Thursday 16 September: Will the country ever be given the chance to learn to live with Covid?

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

817 thoughts on “Thursday 16 September: Will the country ever be given the chance to learn to live with Covid?”

      1. Good morning, Korky. I see “that fella across the pond” has performed yet another of his gaffes.

  2. Britain will help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines to counter China’s military prowess. 16 September 2021.

    Britain has agreed a landmark security pact with the United States and Australia to share military technologies, starting with a plan to help Canberra build nuclear-powered submarines.

    Morning everyone. What’s the payoff here? Australia gets to launch a nuclear submarine sometime in 2030? It looked more like three politicians with serious domestic credibility problems posing for their respective domestic audience to me! Joe has just presided over the greatest cockup in American history with his Afghanistan decisions, all of which he declined to share or discuss with his “allies”. Johnson has come out as a Socialist with an election brewing while his Covid policies are looking increasingly unhinged and Morrison is the leader of the world’s first Globalist Fascist State. They could all do with an image upgrade! Hey Presto we get a Public Relations exercise that looks like it is important but is nothing of the sort.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/09/15/britain-will-help-australia-build-nuclear-powered-submarines/

      1. France. Thales are pretty big on that stuff. Used in our new aircraft carriers. Oh, I cannot stop laughing…

    1. If only, it’s as much use as re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Sadly, the ‘opposition’ parties have been missing in (in)action since Feb 2020.

  6. The Man Putin Couldn’t Kill review – a chilling novichok underpant saga. 16 September 2021.

    In any case, as we know from Russian television, no novichok was found in Navalny’s body until he was flown to Berlin for treatment. Maybe German doctors put it in his underwear while he was in a coma. That is the only explanation that makes sense.

    Best of all was the footage of Navalny, shortly after he came out of intensive care in Germany, ringing up one of the FSB agents he believed had tried to kill him. Posing as one of Putin’s staff disappointed that the mission had not succeeded, he tricked his would-be killer into explaining what went wrong.

    What went wrong, Konstantin Kudryavtsev told Navalny, was that the flight had been too short. Had Navalny been in a coma at 9,000 metres (30,000ft) for longer, he wouldn’t have survived. Instead, a concerned pilot diverted the plane, landing at Omsk, rather than Moscow, for urgent medical treatment. “If it took a bit longer, everything would have ended differently,” said Kudryavtsev, chillingly.

    The author of this critique, aware of the holes in Navalny’s story and the Salisbury Saga, has opted for a slightly sceptical tongue in cheek technique, thus avoiding the many pitfalls of the truth. The German doctors could not have put the “Novichok” in Navalny’s underpants because these garments were left behind in the ER at Omsk when he was transferred to Berlin. Similarly Kudryavtsev’s narrative asks us to believe that the plot required Navalny to be in the plane for a specified period for the attack to be fatal. This is the stuff of purest fantasy. How could they be even sure that he would put those particular pants on that morning or catch the plane on time etc. etc.? It would require an operation by Mission Impossible!

    As always these stories about Putin founder not only on the overall premise that having screwed up once he is so dumb (he even uses the same toxin and agents just to confuse everyone) that he continues to carry them out because they have such beneficial political outcomes, but also in the details. Among the many other anomalies about Salisbury (there are more holes than substance) no one has explained, is why the Skripals, supposedly poisoned simultaneously, and being different, ages, weights and sexes both fell over three hours later at exactly the same time. A result that prefigures Navalny’s experience.

    https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/sep/15/the-man-putin-couldnt-kill-review-a-chilling-novichok-underpant-saga#comment-151854784

    1. The Radio Times summary/review was very good. It said,” Grave as the circumstances are for the people involved,…The film also looks at why Vladimir Putin feels so threatened by the savvy, funny, Navalny, who is -spoiler alert-still alive. JS”
      I’m guessing that the BBC is not entirely objective. I’m guessing that the wokes at the BBC think Navalny is one of them.

