky News

  26. 332818+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,
    Sunday 16 May: Face-to-face GP appointments are vital – but they must be used wisely

    Personally my contact with the medical profession is working out OK what has been done has been as normal
    but noticeably with less patients showing.

    You do NOT have to be an expert to take into account the fact that in a decent running interlocking society the plumber, lecky, construction worker could also be viewed as “life savers” in many ways.

    These governance parties, and in the main a supporting cast of fools are more for continuing with a doom laden
    campaign into the future purely to satisfy a political “officially unknown” agenda.

    The tory ( ino) whatever, is 15 points ahead, ahead of what ? another segment of the mass uncontrolled immigration, ongoing / proven paedophile umbrella coalition, with a top up governance orchestrated campaign openly running via DOVER.

    My view for what it is worth is that a covert force is gaining strength daily behind the voting pattern “vote to keep in / out ” the Nation crippler via the polling booth.
    That force is represented / recognised in parliament even to the extent their chosen nosh is halal and on the parliamentary canteen menu.

    Your vote surely counts, check the state of the Country
    today.

    2. The way to get GPs working again is to pay them for the number of patients they see rather than the number of patients on their lists.

      That’s why dentists, opticians, podiatrists etc are all working and seeing patients.

    1. Angela Rayner was the subject of a favourable mini-biography on this early morning BBC Radio 4 programme. Supporters were suggesting she will be the next Leader of the Labour Party.

  28. Red Wall voters think Labour cares more about the Palestinians than them. And they’re right. 16 may 2021.

    Starmer can hold as many policy reviews as he likes. He can conduct Shadow Cabinet reshuffles, big and small.

    He can make Angela Rayner First Secretary of State, Second Secretary of State, or anoint her Mother of Dragons, the Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, the Unburnt and the Breaker of Chains.

    None of it will matter. If he is not prepared to show his party is going to be strong on immigration, crime, welfare, defence, patriotism or any of those other issues they have ceded without so much as a whimper to Boris and the Conservative Party, they needn’t even bother standing a candidate in Hartlepool at the next Election.

    Why did Keir Starmer take a hammering at the polls? Because Red Wall voters think his party cares more about the Palestinians than it does about them.
    And why do they think that? Because it does.

    One is tempted here, to agree with Hodges, and shout, “Of course it does” but the truth is that the Tories are highly sympathetic to this rubbish as well!

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9583225/DAN-HODGES-Labour-cares-Palestinians-Red-Wall-voters.html

    1. Scotland, Wales and Ireland have their parliaments and their assemblies and their nationalist parties have grown on the back of that, England doesn’t have a parliament and no nationalist party as such, UKIP was sort of one, a nationalist party would be considered racist in England.
      But we do have millions of English people that would vote for a nationalist party if we had or were allowed a credible one, the nationalist voters have left Labour and moved to the Conservatives for now, even though they are no better than Labour really, they just appear less extreme

      1. 332818+ up ticks,
        Morning B3,
        We had a very credible one
        building daily under the Gerard Batten Leadership, in the black financially and gaining members daily.
        Treachery via the parties
        nEc / farage took it down, all on record.

        Much to the relief also of the lab/lib/con hard core members.

        Advice now, support the Anne Marie Waters cause en masse.
        A continuation of the lab/lib/con coalition vote will KILL this nation stone dead.

      2. Sorry, BoB, but the assemblies and the Wee Pretendy Parliament, all money-pits and hot-beds of incompetence, need dissolving with all the authorities brought back to those ultimately responsible and accountable in Westminster.

        Only then can we be called a United Kingdom. Blair’s Devolution was and is just another Bliar scam.

      3. I can certainly understand how the unprepossessing Herr Schickelgruber took over.
        You can only kick a population so many times before it kicks back.

        1. I believe there are photos of a demonstration shortly before the nasties took over, where people were carrying placards saying “Hitler – our last hope.”
          That turned out well, didn’t it.

    2. The reason that Labour is doing so badly is not that they are no better than the Conservatives but that are are even worse than the Conservatives who are far worse than they used to be under Margaret Thatcher.
      I still can hardly bring myself to believe that just like the odious Heath, the lily-livered Boris Johnson has betrayed the British fishermen again and compromised the United Kingdom’s sovereignty with the border down the Irish Sea that he promised he would never countenance. The Conservative Party is no more a Conservative Party than the Labour Party is a Labour Party.

      A plague on both you houses!

      1. Yep, Labour are hard Left metro elite and gimmigrant and the Tories are soft Left, pro metro elite and gimmigrant.

      1. 332818+ up ticks,
        B3,
        Another point of collusion all worked out by johnson and his
        bikes for the herd.

    3. …and not a plod in sight – unlike other peaceful (quiet) demonstrations.

      1. 332818+ up ticks,
        Morning NtN,
        View the future through the eyes of a lab/lib/con
        follower / voter.

    4. Many Ranger fans in the George Square, Glasgow celebrations yesterday were swathed in the Union Flag. The police stirred them up and arrested some.

      1. 332818+ up ticks,
        Morning Cs,
        I won a seat once years ago on a double decker going to the New Year match, ( an English Celtic sup.) downstairs on the long seat of the bus one lad topped up & asleep was unzipped and had his member on display as we slowly made our way through town to the pavement public, good days.

        You describe the coming into being the new reset police.
        People power can accept or not via the polling booth , down to them they have the power to bring about change.

      2. One has to question their loyalty to the Union, if push came to shove. They do it to upset Celtic fans. The actions of the police were predictable. These are the same police under the command of the same officer, Chief Superintendent Mark Sutherland that carried out the release of 2 illegal immigrants from Home Office custody because they were afraid of a crowd of vegetarian socialist do-gooders acting quite illegally. The same police that stood idly by when Glasgow was disrupted by Extinction Rebellion terrorists.
        The trouble with Rangers fans began at the end of the gathering apparently, when the police moved on the remnant of the crowd, the majority having already dispersed. So here we have a police force that won’t take action against law breakers on one hand, but will provoke a punch up with unruly drunks. Have they not got this the wrong way round?

        https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-57133503

    5. All males as far as I can tell. Could we not do a reversible castration of all male babies at birth, to be reversed only when ready to start a family or if there is a threat to the country and male soldiers need a surge of testosterone?
      Just think how peaceful it would be, and how empty the prisons would be.

      1. 332818+ up ticks,
        Morning SiadC,
        Very futuristic for that you would need dickfitterwelders would be their medical name, I have, in construction met a few of that calibre practising on pipe.

        Will file your idea for future ref. it certainly has potential.

          1. 332818+ up ticks,
            Evening SiadC,
            See the human embryo in a sort of pyrex container with a tubular feeding cartridge being slid in, ( probably full of political bullsh!te) tother day, no human interplay,obviously
            the new reset way.

            So anything goes.

            Vote lab/lib/con for more of the same.

          3. Not to mention foreign occupied! Apologies if this appears twice; I typed it and then it disappeared, but that is not to say it won’t reappear eventually.

  33. Will Republicans back a commission to investigate the Capitol breach?. 16 May 2021.

    Lawmakers faced with choice between embarrassing Trump and ignoring insurrection.

    House Democrats are poised to adopt legislation to create a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack, in a move that will force Republicans to either embrace an inquiry that could embarrass Donald Trump – or turn a blind eye to a deadly insurrection.

    Crucially, it would focus narrowly on facts and causes relating to the attack on the Capitol on 6 January by a pro-Trump mob and the interference with the peaceful transition of power. Five people died amid scenes of chaos and violence that shocked the US and the world.

    Insurrection! Breach. Attack! Lol! One person was shot (by a policeman) and the rest died of natural causes. Oddly for the United States, out of all the people trying to get into the building, not one was armed! This is canted toward the Democrats of course but CNN is even worse. It always sounds like a description of the Alamo! That is if you assume Davy Crockett legged it at the first opportunity!

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/16/us-capitol-breach-commission-republicans-democrats

    1. Perhaps the investigation, if it happens, can clear up the anomaly about a “witness” who had to take refuge in a bathroom but who, it seems, might not have even been in the building?

    2. I always thought it significant that John Wayne was honoured in the States with the the Congressional Gold Medal. Then, a year after his death, in 1980 President Jimmy Carter posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. These awards were not for his own life but for the lives of the characters he played in his films.
      I wonder if President Biden and Migraine Merkin are in line for such honours in the future for their fearless dislike of Donald Trump?

      1. Caroline makes plum jam every year. She has a kitchen utensil to remove the stones from the plums so she does not have the Betjemanesque problem with her preserves.

    3. If you buy one, Belle, and are not satisfied, can you press button B for your money back?

    4. If you buy one, Belle, and are not satisfied, can you press button B for your money back?

  35. Off topic, but I thought people might be interested if they haven’t seen this before.

    I have been getting increasingly annoyed at the bandwagon going on about climate change, and the alarmism and misinformation being spread by the mainstream media and politicians about it. So I thought people might like to see some raw data (which is freely available on the NOAA website, or at least was when I downloaded it – it may have been “corrected out” by the AGW brigade by now). This is a record of the annual ice temperature in Greenland going back 4,000 years, taken from an ice core called GISP2 and published in 2011*. The data have the best time-resolution of just about any ice core taken to date, so the record shows annual average temperature changes. These are real changes – the temperature fluctuations are not noise in the data. What is apparent from this record is that average annual temperatures change very rapidly in a periodic fashion, with several different periodicities evident in the data. What that shows is that there are periodic natural variations influencing the planet’s temperature, and these are nothing to do with carbon dioxide emissions. These factors are not represented in the climate models that are being used to predict the destruction of the global climate by mankind. Because these fluctuations don’t fit into the models and they indicate that something else is seriously affecting temperatures other than greenhouse gas emissions, the climate modellers generally smooth them out by taking a 30-year temperature average. What the eye doesn’t see the heart won’t grieve over, eh?

