Sunday 6 October: Israel is defending itself and the West – it must be allowed to finish the job

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

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

606 thoughts on “Sunday 6 October: Israel is defending itself and the West – it must be allowed to finish the job”

  1. Good Sunday Morning – am I first?
    Today's Tales
    A pompous Englishman arrived to pick up his Australian visitor in a Rolls Royce. The Australian sat next to him in the front seat.
    “I suppose, being a Colonial, you’ve never ridden in a Rolls Royce?" said the puffed-up Pom.
    “Sure I have,” replied the Aussie, “but never in the front!”

    Dougal was a typical Scot. His wife Janet had just died and he wanted to place the least expensive death notice. He went to the newspaper office and wrote on the lodgement form, “Janet died”.
    The clerk explained that there was a minimum charge and he could have six words. Douglas added three more words: “Janet died, Toyota for sale”.

    Justin, the hotel check-in clerk, told the couple that the only room available was the bridal suite.
    “But we’ve been married for twenty-five years! It would be wasted on us,” said the husband.
    "But if I put you in the ballroom, we wouldn’t expect you to dance all night!” replied Justin

  2. Good Sunday Morning – am I first?
    Today's Tales
    A pompous Englishman arrived to pick up his Australian visitor in a Rolls Royce. The Australian sat next to him in the front seat.
    “I suppose, being a Colonial, you’ve never ridden in a Rolls Royce?" said the puffed-up Pom.
    “Sure I have,” replied the Aussie, “but never in the front!”

    Dougal was a typical Scot. His wife Janet had just died and he wanted to place the least expensive death notice. He went to the newspaper office and wrote on the lodgement form, “Janet died”.
    The clerk explained that there was a minimum charge and he could have six words. Douglas added three more words: “Janet died, Toyota for sale”.

    Justin, the hotel check-in clerk, told the couple that the only room available was the bridal suite.
    “But we’ve been married for twenty-five years! It would be wasted on us,” said the husband.
    "But if I put you in the ballroom, we wouldn’t expect you to dance all night!” replied Justin

  6. This is going to be a daft question, but how do you Nottler guys and gals receive Notification that Geoff has posted each day's NTTL on Disqus?

      1. Ah! so that's how you do it. I was just waiting from 06:50 and repeatedly pressing F5 (Refresh) on my PC.

        1. Not sure there's always a specific time, but it's rare for me to get up before the new page is up. That said the mornings here are busy-ish with 3 people and 3 dogs all going in different directions.

      1. Mine too along with the DT, Sudoku,, The Conservative Woman, Television and Radio Times etc. and others of current interest..

        1. Every so often – but not that often – I have a cull of unused bookmarks.
          It's reference archeology; I have forgotten why on earth I marked the items in the first place.

    7. Just scroll to the top of the previous day's forum and above the date there is a horizontal line. Above that are the words (in small capitals) NOT THE TELEGRAPH LETTERS. Simply click on those words and a page showing all previous fora opens up. You just then click on the day of your choice.

    1. Because we live in a corrupt and wicked age. I could handle the unfairness (life has never been fair), it's the dose of delusional virtue-signaling and hatred that comes with it that I can't take. One never knows what fresh misery is going to be inflicted up us, with the majority of nodding doggies going along with it because it was on the BBC.
      edit; sorry for the negative post first thing on Sunday morning. The contents of Toby Young's tweet infuriate me. Scanned the Mail briefly in the vain hope for finding something more positive; there's a lovely picture of Meghan on the front and I know how much you all love her.
      Better get on with defrosting the fridge!

        1. As a technology there's nothing 'wrong' with them but they are best used for short journeys, near home where you can charge it. They are town cars.

          Which shows the intent of government: to control you. Besides electric cars are simply designed, like smart meters to restrict what you can do.

      1. Unless the car has been gained through the laughable motability scheme.

        A better question, Mr Young, is why is electricity so expensive generally? The state wants to electrify everything, but is fervently ensuring that our energy prices are the highest in the world. Is this simply to ensure a revenue stream for the state?

        Very likely, making the entire scam of 'climate change' merely a hoax perpetrated on the public by an arrogant, abusive state.

        1. Motobility? I know someone who hasn't worked for 40 years, produced 7 kids, is on every benefit going, has just made £70k on the sale of one of their houses, sold their car and has managed to get a top of the range motobility car.

  9. Curiously on message this morning, yesterday I sang in a day's workshop working through Handel's 'Saul'. This is taken from the First Book of Samuel, and tells the story of a jealous king whose young protégé awoke a sense of envy and paranoia because he had killed ten thousand, whereas the king himself only managed to massacre a thousand.

    I have often heard that the Old Testament can get a bit bloodthirsty at time, and is likened to Medina verses of the Qu'ran, where Allah will cut the Infidel into a thousand pieces out of a sense of righteousness.

    How is this relevant today? Well, the coat of arms of this young warrior (who later claimed the throne himself), a six-pointed star, is precisely the same one used today by the same tribe against the same foe.

    1. If I recall, God became angry against Saul because his instructions were to slay all the men, women and children, sheep and goats. Slaughtering the people were all in a day's work, but the sheep and goats were too good to waste, so they were spared the sword. God heard baaing and bleating and was most put out.

      1. Is that the passage where God tells them to kill the lot or they’ll be forever a thorn in your side, so they didn’t and they are?

        1. When lemmings get too numerous, they jump over a cliff. I imagine that when humans get too numerous, they push their neighbours over the cliff.

          1. Lemmings do not jump over cliffs. That puerile falsehood came about when an idiotic film was released by that Mickey Mouse corporation (Walt Disney) back in the 1950s. Those in the film that did so were driven to do that by the film crew.

            There is no empirical evidence — anywhere — that lemmings have ever performed such an incongruous mass suicidal act. They simply do not possess the necessary sentient consciousness to know when their populations are unfeasibly large.

          2. Are you suggesting then that humans are as happy to push lemmings over the cliff as they are their neighbours?

            Wonderful thing, sentient consciousness!

          3. I don’t know about lemmings, Grizzly, but in the 1950s Disney made a film called PERRI about a squirrel who shot up a tree and then jumped across at the top to another tree. To get this footage they released squirrel after squirrel until on actually did this

          4. There were also umpteen Skippy’s (the bush kangaroo), Auntie Elsie. Skippy changed colour (and sex) every episode and no one noticed. The show was sold to every country in the world except for two, one of those being Sweden. The Swedish TV company stated, “We have no wish for our children growing up thinking a kangaroo can fly a helicopter or play a piano!” I kid you not.

      2. David's lament over the deaths of Saul and his special friend, Saul's son, Jonathan may be formal but it is also moving. It is called The Song of the Bow and my father asked me to learn it by heart when I was a boy

        Thy beauty O Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!

        Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.

        Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be rain, upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though he had not been anointed with oil.

        From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan turned not back, and the sword of Saul returned not empty.

        Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.

        Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your apparel.

        How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places.

        I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

        How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!

  10. You can tell it's Sunday morning. There's no flood of postings after Johnny's one 11 minutes ago. We must all be either insomniacs or stuck in our up-early ways.

        1. Morning, Tom.
          Experience tells me that alcohol before 11:00 am is baaaad for me. Enjoy!

  12. One of UK’s most prolific shoplifters avoids jail for 172nd conviction. 6 October 2024.

    One of Britain’s most prolific shoplifters has avoided prison for her 172nd conviction.

    Tanya Liddle’s latest crimes have emerged just weeks after a unique civil injunction saw her banned from all but three shops across the North East region where she lives.

    Liddle, who has 499 offences to her name, has been described as a “plague” upon Northumbrian shops, but has developed an online following after posting videos on social media that are said to have served as “how to steal” tutorials.

    Funny of course provided that you are not a victim. Shoplifting in the UK has never been regarded serously but it is now becoming a non-crime. In some areas of the US this has led to the decimation of retailers. Whole neighbourhoods and shopping malls have closed down. The cost to customers in convenience and price is probably incalculable.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/05/uk-most-prolific-shoplifter-avoids-jail/

    1. 499 offences. Same as there are stabbers out there with dozens of offences, why are the public forced to tolerate these useless vermin?

    2. 'has developed an online following after posting videos on social media that are said to have served as “how to steal” tutorials.'

      499 offences, more like how to get caught.

  13. The world knew that, in the near future, they would have a gullible idiot British PM in their sights from the moment Keir and Ange published a photograph of them taking the knee in the global MSM.

    Britain must surely be the most gullible nation in the West

    Labour’s decision to hand over the Chagos Islands belies a serious flaw in Lammy’s ‘progressive realism’

    Yuan Yi Zhu
    05 October 2024 5:00pm BST

    Last April, David Lammy, then Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, made a minor splash in Westminster when he floated the concept of “progressive realism”. It was an intriguing attempt to marry the precepts of realism – the international relations theory that puts the emphasis on state power as the driving force for world politics – with the achievement of progressive goals.

    Not yet 100 days in office, and Lammy’s attempt to marry tough-nosed pragmatism and progressive ends already looks as if it’s over. Britain’s decision to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, on the basis of a non-binding advisory legal opinion and petty harassment by the Mauritian government, has deprived Britain of a strategically critical territory and its original inhabitants of a say over the future of their homeland.

    But it has also exposed Britain as a gullible player in world politics willing to do anything against its own national interests, as long as it is couched in impressive-sounding legal jargon by the lawyers at Matrix Chambers. Already, a jubilant Argentina is hoping to use the cession of the Chagos Islands as a precedent for its expansionist designs over the Falkland Islands. More challenges against the ownership of Britain’s remaining overseas territory is sure to follow.

    In fairness, Labour does not shoulder the blame on its own. It was after all Liz Truss who, during her few days in power, had abandoned six decades of British policy applied consistently by Labour and Conservative governments alike, and agreed to negotiate with Mauritius over the fate of the islands. And it is rich to see James Cleverly criticise the government’s decision when he, as foreign secretary, opened the negotiations.

    But there is no escaping the fact that, after Lord Cameron put the brakes on the negotiations, Labour re-opened them, even sending the Blairite grantee Jonathan Powell to close the deal. The depth of Powell’s understanding of the situation is neatly illustrated by a post-deal interview in which he called the islands, which host one of the world’s most important military bases, “very tiny islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean where no one actually goes”.

    To add insult to injury, not only has Britain promised to give the islands to Mauritius, which sold them in 1965 for £3 million and British security guarantees, but the United Kingdom has undertaken to pay significant financial support to Mauritius, one of Africa’s richest countries and at best a fair-weather friend which in recent years has become increasingly part of China’s wider orbit.

    Officially, the United States has given its blessing to the agreement with Mauritius. Behind closed doors, senior officials are concerned that the future of the base on Diego Garcia will be at the mercy of whoever is in power in Port Louis. Mauritius has promised a 99-year lease, with a renewal option; but Mauritius also promised to renounce its claims over the Chagos in 1965, a promise it broke a mere 17 years later.

    And nothing in this deal advances the progressive goals the government claims to champion. The Chagossians, who were expelled to make way for the military installations, were neither consulted nor involved in the negotiations. Many of them are understandably furious that the Foreign Office and No 10 gave away their homeland to a country which has consistently mistreated them.

    Government sources are in furious spin mode. Ludicrously, it has been claimed that the deal will help support more non-Western support for Ukraine. But no country will respect Britain more because of such a blatant display of national weakness. If Conservatives want to redeem themselves for helping to cause this mess, they must oppose the ratification of the agreement at every step of the way.

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

    Nigel Wheatcroft
    14 hrs ago
    Quite simply Starmer and Labour cannot be trusted with our security, they would rather virtue signal to the world how caring they are about image….in fact they cannot be trusted with anything

    1. Handing over the islands without securing the future of the islanders as Mauritius citizens is appallingly arrogant; on a par with removing them with a few hours' notice in the 1970s. Utterly shameless.

      1. There's some muddy rumours that this was actually in train and started by Cleverly – which I take to mean the foreign office had planned to do it regardless and wanted rid.

        1. Boris and Liz in Chagos Islands' blame game

          Steerpike • 4th October 2024, 6:37am

          Mauritius is getting the Chagos Islands – and a lot of Tories ain't happy. Tom Tugendhat calls it a 'shameful retreat'; Robert Jenrick bemoans the 'dangerous capitulation.' The Telegraph calls it a 'national scandal' while the Mail splash screams it is 'Starmer’s surrender.' So with the Tory tribes raising a hue and cry, who better to articulate patriotic harrumphing than Boris Johnson? As part of his book tour, the former premier was grilled last night by Camilla Tominey on GB News. Asked for his reaction to the decision, Johnson called it:

          Crazy. I mean do, I urge viewers of GB News to get out your maps, get out your atlases, check out the Chagos Islands and see where Mauritius is. It’s a long way away. What is this claim? It's nonsense. It’s total nonsense. Why are we doing this? It's sheer political correctness. A desire to look like the good guys. A desire to look as though we are unbundling the last relics of our empire. It’s nonsense. It’s a bad idea in hard geopolitical terms because the base in Diego Garcia, as I’m sure you’ll know, as all our viewers know, is of huge strategic importance for the US, for the West and it's a key component of the Anglo-American alliance. It's one of the things bring to the table. It has been for decades, that base. Why are we trading away our sovereignty over it? Completely the wrong thing to do.

          Good strong stuff. So then, who is to blame for starting these talks, which formally began in November 2022? Step forward, er, Boris Johnson, according to the woman who replaced him. Shortly before the excerpt of Johnson's interview aired, a spokesman for Liz Truss told Mr S that:

          It was Boris Johnson who asked Liz to talk to Prime Minister Jugnauth about this at COP26, which she did. But she was absolutely clear that we would and should never cede the territory.

          Who could have foreseen that talks would actually lead to something eh? There's that famous Tory foresight once again…

          https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/boris-and-liz-at-odds-over-chagos-islands/

          Call-me-Dave, of all people, halted proceedings earlier this year but to no avail.

        2. Boris and Liz in Chagos Islands' blame game

          Steerpike • 4th October 2024, 6:37am

          Mauritius is getting the Chagos Islands – and a lot of Tories ain't happy. Tom Tugendhat calls it a 'shameful retreat'; Robert Jenrick bemoans the 'dangerous capitulation.' The Telegraph calls it a 'national scandal' while the Mail splash screams it is 'Starmer’s surrender.' So with the Tory tribes raising a hue and cry, who better to articulate patriotic harrumphing than Boris Johnson? As part of his book tour, the former premier was grilled last night by Camilla Tominey on GB News. Asked for his reaction to the decision, Johnson called it:

          Crazy. I mean do, I urge viewers of GB News to get out your maps, get out your atlases, check out the Chagos Islands and see where Mauritius is. It’s a long way away. What is this claim? It's nonsense. It’s total nonsense. Why are we doing this? It's sheer political correctness. A desire to look like the good guys. A desire to look as though we are unbundling the last relics of our empire. It’s nonsense. It’s a bad idea in hard geopolitical terms because the base in Diego Garcia, as I’m sure you’ll know, as all our viewers know, is of huge strategic importance for the US, for the West and it's a key component of the Anglo-American alliance. It's one of the things bring to the table. It has been for decades, that base. Why are we trading away our sovereignty over it? Completely the wrong thing to do.

          Good strong stuff. So then, who is to blame for starting these talks, which formally began in November 2022? Step forward, er, Boris Johnson, according to the woman who replaced him. Shortly before the excerpt of Johnson's interview aired, a spokesman for Liz Truss told Mr S that:

          It was Boris Johnson who asked Liz to talk to Prime Minister Jugnauth about this at COP26, which she did. But she was absolutely clear that we would and should never cede the territory.

          Who could have foreseen that talks would actually lead to something eh? There's that famous Tory foresight once again…

          https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/boris-and-liz-at-odds-over-chagos-islands/

          Call-me-Dave, of all people, halted proceedings earlier this year but to no avail.

    2. Starmer is not gullible. He is a hypocrite. He doens't see anything wrong with locking away decent people resisting government policy because, at heart he's a fascist: all Lefties are.

      He knelt to the black looting mob because they're his demographic. He wants to be seen pandering to the criminal vermin because they're practically clients – they're the consumers of policing, social services, welfare, fire.

    3. The Chagossians, who were expelled to make way for the military installations, were neither consulted nor involved in the negotiations.
      A bit like the British – not involved in the giving-away of their homeland to invaders crossing the Channel in their thousands

  14. Good morning, all. Overcast and breezy.

    Trump's return rally to where a few months ago he was almost assassinated included a rendition of Nessun Dorma. The inclusion of this aria has spurred many to read this as a warning to the 'Deep State' as this piece was used in the concluding scenes of the film The Sum of All Fears in which all the traitors are mercilessly dealt with.

    Trump's action yesterday chimes with the report of his meeting with the Taliban and his not-so-cryptic warning to the leader i.e. handing the latter a picture of his house with no further explanation.

    Little wonder that his opponents are concerned about his return as POTUS.

    https://x.com/ShadowofEzra/status/1842722646313533856
    https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1842773527004418502

    1. IF elected, Trump will have the chance to start on the corrective treatment that the USA needs to recover it's standing in the world.
      but for that effort to continue there will need to be a determined group of men and women to ensure that programme continues.

      1. I'm not a fan, but I sincerely hope he wins and rubs the noses of the growing number of nasty leftist garbage into the true grit.

        1. Him accepting a Purple Heart medal from a vet isn't right as he dodged the draft 5 times

  15. 394232+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Sunday 6 October: Israel is defending itself and the West – it must be allowed to finish the job

    Sunday 6 October: Israel is defending itself and the West – it must be allowed to finish the job,an undeniable fact, by the same token we must surely take up the defensive cudgel and seriously START to defend our families and realm.

    Firstly reclaim London reinstate a patriotic pied piper
    type leader to de-rodent the London streets and governing odious elites.

    Once upon a time we got through evil issues with flying colours as in "the blitz" that spirit of unity then must return to the scene of the crimes, in this case LONDON FIRST.

    Many a dumb numb nut still has faith in the governing
    three party close shop system, and the very politico's that sold the herd OUT WHOLESALE.

    1. How, ogga? We can't make our own steel. We can't build a tunnel – I forget the blog (Might have been talktv) where they discussed that Norway building a tunnel had cost less than the UK planning application for a very simple bridge.

      The MoD produced that new tank – which is too noisy. Why? Because it complies with emissions standards. Ignoring that engines are something we do very well (we build Clas tractors here for goodness sake) . The main weapon, designed to be modular can't be because the turret is too heavy because the armour composites are not 'green' enough. It's insulting – ignoring that the damned thing is nigh 20 years late. 20 years! Can you imagine Tesla saying 'Oh, yeah, we made this new car' and releasing the Tesla Roadster now?

      Because there are no failure penalties, because money is infinite and failure rewarded the state has no imperative to do better. It is simply a furnace into which private wealth is shovelled.

      The state is simply holding the country back deliberately.

        1. 360,000 pages. Dear life. When you have to account for the diversity of those working on it something is clearly wrong.

          1. One of the biggest problems in the Dopey Wokey UK is, there is always someone who thinks that they know more and think they are better than everyone else. And as use to happen, instead of shoving them aside and getting on with things. The rest of them listen and act on all their mad assumptions. Aka BS politics.

        2. From Wikipedia:
          The Lærdal Tunnel (Norwegian: Lærdalstunnelen) is a 24.51-kilometre-long (15.23 mi) road tunnel connecting the municipalities of Lærdal and Aurland in Vestland county, Norway; the southwest end of the tunnel is approximately 117 kilometres (73 mi) northeast of Bergen. It carries two lanes of European Route E16, and was the final link completing the main highway that now enables car travel between Oslo and Bergen with no ferry connections and no difficult mountain crossings during winter. It is the second longest road tunnel in the world, after WestConnex in Sydney, Australia.

          In 1975, the Parliament of Norway decided that the main road between Oslo and Bergen would run via Filefjell. In 1992, Parliament confirmed that decision, added that the road should run through a tunnel between Lærdal and Aurland, and passed legislation to build the tunnel. Construction started in 1995 and the tunnel opened in 2000. It cost 1.082 billion Norwegian kroner ($113.1M USD).[3][4]

        3. With sadick trying his hardest to abolish private transport, how can there be a need for anyone to build a new tunnel for London traffic?

