Sunday 17 May: The teaching unions’ belligerence does their members no favours

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/05/16/lettersthe-teaching-unions-belligerence-does-members-no-favours/

790 thoughts on “Sunday 17 May: The teaching unions’ belligerence does their members no favours”

  4. Thank you Geoff, an early start I see this morning!

    Coronavirus latest news: Regional variation likely in England’s lockdown measures

    The government is likely to gradually introduce regional variation in England’s lockdown measures, an analysis of coronavirus case numbers and the UK’s recently published exit strategy suggests.

    New data shows the incidence of the disease varies widely across the country, with Cumberland, Durham, Herefordshire and Norfolk now having 12 times as many Covid-19 cases than counties such as Devon, Cornwall and Dorset.

    The analysis was done by Edge Health, a leading provider of data analysis to the NHS in England, exclusively for The Telegraph.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-news-uk-lockdown-schools-deaths-cases-tests-latest/

    Possibly a good idea, but it will need careful planning and control.

    1. Blimey, we’ll have to be careful if we visit chums living on the Suffolk/Norfolk border. One wrong turn and we could be banged up for the rest of our natural.

          1. They have a small railway museum if you like that sort of thing 🙂 The point of my not going is that the road to get there goes in and out of Wales 🙂

    1. 319295+ up ticks,
      Morning Bob,
      The Dover patrol is the most active fishing fleet we have, courtesy of the
      governance parties.
      Fishing for replaicements for indigenous citizens and party boosters
      replaicing any disillusioned leavers.

    2. Stupid boy! They are guiding them safely to the nearest benefit office and accommodation agency.

  6. Telegraph article: “Neil Ferguson’s Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time”.
    I am one of the fiercer critics of the model and how it was assembled, but it was only decision support. People chose to believe and act, in a haze of hysteria, so any devastating mistake was that of the politicians.
    And that means you, Boris.

    2. 319295+ up ticks,
      Morning O,
      Per usual as with the GEs and consequences for, especially the last two decades, shared blame.
      Blinkered electorate & treacherous politico’s.

    3. I am still – no, not astonished, I’ve been around too long to be amazed by stupidity and hysteria – unimpressed by anyone, let alone politicians, paying any heed to anything coming out of Imperial College.
      The poor standard of their predictions has been known for nearly 20 years.
      Ooops, morning, Herr Oberst

  7. HS2 ‘badly off course’, warns damning report by MPs. 17 May 2020.

    High Speed 2 is “badly off course” and it is unclear that the firm building the £100 billion rail line has the necessary “skills and capability”, according to a damning report by the Parliament’s most influential committee.

    The Public Accounts Committee accuses the Department for Transport (DfT) of withholding information about HS2’s spiralling costs, as its members said they were “unconvinced” that the budget would not rise further.

    Morning everyone. I’m pretty certain it will rise further because that is its purpose. This project has absolutely nothing to do with easing transportation or whatever. It is just another scam to syphon cash out of the public purse into private pockets!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/16/hs2-badly-course-warns-damning-report-mps/

    1. Of course it is. While the public is distracted by the lockdown, HS2 contractors have been moving into the sites of special scientific interest, areas of outstanding natural beauty and ancient woodland to wreak as much damage as possible, so that there would be little left worth saving when the axe comes down on this scam, as it should have done years ago.

      They deliberately left off the environmental costs and the costs of mitigation from the budget presented before Parliament, and when challenged by the people of Hillingdon, and another community in Warwickshire, they got the politicised courts to rule their application out of order. Meanwhile, I had a planning application I made for a house extension in 2013 turned down because there might be bats roosting in the neighbourhood, and I was expected to pay for an environmental audit, costing thousands and conducted by someone with a conflict of interest in the result, before they would allow my application to proceed.

      Each time I challenge my MP, who is a business minister, over conflicts of interest, she ignores my letter, or issues platitudes that do not answer my question. There is therefore something amiss going on there in Whitehall that cannot be addressed democratically.

      A conspiracy theorist might even suggest that the breakdown in Disqus’s software is down to official interference to stop people reading what I have to say.

      1. A conspiracy theorist might even suggest that the breakdown in Disqus’s software is down to official interference to stop people reading what I have to say.

        Morning Jeremy. It seems pretty obvious to me that Disqus is being sabotaged. Perhaps Geoff should be looking for another home for us! Maybe one on a Russian site!

        1. Didn’t Mike Pompeo just sack the officer investigating him?

          Not sure about trusting the Russians – their presidential double-shuffle between Putin and Medvedev has now been replicated by the Israelis. It might have worked between Blair and Brown, had not “Mr Prudence” met that bigoted woman.

          When I hear an old Tory Blue Rinse two metres from me outside the village shop in law-abiding Worcestershire talking about revolution, then maybe I wonder if democracy is not shaping up to what it claims to be. Good honest corrupt authoritarian tyranny awaits, unless the public takes matters into their own hands.

          1. Good honest corrupt authoritarian tyranny awaits…

            I would suggest that it already here and simply attempting to conceal its presence for as long as possible!

        2. 319295+ up ticks,
          As,
          Complete agreement,
          if it is so, numbers will fall & another success story in dismantling the free speech infrastructure.

      2. A conspiracy theorist might even suggest that the breakdown in Disqus’s software is down to official interference to stop people reading what I have to say.

        Morning Jeremy. It seems pretty obvious to me that Disqus is being sabotaged. Perhaps Geoff should be looking for another home for us! Maybe one on a Russian site!

    2. “Badly off course?”

      You mean they are building it in the wrong place? Wow! But nothing surprises me anymore.

      1. Ooooher …..
        I thought there were a lot of people mending the pothole just up the road.
        Morning, Willum.

      2. No, Bill, I think they mean they are starting in London and headed South to connect us with the Isle of Wight.

        :-))

    3. How does a multi-billion pound infrastructure fall into the hands of a company that is now under scrutiny and doubts arise as to its skills and capability? The opposition, on many levels, to this scheme have all been brushed aside and it has been given the green light to wreak havoc on the countryside. Next we’ll hear that the livery of the train company will be a shiny shade of manila.

    4. 319295+ up ticks,
      Morning As,
      It does have a strong odour of
      one major scam down, a replacement on track.
      There is no need of it unless there is an urgent need for wee crankie to visit
      brussels in a hurry.
      Blatant scam & political pocket filler.

      1. Morning Bill – It’s very touching that the little boy has provided his teddy with a face mask.. The sooner the children get back to school and sort out the realities of life with their young friends the better. Isolation is not good for them.

          1. At about that age, I imagined that there were snakes lying under my bed. I knew it was a silly idea; I knew it was a confection arising from my own over-heated imagination.
            I still used to make a flying leap from the bedside mat onto the bed.
            It was a ‘phrase’ I went through. It certainly didn’t occur to me to tell my parents.

          2. With all due respect Mrs A, I think we NoTTLers require a second opinion from YB

          3. With me it was a monster in the loo. If I wasn’t out of the bathroom by the time the flushing had finished, it would get me.

          4. Snakes and trolls will break my bones, but ‘phrases’ will never hurt me.

            (Said with a chuckle)

  9. A man is sitting next to a woman on a jet, which is getting ready to take off. Suddenly, the man sneezes.

    He unzips his pants and wipes the end of his penis off with his handkerchief. He zips up, and continues reading his magazine.

    The woman cannot believe what she just saw. Then the man sneezes again, unzips, pulls out his penis and wipes it off with a handkerchief.

    The woman says, “Excuse me sir, but that is disgusting and rude, and if you do it again, I am going to call the Flight Attendant and have you removed from this plane!”

    He says, “I am so sorry that I have offended you. I have this very rare, embarrassing physical handicap that causes me to orgasm every time I sneeze.”

    The woman, disarmed by the man’s honesty, and somewhat embarrassed by her own callousness, says, with sympathy, “Oh you poor man, what are you taking for it?”

    “Pepper,” he answers.

  11. ‘Morning All
    Bloody Disqus,I warned then not to use Prof Ferguson for their code upgrade………….

    1. 319295+ up ticks,
      Morning Rik,
      Sad to say as a disrupter of a free speech network of peoples it works a treat.
      There is, IMO to much concentrated
      brain power in that area for it to be other than intentional, going on to long.

    2. Seems to have fouled up at the same time as the see more/less button moved above the wee pulldown for delete. The latter only works when the comment is minimised.
      So, yes. It’s been Fergusoned.

  14. SIR – One positive consequence of the current situation is that our surroundings are greener.

    The verges in and around towns, which would normally have been cut, are now full of grasses and wildflowers, providing a feast for beleaguered insects. Let us hope that this results in a change in councils’ “grass-cutting” policies, and that they leave our verges alone in future.

    Katharine Groom
    Hitchin, Hertfordshire

    You must be a super optimist, Kathy, if you think that members of councils will heed your plea. Councils are the lowest tier of government, i.e. they are made up of wannabe politicians who are crazed with power. They will not listen to the little people who advise them with their common sense. They will continue to wield their power and make idiotic decisions because they can. Plus ça change.

    1. I agree with the thrust of your comments but I am not sure whether or not the problem is with the elected councillors or the employed staff. The real power and the making of idiotic decisions seems to lie with the highly-paid CEO of the Council (or whatever title they have) with, as far as I can see, almost no power of the councillors to rein this in.

  15. SIR – In an otherwise excellent compendium of worthy British war films, Simon Heffer (Hinterland, May 9) makes a fundamental error in his description of the The Dam Busters as “routine”.

    It is precisely the element of normalcy that is compelling; one gets the impression, reinforced by the scenes where they finish their tours, that this is just another raid – until the targets are revealed.

    It is understated drama which seems to convey the attitude of those in uniform during the conflict – and is the best British war film, by far.

    Andrew J Lewis
    Chelmsford, Essex.

    “Normalcy”? There is absolutely nothing normal about a (presumed) Englishman who routinely uses this vacuous non-word when the correct form of normality is available for his use.

    I think you may have been watching too many American made war films which educate us all to the “fact” that it was the Yanks who won the second world war, singlehandedly.

    1. Morning, Grizz.
      Yes, that jarred; like biting on tinfoil with an old amalgam filling.

      1. Morning, Nursey.

        Were you a fellow sucker of the foil used to wrap the Sunday joint too? 🤣

          1. And hinders splatter on the inside of the oven.
            I’ll get me brillo…

          2. Only if completely wrapped in the stuff. Make it into a boat shape and it keeps the roasting tin clean.

          3. I’ve become devoted to slow roasting in a huge cast iron pot my elder son gave me.
            As a bonus, it’s so heavy that bending and pulling it in and out of the oven is excellent exercise.
            Victorian cooks must have been extremely fit.

          6. I do that too but in a wide, enamelled, cast-iron Le Creuset dish (lid off) that I got cheaply on offer at Jessops in Nottingham (John Lewis) 25 years ago. I wouldn’t be without it.

            Only mum used foil. I don’t.

    4. Could be that he is a septic, of course. Note the middle initial. Very Merkin….

          3. Do keep up, Grizz. Joseph was questioning my assertion that middle initials are “very Merkin”. As he has one and isn’t….

          8. Middle initial, Grizz – middle initial – look at Jo’s moniker….

          13. ‘Morning, Bill, you’ll be saying, “Super” and “Spiffing” next.

  16. SIR – In an otherwise excellent compendium of worthy British war films, Simon Heffer (Hinterland, May 9) makes a fundamental error in his description of the The Dam Busters as “routine”.

    It is precisely the element of normalcy that is compelling; one gets the impression, reinforced by the scenes where they finish their tours, that this is just another raid – until the targets are revealed.

    It is understated drama which seems to convey the attitude of those in uniform during the conflict – and is the best British war film, by far.

    Andrew J Lewis
    Chelmsford, Essex.

    “Normalcy”? There is absolutely nothing normal about a (presumed) Englishman who routinely uses this vacuous non-word when the correct form of normality is available for his use.

    I think you may have been watching too many American made war films which educate us all to the “fact” that it was the Yanks who won the second world war, singlehandedly.

    1. With the bat lurgy in full flood, it is no surprise that the world has been turned upside down.

    2. We have some very good Chinese restaurants near us which serve delicious food. I wonder if they will survive the crisis.

      In the 60’s when I was at UEA there was a police raid on a Chinese restaurant in Norwich to which we used to go for celebrations when we were in funds. They found the carcass of an Alsation dog in the cold storage freezer room.

      We changed our eating habits and on special occasions when we could afford it we went to an Indian restaurant instead.

      1. A university friend of mine went into environmental health and spent a lot of time in the 1980s inspecting ‘ethnic’ restaurants and takeaways in Manchester. Some of the tales he told had us reaching for the chunder bucket. We too changed our eating habits if we met up for a night out – it was strictly British chippies after a few pints.