    In science, the number one rule is to be skeptical, and to challenge everything. When everyone is telling you the science is settled, that is the time to be even more challenging. So I looked for other evidence, and came across a paper published twenty years ago that used modelling of the variability of the Sun’s output to try and explain past climate change that is seen in the various temperature records**. Their model, when parameters were adjusted suitably (which is what all modellers have to do to correct their assumptions) was able to match past climate changes very accurately indeed – far more accurately than current climate models based on the carbon cycle have been able to do. When I overlaid the output of their solar variability model onto the graph of ice temperatures from GISP2 that I had produced from the raw data, I found that there was a pretty good match – one that did not require any “tweaking” to make the data fit a theory. That, to me, is a pretty good indication that there is credibility in their model and their theory about global temperature changes.
    Solar output varies cyclically, with various times for different kinds of variation – the 11-year sunspot cycle being the most well-known. Solar output as measured at the Earth can vary cyclically over periods extending up to millennia, and when the GISP2 data are smoothed to even out the more rapid (but real) fluctuations, such periodic variation can indeed be seen. It all seems to fit pretty well.

    The kicker to this story comes when you put a linear fit line through the GISP2 data points. This shows that the ice temperature in Greenland has FALLEN by 1.5°C over the past 4000 years, so a rebound might well be on the cards – and that is indeed what the solar output model predicts and there are signs of this happening in the GISP2 record. Isn’t it nice when things come together without data having to be “corrected”?

    Note also that the GISP2 data show extremely rapid and consistently repeated year-on-year average temperature changes going back over thousands of years – none of these oscillations were caused by mankind. Just one of these often-repeated temperature swings resulted in a 4°C change in a century – you can just imagine the apocalyptic headlines that such a significant change would trigger if it were being reported by the media today, and it would all be blamed on fossil fuels, of course.

    But you don’t get to hear about this in the newspapers or on the TV, do you? It doesn’t fit the story they are pumping out, does it?

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1885b62b16f290ef509ab0a424597484b9b52ac89e3f24e3a4a46e55cffe2fd4.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ffca3d2a91f87a993f3e457d8fe50b69c9124576e38aa5a5eb4092f568c15ce4.png

    * Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L21501, doi:10.1029/2011GL049444. “High variability of Greenland surface temperature over the past 4000 years estimated from trapped air in an ice core.”
    ** Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 7, 2000, vol. 97 no. 23, 12433–12438 “Geophysical, archaeological, and historical evidence support a solar-output model for climate change”

    1. Good Moaning, TCS.
      I’m not a scientist, but how would the ‘climate change’ adherents account for Britain being warmer and wetter in the Roman period, warmer than average during the early mediaeval years and the mini-Ice Age during the time of the Tudors and Stuarts?
      Or even account for the difference between last year’s warm and sunny spring with this years’ cold and wet one?
      Volcanic eruptions are one explanation, but they have nothing to do with human activity.

      1. Indeed Anne, the story is very cleverly twisted and edited to eliminate awkward facts that don’t fit the story. There is money behind it all – the money to be made behind the scenes by those who legislate, plus the value of the distraction of the population’s attention from other subjects that the politicians would like to hide. It’s all a monumental scam.

        Yes, the climate is changing – it always has and always will. Yes, we might be having an impact on it – I would doubt that the activities of around 8 billion people wouldn’t have some effect. But what is being done in the name of trying to change climate change (!) is actually having exactly the opposite effect to that intended – and more on that in a moment.

        1. Yes, the climate is changing – it always has and always will.
          Just below next-door’s garden are scrape marks in the granite wall where the glaciers oozed by a few years ago. I wonder how we see these – the glaciers meltet quite a while back, by, one assumes, there being too many steelsmelters and Range Rovers in the world.

          1. The Romans grew grapes north of Eboricum (York). Must have been all those quadrilega emitting CO2 and methane.

      2. They have no interest in accounting for these things.
        All they are interested in is in finding enough gullible idiots to go along with their nonsense for their own dubious political ends.
        That they have succeeded in getting so much of the MSM and so many prime ministers, presidents, celebrities and member of old royal families to go along with their lies shows how remarkably successful they have been.

        1. I don’t think it’s even finding people to agree to it. The state just wants to use it as a system to hike taxes and further control our lives.

      3. Simple. They ignore it.

        When it became annoying that the UK didn’t turn into a desert they changed the name to ‘climate change’ from ‘global warming’. Climate change is a much broader catch all to which anything can be attributed.

    3. The Prince of Wales and his elder son have jumped on the ‘global warming’ bandwagon.
      Of course we have known for some time that both Charles and Harry are dung dense (i.e as thick as p*gsh*t) but it is very worrying that even William is happy to go along with this great con trick.

    4. Oh no! We’d better all move uphill and fill sandbags just in case. The UK government should urgently offer to rehouse the South Sea islanders.
      I’ll think of more later.

  38. Good morning all
    I thought I’d let you all know about a scam that looks credible.
    Yesterday I received 2 text messages, from 2 different phone numbers, purporting to be from the Post Office as follows:

    Post Office: Your parcel has been redirected to your local Post Office branch due to an unpaid shipping fee.
    To reschedule a delivery please visit (and then gives a link)

    I clicked the link and it looked genuine but then I thought how would they know my phone number?
    They also wanted name and date of birth – why?
    It then dawned on me that it was a scam. They asked for a sum of £1.99 to reschedule but that would have meant giving a card number and security code.
    That would give the scammers all the details they need to access your bank/credit card account.
    I’m sending this to you as I would hate any of you to get caught out by this dreadful scam.
    Perhaps, those of you who use Facebook and Twitter could spread the word.

    2. I’m always getting those. Fortunately, my laptop automatically junks them.

      1. Why are these scammers not hunted down and killed? What they do is illegal. We are all greatly inconvenienced by the “security” measures that the banks imposed to avoid them. I cannot remember hearing of any scammer being convicted. Yet there are thousands of them. Would someone from 77 Brigade reading this, please do something to them (and not to me, obviously).

    4. Relatively common over here. They even have the pukka logo, typeface, and links that go to the right place – just not the link that has “pay here” or whatever. Could be difficult to trap these, except they never quote who the parcel is from, or the waybill number – or, why you should be paying.

    5. I had one of those on my “smart” phone which I only use for Facebook and Whatsapp. I’m not expecting anything from Royal Mail anyway.

      1. That’s the difference. The text was from post office and they don’t deliver mail Royal Mail do.

  39. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle face storm over deal with Procter & Gamble which sells ‘racist’ skin whitening cream
    The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are facing questions over their partnership with the US multi-national Procter & Gamble (P&G).
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9582709/Prince-Harry-Meghan-Markle-facing-storm-deal-firm-Procter-Gamble.html

    My good friend Jeremy wrote a song about this sort of thing back in the 60’s:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKXE5rbw0SM&list=PLtnyb8KoYfYS7Mr-979NjW3uqFqtB2_k5&index=37

    1. That is a serious issue that deserves the following serious comment
      Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

  40. Off-topic tome No. 2. This time it is on carbon emissions reductions.

    We are all being told over and over that we have to go green and reduce carbon dioxide emissions to save the planet. By now this story has been told so often in the media that nobody questions it any more. It is all based on the PREMISE (which has never been proven) that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are changing the climate. The basic science about the effect that “greenhouse gases” have on the retention of solar energy is valid, but the extension of that to say that our use of fossil fuels is the primary factor that is changing the global climate is unfounded. But, I want to put aside that part of the debate about climate change (dealt with in an earlier post) and, allowing the belief that carbon emissions are changing the climate to stand, look at the effect of what has been done to try and address it.

    47 of the world’s most advanced nations signed up to an agreement in Kyoto in 1997 to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Part of the measures taken to try and bring about the change was the imposition of taxes on carbon emissions. According to the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change* (yes there is actually a government department dealing with climate change) by 2030 we will all be paying between 41% and 71% more for our electricity than we otherwise would in the absence of climate change policies. These additional costs are being felt in all advanced countries that have adopted carbon emissions reduction policies in response to the various international accords on the same. This increased cost for energy affects all manufacturing industry, and not surprisingly industry has sought lower cost sites for production. This has resulted in much of the manufacturing that used to be conducted in the advanced nations being exported to developing nations where there are no carbon emissions reduction requirements, hence much lower production costs.

    This is what that has done to national carbon emissions from the production of energy:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cb63ac823cf144c349653c73ee3ec0c138794b5a8c8c4d9eae70efae05cae44e.png

    The reduction in carbon emissions from the developed nations has come about not exclusively from emissions reduction measures such as improving efficiency, turning off street lights at night, etc., it has come from the closure of manufacturing facilities which have moved abroad. The increase in China’s emissions has not come from their own growing national consumption as they recover from decades of Communism-imposed retardation, it is coming from them taking over manufacturing that used to be carried out in the developed nations. China’s annual exports grew from US$253bn in 2000 to US$2,006bn in 2011 – and they continue to rise as manufacturing declines in the West.

    The net result of all this carbon emissions reduction nonsense is therefore this –

    In the decade from 2000, the 47 nations that had signed up to the Kyoto agreement saved an annual total of 793 million metric tons of carbon emissions. Meanwhile, the 167 other nations who were not constrained by carbon emissions reduction commitments increased their annual output by 9,207 million metric tons

    In just one month the rest of the world cancels out all the savings made in a whole year by all the nations who are reducing their emissions!

    So, it is not the developed nations that are responsible for “destroying the planet” (which you would probably think if you listened to the likes of Greta Thunberg) – it is those who have brought about this global shift in manufacturing output from the West to the unconstrained nations who pollute everything with impunity.

    And what does all this mean to us in our little island nation? What effect are our emissions reduction efforts (that are costing us 41-71% more for our energy) having on global atmospheric carbon dioxide? Well, In only 4 days just the INCREASE in China’s emissions (not their total emissions) completely cancels out anything the UK saves in a whole year! the UK could stop emitting carbon dioxide completely tomorrow and it wouldn’t even put a blip on the chart of global atmospheric carbon dioxide.