      2. And It will never end in our lifetime's.
        Same old story, everything our political idiots come into contact with they eff it up and big time.
        Everything.

      3. 394232+up ticks,

        Morning W,
        In a good 90% of ALL odious issues
        I make the indigenous peoples to be at fault as in a major abuse issue that occurs many isolate themselves saying tother side of town no worries.
        I would think about 40% now would consent to eu incarceration
        if asked, so with weight of numbers we should be reversing ALL this shite on a daily basis.

        As with my earlier post clean OUT
        London, first ask ALL indigenous
        inclusive, to move on, foreigners
        to seek their original roots, locals
        actively anti Brit, to seek silent order refuge, or else.

        1. ask politely.
        2. bring cudgel into play.
        3. insert large nail into head of cudgel.

  16. Good morning, all. Grey day. There was a bright red sunrise an hour ago. All gone now. Rain later.

    1. Aye, I nipped out to put the washing out and there's a soft drizzle. So stuck it inside under the dehum.

  17. As regards the headline – I'm not sure it can ever be finished until one side or the other is wiped out. That's how potty the situation is.

    1. Yes, it does seem to be pretty clear that it's an existential conflict for both sides.

      1. I had to read the article to make sense of it.
        To boil it down to essentials; Packham got £100,000 ish from a couple of chaps writing in a country magazine who suggested he was involved in a dodgy charity.
        Packham tried the same trick on the proof reader, came a cropper and has had to hand over double the amount.

          1. Who knows, but the main defendant was IMHO, silly. An apology and a donation might have avoided a trial.

      1. Good use of understatement!

        He is a thoroughly foul person though to be fair to him I do not know him personally and have no wish to do so!

        1. I know someone with important British Ornithology links.
          I did ask him years ago if he’d met him. My friend told me that he wasn’t as bad as most people expect.
          But my friend is quite an easy going person.

    4. Right, here is the judgement.
      https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Packham-v-Wightman-Judgment-250523.pdf
      I spotted one small error in a name, not important.
      The whole libel situation revolved around whether, during a fund raising campaign, the expression 're-house' would have been more appropriate than 'rescue'. Storm, teacup.
      It is a Good Thing to provide a haven for wild animals that are not suitable for release; however there is inevitably a degree of exploitation when such animals are then exhibited to the paying public. What concerns me about the arrangement at the Wildheart Sanctuary (aka Sandown Zoo) is that the charity, one way or another, pays a rent of £68,000 per annum to the site owner. That person happens to be Ms Corney, the business associate of Mr Packham. She is listed as being the secretary of his services company.
      Ms Corney is also his girlfriend, though they do not live together and after 17 or 18 years they have yet to formalise their relationship. Of course if Ms C is still managing the Zoo/Sanctuary, ferry travel costs would make living together impractical and unaffordable.
      According to the Charity Commission, the Sanctuary has about 44 employees (many part time I suppose) so those tigers etc still earn their keep, and generate VAT receipts. To be clear, a well-cared for animal in an outdoor enclosure is better off than in a series of cages.

  19. Good Moaning.
    Beautiful sky first thing, but now back to grey.
    At this rate, we will run out of boring jobs.

    1. I'll be swinging the chainsaw again up the hill.
      I missed Cromford Apple Day yesterday, didn't realise it was on this weekend, but then again, I've been that focused on getting the wood sorted I've been ignoring my own apples.

  20. We found out yesterday that Oscar has an ingrowing dewclaw. As he is 'less watched' by his mistress I only noticed when he started to fall behind on our walk and saw him looking plaintively at the Warqueen as she surged ahead.

    On sitting with him he let me look at his feet and lo, his left leg was bleeding and his claw has dug in. I've cleaned with antiseptic and trimmed the claw so it's not contacting the skin any more and he seems ok but we'll go to the vets to make sure.

    The others are fine of course because they're played with and fussed over. Bloomin' woman.

  21. Morning, all Y'all.
    Sunny. Cats happy to be home again. Last of the gardening to do before winter – tie up the plum tree, harvest the rhubarb, plant the heather.

  22. 'Morning All
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/680dac3659c16074c603d629de8e5a1f34afc17f6f9fc3fc7f914e62966d8362.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/426150d431824d93794b6d0be1e7fcb2585884dd6f07c91af72fcaba013d2d81.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/77da555e9930a86afcea621e1639a0cc40f4a7e01a7f166659ffaaf32d6b9df7.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/550319e80246ea7d743620c1e90f95c6336bcdc86a73d8f588e3e7c44616954c.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3addcfb630564a16299fdaaf2724d078909ad0a16ff1998d199421f5c81b0926.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/87b163b0e02d3bf19427fbf9b46635efb8728b1eda83ea62b1d538e58ddfda00.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a565e62640f5c9e44cfde71c707e95276211e9e31224908d7109ef6746739944.jpg

  23. Are there any other undisclosed promises to individuals etc. in the PM's portfolio?

    It's not as if "assisted dying" is a minor issue and its publicity and therefore its future adoption having been bequeathed to a 'meeja celebrity' and not to the people is a disgrace. This Labour so-called government is well beyond the pale when it comes to treating the electorate with the respect it deserves.
    https://x.com/Adrian_Hilton/status/1842291639563571214

    1. Manifestos are meaningless. Brown went to court to prove that. Anyone believing them is an womble.

      If we're going to have a discussion about assisted dying why also not one on the hoax of climate change? That's a form of assisted dying – it practically enforces death.

  24. It's War
    Service gives citizenship..
    DM
    "Defra left with egg on its face in online revolt over chicken database crashes website – as pranksters list rubber chickens and chicken nuggets as 'pets'.
    People who keep chickens in their garden now face prison and large fines if they fail to register them all under strict new rules brought in to tackle bird flu.
    But within hours of the new Government database going live on October 1, protesters and pranksters managed to crash its website by listing as ‘pets’ everything from rubber chickens to chicken nuggets."
    Become ungovernable,proud to say I did my part

    1. But Defra's response won't be to abandon the policy – it's EU law after all – no, it'll be to hire ever more people and throw ever more of our money at this farce.

    2. Clearly a really stupid idea – we were at a local park on Friday that had a number of small lakes. All are teeming with ducks, geese and other birdlife! If bird flu does strike, what is the rationale for having domestic birds listed when a massive wild population exists with no record??? Then again, who expects common sense from politicians?

      1. Now, if they culled Seagulls, my 'Eat it in the Open Air" pasty would last a lot longer

  25. Good morning all.
    A dry, duller but less cold start to the day with 6°C without a lot of wind.

  26. Well, that didn't take long. Possibly they will find a use for those fume belching vans that fail the ULEZ.
    I wonder if Ms Leadbeater has in mind the chap who shot her sister? The alleged Nazi supporter who was a beneficiary of "Don't Care In The Community"?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/10/05/widen-access-to-assisted-dying-say-labour-mps/

    "Extend assisted dying to those without terminal illness, say Labour MPs

    Call for bill to go further and apply to those who are ‘incurably suffering’

    Kim Leadbeater says she wants a ‘broad debate’ on the bill OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images
    Dozens of Labour MPs are pushing for more people to be eligible for assisted dying, The Telegraph understands.

    Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, will table legislation on Oct 16 to legalise assisted dying after her Private Member’s Bill was selected for debate. Her decision to propose the law change means there could be a free vote by MPs before Christmas.

    The bill is expected to give terminally ill adults the right to choose to shorten their lives if they wish.

    As many as 38 Labour politicians, including 13 who hold government roles, are understood to back proposals for the bill to go further and to apply not just to the terminally ill, but more broadly to those “incurably suffering”.

    They are among a cross-party group of 54 MPs calling for the scope of the bill to be widened, according to Humanists UK, which has long called for a change in the law. It is likely to raise fears over introducing ambiguity into who would be eligible for state-sanctioned euthanasia.

    A key fear of those who oppose assisted dying is that too loose a definition of who qualifies could lead to people suffering from depression and other non-terminal health issues being allowed to take their own lives.

    Backers of a change in the law say that it is inhumane to keep the terminally ill alive if they are experiencing unbearable suffering.

    A change would also end the practice of terminally ill people travelling abroad to end their lives, often separated from their friends and families.

    It will be the first time the topic has been debated in the House of Commons since 2015, when an assisted dying bill was defeated.

    While polling shows that a majority of the public backs legalising support for terminally ill people who wish to end their lives, the issue could cause serious divisions across parties.

    Ahead of the bill’s first reading, Ms Leadbeater must decide on its title, which will determine the breadth of the debate. If the bill is defined narrowly as assisted dying for the terminally ill, it would make it difficult for MPs to debate the merits of whether the legislation should be broadened in scope.

    But if the bill is given a more open-ended title, it means MPs could introduce amendments, including on whether those with incurable illnesses should be eligible for legalised assisted dying as well as the terminally ill.

    Ms Leadbeater said she intended for the bill to be focussed on legalising assisted dying for those who were terminally ill but added that it was “important that the debate is broad and robust and very open”.

    “I haven’t decided the title of the bill yet,” she said. “I will meet and speak to people with different views. I am open-minded and the important thing is that the debate needs to be broad. It’s always really important to get back to the point that it’s about choice.”

    Several Labour MPs are expected to seek meetings with Ms Leadbeater in the coming days to discuss the wording of the bill.

    Suffering ‘not limited to terminal illnesses’

    Lizzi Collinge, the Labour MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, said she believed assisted dying should be legalised for those with incurable illness and had already written to Ms Leadbeater about the issue.

    “It is an important position because ultimately this is about human suffering,” she said. “Unfortunately suffering is not limited to those who have a terminal illness. Some people who do not have a prognosis of six months or less will be suffering in a way that no matter what you do, no matter the care you receive, their suffering becomes intolerable. That, I think, needs to be reflected in the law.”

    Nathan Stilwell, Humanists UK’s lead campaigner on assisted dying, said he was “thrilled to see so much support in this new Parliament for assisted dying”.

    He added: “Humanists UK has consistently campaigned for over a century for a compassionate assisted dying law that includes the incurably suffering and terminally ill.

    “We’ve been continuously speaking to MPs and have identified at least 50 who would want to see an assisted dying law that allows people who aren’t necessarily dying, but are incurably suffering from conditions like multiple sclerosis and locked-in syndrome the right to choose. We suspect that when MPs begin to read the proposed changes, that number will be higher.”

    1. Odd that Labour want to give people a choice over whether to kill themselves or not but see nothing wrong with denying them the choice over heating their homes, working, paying their bills or driving their cars.

    2. It could be a TV show "The Early Grave" and run a bit like the one that Schofield is on

      The general public put names forward for those they want to see die.

      Then we vote them "OFF" (to die). The least nasty one will last the longest….

    3. Assisted dying.
      It will begin with 'it's your choice' which will morph into 'it's your turn next'.

      1. Although they didn't have a choice, it's all being to sound a bit like Germany in the 1930s.

    5. Life is an incurable condition – none of us come out of it alive.
      Watch Richard D Hall's Jo Cox film before deciding whether the 'Nazi' did it. Two key witnesses from different parts of the story happened to be closely related – timelines that don't add up – the police calling him by name just before they arrested him in the street shortly after the murder – the accused saying nothing on camera. Just stinks a bit.

      1. It was all a bit too convenient.
        A "neo-Nazi" totals a female Labour MP days before a referendum on leaving the EU.

      2. Thank you, looks very interesting, but 55 minutes, will need to watch more later. A retired make up artist in the USA said that latex masks are more sophisticated than previously, produced from 3D scans etc.
        What always puzzles me is how TM could have obtained the murder weapon; supposedly it had been stolen from a locked SUV at a gunclub in Keighley, 20 miles away. No car alarm? A loner like Mair could not just wander around asking to buy weapons at carboot sales and pubs. But yes, Mair killed Jo Cox, just a question of who helped him and why.

    1. Maybe the donations could diverted to more important causes ?
      Such as keeping the elderly warm this coming winter.

    2. Robbing hoods.
      This and previous governments maintain a regime for electricity generation and supply in which the poor subsidise the rich.
      For pedants: in which less affluent working households (without savings) subsidise more affluent households (with savings).
      Most Nottlers would know this anyway but photovoltaic roof panel schemes are subsidised by charges on your electricity bill.
      EVs are subsidised. Large firms are subsidised for windturbine and/or PV installations in order to meet govt targets.
      Said companies are often foreign owned and their revenue sheltered within private equity firms where your pension provider might not be willing to invest. (although I tracked down the ultimate owner of one such PV installation, and it was a UK bank's pension scheme)
      Incidentally, when the sunlight-concentration camps reach the end of their useful life, and thousands of tonnes of glass and scrap metal must be recycled, a pound to a penny that the companies will have already done a runner, I mean opted for voluntary liquidation.

      1. The entire farce is corrupt to the core. Windmills cannot exist without subsidy. They get paid when they generate and paid when they don't. The state rigs the market to keep gas expensive through taxation and thus pretends that the prices for wind mills are not so bad where really they're more than 100-200% more expensive than other fuels and even then they're the cheapest of all the unreliables.

        But it's not just that. Because energy is now so expensive the government mandated that companies could not cut people off so slapped up the standing charges to cover the losses of non-payment.

        In addition to that the bill payer is lumbered with the costs of grid upgrades – the unreliables producers basically get a blank cheque on the bill payer and government rigs the market to pretend it all works.

        That's why energy is expensive, it's why nothing works, it's why the UK is effectively deindustriaising, it's why food and fuel are so expensive, it's why we are being driven back to the Dark Ages.

  29. Omg. There is a weird Japanese-style toilet in my hotel room (as well as the world’s most uncomfortable bath). I’m too frightened to use it….the seat automatically goes up when you open the cubicle door and there is a bar with loads of options you can press…(but don’t dare)…oscillate, pulsate, dryer…if this is the future, take me back to the days of that strange toilet paper my grandad used to use.

        1. Don't press the 'women only' button – a hand comes out, grabs your balls and places them in an incinerator

          1. For controls that complicated, I'd expect at least to be able to play my old Fraggle Rock video tapes.

          2. The "bidet" button seems to unleash a jet of such power that it lifts you into the air!
            Does the "spray" button wash the cleavage?

    4. I stopped in Tokyo (Narita) airport shortly on my first trip to Sydney. On the way back I had an overnight stay in a hotel at Osaka (Kansai) airport. I found those Japanese bogs quirky but a delight to use. Everything in Japan, it seemed, was scrupulously clean.

    5. A toilet AND a bath? Luxury.
      When I was a lad we were marched up to the local gasworks, to add a bit of aroma.

      1. And you thought you had it tough! We had to use cork up the bum and were only allowed to take it out in church.

  30. Sir Keir to issue statement.

    “This Government remains committed to defending the Falkland Islanders’ right of self-determination, and the UK’s unwavering commitment to defend UK sovereignty remains undiminished.

    You have my word on that.”

    4. Having seen the Chagos Islands sell out I think the Argentinians will have disregarded anything he's said on that subject. They're quite capable of reading between the lines.

    5. Having seen the Chagos Islands sell out I think the Argentinians will have disregarded anything he's said on that subject. They're quite capable of reading between the lines.

    6. The Regents Park hedgehogs once relied on Starmer's word. Fat lot of good that did them when he voted for HS2 to bulldoze their sanctuary.

    7. Righty, so he's going to give away the Falkland Islands to Argentina and the UK to the EU, no doubt forcing us back into the single market – which is chaining us by default.

      At least we can trust his lies. He'll do the exact opposite of what he says,

  31. Morning all 🙂😊
    Not a nice day weather wise. Already been chucking it down again.
    We had a lovely evening at a party last night.
    There must have been 200 people there at the happy occasion. Our youngest sons future in-laws celebrating a family birthday and the recent birtth of two grandchildren. Nation dress and lots of people from the Midlands present. We caught up with family members and met some very nice local people at our table of ten. Lovely Indian food, lots of free, help your self drinks. Although I was the 'nominated driver', zero alcohol. I'm not a great fan of the loud and thumping Indian music, but it certainly gets people up and dancing. Except for those with arthritic knee joints.
    A good excuse eh. 🤗

  32. Something for Baroness Warsi and the many Muslim MPs to look at and to ponder. Why do they tolerate this? Why do so many Muslim women kowtow to barbaric medieval rules and practices?

    The British would have far more respect for Islam if the many Muslims in public office were prepared to campaign for the freedom of Muslim women.

    https://x.com/i/status/1841944304115147222
    (Borrowed from the weekly email from The Conservative Woman's editor, Kathy Gyngell)

    1. The fact that so many atrocities are permitted (or ignored, for convenience) when the excuse given is either 'religion' or 'culture' is an utter abomination.

      Religion and culture are simply belief systems and more than a thousand of each exist on this planet (all of them constantly at odds with all the others!). How the hell can the human species consider itself intelligent or civilised while this utterly — appallingly — idiotic status quo remains?

      1. I think I answered that below in response to Sue Edison. It's what we do when we get too numerous. The pretext we give as we push our neighbours over the cliff is primarily to appease the gods and make us feel good about it.

    2. It's the younger women who were pushing it in the 80s. Unbelievable but true. The desire to seen to be 'good' and to conform is very strong in young women.

  33. Good morning all,

    The Met office have misdiagnosed the weather again .. calm here , slightly damp , 13c.

    Moh and his pal cancelled their golf game plans for today because there were weather warnings ahead .. strong winds and lashing rain..

    Quiet here and not even the rustle of leaves .

  34. From Wayne Dunlap's X account.

    We could say this about several recent PMs in the UK including the present incumbent.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e97b96de10cf3c6c92f621b06675baf63ba1e2a09a5d9a740ee64478a24a8777.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b58760ec87b8eaf152bd1e4c708827057cc289d3d84463ee937f8d23c1bad549.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a2537c9378268b135e527c439e76d3144434b9e7204ec7d7478521115e220918.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b68665850c0a1d23ea8ff5f29e0f6724e15305112e53931d52f10c6fa6cb28a0.png

  35. Lemmings do not jump over cliffs. That puerile falsehood came about when an idiotic film was released by that Mickey Mouse corporation (Walt Disney) back in the 1950s. Those in the film that did so were driven to do that by the film crew.

    There is no empirical evidence — anywhere — that lemmings have ever performed such an incongruous mass suicidal act. They simply do not possess the necessary sentient consciousness to know when their populations are unfeasibly large.

  36. And that is me off to tidy up the logs I've sawn, then sharpen & refuel the Husqy.
    TTFN

        1. Thank goodness; I thought it was just me.
          One of those v. large Japanese dogs like hay stacks on legs.

      1. Just finished an hour and a quarter with mine.
        It's surprising how many one can get through.

      1. I wonder about the source of their electronic systems.
        Shergar was dead keen on the Chinese during her stint as PM.

        2. I object to her being nicknamed Shergar. He was an outstanding racehorse. Ardern, on the other hand …

    1. I find it hard to have warm, compassionate feelings towards the little furry devils who ruin my lawn!

  40. Dozens of Labour MPs are pushing for more people to be eligible for assisted dying, The Telegraph understands.

    Kim Leadbeater, the Labour MP, will table legislation on Oct 16 to legalise assisted dying after her Private Member’s Bill was selected for debate. Her decision to propose the law change means there could be a free vote by MPs before Christmas.

    The bill is expected to give terminally ill adults the right to choose to shorten their lives if they wish.

    As many as 38 Labour politicians, including 13 who hold government roles, are understood to back proposals for the bill to go further and to apply not just to the terminally ill, but more broadly to those “incurably suffering”.

    They are among a cross-party group of 54 MPs calling for the scope of the bill to be widened, according to Humanists UK, which has long called for a change in the law. It is likely to raise fears over introducing ambiguity into who would be eligible for state-sanctioned euthanasia.

    A key fear of those who oppose assisted dying is that too loose a definition of who qualifies could lead to people suffering from depression and other non-terminal health issues being allowed to take their own lives.

    Backers of a change in the law say that it is inhumane to keep the terminally ill alive if they are experiencing unbearable suffering.

    A change would also end the practice of terminally ill people travelling abroad to end their lives, often separated from their friends and families.