        Some of the proprietors claimed ignorance of the law and the language. My friend, in court: “They knew enough English of a particular kind when telling me they didn’t agree with my findings!”.

  19. Good Morning Folks

    Nice sunny start here,

    I thought disqus was back up again, but it was a three day old comment

    1. Yes, replies to disqus posts do seem to be arriving a few days late, if at all. I think I’ll start replying now to posts which will be made next Wednesday.

      There might be something wrong with my plan, but I’m not sure what it could be.

    2. Yes, replies to disqus posts do seem to be arriving a few days late, if at all. I think I’ll start replying now to posts which will be made next Wednesday.

      There might be something wrong with my plan, but I’m not sure what it could be.

  20. Morning all

    SIR – As a recently retired member of the teaching profession, I deplore the current attitude of the unions.

    Whether right or wrong in their opinion that asking teachers to return to the classroom was too dangerous, the manner in which they have handled the matter has been outrageous. Instead of immediately adopting a contrary stance, the unions should have asked themselves how they could work with the Government.

    The teaching profession is much-maligned. We had the chance to regain public support, but the unions have blown it.

    Jonathan Whybrow

    Lechlade, Gloucestershire

    SIR – Having taught for 30 years and spent 10 as an inspector, I would like to know how a teacher might, first, keep two metres away from a pupil who requires personal help and, secondly, talk to a class while wearing a mask and goggles.

    David Jones

    Wigan, Lancashire

    SIR – Surely schools will be less dangerous places than they were before the lockdown.

    Everyone knows about washing hands regularly and adults are well aware of social distancing rules. There have been no cases of children passing Covid-19 on to adults, so the sooner pupils are back socialising with each other and learning together the better.

    Victoria Back

    Wadhurst, East Sussex

    SIR – Perhaps the union leaders should ask for advice from supermarket managers, who have kept the food supply flowing throughout lockdown while also keeping their staff safe, in both stores and distribution depots.

    Mary Marshall

    Ilkley, West Yorkshire

    SIR – Teachers’ reluctance to return to school, backed by their unions, is one thing – but their reported reluctance to teach online is unacceptable.

    My daughter-in-law, a senior maths teacher, has been working normal weeks teaching online. The only change, she tells me, is that she is at home, with students based in Singapore, Hong Kong, India and other countries around the world.

    Her pupils have adjusted easily to their differing time zones, and her A-level students are doing brilliantly. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

    John Dakin

    London SE15

    1. ” …talk to a class while wearing a mask and goggles…”

      Goggles, Mr Jones? GOGGLES? Blimey, why not go the whole hog and wear the white suit as well while you’re at it, then you can really frighten the children witless!

      ‘Morning, Epi.

        1. I will never forget our chemistry lessons. A length of bunsen burner tubing called Dr Tonic hung menacingly on one side to be applied to the class miscreants. Today, social services would be involved. Maybe why I was able to gain a degree in chemistry later on!

          1. Poor chap wasn’t a cricketer then? Unable to aim board rubbers accurately?

          2. Until I saw the words ‘bunsen burner’ written down I thought that this device for heating retorts full of chemicals was called a Bun St Bernard. One of the most miraculous things on my cv is that I have “O” level passes in Physics and Chemistry

          4. It’s a shame there is no way of posting pictures here of the devastations you may have caused by dodgy dentistryI

            At least I can keep you on your toes and your teeth on edge by posting the occasional typo for you to say it is not a typo but a grammatical error.

            (To be honest I have no evidence to suggest your dentistry was not of just as high a standard as my teaching of English!)

  21. SIR – The latest coronavirus modelling from Public Health England, suggesting that there are just 24 cases per day in London, surely indicates that the Government needs to be more effective in targeting places where people are most at risk.

    At present we have a one-size-fits-all approach. Perhaps it is time to give some regions more autonomy over when and how the lockdown is lifted.

    Catherine Milone

    London SW17

  22. SIR – I have seen very little publicity about the coronavirus app, which 3.5 million have apparently already downloaded (not just in the Isle of Wight).

    There is no coverage, no advice, no guidance on how to download it. Surely the Government should be encouraging people to do this. Why the secrecy?

    Nick White

    Carshalton Beeches, Surrey

    1. Avoiding bad publicity when it doesn’t work as intended? After all, this is a government IT initiative, so bound to fail.

    3. My response to a bookface post

      Would people be happy to download the new NHS contact tracing app to help reduce spread of virus?
      Question by Claudia Katharine Brooks

      No – having worked in NHS software I would confidently expect the first attempt at tracing to cause an Uber delivery of asparagus

  27. Janet Daley in the DT:

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/16/bitter-class-war-raging-haves-have-nots-lockdown/

    Unions will unleash bitter class war in their alliance with the bourgeoisie

    “Fierce social divides are emerging between the ‘winners’ of lockdown and those who are losing out

    16 May 2020 • 1:00pm

    The season of good will is definitely over. Now that the monolithic shutdown is being replaced in an experimental, higgledy-piggledy way, there is plenty of scope for contentious division, particularly when the problem is one to which nobody can have definitive answers.

    And division is what makes it possible for opposition forces – both official and unofficial – to get back into the game. Which is fine: free societies need open disagreement. Enforced unanimity is for totalitarian governments, not democracies. So what war correspondents would call “the uneasy truce” is breaking down.

    The regions and the unions and the political lobbies are making it clear that they are distinguishable entities with their own constituencies. If their interests collide with government judgement, all the better – which is to say, all the more newsworthy.

    The population at large seems rather bemused but is inclined to tolerate these confrontational forays so long as they present themselves as driven by concern for Public Safety which is becoming a pretty tortuous concept. If you have a morbid sense of humour, you might have been amused by the teaching unions trying to explain why they wanted classrooms closed indefinitely when that is so clearly exacerbating the problems of just those disadvantaged pupils who – in another political context – would be their special concern. It is all very confusing, as everybody keeps saying. But the government doesn’t appear any more incoherent than its critics.

    One of the more bizarre outcomes of this historic episode is that a whole platoon of left-wing union leaders are resisting any relaxation of the lockdown and thus putting themselves on the side of the privileged classes: the educated parents who can provide their children with a home life that makes formal schooling less essential, the professionals who can comfortably carry on their careers from home, the technologically equipped and competent whose work and social contacts continue quite seamlessly.

    The latest figures show that 44 percent of the population is now working from home. Most of those are getting at least 80 per cent of their usual earnings but with far fewer outgoings. These people are having a “good lockdown” in the way that some fortunate members of a previous generation were said to have had a “good war”. The big difference is that the lucky ones this time have a great deal in common: they are almost entirely middle class, have higher education qualifications, and are in professional jobs which can be adapted to suit these changed circumstances.

    What we are seeing is not so much a new class system as a revival of the old one, just when we thought we had arrived at the end of it: over the last decade or two, skilled tradesmen have been earning as much as young professionals (much better to be a plumber than a graduate nurse), and many of the old social divides have been breached by popular culture and improved state education.

    Well, forget about that for the foreseeable future. The people who work with their hands or whose physical presence is required to do the job, are losing out big time. Not only are their livelihoods taking a disastrous hit for the duration of the present emergency, but they are getting into the sort of longer term financial difficulty from which they might never recover – especially as their productive lives are likely to be less flexible than those of university graduates who can adapt to new occupational paths without much difficulty.

    Obviously, the trade unions and Leftwing activists were going to find grounds for attacking whatever the (Tory) government decided to do next but how on earth did they get here? How absurd that they should now be embracing a position which is so deeply detrimental to the very people they were committed to defend.

    The great mass of the industrial proletariat may have faded into the mists of history but there are plenty of the less fortunate who need to be spoken for: the children who desperately need schooling to give them half a chance in life (as the heads of academy schools angrily pointed out last week), and the adults who need to go back to work if their jobs are to survive. (Just a thought: perhaps this new union orientation is all part of the Islington-isation of the Left.)

    There may be an ironic retribution coming, of course. Some of those middle class parents who are now so complacent about their own and their children’s futures that they want the lockdown to be preserved until all semblance of risk is abolished, might discover that they are, in fact, unemployed when the government subsidy of their income is finally withdrawn.

    But even as the news narrative changes and the risk of irreparable damage to the economy is taken seriously, this strange political alliance remains: militant unions which once spoke for what was known back in the day as “the organised working class” are now obstructing the return of working class jobs and defending the interests of people they would once have dismissed as “bourgeois liberals”.

    Mind you, there is some evidence that this new orthodoxy is confusing even to its own followers. I saw a spokesman for one of these left-wing lobbying outfits tie herself in knots in a broadcast interview last week: she insisted that all their opinion-testing showed that people were still too frightened to go back to work and, she added, that was understandable when you saw all the thousands of people crowded onto rush hour trains last week. Wait a minute…

    The language of the Left was once – if you can remember that far back – about class war. More recently, it was about social justice or “fairness”. For a generation we have argued about whether there should be equality of opportunity (as the free market Right believed) or equality of outcome (advocated by the Left). Almost nobody with a modern social conscience would have supported moves that blatantly favoured people who already had huge advantages over those who had none. This is new territory. I hesitate to think where it is going to end.”

    1. The Unions will be playing their part, I suppose, in the great carbon neutral saving the planet agenda.

      1. 319295+ up ticks,
        Morning Bob,
        Do we acknowledge that the unions are the people ie the herd in content.
        Also selection of governance parties are, via the ballot booth
        the peoples, herds, choice.
        Once bitten twice shy, to be bitten numerous times means you enjoy the sensation and want more of the same.
        Facts need facing.

    2. The Unions (and the Left, generally) have long since abandoned the working classes.

  28. 90 migrants intercepted in six small boats in English Channel. Sky News 16 May 2020.

    Six boats carrying 90 migrants which were attempting to cross the English Channel have been intercepted by Border Force boats.
    The occupants of the six boats, one of which carried 25 people, were brought to Dover, Kent, to be dealt with by immigration authorities.

    Minister for Immigration Compliance and the Courts Chris Philp said: “Today’s incidents are the result of criminals smuggling people into the country illegally.

    “Criminal intelligence continues to be shared between the NCA and French authorities and substantial French law enforcement deployment prevented a number of further boats crossing this morning.

    Just to remind you all that the Home Office Muslim Pipeline has not been closed down! The excuse is of course just nonsense; it’s like saying; Today’s incidents are the result of criminals robbing banks illegally. There will be more robberies tomorrow.

    https://news.sky.com/story/90-migrants-intercepted-in-six-small-boats-in-english-channel-11989668

    1. The problem will never be solved because the police, the civil servants and the politicians are more than happy for the practice to continue.

    2. More people are coming across the channel illegally ( supposedly ) than catching the corona virus.

      1. This is the Cunard Line of Illegal Migration. Travel in Luxury. Arrival guaranteed. Accomodation assured!

          1. “Accomodation Accommodation assured!” – -or – you’ll get a house once we’ve built – and paid for – it.

      1. Why doesn’t the government just openly admit what they are doing instead of trying to hide it and attacking the messenger, it makes for worse public feeling at the end of the day.

        1. 319295+ up ticks,
          Morning B3,
          Why would one want them to admit it?
          The peoples that put the governance parties in power can plainly SEE what has been evident to many for many a year.
          What is happening is due to peoples consent via the ballot booth.

          1. It is but at elections people always get hoodwinked into voting on other issues or for keeping out Stalin

          2. 319295+ up ticks,
            B3,
            Many of us were in no way “hoodwinked” to vote denying stalin and giving hitler carte blanche is to many of us NOT the answer.

          1. It may well have done 20 years ago, but I don’t think it could bothered now. There seems to be a national attitude of ‘whatevs’ amongst those who would provide the groundswell.

            Good morning, Bill.

          2. The Covid19 experiment is proving a great success.

            Politicians have seen that the general public has become so cravenly cowardly that it will accept any restrictions of its liberty that the politicians wish to impose.

            The time is now ripe for the Post-Democratic Age of Tyranny.

    4. 319295+ up ticks,
      As,
      Once again the governance party has proved to be of a treacherous nature.
      Whatever possess people to support / vote for parties that by now as shown, will guarantee their sons / daughters
      a lifetime of on their knees suppression.

      1. Good morning, ogga

        As you know I often agree with many of the points you make.

        Were I to be, for example, a strong supporter of the Monster Raving Loony Party and desperately wanted it to form the next government I think I would have to admit to myself that it would never happen. Can you not admit to yourself that UKIP is now finished? We may indeed need another anti-EU party in the future but it surely won’t be UKIP.