    And as my previous post showed, carbon dioxide might not be having the effect we are being told it has anyway. So all this could be for nought. We are destroying our own manufacturing industry, bankrupting ourselves, and making ourselves increasingly dependent on a totalitarian communist regime that is hell-bent on world domination, FOR NOTHING!

    * “Estimated impacts of energy and climate change policies on energy prices and bills” DECC March 2013

    1. It’s not just the movement of industry overseas. It’s the loss of jobs. When it’s cheaper to send a book overseas to be printed in China and to ship it home, where the biggest cost is import duty, VAT and taxes levied in the UK outweighing the cost of printing the product itself! We are losing jobs to those countries. The jobs, the skills, but critically the spending from those jobs.

      As with all taxes, it forces another dump of wealth down the plughole. The state keeps filling the sink with debt. Debt is simply deferred tax which requires ever more debt to keep afloat.

      We’re heading at an ever accelerating rate for an epic level crash that we simply will not be able to avoid.

      Brown had the opportunity when he crashed the banking sector with his tax grabs. Boris could have re-arranged the economy as a response to covid. Neither did so. Why? Because statists think they’re the centre of the blasted economy.

      As regards climate change – it has nothing whatsoever to do with the environment. It is simply another system the state is using to take money from the earner and to move it to the state. It is simply a mechanism of social control.

      1. Boris could have re-arranged the economy as a response to covid.
        You mean, build back better?

    2. A particular irritation for me is CO2 is not Carbon – and there lies the manipulation of our language to further “blacken” the name of a useful plant nurturing trace atmospheric gas , the other semantic con trick is equating the EU with Europe
      grrrrr

      1. Yes, even I succumb to the shorthand terminology on occasions. I think it is known what is meant, although one has to be careful if comparing numbers, because some data sets quote carbon, some carbon dioxide, and some deal with other metrics (like the American study that looked at carbon monoxide production – a sign of the inefficiency of combustion in conventional power plants used as “spinning reserve” – see my other post). I admit, I didn’t give that the full treatment it perhaps deserved in my post, because it was already getting long-winded.

      2. A Letters BTL comment about global warming that caught my eye…yet another budding Nottler I think:
        John Kirby
        26 Oct 2020 4:28AM
        @Kevin Bell ,,,,Hi Kevin, I agree 100%
        As I write the BBC have a group discussing Global Warming.
        All of them believe that carbon dioxide causes it. No scientific debate then, no Devil’s Advocate. They want “De-Carbonisation” of the economy by 2050.
        Successive governments have taken us along this path with the Climate Change Act of 2008.
        No attempt has been made to follow true scientific debate. Any opposition has been treated as some sort of heresy.
        Our politicians have followed the dogma. This is a much greater threat to the economic and intellectual future of Britain than the Covid virus.
        Yet the government continues with this dangerous and wrong-headed policy.
        I repeat some facts:-
        1) CO2 is a trace gas.
        2) At 0.04% it is 1 part in 2,500 of the atmosphere.
        3) But 24/25ths of atmospheric CO2 comes from nature,
        4) From rotting vegetation, volcanoes, wildfires and the oceans.
        5) So manmade CO2 is 1 part in 2,500 X 25 of the atmosphere
        6) That is 1 part in 62,500 of the atmosphere.
        In terms of Statistical Thermodynamics and in terms of Common Sense, that is insignificant
        I think the slight increase in CO2 is CAUSED by global warming, warming up the oceans and driving out dissolved CO2.

        1. Hi NtN
          I go along with that comment. The present theory about CO2-driven climate change resulted from the original ice core data taken from Vostok in the Antarctic, from which it was noted that CO2 concentration tracked with the temperature record. That scientific evidence supported a much earlier hypothesis for which there was no evidence at all. It was therefore considered that the CO2 rise was causing the temperature change through the greenhouse effect and that’s when the ball really started rolling.

          Unfortunately the data had been taken with low temporal resolution, and later more detailed analysis showed that the rise in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rise, by up to a couple of centuries. But of course, by then the AGW bandwagon convoy was well en route, and couldn’t be stopped by inconvenient truths like that (to coin a familiar phrase).

        2. Hi NtN
          I go along with that comment. The present theory about CO2-driven climate change resulted from the original ice core data taken from Vostok in the Antarctic, from which it was noted that CO2 concentration tracked with the temperature record. That scientific evidence supported a much earlier hypothesis for which there was no evidence at all. It was therefore considered that the CO2 rise was causing the temperature change through the greenhouse effect and that’s when the ball really started rolling.

          Unfortunately the data had been taken with low temporal resolution, and later more detailed analysis showed that the rise in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rise, by up to a couple of centuries. But of course, by then the AGW bandwagon convoy was well en route, and couldn’t be stopped by inconvenient truths like that (to coin a familiar phrase).

        3. It has been shown in examination of ice cores that CO2 followed a rise in temperatures, NOT preceded it.

    5. There are things that we can, and should do, to make ourselves less wasteful. We can also influence others by taking care with our imports. Cherries are imported from Chile so that can eat them out of season. Microplastic bobbles are put into cosmetics, applied in the morning and washed off at night and find their way into fish in the ocean. Palm oil is used in biscuits and confectionery on a huge scale, even on products that claim to be made according to a “classic” recipe, like Roberson’s mincemeat. When needing bits an pieces like a potato peeler I cannot find one that was not made in China. As Wibbling says lower down we are simply piling up debt. My peeler costs maybe £3.00. If I could find one made in the UK that cost £6 my purchase would stop £3 being added to UK debt which I’d be charged in tax further along thr line, or my children would?

    1. What amazes me is the fact that one can see the alternative scenarios being played out abroad, where restrictions have not been adhered to so rigidly, yet the effect of this is being ignored by the anti-lockdown brigade as if it hasn’t happened. The reality is that no matter how careful the “responsible majority” of British people might be if government restrictions were relaxed, the irresponsible, brainless and selfish minority would rampage everywhere and we would all become infected in no time. One only has to look at the mayhem the released hordes caused on Dorset’s coast after the relaxation last summer to see how responsible and considerate of others these people actually are. I for one do not want them to be allowed to wreak havoc here again before I have had my second jab.

      1. 332818+ up ticks,
        Afternoon TCS,
        Your second, third, forth & future follow ups is surely your personal choice as a NO jab choice is mine.

        The actions of the toxic trio lab/lib/con as plague spreaders
        over the last three decades especially ie, mass uncontrolled immigration,( ongoing ) mass paedophilia resulting in mass mental scarring of children, the reintroduction of TB as a people killer erc,etc, is ALL well recorded as factual activities
        deployed via the lab/lib/con coalition political hierarchy.

        Your choice also to have these odious political types insisting & experimenting via your arm but then it does save some dumb animal being used so some good comes of it.

        In short , I disagree with the jut of your jib on the jab.

        1. I fully agree with your sentiment in the body of your message, which is another issue, but not in the final point about the vaccination. Vaccination is about educating the body’s own immune system to be able to deal with the real thing if it should encounter it. It doesn’t infect you, and it doesn’t cause any of the permanent harmful effects that the real virus can have on the body. As with anything one puts into the body (even food) there are some people who might have a negative reaction. So it is about balancing risk, and that is the point of having controlled tests carried out before releasing vaccines – so the potential risks of the treatment can be weighed against the risk of not having it.
          Having known someone who didn’t get the jab (because it wasn’t yet available) and who died as a result of contracting Covid from a stranger, probably on the bus, I would rather take the risk of having a jab of an inert substance that my body might not like but which might afford me some protection, than risk getting a dose of the real thing that my body probably would react badly to.

          1. 332818+ up ticks,
            TCS,
            Methinks you rely on the rhetoric of the politico’s not one of which has been found to even be able to lie straight in bed.

            A number of people would know somebody who has died
            “with covid” that is not to say “OF covid”.

            These politico number manipulators will be claiming next to have eradicated flu and various other maladys.

            It really is very selective this virus tell me why are the supermarkets still open, how many staff refused the jab ? how many medical staff, nurses, etc refused the jab ?

            Reality different type of flu with very strong odious political manipulative connotations.

            You will wait a great deal longer, longer than the answer to Dunblane for the real truth.

      2. It’s a tad more complex than that, TCS.
        Sweden: total population 10 230 000, COVID deaths end April 2021 =13 967, so 0,14%
        UK: total population (apparently) 66 796 800, COVID deaths beginning May 151 533, so 0,23%
        Sweden – pretty well free-for-all, UK – megalockdowns.
        Hmm…

        1. It is perfectly clear that if you don’t have people bringing the infection into the country from abroad, you won’t get high infection rates regardless of the level of precautions you might impose. So population size and infection rates are not linked directly – it’s more to do with the transmission pathway, which is why the government was so keen to get track and trace up and running. What amazed me at the time, and still does, is that there are not more stringent restrictions being applied at the borders of this country. New Zealand banned travel very early on and has managed to keep things well under control – any case that does occur is instantly locked down and all contacts are traced and put into isolation. It’s the only thing that works to stop the spread. Unfortunately, in the UK there were too many cases, too little willingness of the population to be tracked and traced, and too many people spreading the word that it was all some kind of government-control conspiracy.

          1. Indeed.
            Why did it take so long to stop folk coming in from India/Pakistan? They are STILL arriving in Norway, yet you can’t come in from the UK without weeks in quarantine hotel (somthing a bit better borrowed from Oz).

          2. I still don’t understand this part of the government’s policy. There was one very credible professor in some of the TV briefings and I wish his level of circumspection was present within the Cabinet Office.