    It will be the first time the topic has been debated in the House of Commons since 2015, when an assisted dying bill was defeated.

    While polling shows that a majority of the public backs legalising support for terminally ill people who wish to end their lives, the issue could cause serious divisions across parties.

    Ahead of the bill’s first reading, Ms Leadbeater must decide on its title, which will determine the breadth of the debate. If the bill is defined narrowly as assisted dying for the terminally ill, it would make it difficult for MPs to debate the merits of whether the legislation should be broadened in scope.

    But if the bill is given a more open-ended title, it means MPs could introduce amendments, including on whether those with incurable illnesses should be eligible for legalised assisted dying as well as the terminally ill.

    Ms Leadbeater said she intended for the bill to be focussed on legalising assisted dying for those who were terminally ill but added that it was “important that the debate is broad and robust and very open”.

    “I haven’t decided the title of the bill yet,” she said. “I will meet and speak to people with different views. I am open-minded and the important thing is that the debate needs to be broad. It’s always really important to get back to the point that it’s about choice.”

    Several Labour MPs are expected to seek meetings with Ms Leadbeater in the coming days to discuss the wording of the bill.

    Suffering ‘not limited to terminal illnesses’
    Lizzi Collinge, the Labour MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, said she believed assisted dying should be legalised for those with incurable illness and had already written to Ms Leadbeater about the issue.

    “It is an important position because ultimately this is about human suffering,” she said. “Unfortunately suffering is not limited to those who have a terminal illness. Some people who do not have a prognosis of six months or less will be suffering in a way that no matter what you do, no matter the care you receive, their suffering becomes intolerable. That, I think, needs to be reflected in the law.”

    Nathan Stilwell, Humanists UK’s lead campaigner on assisted dying, said he was “thrilled to see so much support in this new Parliament for assisted dying”.

    He added: “Humanists UK has consistently campaigned for over a century for a compassionate assisted dying law that includes the incurably suffering and terminally ill.

    “We’ve been continuously speaking to MPs and have identified at least 50 who would want to see an assisted dying law that allows people who aren’t necessarily dying, but are incurably suffering from conditions like multiple sclerosis and locked-in syndrome the right to choose. We suspect that when MPs begin to read the proposed changes, that number will be higher.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/10/05/widen-access-to-assisted-dying-say-labour-mps/

    The Hippocratic Oath is no longer required for doctors in the UK, but many medical students still take a version of it. The oath is a historical oath of ethics for physicians that establishes principles such as non-maleficence and medical confidentiality.
    The oath is a Greek text that originated between the fifth and third centuries BC. It is traditionally attributed to the Greek doctor Hippocrates, but some modern scholars believe it was not written by him.
    Some principles of the Hippocratic Oath include:
    Beneficence: To do good or avoid evil
    Non-maleficence: To do no harm
    Confidentiality: To maintain confidentiality and never gossip
    Respect: To respect the autonomy and dignity of patients
    Human life: To respect human life and not use medical knowledge to violate human rights
    Professionalism: To practice medicine with conscience and dignity
    Self-care: To look after one's own physical, mental, and emotional well-being
    Hippocratic Oath – Wikipedia
    The Hippocratic Oath is an oath of ethics historically taken by physicians. It is one of the most widely known of Greek medical te…

    Wikipedia
    Declaration of a New Doctor
    As a new doctor, and a member of the medical profession: * I solemnly pledge that I will do my best to serve humanity – caring fo…

    University of Exeter
    The Hippocratic Oath and Good Medical Practice – http://Patient.info
    10 Nov 2021 — Summary of principles from the Hippocratic Oath …

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

    1. “We’ve been continuously speaking to MPs and have identified at least 50 who would want to see an assisted dying law that allows people who aren’t necessarily dying, but are incurably suffering from conditions like multiple sclerosis and locked-in syndrome the right to choose. We suspect that when MPs begin to read the proposed changes, that number will be higher.”

      The slippery slope has started even before the bill has been introduced.

    2. Presumably, this programme is anticipated to shrink both the total costs of pensions and the anti-Labour vote in time for the next General Election.

      1. Don't forgetthe savings that the NHS will make by offing the most expensive patients.

        it has happened in Canada where costly cancer treatments are not available in a timely manner but assisted dying is offered as an option.

        Assisted dying has also been offered to veterans who have requested help with their PTSD.

        1. There is a fair argument to be made that human life hasn't started until the baby is able to survive outside the womb. But by that argument, the abortion limit should be pulled back, as medical science has advanced since the 1960s.

          1. Define "survive outside the womb". If you put a 6 month old baby in a house with all the food, water, heating etc it would need it would still die. Babies outside the womb need just as much support as babies inside the womb. Perhaps abortion should be allowed up to the age of 5?

          3. Going back to my merciful brief time in teaching, some children should be aborted up to the age of 16.

          5. On the contrary, it is a perfectly valid argument. Not with serious intent of course. It's a pity you chose to dismiss it rather than counter it.

          6. "Survive outside the womb " means breathing and suckling, i.e. surviving with its mother. Putting a baby on its own is whataboutery.

          9. How meaningful is life that can’t perform basic functions like drawing breath? A more relevant question might be to ask when the baby becomes conscious – and we don’t know the answer to that.
            One can argue back and forth on these pure principles. Women will always find ways to get rid of pregnancies, so some kind of pragmatic control is probably sensible. The Russians set the limit at 12 weeks, I believe.

    4. I noticed in an earlier post that Korky asked why this was not in the Labour manifesto. The Assisted Dying Bill was not in the manifesto or the King's Speech to protect the King. As Head of State he would need to give Royal Assent to the Bill but, if formally introduced by the government, it would compromise his position as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England (sanctity of life etc). The fix is to introduce it as a Private Member's Bill so that Charles can say it was not introduced by his government.
      Exactly the same thing happened when David Steel introduced the 1967 Abortion Act as a Private Member's Bill to protect the Queen.

    6. It's all rather complex, really.
      On the individual's side, there's my beautiful friend, Elaine, who in 1998 decided life was too bad to be worth living, despite having a husband and two small boys, and ended life by her own hand, with pills, in her car. Is this "privatised" approach that which the Labour party want to stop – and will it stop suicide? I doubt it. Those ill in the "approved" way will be given assistance in offing themselves, that's all – and how about the medical professionals involved? What will it do to their mental state, helping folk kill themselves? If nothing else, I hope that they will be given an option to not be involved at all.
      There's also the bereaved. Bad enough to be bereaved, very many times worse to know your loved one actively wanted to be dead. That really hurts – why was I not a good enough friend to see that she was in a bad way and needed help? It still breaks me up even now, decades later, and I can't listen to the attached without getting really upset, as I associate it with her.
      https://youtu.be/7O049oi2Dxw?si=ZFsHwGqb8LPdwg-q

      1. When we reach our lowest point , sometimes we bounce back .

        I feel that patients could be bullied or made to feel a nuisance , or a bed blocker , nuisance or what ever.

        Illness , accompanied by pain can be bleak, dark and lonely .

        Didn’t we feel appalled when we witnessed the rapid decline of Lotl, God bless her .

        The NHS let her down , and I fear they wrote her and her beloved new husband off .

        I don’t know the truth and circumstances , but most of us on here were shocked and saddened and furious by the careless treatment they both received .

        Death by discussion etc is just the same as an execution .

        We have enough obstacles in our path either caused by discomfort / illness / depression/ loneliness/ negligence.

        The NhS is in a shocking mess and the present low standard of diagnosis , treatment and subsequent nursing is
        questionable .

        I don’t want to be murdered by the NHS without my say so .. A DNR would perhaps suit me .

        1. That's where you need friends, Belle. Someone to lean on when the going gets hard, someone on your side.
          I'm just shocked at how Elaine never let on, or if she did, what her husband was thinking.
          Maybe she was mbarrased to discuss her problems? Never mentioned a word to me.
          This is one reason I work hard (could be better, I know) to keep close to those I care for, and that includes those that infest this site. I learned, by painful experience, the cost of not following up those you care for. It fucking hurts, I tell you.

    1. Leisure : by William Henry Davies

      What is this life if, full of care,
      We have no time to stand and stare.

      No time to stand beneath the boughs
      And stare as long as sheep or cows.

      No time to see, when woods we pass,
      Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

      No time to see, in broad daylight,
      Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

      No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
      And watch her feet, how they can dance.

      No time to wait till her mouth can
      Enrich that smile her eyes began.

      A poor life this if, full of care,
      We have no time to stand and stare.

      1. One of my favourite poems, Rastus.
        Brought to mind every time we visit Firstborn's farm.
        Where nights (in the winter) are properly dark, so you can see that there are so many stars that the sky isn't black, but a smooth milky grey. Where eagles soar in the summer; where hares, badgers, foxes play; where the bees buzz and the cleggs bite fcuking great chunks out of you; wild flowers bloom, pesticides aren't used… lovely.

      2. My father was always quoting that.
        In fact, I have a photo that won him a newspaper prize c. 1938 with the strapline "No time to stand and stare".
        It is a photo taken by his cousin of him and my mother sitting on a farm gate gazing over the fields. I will have to check where it is.

      3. For many years, pre-web, I used to confuse William Henry Davies with William Henry Hudson.

  42. Ok, that's me done for a bit, off to check out other Costas (no not the coffee lot)

  43. Today's new article in Free Speech by mind specialist and NHS psychiatrist Xanda H delves into how the brain perceives reality, or only a part of it, and why it is receptive to propaganda like that on global warming. It's deep, but well-worth reading. And don't worry, your comments will not be anaysed and used against you.

    And, following on from her article yesterday on how to save Britain, Frederica has suggested that we all sign the Pledge. No, it does not inolved giving up alchohol, but is instead a Pledge to do what you can to restore our country back to sanity – exactly what FSB was started to help do.

    So please sign. Click here to be taken to the signing ceremony.

    Thanks.

    freespeechbacklash.com

  45. Britain calls on Israel to show ‘restraint’ as airstrikes kill dozens on eve of Oct 7
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/10/06/israel-iran-war-hezbollah-lebanon-latest-news1/

    I would be interested to know how Leftists would defend the use of human shields placed in front of legitimate military targets?

    It is those who callously and deliberately sacrifice innocent people by placing them in the line of fire who are responsible for the carnage and not the Israelis who have the right to self-defence.

    By all means condemn the loss of innocent human life – but do not blame the Israelis for it – blame Hamas and Hezbollah.

    'Two wrongs do not make a right' is the old cliché – but a wrong that is not effectively countered will lead to more and more wrongs from the original wrongers on October 7th 2023.

  46. British Steel ‘green’ plan hit by electricity shortage
    British Steel told by National Grid that connection for electric arc furnace production will not be ready until 2032

    British Steel’s ambitions to switch to producing “green steel” have been hit after National Grid told the struggling steelmaker that it will not have access to a new electricity connection until 2032.

    The company, owned by Chinese conglomerate Jingye, wants to close the blast furnaces at its Victorian works in Scunthorpe this year and had hoped to switch to cleaner electric arc furnace (EAF) production by 2025.

    However, industry sources say National Grid has made it clear that the electricity connection needed to make that plan a reality will not be available for another eight years. Demand for new connections has surged as the UK seeks to decarbonise the wider economy.

    Business briefing Morning and midday updates on financial and economic news from our award-winning business team. Sign up with one click
    Without it, British Steel would need to import semi-finished steel for manufacturing in the UK, as a stop-gap measure to avoid making its entire 4,500-strong workforce redundant. The closure of the blast furnace is already set to lead to 2,000 job losses.

    Frantic talks are understood to be taking place in order to thrash out a solution. National Grid has proposed making a connection available in 2029, according to sources familiar with negotiations. No agreement has been reached.

    Earlier this year, a select committee of MPs found that the demand for new connections equates to more than double the amount of power generation required to meet net-zero targets.

    “We recognise the significance of this project and are working closely with all of the key parties involved to explore options to find a connection date that meets British Steel’s requirements,” said a National Grid spokesman.

    Even on an accelerated timetable, there are concerns that the interim measures may become permanent, and that two planned EAFs — one in Scunthorpe and another in British Steel’s mothballed Teesside plant — will never be built. EAF production reduces carbon emissions by 75 per cent compared to blast furnaces.

    Sir Keir Starmer and energy secretary Ed Miliband visited the Scunthorpe plant in June 2023. But Labour’s stance on the steel industry has been criticised

    Failure to return steelmaking to Teesside would be a blow to the region’s Tory mayor Lord (Ben) Houchen, who has this weekend written to the main three steel unions — Community, GMB and Unite — seeking crunch talks over the “existential crisis” in Britain’s steel sector.

    “I appreciate that we may not be politically aligned, but this is above politics,” he said, adding that the switch to electric arc furnaces is “the only way we can protect the industry in the long term and make it more financially sustainable”.

    The Tory government was said to be willing to offer state aid to retain blast furnace production ahead of the switchover to EAF. However, sources said the Labour administration is not willing to fund the industry’s losses, having refused to do so at the Tata steelworks in Port Talbot.

    British Steel, which also operates rolling mills in Teesside and Skinningrove, North Yorkshire, is currently losing an estimated £800,000 a day keeping the blast furnaces running in Scunthorpe.

    Houchen advocates keeping blast furnaces running until the new electric-arc furnaces are commissioned — and blames the Treasury for its refusal to bankroll the losses.

    “[Business secretary] Jonathan Reynolds, in my experience, is a sensible politician who understands the issues but has had his hands tied by the Treasury, who seem unwilling to properly back a common-sense transition that supports existing jobs and allows for a positive transition to new, sustainable jobs,” he said.

    A government spokesperson said: “This government will simply not allow the end of steelmaking in the UK. That’s why we’ve committed to £2.5 billion of investment to rebuild the UK steel industry. We’re working across government, in partnership with trade unions and businesses, to secure a green steel transition that’s right for the workforce and safeguards the future of the steel industry.”

    British Steel declined to comment.

    mick barnes
    3 hours ago

    Its ok chaps. Nothing to worry about.

    The eco zealot Milliband is in charge. With typical religious fervour of a faith covert and believer, he's absolutely sure everything is in place for Net Zero by 2030 when we will 100% using renewables and have renewable backup technology in place all whilst saving us £300 a year on our bills.

    Even better, he has a well researched, thought out formulated plan to achieve his religious nirvana which he revealed a couple of weeks ago.

    His plan consisted of sending a letter to the National Grid asking them how they would achieve his brilliant Net Zero idea.

    They said they had absolutely no idea but they would follow his plan to the letter.

    Miliband the evangelist believer is the most dangerous person that has ever been in a position of power in this country.

    We already have the most expensive power in the EU. We buy gas fracked in America, sailed across the sea on Dirty ships but cant drill or frack for our own gas. We use Chinese coal powered manufacturing for our solar panels.

    Yet we call this insanity green.

    He is so useless even Lord Ali the didnt waste his money and bribe him for future favours.

    Yes he is that bad!!

    2. "Green steel"
      In the future, it will be talked about with amazement how the west lost its collective head and started chasing willow-the-wisps at the cost of its own prosperity, food and warmth.
      People will say, "How did they go along with such evil? Why did they keep voting for such an obvious fraud? I wouldn't have fallen for it!"

      2. The Bonfire of the Vanities only lasted a year in Florence.
        Savaranola was hanged and burned.
        (Just sharing information.)

  47. It is a very agreeable autumn day. Cloudy – no sun – but very still. Assisted the Head Gardener in trimming hedge – by doing all the damned raking up of trimmings. Picked a boxful of pears (sadly, though they are delicious, they don't last). Watched Pickles cavorting on the roofs of the two large sheds (about 12 ft off the ground). He was just loving every minute – wonderful to see.

    Shortly time for lunch. And my weekly treat of a glass of Leffe Brune.

    2. Y'all realize that they are not the first state to show common sense. Oklahoma was first.

    3. Why is it 'breaking'?

      Since 2010, 201 anti-Sharia law bills have been introduced in 43 states. In 2017 alone, 14 states introduced an anti-Sharia law bill, with Texas and Arkansas enacting the legislation.

      https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/02/05/anti-sharia-law-bills-united-states

      Is such state legislation even necessary?

      The majority of anti-Sharia legislation introduced across the country incorporates the American Laws for American Courts model legislation published on the American Public Policy Alliance’s (APPA) website. This sort of language typically includes a clause prohibiting foreign law in American courts where it would result in a conflict with rights guaranteed by the constitution of the state or the United States. This legislation is totally useless — the U.S. Constitution already expressly denies authority to any foreign law.

      1. 394232+ up ticks,

        Afternoon DW,
        You know that, and now, via you many of us know that, thanks, but there are still many indigenous in the United Kingdom who would refuse to acknowledge it

  49. 394232+ up ticks,

    Hows this for audacity, audacity & more audacity, whilst still pushing the vaccine jab.

    Dt,
    Live Britain calls on Israel to show ‘restraint’ as airstrikes kill dozens on eve of Oct 7

  50. Two hours of tidying up, a bit of chainsaw fettling, found I did have a replacement fuel filter for one of my EFCOs so have that one operational too and the last few large diameter logs sawn into chopping lengths.
    Now got heaps of chainsaw chippings all over the upper terrace which will get spread about and left to rot and a decent stack of logs awaiting the axe.

    Relaxing with the obligatory mug of tea before heading up to bring down the rest of the sawn logs from further up the hill.

  51. The subject of peeing in the night comes up rather too frequently on NOTTL…you might be interested in this week's piece from Dominic Frisby detailing his experiments in this area and how he managed his first unbroken night's sleep for twenty five years. It's on The Flying Frisby, but you can get a 7 day free trial if you sign up for it.

    2. I just put a litre bucket on the vanity unity and pee from prone. My aim has got really good. Though i do have to do it backwards. :@)

      1. Bucket and chuck it is often the form at sea rather than using a pump out system.

        Indeed when people like Uffa Fox were sailing a lavatory seat was fitted over the stern of the boat well clear on the deck and hull.

    1. I read that last night, as you say it's harrowing and certainly not something that I should have read just before bedtime.

      An idiotic hamas protester in Washington set himself on fire yesterday, I would have left the bugger to burn.

      1. Too big to copy and paste.

        You can get by the firewall by pressing the escape key as the page begins to load.

        2. It is ginormous.
          Here's Melanie Phillips instead.

          "The choice: civilisation or barbarism

          Now we understand how the Holocaust could have happened
          MELANIE PHILLIPS
          OCT 6

          We are living through a seismic moment in our history, and the Jewish people will never be the same again.

          On October 7 — that terrible day — few would have imagined that one year later Israel would still be under attack from an eight-front war of extermination led by Iran.

          Even fewer could have imagined that, far from sympathy and understanding over the worst single attack on Jews since the Holocaust and the targeting of Jews once more for genocide, the west would turn against Israel as the aggressor and war criminal and subject diaspora Jews to an unprecedented tsunami of antisemitism.

          The scale and nature of this response indicate that something totally abnormal has been happening.

          It’s not just the street mobs chanting for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, and every other university student hurling accusations of genocide at the Israelis for trying to defend themselves against genocide.

          It’s not just the wretched media pumping out the Palestinian-scripted narrative of lies aimed at demonising and delegitimising Israel and writing the Jewish people out of its own history in the land.

          It’s not just the Biden administration and the Starmer government and the UN and international courts and NGOs and the Church of England all singing from the same Hamas hymn-sheet.

          It’s also that, when Israel bombs Hamas terrorists and their weapons in Gaza, the west tells it to stop because it’s killing “too many civilians”, even though it has produced the lowest ratio in modern history of civilians killed in war.

          When Israel carries out an unprecedentedly precise attack by exploding thousands of pagers on the person of Hezbollah fighters so that vanishingly few civilians are harmed, the west accuses it of “indiscriminate killing”. When Hezbollah is left reeling still further after Israel wipes out with one missile the entire senior command of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan force, the USA, France, Britain and other western countries start piling pressure on the Jewish state to cease fire immediately.

          In other words, there’s simply nothing Israel can do to defend itself adequately that will gain the approval of the so-called civilised world. Simply, the west doesn’t want Israel to win. It wants to leave the Jewish state indefinitely twisting in the murderous wind.