        1. 319295 + up ticks,
          morning R,
          Try more ketchup, Current UKIP with ersatz Nec are unsupportable, but the
          real UKIP members are still in play & seeking a
          new political home.
          Present UKIP fell foul of the treachery campaign via the Nec
          following lab/lib/con in that respect.
          The electorate will NOT accept the fact that the
          lab/lib/con coalition party are un-electable
          treacherous sh!te.
          I for one are looking at the UKFM with growing interest.

          1. Ogga, I am very fed up with your constant sniping at the populace for voting for the only candidates that stood for election. You do need to understand that voters cannot vote for someone who hasn’t put themselves up as a candidate. UKIP has imploded and is no longer the answer and as for your wnderful real UKIP members – didn’t they elect the treacherous NEC – whatever possessed real UKIP members to support / vote for such traitors?

          2. 319295+ up ticks,
            Morning C,
            As for your being fed up
            I my dear don’t give a
            damn.
            In all probability you are one of the supporter / voters I truly blame for the state of this Country currently.
            Listen up we UKIP members voted in the
            nec granted, there were
            decision makers already in who outnumbered those joining, read up on it.
            So unlike the lab/lib/con coalition party members / voters that continue to
            support& vote for guaranteed failure.
            What is an underlining fact is that you in all probability vote in a sh!te party once again
            there lies the cause of your fed up malady.
            There are other options instead of party first or the best of the worst.

          3. Why doesn’t ‘Real UKIP’ break away from its NEC, rebrand itself and start again?

            Look at the success Nigel Farage had to begin with with his Brexit Party. The tragedy was that he caved into Johnson far too easily, far too soon and in exchange for: Diddly Squat – that nasty expression Johnson likes using meaning Sweet Fanny Adams.

            If only Farage had not fallen at the last hurdle we might have been in a far better position to achieve a decent Brexit.

            Where you and I differ is that to me Brexit is more important than any political party; for you UKIP is more important than getting completely free of the EU.

          4. 319295+ up ticks,
            Afternoon R,
            You really must catch up, UKIP has fallen brought down by a treacherous Nec.
            The farage IMO has always been a tory man as I have explained to you before, many times.”
            “if only’s” don’t work.
            Real UKIP members stil abound as I explained to you 2 hours ago.
            Now I am seriously looking at UKFM.
            Wellington did not sent half his troops home prior to Waterloo.
            The farage did prior to the GE.
            I was NOT one of those on the 24/6/2016 shouting job done leave it to the tory’s, far from it.

          5. 319330+ up ticks,
            Morning R,
            The problem is as with many farage did not “cave in” to johnson
            farage was a johnson / tory asset.
            As with a multitude of peoples trust & HOPE was / is put into each & every tory leader for years with a near on guarantee of
            treachery / failure.

    5. Why is our government not turning to the French government and saying ‘your problem, you deal with it’?

      It’s as simple as towing the boats back to within sight of the French coast and holing the boats.

    6. There are more small boats crossing the English Channel from France now than there were from Dunkirk in 1940!

    7. “Six boats carrying 90 migrants which were attempting to cross the English Channel ” – ( they’d probably heard construction on new houses was going to resume) – so Border Force got involved to ensure they successfully reached Dover. Add on the rest of their families and that 90 become a lot nearer a thousand wanting a free life.
      On a serious side – as we have the Terminal in Calais where lorries are checked for illegals, why can’t the BF return the illegals to that, then leave them there to be removed to the French side ( after taking the boats off them ). I’m sure I’ve seen that even if some get onto the ferry before it leaves Calais, they can be removed from the ferry and turned back to France’s side, so why not those that are picked up in the Channel?

      1. 319295+ up ticks,
        Afternoon W,
        The rewards for supporting / voting for mass uncontrolled immigration parties time & time again.
        If a person voting lab/lib/con as is their right, then there is no cause for complaint as these issue are with their consent via the ballot booth.

  31. Is it just me or has disqus sorted the problem with .jpgs just shewing a link but not the picture?

    I have refreshed several times (as usual) and the pictures and tweets remain visible.

    1. But I see the “New Comments above/below” still gives up and stops working, after 3 pages or 150 comments are opened

  33. I made these comment on Greta Thunberg’s Facebook page just now:

    In response to a report that Jair Bolsonaro’s assault on the Amazon forest is intensifying while world attention is on this virus:

    “‪People often talk of those indulging in mass genocide – the Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot of our time and going back to the Genghis Khan, as villains committing the greatest crime. There is even a day to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust, a notorious act of genocide from the 20th century.‬

    I disagree that they are the worst. The worst criminals are those that are right now destroying the great forests. Genocide only affects one species; habitat destruction on this scale drives very many species to extinction. How could it not be worse?

    A suitable penalty for them is for them and their relatives as far as cousins to be put to death in the same manner they are doing to the forest. A particular place in hell reserved for the likes of Jair Bolsonaro and his associates.”

    In response to Jenifer Yoder Garlitz’s comment “Not
    eating meat is a direct action we can take to stop deforestation in
    Brazil, since logging is happening to make new areas for cattle raising.” following Thunberg’s long-standing call for veganism, I had this to say:

    “I have decided to boycott corned beef produced in Brazil, and recommend all those with a conscience to do likewise. Where I can find it, I do buy and enjoy that produced in my country, the UK.

    Not for us, the mass industrial ranches on cleared land, fed on grain grown on yet more cleared land, and belching out huge amounts of methane that contaminates the atmosphere and slurry that pollutes the water systems until all life there dies.

    Cattle should be on pasture land, fed on grass that grows as it should, on land fertilised by their dung. Much as I dislike feminism, it has to be said that dairy herds keep their females and eat their males.

    What decided it for me in favour of mixed farming was living in Herefordshire next to a farm. It had been a dairy farm, since Herefordshire is a pastoral county and it is hard to grow arable profitably without lots of chemical input. Guided by modern thinking though, the farmer reduced his herd and put the land down to growing wheat and barley.

    First to go were the hedges and field trees. There was no need for stockproof fences and they just got in the way of the machinery. Then, ten times a year, the enlarged fields were sprayed with weedkiller, herbicide, insecticide, fungicide and growth hormone, according to modern practice. There was a constant chemical stench hanging in the air. A sheep farmer in the valley lost over 40 of his lambs, and my own son rushed to hospital with breathing difficulties after the arable farmers sprayed Roundup on a warm still day.

    The fields that were still down to grass, however, had a healthy insect and bird life on the fringes. There were herbs and wild flowers, considered an important part of a cow’s diet.

    Sadly, the trade deal with the USA being pushed through while the public is being distracted by Coronavirus, is insisting that we allow the American model of cattle raising to become the norm, and to drive the traditional mixed farmers of my country out of business.”

    Had I been able to vote in the 2016 US Presidential Election, I would have voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton, being the least worst option. The dodgy deal-maker who gets things done and gets things working for the common man and his feline squeeze (the Slocombesque word I want is on the banned list) is better than the corrupt insider who serves only her select elite and offers no hope for anyone else. This year, it would be the opposite. Trump’s association with Bolsonaro, Erdogan and Netanyahu have dishonoured him irreparably. I would vote for Biden, even if he was in advanced dementia, and even if his party were consumed by woke lunacy.

    2. A million upticks!
      I was attending a class, or meeting, or something, one evening when the question of steak arose. (Probably my being provocative – the foot and mouth outbreak was in full flow.). I suggested that as far as I knew beef steak came from bulls and not cows. A woman, who gave her credentials as “a farmer’s wife”, told me, and the rest of the world with some forcefulness that I was talking rubbish. She said beef came from cows. I replied that the steak I wanted to eat was beef from bulls, and not minced cow burgers from McD.
      She came at me again, but I said nothing more.
      I watched a programme on Argentina presented by John Torode. I was astonished and dismayed to learn that Argentine cattle are fatted up on feedlots, crammed together like battery hens.
      And another thing. I read somewhere that food is less nutritious than it was 100 years ago, although it looks much better cosmetically. Considering how awful Dutch tomatoes are, I well believe it. Don’t see much in the MSM about that though.

      1. Many veges & fruit are picked & transported (chilled) before they are ripe, so never develop their expected quota of vitamins, etc.

      2. Everyone has a mother, and beef cattle (whatever gender they identify themselves as) are no exception. Of course beef comes from cows.

    3. Intensive farming of any sort – whether arable with the increased amount of chemical spraying, or intensive livestock farming where the animals never see the light of day is hugely damaging to ecosystems, insects, birdlife and wildlife of all kinds.

      I hope this trade deal with the US, if those are going to be the terms , is seen off as the one with the EU will be. The USA, no more than the EU, should not be allowed to dictate the animal welfare or farming methods of this country.

  35. The depth of public fear about this virus, to the extent that they sit quivering in their houses in the sure knowledge that if they so much as see a person on the street, or touch a gatepost, they will against all the odds catch the most deadly form of the killer virus and succumb to its unseen evil has been a bit of a puzzler to me.

    Then I realised that they all, or a high percentage of them, probably hand money over every week in the sure and certain knowledge that this week will be the one that they win the National Lottery, and if not this week, they’d better do it next week just in case, and so on.

    Because, after all, somebody wins it.

    1. I wonder if our fragrant sempstress in Bath won the millions last night?

    2. The Corona virus, in causing chaos and damage to society, acts as camouflage and opportunity for a take-over by the “elites” to “save” society and restore order. At the same time, freedoms are removed to ensure “safety”.
      Like boiling a frog, by the time society realises, it’s too late.
      Thus, immigration is encouraged & facilitated, virus panic encouraged, all leading to draconian curtailment of freedom, all to “protect” society. Nearly there now.
      Never waste a good crisis.

      1. And in the mean time the invasion of our once sceptered land goes on indefinitely.
        Home secretary who promised to stop it has been missing from the scene for more than 8 weeks.
        But apparently she’s back on the case tomorrow.
        Not at all what the British public voted for.

        1. 319295+ up ticks,
          Morning Re,
          “promised” she is ersatz tory, the wretch cameron knocked the arse out of pledges,promises, & vows.
          ” Not what the peoples voted for” can be applied to the time before, then before that
          then prior to that,that ,that,& that.
          Without their input we would never have got to where we are today as a Country.

    3. I’m not greedy, I only hold a number of Premium Bonds that return a higher percentage than the Building Society.
      In fact i’m tempted to pull half of what I have in the BS and use that to bump up my PB holding.

  36. Fish’n’chips ??

    M. Salah rejected an offer from Real Madrid in order to remain at Liverpool in 2018, according to former Egypt assistant Hany Ramzy. (On Time Sports – in Egyptian)

    1. When I was doing my “conceptual art” (don’t ask – it was a “just jump through the hoops to get the degree” moment), I printed the Braille for “don’t touch” and put it behind glass. I am relieved to say that once I graduated I never went near such silliness ever again.

    3. Ah! is the Disqusting comments notification system finally kicking back to life?

      1. Looks like it’s back Bob.
        How’s it all going opp narth ?
        We have been staying in as much as possible. After making the guitar and an occasional table for the garden, I’ve been busy making repairs to garden furniture. Just a table top to go.
        My wife has been to the garden centre where I met with you. We needed some tomato plants. But although they sell produce from Redbourn Mill we
        still can’t get hold of bread flour.
        Strange that both flour and yeast are unavailable at the moment !

        1. Too many people making their own bread?
          We’ve not been too bad up here and being retired it’s not affected me that much.
          As we only have 10 houses near us, the stay indoors rule has gone by the wayside.

          Yes, that guitar looked nice. Dr. Daughter would probably be interested in having a play on it!

          2. My wife called in and managed to buy some whole meal and yeast more than twice the supermarket costs. But hey…..
            Where is your daughter a doctor Bob ?

          3. Currently Carlisle.
            In the 2nd year of a 7y Ophthalmology training post.

          4. Too far from home 😕.
            I have a nephew in the north Pennines.
            We haven’t been there for ten years.
            Rookhope, It’s a wonder part of country.
            They’ve just had well over 2 thousand trees planted near by.

    5. I get nowt but a brief flickerette of the red blob when I log in. No new notifications, though.

      1. Even though mine say 9+, when I open it, it has the same old, same old and then turns black when I close it. A refresh brings it back with the same 9+ and the same responses lined with blue on the left side, indicating that I’ve never read them.

        Disqus is such an arse, I wish I had the know-how to find us another system that would update, move to new comments no matter how many were already there and also display the names of the otherwise cowardly down-voters.

        2. Downvoters have been visible for several months now.
          I guess they’ll sort out the notifications problem eventually as they did before.