      1. Morning Anne. Comically enough it would take something like that to make this story credible!

  9. Boris Johnson has handed total power over the country to the NHS

    Be in no doubt: if this winter the NHS declares that it can’t cope, the public, not the health service, will get the blame

    JILL KIRBY

    Who governs Britain? In his announcement of the Covid Winter Plan this week, Boris Johnson gave a clear answer: the NHS.

    Flanked once again by Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance at a Downing Street press conference on Tuesday, the Prime Minister reserved the right to introduce anti-Covid measures, including vaccine passports and mask mandates. He even refused to rule out the possibility of another national lockdown if, as the Winter Plan document puts it, we have to take “whatever action is necessary to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed”. For the avoidance of doubt, the Health Secretary, Sajid Javid said: “we don’t want to get into a position ever again where there’s unsustainable pressure on the NHS so it’s not able to see people in the usual way.”

    The logic is simple: if this winter the NHS declares that it can’t cope, the Government has committed itself to bringing the country to a standstill until it can. Somehow, after three national lockdowns and the rollout of vaccines to more than 80 per cent of the adult population, we are still in the position where the people of Britain are being asked to “protect the NHS” rather than the other way around.

    This worrying reversal of priorities was born during the pandemic and it would be a dangerous step if it were to linger after it. In NHS crises of the past, as tragic as it undoubtedly was to see ambulances backed up outside hospitals, there was no question of normal life being suspended until the crisis had passed. Or, indeed, of allowing the NHS itself to dictate terms to the rest of us. The answer was to try and improve the NHS.

    Boris Johnson, as other prime ministers have done before him, has sought to do so with a massive cash boost, in his case an unprecedented commitment of an extra £36 billion. But where is the incentive now for the NHS to use that money well?

    The first mistake was in writing a blank cheque with few, if any, conditions attached. Where, for example, is the stipulation that the extra money be spent not on extra managers but in training front line staff? Or the demand for innovative ways of keeping wards open, including devising a proper plan to make the most of Nightingale hospitals and seeking new ways, anathema to many in the health service bureaucracy, of integrating elements of the private sector? Why are frontline NHS staff, unlike those in care homes, still for the moment getting away with not having the vaccine?

    Offering the reserve option of a lockdown if the health service’s leaders fail to improve capacity sufficiently and hospitals are overwhelmed only further weakens the incentive to improve. Worse, it is easy to see how the threat of a costly new lockdown could be leveraged to demand even greater injections of health funding.

    To be fair to Amanda Pritchard, NHS England’s recently appointed chief executive, capacity cannot be built overnight. In a creaking, monolithic structure that has proved stubbornly resistant to change, it is not easy to implement emergency measures capable of tackling a winter with the threat of Covid coupled with other seasonal illnesses such as flu. But what we have seen so far is precious little appetite to right these wrongs and few incentives from Government for things to change.

    Sir Patrick Vallance made clear that he was keen to see the Government do everything necessary to repress the virus because the NHS is, in his view, already “under extreme pressure”. For all too many people in this country, struggling to get a face-to-face appointment with their GP, or unable to get diagnostic scans or cancer treatment, the NHS is still not seeing them “in the usual way”. But rather than an all hands to the pump effort to make hospitals fit for the challenge, we have more threats of lockdown and ministers and advisers once again resorting to doom-laden projections.

    Be in no doubt: if this winter the NHS declares that it can’t cope, the public, not the health service, will get the blame. Perhaps the most dismaying conclusion from this week’s announcements is that this Government will never say no to the NHS, whatever the cost to the country.

    We must remain in thrall to an unreformed, inefficient service which we must continue to revere, despite its many failings.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/15/boris-johnson-has-handed-total-power-country-nhs/

    1. We must remain in thrall to an unreformed, inefficient service which we must continue to revere, despite its many failings.

      It’s Moby Dick. N’est ce-pas? Johnson playing the part of Ahab!

  10. Good morning all from a sunny Derbyshire. Bright, clear skies and a distinctly autumnal feel to the air at 7½°C.

      1. Boy George and his boyfriend, Jon Moss, recorded a song about them – Kami, Kami, Kami, Kami-karzian. It reminded them of the times they used to meet in the local toilets. That was before Gorgie was jailed for handcuffing another boyfriend to a wall and beating him up with a metal chain. What interesting lives these people live.