          For decades, the west said nothing while Hezbollah assembled its 150,000 rockets pointing at Israel from civilian areas of southern Lebanon, in flagrant disregard of UN resolution 1701.

          It said nothing for the past 12 months as Hezbollah bombarded northern Israel with missiles every single day.

          It said nothing for more than 20 years while Hamas fired hundreds of rockets from Gaza to kill Israeli civilians, forcing them to all but live in bomb shelters and their children to suffer enduring trauma.

          But when Israel finally defends itself, the west suddenly finds its voice and tells it that it mustn’t do so.

          Why is this? Several reasons. There’s the way left-wingers and Islamists unite in an attempt to wipe Israel off the map. There’s the endemic Jew-hatred, whose latest mutation is the wish to eradicate the collective Jew in Israel.

          There’s the liberal article of faith that all conflicts can be ended through negotiation and compromise, so the notion that sometimes war may be unavoidable to defeat fanatics with non-negotiable agendas is simply never acceptable.

          And there’s the destruction of the west’s moral compass under the impact of ideologies aimed at destroying its identity, values and culture.

          Now we understand how the Holocaust could have happened. It’s not just that there are people who want to exterminate the Jews. They can only do so with the active connivance or indifference of the rest of the world.

          October 7 presented the west with a clear choice: civilisation or barbarism. It has not chosen to defend civilisation. But as the west disintegrates under the weight of moral bankruptcy and collapse of self-belief, iron has entered the Israeli soul.

          Israel made a different choice. It said never again would it allow its people to be invaded, slaughtered, raped, beheaded and burned alive. This would be the last war in which it would have to fight for its existence.

          The Israelis are deeply traumatised. Their grief and anxiety are off the scale. At the same time, their spirit is unbroken. Yes, many deeply dislike Benjamin Netanyahu and there are large demonstrations aiming to get him out of office. But Israelis are remarkably united in their determination to inflict total defeat upon the enemies who want them gone.

          Yet there’s more. The astonishing, heroic commitment of the young conscripts at the front derives from their belief that they aren’t just fighting for their nation and for those who were slaughtered or kidnapped on October 7, but also for all those Jews who came before them and kept the Jewish people alive despite the centuries of such slaughter.

          Israel will win this terrible war — whatever the cost — because it knows what it is, loves its Jewish identity and is proud of it. As a result, it is determined to live. The opposite is true of the west that has abandoned it.

          Jewish Chronicle"

      2. It's too big to be posted in one piece.

        Part 1 of 4

        'Not one girl could be shown to her parents': The horrors of Oct 7 – as told by the survivors

        In a heartbreaking dispatch to mark the anniversary, witnesses recall the heroism of victims and the true depravity of the attack

        Allison Pearson • 05 October 2024 • 8:00am

        'Not one girl could be shown to her parents': The horrors of Oct 7 – as told by the survivors

        In a heartbreaking dispatch to mark the anniversary, witnesses recall the heroism of victims and the true depravity of the attack

        Allison Pearson • 05 October 2024 • 8:00am

        Three weeks ago, I travelled to Israel to try and work out what October 7 had meant as the first anniversary approached. The massacres committed by Hamas on that black Sabbath were among the foulest of the modern era and saw the worst loss of life for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Not much time elapsed, though, before the bloodcurdling crimes were sidelined as international attention switched, rather too eagerly, to Israel's war in Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians were tragically killed as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) tried to root out an enemy which used billions of charitable aid to build itself a network of tunnels more extensive than the London Underground. One military expert summed up Hamas's strategy in two chilling words: Human Sacrifice.

        A proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hamas – like Hezbollah – is dedicated to the annihilation of Israel. It's quite hard to fight a group which hides behind women and children, burrows under nurseries and hospitals; it's quite hard to do a deal with terrorists whose charter demands your own extinction. Regardless of the provocation, it is always Israel that is blamed for "escalation" and called upon to exercise "restraint".

        As Sir Tom Stoppard, our greatest living writer, observed exactly a year ago: "Who can say where Israel's response to October 7 will sit in the calculus of suffering by the time the region subsides into the next configuration of uneasy neighbours… We are aware that Jews are not the only victims of this tragedy, Hamas knew that there would be consequences to October 7, but the consequences did not weigh with Hamas. Before we take up a position on what's happening now we should consider whether this is a fight over territory or a struggle between civilisation and barbarism."

        I was one of those who thought it was the latter; 7/10 seemed to me to be every bit as pivotal as 9/11, one of those hinges in the history of the world when a profoundly shocking event triggers changes heretofore considered unimaginable. That was not always a popular view, particularly among the young who had been taught to see the only democracy in the Middle East, a haven of women's equality and gay rights, as a colonialist oppressor. (Even within Jewish families, Israel has the ability to set generations at loggerheads). Fear of "Islamophobia", seeded in progressive minds with considerable skill by Islamists, may have been part of it. One wit put it well on social media: "Israel is fighting to save Western civilisation before Western civilisation can stop it."

        The legacy of October 7 is complicated, although the evil done that day is not. Some Jews have experienced antisemitism for the first time, and they are living in fear, even here in the UK. In Belsize Park, north London, a man recently waved a placard saying: "I HEART 7 October." He was not arrested.

        On Monday, Israel's official commemoration of the first anniversary will be pre-recorded. Security may be a factor, but so is the risk of angry protests against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. A warrior hero for a nation still in trauma, the prime minister is also believed by many Israelis to have failed to get the remaining 101 hostages home, or to agree a ceasefire, because the end of the war will mark the end of his own career.

        Since I got back from Tel Aviv, events in Lebanon, including the breathtaking and ingenious humiliation of Hezbollah, have moved the dial again. "All part of the rehabilitation of the IDF image – back to what we expect, intel and technological excellence," one analyst enthused. But that raises an awkward question: how can a country so smart, so Q from James Bond it can set up a factory to manufacture pagers, fit them with mini explosives, have Hezbollah distribute those pagers to all its members and get them to blow up at the same time, have failed to prevent thousands of barbarians breaching its border security and raping, burning and butchering 1,200 of its citizens?

        So many questions still unanswered from October 7. I put those queries to scores of Israelis – survivors, soldiers, politicians, bereaved parents, mothers of hostages and just regular people who had to step up for their nation on that dark day.

        Some of what follows is horrifying and hard to bear, I know. I am warning you in case you'd rather not read on. But it is important to write it down. We know how important it is because on the BBC news on Thursday, Hamas's deputy leader told international editor Jeremy Bowen that Hamas didn't set out to kill any Israeli women or children on October 7. Hamas "resistance fighters" were ordered only to kill "occupation fighters", although he did concede that "there were certainly personal mistakes" and the fighters, who just popped into family homes on kibbutzim to have a chat and a bite to eat, "may have felt they were in danger".

        The accounts told to me by the individuals below, and many others who shared their insights, paint a very different picture. As always, the Devil is in the detail.

        6.30am: It was going to be a happy day, one of the happiest days of the year. Simchat Torah, which was scheduled to start at sundown, at the end of Sabbath, is a Jewish holiday that celebrates the conclusion of the annual cycle of Torah readings. There is a lot of food and dancing. The siren woke up Shari Mendes in her family's apartment in Jerusalem. Shari and David thought it was a mistake. But the architect and her surgeon husband went down to the shelter in the basement of their building with the other residents, just in case. False alarm.

        They came back upstairs and started to get dressed. "We were getting ready to go to the synagogue, and then there was another siren and another," Shari recalls. "People kept going back downstairs into the shelter with each siren at a different stage of dress – half dressed, almost dressed – and it was quite funny."

        The Mendeses didn't have their phones switched on because they don't use electricity or any electrical devices on the Sabbath.

        After a while, Arab neighbours came up to show them the news on their phones. "We were horrified," says Shari. She switched on her own phone to find Emergency Order #8 in Hebrew (tzav shmoneh). She was stunned. "This only happens during a war, right?"

        Order 8 is sent to IDF reservists during an emergency telling them to report immediately to their base. Shari Mendes had never done military service, as all Israelis must when they leave high school. She missed it because she was born and brought up in the United States, only moving to Israel in 2003 to raise her family. Just a couple of years ago, however, she had been approached to be part of a small, all-female unit which would help take care of the bodies of women soldiers in the event of a mass casualty event. In the Jewish tradition, it is women who prepare female bodies for burial. As more young women were seeing frontline service, the army thought it was a necessary precaution.

        On Saturday night, Shari drove to the Shura army base and joined her unit. "My first shift was Sunday morning. It was unimaginable. There were refrigerator trucks lining up as far as you could see. There's this massive intake area like an airport hangar and it was packed with bodies, body bags stacked one on top of each other right up the walls. Hundreds of bodies. The smell was incomprehensible. I'm very sensitive to smells, and I had never smelled this before. It was like the secret smell of death. I don't even know how to describe it, you couldn't breathe the smell was so bad. Literally gasping, struggling to breathe.

        "The floors were wet. Fluids were dripping from the bags. There was blood on the floor, so much blood. It was like walking into horror."

        Around Shari and the team, people were working at record speed, putting up sheetrock walls to create new rooms to stack the bodies in, bringing in more and more shipping containers with refrigeration and shelves. A decision had been taken to bring all the casualties of October 7 to the military morgue instead of sending civilian corpses to a hospital. Many of the bodies were so disfigured or destroyed you couldn't tell if they were soldiers or kibbutzniks or young people from the Nova festival anyway. Some were just ash.

        Shari's first job was in the identification room. "I can't overemphasise how shocking this was, even to professionals. Like, there were forensic doctors and army photographers and army dentists and army physicians all in this room gathered around a girl's body trying to establish who she was. Most of the people in my unit have no medical background. We're normal people, like secretaries or lawyers or retail workers, whatever. And suddenly there we were dealing with things that no one ever thought you could deal with."

        We are sitting at Shari's kitchen table. Sixty-three-years old, she is both striking and imposing, somehow radiating moral authority, yet also warm and hugely sympathetic. She has baked brownies for me and they smell delicious, but they sit in the tin untouched. The family's elderly dog sniffs around at our feet. I think I want to know everything, every thing she went through, but do I really?

        There's an imperative in Judaism that the modesty of the dead woman should be respected. Shari says that was what her team were trying to do. "Even in the rush and in the horror, we said, 'Please, let's cover the body when no one's working on it' and everybody said, 'Yes, let's cover her.' I was very touched by that. You know, that takes sensitivity in the midst of that unimaginable nightmare, and it was our job to do all the touching of the woman that wasn't medical.

        "If clothes needed to be taken off, we would take them off and it's important to give back to the family all the personal effects. We were taking things out of pockets like cigarette lighters. Every single thing, we wiped off the blood, put it in a special bag with a number to go into a certain box, to be returned to her parents." (Shari has a friend down her street whose son was killed. "She told me what it's like to open that box and how meaningful it is to them.")

        The team did their best to take off the jewellery. "Sometimes, it was very difficult. These young women had nose rings, and their faces were completely smashed up. And me who's squeamish is working with a dentist trying to take off a nose ring and there's nothing left of the face but the nose."

        The women were shot many times in the head. "Why? Why? We saw that these women were shot to be killed, maybe in the heart, in the head, but then they were shot many times in the face, and it looked like systematic mutilation because it seemed like they wanted to ruin these women's faces. A lot of them were young soldier women, and a lot of them had been very beautiful. The first few we saw weren't too bad because they might have been caught in their sleep and Hamas just shot them. But, after a while, we got women who had clearly been awake when they were murdered and these women came in and their mouths, their teeth were in grimaces and their hands were clenched, if they had hands.

        "We got notified that a woman's coming in and she has no legs, so the terrorist cut off her legs. There was clearly immense sadistic violence." A lot of the women had bloody, stained underwear, Shari says, some had no underwear at all. "People were shot in the breast, they were shot in the crotch, and that was not done to kill them." She is a calm, thoughtful person, but her voice is stiff with anger now.

        One body Shari dealt with personally still had a knife stuck through her mouth. "There was so much violence and it was totally sexual."

      3. Part 2 of 4

        Shari Mendes went to the United Nations on December 4 to tell them about the sexual violence, the unbelievable depravity she saw inflicted on women and girls. (As well as Jews, they were Christian, Druze, Hindu, Muslim.) It was an incredible speech, but the UN was notably slow to respond to the mass violation of Israeli women giving rise to the hashtag, #MeTooUnlessYoureAJew. "The UN is supposed to represent all nations," says Shari, "and they had an exhibit on August 17. It was the International Day of people who were killed in conflict and terror attacks. And they showed a picture of every single terrorist attack that happened that year, but they did not include October 7. What does that say about the UN?" They did eventually send the special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict to Israel from January 29 to February 14. Shari and others testified to Pramila Patten. Her report said there were "reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence – including rape and gang-rape – occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October". That's not good enough, Shari snaps. "I haven't heard most women's organisations condemn the sexual violence. And what about the fact that there are still 101 hostages, living and dead? Including the young woman we saw taken with bloody jogging pants. What's being done to them? Why are their names not on everyone's lips? Every. Single. Day.")

        After October 7, Shari and her colleagues worked 12-hour shifts, non-stop for two weeks; they often slept at the base. Their own children were being called up. "I had a son, a daughter-in-law and another son who were on active duty. I didn't know where they were, were they safe?

        "You ask me, Allison, how could I bear it? You asked how we got the strength. I mean, I remember thinking that first day I was just in shock, and everybody was just doing, doing, doing. We were using masks, and they were giving us lavender, but all the senses were being assaulted. By the third, fourth day, I was losing it, and I thought, 'I don't know that I can do this anymore'."

        After the bodies had been definitively identified, they were taken to a second room, the burial room, where the atmosphere was calmer "and it was just us women with the woman".

        The team would look after her, showing all the tender care that was the opposite of her final moments alive. One morning, amidst the grey, they saw a flash of pink. "A beautiful manicure with a flower on each fingernail. And that was such a terrible moment for all of us women because a manicure is such a sign of hope for a woman. They're making themselves beautiful, aren't they? It was the only colour in the room."

        They didn't wash the bodies. Shari explains that someone who dies in war or in terror, according to Jewish law, is not washed because even that dirt is holy, that they died in a sacrifice for God. "They're already as holy as they could be. We took our time with them, said a prayer. You put dust of Jerusalem above the eyes. And you ask the person for forgiveness."

        She tried not to know their names. "I didn't want to associate them with the news stories. I'd go home and learn they had a dog and a sister and a mother who was crying. I made that mistake the first day, and it almost destroyed me. I had to keep going."

        She says she knew she would probably be the last person who saw them "and that's a responsibility. Because they could have been our daughters."

        Of all the young women whose bodies she took care of and prepared for burial, how many were in a fit state to be shown to their parents?

        There is total silence in the room, except for the ticking of a clock on the kitchen wall. I pat the dog beside me, pressing my hand deep into his fur to bring me back to this world and away from that place where jihadi psychopaths annihilate the faces of young women for kicks.

        Shari looks at me. I can't tell if her eyes are full of sorrow or glittering with rage. "None," she says at last. "Not one girl we could show to her parents."

        6.35am: Around the time Shari Mendes got her Order 8, Nimrod Palmach, who was staying near Tel Aviv, received an order from his company commander to report to army HQ near Jerusalem. Former special forces, Nimrod was now a reservist in the search and rescue team. He disobeyed the order, arguing that his brigade should head south to the Gazan border, although he's still not quite sure why. He told his commander something didn't feel right. "A hunch. I felt it was much worse than we were being told. There were two voices; one was telling me to trust my instincts, the second was saying, 'Be modest, trust the IDF, who do you think you are?'"

        Choosing the former, Palmach, who runs an NGO that involves networking and outreach for young Israelis across the Arab world, drove south trying to build a picture of what had happened along the way. The only weapon he had was a pistol which contained nine bullets.

        Nimrod, 39, got a call from his ex-wife who was sobbing. Her new husband was from Kibbutz Nir Oz – it was under attack from hundreds of terrorists. "I had already heard about the attack on Sderot [the closest Israeli city to the Gaza border, where more than 50 residents were killed]. So now I understand. Israel has been invaded and the Gaza division has been overwhelmed. Hamas took down intelligence, they took down antennae, even my phone was scrambled. No one [in the hierarchy] knew what was going on. The radio is supposed to give members of the IDF a secret password to tell them go, go! Red alert, it's a war. But they couldn't even do that. No radio. Three thousand rockets in the first 20 minutes; we were overwhelmed, the entire system is crippled."

        He says he suddenly had "the most crushing realisation that I'm about to die. There are thousands of them." He paused briefly by the side of the road to record a video saying goodbye to his two kids so when the army found his body his children would have something to remember. "I said, 'Daddy loves you and he will be proud of you the rest of your lives.'" Then, he texted army mates telling them to get down there asap. "If you have a gun come here now, you'll save lives."

        He was stopped at a special forces checkpoint near Netivot around 9am, and they prevented him going any further. So he hopped on a pick-up truck, which was allowed through, and soon found himself fighting alongside a collection of random soldiers and ordinary Israelis outside Kibbutz Alumim. He managed to pick up a dead terrorist's gun. "I was one of the first responders, the only one who survived the whole day, I think. There wasn't time to communicate with people. It was the fight of our lives, a handful of us against hundreds and hundreds of terrorists. You're outgunned, outnumbered. I saw many examples of bravery, even civilians. We gave everything we had to try to stop it."

        Everyone he came across until 7.30pm that night was dead. At the Alumim junction, he counted 23 bodies. "All of them were kids, like young adults. I didn't know about the Nova festival. I was asking 'Why are they dressed like that?'" Near the roadside, he found the body of a young woman, "her trousers pulled down, her underwear, blood on her backside." Instinctively, Nimrod started to dress her.

        "Of course they raped women," Nimrod almost shouts. On one terrorist's body, he found a detailed map of the kibbutzim and a list of Hebrew phrases. "Pull your pants down" was one of them. It was hard to preserve evidence, he says, because everyone was picking up the bodies as fast as possible. Hamas was still kidnapping the dead and taking them over the border.

        Palmach believes that Hamas was unaware the Nova festival was taking place. He thinks they could have made serious progress towards Tel Aviv, but conversations the terrorists had on video suggest the lure of raping beautiful young girls at the desert party was too tempting. "Suddenly, after all those years, the monster was released. A lot of them left their tasks. They were supposed to go to Israeli air force bases. Imagine the humiliation of a bunch of jihadists wearing their sandals standing next to an F35!"

        He will never forget the carnage he witnessed in places like Kibbutz Be'eri. "I saw it all – women raped, dead kids in cars, families burned, some with body parts, some without. And the damage to the buildings, like a tornado passed. I saw the Holocaust," he says. "So many dead bodies, many mutilated. The creativity of the deaths was overwhelming. A head speared on a rake. Hamas terrorists took their time. We didn't have an army that day. I've seen what happens to the Jewish people without an army."

        Palmach, who spent five years in the special forces, says he wanted to go into Gaza. "I wanted to go not for revenge, but to see the Israeli army in a strong position. Our army was caught by surprise that day. I want to see the strength and power of the IDF again."

        Militarily, he thinks Israel has been doing the right thing. "We've moved slowly, taken our time. You can't clean Gaza in a week. We're not shooting then checking, we're checking then shooting. That's what we do. We're obligated in our moral fabric to bring the hostages back. We can strike Hamas to the point where it's no longer a threat. I think we are 90 per cent of the way there."

        Like many survivors, Nimrod Palach is haunted by What Ifs. There is a desperately sad video, unbearable actually, of two girls being pursued by a terrorist. He shoots the first one, then the other drops to her knees and begs for her life. There is a brief pause before he shoots her in the head.

        Nimrod thought he recognised the place where it happened. It was a few feet away from where he was at the Alumim junction. Why couldn't he have saved her? Recently, he couldn't sleep and he got in the car and drove to the spot. When he got there, he knelt down and said a prayer. In the dirt, he spotted the young woman's credit card. "I saw her name, I called her mother. She answered. I said, 'I'm sorry.' We both cried."

        Earlier this week, as Iranian missiles were launched against Israel, I texted Nimrod to check he and the family were OK. It took a second before he texted back, "WE WILL WIN!" With people like him, of course they will.