    1. Much the same as arguing with the vast majority of people of either sex (or “sheeple” as Winston Churchill called them).

    2. They are maddening and pop up everywhere, but if I can I go to “manage”, make sure they are all “off” and then save. The DT is one of the worst ones now.

  41. Live golf on Sky Sports tonight – maybe not your idea of good TV but better than recordings of Eurovision.

          3. I had to do some research – apparently foursomes involves two pairs four balls and a lot of stroke play….

  42. COVID-19 starts with inflammation of the endothelium which promotes the creation of blood cell rosettes where healthy red blood cells are recruited as a coating by virus infected cells making the latter endetectable by the body. This process happens at the microcirculation level and therefore becomes systemic with the result that it can affect all organs of the body but the virus may not be necessarily be detectable in all of them post mortem.

    The lungs are the first to respond to this effect where the arterioles meet the venules in capilliary vessels. Hence COVID has been labelled wrongly as an acute respiratory disease after observations of drastic drops on blood oygen saturation level.

    This explanation may be wrong because the science has yet to be discovered.

    1. Not to worry, Angie. My arterioles never meet the venues in capillary vessels. They are much more alert and sensible and keep a good 6 feet apart.
      :-))

  43. Social distancing corrodes society. Spiked. 17 May 2020.

    The health secretary had been asked when Brits might be able to embrace people outside their own household. ‘Well really, to get to the point where this is totally sorted’, he burbled, ‘it’s when we have a treatment or a vaccine’. Hancock said one could be ‘on stream’ by the autumn. But most say it would take at least 18 months, and we might not ever find one at all.

    It’s hard to work out what is more absurd here: that a government minister now feels emboldened to decree that there will be no hugging until further notice, or that he thinks such advice will actually hold.

    One is irresistibly reminded here of a television series from long ago entitled When the Kissing had to Stop. This showed a Britain slipping inexorably into a Police and Marxist State with Russian help. Happily we’ve advanced sufficiently in the real world so as not to have needed their assistance!

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/17/social-distancing-corrodes-society/

    1. I am quite glad that we are not allowed to embrace other people.

      There was far too much of that “mwah, mwah” kissing malarky – one was often expected to kiss people whom one had only just met.

      Even yer French thought it had gone too far….

      1. Nonsense. Rome under the Borgias was the epitomy of civilisation. What we need’s an orgy in a mudbath. Bring back Glastonbury, that’s what I say.

  44. Morning again

    SIR – Your report (“Smaller high streets may signal route to shopping sector revival”, May 11) rightly identifies high streets as crucial to the retail revival. However, ensuring that they thrive will require government support.

    Retail was a major employer before the pandemic struck, integral to the economic wellbeing of the country, so it should be at the heart of the rebuilding strategy.

    The aim must be to create a new breed of entrepreneurial shop-keepers, while supporting those who have survived the lockdown. Central to this will be wholesale changes to commercial property law, reducing the burden on stores by abolishing upward-only rent reviews, introducing turnover rents and relaxing change-of-use restrictions.

    At the same time, responsibility for turning our town centres into community hubs that people want to visit must be given to local authorities. Before the lockdown, the Government had introduced a handful of schemes to rebuild high streets; now it has the opportunity to go further, and to make a real and positive difference.

    Rowland Gee

    London W14

    1. I have said this before, but I doubt anyone has the patience to dig into my comments archive.

      In 1990, my then-wife entered the playgroup she founded into a ‘Village Ventures’ award competition within Herefordshire. One of the other entries was a promotional video from Kington, a small market town on the Welsh border, showing off the many and varied shops and businesses of the town with some well-deserved pride. In 1991, after introducing the National Business Rate, two-thirds of the businesses featured in the video closed down because they were no longer viable.

      Ten years later, I visited relatives in the United States. What struck me was how very impoverished their town centers were. There was a diner and a gas station, and that was about it. Everything was concentrated on the shopping malls, with their huge car parks. I was glad to be home, where at least there were some interesting shops surviving in the high streets.

      Why must we always do things like the Americans?

      2. ‘Morning, Jeremy – the Australians also slavishly follow the Americans as well. About the only thing remaining is that they still drive on the left.

    2. Free parking would be a start (we have to use a car here or we don’t go anywhere).

  45. SIR – A friend of mine was diagnosed at the screening clinic with breast cancer.

    She has been waiting more than four weeks for a consultation with a specialist. When she phoned to ask when she would be given an appointment, she was asked whether she was aware that there was a pandemic.

    How many patients with potentially curable diseases are being sacrificed so that all NHS treatment can be devoted to Covid-19?

    Richard G Faber FRCS

    Shefford Woodlands, Berkshire

    2. Our younger son has a grumbling appendix which decided to flare up in the middle of this ‘pandemic’ i.e. three weeks ago. It was treated with IV antibiotics overnight and sent on his way with a week’s supply of further antibiotics. He said his ward was empty and the hospital was like a ghost town. Speaking to him yesterday he said he wouldn’t be doing star jumps anytime soon….. and he was getting tired of the bland, mushy food he had been advIsed to eat. After a recommendation from his gp he has phoned around various private hospitals, he has BUPA cover from his work, thinking he would get a quicker response. He learned that they are only interested at this time if one can be treated – wait for it…. by video.

  46. The NHS is sick.

    SIR – We salute the brave NHS doctors, nurses and ancillary workers; and yet, when we clap for the NHS, we dismiss from our minds the fact that these people are paid, on average, one sixth of the salaries earned by their managers, who have not been nearly as effective at doing their jobs during the Covid-19 crisis.

    When this is all over, we should stop clapping and instead demand a complete review of the salary structure of the NHS. The review must be entirely independent: no NHS bureaucrat should be allowed anywhere near it.

    Boris Johnson is in a unique position to lead this initiative, given that he owes his life to NHS doctors and nurses – and not their managers.

    Professor R G Faulkner

    Loughborough, Leicestershire

    1. Again, the NHS is really two organisations – as almost all the public sector is. There’s the service and the administration and the administration is vast, inefficient, ineffective and expensive.

      When the usual demands come through for higher taxes for ‘the old people and children’ what they mean is more bureaucracy. The money never, ever gets to the service side – it’s not intended to.

      Until the lies around tax hikes end and public sector funding is radically cut nothing will change.

  47. I was pondering during the night.

    All “civilised” countries appear to have gone doolally over the virus.

    Does that mean that every one of those counties has a Professor Branestorm? (Ferguson)….

    I mean, it’s an odd coincidence that sch madness is universal.

    Your thought for the day, NoTTLers.

      1. Indeed, I saw that, but thought that NoTTLers would not wish to have their morning ruined….

      3. She looks like a hefty wench these days; it’s amazing what ten years can do to one, which is when I assume the earlier seen photographs were taken, and presented to the nation’s Dailies for the delectation of their readers. They would have fallen about laughing if they’d seen that one in the first instance.

      4. The svelte proff was obviously doing most of the lifting with his bit of Skirt.

    3. Popular delusions and the madness of crowds. South Sea Bubble and Tulipmania. Global warming and corona virus.
      Morning Bill.

    4. He was probably first out of the blocks with outlandish projections of death.

      He thus got the lion’s share of the headlines around the world, via Reuters/AP Sky etc etc.

      The politicians reacted like the herd spotting that lion.

      Like the proverbial lie, it was running before the truth was even out of bed.

  48. SIR – If Robert Jenrick, the Housing Secretary, wants to get the housing market restarted, he should talk to the Chancellor.

    There is no single change the Government could make that would stimulate more parts of Britain’s internal economy than to suspend stamp duty for at least two years – and, I suggest, up to a value of £1.5 million.

    David Raynes

    Bath, Somerset

    1. Thereby stimulating demand, pushing up prices and increasing pressure on developers to build over unsuitable land, such as floodplains, prime agricultural land, conservation areas and land that is needed for industrial use and public utility. Osborne did that by his “Help to Buy” housebuying subsidy scheme. Thatcher did much the same thing in the 1980s by disposing of public social housing cheap with her “Right to Buy” for the speculating working classes.

      The most effective single change anyone could make would be to reverse the social changes since the 1970s that encourage divorce and people living in their own isolated bubbles, and instead create households in multiple occupancy, including grandparents and lodgers to eke out the income.

      1. You missed out the elephant in the room – stop importing a city the size of Derby (other city comparisons are available) and send back the imported criminals.

        1. Under the Home Office rules, criminal migrants are “skilled workers” and many can earn above the salary threshold, especially if they can get on a renumeration cartel that can fix their bonuses and share options.

          It’s the feckless care workers and nurses they will send home.

      2. All I can imagine is that she was offended because of the C-19 Wuhan hysteria and the Police inserted the sexual assault bit to justify taking it further.

    3. Morning all 😊
      There’s a new book out by John Sutherland.
      Crossing the Line.
      “Don’t blame the police for crime, blame politicians”.

      There’s a lot to be said for that but when the form of pc is dominating and human rights are a huge factors. And of course the certain types put into the prime positions. I’d say it’s about 50/50 at the moment.
      But I understand where an ex chief superindentant from London is coming from.
      I use to play a bit of golf with a senior copper from London. He took early to retirement because he had put up with the ‘political and pc interference’ for too long.

      2. Don’t knock Anita; the ‘common purpose’ of all Sikhs is to resist muslim domination, 24/7.
        If perchance that were to involve un petit peu d’effusion du sang, désolé , c’est la vie.

    1. I actually saw someone wearing a mask on the golf course yesterday. He was at least twenty yards from anyone else in his group so I have no idea what he ws protecting against.

      Somewhere in the middle us a sensible compromise.

  51. A long watch, but Prof. Dr Dolores Cahill appears to be making waves over in Ireland:-
    https://youtu.be/Avc6_ftzk3w

    Her Bio:-

    Prof. Dr Dolores Cahill is a world-wide renowned expert in high-throughput proteomics technology development and automation, high content protein arrays and their biomedical applications, including in biomarker discovery and diagnostics.

    Prof. Cahill pioneered this research area at the Max-Planck-Institute of Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany, and holds several international patents in this field with research, biomedicine and diagnostic applications.

    https://people.ucd.ie/dolores.cahill

    There’s been quite an online attack on her in the past few days since she had the chat with Dave Cullen, and then the next night appeared on Grand Torino’s online show, which is something that would be tagged with the “far-right” label.

    She’s also Chairperson of the Irexit Irish Freedom party, which would not see her in the approved media’s good books.

    1. She is amazing, brilliant, so informative. She should be lauded to the skies. Thanks for posting. Wish she had the ear of Boris and his cohorts.

  52. A statue and a case of ricin: How a suburban Czech mayor sparked a diplomatic war with Russia. 17 May 2020 • 9:00am.

    When Ondrej Kolar arranged for a statue of a Soviet general to be moved from a town square to a local museum, he didn’t expect his life to be upended.

    Now the 36-year-old mayor of Prague 6, a green and leafy district of the Czech capital, has found himsef at the centre of an alleged assassination plot that could have been lifted from of the pages of a Cold-War thriller.

    Mr Kolar was placed under police protection not long after Respekt, a Czech news magazine, ran a story on how a Russian official, identified later by Czech media as Andrei Konchakov, had apparently arrived in Prague with a case containing ricin.

    I used to read a lot of those Cold War thrillers and this one wouldn’t have got past the Toilet Paper stage. The “story” was apparently engendered by an article in a magazine. What happened to the Police and Customs? Even supposing it was leaked by them what did they say?

    “Anything to declare Mr Konchakov?”

    “Well just this pint bottle of ricin which I’m going to use to knock over that Statue toppling bastard Kolar!”

    “A pint? You are only supposed to need a few micrograms!”

    “I’m going to hit him over the head with it you Czech moron!”

    “Now, Now. You know that murdering people here is illegal Mr Koncharov? We will just have to guard him from you.”

    “You do as you like. From now on anyone who topples one of our statues is Borscht!”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/17/statue-case-ricin-suburban-czech-mayor-sparked-diplomatic-war/

    1. If I may summarise, I think you said: the virus causes a bloody mess….

      1. Quite right Stephenroi.

        A bloody mess is the scientific term for putting together a lot of meaningless words and then using them as scientific advice to formulate Government policy.

  54. All these people that will be unemployed will at least be able to listen to speeches by Greta, Attenborough and Prince Charles telling them that their sacrifice will be worth it as the polar bears now have more ice to survive on

    1. Surely we could just move a few hundred polar bears to the South Pole?

        1. My thought exactly. There also quite a few researchers as well. Could be fun, for the bears.
          (Ah, the story of the “Cat on the Dovrefjell” comes to mind.)