    1. Did the odious Faisal Islam have a response?
      Will the BBC ever apologise for the gross institutional anti-Christian bias it has?
      The Bonker was a child when the events in Ireland for which he apologised last week took place just and The Liar was not even born until over 100 years after the Irish Potato Famine took place.
      I have just been advised by my wife to apologise personally to the MP for Derby South for the murder of Thomas a Becket in 1170.

      1. You know it makes sense, Rastus – you must be carrying a heavy burden of guilt for the murder of the turbulent priest by your ancestor.

    2. I hope he’s ashamed of the crap he spouted, but i’m not holding my breath ….on the bright side perhaps he’s now feeling a bit vulnerable after his stupid BBC sponsored nonsense.

    1. Hmmm… I do think for myself, and I think that anyone doubting the nastiness of Covid should go and talk to someone who has had it (if they are still alive). The fact that it can be caught from a seemingly healthy person who displays no symptoms makes it all the more hazardous to anyone who does not have natural defences against it. I knew someone who died from this disease and they were doing nothing unusual when they contracted it from someone else. Try telling her that everyone should be free to behave however they themselves think is appropriate, regardless of their knowledge of the disease and its consequences or the impact they might have on the lives of others (oh sorry, you can’t, because she is dead).

      1. How old was your friend and did she have any other underlying problems that could equally have been exacerbated by ‘flu or pneumonia?
        I know an old woman, in her late 80’s, who has multiple underlying illnesses, including cancer. She has had Covid twice now and survived.

        Nobody is suggesting that it isn’t unpleasant, but please don’t tell us that it is the threat to mankind that it is being painted and certainly don’t try to tell me that sacrificing so many children’s childhoods and schooling, sacrificing jobs and creating mental health issues resulting in suicides and losing early diagnoses of cancers, heart disease and other potentially curable diseases that haven’t been caught because of the real covidiocy is worth the price.

        2. She was in her late 60s, fit and healthy with no underlying problems. It’s a genetic lottery whether you have resistance to it or not. And surviving Covid is not like having a bout of ‘flu – it has major impacts on many parts of the body that affect people long after they have apparently recovered.
          I was a skeptic like you about all the hoo-hah, thinking it would be just like the ‘flu, until I did more research and actually encountered the impacts it has first hand.
          I agree with you that the shutting down of much normal healthcare, resulting in cancer patients not getting the treatments they needed in a timely fashion for example, is unfortunate and might have been partly avoidable. But this was an unknown disease with only little known about its severity and transmissability. Experience from the SARS outbreak and a later one in the Middle East alerted the medical profession to the potential seriousness of it, so a decision was made to err on the side of caution, based on what was then known. One can expect no more from the medical profession than to give their best advice based on what is known, you can’t base policy on optimistic speculation.

          1. What the authorities did was a total over-reaction to the problem.

            They took wrong turns at every point, from chucking those who had the disease into care homes, to keeping the borders fully open to places known to have outbreaks, from failing to use treatments that had been shown to work, to effectively closing the NHS to all but Covid.
            Even a cursory glance at the death figures and condition of those dying would have given excellent indications as to who the most vulnerable were.

            The Government only followed the advice of those who were most pessimistic and who, quite frankly, had appalling track records over other epidemic diseases and how to approach them.

            Even the long-term impacts have not been shown to be entirely down to Covid and in terms of the population of those getting it have been small, let alone in terms of the whole population.

            And whilst one cannot necessarily base policy on optimistic speculation neither should you continue to base it on doomsday scenarios when all the evidence is that it is nothing like the doomsday initially feared.

            I haven’t even started on the economic aspects which again are being played the opposite way to the reaction to the disease where financial and economic costs are optimistically assumed to be readily manageable. Paying for this is going to be anything but.

            And as an aside, was an autopsy/investigation carried out to demonstrate your friend really didn’t have any underlying conditions and died purely from Covid?

          2. Well said sos. I understood that autopsies were not being carried out on instructions from “above”. There is an awful lot of lies, deception, misinformation, and obfuscation going on, not to mention that absolut awful ely propaganda. And a contract has recently been put out for a 2 year propaganda campaign. Looking at the figures the virus has all but petered out. Why do we need to be frightened for another two years? It’s all about big Pharma and government contracts with enormous rewards for those either in the know or in the club. It has all been a convenient way of controlling the population and, boy, have they succeeded. For goodness sake never has the U.K., eve in wartime, been locked in at home with orders to “Save the NHS”.

            Here in Woking we even have “Symptom free testing” centres. What the hell for! If you are ill you stay at home don’t you? Use common sense? As someone posted elsewhere common sense will soon be a criminal offence.

          3. Thank you.
            I’m not yet convinced it is some sort of conspiracy on the part of Government, Davos, High Tech and Big Pharma, Build Back Better and the Green Blob etc. to control all aspects of our lives, but as Sherlock more or less suggested, when you have eliminated all the other possibilities, whatever is left, however improbable is the truth.

          4. I can’t say I go along with your drift here. The policies enacted by the authorities will always look wrong to a large proportion of people. Many of the actions taken, especially with Care Homes, looked wrong to me as well. Hindsight always identifies the mistakes, but at the time someone has to make a decision and they don’t always have all the evidence they need, so I have some sympathy when they get things wrong.
            The government certainly did NOT go along with those who were the most pessimistic. For instance, they kept the borders open when I believe they should have been slammed shut, like in New Zealand. They decided to immunise those most at risk, when I would have thought immunising those in front-line public facing jobs would have been more appropriate. There are always lots of alternative things one could do.
            As for my friend who died from Covid, no there was no autopsy carried out. Covid was confirmed as soon as she was admitted to hospital, she had no pre-existing condition on her medical record to indicate a particular vulnerability, and she died from complications resulting directly from the Covid infection (mainly loss of lung function which led to progressive organ failure). There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that Covid was the direct cause of her death.
            My brother-in-law contracted Covid but recovered. He had no underlying conditions that were affected by the Covid, but he does still have problems with loss of strength, inability to think clearly (attention deficit), loss of taste and smell (which has cemented his retirement from being a professional cook) etc. He was relatively lucky.
            I have another friend who tested positive for Covid after his father, who he was caring for, contracted it during a hospital visit (rather like the lady who infected our local care home). His father subsequently died, probably as a result of Covid aggravating underlying medical problems which he certainly had. My friend has recovered and apparently has no long-term effects, but only time will tell.
            I have another acquaintance who contracted Covid at her school. She recovered but has a lack of strength and stamina, plus damaged sense of taste and smell. Other changes in her body resulting from the infection may only become apparent in later life.

          5. Again, I disagree, particularly over using untested immunisations on front line workers.

            If the vaccine had been a disaster with more blood clots etc. (and we still have zero real idea whether there will be long term effects from the vaccines, even worse than the supposed long Covid) then what one would have done was to take out those best qualified to care for the rest and leaving fewer to care for them.

            Re pessimistic, I was referring to medical rather border/travel restrictions but on that point, I do not recall anyone advising the Government/any governments to shut borders immediately. Even Australia and NZ did not do so immediately.

            I know very few who have had it, none who have died. All have recovered fully and whilst they had some after effects these all disappeared eventually. Most people I know are similar in their experiences re knowing people none of whom have died and yet oddly enough are still scared witless by the disease, even after having been injected.

            I agree hindsight is not the best way of judging how one should have react to something, but my view remains that far, far too little thought was being given at the time to what was actually happening and why.

            If amateurs such as those on Nottle could see the glaring mistakes and ineptitudes at the time, and at the time we were certainly discussing them then the “experts” should have made a much better fist of it.

          6. Well that is one perspective. I think the perspective of medical professionals dealing with the disease first hand would be somewhat different.
            I do have a certain amount of skepticism about some of the statistics surrounding Covid, because deaths are reported as Covid-related when someone dies after testing positive, it doesn’t mean they have actually died from Covid itself. But, as with the residents of the care home near me, those who died after succumbing to the disease might well still be alive if it hadn’t been for the infection, despite having underlying health issues. So claiming that they would possibly have died anyway without the Covid and so they shouldn’t be included in the statistics is a pretty tenuous argument, and not something their relatives would probably agree with. (not that you have made that point, but others have in online discussions).

          7. Well that is one perspective. I think the perspective of medical professionals dealing with the disease first hand would be somewhat different.
            I do have a certain amount of skepticism about some of the statistics surrounding Covid, because deaths are reported as Covid-related when someone dies after testing positive, it doesn’t mean they have actually died from Covid itself. But, as with the residents of the care home near me, those who died after succumbing to the disease might well still be alive if it hadn’t been for the infection, despite having underlying health issues. So claiming that they would possibly have died anyway without the Covid and so they shouldn’t be included in the statistics is a pretty tenuous argument, and not something their relatives would probably agree with. (not that you have made that point, but others have in online discussions).

          8. 95% of front line health workers who contracted SARS-2 (Covid is an invention) were obese and suffered at least one co-morbidity.

            The most elementary research into companies such as Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson will reveal that they care nothing for human health and have been fined billions of dollars in often protracted compensation claims. Nobody but a fool would trust big Pharma, given indemnity from prosecution, to produce effective treatments.

            None of the faux vaccines has been licensed for use and are being deployed under emergency legislation. Neither have there been properly conducted clinical trials and nobody yet knows whether the jabs work at all. They most certainly do not claim to provide immunity but merely to reduce symptoms in those infected.

            There is so much fear and panic around the world this instant that many have lost the power of critical thought and enquiry, instead being lead by ‘experts’ in just about everything (sweet FA) apart from epidemiology.

          9. I find it strange that the PTB are taking so much effort censoring anyone who doesn’t support the narrative and questions what is happening or offers alternative approaches.
            It’s all “our way or no way”

          10. 95% of front line health workers who contracted SARS-2 (Covid is an invention) were obese and suffered at least one co-morbidity.

            The most elementary research into companies such as Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson will reveal that they care nothing for human health and have been fined billions of dollars in often protracted compensation claims. Nobody but a fool would trust big Pharma, given indemnity from prosecution, to produce effective treatments.