        'We know our daughter is alive, and that's enough for us to continue fighting for her life'

        6.35am: Of all the traumatic starts to October 7, Meirav Gonen had one of the worst. Her daughter, 23-year-old Romi, had arrived at the Nova festival with her best friend Gali at 4.38am. There is a short video of the girls dancing, they look so happy. At 6.35am, Romi called her mother to say she was terrified because there were rockets. "She has PTSD because of the war in Lebanon, because we live in the north of Israel near the border and we always have rockets fired by Hezbollah."

        The girls went to look for their car. Eventually, they found it and managed to go one mile to the east, where they got stuck in a traffic jam that didn't move. "They were trapped and then they started hearing people shouting, screaming, 'Get out of the car. They're coming to murder us.'"

        The girls fled into a valley where they tried to hide but there wasn't really any cover. A male friend of Gali came to rescue them. He had already got 12 people to safety, but, courageously, he came back. They picked up another guy and they were driving very fast on Route 232 and when they reached the Alumim junction (Nimrod would reach there later, but not in time to help Romi) there were terrorists waiting for them, and they sprayed the car with bullets.

      4. Part 3 of 4

        Meirav received a phone call at 10.14 saying, "Mommy, I was shot. I'm bleeding, and I think I'm gonna die. Gali is not answering me anymore, the driver is killed, and I'm shot. There is another guy in the car. He was shot in the stomach." Meirav says she could hear the guy barely breathing and suffering. She was talking to her daughter, trying to help, telling her to try and bandage the wound in her arm. But she was crying and she said she couldn't.

        There was fighting, soldiers on one side and terrorists on the other side of the car, they were in the middle. Meirav knows they were shot at 10.12am because Gali was on the phone with her father, and the driver was on the phone with his girlfriend. "And Gali, my daughter's best friend, she died on the spot. We heard her last breath, and knew she was murdered."

        Meirav felt helpless hearing the terror in her child's voice. "Once I understood I couldn't help Romi, I just started telling her how much I loved her and she [was] strong. And what we would do when she comes back if they take her. Romi started hushing me, telling me to be quiet. Then, I heard the terrorists come into the car. I heard them opening the door. They were shouting in Arabic. And later on, I understood they said, 'She's alive, she's alive! Take her, take her to the car', something like that.

        "Romi told me they took her by the arm and pulled her by her hair, dragging her on the road. They punched her and she had a big bruise on her eye. Her phone fell and it was lying in a pool of blood, and I knew that she couldn't pick it up, but I heard part of what was happening and I kept talking to her although I don't know what she could hear. Then the phone went off."

        One of the benefits of mobile phones is the way they allow us to keep in touch with our kids, mostly about stupid stuff like missing keys. It was miraculous Meirav could be with her daughter for those moments, but also incredibly painful. I wonder how she feels about it now?

        "Relief," she says. "I have five kids, Romi is my third one, and the kids are glad she was with me and I was with her."

        Romi was supposed to be among the women released by Hamas last November but, agonisingly, she didn't come out. "Women that came back told us she was with them in the tunnels. We know she's alive, and that's enough for all of us to continue fighting for her life."

        Meirav says her daughter is strong, a girl scout kind of person, resilient, with a big smile. "But, you know, after 349 days maybe she does not get enough food to be strong physically. Maybe in her mind she is, but she can lose her life in a minute. We saw that three weeks ago when they shot six of the hostages. We don't trust, we don't have the same assumptions any more that Western people have. Hamas are cruel. They will use the hostages to hurt us. Not just those 100 people, not just the Jews, but us as human beings, and we need to fight together."

        Two days after October 7, Meirav and her son went to the Nova festival site to try to retrace Romi's steps. "We found underwears, bras hanging on bushes. Private stuff spread all around." She hates the Nova memorial. "It's too clean, too nice, too beautiful, very tidy. It doesn't show anything of the hate that happened. It was hell, HELL! This is not a story. There were barbarians, monsters, they killed our children, they took them."

        Like many people I speak to during my days in Israel, Meirav is keen to stress that Hamas and their Iranian paymasters are a threat to the UK and to the entire free world. "What people don't understand is that it's not about Israel. It's not antisemitism. And I would like us to stop talking about antisemitism. They didn't come to kill us because we are Jews, because they murdered, butchered, raped Bedouin women, Christian women. People said, 'I'm a Muslim' and they killed them too. They came to kill whatever represents freedom. Sorry, this is about anti-freedom, anti-human, everything that humanity represents, they are against it. They are also anti-Palestinians, anti-Gaza people. But what they did to those young women, they are outside the human race. They are evil, not just to kill, but to delight in obliterating. Our aim is to live. We cherish life, and they cherish death, that's the difference."

        Does she feel that enough has been done to bring the hostages home?

        "It cannot be enough if they are not here. Everybody wants the hostages home, but I think that our leaders are not using their capabilities. They have a different role now, and that role is to unite us."

        Meirav and I are talking in a conference room in the Hostages HQ. On the walls, there are posters of all those still imprisoned in Gaza. Being here with her I feel the horror of it with sickening clarity. As it's almost a year, all the hostages have had a birthday in captivity, a terrible thought somehow. Their ages have been updated on the posters:
        • Shlomo Manzur – 85 86
        • Iden Shtivi – 28 now 29
        • Naam Levy – 19 now 20 (the young soldier seen on a Hamas video with bloodied jogging bottoms being manhandled out of the boot of a car)
        Occasionally, just one word is written in the corner of a poster: "MURDERED"

        I look up at Romi's lovely fresh face on her poster, Meirav catches my eye and knows what I'm thinking. What will be Romi's fate? Israel was built on trauma. The trauma from October 7 goes on and on. The country won't begin to heal until her people are home and safe, or at least home.

        Does Meirav talk to Romi?

        She nods. "Yes, all the time. I tell her I love her, I tell her she's strong. I tell her all the things we'll do when she's back. Sometimes, I feel too ashamed and too guilty."

        Why?

        "Because it's too long."

        It's not your fault.

        "But I'm her mother. Nobody else is her mother."

        On my final day in Israel, I visit Yad Vashem, the nation's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. You have to come here, to this museum of incomprehensible suffering, to begin to comprehend, I think. In one gallery, there is a large glass case containing thousands of pairs of shoes. Eighty-five years old at least now, the shoes are gnarled, grey and brown. But there, amidst the mushroom mulch of sad sameness, are two pairs of women's shoes. One has the faintest thread of gold, glamour; the others were pumps, embroidered with flowers. I think of what Shari Mendes said about the young woman in the morgue with the beautiful pink manicure. The victims, those missing millions, were people, with vanity, with hope, with fancy footwear.

        After several days at the morgue, when they were doing deep-tissue DNA extraction because some of the women had been so badly burned they could not be identified any other way (a year on, and five bodies still have no name), Shari wrote to her commander saying, "I'm not sure I can keep doing this." What made her go on was the importance of testimony. Shari's mother was a hidden child in the Holocaust, she survived, starving, in Slovakian woods. But almost everybody else in the family was murdered in terrible ways. The only way their descendants know what happened is because someone saw and passed the story on.

        Shari had a great-uncle Jacob, aged 20, a gentle soul by all accounts who ended up in Auschwitz in the Sonderkommando, the very worst job, loading the dead bodies into the ovens. "I kept saying, 'If Jacob can do it, I can do it.'" Shari never dreamt she would have horror stories of her own to pass down.

        Israel has been accused of weaponising 7/10, of exaggerating the sexual violence and Hamas's sickening depravity. Of using it as "an excuse". I have come to believe that the opposite is true. Nimrod told me he thought that government ministers and the army felt ashamed and humiliated that they had not protected people, the women in particular. That's why Shari feels obliged to talk for them, however much she is attacked, "otherwise they'll be forgotten".

        A group of new IDF recruits were at Yad Vashem that afternoon, maybe they were 18 or 19 years old. All around them was the onerous legacy of what it means to be born Jewish. At least you come out of that museum in no doubt as to why Israel has to exist.

        In the final room, a guy with an Old Testament beard addressed the baby soldiers in Hebrew. I asked someone what he was saying, and they said, "He is telling them that the Jews were weak back then. Now we are the strong ones we must never behave as the Nazis behaved to us."

        Trying to be the good guys and doomed to be seen by the world as the baddies; that is Israel's burden. After October 7, they could not care less what the world thinks. Let's finish with one astonishing young man who did his nation proud 12 months ago, and who should never be forgotten.

        If there is a single image of October 7 that will go down in history, it is of a tall, fair-haired young man in a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops standing at the entrance to a shelter, catching grenades with his bare hands. Aner Shapira had travelled to the Supernova festival in the Negev desert with his best friend, Hersh Goldberg-Polin. It was "the best party in the world," according to one excited girl with flowing dark hair, although Hersh did briefly fret about how close they were to the border with Gaza.

        Just after dawn, when the sleepy crowd was admiring the fireworks in the sky (they were rockets), Aner, Hersh and their group took one last selfie. They look blissed-out; just your average young people who have stayed up all night at a trance party dedicated to love, peace and psychedelic drugs. They didn't know that horror was lurking just outside the frame. The milky, early-morning sky was speckled with black dots – a demonic squadron of paragliding terrorists.

        Hamas had breached the 40-mile southern border in 30 different places, along with an estimated 3,000 Gazan civilians eager to become shahids (martyrs). At Nova, they found 3,500 defenceless kids to hunt down at their leisure. Over the next six hours of scarcely credible barbarity, that idyllic location became Israel's killing fields. It was like a Biblical exodus. A new BBC documentary, Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again, uses footage from the festival-goers' own phones to show the visceral reality. They stumbled across the barren, pitted landscape in their party gear; desperately trying to escape, they were gunned down or burnt alive in their vehicles. Hamas's own body-cam film shows those who stumbled or were dragged from bushes being put to death with a shrug of the shoulders. "Another dog (Jew) – it is his fate."

        Some, like Noa Argamani, were taken hostage on a motorbike, others hid silently in skips and orchards, playing dead as they listened to the screams of their friends. Shani Louk, a striking, dreadlocked 22-year-old German-Israeli, was abducted from the festival she had adored. Her half-naked body (brutally dislocated, one leg at an obscene right angle) was paraded by her captors on the back of a truck through the cheering streets of Gaza. They spat on her. Sexual violence was common that disgusting day. One police officer came upon a glade where young women, clothing torn, underwear wrenched aside, were tied to trees with their wrists bound above their mutilated heads. (Shari Mendes and her unit would soon be preparing those girls from Nova for burial.)

        Aner and Hersh ran to the highway, Route 232. (Nimrod Palmach, who was desperately fighting terrorists a couple of miles north couldn't understand why the bodies strewn across the road were dressed in party clothes. Communication was so bad soldiers didn't even know about the Nova festival.) The boys took refuge in a migunit (a small roadside public bomb shelter with no door) where up to 30 young people were already hiding. During his military service, 22-year-old Staff Sgt Aner Elyakim Shapira had been promoted to an elite army unit when his commanders noticed what an incredible soldier and all-round terrific person he was.

      5. Part 4 of 4

        "Hi everyone," he announced. "I am Aner Shapira, I serve in the Orev unit of the Nahal brigade. My friends from the army are coming soon. I am going to take care of things here, so don't worry." A video taken on a phone picked up someone in the shelter responding, "Thank you, Aner, we feel calmer now."

        Realising that the terrorists would throw grenades into that dangerously small, enclosed space, Aner told the group to lie down and cover their heads: "I'll catch the grenades and throw them back – and if I miss any, you throw them back."

        He was as good as his word. A camera on the dashboard of a car parked outside recorded terrorists walking up and lobbing a grenade through the megunit doorway; and the grenade coming right back out again. Aner caught at least seven of them. Legend has it (for he is already a legend) that the eighth exploded, but his father, Moshe Shapiro, believes it was a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) that finally killed his beloved son.

        "A military historian says that, since the grenade was invented, there is nothing like this, somebody thinking they could hold a grenade – hold it not once, not twice, but eight times. And throw it back," Moshe tells me with fierce paternal pride. That lonely last stand – Aner against 20 terrorists – endured for 34 minutes. Moshe knows almost every second of it by heart. "It's amazing when you think 20 terrorists came heavily-armed with grenades, with RPGs, everything. And Aner was without anything, just a broken beer bottle. And he succeeded in holding them for 34 minutes till the third RPG hit the migunit. And the RPG, you can't do anything, the explosion is very, very strong. So – boom! – and, therefore, he saw it coming to him, but he wasn't able to hold it, and he died."

        We are talking in the penthouse kitchen-living room of the Shapiras' apartment which has a panoramic view over East Jerusalem. Propped up in one corner is an enlarged photograph of Aner, which was taken over the crouched forms of people packed like sardines inside the shelter. He is standing just inside the threshold, his body tilted forward, tensed, ready for a catch, like a cricketer in the slips.

        Both Aner's parents are architects. Mum Shira is a British Israeli who was born in Oxford when her father was studying for a PhD. Preoccupied today, Shira is on the phone arguing for a thousand burnt-out cars that lined the route away from Nova to be preserved as evidence (insurance people want to sell the vehicles, still full of unquiet ghosts, because for each car you can get $2,000 for the iron). Eventually, the Shapiras hope they will be historic artefacts featured in a 7/10 exhibition or permanent monument.

        Moshe, strong-featured and handsome, gets up and comes back with a shallow, glass-topped wooden case which he sets down on the table between us. It's full of bullets, cartridges, shards of glass and other bits that the Shapiras gathered from the shelter a month after their boy's murder. Hersh Goldberg-Polin's left arm was blown off, possibly by the same blast that killed his boyhood friend. Hersh was taken hostage along with three others from the shelter and held in Gaza for 330 days, becoming the poster boy for all of those brutally abducted, thanks to the tireless efforts of his mother Rachel. (On September 1, a fortnight before I arrive in Israel, Hersh and five other young hostages are executed in a tunnel under Rafah, in southern Gaza, with bullets to the back of the head. The appalling conditions in which they were held and the failure to broker a deal or a ceasefire to rescue them weighed heavily on all of Israeli society, I was told. It reopened agonising wounds barely scabbed over since October 7, and it brought further heavy criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. Failure to bring the remaining 101 hostages home is widely seen as breaking the social contract between state and citizen, a serious matter in a country where so many are expected to put their lives on the line.)

        Moshe gets me a coffee before talking me through his mementoes. "This is what we found in the liquid on the floor, the blood, all these bullets. This is a hand grenade which exploded and this is the RPG." Moshe holds up the weapon's steel tail which is like the bristling insides of a hefty umbrella. As he tells me more about the eldest of his seven children, he clutches the RPG that ended Aner's life, like a Catholic would use a rosary to pray.

        Aner Shapira most certainly did not fit the stereotype of the "genocide-committing IDF" which is drawn by pro-Palestine "River to the Sea" marchers and moronic American college kids sporting recreational keffiyehs to match their anti-semitism. An artist and musician (he played classical piano from the age of six and latterly wrote and recorded rap songs), Aner, as his father recalls with fond bemusement, was "an anarchist. He didn't believe in nationality. He was against flags. He believed in the good in people, and that society should be free of police systems. He was also against the army, so he lived in a conflict with himself about that, but he saw the need for the army to defend the country, and he gave his all to serve."

        As a small boy, Aner already had a fierce sense of social justice. He would loudly berate police on the street if he saw them treating illegal immigrants roughly and called out racism in particular and unkindness in general. "We kept telling him the police may open a file against you," Moshe laughs, shaking his head, "but he didn't care. Aner was always against what he saw as evil being done to anybody." Two months before the massacre, Aner took a vacation in Greece where he saw some Free Palestine posters in a café window. "He went in to talk to them," Moshe recalls. "He thought he could help them understand the conflict, that it's not always black and white. He believed in people."

        Moshe takes a more cynical view than his son. He points out that Hamas took control in Gaza after free elections, "and they got a big support so that's really sad. Where is the resistance to terrorism among Palestinians?" He gestures outside to the roof terrace and to an Arab village beyond. "After the slaughter of October 7, they started letting off fireworks to celebrate. These are our neighbours. I mean, the village it's like 100 metres from my house."

        The Muslim villagers, Moshe points out, enjoy a good life in Israel, they own the local bus company, nice houses, full civil rights, "but the hatred is so deep". He blames UNWRA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) and schools in Gaza for feeding children anti-semitic poison. "Even the Right-wing extremists in Israel would never teach their kids to slaughter and regard people as not human."

        Out of respect for his son's tender nature, Moshe is at pains to point out that Aner's "act of bravery" was for "the surviving of people, not the killing of the terrorists". In fact, Aner Shapira perfectly encapsulates GK Chesterton's maxim: "The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."

        Moshe tells me one story which reveals a bigger truth about Israel, I think. Not long before the war, Moshe took part in the widespread demonstrations against plans by Netanyahu's government to overhaul the judicial system – cancelling the Supreme Court's ability to block government actions and appointments, it was felt by many to be a threat to democracy. He asked Aner to join him. Aner refused. He said he had heard people at a protest saying that soldiers should disobey commands, and he couldn't stay because he was disgusted. "But why, you're an anarchist?" his father pointed out. Aner rebuked his dad, saying his unit was fighting terrorists who were trying to kill civilians. "When you have a cruel enemy that wants to kill us, we need discipline," Aner said. "I can't disobey the commands because they are for rescuing people, it's not a game, we have to save lives. I will never let somebody else risk his life in order to save me. I prefer to be the one that rescues." And so he was.

        Aner died on Saturday the 7th, but the Shapiras had no idea what had happened to him until they got a call on the Monday. The entire family sat on the sofa and heard the voice of a girl on speakerphone saying: "I can't speak, but I want to tell you how Aner handled the situation and, thanks to him, I'm alive."

        "What situation? We didn't know. She couldn't speak, she was in shock." Later, the father of the guy that took the picture of Aner in the shelter called Moshe and said: "I don't know if he's dead or heavily injured", but his own boy had seen Aner in action, catching multiple grenades. "He said, 'Thanks to your son, my son and his girlfriend are alive.'" Although the family found it hard to believe the grenades story, a video from the dashcam which soon went viral proved it.

        Aner was buried at Mount Herzl on October 10. Rachel Goldberg-Polin posted a remarkable tribute to him on Facebook. "How can I talk about beautiful Aner? I remember him as a boy, in Hersh's room, sitting on his bed laughing and speaking to me in his heavily accented English… always in English, to make me feel comfortable. And I remember listening to his music; he composed the music and created the lyrics in such a beautiful and sometimes hilarious way. I think of the treks and adventures the boys went on together, starting at a young age and continuing through as they became young men. And I think of the 11 people who walked out of that bomb shelter on October 7. Eight of them sleeping at home tonight and three sleeping in Gaza, and I know the ONLY reason any of those people are alive is because of sweet, brave, clever, fearless beloved Aner. Why isn't there a word bigger than hero? Aner, you are our bigger-than-hero. May your beautiful memory be for a blessing."

        I tell Moshe I can't believe how mature Aner was for a 22-year-old, instinctively taking command and assuming responsibility for so many others, and Shira corrects me; "he was 22 and a half, he'd be 23 now."

        The Shapiras clearly get huge consolation from the strangers that Aner saved. "They said that they didn't see any fear in his eyes," Moshe says. "He was focusing on the mission." He takes out his phone to show me the video of Hamas attacking the megunit. You can see the grenades that Aner is throwing back at the terrorists.

        "We are lucky," his father says. "We have recordings from inside the shelter and we have the movie from the outside. They were not exaggerating what Aner did. It's a gift from God to have this documentation, otherwise nobody would have believed it."

        I get that, but I still wonder how I'd feel watching the video if that was my son, who is close in age to Aner. "You've collected all these things, Moshe," I say. "Is it helpful to you and Shira to know exactly what happened to him in those terrible minutes?"

        Moshe nods: "There is a phrase in Judaism that's called 'the mercy of truth'. It deals with all the things that you're doing for somebody that died. It's a charity because you won't get anything from it. But I think that we got a charity of truth. To get the truth as it was for Aner is a charity, yes, because so many people don't know what happened to their kids on that day."