    2. Well, there is less pollution in towns and cities, people can hear the birds singing and less noise from cars and aeroplanes. So being kind to the environment is good, and Extinction Rebellion have proved their case.

      Unfortunately, millions of people will lose their jobs because of this pandemic and will be unhappier and less healthy as a result, but, hey, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, can you?

      1. Its no different where I live, just wishful thinking by the green idiots.

      2. On BH Friday I was aghast to hear ice cream van chimes twice, but no more since. I’d like to think that the boys in blue did something right for once & dealt with the culprit.

        1. Ice creams on sale today on Bexhill seafront, and doing an excellent trade.

      3. Powdered eggs? used in forces cookhouses in the 50’s – they used to throw in a few bits of egg shell to try to fool you – yeh that worked!

        1. Mushroom:

          Other ratings ………..only stalks
          Seniot Ratings……….whole mushrooms
          Orficers…………………only tops

        2. Nowadays you would probably be given powdered eggs from China, they occasionally throw in bits of egg to fool you.

    1. 319295+ up ticks,
      o2o,
      But we pointed the route to take post
      24/6/2016, but it was drowned out by
      “job done leave it to the tory’s” how did that turn out ogga ?
      None to well, as expected.

    2. Level playing field – if you drop your taxes and boom, it’ll show how appallingly pointless we are in hiking them.

      Balanced for the EU means they get more than we do. If it’s our water, we’ll fish in it. Other EU nations won’t.

      We will, of course, sell them our fish.

      As aagreeing with the EU is absurd and damaging, it looks like there will be no agreement.

    3. No agreement, then no point in hanging on until December. Leave now under WTO rules and pay not a penny more to the EU.

      That’ll larn ’em!

  56. Our TVs have brought us together again. But how I miss the world outside. David Olusoga. 17 May 2020.

    Just as stories within a television series can suddenly be seen afresh, in light of the current crisis, so too can our relationship with television itself. Until recently, public service broadcasting was regularly dismissed as an anachronism. The days when a national broadcaster could bring us together around a shared event or experience were said to be long gone.

    Just three months ago, “what’s the point of the BBC” was a politically loaded question. Now, with audiences for the BBC’s 6pm news hitting 20 million, and millions of children and parents turning to the corporation’s new home schooling services, it has increasingly become a redundant question.

    Olusoga is of course a Disciple and Employee of the BBC and this is a, “Thank God for Coronavirus it has saved my Ass.” eulogy to the same. It hardly needs pointing out that people are locked into their homes with little alternative but to watch TV and the BBC is familiar to the majority of them from their youth.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/17/our-tvs-have-brought-us-together-again-but-how-i-miss-the-world-outside

    1. A half caste who loathes England and the “imperial fascism” of the past – but was happy to accept an OBE.

    2. I haven’t yet reached the near suicidal depths of depression necessary to switch the bastards on.

    3. “Now, with audiences for the BBC’s 6pm news hitting 20 million…”

      Nearly a third of the population tuning in? Pull the other one, Olusuga, you pro-Beeboid creep.

    4. 20 million deluded people who still think that the Bonehead Bonkers Corpse tells the truth.

    5. Yo Minty

      or

      It hardly needs pointing out that people are locked into their homes with little alternative but to watch TV and the BBC World Service is familiar to the majority of them from their youth.

    6. I have been locked into my home (apart from sorties to walk the dog and go shopping), but I read books, play music and do jigsaws rather than watch the Beeb.

  57. Right, having just spent a good and well worthwhile 40 minutes listening to Dr David Starkey, I’m going back to my recording, in the written form, of the current events as I see them – and how it affects me and mine, as a rising 76 year old – and at the same time I shall be trying to fill out how my Paternal Grandfather might have felt in his lifetime, from 1864 to 1934.

    As Bill would say, jusqu’à demain.

  58. A Copy of the last Lunch Menu at The 5* Grand Hotel Eastbournre be for the MS CORVID went down

    Table d’hôte LuncheonMenuTuesday 17thMarch 20203 courses £26.00-2 courses £22.00
    Smoked Salmon Salad, Celeriac Remoulade–Pickled CucumberConfit Duck Roulade –Plum PuréeGoat’s Cheese Tart –Red Onion Marmalade‘Grand’ Fish Cake –Tomato Salsa, Saffron Mayonnaise Mushroom Soup****Fruit Sorbet****Fillet of English Pork, Wholegrain Mustard SauceCreamed Potato, French Beans, CarrotsSuprême of Chicken, Paprika CreamButterbean & Tomato Ragout, BroccoliBaked Cod Fillet, Lemon ButterNew Potatoes, Bok Choi Grilled Halloumi, Ratatouille VegetablesPortabello Mushrooms
    Side Dishes-All Priced at £4.95Colcannon Potatoes-Roast Chanternay Carrots-Green Beans with ShallotsNutmeg Buttered Baby Spinach-Ratte New Potatoes& Herb ButterTenderstem Broccoli with Almonds-Roquette Salad& Parmesan Shavings, Balsamic Vinegar****
    A daily menu of dessertsor afine selection of British cheeses***
    *Cafetière of ground Coffee & Petits Fours£4.95-Speciality Coffee &Petits Fours From £5.15A discretionary 10% service charge will be added to your bill for all food and beverage services and will be shared by the entire team.If you suffer from a food allergy or intolerance, please inform a member of staff, who will be happy to assist you when placing your order

      1. Yes we had planned to go to The Grand in March, Cote in Lewes in April and best of all Horsted Place in this month.But we have our cleaner back tomorrow. Stilll we have made full use of our time and found all sorts of online suppliers. One for first class cheese.

    2. Careful, Peddy. Two mornings in a day make you twice as old twice as quickly.

  61. Morning all,

    I wrote earlier about how COVID-19 shouldn’t be treated as SARS but I didn’t mean it as a comment – it happened to be where I was writing at the time.

    Here however is an interesting finding about the contentious use of masks:

    https://youtu.be/ftZy5s-klUA

    1. Thanks for that. I have the link, thanks to this here Nottlerdom, but forget to look and check the upcoming diary.

    1. One would have thought the BBC would be salivating to broadcast this interview!

      1. Hardly, Stephen, they along with rest of the fake news media, couldn’t bear to hear a word of the truth.

  64. Good Afternoon, all. As a Public Service posting, here’s Rod on Sunday

    We all know how nasty China can be, but it bungs us another panda and all is forgiven
    Rod Liddle – Sunday May 17 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

    Of all the many tragedies to have occurred during this pandemic, surely none has been more egregious than Bryan Adams being forced to cancel his concert at the Royal Albert Hall. As a result we have missed the Canadian explaining to us, via the medium of his exciting music, how he had an agreeable time during a warm spell in 1969, and perhaps singing that ballad which seemed to last for the entire 1990s — Everything I Do, I Do, Everything (I Do Everything) I Do For You, or something. Never mind.

    One person more upset than most was Bryan Adams, and he knew where the blame lay. It lay with “bat-eating, wet-market animal selling, virus-making greedy bastards”. And of course having said this, he entered a world of pain. Racist! He was vilified on social media and by various anti-racist and leftie groups. It is wrong to associate China with the virus, we are told — another rather wonderful instance of liberals denying reality because reality, as ever, does not accord with their beliefs.

    We are told that we must not call Covid-19 the “Chinese virus”. For once I agree, but only because almost all the flu viruses we have been fortunate enough to experience these past 20 years have been of Chinese origin — Sars and avian flu, to name but two more. They came from China.

    If Covid-19 had a passport, it would be registered in Beijing. It is of Chinese origin. And most experts suggest it has something to do with those wet markets and the questionable Chinese predilection for sweet’n’sour stir-fried bat and pangolin balls in a bap.

    None of this should incite us to accost individual Chinese people: that would be absurd. But the notion that China should be exculpated from all blame (as the World Health Organisation continues to insist) is — once again — an expeditious evasion, a refusal to acknowledge the truth.

    A year or so ago I wrote a piece that suggested we should go to war with China, in order to instil a decent martial spirit and camaraderie among our slovenly, whining population. It was, very obviously, satire. I do not really think we should bomb China. But it might be time to reappraise our relationship with that appalling country.

    Too many excuses are made for China — again, usually by liberals. Its tyrannical state capitalist government is dismissed as simply being another variant of that vigorous new thing, “Asian democracy” — that is, what we used to know as “fascism”. As far as Covid-19 is concerned, I have little doubt that this system of government, with its lack of accountability and openness, with its brutality and complete absence of independent viewpoints, contributed to the virus’s spread. Paranoid officials terrified for their lives and careers: it was much the same with the USSR and the Chernobyl disaster — a similar system in which truth was not allowed to speak.

    But Covid-19 is only part of it, a small indicator of China’s flaws. This is a country in which thousands upon thousands of Chinese Muslims are held in concentration camps in Xinjiang (again, with little outcry from western liberals or indeed other Muslim states). A country that continues to occupy Tibet, that menaces Taiwan, that loathes and harasses the dwindling democracy of Hong Kong, that affords no freedom of speech to its citizens and that bullies its neighbours in southeast Asia with its overweening territorial claims.

    And we, for the most part, say and do nothing. Every so often, in reward for our quietude, the Chinese bung us another bloody panda as a “goodwill gesture”. What mugs they must take us for.

    Meanwhile, our markets are flooded with cheap Chinese goodies: produced how, by whom and for what wages? By prisoners, in some cases. By the desperately impoverished. It is China’s triumph that it has managed to combine the most brutal aspects of communism with the most brutal aspects of capitalism.

    We have become too reliant upon this country and are thus scared to raise our voices. The liberals — along with the United Nations — seem to believe that there are no caveats, no downsides, to globalisation and that all countries are morally equivalent. These are delusions.

    China is not quite the nastiest country in the world, but it is undoubtedly one of them. We should not be afraid to say as much.

    Boris targets obesity

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Fsundaytimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Fb6d183c4-9779-11ea-8cd3-563103839a48.jpg?crop=1500%2C1000%2C0%2C0&resize=1022

    A walk on the wild side
    Important advice from the police. It is unwise, they suggest, to step out into the road to avoid coming within two metres of another human being on the pavement. Apparently this could lead to people being killed by motor vehicles, facemasks providing little protection in such circumstances. I have written to the police for further advice. If, say, you are standing on the top of a very tall building and you espy someone else approaching, is the best thing to stand where you are or quickly throw yourself off? And what if the person approaching coughs?

    For science advice, call on a celeb
    The leftish American news channel CNN has convened a panel to advise the country about Covid-19. One of the members is Greta Thunberg. I had not known that epidemiology was one of her areas of interest. She might ruminate on the fact that Mr Covid has done more to address climate change than she and her young, middle-class, not always hygienic followers could have dreamt.

    Meanwhile, one website reported that former Spice Girl Emma Bunton had confessed that she wouldn’t know where to start when it came to creating a vaccine for the virus. Fake news? Who knows — maybe next week former members of Take That will be invited to construct a safe nuclear fusion device to solve the world’s pressing energy problems.

    Roamers might be bored to death
    The rapid reduction in new Covid-19 infections in London — down to 24 a day as of Friday — suggests lockdown has worked rather well. This will cut no ice with that vociferous minority who reckon it is a grotesque overreaction and the only people who have died are morbidly obese diabetic old codgers who were going to die anyway. There is no arguing with these people.

    I fear Boris Johnson et al have given in to the clamorous minority who insist that they have a human right to go to the pub, buy garden ornaments and eat overpriced gloop in restaurants. They pretend their opposition to lockdown is rational, and spout spurious stats, but it is simply because they are bored. As Keats might have put it: “Ever let the Covid roam / Pleasure never is at home.”

    3. Is this stuff for real? Please say no, otherwise I shall have to kill myself immediately, as I cannot bear to be on the same planet as these bozos.

      1. Rodders can get a bit carried away now and then (he lives in North Lincolnshire which accounts for a lot) but he can get all too close to the truth in his sneering at the Metropolitan Governing Elite. Stay where you are, Oberst and keep brewing – it’s ages since I was last in Norway but you have a far better chance of sustaining sanity. Even my Finnish friends who keep in touch think we have gone completely mad…and you know what they’re like.

          2. Perhaps I should mention that my near neighbour in No 3 xxxx Cottages is a delightful Finnish lovely.

  65. Set us free from lockdown, ministers, and stop covering your backs
    Jonathan Sumption – Sunday May 17 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

    The lesson of Covid-19 is brutally simple and applies generally to public regulation. Free people make mistakes and willingly take risks. If we hold politicians responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our liberty so that nothing can go wrong. They will do this not for our protection against risk, but for their own protection against criticism.