            None of the faux vaccines has been licensed for use and are being deployed under emergency legislation. Neither have there been properly conducted clinical trials and nobody yet knows whether the jabs work at all. They most certainly do not claim to provide immunity but merely to reduce symptoms in those infected.

            There is so much fear and panic around the world this instant that many have lost the power of critical thought and enquiry, instead being lead by ‘experts’ in just about everything (sweet FA) apart from epidemiology.

          11. Ha! A negative vote! I’m mortified.

            It would be polite to leave a comment explaining the reason for that sentiment, “Tier5Inmate”.

      2. How old was your friend and did she have any other underlying problems that could equally have been exacerbated by ‘flu or pneumonia?
        I know an old woman, in her late 80’s, who has multiple underlying illnesses, including cancer. She has had Covid twice now and survived.

        Nobody is suggesting that it isn’t unpleasant, but please don’t tell us that it is the threat to mankind that it is being painted and certainly don’t try to tell me that sacrificing so many children’s childhoods and schooling, sacrificing jobs and creating mental health issues resulting in suicides and losing early diagnoses of cancers, heart disease and other potentially curable diseases that haven’t been caught because of the real covidiocy is worth the price.

      3. I work with several who survived Covid, and don’t know any who have succumbed. The general consensus was it was like flu – not the it’s-really-a-cold-but-I-want-some-sympathy kind of flu, the real kind that knocks you flat, gives you fevers and chills, and makes you lose significant weight kind of flu.
        The kind of flu that, in 2018, killed about 1 400 people in Norway, and 64 137 in the UK.

        1. I also know a few people who have survived Covid, including my brother-in-law. Unlike a bout of the ‘flu, Covid leaves one with apparently permanent damage in many ways, including loss of mental function, kidney and liver damage, lack of strength and coordination… the list goes on.
          Discussing whether the measures being taken are proportionate to the risk, given that many of those suffering hardship under the restrictions might never have encountered Covid or even been badly affected by it if they did, is just pure speculation. One thing is abundantly clear – Covid is a highly infectious and potentially fatal disease. I would not want to take any risk of being exposed to it, because I might not be one of the lucky ones with natural resistance to it. I might be like Linda, dead within four weeks.

        2. One chap I work with had Covid early on. He’s about 25yo – he described it as the most frightening thing he has ever experienced. He was fully conscious but couldn’t breathe for himself for about four days. This was almost a year ago and he still gets short of breath at the mildest exertion.

          2. My sister said there was a scary sort of feeling of pressure on your chest as well, but she’s fully recovered.

      4. Asymptomatic transmission is extremely rare, though. A recent study in JAMA showed 0.7% secondary attack rate *within households* for both asymptomatic and presymptomatic cases. Your friend was very unlucky. I’m sorry for your loss.

        It can be a dreadful disease for some, but for many, it’s less likely to cause death or serious side effects than the flu.

        1. Yes, my friend was indeed very unlucky, but to some extent she may have brought the bad luck on herself through her actions. Like many expressing views in here, she poo-pooed the risk and decided to carry on behaving as normal, going on public transport and to public venues without taking any precautions. Just one week after expressing that opinion to another friend she fell ill. A week later she was admitted to hospital, and days later she died.
          Those who I know who have recovered from Covid would probably disagree with your sentiment that there are no more serious side effects than from a dose of the flu.
          Personally, when faced with a situation where I don’t know all the facts and where the outcome for me might be death, I would choose to err on the side of caution rather than being gung-ho about it, like Linda was.

          1. My “sentiment ” that the flu is more fatal to those of us in a younger age group than Covid? Not sentiment; fact.

            You are absolutely free to make your own choice in this respect.

          2. Of course I am free to make my own choice, as you are. But whether or not I would use a perceived lower lethality by comparison with the flu of a disease that can be protected against as a justification for not accepting viable protection against it… I don’t think so. There is no logic in that.

          3. Then we shall have to agree to disagree. In order to debate freely, the parties need to define the terms involved. What you see as “not accepting viable protection”, I see as not compromising my immunocompetent body with a novel gene therapy still in the trial stage, which does not provide sterilising immunity and therefore cannot prevent my unwittingly infecting others.

            I’m glad you’re upholding my right to bodily autonomy, though, even if you see no logic in my position. Thank you.

            And for the record, when I blew up my career to move here and care for my terminally ill mother, the first thing I did was to request a flu jab. Should I develop symptoms of any sort of respiratory disease, I shall do as I have always done and keep away from others in order not to pass it on.

      5. What? A work colleague, my sister, my daughter and my cousin’s entire family have all had it. Nasty bug, better in a few days.

        1. They were obviously lucky. Millions of others haven’t been.

          1. No, they had a normal experience.
            You posted the headline figure of people who have died world wide where the death was put down to covid, and it was just over 3 million if I remember rightly.

            We’ll skip over things like US hospitals being told to write covid on every death certificate, which have inflated this figure, and ask, how many people have actually had the virus?

            https://gidmk.medium.com/how-many-people-have-had-covid-19-75070dc2766a
            There’s a useful article here, which talks about the difficulties in coming to a reliable estimate.
            “A plausible range of infections as of the end of 2020 may have been 6–700 million, but given the massive outbreaks of the last few months, that number has increased enormously.”

            So, even if you take the inflated death total, and the lowest point of the plausible range of infections, which are already out of date remember, then you still have around 579 MILLION people who did not die.

            Please take that figure away with you – 579 million who did not die, and that’s the very lowest possible estimate – the true one will be much higher.

            I am guessing your next comment will be about people crippled for life, wheezing and gasping and wishing they’d had the vaccine for the rest of their lives.
            Well, post viral syndrome has been known about for a very long time from other viruses, and there are pioneers who have cured it – look up the Perrins method, for example.
            Other post covid infection problems are the ones caused by the spike proteins (the vascular and lung damage, for example) – these are the same spike proteins that are the result of injecting the vaxx into you, and the health problems are similar to the side effects caused by the vaxx, also to a very small number of people.

            I do not believe that the facts support such a gloomy view of the situation as you appear to hold.

      6. I caught Covid in February last year (I went racing at Haydock Park and used public transport – trains and taxis) before the panic set in. I had a bad dose of ‘flu that put me in bed for a week and meant I missed walking my dog for a day. I ticked all of the boxes that warned people of having Covid symptoms once the panic set in, but of course I didn’t self isolate because there was none of that at the time. Needless to say, since I’m typing this, I recovered, despite being overweight and in my seventies. Mind you, I was a whole lot fitter then than I am now, thanks to lockdown. Maybe after having been shut up for so long without my usual amounts of exercise, and having put on even more weight due to inactivity, I might not survive this time.

        1. What you are seemingly not taking into account in your expressed attitude is the fact that not everyone infected with Covid was as lucky as you were. My friend Linda wasn’t, and I don’t think she did anything very much worse than you did. One thing is clear to me though – if neither of you had been infected with Covid in the first place, neither of you would have died (probably).

          That situation applies going forward, so for every prevention of another infection through the present measures being taken to prevent the spread of the disease, there is a reduction of the chance that any other innocent person would die. That seems entirely justifiable to me, since I think the right not to be infected by another person who flouts the restrictions outweighs the right to party.

          PS: Covid is not “a bad case of ‘flu”!

          1. I ticked all the symptoms boxes and for me, it was like a very bad case of ‘flu. Like many illnesses, it affects people differently and their recovery rates vary. In my view, my number wasn’t up so I got better. Others were not so lucky. Probably if I’d been admitted to hospital I wouldn’t have survived (intubation and failing to treat with the appropriate drugs had a lot to answer for).

          2. Clearly you were one of the lucky ones. My friend wasn’t.

        2. What you are seemingly not taking into account in your expressed attitude is the fact that not everyone infected with Covid was as lucky as you were. My friend Linda wasn’t, and I don’t think she did anything very much worse than you did. One thing is clear to me though – if neither of you had been infected with Covid in the first place, neither of you would have died (probably).

          That situation applies going forward, so for every prevention of another infection through the present measures being taken to prevent the spread of the disease, there is a reduction of the chance that any other innocent person would die. That seems entirely justifiable to me, since I think the right not to be infected by another person who flouts the restrictions outweighs the right to party.

          PS: Covid is not “a bad case of ‘flu”!

    1. One of our sons sent me that on WhatsApp a few weeks ago, it certainly put me off buying one of those.

        1. Just sent it to my old man only for him to tell me he’d seen it last week!

    3. How funny is that! Our SiL bought a Maserati a couple of months ago, in Dubai, but he’s only 52! He is very very proud of it.
      ETA: He’s not retired. Yet!

    4. I’ve always thought that a small but strong harness on the roof interior could swivel one out of the seat. Or one could buy a very nice classic car for much less money, and pay the upkeep for several years.

    1. Beautiful, Uncle Bill! Glad you didn’t lose it to frost/howling gales!

      1. Thank you – so are we – What with the gale AND the hail last week, I was worried.

    2. Ours is still quite tightly in bud – but it’s on the pergola and at the head of a draughty valley. It’s normally out by now, though. The clematis montanas are very late as well.

      1. My Montana is a bit late as well, but we are several miles North of you! I planted two new clematis/clemati? and a passiflora a couple of weeks ago and they are thriving!

        2. My montana grandiflora is in bloom (it’s a white one, rather than pink) and the other one is just starting to bloom. I might acquire a pink one as I have trellis lining one of my seating areas and I think it would look good trailing along there (and hiding the oil tank).

    3. So beautiful Bill.

      My Wisteria has never flowered , it spread out to all the wrong places , throwing suckers and galloping along the ground similar to a John Wyndham horror story .
      Moh became very frustrated , and hacked it to bits last year, my goodness it is tenacious because its tentacles are reaching out again . South West facing wall, but very much in the shade for quite a few months .