  11. Morning all

    SIR – Boris Johnson has put the country on alert once more, warning that there may be fresh Covid restrictions and even another lockdown (report, September 15).

    Chris Whitty, meanwhile, is spreading doom and gloom, suggesting that the NHS could be overwhelmed again, even though it never was.

    Who saw this coming? Everyone – and we are sick and tired of not being allowed to get on with living our lives. This virus is here to stay.

    Simon Crowley

    Kemsing, Kent

    SIR – The Prime Minister said that the ending of lockdown would be “irreversible”. So much for that.

    Already he is telling us what “might” happen in the autumn: compulsory masks, working from home and the possibility of a further lockdown.

    Experience suggests that this is not a case of “might” but “will”. The technique employed is simple but effective: give people time to get used to the idea and they will accept it without question when it is finally implemented.

    Surely it is time to end this farce. The entertainment and hospitality industries have only just reopened and cannot survive another hit.

    David Lane

    Birmingham

    SIR – It was somewhat disingenuous of Professor Whitty to compare last September’s Covid figures with the current ones.

    In 2020, many people had prematurely died of Covid in the spring and summer, so the figures on last September’s graph appear low.

    As for case numbers, far more testing is now taking place, which inevitably means there are more cases, but most of them are not resulting in serious illness.

    Fiona Wild

    SIR – At Tuesday’s briefing the Prime Minister delivered the usual mixture of ambiguous graphs and lots of words. My conclusion: nothing has changed, and he is sitting firmly on the fence.

    Boris Johnson is the consummate politician: he makes a big noise without committing to anything. While I appreciate that this is how politics normally works, it’s not what we need right now. What we need is 
a leader who will set a course and follow it.

    Steve Petherbridge

    Blyth, Nottinghamshire

    SIR – I applaud Boris Johnson for making preparations for winter in good time.

    Any sensible leader must be ready to tighten the rules if necessary: we all saw how fast the delta variant spread last year.

    Geoffrey Brooking

    Havant, Hampshire

    SIR – Could the Government at least give us a bit more notice before it decides to cancel Christmas this year?

    Keith Chambers

    Brockenhurst, Hampshire

    1. Mr Brooking, locking us up, forcing masks and a mandatory vaccination programme didn’t work before.

      The virus will mutate and adapt. The solution is to live with it. More lock ups just for the sake of it will solve nothing.

      1. But they will.

        They will create a FUBAR economy, which will advance the green blob with the further division of Britain between the private and public sectors. Then the public sector will be forced to contract as the money runs out and we will slip into pUKistan.

        1. We know that when there’s no money, the last thing the public sector does is reduce itself in size and scale. In fact, it usually does the exact opposite. After all, the government panics and ‘creates jobs’ to disguise the waning economy and collapsing growth. The private sector then charges the public ever more – because the private is so heavily taxed – and money just moves around in an ever tighter circle.

          But hey. We’ve been doing that for the last 10 years or so. Inflation manages the debt, squashed interest rates allow the state to keep borrowing. More borrowing means the state can buy from the private sector and the only loser is: the worker, saver and home owner.

        2. Folks Under Boris Are Reactionary? Fred Urquhart Bowls And Rides? I must find my Acronym Dictionary.

      1. Bright sunshine here.
        I’m just about to finish getting dressed then up to the garden to clear the brash from and log up the ash tree I dropped yesterday evening.

  13. BoB vs BoA:
    “Unlike the Battle of the Atlantic, this was not just down to the bravery of young men; it was the result of major government investment in aerial defence and very effective forward-planning by the Royal Air Force.”

    Ah, the old ‘forward planning’. Tell me, is there any other kind?

  14. Biden is demolishing Trump’s Middle East triumph. 16 September 2021.

    It is just not the damage the Afghan fiasco has inflicted on the credibility of the US and its allies to act as honest brokers in helping to resolve the region’s many challenges. Pro-Western Arab leaders will be far less likely to place their trust in US pledges of support in the wake of the Biden administration’s wanton betrayal of the Afghan people.