    The lockdown was originally justified as a temporary measure to spread coronavirus infections over a longer period. This was to allow time for the NHS’s critical care capacity to catch up. Hence the slogan “Protect the NHS”.

    It was never much of a rationale. The NHS is there to protect us, not the other way round. How could its unpreparedness possibly justify depriving the entire UK population of its liberty, pushing us into the worst recession since the early 18th century, destroying millions of jobs and hundreds of thousands of businesses, piling up public and private debt on a crippling scale and undermining the education of our children?

    Since the prime minister’s broadcast last Sunday, the lockdown has found a new rationale. The government has dropped “Protect the NHS” from its slogan. The reason is plain from the paper it published the following day. The NHS is not at risk.

    This is partly because the government has done an outstanding job in increasing intensive care capacity, and partly because the threat to the NHS was always overstated. The critical care capacity of the NHS has nearly doubled since January, even without the 4,000 or more additional beds in seven temporary Nightingale hospitals. Around the top of the spike in infections, on April 10, 41% of NHS general acute beds were empty. Only 51% of acute beds were occupied by a Covid-19 patient. The current figure is 20%. The Nightingale hospitals stand empty. These are government figures.

    Today, the lockdown is only about shielding us from the risk of infection. This raises serious questions about our relationship with the state. It is our business, not the state’s, to say what risks we will take with our own health. We are not fools or children needing to be told by ministers what is good for us, and forced by police officers to do it. We should not need to consult ministers, as the first member of the public to phone in to the daily press conference did, about whether she was allowed to hug her grandchildren.

    The usual answer is that by going out and about we may infect other people. But that no longer works as an excuse for coercion. Those who do not want to run the risk of being infected can isolate themselves voluntarily. They will be no worse off than they are under the current compulsory regime. The rest of us can then get on with our lives.

    The continuance of the lockdown is particularly odd given that in its latest paper the government accepts that, whatever we do, Covid-19 is likely to be with us long term. So unless it plans to keep the lockdown in place for ever, all that it achieves is to put off the moment when we have to face the risk anyway.

    The prime minister told the House of Commons on Monday that his new so-called plan was workable because the British would use their common sense. In that case, why not allow them to do so by leaving the decisions to them?

    Instead, we are resorting to law, which, because it requires exact definition, will always cover very many things that are perfectly harmless. Thus it was OK to go for a walk in the park but not to sunbathe. It is OK to drive to the Lake District but not to visit your second home. It is OK to meet one person but not two, and OK to do it in the front garden but not in the back. This kind of thing is arbitrary and absurd. It discredits the law as well as those who make it.

    So how has the government ended up in this unsustainable position?

    The answer is that, having originally embarked on a sensible policy that would have avoided a lockdown, it did a 180-degree turn on the afternoon of March 23, without thinking of the wider implications. It was in a blind panic provoked by Professor Neil Ferguson’s “reasonable worst case” of 510,000 deaths. Quite apart from the fact that a worst case is by definition an unlikely one, few scientists now support this figure. But it has had disastrous consequences. It pushed the government into making a decision that mocks our humanity and treats us all as mere tools of government policy.

    The government terrified people into submission by giving the impression that Covid-19 was dangerous for everyone. It is not. It attacks people with serious vulnerabilities. By most estimates, between 0.5% and 0.75% of infected persons die. Of those, 87% are over 65 and at least 90% have multiple causes only one of which is Covid-19, according to the Office for National Statistics. The death rate for those under 50 is tiny. For the overwhelming majority, the symptoms are mild. Yet Matt Hancock solemnly intoned that “if you go out, people will die”, in what was surely the high point of governmental hype.

    The prime minister’s broadcast was supposed to be his Churchillian moment. Instead, we beheld a man imprisoned by his own rhetoric and the logic of his past mistakes.

    The lockdown is now all about protecting politicians’ backs. They are not wicked men, just timid ones, terrified of being blamed for deaths on their watch. But it is a wicked thing that they are doing.

    Lord Sumption is a former Supreme Court judge and last year’s BBC Reith lecturer

    2. This article is spot on, and Boris is intelligent enough to understand this and agree with it.

      1. But he cannot admit that he (and his pals) got the whole thing out of proportion and that the quarantine has been a ghastly mistake.

        Yer politicians don’t do contrition….

        2. I don’t think that any politicians apart from Steve Baker who has worked as a software developer truly understand the shame involved in buying Ferguson’s dodgy results.
          Nobody who has worked in manufacturing would have been that unsuspicious.

    3. Does Lord S read our comments? I pointed out a day ago, or some days ago, that the lockdown would have to last forever.

    4. …the threat to the NHS was always overstated.

      Disingenuous to say the least. Surely even he knows that if no action was taken the NHS would have been overwhelmed. As it was, it was up to 60% capacity in ITUs with lock-down in full effect. And that’s based on actual data, not on pants down models.

    5. They are not wicked men…

      Not all are, Lord Sumption; however, enough are wicked to make the difference between good governance and what we have suffered these past two decades or so.

  67. HAPPY HOUR – at last….
    I hate Sundays!

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/acbafe2ff8c274be72ad291fa29f607eee63ed9d93f6f97bfb506d1934155783.jpg

    I knew I was on the verge of madness after watching repeats of Love Island and I’m a Celebrity- Get Me Out of Here….

    Sanity prevailed after several sherries and I made for the kitchen to make lunch.
    Cooking for one is a total bore so I threw some pasta/bacon/broccoli/garlic in a dish and smothered it with cheese sauce. Topped with extra cheese and sliced tomatoes I placed it in a hot oven.. A cheap bottle of plonk left over from Christmas was left to warm in the sun.
    After half an hour and several sherries I returned to the kitchen to find a golden brown Pasta Italienne…eat your heart out Gino!

    Taking advantage of the sunny weather I dined al fresco, enjoying my hastily prepared lunch in an English garden in May.
    Bliss!

    1. I just upvoted you and it’s vanished. Well anyway sounds like a delicious lunch and the garden
      Is beautiful .

        1. I’m the same, love our little floral garden, very much like sitting out there with a book
          watching the bees and butterflies.

        2. I just bought the Bibendum Cook book and The Home cook by Simon Hopkinson.

          His first book was ‘Roast Chicken and other Stories’. A lot of what is in the book is suitable for cooking for one.

          1. We have the Bibendum book. I must try it some time. Simon is one of our preferred TV chefs.

          2. I bought his roast chicken book about a decade ago, and I still use it. I recommended it to Elsie Bloodaxe and he is also happy with it.

          3. I already have lots of cookbooks, which I don’t consult. If I don’t know how to cook something, nowadays I just google some recipes and browse through them, then go my own way: cue song.

          4. Most of us are like that. Probably just one or two recipes from any cookery book are used before they resume their dust-gathering function.

        4. Absolutely glorious! It’s tipped down here all day. Would have been our daughters wedding!

          1. Two couples i know have put theirs off till next year. Hopefully your daughter and her beau will have better luck with the weather when they do eventually tie the knot.

          2. Thanks Phizzee! It’s going ahead in January!! That’s assuming wee Nicki lets us out by then!

          5. It’s a fair bet! The dainty strappy shoes won’t be much use – more the Hunters! Very elegant!

          10. Yep! The venue and minister cancelled very early on so it was a case of rebook for when we could!

      1. I don’t watch cookery progs….I used to enjoy Delia’s recipes, she always looked so clean and spotless…not so today’s chefs.

        1. I have a (very) old hardback (but falling apart) copy of Delia’s “Complete Cookery”. I still refer to it for help or inspiration sometimes.

    3. Lovely garden. I like to eat outside when the weather is good, but today it’s been overcast, although a reasonable temperature.

      1. Lovely day here, but the wind was moving the outdoor furniture around, so we ate indoors.

      1. I watch BBC4 but it’s days are numbered. Due to be replaced by BBC3 to attract younger viewers!

        1. Younger viewers are not interested in the bbc whatever they try to do; the bbc is a bit like M&S in this regard, forever trying to attract the young, to no avail.

        2. I thought that BBC 3 had bitten the dust some time ago or was that the point in your post?

    5. PT – I think it’s fair to say that anyone watching even a repeat of the programmes you refer to, is not on the verge of madness, but has lost all sense of reason and should be sectioned under the Mental Health Acts. Fortunately you seem to have had the presence of mind to self-medicate in good time. For what it’s worth my advice to you is to avoid the addiction and stick with your medication.

      1. Being somewhat incapacitated with a sprained tendon I was at the mercy of the TV/radio and desperate to escape the coronavirus in more ways than one…

        1. OMG! being incapacitated and “at the mercy of the TV/radio” I can only imagine that a visit from the Spanish Inquisition would have been more merciful…..

          Get well soon!

    6. “left over from Christmas” ? Plonk? Come, come, Plum, plonk couldn’t possibly last that long chez-vouz (or chez nous, come to that). The only one we’ve got is rather nice and has been saved/has been hidden, until today (Monday).

      D has written a card in which he says that

      He still needs me
      He’ll still feed me…

    7. “left over from Christmas” ? Plonk? Come, come, Plum, plonk couldn’t possibly last that long chez-vouz (or chez nous, come to that). The only one we’ve got is rather nice and has been saved/has been hidden, until today (Monday).

      D has written a card in which he says that

      He still needs me
      He’ll still feed me…

        1. Thank you, John. Have been out in the garden with a bottle of wine, cheeses and gropes grapes. I’m making our favourite, roast lamb, yorkshire pudding, airfried potatoes, asparagus and green beans.

          Dear friend came round yesterday with a tiramisu, so that’ll be us sated and happy!

  68. Good afternoon from a Saxon Queen with a Longbòw and axe in handbag.
    I see Dïsqůs is still self isolating itself as it did at Christmas when all went to pot.

    It’s been a nice and sunny lockdown Sunday, assuming it is Sunday and not Wednesday,
    one gets the days mixed up now.

    1. I’m having one of my favourite Nigella suppers: poussin & cubed sweet potato all tossed in oil with 3 or 4 spices, baked & served on a bed of watercress.
      Followed by chocolate ice cream.

      1. That sounds delicious Mr Viking and chocolate ice cream is my favourite.
        We’ve got roasted skate wings with basil pesto, shrimps and baby tomatoes with roasted new potatoes.

        1. Sounds good too. Last night I had cod, but I love skate. Please tell me how you roast it. I usually fry or poach it.

          Just tucking into my first Pimm’s of the season.

          1. Preheat the oven 180c . I rub olive oil into the skate wings, add pesto
            or chopped basil, a dash of lemon, capers and cook for around 15 / 20 minutes
            adding the shrimps for the last 5 minutes , but of course you can add
            whatever topping you like. It’s nice with some roasted tomatoes on the vine too

      2. Roast venison & Yorkshire puddings, followed by Pavlova in red, white & blue (meringue, strawberries, raspberries & blueberries) to celebrate Constitution Day.

        2. The venison and yorkshire puds sounds divine. I should have a roast beef dinner to look forward to at work. I’m just hoping the chef hasn’t drowned it in his horseradish sauce or i’ll have to call the pizza dude. I hate horseradish.

          3. The pizza dudes, over here in Sweden, drown their pizzas in béarnaise sauce. I kid you not, Swedes are obsessed with the bloody stuff. And ready-made in a bloody jar at that!

            [I eat béarnaise sauce about once every two years (and only with steak) and when I do I make it from my own tarragon vinegar to the late Michel Roux’s recipe.]

          4. I only put 3 things on steak. Butter, roquefort, or black peppercorn sauce.

            I like my pizzas with pepperoni, pepperoni, pepperoni and maybe some more pepperoni, with a sweet chilli dip.

          6. It really works as a topping for steak. Try it you might be pleasantly surprised.

          9. I’ve never tried it on lamb. Sounds interesting. I’ll try that. Ty peddy.

          10. Côte do lamb chops with Roquefort butter twice a year under normal circs.

          12. Brown sauce for cheese on toast / toasted cheese sarnies / cheese sandwich or for fry-ups. I like mint sauce with roast anything really, got used to that as a kid as that was what my parents liked. Salad cream for salads and chips. I actually haven’t tried brown sauce on steak.

          14. When I used to catch wild brown trout in our local river I sometimes baked them in foil with a few sprigs of fresh mint from the garden filling their belly cavity. Very nice.

          15. Works ok with beef and pork. Perhaps not as well as it does with lamb but anything is better than that gross horseradish stuff.

          16. I have a bit of cod every 3 or 4 months and that’s about my entire consumption of fish.

          17. Salad cream is the best possible dressing for a decent pork pie. It works really well.

            [I make my own pork pies to the Yorkshire standard, far tastier than the bland grey muck from Melton Mowbray]

          20. I’ve never really been keen on pork pie. My grandad loved the stuff and ate it with colmans English mustard

          22. There are far more dreadful pork pies around than decent ones and those are the ones that form most disinterested people’s opinion of the product.