        1. MOH wouldn’t rest until the wisteria on the pergola had been destroyed 🙁 I sneaked in a new one, in a pot, against a south-facing fence because I like wisteria. I am on the look-out for a white one as I have an arch to erect once I’ve created a seating area in a dead patch of ground that’s a bit of a wilderness at the moment.

      2. Some years ago, we had one; it went berserk and then withered and died.
        Possibly a dodgy root stock.

          1. Eventually. I long since wrote off the capital cost. The leccy generated and sold to the network is roughly half the annual electricity bill.

          3. We are front south facing and have considered having Solar Panels, people in our road have them and they say they do save on electricity and even gas Bills but they paid a lot of money for the panels and the installations. But we had to have a new gas boiler installed just after Christmas at 2.5 k

          4. There are radio ads running here at the moment, offering people who installed solar panels the service to claim compensation for them if they haven’t made them any money!

            Did I larfff…

          6. I am not remotely green, but the idea of reducing the electricity bill, especially the AC during the summer would be very welcome.

            However that would mean – doing it properly – solar panels and a big old battery, like a Tesla power wall.

            The investment is huge though – something like £15K.

            For us to get that money back, with our electricity bill of about £50 a month is about 15 years. If there were no VAT attached I’d leap at it, but the grant is deliberately limited as if you own your own home and earn more than 20p you don’t qualify.

          7. I worked on a house in Redbourn, Herts about ten years ago and the people had ground source heat pumps installed, the set up meant digging deep trenches all around the property and a huge operational panel installed on one wall of the garage. It was estimated it would take the rest of their lives before it became cost effective. And they still had to top up the heating of the hot water storage tank daily.

    6. My big sister had a beautiful Wisteria on a pergola, but unbeknown to them the frame had rotted and it collapsed bring the whole thing to the ground. Not the sort of thing you want to find on your driveway returning from a holiday.
      But yours is in full mode Bill.

    7. At the far left (where the greenery shows) is a white wisteria which is just budding. It is always about a month behind the blue one. Never so prolific – but much longer flowers.

  50. Off-topic tome No. 3, about renewable energy:

    As a scientist I am a great believer in renewable energy. It is a fantastic idea to harvest energy from the Sun that could otherwise not be used for our own constructive purposes. It’s not new, of course, because wind power and the power of flowing water have been used for centuries. What is new is the forced subsidy of these technologies by all of us, under the auspices of climate change policy enacted by governments. While it may indeed be a noble objective to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, there is a cost to all this, and it is a cost that is being hidden from the public.

    A few years back I saw a headline from a German newspaper proudly announcing the production of an all-time daily record amount of renewable energy, thanks largely to the amount of solar panels being installed (with subsidy from everyone else, of course). This was proclaimed as a marvellous achievement about which the German people should feel proud. Unfortunately, the story behind the scenes that didn’t make it into the article was the consequence that this record amount of renewable energy production had on the energy supply market in Germany.

    Under German law, renewable energy suppliers are given priority for the selling of their energy on the daily spot markets. A large amount of energy is traded internationally by Germany, and if the energy being sold has not been purchased in advance through a forward contract, the price achieved for it is set by the daily supply and demand balance. If one looks at the energy production record for Germany (conveniently charted for public consumption by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy) one finds an interesting trend: when the renewable energy producers are supplying most energy to the grid, a lot of that energy is being exported from Germany. This is because it is difficult to predict the balance of supply and demand, and renewables are notoriously unreliable and unpredictable, so conventional power plants have to be used to supply the bulk of Germany’s energy. If it is a bonus day for the renewables producers on cannot simply turn off the conventional power plants and allow the renewable energy to take over, so the excess being produced is sold on the international market at the daily spot price. Here is a chart showing a week’s production and the corresponding exports:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/786e578154be82a3b63de84148c743058bdabfb3da9d353f1149564483839923.png

    Herein lies the problem. Sometimes there is simply more energy available than there is a need for, and the effect this has on the market is to drive down the price. Note the marked dip on that chart.

    This is a record of the energy transactions on the German energy market for half a year in 2013 (a time when there was far less renewables production than there is now).

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8c381dca5a125b497753f454d519eb609f0c593f532da8d183debf90fdcbfc6a.png

    It can be seen that just two of the energy export transactions, for a total of 10GWh of electricity, were at a NEGATIVE price just like the dip in the first chart, meaning that the energy producer had to PAY for the energy to be taken away. This cost 1 million Euros over and above the cost of producing the energy in the first place and the cost of the subsidies paid by all energy consumers for it to be produced. The producers of the renewable energy didn’t pay this, of course, because they have a minimum price for their energy guaranteed by the government – so the taxpayer foots the bill. You can see that there were many transactions carried out with negative pricing, and a lot of the positive prices achieved were below the cost of production. So much of this renewable energy production is actually costing money – it is certainly not “free energy” from the Sun!

    Another myth about the use of renewables is that it reduces carbon dioxide emissions by replacing conventional fossil fuelled production. Of course, there is some reduction in carbon emissions, but it is not a one-for-one replacement for every GWh of fossil fuelled production replaced with renewables. As mentioned before, it is necessary to have the bulk of the energy supply provided by guaranteed sources, and a certain amount of traditional production capacity has to be held in “spinning reserve” so that it can be turned on quickly if the renewables fail or if there is an unexpected surge in demand. In a study carried out in America it was shown that the power plant operating in “spinning reserve” is operating much less efficiently than it would if operating at its rated capacity. This means that it produces higher levels of emissions than it otherwise would:

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a83674a0140a2b28562b33efd5df3f61c9e9ae3776fcfb6bcebbd368027f3511.png

    According to this study, replacement of 40% of energy production with wind energy does not achieve a 40% reduction in emissions – it is less than half that. And don’t forget, that electricity is more expensive to produce than conventional energy, it is subsidised which is a cost paid by all consumers, and some of it has to be sold at a negative price from time to time.

    My conclusion is that while renewable energy schemes are worthy of support, they should not be placed at the heart of national energy policy and they should NOT be subsidised on the grounds of carbon emissions reduction (see my other posts for the reasoning behind this).

    This is especially important since much of the equipment being used for renewables production is actually being manufactured in China, using fossil fuels to produce it! Even one of Europe’s biggest wind turbine producers outsources much of its production to China, and only assembles the units in Europe. We need to extricate ourselves from reliance on China, re-generate our own manufacturing industry, and let the rest of the world deal with their concerns about carbon emissions. Ours don’t make a blind bit of difference.

    1. Have you researched land requirements for ‘renewables’? It’s a subject that has not had much coverage in the media. To produce useful amounts of electricity, wind turbines and solar ‘farms’ [sic] would have to be installed across vast areas of the country.

      1. That, Paul, and solar energy produce more carbon during their production than they’ll ever save and, if produced in China, are the products of slave labour.

        1. Indeed.
          I worked in Esbjerg some years ago when they were shipping turbines and the huge blades were stacked on the quayside.
          They were the most beautiful, sleek, feminine form imaginable. Absolutely gorgeous and lovely, so they were.

          1. Yes. The aesthetics are not so much appreciated when they are being carried on huge low-loaders on the Edinburgh bypass, taking up two lines at 5mph at rush hour. Just saying. Bitter experience etc…

          2. Orr, whirling round almost out of eyeshot, just enough to grab your attention.
            But, these were absolutely gorgeous in form.

          3. Years ago, my brother was running a transport company. One job was taking turbine blades over to Ireland. My brother sent the measurements to ensure that a suitable sized lorry was waiting on the dockside.
            A lorry was there – but it was too small.
            My brother phoned the Irish company and asked if they’d received the measurements.
            “Oh yes”, was the reply “but we didn’t think you actually meant it.”

          4. No question they’re amazing engineering.

            Yet they’re a complete waste of money as an energy source.

      2. Well spotted! It’s good to know that people actually read these posts.

        It was a bit naughty of me to use a chart referring to CO rather than CO2, but there are very few publicly-available studies showing negative effects from adopting renewable energy. I had to go with what I could find. In their case, they were highlighting the effect of conventional power plants being made less efficient when running in standby mode to back up wind power, and CO emission rate is a measure of the efficiency of the combustion, so that is (I imagine) why they charted that.

    3. Why can’t the surplus be used to charge batteries to keep in store for when needed?

      1. Battery technology capable of storing that much energy does not exist. Battery storage is possible on a small scale, such as with domestic installations, but the only viable means of storing excess renewable electrical energy at present is pumped storage, whereby the excess energy is used to pump water into an elevated reservoir, then it can be used to produce a surge of hydroelectric power when demand requires it (this is the principle of the Dinorwig facility in Wales – see wikipedia)

    1. OK! OK! I’ll assume it’s me and not the much less stroppy Sue Edison! I wish it had been me!

        2. And yet she spent years upvoting but never saying what she thought…………

      2. I once worked in a builders merchants and hardware store in Oz and at Christmas all the staff went to the pub together with one of the store’s Ozzie wind-up the poms guys, us brits stuck a notice on the back of his jacket that said, ‘i’m just a whinging pommy bastard’. People fell about laughing when we entered the pub but he had no idea it was there.

  52. John Hutchin, fought with the Chindits behind enemy lines in Burma – obituary. 16 May 2021.

    Wounded the neck, delirious with malaria and jungle sores, he was left for dead for four days before being rescued by US-led Chinese forces.

    Hutchin had been wounded in the neck by shrapnel from a mortar round. The medical staff took maggots from under the saddle of a mule to bind into the wound to stop the infection. Racked by malaria with successive bouts of fever, overwhelmed with exhaustion from marching through ankle-deep mud and becoming delirious, he could go no further.

    “I was given an extra water bottle, a spare ammunition clip and one K-Ration meal. Nothing much was said. No regrets were expressed. I looked at my legs and they were covered in deep jungle sores. My will had gone. I was finished and would never see my home again.”