        Some 364 young people who attended the Nova festival were murdered, and 44 were taken hostage (Meirav Gonen's darling Romi is still in Gaza 12 months on. "We love you, stay strong."). Noa Argamani was rescued by ground forces, but the boyfriend she cried out for from the motorbike – Avinatan Or – has not come home. The only way Shani Louk's death could be confirmed was when a piece of her skull was found in Gaza.

        "Aner didn't succeed in saving his life," Moshe says. "But he succeeded in showing that you can't go to slaughter like a sheep. You have to stand, and it's amazing, you know, he did succeed. He succeeded because you show the world that if you have a spirit, even if you're unarmed, you can face evil and you can fight."

        I visited the Nova festival site on a perfect sunny afternoon. It is an eerily beautiful place; no screams now, no remorseless gunfire, no jubilant monsters hellbent on martyrdom, just the tinkle of wind chimes attached to memorials with their photos of each young victim (so many faces so full of promise, my God, so many), and the sound of visitors softly weeping.

        On the drive home, we stop at the megunit, the site of Aner's last stand. Rust-coloured blood everywhere, on the floors, on the walls pitted by gunfire. It is shockingly small, the size of a garden shed; so small that the living managed to stay alive under the bodies.

        As long as they live, today's young Israelis will always be the Nova generation. Their attitudes have hardened, or so people say, because they saw what your enemy does to you if you don't pay attention. That's a cruel lesson students in the West, who idly lend their support to Islamist rapists and murderers, should pray they never have to learn.

        What a leader of his country Aner Shapira could have been. A sensitive soldier who inhabited the contradictions of being a Jew surrounded by hatred, a peace-lover who had to take up arms to save people. Who knows? Aner might have persuaded the world that Israel was on the side of good. On the first anniversary of October 7, we may glimpse the tall, fair-haired young man standing there in the doorway still, alert, ready to protect. "I'll catch the grenades and throw them back."

    3. It is so sad, Sue and one wonders how any right-minded British person could even think of supporting Hamas and its evil ways.

      1. Folk supported – by donation and shouting – the IRA.
        Explains it all, really.

    2. Interesting indeed, Grizzly. I vaguely remember a radio programme (BBC4?) covering this issue, many years ago – people dropping dead in the street having been completely normal just a few minutes previously. A case of rinse and repeat? Bio-warfare lives, and occasionally walks among us.

  58. That's me finished being good for the day.
    Baggage & cat boxes in the roof.
    Washing on.
    Garden tended – heathers planed at gateposts, plum tree re-supported, rhubarb pulled & on a light heat, indoor plants tended and watered.
    Mother's banking and bills dealt with.
    Now relaxing with a preprandial G&T. Sigh…

    1. Rhubarb pulled and on heat? We just left ours in the ground and ir always took care of itself. Is a winter crop of rhubarb some weird Norwegian custom?

      1. Yes; I have to say that it is only dogs (well, technically bitches) that I have had a problem with when they were on heat. Rhubarb? The mind boggles!!

      1. Cheersh!
        Got summat done, for a change. Sun's shining too, and that helps the energy levels.

        1. Sitting around mouldering can seem a good idea at the time, but I usually regret the lost time I inflict on myself..intended to sketch an owl on branch yesterday..nope…today, raven in die-back mountain ash…nope…tomorrow likely more procrastination, am told a ‘form of anxiety’..hmm..okaaaayyyy…(no sunshine here, that’ll be the problem…)

          1. I’d love to be able to paint watercolour… even went to classes 25-odd years ago, but had to give up due to too much travelling for work.
            What it did reveal, however, was my total lack of talent. 🙁

          2. Watercolour is the most difficult of mediums (or so I’ve found). Easiest is oil (some are even water based now), with a palette knife – fairly easy. Charcoal is pretty messy. I now mostly use graphite/waterbased gouache, or tube egg tempera (favourite, a cross between actual egg tempera and oil). Have a go – doesn’t matter if you’re ‘without talent'(doubt it, everyone has something (look at Damian Hirst and he gets others to do the work for him)…puts my mind/thinking in a different place – alternatively, go online and have some fun 😀

          3. I just love the ability to make hard or soft edges and allow the colours to blend, like the attached.

          10. I see them, and they are excellent – you have way more talent than I have. I’m more in the Picasso mould, tumbling out of bed, rolling down the hill to the bar, perhaps create something on the beach, rinse and repeat. Just kidding – I have a copy of his drawing ‘Francine’ which my lovely mother in law thought was my work, I wish. Double dare you not to paint more. Just do it, Paul – just do it:-))

          11. Wish they were my work, but they are examples of what I'd love to be able to produce, and had hopes for… but with no talent or skill, I can't.
            These two hang on my living room wall, BTW.

          12. I say very similar about mine, but art is subjective (in the eye of the beholder)…have been asked many times to sell, exhibit, take commissions and always refuse, saying I don’t want the pressure but really because in my heart I think I’m not ‘good enough’ – although in art there’s really no such thing, all is valid. So even if you burn, discard your work – you’ll get something out of it. Better than mouldering…don’t ever do that, not that I think you ever would :-)))

          14. I wear mine too long before laundering, too. More comfortable. I defend by saying- but there’s paint and ink on them, that won’t wash out, so what’s the point…

          18. Looks good (some people paint that way on large canvases, just saying….) is it Norway? some parts of Scotland similar (Scotland scenery fan)….

          19. Norway; Numedal, about 30 minutes drive north from Kongsberg. Lovely part of the world. Firstborn has about 350 acres, 90% being scrubland/forest/vertical hillside, plus a bit of grazing land rented to local farmers.

          20. Sounds absolutely wonderful. Our land is very similar, except less than a tenth of 350 acres. I think possibly a number of subjects there for you to paint….:-)

  59. Breaking news from the DT

    Sue Gray resigns as Starmer’s chief of staff

    Sue Gray has resigned as Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, saying she “risked becoming a distraction”.

    The former civil servant said she had accepted a new role as the Prime Minister’s envoy for the regions and nations after a controversial three-month tenure in Downing Street. She will be replaced by Morgan McSweeney.

    Ms Gray had endured months of hostile briefings as chief of staff amid concerns from rival Labour figures that she wielded too much power over No 10. Her salary, which was £3,000 more than that of Sir Keir, was also leaked to the press.

    She said in a statement: “After leading the Labour party’s preparation for government and kickstarting work on our programme for change, I am looking forward to drawing on my experience to support the Prime Minister and the Cabinet to help deliver the government’s objectives across the nations and regions of the UK.

    Ms Gray added: “Throughout my career my first interest has always been public service. However in recent weeks it has become clear to me that intense commentary around my position risked becoming a distraction to the government’s vital work of change.

    “It is for that reason I have chosen to stand aside, and I look forward to continuing to support the Prime Minister in my new role.”

    Sir Keir said: “I want to thank Sue for all the support she has given me, both in opposition and government, and her work to prepare us for government and get us started on our programme of change.

    “Sue has played a vital role in strengthening our relations with the regions and nations. I am delighted that she will continue to support that work.”

    1. That’s what happens when you become ‘the’ story! I wonder how much she’ll be ‘earning’ now?

      2. It's a different world Sue
        Bet those workers at Port Talbot would love to step straight into another well paying job……………

        1. And the workers at Grangemouth…but it’s OK…they’ve organised a re-skilling event! Whatever that is!🤦🏻‍♀️

    2. One comment suggested she knows where the bodies are buried.
      Give her possible links, that maybe horribly accurate.

      1. Dangerous to know that kind of thing. One might so easily join them. Omerta, in Sicilian terminology.

    3. Sue Gray is now "Prime Minister’s envoy for the regions and nations". Ideally placed to carry on Blair's Balkanisation with elected mayors covering vast unitary authorities, helping the Scots Nats try to bring independance back to life, starts the "calls" for an Ireland unificaiton referendum, and so on…

    4. "Throughout my career my first interest has always been public self service" – that's more like it

  60. Saint Andrew's at Tarrant Tomson earlier.

    There are two River Winterbornes in Dorset. Winterborne Tomson sits on the North River Winterborne which flows from its source at Winterborne Houghton through the villages of Winterborne Stickland, Winterborne Clenston, Winterborne Whitechurch, Winterborne Kingston, Winterborne Muston, Winterborne Anderson, Winterborne Tomson, Winterborne Zelston, and Almer. After Almer it runs onto Sturminster Marshall where it flows into the River Stour. The name ‘Winterborne’ refers to the fact that usually the river only flows overground during the winter months.

    The Church of St Andrew sits in a field by a farm. It dates from the 12th C and is a single cell plan. The chancel is apsidal which is unusual for Dorset. In the late 15th or early 16th C it was repaired, heightened and a plastered wagon roof with timber ribs added. The windows are possibly early 17th C, maybe replacing windows inserted when the church was heightened.

    Its walls are built from flint and rubble. Some of the flint is knapped and a good variety of rubble stone. Decorative banding can be seen. There is evidence of lime mortar. The roof is tiled with a few courses of stone slates. There are 3 shallow buttresses around the apse dating from the 12th C. A small weatherboard belfry with a single bell sits neatly on the roof.
    A lancet window now blocked gives an idea of how the church has been heightened.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8f8e6b14a854e56dd15a0a8b2fa8b968f99696a834c7cd2b8dda623d14bfbc5d.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7746cd452a10021691175d1f291194069fc4e6ae70453666dc12f02791fc2291.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/67027b40822ad081da6f3e6d925b6924f340629a2ac03c2c57a4b86d9e48ba32.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a5518743ce22924522116849945da795ddabd34e234ffd44277826e85a198a14.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/aa32f49eb93d3cb05bb95ef851315eedb42d00df34c2ec8806ba6ec4ae146704.jpg

        1. Looks like it might be a tad chilly in winter. No noticeable electric light, either.

          1. Like Old St Chad's, All Alone in the Fields. Only has services in the summer months (no lighting and heating).

      2. It’s not in regular use alas, but Harvest Festivals and Easter services are held.

        1. Hope that somebody still loves and cares for the place.
          Buildings that old and with htat kind of purpose have a soul, and feelings. They need to be loved, not ignored.

    2. "…...flows overground during the winter months…." Because of global boiling, of course..!!

  61. Good Grief.
    500 comments in 20 minutes.
    All effectively saying to Grey: door, bang, RRs.

    1. From Coffee House, the Spectator

      Sue Gray out, Morgan McSweeney in
      Katy Balls6 October 2024, 1:22pm
      Keir Starmer has not yet reached the 100 day mark but already he has lost his Chief of Staff. This afternoon, Downing Street has confirmed that Sue Gray is leaving her No. 10 role. Instead, she will be taking on an ‘advisory’ role as the Prime Minister’s envoy for nations and regions. In a statement announcing her departure, Gray referenced the media attention she had received as one of the reasons behind her decision to quit:

      It has been an honour to take on the role of Chief of Staff, and to play my part in the delivery of a Labour government. Throughout my career my first interest has always been public service. However, in recent weeks it has become clear to me that intense commentary around my position risked becoming a distraction to the government’s vital work of change. It is for that reason I have chosen to stand aside, and I look forward to continuing to support the Prime Minister in my new role.

      Starmer has also issued a statement – thanking Gray for her work that has let him get ‘started on our programme for change.’ He added that he looked forward to work with her in her new role ‘strengthening our relations with the regions and nations.’

      Yet despite Starmer’s warm words about Gray’s new position, the news of her departure is both embarrassing and problematic for the new government. Even before Labour’s election win, there have been multiple reports of tension between Gray and members of Starmer’s team. Initially this was largely seen as Gray vs Morgan McSweeney, the party’s key strategist. However, since entering government the number of Gray opponents has increased and the former civil servants has found herself butting heads more generally with party figures, special advisers angered over pay and members of the civil service. Recent rows over freebies and Labour sleaze have added to a sense that the current operation was not working.

      The number of hostile briefings against Gray has made it hard for Downing Street to bat away the story as simple Westminster gossip. A briefing to the BBC last month which saw the size of her salary leaked (she earns more than the Prime Minister) was just one in a series of stories that made her position increasingly untenable. Her absence at party conference was evidence that she had become the story – a dangerous place for any unelected aide to be. As I wrote in this week’s magazine, there has been a general sense amongst cabinet ministers that the dysfunction in 10 Downing Street was having knock on effects across Whitehall.

      The hope in Downing Street is that Gray’s exit along with a raft of new appointments will put a stop to the rot and allow Starmer to reset. Succeeding Gray is Morgan McSweeney. This move will be popular with parts of the Labour party – many aides thought he should have had the job to begin with. However, it also risks looking as though its opening a new chapter in the ongoing drama given there has been a narrative previously of McSweeney and his ‘boys’ vs Gray and female cabinet ministers who have felt sidelined in the past.

      In an apparent bid to quash that, McSweeney has two deputy chiefs of staff – both female. They are Vidhya Alakeson, who has been working as the political director and previously led on business engagement for the party, and Jill Cuthbertson, a veteran of the Labour party who has worked for successive Labour leaders including Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. Most recently she has served as Starmer’s director of government relations. Other changes announced today include the appointment of a PPS, Nin Pandit and a bulking up of the communications team. James Lyons – a former Sunday Times hack who has also served as NHS director of communications, joins to head up a new strategic communications team.

      Taken altogether Gray’s departure and the subsequent No. 10 shake-up are an implicit acceptance that Starmer’s first few months have not gone to plan. This is particularly tricky for Starmer given he spent much time as opposition leader attacking the Tories for No. 10 psychodrama. The question is whether he can now implement a course correction. Some in the party will be pleased that Starmer is taking steps to calm an operation under fire for several self-forced errors (such as freebie gate). But it can’t be denied, that a Downing Street reset so early into Starmer’s premiership is a rather worrying sign.

  63. Sue Grey gone?
    Or more likely regurgitated as the head of a quango or charity head on £250,000 a year?

  64. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7d2c36d975b3c6e3dce968fc8f590d0942290a940afe59b00ef1ba6ca989f3be.jpg
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13929783/Sue-Gray-QUITS-Keir-Starmers-aide-shuffled-Government-role.html

    She has not been sacked – she has been given the opportunity to be given an even larger salary!

    Sue Gray has quit as Sir Keir Starmer's chief of staff and has been shuffled to another Government role, it was announced today. The former civil servant will become the Prime Minister's envoy for nations and regions. Sir Keir said: 'I want to thank Sue for all the support she has given me, both     in opposition and government, and her work to prepare us for government and get us started on our programme of change. 'Sue has played a vital role in strengthening our relations with the regions and nations. I am delighted that she will continue to support that work.'

    There seems to be no doubt at all that when she was a civil servant she did not follow the rules about political impartiality.

    1. ‘She has not been sacked – she has been given the opportunity to be given an even larger salary!’
      Spot on. She’s just been moved about the way they used to move errant priests and nuns to other locations.

    2. So its all her fault that Starmer is a pratt. He just did as she told him so she has to go. Who will replace her.? Goring or Himmler.

  65. 394232+ up ticks,

    AKA,
    Taken the wonga and legged it.

    Live Sue Gray resigns as Starmer’s chief of staff

  66. Assisted dying.

    The problem with such legislation is what is in the detail and when it comes to litigation it is up to judges to interpret the law to establish what the law intended. It then becomes case law by settimg a precedent for that judgement.

    The situation I found myself in was that I had the old enduring power of attorney (EPA) for my mother which meant I had authority to represent her financially and medically. Her GP even congratulated me when we went through the detals of mother's drug history together to bring the records up to date.

    The issue arose when mother was urgently admitted to hospital from her nursing home and I suspected this could be her last trip to A&E after many TIAs. When I got the call from the hospital MOH, being a nurse, guessed what the call was about when the doctor said I should get there as quickly as possible. I even remember saying DNR over the phone.

    My daughter and I were able to kiss her goodbye whilst mother was still semiconscious.

    After she died my power of attorney became void and my role of having been nominated as executor in her will became operational. But the NHS had my brother recorded as next of kin. Uknown to me, he was still in a state of bankruptsy meaning that any inheritance he received as a beneficiary of an estate would be forfeited until he was discharged.

    If he had had the ability to prolong his mother's life to ensure that he received his inheritance would he have done so? – or had I unwittingly ensured my mother's death by telling the doctor DNR to save her the distress of unnecesary CPR at her advanced age?

    This situation will not arise again since EPA has been replaced by LPA (Lasting Power of Attorney) for which there a separate authorities for financial and health matter. But if anything this makes the framing in law of assisted dying even more difficult to interpret depending on who might have a motive in benefitting from an imminent death.

    Could an assisted death still become a crime scene if there were suspicious circumstances as to the precise timing of an unnatural death?

    1. My dad had dementia, in a BUPA care home the last couple of years of life. Some really sad cases there – he was fortunate in having good carers. Nevertheless, he became unmanageable unless sedated – many of the residents came to that, staff unable to cope otherwise. There was one chap who was visited by his wife every day. As he worsened, the staff would normally follow same procedure as with my dad. His wife wouldn't allow this on religious grounds, and slept on the floor at his bedside and cared for him for the (from memory) several weeks it took him to die, according to the staff an absolute wreck physically and mentally in great distress. So each case would have to be decided upon, by all parties involved, I think. I've been told in France the system is quite different, but I don't have the details.

      1. ‘Lack of capacity’ is another issue that would need to factored into assisted dying legislation as power of attorney for health matters must be registered whilst an individual still has ‘capacity’.

        1. Lack of capacity would have to be well-defined, yes? When I went to see a solicitor about PoA for my dad, she told me a story about a woman who wanted to leave all she had to ‘Peter’ – more questioning revealed that to be the teddy bear she had with her. My dad had little to leave, but the PoA ensured I had home visits for around a year to ascertain any change – a coffee and quick look at papers and ‘see you in a month or so’.

      2. I know of one case where the wife and sons of a terminally ill patient, who was in much physical distress, were asked if the doctor could administer quite a strong drug which would make him comfortable, but might also have death as a side effect. The family agreed to this and his wife stayed by his bedside in the nursing home. In the morning, the nurses were surprised that the husband was still alive and called the doctor. He examined the now peaceful patient (breathing normally, and manifestly fast asleep) and asked the wife if she wanted him to administer a second dose to "finish the job". She was appalled as she had not been told that the drug that had been administered in the evening was, effectively, a euthanising drug. Anyway, she refused as her husband was clearly not suffering any pain and he passed away quietly later on that day.

        I don't call that proper consent. Euthanasia by the back door.

        1. Do you know his age/medical condition/length of hospital stay. I know from my grandparents – elderly can be seen as bed-blockers. Euthanasia – abortion by another name, imo.

          1. The patient had Parkinson’s disease and had been in a nursing home for a couple of years as it had become impossible to care for him at home. He would have been mid-seventies when he died. He didn’t die in hospital; he was in his room in the nursing home. Here in France as you probably know, the H in EHPAD which is the acronym for a nursing home stands for “hospitalier” so the homes are, effectively, long-term hospitals.

          2. My grandmother had the same disease, it’s very cruel. She died fairly young, late 50s. I’ve been told the care homes/nursing homes are excellent in France, but I have no direct knowledge, just of UK ones.

          4. Yes, likely similar other countries. A world-wide problem, even young people. Very little treatment available, Parkinson’s too far as I know.

          5. They are patchy, I believe. We are lucky in that the one in our village is excellent, with incredibly friendly and helpful staff, and lots of things organised to keep the more healthy residents occupied. There is a full-time occupational therapist who devises all sorts activities and outings: regular “at home” activities include singing, painting and helping with the preparation of meals; for their outings, she takes small groups of residents to the sea-side, the swimming pool, an equestrian centre and, every Tuesday morning, the local market. Residents have their physiotherapy sessions at the nursing home in a dedicated area; the village pharmacist comes daily to supervise the dispensing of medication and I am seriously impressed with the internal communication – what you tell one member of staff gets fed through the system and you don’t have to repeat it. Residents keep their own GPs who come to the home to visit them. There is even a psychologist who comes in once a week.

            My experience of all this is very fresh as an Irish friend of ours has recently moved in there. He is now 89, and apart from general physical frailty which makes him fall over all the time, he also suffers from what is now moderate dementia and has forgotten most of his French. So he is quite a challenge to the home, as none of the other residents speak any English, and only three of the staff do.