            I grew up with similar, decidedly average, pork pies and my opinion towards them mirrored yours. It wasn’t until I reached my early twenties that I first encountered a properly-made and exquisitely delicious example and, from then on, I was hooked.

            Since moving to Sweden (a pie-free zone), it took me lots of experimentation before I hit upon the formula for making a pie similar to those delicious ones I experienced when I was younger. I am now in bliss.

          24. Certainly. I’ll try to post them on here.

            If unsuccessful, I’ll send them to Hertslass for onward transmission to you.

          25. Pork Pies

            The pork pie recipe I have developed makes simply the most delicious tasting pork pies I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. A hell of a lot of research and experimentation went into producing these pies and I have now written down the results of my latest endeavour for posterity. Certain aspects of the recipe (reproduced, below) have been taken from other cooks’ portfolios but the whole (especially the filling) is entirely mine.

            Many chefs advocate the use of numerous herbs and spices in their pie recipes. I go for a simpler approach. I find that the addition of items such as: cayenne pepper, paprika, allspice, mace, nutmeg, ginger, coriander, thyme, parsley and (especially) bay leaf, tend to diminish the delicious “porkiness” of the final product rather than enhance it. My preference is for nothing more than salt, pepper (white or black) and—pork’s best friend—sage. This way they remain as background flavourings and intensify rather than detract from the piggy delight.

            Pigs trotters are irreplaceable for making a decent gelatinous stock for the pie’s jelly. The hot-water crust is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s recipe which uses equal parts of butter and lard, plus two eggs. Hugh’s version is such an improvement in flavour and texture over all other similar type pastries that I have now made it my default crust for this type of pie.

            My Pork Pie (the various amounts, in their colour combinations, make varying numbers of pies)

            Filling: (make up to two days in advance in order for the meat to partially cure)

            2,000g/1,500g/1,000g/800g/500g pork shoulder

            1,000g/750g/500g/400g/250g pork belly

            60g/45g/30g/24g/15g* salt

            6·0g/4·5g/3·0g/2·4g/1·5g* freshly-ground black pepper

            6·0g/4·5g/3·0g/2·4g/1·5g* dried sage

            [*The magic ratio for seasoning pork for pork pies is: 2% of the total weight of the meat in salt, and 0·2% of the total weight of the meat in both pepper and sage]

            Cut half of the pork shoulder into small cubes (roughly 5-10mm) and place into a mixing bowl. Mince the remainder of the pork shoulder along with the pork belly on a medium setting. Add the mince to the diced pork shoulder in the mixing bowl. Add the seasonings and mix, thoroughly, with your hands until all the ingredients are well combined. Cover the bowl with clingfilm (or a shower cap) and chill in the refrigerator to partially cure for between one and two days.

            Jelly:

            2 pig’s trotters (split lengthways)

            Pork bones, roasted and cut up [optional]

            1 litre good pork (or chicken) stock

            2 small onions roughly chopped

            20-or-so black peppercorns

            11g celery salt

            Place all jelly ingredients into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Simmer gently for 2 hours, covered. Strain into a jug through a fine-mesh sieve lined with muslin. Allow to cool.

            Hot-water crust:

            400g plain white flour

            150g strong white flour

            8·5g salt

            200ml water

            100g butter

            100g lard

            2 eggs

            Sieve the flour into a large bowl. mix in the beaten eggs until a breadcrumb texture is achieved. Melt the butter and lard in a saucepan with the water until an emulsion is achieved. Do not allow it to boil. Pour the hot emulsion into the flour/egg mixture and knead with your hands until a smooth dough is achieved. Wrap in clingfilm and cool in the refrigerator.

            Building the pies:

            I use 100mm diameter, 75mm high, coated-steel dedicated pork pie moulds with loose bottoms. Once the hot-water crust has cooled, but is still pliable, cut it into portions. Remove a quarter of each portion for the lids. Roll out the larger portions into a disc around 5-6mm thick. Carefully place each disc inside a pie mould being careful not to rip it. Ease the pastry to fit the interior contours of the mould and press it into the sides to achieve an equal thickness all round. Leave the excess hanging over the top of the mould for the time being. [If you do not possess pie moulds, form the pastry around a jar, dusted with flour, of suitable diameter.]

            Fill each pastry-lined pie mould with the meat mixture and press it down to ensure no gaps. Fill to just below the level of the top of the moulds. Roll out the smaller portions of pastry into 5-6mm thick discs and place on top of the moulds. Crimp around the edges to form a seal before cutting off the excess pastry with a sharp knife. Poke two holes in each pastry lid and wash with beaten egg.

            Baking the pies:

            Place the pie moulds onto a baking sheet (or inside a baking tray) and bake, uncovered in a preheated oven at 180ºC for one hour. After an hour, reduce the oven temperature to 140ºC and cover the pies with a sheet of greaseproof paper. Continue to bake for another hour. At the end of the cooking time, remove the pies and allow to cool for about one hour. The meat mixture will have shrunk during baking leaving a gap between meat and crust.

            Warm the jelly, until just melted, in a jug and place a small funnel into one of the holes in each pie lid. Gently pour the jelly into the pies through the funnel until some emerges from the other hole [alternatively, use a syringe or turkey-baster]. Leave the jelly-filled pies to cool thoroughly, preferably in the refrigerator. These pies will last up to a fortnight in the refrigerator. They will also freeze successfully for up to three months. Always allow plenty of time to defrost frozen pies at room temperature since pork pies cannot be reheated or the jelly will melt and disappear! Pork pies are always meant to be eaten cold: the perfect picnic food.

          30. Thanks Grizz for taking the time to make that post.

            Would it matter much if I didn’t cube the shoulder and just minced it all? My teeth are not what they were. That should only alter the texture a little and not the flavour I think.

            Very much appreciated.

          31. Hi George. Have copied and saved that. Not sure it’s within my (limited) capabilities, but may give it a go if I’m feeling brave.

            I may have questions along the way…

          34. I baste mine in butter then eat it with Maille Dijon moutarde.

            [It has to be Maille, that Grey Poupon muck is disgusting!]

          37. I’ve made pizzas tonight. On mine I put anchovies and a good saucisson sec.

          38. I love chorizo on a pizza but it’s really rare to find here. They had it in Tenerife last time I was there. That was an amazing pizza.

          40. Considering the local Sainsbury’s do a good do at home double pepperoni pizza for about 1.50 it’s not worth the effort but on the rare occasions I have takeaway i would love to find a takeaway offering chorizo. I find papa John’s to be the best local takeaway. Plenty of toppings. Good value for collection. And their sweet chilli sauce is the dogs bollocks.

          41. The tastiest sausage pizza I ever had was bought from a hole-in-the-wall street pizza seller on Wall Street, Noo Yoik City.

          44. I only put two, Russell: raw onion and mustard; Dijon or English, depending on my mood.
            Hope you had a good Roast Dinner – and shift!

          45. It was sadly rank. Soft rather than crispy spuds. Beef cooked too fast so was like leather rather than melt in the mouth and only carrots. Chef didn’t even get yorkshires right. They looked like tiny flatbread. Oh well. Better not let the cover chef do roasts in future he can’t cook them.
            Got a 95 year old diabetic with pancreatic cancer being borderline hypo all night. Entertainment but his sugar level has stabilised. The nurses having trouble getting his insulin regime right.

          47. Always knew the Swedes are crazy! Bearnaise? Everyone knows you use herby cream dressing, or garlic dressing if you absolutely must.

          48. Sounds excellent! Sauces should be available to the diner to apply as needed. I love strong horseradish, me, but everyone has their own taste.

          49. Have you every tried strong horseradish blended with an equal part of English Mustard?

          51. Give it a go – t’was a happy culinary accident that I’ve taken to repeating (Burp!)

          53. We have a jar of that – too hot for me, but son-in-law loves it!

          56. I’ve tried to find a reference to it but I can only find that which is made by other companies, mainly in the USA.

            When I first started going to Norfolk frequently, in the early 1980s, I was a regular at their Mustard Shop on Bridewell Alley. In those days they also produced a “French” mustard, which was banned by the EU.

            Other delicious short-lived varieties were: Bordeaux mustard, Meaux (wholegrain) mustard, and their own Dijon.

        3. I’ve had three lamb chops (properly butchered to my spec, i.e. none of that silly, idiotically wasteful and pointless “French trimming”) roasted, with onion gravy, peas, French beans, steamed cabbage and mint sauce.

          1. A lot of the flavour is in the fat. I hold the fatty sides to a hot pan to render them and then turn them in that fat. My butcher also knows my preferences and just trims the tips of the rack.

          2. I’ve had to train Swedish butchers (mainly by bombarding them with photographs) on how to properly butcher lamb [which is quite rare in this country, not many Swedes eat it].

          3. Norwegian butchers just cut meat into chunks. No finesse, no style, no effing idea.

          4. They no doubt trained in Sweden.

            Buy a shoulder of lamb here and it bears no resemblance to those in British butchers’ shops. It usually comes with at least half a dozen ribs attached! FFS!

          5. This is a chunk of indrefilet of an animal butchered by Firstborn last year. No expert cut, but we know the hillside it came from!
            Wrapped in bacon & butter, with a pile of herbs.

      3. Roast venison & Yorkshire puddings, followed by Pavlova in red, white & blue (meringue, strawberries, raspberries & blueberries) to celebrate Constitution Day.

    3. Thanks Phiz, one of my all time favourite organists, although Mrs H J thinks his Bach’s Toccata is too slow. No, in my view it is wonderfully powerful and majestic. He’s completely unemotional, too. Can’t stand showy organists.

      2. You have to play to the room, otherwise the notes overlap in the echo, and it becomes a mess of noise. Varnus does it beautifully.

    1. Yo OLT

      Do you manufacture the equivalent to be affixed to the top of a bootle of Singular Mlat Whuskee?

        1. Hmm, Perhaps, Paul, Norway has a different attitude to Sweden about wine-boxes. The Swedes in their Thunderbug, lecturing and nannyish ways think wine-boxes are the work of the devil as, “You cannot see how much you have already consumed”.

          They need to go out into their own countryside and see how many stills there are in people’s backyards but, given Norway’s spirit tax regime, I’m sure there will be more than a few up the fjords as well.

          1. There were many stills in Denmark when I was on detachment to Aalborg in the early 70’s. You just added an essence of either whisky, gin or rum to get the spirit you wanted….lethal stuff too and it was available in the mess too.

          2. Can buy all necessary components except the still in a chain of supermarkets.
            ;-))

          3. I remember as a member of a coach party ordering a steak & a glass of red wine in a roadside restaurant in Sweden.
            Waitress in a booming voice:”Och du vill har vatten med detta, eller hur?” (And you will have water with that, won’t you?)
            My reply, in a louder voice: “Nej, det vill jag inte!” (No, I will not!)
            Loud clatter of knives & forks all around the room followed by a pregnant silence.

            On another occasion, after I had been in Sweden about 3 weeks, I was invited to a crayfish-scoffing party. I was told, “Just bring your own drink,” so I bought a 6-pack of supermarket beer, which is as weak as gnat’s piss. After I had slowly finished the first can, I pulled a 2nd out of my bag & opened it with a loud hiss. Gasps & nudging all around the table. I felt that every time I raised the can to my lips, the action was followed by a dozen pairs of disapproving eyes.

            Yet Swedes themselves often get quickly drunk out of their tiny minds at parties because they are not used to alcohol.

          4. We have a still. Rocket fuel, about 70%. Experimenting with gin recipes, next whisky.

      2. Yo CV

        I f do not manufacture the cap. it is essential that you use the selectable time crossing.

        You will need more time zigzig 50ft, rather than walk 20 straight

  71. No one is immune from the economic storm to come. 17 May 2020 • 10:00am

    I blame this blasted weather. It lulls us into thinking that we are passing through a sunlit dreamtime, a holiday from reality after which things will get back to normal. But things won’t get back to normal. Our problems are only just starting.