    The Chindit Campaign is not beyond criticism. It was poorly thought out and led; it’s leader Wingate, all too typical of the commanders of the British Army, then and now. This does not apply to the men who served in it. They made exceptional sacrifices in the most terrible of conditions and so it is here. The real tragedy of it all is that it led to nothing good after the war itself. Their losses and sufferings were thrown onto the Rubbish Heap of history by men not fit to lick their boots! Everything they fought for and believed in has been betrayed by the politicians that only exist by virtue of their will to endure.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2021/05/16/john-hutchin-fought-chindits-behind-enemy-lines-burma-obituary/

    1. 332818+ up ticks,
      Afternoon AS.
      “Lest we forget” currently via the polling booth reluctant to remember is more apt.
      These odious politico types / parties
      STILL have a following in supporters & votes.

  53. Since Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, a reminder of the days (most of us) remember:

    Back in the days of tanners and bobs,
    When Mothers had patience and Fathers had jobs.
    When football team families wore hand me down shoes,
    And T.V gave only two channels to choose.

    Back in the days of three penny bits,
    When schools employed nurses to search for your nits.
    When snowballs were harmless; ice slides were permitted
    And all of your jumpers were warm and hand knitted
    .
    Back in the days of hot ginger beers,
    When children remained so for more than six years.
    When children respected what older folks said,
    And pot was a thing you kept under your bed

    Back in the days of Listen with Mother,
    When neighbours were friendly and talked to each other.
    When cars were so rare you could play in the street.
    When Doctors made house calls; Police walked the beat.

    Back in the days of Milligan’s Goons,
    When butter was butter and songs all had tunes.
    It was dumplings for dinner and trifle for tea,
    And your annual break was a day by the sea.

    Back in the days of Dixon’s Dock Green,
    Crackerjack pens and Lyons’s ice cream.
    When children could freely wear National Health glasses,
    And teachers all stood at the FRONT of their classes.

    Back in the days of rocking and reeling,
    When mobiles were things that you hung from the ceiling.
    When woodwork and pottery got taught in schools,
    And everyone dreamed of a win on the pools.

    Back in the days when I was a lad,
    I can’t help but smile for the fun that I had.
    Hopscotch and roller skates; snowballs to lob.
    Back in the days of tanners and bobs. 👫

    1. This was written by a person called David Wood. Anyone know anything about him?

    4. What about crisps with a little blue bag of salt in, and taking your dad’s empties back to the offie to get a few pennies for sweets?

          1. And just what were you doing outside the Christopher Hotel at 4:30 in the morning?

    3. Don’t mind them. Better than a work day (Says she who is working this afternoon in her second job) 🙁

    4. Not really, it’s homemade pizza night (a nice easy job to produce), 2 bottles of Grillo in the fridge and a good book on the go or a film if my eyes get tired.

    5. No, normally I like Sundays; church parade, relaxing in the garden, a bit of a break before the drudgery starts again on Monday. Today, I was too tired to go to church and only got a bit of work done in the garden before it rained heavily. Now I have washing to do after doing the washing up 🙁

    2. Does anyone else see the hypocrisy of this clip and the slogan “for the many not the few,” when everything about the Labour party is about the few not the many?

          1. In my day it was the Woolwich Equitable Building Society.

            Roy Fuller – the distinguished poet, was the Solicitor to the Woolwich…

    4. As Dan Hodges wrote in the Daily Mail: “Red Wall voters think Labour cares more about the Palestinians than them. And they’re right”.

      The video clip demonstrates a total disconnect between what Labour activists think and what traditional Labour voters think.

        1. Yes. Full choir back now. Though they still have to stand 3 feet apart, that actually works rather well. Anthem by Orlando Gibbons this evening.

    6. I see they have let in a few defectors from the Monster Raving Loony Party. It’s not been the same since old Sutch died.

    8. “…nothing good will become of Brexit, it is a far-right project…”

      Supported by millions of Labour voters.

      “…no borders, no discrimination, everyone working together…if you’ve seen Star Trek you’ll appreciate the metaphor…”

      What?!

      1. Labour the party has completely lost sight of what Labour voters want. I’d go so far as to say it just doesn’t care.

        A party for the weird, the disposessed, the lazy indolent rich having a tantrum at their trust fund.

        1. If they’ve got any sense they are; why support a party that thinks they are nasty, racist bigots? – oh, wait! Mrs Duffy did just that, didn’t she?

    1. We seem to have a dry (not very sunny) interval at the moment. Better go and make the most of it.

      1. Driving to work earlier, I drove alternately through pockets of rain and pockets of sunshine about ten times, in all of four miles.

      2. The former BBC, Golders Green Hippodrome is now an Islamic Centre…..
        Nasty traitors the BBC….they know how to insult….

        1. Talk about driving the islamic wedge into the Jewish heart land of north London.
          That stinks and is a deliberately engineered anti Jewish process.

    2. Heavy police response?

      Thought not. The slammer “mare” directed the useless Dick Head not to “attend”.

    3. 332818+ up ticks,
      Evening Rik,
      Be like dad keep mum, these could very well be the next governing overseers, I have a feeling the sheepskin overcoat is coming off soon
      either to replace lab, or the tories (ino) will take them on as a 50/50 partner.
      The thin end of the steak & veg is already in parliament on the halal canteen menu and oath taker.

    4. I’ve got no link to open the whole comment is blank from one…. to Of course

      Strangely i can see this on my mobile (which is charging down stairs right now) phone but i can’t log into Nottlers it says i’m not who i am when i try !!!???

      1. Mind your mobile doesn’t trip when it charges down stairs – could be a nasty accident 🙂

    5. Not hate speech, is it? Threatening violence to Jews and women is clearly OK.

      2. Yet the feminists won’t say a word and the BBC will wheel out someone to explain why this is justified and acceptable.

        1. That’s one thing I don’t understand about feminists – their blind acceptance of subservience under islam.
          And the right-on types think it’s OK to kill gays by throwing them off high places, whilst celebrating gay rights.
          I look forward to someone explaining how these contrary beliefs can be reconciled.

    6. Import savages, you get savages. These people are sewage. That so many infest London and no doubt live on welfare makes me sick.

      Thanks Labour.

  65. Now for the good news.
    Moderate drinkers are at less risk of heart attacks than teetotallers if
    they drink red wine.

    Who said ‘Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but The Bible says: ‘Love your enemy.’

    1. I nearly had a heart attack the other evening when I thought I had run out of wine.

      Luckily I had a few bottles left in the other cupboard. Cheers! 🥳

        1. In very bad weather & choppy seas the captain of a ship ordered the cabin boy to bring him & the 1st mate a bottle of good port. The young lad knew nothing about wines & brought the captain a really cheap bottle of port. The captain began berating him & told him to return it to the galley but the 1st mate taking pity on the young lad having to make his way back in a ship that was rolling in the rough seas said to the captain “lets drink it up as its getting really choppy out there and after all as the old saying goes – any port in storm! “

        1. See them chugging the stuff in the Gulf Hotel in Bahrein at the weekend. All pious the rest of the week.

    3. I need to do some experiments to define “moderate” and how and if each grape variety affects the beneficial effect, tonight I may try a shiraz and a merlot to two or so, 250ml glasses I think, just to be sure.

      1. I’ve got a box from Laithwaites ready for unpacking – had to make some space in the wine-rack first…….

        1. I can heartily recommend a company called NAKED. They support independent wine makers around the world, and some of the wines I have had from them are spectacularly good. Not cheap, but good. You can pay in a monthly amount to your account then have a case delivered when you reach the appropriate total. It makes the purchase a bit less traumatic!

          1. Ah – a fellow Angel, since I signed up I’ve been constantly delighted with the quality of their range. Until I joined up Portuguese and South African wines on offer at the local supermarkets failed to impress and I had tended to discount them when choosing a bott. or two. not from Naked. hmmmmmmm

          2. Indeed! 😇

            PS: I was thrilled to discover that the remaining stash in cupboard No.2 included one bottle of Hacienda Don Hernan Rioja 2018, which is without doubt the best Rioja I have ever tasted. I was devastated when I went to re-order it and found it had sold out. But there are plenty more to try…

          3. Ah – a fellow Angel, since I signed up I’ve been constantly delighted with the quality of their range. Until I joined up Portuguese and South African wines on offer at the local supermarkets failed to impress and I had tended to discount them when choosing a bott. or two. not from Naked. hmmmmmmm

          4. One thing that attracted us to the hotel we stay at for winter holiday here in Norway was the unusualness of the wine list. I like to be challenged a bit, and whilst it’s OK to have a box of unremarkabe not-quite-chianti for quaffing of an evening, life is made more interesting by trying something not tried before – and rarely is it undrinkable.
            Had a wine from Bekaa valley for birthday last year, and Hardcastle recommended a Georgian red that was great last year too…
            Makes life interesting!

          5. Have you tried Château Musar? (Howling; autocarrot just changed that to Château Mushrooms!!) Bloody amazing. One of my favourite wines.

        2. I’m popping to Majestic Tmz, special offers closing later Monday. Need to stock up.
          They quite often have tastings as well.

        3. Mother gets a regular delivery from those roosters. Mixed box. Problem is, she doesn’t drink as fast as they arrive, and so it’s piling up…

      2. You measure your consumption by the number of glasses not bottles? That makes you a moderate drinker, I would say.

      3. Just about to join you, just waiting for the potato’s the roast, to compliment the roast beef.

    4. A chap once told me that drinking in moderation is a good thing. What was his name again…..oh yes, Jack Daniel

      3. Can’t stand that American muck – nothing wrong with good honest Scotch.

        1. They are two different drinks. Might as well compare it with vodka as scotch.

      1. I hope not, jtl, at home I only drink dry white. Anyway, one way or another, we’re all doomed.

      2. Just discovered whites from New Zealand. Some damned good wine there!
        And I only drink red… :-))

        1. I’ve been buying NZ Sauvignon Blancs, Marlborough, Nelson etc. from Laithwaites for some time. Delicious wines, all of them. South Africa make splendid Chenin Blancs, the Huguenot from the aforementioned company is very good.