            The patient I was talking about earlier was not in this home and, indeed, we never even met him. But we knew one of his sons quite well, and got to know the other son and his wife after he was admitted to the nursing home. It was his wife who told me the story when I helped her prepare the funeral. Apart from this one distressing event, she was really pleased with the care that her husband had been given in the nursing home.

          6. Our dear old Irish friend, Jim (89), is in a nursing home in Pleudihen, a village near us. The nursing home is excellent and there are activities organised every day and excursions for those who are capable of going on them and the fees are about a ½ the fees one would expect to pay for a comparable establishment in the UK.

            Caroline first met Jim when she played at his wife's funeral Seeing a kind, sympathetic face he immediately burst into tears and since then Caroline has taken him under her wing and he has come to us each week for either lunch or supper and has spent Christmas and the New Year with us and our family or guests who were spending the Christmas holiday with us.

          7. Wonderful to read, Rastus. I empathise with Jim, he’s so very fortunate to find Caroline (and you). A dear old friend indeed, we all should be so lucky 🙂

  67. Apparently a clash over direction..
    Starmer wants Gilbraltar & Falklands relinquished immediately.. Sue Gray suggested waiting and it wasn't in tune with public feelings.

    Starmer asked.. What are feelings?

  68. 394232+ up ticks,

    🎵,
    Move over darling,

    Record number of migrants cross the English Channel in a single day with more than 970 in 17 small boats.

    The British infrastructure must by now be seriously mortally ruptured.

    Is it time we consider evacuation of the fit
    indigenous ? we have proved beyond doubt to be completely useless at realm & countrywide protection, which then brings into question our infirm and elderly ?

    We should just hope the enemy emamas are of a more sympathetic nature.

    1. I just don't get it, ogga – why do politicians of any stripe gripe but no-one comes up with a plan? I've been told it's because of ECHR, which is embedded in NI because of the NI Agreement and having to have parity with the Republic and hence all EU laws. Hmm.. Jenrick says he's going to take the UK out of the ECHR, if he keeps saying that and how he'll do it – he'll get my vote.

      1. If the ECHR doesn't like it, then tell them to declare war. Or, fuck right off, get in a plane, and fuck off some more.

      2. KJ, they could haltt the boats and return the vermin tomorrow. They don't want to. They don't see anything wrong with the invasion.

        The Windsor agreement was designed to chain us to the EU. It, like any other law is easy to dismantle but again, the state doesn't want to. It wants us chained to the hated EU.

        1. Thanks wibbling – it seems crazy to me – is it because ‘get Brexit’ rather than ‘get Brexit done’. They didn’t get us one way, but they’ll get us another, no matter the damage done to politics/certain politicians. And of course Germany and France can continue to waive the wave on to UK, Germany in particular telling immigrants how easy it is to work on the huge UK black market – and no questions asked.

          1. They’re all globalist stooges. May signed us up to the UN Migration Pact. They want to destroy Europe and North America. The question is why are they being allowed to get away with it. How bad does it have to get.

          2. It’s very odd. Beyond time for the CP to recognise Reform/Farage – but I doubt they will, so they will continue to drain support which will go to Reform.

        2. Hated by some, adored by others, but mostly met by shrugs of indifference and ignorance, in my estimation.

      3. 394232+ up ticks,

        Afternoon KJ,

        ALL of them will keep saying what the peoples want to hear, as soon as you lift the PEN from the ballot form its all change at the treachery terminus.

        The wretch cameron was a chiseling master swiveler, in regards to the incoming invasion troops saying, he’ll stop it then promptly raised the numbers.

        1. Thanks, ogga. Completely agree re Chameleon Cameron (and his creature Osborne). I voted Reform, and will continue to until and unless they show me differently and just more of the same. I think part of the game is to stop us voting at all, period.

  69. "He (Starmer) said she (Gray) would take on a new role as his envoy for the regions and nations."

    WTF does THAT mean?

        1. Would they welcome her? The Provos and the Orangemen are equally resistant to The Great Replacement and neither group ever really surrendered their arms?

      2. You forgot to include the Arctic and Antarctica.

        Gray might also have to explain the loss of billions on the disastrous Ukraine War which Russia is winning decisively.

        As to the regions Gray is looking to ditch Northern Ireland completely. The job is only half done at present.

    3. She can depose any leader of a nation or region as the PM decides – just as she did to oust Boris.

    1. "Two tier Keir won't survive too much longer"

      Always keep a hold of Nurse
      For fear of finding something worse

      Hard to imagine anything worse than Starmer but I am sure that Rayner, Cooper, Reeves and Lammy would give him a good run for his money in the sheer foulness stakes!

  71. No wonder Gray always looks so bloody miserable – changing jobs every month….{:¬))

  72. Not easy -again
    Wordle 1,205 4/6

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    1. Quite a few options!
      Wordle 1,205 5/6

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      1. He was referring to the raft of assaults on the Constitution by government. As you may know both the first and second amendments under under sustained propaganda attack, quite apart from the threat to the independence of the Supreme Court. The Second amendment was in his sights in particular.

  76. Heavy rain now , but wow, 16c.

    Talking of sixteen , son no 1 has just run 16+ miles , Weymouth to Ringstead coastal stretch and back , hard going rough country tracks in a circuitous route ..

    Live track Garmin is an amazing invention .. We can track his progress either on the laptop or on Moh's phone . So clever ..

  77. S.S. Benlawers.

    Complement:
    51 (24 dead and 27 survivors).
    Army stores, including lorries

    At 13.04 hours on 6th October 1940 the Benlawers (Master W.G. Scott-Campbell), a straggler from convoy OB-221 , was torpedoed and sunk by U-123 (Karl-Heinz Moehle) northeast of St.Johns. 23 crew members and one gunner were lost. The master, nine crew members and one gunner were picked up by the British merchant Forest and landed at Bermuda. The second officer, 14 crew members and one gunner were rescued by the Bengore Head.

    Type IXB U-Boat U-123 was decommissioned on 17th June 1944 at Lorient and laid up in box K3 of the U-boat pen. Scuttled there on 19th August 1944. Wreck captured by US forces in May 1945 and handed over to France.

    Post war information:
    Became the French submarine Blaison. Stricken 18th August 1959 as Q165.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e205c36ca09f9c4f88f52e8d251150453932776a1e459f6ce24561224de31e7c.jpg

    1. If you or any member of your family has a private pension there is a reasonable chance they too are investing through BlackRock or Vanguard, or both.

      1. Vanguard Group is a fund manager, owned by its own funds and therefore ultimately owned by its investors. It's effectively a mutually owned business without being mutual. The founder, John C Bogle was one of the greatest investment managers of the 20th century, and became a philanthropist. All the information is freely available on the web, so I cannot understand all the vilification.

        1. Agreed.

          These companies are so huge that they have fingers in most pies.
          If there is a problem with them it's the "too big to fail" syndrome, which history tells us is bad news

      2. Headlines from and links to various other websites.
        I'm unconvinced he understands what he's looking at.

  80. A pale piss Par Four!

    Wordle 1,205 4/6
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    1. And me.

      Wordle 1,205 4/6

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    2. My near disaster is self explanatory.

      Wordle 1,205 6/6

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    3. I thought it was a toughie! Glad to get out with a big bad bogey……

      Wordle 1,205 5/6

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      PS It wasnt quite as bad as the dreaded ?o?er, but it was close!

    1. The frightening thing is that whatever replaced him would almost certainly be even worse for the UK from the policy perspective.

      2. It matters not who replaces him. The entire Labour Party (Labour movement) is a complete and utter shower of effluent, so whoever you get, it is guaranteed to be bad!

        2. True, but some of the slowest on the uptake are also both the most dangerous AND likely to be the policy drivers

    2. Tommy R threatens to reveal a corker about The Right "Honourable" Sir Keir Starmer outside No 10 on 26th October.

      Anyone with any detail about SK's dirty secrets DM me. he says.. I have plenty already.

  82. 394232+ up ticks,

    Heavens almighty, getterway, could this be so, well I never.
    Has only been going on since "matilda"PM walzed down to the entry gate and opened them world wide
    resulting in mass paedophilia, mass murder, mass damage to the infrastructure.

    Consenting people voters blaming the NHS for shortfalls in service when they have, on average, a token 100 foreign potential patients arriving daily, year on year on year General Election after general Election after General Election.
    When we have one bed MORE than the world population the NHS will NEVER be in a healthy state.

  83. That's me for today. Quite agreeably spent pottering. Some rain expected overnight but – allegedly – sunny tomorrow. On verra.

    Have a jolly evening.

    A demain.

  84. Phew!
    Another couple of hours up the "garden".
    The day's work:-
    A lot of logs sorted & stacked
    Chainsaw sharpened & fueled
    One lot of logs sawn to chopping lengths
    More logs brought down the hill and sawn.
    Then the Husqy ran out of fuel and the EFCO decided it was not going to play!
    So that is me for the day.

  85. Just a last thought. Wasn't it lucky that Gray's pay went up just before she left – ensuring a better payoff and an even better pension?

    4. That must depend on who her employer is. Is she classed as ‘civil service’ in the political appointment of chief of Staff? If not, any pension accruing from the Labour Party’s employment won’t be huge because she wasn’t in employment for long. Even if she managed by some devious wheeze to get classed as civil service again (having had a gap in service when she left to become 2TKs right hand in opposition) she might not have been eligible because she in her late 60s and I’d be surprised if she didn’t start drawing her civil service pension as soon as she left.

  86. Well, that's a pisser.
    Was wondering about a wedding anniversary party next summer, and started to search out the original cast
    Seems that Best Man (lost touch) died in 17 November 2013, so no point in inviting him. That's a right downer, that is.
    40th anniversary blew past whilst we were installing Mother in care home and selling her house. Next year is 43rd. Better late than never, I guess – even though the BM is late. 🙁
    Good bloke, so he was. RIP, Neil.

    1. My brother-in-law informed me that I (aged 10 at the time) was the only person still alive who had been at his marriage to my sister Belinda 68 years ago excluding his eldest daughter who was in utero!

      1. Most of those attending ours are in their 70's upwards.
        Two are in their late 90's and looking good for three figures.

      2. My brother and my nephews are still going from ours, along with (for the time being as she's terminally ill) my sister in law.

  87. 'Night All
    I should have known better I normally never buy standard supermarket bacon but I was seduced by the "thick cut drycure" labelling
    4 rashers in the pan to start dry frying to crumble onto my home made Asparagus soup return 7 minutes later to be presented with a literal sea of liquid and white gunk
    It took 4 yes FOUR thick sheets of kitchen roll to dry the pan after which the rashers were no longer "Thick Cut"
    I hate these con artists with a passion

    2. Find a local pig farmer who cures and sells his own product. We have one such 3½ miles away.

    3. It is so wet it doesn't even brown properly. All the crispy brown stuff ends up burning on the pan.

      You will get a better result from grilling. Though airfryers do a better job.

      There is also another way. Take it out of its plastic coffin and leave it in the fridge for a week. I do that with steaks too.

      1. It is mainly water that has been injected into the bacon, by the manufacturers, to increase its weight so they can sell you fewer rashers. The whiteness is a concoction of preservatives.

        That's why I cure my own bacon.

      2. It is mainly water that has been injected into the bacon, by the manufacturers, to increase its weight so they can sell you fewer rashers. The whiteness is a concoction of preservatives.

        That's why I cure my own bacon.

    5. That happened to me when I bought some bacon labelled "dry-cure" at Tesco's in Norwich. I had the same gruesome white gunk fiil the pan. My remedy was to drive back to Tesco, with the pan and its contents in situ, and I presented it to their customer service desk. They tried to offer me another pack of this 'bacon' but I refused it. I told them that I required a full refund, plus compensation for my unnecessary journey and time-wasted. They demurred initially but I got my way eventually (I always get my way in these situations).

      I had a similar situation with a refrigerated pizza I bought in Morrisons at Fakenham. I ate half of it that day then intended to cook the other half the following day but it was covered in a blue mould despite being refrigerated all the time. For that half a pizza I got: A full refund for the whole pizza from Morrisons plus cash for my petrol used. Plus I got another full refund from the manufacturers of the pizza (Pizza Express) plus a set of vouchers to use on any groceries of my choice. I added all this together and my recompense for that pizza amounted to a value of £38 in total. It pays to stick to your guns when complaining.

      1. My supermarket experience, Grizzly – Morrisons staffed with real people, others deadbeats or robots…

    6. Dry-cure bacon shouldn't produce loads of white slime when being cooked. I buy mine in Waitrose, and I don't end up boiling it in white slime.

          4. Exactly, Grizz. Half my fam were Yorkshire folks, the other half darn sarf. I have a book of poems by John Clare, a number of words in the Glossary remind me very much of the other half grandmother. I have no idea where ‘siling’ came from, a Yorkshire joke perhaps, from a Yorkshire lad:-)

  89. Sir Keir Starmer has refused to rule out ending British control of Gibraltar and the Falklands.. after Chagos Islands territory given away during parliament recess. And you're paying for the pleasure.

    The only way you can stop the out of control Trot is for King Charles to dissolve parliament. That's what he's there for. Then again, his mother did nowt during Theresa May's brexit surrender Treaty signing.

    2. There must be someone in Max's club capable of a bit of joined-up thinking. If they're so worried about global warming, then hanging on to the Falklands is vital. Sell out to the Argies and China will buy the lot – £30 trillion at today's prices.

  90. This goes off-track only in its references to Russia. Putin may like to wind up the West but Russia is no match economically or militarily for China, the real Red Terror that will end the world. We are all but defenceless.

    The West is stuck in its arrogant torpor: thank God for Israel's bravery

    Our military uselessness next to Israel and its enemies is not just laughable, it's terrifying

    Zoe Strimpel • 5th October 2024 • 4:46pm

    There's the real world in which there are bullies, aggressors and perpetrators…and the proper response to them.

    And then there's the fake world of arrogant entitlement, a world in which right and wrong and life and death don't seem to exist, in which the victim is blamed for angering, and then responding to, the bully. In which the bully becomes the victim as soon as anyone tries to stop them.

    In which mendacious respectability requires the condemnation of war, escalation, and the inflammation of tensions – no matter what tensions, what war, what cause. In which anything is better than making the bully more angry. In which appeasement is the emotional and political order of the day.

    In which winning is taboo. In which the "international community" and dubious "international law" are weaponised against the good guys.

    Israel is the real world. It alone among Western nations is awake. It is fighting a multi-pronged war with its Iran-funded enemies, and it is a war waged to be won.

    It is through the struggle of the Israeli nation that those in the la-la land of Western denial are finally being catapulted into reality, no longer able to remain ignorant to the forces of history.

    While the great and the good cluck over fears of Israel pushing the region to the brink of all-out war, Israel is busy fighting a battle whose outcome could determine the fate of the entire world, in the West and beyond. Israel knows it is facing an existential threat. We don't seem to, even though it is staring us in the face.

    Iran, in cahoots with other Islamist territories, plus Russia and China, could well take us all down – and would stand a much greater chance of doing so if Israel was behaving with less warlike courage, clarity of mission, ingenuity and persistence.

    Iran is an almost-nuclear power and its intentions for mass murder and destruction are not hidden, especially where "the Zionists" and America are concerned (the Great Satan and Little Satan).

    Its endless proxy wars and campaigns of terror, its destabilising strategies and its myriad terror groups operating through the Middle East and Europe have already done much damage, instilling doubt and fear alongside a growing bill of murders. We splutter and hedge and appease, but it is already on our doorstep; just last week there were explosions outside the Jewish embassies in Copenhagen and Stockholm. Terror has been active in Europe for some time.

    Israel, too, was sleeping before October 7, distracted by domestic disputes about the judiciary. But after that day of unparalleled violence, a year ago tomorrow, it was catapulted into a new historical era, one of showdown with the real post-Nazi axis of evil, aka the Iran-led "axis of resistance". We in the West are in that new era, caught in the same battle, whether we realise it or not.

    Israel doesn't have the luxury not to realise the existential stakes.

    In the course of a little over a week, while smug Western prestige commentators and leaders have shaken their heads, accused Israel of "invading" Lebanon with intent to kill and conquer, and mocked the use of "high explosives" to solve problems – and while the masses online spout their vicious anti-Semitic bile – Israel has taken out Hassan Nasrallah, one of the nastiest dictators in the world, and many of his henchmen.

    Iranian missiles have flown through the night sky bound for Tel Aviv but been mostly rebuffed by the best missile defence system in the world. Terrorists killed more than half a dozen Jews strolling in the hip Tel Aviv-adjacent neighbourhood of Jaffa; the IDF has left huge craters in Hezbollah-run enclaves of Beirut where the Islamist dictatorship's honchos once schemed, and, so that Israel's northern residents can return home after a year of shelling, has sent troops into southern Lebanon to manually remove Hezbollah from its infestation of border towns and villages.

    And what have we done?

    Our military "played their part", according to the Defence Secretary John Healey, as Iran battered Israel with 200 long-range missiles last week.

    This elementary declaration turned out to mean that RAF jets played a supporting role in Israel's air defence…but failed to actually hit any incoming bombs. At least we joined the right side, unlike in 1948, but our military uselessness next to Israel and its enemies is not just laughable, it's terrifying. Indeed, it is hard to fathom the sheer stupidity of the management-consultant-type thinking that has led to us having barely any defensive ability at all.

    As some noted last week, Britain's Type 45 anti-missile destroyers would be hard-pressed to respond to any attack at all, let alone to an onslaught of last week's scale. Some expressed doubt that Britain even has enough sailors to operate the ships in a war zone.

    The plague of lethal complacency is Europe-wide. A new report from the UK Defence Journal highlighted that neither Britain nor any "European NATO air forces have sufficient expertise or munitions stocks to conduct suppression and destruction of enemy air defences at scale".

    Addressing this, they wrote, is all the more urgent in view of Russia's ongoing onslaught in Ukraine. Indeed, Russia's attack, now almost three years old, ought to have been enough to stir us from our stupor, at the very least spurring us to improve our creaking, outdated defences.

    It didn't.

    But the harsh reality is catching up with us. This is not the first time in history that the Jews have catapulted a complacent, morally bankrupt West into the molten core of the absolute binary between good and evil. I just hope this time that the lessons will be learnt before it's too late.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/10/05/west-stuck-in-its-arrogant-torpor-thank-god-for-israel

  91. Evening, all. In church (freezing because the boiler had broken down – a foretaste of things to come?) we were reminded that it will be a year tomorrow since the Hamas attack that kicked it all off in the ME. The Pope has called for a day of prayer and fasting. I bet that will go down well in the Beeb. In the afternoon I had a guided tour around one of the local manor houses with a fascinating history. It has links to the triangular shaped folly of the Catholic chap with an obsession about the Trinity (Tresham) and was built at a similar time.

    The West seems to think that defending oneself is a mortal sin and everyone should just lie down and let islam take over. Personally, I don't subscribe to that view.

    1. We had the church boiler problem a couple of years ago. The Bishop wanted us to take the extortionately expensive and inefficient green route therefore it took longer than it should have done to get a new gas boiler installed. Time and money had to be spent proving Dame Bishop wrong.

      1. The church plumbers are being told to get on with repairing it now. We have the Bishop (of Lichfield) coming to take a service on Friday evening. Since I doubt he wants to freeze to death in the dark (there's a lighting problem as well), we should be okay.

    2. Her sexuality is irrelevant.

      What's relevant is her competence to do the job and the competence of those who appointed her, if the reason she was appointed was her sexuality rather than her competence.

    3. The entire bridge is all-female captain & officer crew. Not a single male officer.

      Funny comments..
      The ship not only ran aground, but it also caught fire, it capsized, & it sank..
      Well, she sure did a thorough job..
      They are wearing more awards than a North Korean general..

    1. Good stuff.
      Manchester has a large Jewish population.

      HG still has Jewish friends from when she lived in Didsbury in the 1950's.

      Jokingly and affectionately known as "Yidsbury".

      3. Gateshead has the largest Talmudical college outside Israel. I was at school with a lot of Jewish people, as were my Dad and Mum. They were and are a big part of the ‘community’!

  94. Damn and blast.

    In her new role, and it's a stellar achievement; for the good of the planet Sue Gray has given the UK to Eire.