    For some reason of which I am not fully cognisant I don’t really rate Hannan but he is not wrong here. The storm of which he speaks will also engulf the politicians over the next year or so when people finally realise the Coronavirus Fiasco has not simply given them a few weeks off work with their feet up watching telly but put them permanently out of work and consigned them to a struggle for their very existence and in many cases poverty for life. The vast sums that Rishi Sunak has dished out will soon need to be recouped, which means cuts in Social Security and the raiding of pensions and savings, if not directly then by inflation. Sensible people should expect a Twenty First Century version of the nineteen thirties. All this would be bad enough in itself but the UK is now a fragmented society which at present is lubricated to a large extent with Government cash to keep it going. Most of us on here will miss this. Fortunately.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/17/no-one-immune-economic-storm-come1/

    1. We could declare war on China. That would stimulate the economy. And conscript everyone under the age of 30.

      1. Normally I would not care for such a suggestion. I think that the Zulus had it right. Only mature men, men who had fathered male children, served in the regiments. We, being selfish, sent our younger generation to war, leaving the future to fall apart without them.
        However, I now think that decimating the snowflake generation would do no harm at all.

    3. “The vast sums that Rishi Sunak has dished out will soon need to be recouped”

      Says who?

      “which means cuts in Social Security and the raiding of pensions and savings, if not directly then by inflation.”

      Social security can’t be cut any more. Pension raiding is a possibility but I doubt it. Hannan showing ignorance about where inflation comes from. If you look at unemployment plotted against inflation you’ll see every single time that as unemployment shoots up inflation comes down and vice versa. If people are out of work and have no money to spend they can’t bid up prices. We’re expecting 15-25% unemployment.

    4. There is also talk of taking an extra 5p in income tax. No way to get the economy moving.

      1. Correct. Only an idiot like Osborne would think of tax rises and/or spending cuts in the middle of a massive recession or more likely a depression. We’ve tried that plan now for a decade and have we hit even 2% growth once in a decade? We seem to celebrate 1.6% (50% of our normal functioning economy growth level) as a freaking wonderful year.

    5. Couldn’t cuts in social security be a good thing if implemented wisely?

      Just think of the idlers that chose a life on benefits being forced to take a job if they want more than a subsistence living, just think of all of those new arrivals being told that there is nothing available to pay for housing, living allowance and free healthcare.

      Of course the issue is that it will not be implemented wisely, I would expect that the permanently idle will know their way around the system but newly unemployed will suffer.

      1. Benefits have already been cut for 10 years. When middle-classes looked like being out of work in their masses Rishi added almost £20 to welfare payments temporarily which puts welfare at the level it should have been at now if it hadn’t been cut for ten years. The only possible cut in welfare now is to deny the state pension to those with a decent private pension. But as most elderly tend to be Tory voters that’ll never happen, and the means testing will cost an arm and a leg.

    6. When reading Hannan’s articles (stuff) one must always remember and take into account that he is a possible shill for the eu. I do not trust him.

    1. Yo ogga

      There has been enough covering up of/for paedophila already

      Starting with Starmer

      1. 319295+ up ticks,
        Afternoon Olt,
        A good serious start would be the Hoc / Hol seriously interrogate harman/hewitt/ steele on PIE , and the chef of the canteen for catering for islamic ideology followers as shown on the menu.
        I truly want to see a GE every
        3 months itie style until the political sh!te is erased.
        These political peoples have actually conversed with PIE and they are STILL walking the corridors of power and their parties still getting support / votes.
        Is it any wonder we have paedophiles strolling the streets.

  76. Evening, all. Disqus didn’t want me to log in tonight; the “I am not a robot” session lasted for ages (crosswalks, buses, cars, stairs, traffic lights – you name it, I had to identify it) and even then, it kept telling me to log in again. Not to mention the notifications facility is not working still. On a better note, the weather is set to warm up considerably in the coming week. 27 degrees C has been quoted (but only for London and the South).

      1. Does that mean you are permanently logged in? I clear all the cookies when I shut the browser down, so every time I come to Nottl anew, I need to log in.

        1. I just shut the lid of the laptop & everything is still there when I open it again. Even if I occasionally log out or shut down (when it goes slow) it’s all still there.

          1. That sounds as though your laptop just goes into sleep mode and you don’t delete your cookies.

      2. I have to log in again every time I leave the page eg refresh or go to another days letters

      1. I wonder what would happen, if i wore a T shirt poclaiming

        Proud to be Hetero

        1. OOPS!
          I wonder if there is a special new tech word for failing to read down a blog before commenting? I think that there should be.

          1. Didn’t they try to arrest the person who wore a Tee shirt with “Bollocks to Blair” on it?

    3. Jesus H.
      On the positive side, while they’re doing that, at least they’re not harassing sunbathers

    6. If we meet any obviously straight people, then we will identify them as right wing extremists and give them a good bashing, especially if they are OAPs out for a walk.

  78. The Government has announced £84 million of new funding “to help accelerate” domestic efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine.

    Alok Sharma, the Business Secretary, said today that this was in addition to £47 million which has already been invested into vaccine development at Oxford University and Imperial.

    “This new money will help mass-produce the Oxford vaccine so that if current trials are successful we have dosages to start vaccinating the UK population straight away,” he told today’s daily press briefing.

    The British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has finalised a “global licensing agreement” with Oxford University with Government support, Mr Sharma said.

    “This means that if the vaccine is successful AstraZeneca will work to make 30 million doses available by September for the UK as part of an agreement for over 100 million doses in total.”

    Cheap at half the price only £2 per head of population (68 million)!

      2. Surely everything is “if” at the moment and most people seem to be terrified of “if”.

      1. WHO – currently in China’s pocket. I don’t believe a word they say.

    3. A start figure of 30 million doses? That should take care of Border Forces ferrying tally for this year.

  79. Last post – request for info.

    Yesterday someone posted details of a fake Amazon website, asking people to send new password etc

    The MR’s Loopy Friend (see NoTTL, passim over the last four years), is the very sort of person who immediately falls for these scams. She opens the link and gives the info…..

    The MR wants to warn LF about this one (as LF buys a lot of stuff – with money she doesn’t have – from the real Amazon).

    Could some NoTTLer be an angel and give me the details of the fake site?

    Mercy buckets.

      1. Thanks – the one yesterday started with (as I think I remember) Amaozn….

    2. Any email purporting to be sent by a website which you may use, which doesn’t address you by name e.g. “Dear customer”, should immediately be suspect.

      2. I always ignore such messages on the basis that if it really is genuine they will send me a letter by proper post.

          3. Best you go and lie down then.
            I suspect it won’t happen again for at least a year.
            };-))

          7. “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”.

            How true.

      3. I always log in through the normal route, never through the provided link. Ever.

      1. Nope.

        The start word was Amaozn (I think). The whole URL was posted by the helpful NoTTLer.

      1. Thanks, OLT – What was the URL?

        That’s what the MR needs to warn her LF.

        1. I NEVER Press links; if she is worried, tell her to contact AMAzon asap

          1. Ah – if only OLT. LF is the very person NOT to do the sensible thing.

            I have seen her deteriorating into a walking lunatic over the last 20 years.

            It is very sad – and very frustrating. She asks for advice – then, when it is given, does the opposite..

    5. The test is what the originating address is. For example, any legit correspondence from Amazon will have an address ending with “amazon.com”, or “amazon.co.uk”. Originating address as in the “From” field of the email, not the “reply to” address.

      If you look at OLT’s example, the actual originating address is “noreply@brsgolfemail.com” – Amazon.co.uk is just the name someone has assigned to that address.

      I have seen some that looked real, but if you look at the message headers or raw source, it’s from some other place entirely – usually some ex-USSR country. Non-techies would be thoroughly confused at what you see in those views.

      1. Yes, yes, yes. I KNOW that. The address posted yesterday was slightly different.

        1. Bill, I think it was posted by Anne.

          Amazon was not spelt correctly but near enough
          to pass muster from a cursory glance.

      2. All you need to do is hover the mouse over the reply-to address – BUT DO NOT SEND!

    6. —— Original Message ——
      From: “Amaozn.co.uk”
      To:
      Sent: Saturday, 16 May, 2020 At 12:05
      Subject: Important information about your Amazon.co.uk account

      We noticed new login attempt with your account from a device we don’t recognize.

      For your security, there may be some limitations on your account.

      We need to confirm your information, we need you to take action on your account to continue using our services again:

      Confirm now Clicking this will tahe you to Hell

      Thanks,
      Amazon

      1. Oops, now all the Nottle girlies will be after you, Bernard.

        Bernard?

        You don’t seem like a Bernard, OLT, perhaps you’ve spoofed us.

          1. No good turn EVER goes unpunished.

            Too late, I’ve copied it and forwarded it to Bill’s very good friend Mr. Rashid.

    7. The one I got yesterday was clearly fake. If one holds the cursor over the incoming email adress,, eg, over Adminamazon.com, the actual email addressor of the real sender will appear,eg “Xlsplitl24amazo.rus”, or whatever. Clearly not the real Amazon.
      Additionally, real websites to which one has subscribed will usually use your name at the start of the text, “Dear Mr L. Beagle, we are writing to tell you…”

      1. I bet it’s an old one.

        This morning I received an e-mail from my house insurance thanking me for renewing the policy. That I did in March…..

        1. Ah, that’s the email distancing policy…. All emails must be separated by at least two months…..

    1. 319295+ up ticks,
      Afternoon Rik,
      Many would say I voted lab/lib/con again to control migration.

  85. Our approach to religious slaughter and animal welfare
    Religious Slaughter
    Last updated: 29/01/2019

    Background
    Tesco is an international retailer operating in European and Asian markets. We serve customers from different cultures and religious beliefs, and this is reflected in the products we sell. In the UK, there are long-standing provisions in UK law which, subject to specific requirements, allow the slaughter of animals without stunning to meet Jewish and Islamic religious requirements.

    https://www.tescoplc.com/sustainability-old/downloads/religious-slaughter-policy/

    1. So if some Tesco stores are in areas where there are a preponderance of paedophiles, do Tesco sell young girls “to serve our customers” or is there a moral aspect to Halal slaughter? (Don’t tell me that the animals are killed with some kind of respect; there are far too many videos on YouTube to prove the lie to this.)

      1. My local (big) Tesco removed the meat the fish the cheese the bread counters. I removed myself as a customer.

  87. There, out in the darkness
    A fugitive running
    Fallen from God
    Fallen from grace
    God be my witness
    I never shall yield
    Till we come face to face
    Till we come face to face
    He knows his way in the dark
    Mine is the way of the Lord
    Those who follow the path of the righteous
    Shall have their reward
    And if they fall
    As Lucifer fell
    The flames
    The sword!
    Stars
    In your multitudes
    Scarce to be counted
    Filling the darkness
    With order and light
    You are the sentinels
    Silent and sure
    Keeping watch in the night
    Keeping watch in the night
    You know your place in the sky
    You hold your course and your aim
    And each in your season
    Returns and returns
    And is always the same
    And if you fall as Lucifer fell
    You fall in flame!
    And so it must be, and so it is written
    On the doorway to paradise
    That those who falter and those who fall
    Must pay the price!
    Lord let me find him
    That I may see him
    Safe behind bars
    I will never rest
    Till then
    This I swear
    This I swear by the stars!

    2. ‘Evening, Philip, it’s being so cheerful that keeps you going, isn’t it?

      1. Yes, yes – we know he never sleeps – In fact with World Population heading towards 10 billion he’s probably busier than ever….

  90. My Message Upticks (the little blob next to my ID) has just gone to 9+

    yipppppppeeeeeeeeeeeeee

  92. I’m going to wish you all Goodnight and God bless. I hope to be back on Tuesday, as tomorrow is Office revamp day to build Best Beloved and me a form of ‘Partner Desk’ and make better use of the space available.

    Much grunting, groaning, huffing and puffing – and that’s just me!

  93. Good night, folks. I’m off to cook something (don’t know what, yet) and read a book.

  95. For those seeking escape from Coronavirus, ‘Allo, ‘Allo! is on Yesterday channel …

    1. “I was pissing by the door,
      when I heard two shats. You are holding in your hand a smoking goon; you
      are clearly the guilty potty.”

    2. Allo allo was always a guilty pleasure. One of the better sitcoms of that era.

  98. ‘Educating Rita’ with Michael Caine and Julie Walters on BBC1 now – and BBC1 Scotland at 11.00pm …

    MC’s rooms are in front square of my Alma Mater, Trinity College, Dublin.

      1. Caine got bollocked by the producers of Educating Rita for taking the piss out of himself in the scene where he was carried out, in a drunken state, from the lecture hall.

        He had never, at any stage of his career, actually uttered the alleged phrase he was famous for, viz: “Not a lot o’ people know that.” So he ad libbed it into that scene. Despite his bollocking, the producers kept it in the finished film.

  99. Red blob updated from 3 days ago – I wonder when I’ll get the e-mails.

    Oh, although the red blob has gone black, when I checked the blue lines on the left side – meaning I haven’t read them, are still there.

    I’ll refresh after this and see if the blob goes red again with 9+

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