          1. I’ll look them out when I’m at the wine monopoly on Tuesday! Thanks for the heads-up.

          2. We found some wonderful sparkling whites from South Africa, Graham Beck, knocked spots of yer French stuff!!!

          3. Many wines knock spots off yer French stuff, much of which is over-rated! I find Chilean, Australian and South African wines eminently drinkable (and I’m a Francophile!).

        2. Oh yes, discovered the NZ Sauvignon Blancs some years ago, great summer quaffs!!

      3. It’s the resveratrol in red wine that is the miracle worker, apparently. There isn’t any (or at least, as much) in white wines, as far as I’m aware.

    7. I’ve been saying it for years, there is sunshine in every bottle produced.
      And i assure all people who submit the same old same old type of complaint about drinking……..i’m certainly not going to be worried about the most recent glass of wine i had, as i take my last breath.
      My mothers elder sister, dear old auntie Betty was 96 years old when she shuffled off in QLD, about ten years ago, every night before bed she took a wee dram.

      1. My mother was 90; she had a daily glass of sherry (or two). In my view, un repas sans vin, c’est un jour sans soleil.

        1. Not convinced that alcohol before 11 am is a good idea, but otherwise with you there.

          1. Even I don’t drink alcohol before noon! Depending on how stressed I am, I can convince myself that the sun is over the yardarm SOMEWHERE in the British Empire after midday 🙂

      2. Good for you, Eddy, I have to wait until tomorrow when my 6 x 1l whisky plus 6 x white wine (various) arrives.

        For tonight I’m finishing the cheapo white bought to supplement the tartiflette made last night. Although cheap, £4.99, it’s quite drinkable but then they say meths is also drinkable.

        1. After finishing my 5 year apprenticeship I found a well paying job in London working for Camden Council. I traveled from Mill Hill East to Mornington Crescent each day and walked the half mile to the construction site from the station. Imagine my surprise the first time I alighted the underground train to see men huddled in the entrance hall of the station stinking of urine and methylated spirits.

          2. I don’t know; most people seem to be able to cope. It’s a rare day I come on here and don’t have a whinge about something.

          3. In my experience, one very good thing about Nottle is that one can always have a whinge and as long as one doesn’t overdo it there is a deep pool of support.

  67. All this talk of wine has set me dribbling, so I am off to find a friend to join me in a glass or three. Byesy-byes for now.

  68. That’s me for the foul and fair day. Sunny now – after several heavy downpours.

    The MR and watched half a prog on TV last night that was so good neither of us can remember what it was! Can’t wait to find out later on!!

    A demain.

    2. Was it How the Other Half Live ?

      We have been enjoying the Portillo train journeys down under. It brings back many memories.

      1. The progs are fine – it is just the fat, loquacious, pontificating, smug tosser who wears stupid jackets that we don’t care for.

        (Edited to make it clearer!!)

  69. Haddock in tarragon and cream sauce,garlicy cabbage and bacon and new spuds washed down with a bargain White Rioja,I’ve paid triple the price for worse wines…….
    No I’m not going to name it,last time it sold out and I had to go without………….
    Night All

    1. Smoked haddock?
      If not, you should try it next time. We like the undyed version, but either are excellent.

      1. For the avoidance of doubt, it’s a Chilean Pinot Noir, not one from the EU.

  71. “Antiseminism has no place in Britain” says pm
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/16/anti-semitism-has-no-place-britain-says-pm-convoy-cars-chanted/
    What a pity nobody did anything about it, Boris, you shit-for-brains. Why did the police not attack them with the same zeal as, for example, women in “freedom” marches? Old ladies punched by your fascist police? No, no, gotta avoid any confrontation with islam. Well, piss be upon it, and upon you.

    1. The country is covered with cctv cameras, no problem to read the number plates of the vehicles involved as a starting point to track down who was involved, now we wait and see how outraged Boris is.
      Shit for brains is very apt but bo****ks for brains is probably more accurate.

      1. His bollox and Sad Dick is where his brains are and the Carrion are sucking any intelligence out of him.

        Mind bleach is on prescription – sorry.

  72. Nicked from Letters Page BTL

    For some reason, the Telegraph and other new sources have all imposed a
    total news blackout on events in front of BBC headquarters yesterday.

    Thousands of ordinary people, waving union flags, surrounded the BBC
    headquarters in London, Cardiff, Manchester and Birmingham shouting

    “shame on you” and “defund the BBC.” Even if you don’t agree with them t
    hat the BBC is shamelessly biased, the event should be covered. Why is this
    not being reported? I’m paying my subscription for news, not censorship!

  73. Nicked from Letters Page BTL

    For some reason, the Telegraph and other new sources have all imposed a
    total news blackout on events in front of BBC headquarters yesterday.

    Thousands of ordinary people, waving union flags, surrounded the BBC
    headquarters in London, Cardiff, Manchester and Birmingham shouting

    “shame on you” and “defund the BBC.” Even if you don’t agree with them t
    hat the BBC is shamelessly biased, the event should be covered. Why is this
    not being reported? I’m paying my subscription for news, not censorship!

      1. I’ve had a very draining week, unfortunately. So much so, I couldn’t get my sorry arse out of bed to attend church this morning. I went back to sleep until well after noon, which is a sign of how tired I’m becoming. I did manage to get some work done in the garden (tackling the ground elder again and planting some holly bushes and an apple tree) before the heavens opened. I harvested the rhubarb and gave some to a friend who helped me by doing some shopping and to my next door neighbour (whose crowns they originally were; they had to get rid of them to build their garage).

        1. Sorry you don’t have the energy just now, Conway. I guess the accumulation of recent stresses have finally caught up with you. Hope the oncoming spring/summer gives you a boost, but I suspect a few early nights and late mornings might be needed to recharge a bit.
          Take care, anyhow.

          1. Thank you. It’s late mornings I need. MOH has been getting me up earlier than I planned, to deal with cleaning up. I am naturally a night owl, so going to bed early doesn’t mean I’ll sleep.

        2. Oof. Ground elder’s a bugger.

          Jealous of the rhubarb, though. I had mackerel for dinner tonight and that would have made a delicious sauce.

          KBO.

          1. I can think of a lot of epithets for ground elder! 🙂 I can only hope that digging it out and zapping the rest with Weedol will eventually tame it (bugger the EU and their diktats that ruined effective weedkillers!). I was really dippy when I had the drains done; the builder asked where he could dump the surplus soil and like an idiot, I said, “put it on the veg plot” (that being free, unplanted at the time and needing building up). It was only after he’d done it that I remembered there would be ground elder roots in the dumped soil 🙁 Having put ground elder where there was none previously, I now have to eradicate it 🙁

      1. No, unfortunately. Late last night I found a site that rehomes dogs from foster homes and I tried to fill in a form to put myself on their books. Cue Firefox having a hissy fit, the Internet downing tools and general non-co-operation from my computer. Accordingly I left it on all night to attempt to send the form. When I came back to it this morning, it still hadn’t sent it! 🙂 I did, eventually, by typing it all out again, manage to send it off. Now I need to wait. I am trying – some people would say I’m VERY trying!

          1. Thank you. People keep assuring me there’s a dog out there waiting for me, but as time passes, it’s getting harder and harder to convince myself of that 🙁

          2. I get the impression that it is going to be a very spoilt dog when you do find it.

          3. I hope not; spoilt dogs are spoiled dogs! He’ll have lots of love and TLC, but he’ll know his place in the pack (and it won’t be leader). He’ll go out for walks to mark his territory (but I’ll be in charge) and read his wee mails and send replies if necessary and he’ll engage in doggy behaviour, but he’ll have to remember I’m the pack leader and what I say goes.

          5. I eat first, I go out of the doors and gates first. I make the decisions. When my old boy was coming to the end of his time I did let him decide where we walked. By that time he’d given up challenging me for pack leadership.

          6. Agreed, I wish Best Beloved could understand that but she’s never had a dog and I can see that discipline is required but I can’t get it through and I don’t want a fight.

          8. I sympathise, Plum. It’s the empty house, the lack of snuffling, the failure to be greeted with a waggy tail that gets me. I still find myself looking at his empty basket and saying “goodnight, Charlie, I love you” before I go to sleep, even though he’s not there. I removed his bed when he died, but then, when I thought I was getting Timmy, I put it back, consoling myself with the thought that soon there would be a little black body snuggled up in it. Since that disappointment I haven’t put it away again. I am bereft 🙁

          9. I know how you must feel Conners. Often I have said to various people that our dog is far nicer than a lot of people i have known.

          11. One of my favourite replies to people who obviously have never owned a dog and walking with children and the kids are obviously scared stiff of a dog is, she loves children ……but she couldn’t eat a whole one.

          13. I hid Maud’s toys bed etc in the garage…couldn’t face it.
            Often come across the odd tennis ball in the garden and that ends in tears. I never thought I would feel so soppy about a dog but she was my best friend..
            I know how you feel…x

          14. I put Charlie’s bed away after I came back from the vets, but when I thought I was getting Timmy, I put it back. I couldn’t face putting it away again when that fell through. It’s a horrible feeling.

          16. No Jill, … a small older dog/bitch ….who needs a warm comfortable bed,
            chicken/fish suppers, biscuits and plenty of cuddles……!

          17. I think that there are many on here, Plum and Conway, wishing and hoping that you find that companion and playmate you both seek.

    1. They have video evidence and even though there is not a cat in heels chance of them being convicted of anything, at least make their lives miserable for a while.

    2. Why are they even still flying there, given it’s on the Red list?

    1. I vote to close down Imperial College London. Their teachings are a danger to society. Their supposed scientists such as Neil Ferguson are proven liars snd idiots and their funding is largely from collusion with the Chinese Communist Party viz. our enemy.

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