    The agreement states that the former UK must pay three trillion pounds annually to Dublin to support all Ireland's and the EU's gimmegrants, who will be housed in what was formerly known as England.

  95. Another day is done so, goodnight, Gentlefolk. Bis morgen fruh. Schlaf gut. Ich hoffe.

  97. from Coffee House, the Spectator

    The 1990s were Britain’s sunset years
    Robin Ashenden6 October 2024, 6:00am
    A myth seems to be developing about the 1990s. In a recent programme on Disney Plus called In Vogue: The 90s, a series of talking heads rhapsodise about the decade. ‘God, the 90s just changed everything,’ oozes Hamish Bowles, a fashion journalist. ‘It was a great time to be alive, it really felt like a revolution was underway,’ says model and actor Tyler Beckford. ‘Wow – what does the 90s mean to me?’ asks Naomi Campbell, suggesting it’s almost too vast a question to answer.

    Outside the programme, others seem to agree. ‘The 90s were the best decade ever – a time of real fun, freedom and abandon,’ says a recent article in the Irish Mirror. Novelist Bret Easton Ellis adds: ‘They were completely awesome all the way round, from movies, to music to…just freedom. It was freedom.’

    It was all going kaput, and this was true of many people too
    Listening to the gush of this nostalgia, I can’t help wondering, did these people and I live through the same decade? Because the 1990s, as I remember them, were almost unremittingly dull.

    Part of it was the feeling of having missed out on the Sixties – the really cool decade – or simply the turgid stability of 90s political life. Yes, the Berlin Wall had just fallen and the Cold War was over, but in Britain it seemed like things would never change. A decade of Margaret Thatcher had given way to seven years of John Major, a man so unexciting he was depicted on Spitting Image as grey all over and wittering on incessantly to his wife about the peas she’d served at dinner. We longed, as young people will, for a Labour government but, seeing them lose by a whisker in 1992, had to make do with watching smugly left-wing films like Truly, Madly, Deeply or wallowing in the misery of Ken Loach.

    In so many ways, we appeared to have missed the boat. The generation born after the war at least had the three-day week, the power cuts of the 1970s and the Soviet menace to grapple with. Casting around for enemies, we came up with Rupert Murdoch, McDonalds and The Word presenter Terry Christian.

    Even when Tony Blair came along – a Labour leader who would break the 18-year pattern of Labour defeat – his policies were so close to Tory ones it just seemed business as usual. It wasn’t Clement Attlee in 1945, building a New Jerusalem. It wasn’t even Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’. Instead, when Blair spoke, we got a dizzying array of verbless sentences with the words ‘new’ and ‘young’ in all of them, to hammer home just how knackered we felt.

    There are plenty of things, looking back, to miss about the 1990s, but they were even more prevalent in the decades just preceding them. We could, until 1998, still get a free education. We young could bum around on the dole as long as we liked and property, even in central London, was still relatively cheap. Our behaviour was less rigidly policed and, in that last gasp before Twitter and mobile phone cameras, we weren’t each other’s potential spies and informers. We read books, wrote long letters to one another and, if we met up, it was face to face. ‘Inappropriate’ and ‘problematic’ had yet to become buzzwords and the culture, summed up by the whoops and giggles of the Big Breakfast audience, was engaged in a desperate hunt for fun.

    Yet there was the feeling of coming to the end of something, and not just the Millennium. Routemaster buses and red phone boxes were starting to disappear, and the traffic in the capital, before the congestion charge, was becoming a bad joke. We still had plenty of musty bookshop and hangovers from the past, like Bunjie’s Coffee House & Folk Cellar (off Charing Cross Road) or the New Piccadilly Café, where the waiters wore epaulettes and you could get a cup of tea for 50p. Yet rent rises were about to snuff them out, as they would with so many of those gloriously tatty repertory cinemas each area seemed to have – to which, for under a fiver, you could slip out any afternoon for a double-bill of Jean Luc Goddard, Kubrick or Kieslowski.

    It was perhaps the last decade which really valued the arts. Programmes like Omnibus, Arena, the South Bank Show – which had inspired and educated generations – were enjoying an Indian summer before being pushed callously to the margins. Painters and novelists were still front page news, and the Commonwealth-based Booker Prize, before its catastrophic opening up to all comers in 2013, still meant something. We may have been politically inert but Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, needless to say, were left to bloom in peace.

    Yet it was all going kaput, and this was true of many people too. The actor Sir Robert Stephens – a great thunderstorm of a man – was giving peerless performances of Falstaff and King Lear at the RSC, but he’d be dead by 1995. The same year would claim the comedian Peter Cook – a man who’d laugh any folly out of countenance, and whose wry take on life seemed indispensable. Cantankerous writers like John Osborne and The Spectator’s columnist Jeffrey Bernard were leaving us too, in 1994 and 1997 respectively.

    Slowly we were turning into something duller, more intolerant of human frailty, something else. As we became less empathic and less kind, we began to use the words ‘empathy’ and ‘kindness’ more often. The Dianafication of the UK – the creeping supremacy of feelings and emotions, all played out in public – was now underway. It became more important to be seen to feel, than actually to do so.

    We appeared, in so many ways, to be pointing in the wrong direction. In 1994, in one of the cultural highlights of that decade, TV writer Dennis Potter, dying of stomach cancer, gave his famous final interview to Melvin Bragg. We were, he warned, heading into a cultural, moral desert, and for a conformity almost total. TV, which no longer cared about our emancipation, was being taken over by the moneymen. The welfare state his generation had fought for and were so proud of was now being ‘callously dismantled’. Tabloid culture had polluted the political process and, he said, by not making simple statements about what mattered in life and how we should treat one another, we were ‘destroying ourselves’.

    The interview was hugely affecting, almost seismic, but like so many things it encouraged you to look back rather than forward and do anything but live in the here and now. It had, though, the ring of truth. For all the guffaws of TFI Fridays and the Girlie Show, the party was essentially over.

    It’s a sad irony that we now look back on that decade as one of plenty. It’s only amidst the strictures and shibboleths of 2024 – as we watch our Ps and Qs and worry what we’ve said, written, even worn – that the UK of the 90s looks like a paradise lost. Had we been told then that we were living through a great renaissance – Britpop, Britart, Phony Tony and all – we would have given the most ironic of 90s sniggers. The culture seemed about as lively as one of Damian Hirst’s pickled cows.

  98. 394232+ up ticks,

    The super scam will sill pay rich dividends and will remain so until there is mass unity among the victims,
    future victims, in demanding most strongly that justice
    be served, and I mean MOST STRONGLY.

    The prototype worked out well for the political / pharmaceutical scammers, all facets of the trial scam probably doing better than they ever hoped for.

    Will now be in the governing coalition parties toolbox
    for when they are re-elected.

    https://x.com/dksdata/status/1787202976123101219

  99. A Decent day, later this afternoon two of our younger grandchildren and their parents arrived. It was raining so at least I didn't have to play games in the garden.
    Nice cuppa tea a biscuit each and engagement with the lovely children. The bigger brother is not even five until late February. I can't believe how bright he is.
    I've cooked a roast beef Etc dinner, washed up an tidied up. Two glasses of decent vin rouge and now feeling drowsy. Twirly for bed.
    Watching Simon Reeve (Relation)? Telling the world what a mess 8 million tonnes of plastic waste does to our climate. But he doesn't actually lay blame but because we recycle it can't be us.

    1. I envy you the grandchildren, Eddy. Would love a tiny grand-daughter, but not my scope of work.

    2. Same here.
      A couple of logging sessions, starting with shifting and stacking the last lot dragged down the hill and sawn, then sawing the bits that still needed sawing, stacking a lot of the smaller diameter lengths and dragging another load down the hill and getting them sawn.
      The weather has changed so might have a rest tomorrow.

  100. From Coffee House, the Spectator,

    Paul McCartney never got over his filmmaking flop
    David McAlpine Cunningham6 October 2024, 6:00am
    Witnessing the recent imperial progress of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, it occurred to me how impossible it is to imagine her ever shedding her current incarnation as world-bestriding, bronze-thighed musical potentate. But of course, she will. The time will come when the hits will dry up and new sorts of eras will beckon: the ‘disappointing sales’ era, the ‘desperate collaboration with younger artists’ era and, ultimately, the ‘Las Vegas residency’ era. It won’t be her fault. It happens to everyone eventually.

    Forty years ago this month, Paul McCartney, who had been a global superstar for more than two decades, effectively torpedoed his career with an ill-advised movie project called Give My Regards to Broad Street. Hyperbole? Read on…

    By the end of the decade, McCartney was touring for the first time in ages
    It’s hard to convey, unless you were around, what an extraordinary figure he seemed in his prime. He stayed in the UK and paid his taxes when most other big stars fled. He sent his kids to the local comprehensive. He insisted on having his beloved wife, Linda, on stage despite the ridicule directed towards him and the vituperative misogyny aimed at her. And between 1963 and 1983 barely a year went by without a chart topper on both sides of the Atlantic from The Beatles or Wings.

    That may well have been the reason for his adventure in filmmaking. After pretty much the longest winning streak in entertainment history, perhaps he was feeling invulnerable. Then again, the idea of a movie had long been on his mind. It had morphed over the years from an Isaac Asimov-authored science fiction epic about Wings being kidnapped by aliens (I kid you not), to a Tom Stoppard anti-war epic, to a Willy Russell comedy (topic unknown). None of these made it far past the first draft and there’s a highly revealing moment in the contemporaneous South Bank Show where Paul cheerfully admits that his self-penned script was regularly returned to him by film producers along with enclosed alternatives. Watching this now is like witnessing a man strolling, whistling, towards a cliff edge. You want to yell, ‘Stop! Turn back!’

    But, of course, he didn’t turn back. Ringo clambered aboard and is a droll, welcome presence throughout. Commercials director Peter Webb gave the whole thing a sub-Ridley Scott, Hovis advert sheen. Ralph Richardson, in his last screen role, appeared as Paul’s Dad. Linda, Ringo’s wife Barbara Bach and Tracey Ullman also… well, ‘appeared’ is maybe too strong a word. They hung out together in front of the camera. Tellingly, there is no mention of The Beatles. Paul seems to have been a solo artist for his entire career.

    A long-standing rule of thumb in the media dictates that when a big star has a dodgy project to push, they’re magically available for interviews with even the most obscure outlets. Until then, one aspect of Paul’s slightly otherworldly aura was the fact that he never appeared on chat shows. But suddenly there seemed to be no interviewer he didn’t want to meet. The energy and forbearance all this must have required is admirable, but it also had the unfortunate side effect of ensuring the entire world was paying full attention when the reviews came in.

    These were of that particular species that might best be described as ‘comeuppance’. Critics his own age who had long envied his talent, success and wealth fell upon the movie with knives they had been sharpening for… well, for his whole adult life. Attacked from every quarter, this impossibly lightweight project puckered, sagged and spiralled to the ground.

    Noel Coward once astutely advised a colleague, ‘We all have occasional failures, dear boy. But try not to have a famous failure.’ Broad Street, unfortunately, was a famous failure. There was even a sketch on Spitting Image that depicted puppet Paul in a restaurant, being served a can of film by a waiter, who solemnly intoned, ‘Your turkey, sir.’

    He didn’t deserve it. As a drama, Broad Street was not, by even the most elastic use of the adjective, ‘good’. But the theme song, ‘No More Lonely Nights’ was gorgeous. And if you want to see what it is to be given the divine gift of effortless musicality, go to YouTube and watch the medley of ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ and ‘Wanderlust’. Just him on an acoustic guitar then a piano, still insulated by the easy confidence that all those prior years of success had bestowed.

    So, yes, the film was a disaster. But not to worry. The music had still been praised. And this was Paul McCartney we were talking about. He’d survived the disintegration of The Beatles, quickly pulled himself out of depression, and created one of the biggest bands of the 1970s from scratch. He’d bounce back no problem!

    Except he didn’t. He worked hard at doing new things on his next album, Press To Play. It contains some magnificent flourishes, but the melodies had suddenly lost their divine immediacy and hardly anyone bought it. By the time of the album after that, Flowers in the Dirt (slaved over by a myriad of producers), he was writing self-consciously Beatle-esque stuff with Elvis Costello. It was solid, sometimes lovely, but the songs didn’t soar any longer. They felt laborious. By the end of the decade, he was touring for the first time in ages. The audiences were vast and deliriously appreciative. And he was terrific: still full throated and indefatigable. But most of the set list derived from the 1960s and 1970s. It had been a painful transition, but he’d finally become a nostalgia act.

    In the long years since, there has been more good material than is commonly allowed: sometimes experimental, sometimes whimsical, sometimes surprisingly introspective, always interesting. And, of course, he gave us the ‘Fab Fourmaldehyde’ ventures of ‘Free as a Bird’ and ‘Now and Then’. But he never wrote another song that stole its way into the public consciousness through numerous cover versions like Bob Dylan did with ‘To Make You Feel My Love’. Mainly, he toured and kept on singing the old stuff.

    Why did it happen? My guess is that the shock of an embarrassing solo flop robbed him of something he couldn’t quite get back. Unlike his peers, he’d never really had one of those ‘dry’ spells where the audience turned their backs and when it happened it shook him to his core. This was a man, after all, who had endured several years in the wake of John Lennon’s death of journalists finding it necessary to elevate the memory of his erstwhile friend and collaborator by putting him down as a hack. And he’d often told us in interviews that he was prone to anxiety and insecurity – we just hadn’t been paying attention.

    So there it stands… Give My Regards to Broad Street. Meandering. Lo-Fi. Often amateurish. It’s impossible to find on streaming and hard to track down on DVD. There’s no special edition Blu Ray and there probably never will be. But in its own way it’s a consequential work as it demonstrates how a seemingly unstoppable career can come grinding to a halt just when everyone least expects it. Taylor Swift take note.

      2. You must be walking around with ear defenders on – they're everywhere! And some arent bad at all!

          1. I think it could also be an age thing, I listen with my granddaughters (both swifties) and their choice of music and thank the Lord I was born at a time of the 50's, 60's and 70's music.
            A different class of musician was giving the world "pop" music, who today for example compares to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys or Lennon & McCartney.

          3. The list could go on and on. I try to appreciate different types of music, Opera, Pop, Classical etc but today’s offerings from the pop world lacks so much.
            PS I do struggle with Chamber Music and (C)Rap 🤭

      3. Unless you are female, in your early to mid teens, with a grudge against a boyfriend ….you possibly won't identify, mola.

        1. I had heard that Ms Swift was a lyricist with a rather singular theme to her songs – griping about past boyfriends.

          1. That’s the one, current squeeze is different to past bf/s, remains to be seen how she portrays their time together:-)

        2. I had heard that Ms Swift was a lyricist with a rather singular theme to her songs – griping about past boyfriends.

    2. He's playing here this coming week. Lots of friends are going. I hope he enjoys it.

      1. My son and his family saw Paul McCartney in Los Angeles. The videos he sent were fantastic. A memorable night.

  101. Oh dear I've just had a phone call from Victoria Oz.
    My lovely good old mate Brucey died about an hour ago. Expected, but I'm so upset.
    Good night all.

      1. What a horrible job, ringing round with the bad news.
        Respect to the person doing that.

        1. A mutual friend rang me about my friend's suicide (although I already knew because the dead friend emailed me to say goodbye before she killed herself). I remember it like yesterday; I was walking my dog in the field.

    2. Oh, man.
      I'm so sorry. That's really hard. My sympathies.
      Sleep, dream of him, and remember the good times.

    3. You must have been as important to him and his as he was to you, for them to have informed you so quickly
      RIP Brucey

    4. Sorry to hear that, R E. My condolences. Even when you know it's coming, it still hits hard.

      1. You've been relatively quiet recently; I hope all is well with you.

        And your dogs, naturally.

        1. The day i got back from Malta i developed a respiratory infection. Coughed so much my abdomen was covered in bruises. Couldn’t sleep either. Fever, chills and the worst part…confusion.
          Better now thanks.
          Doggies are fine.

  104. She clearly wont be as popular with this demographic, but she recently had all 10 of the US Top Ten chart – that is a serious achievement which I dont think any other act has achieved before!

  105. Oh, Lord, Conners.
    That's awful – I have no words – and I know about a friend killing herself.
    No words… only sympathy.

    1. I know. I feel so guilty; I feel I should have been able to do something, even at that distance.

  106. New ground offensive North in Lebanon. Beirut advised to evacuate.
    Sitting here in my comfy sofa, wine at hand and cat sleeping on the windowledge, I feel for the civilian population over there. Israel are going at it hammer & tongs, and as an ordinary person, what can you do, where can you go? Let's pray for the ordinary folk in the middle of all this shit.

  107. Good evening, chums, just got back from York after a traumatic day on the motorway. And thanks, Geoff, for the Sunday site. Just got today's Wordle in five so am posting it below. And then, it's off to bed for me. See you all tomorrow.

    Wordle 1,205 5/6

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

  109. https://twitter.com/boblister_poole/status/1842997716089008548 Yes, the Stonehenge tunnel was canceled in 2024:
    Background
    The tunnel was a proposed two-mile section of highway that would have run underneath the World Heritage Site of Stonehenge. It was part of an eight-mile project to improve the A303 road. The tunnel was approved in 2017 and received planning permission in 2020.
    Cancellation
    The tunnel was cancelled by the UK government as part of a spending review. The cancellation was announced in July 2024.
    Reaction
    The cancellation was met with disappointment from civil engineering contractors. Some villagers near the site expressed despair, saying they were "back to square one".
    Arguments for cancellation
    The cancellation was said to save £2.5 billion. Some say the project should never have been proposed, and that it would have caused "permanent, irreversible harm" to the area.
    Arguments against cancellation
    Lawyers warned that cancelling projects can have a ripple effect on supply chains and materials shortages.

    1. Hindhead, where I lived for a while, was always a terrible bottleneck on the A3. The problem was that it was nestlled between Giibbet Hill and the Devil's Punchbowl, both areas of outstanding natural beauty, and there was nowhere to put a dual carriageway. Hindhead lay on a crossroad with a set of traffic lights that held up the traffic on this major trunk road.

      The solution eventually was to tunnel under Hindhead. I went back there after they had done the works and was horrified at the devastation. There was one very pretty wooded area on a lane between Grayshott and Haslemere that was completely destroyed, and in its place a scar of civil engineering utterly out of keeping with the environment and really seemed gratuitously horrible and unnecessarily unsympathetic.

      I fearr that while tunnelling under Stonehenge might sound benign, the reality might well be something really nasty.

    1. Labour or Conservative, different cheeks of the same arse.
      Neither of them work on our behalf, they are just regional managers for the WEF and their globalist chums.
      I bite my lip when people in conversation complain to me about our governments yet they voted for them, either this recent election or the previous one. I want to tell them to stop being sheep and consider an alternative.

      1. 394269+ up ticks,

        Morning VVOF

        Good that we have the same mindset but in my book I see the sheep as innocent parties, suffering themselves from the curse of HALAL plus, I do believe one must unleash the lip in a very just cause.

        1. Morning ogga1, it is going to take some time to bring about a change of mindset, unfortunately time is not what we have in abundance.

          1. 394269+ up ticks,

            VVOF,
            A very patriotic, beneficial to the young, legacy would not go amiss though.

    1. Happy birthday, young Bob 3. Just think, another 16 years and you will get your OBE (Over Bloody Eighty!) Lol.

  114. 745,000 illegals immigrants in the UK, apparently. 1 in 100 of the population.

    If you don’t like it, HMG will lock you up (releasing violent offenders to make way for you).

    If you are an illegal immigrant, you are rewarded with accommodation and money.

    “Only” 300,000 in France. And 700,000 (upper estimate) in Germany.

  115. 745,000 illegals immigrants in the UK, apparently. 1 in 100 of the population.

    If you don’t like it, HMG will lock you up (releasing violent offenders to make way for you).

    If you are an illegal immigrant, you are rewarded with accommodation and money.

    “Only” 300,000 in France. And 700,000 (upper estimate) in Germany.

    1. Soon, the Immigrants Party will be able to vote themselves extra bennies, rather than leaving it to Labour.

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