    The bigger threat, though, to further progress in improving Arab-Israeli relations comes from the stunning success the Islamist leaders of the Taliban have achieved in seizing control of the country after more than two decades of bitter conflict. Despite facing the combined might of the US and its allies, the Taliban ultimately defeated a country that remains the world’s pre-eminent military superpower, and are now in the process of forming a new government that will include a number of militants who are widely regarded as terrorists in the West.

    This is the second consecutive article in which I’ve agreed with Coughlin. The World is About to End”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/16/biden-demolishing-trumps-middle-east-triumph/

  15. Will the country ever be given the chance to live with Covid? No. “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

      2. Indeed, and do they have two eyes on one side of their nose? Clearly these two can read & speak english, but who was responsible for their hedgucation?

  17. Boris should have declared the pandemic over

    Ministers are reluctant to admit this is as good as it gets and still behave as if Covid can be eliminated

    ROBERT DINGWALL

    The Prime Minister likes to make grand pronouncements about Covid-19 – but experience should have taught us to look carefully at the small print. “Freedom Day” on 19 July turned out to be nothing of the kind, with a host of restrictions maintained throughout the summer. Even where restrictions were lifted, as in mandating face coverings, people were told to continue behaving as if they were still in force. There was no effort to push back against freelance enforcers like Transport for London. The public address system at my local Sainsbury’s still cranks out a mantra about making a personal choice to continue wearing masks.

    Yesterday’s announcements are just as deceptive. Obvious provocations are to be removed in the hope of placating the Government’s backbench critics. Vaccine passports will not go ahead this month – but the Government will press organisations to use the NHS Covid Pass, which amounts to the same thing. Large sections of the Coronavirus Act will be dropped – except that comparable powers exist under the Public Health Act 1984 (and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004).

    The UK population will be urged to go on behaving as if restrictions were in force or they might be reintroduced anyway. The discredited use of lateral flow tests for asymptomatic case finding will continue, although the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has called for it to stop in schools and it is unlikely to offer more value elsewhere. Despite the lack of investment in research to establish what works, the same portfolio of non-pharmaceutical interventions will be continued. Don’t expect Sainsbury’s to shut up about masks any time soon despite the lack of evidence of benefit.

    Healthy teenagers will be “offered” vaccination in a context where it is likely to be unrealistic to refuse, given a barrage of official information designed to promote uptake and intensify peer pressure. It is hard to see how any of the normal expectations of informed consent will apply to production line vaccination in schools. Having placed Gillick competence at the centre of this strategy, the Government may, of course, still run into trouble with the courts. The case law on Gillick strongly suggests that judges would expect a degree of personalised assessment of understanding and consent that is not compatible with talk of vaccinating 3 million teenagers within six weeks.

    The core problem here is the Prime Minister’s reluctance to stand up and say “this is as good as it gets”. I have previously mentioned Jonathan Van Tam’s dictum that you should never start a medical or public health intervention without being clear when you are going to stop it. While the Government may have seen off the Zero Covid lobby, it is still behaving as if elimination were the goal.

    Ministers are not publicly acknowledging that Covid-19 is taking its place alongside other endemic respiratory viruses, and is not necessarily the most dangerous or burdensome of them in a largely vaccinated population. The infection fatality ratio, the chance of dying if you get Covid-19, is currently estimated by the MRC Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge to be around 0.26 per cent – and most of this is in the over-75s, where the rate is 3.3 per cent. This is broadly comparable with the rates for influenza and RSV, another common respiratory virus. Both of these represent more of a threat to the very young, as well as having a significant impact on the over-80s. Covid deaths seem to overlap with both so there is little impact on the overall mortality rate in a vaccinated population.

    What this means in practice is that the vaccine roll-out, even before any extension to healthy teenagers, has got us close to the position of November 2019 in terms of the risk of death or hospitalisation faced by any individual member of the public at any age. This is why the test for the winter should be: would we have done this in November 2019 as the other seasonal respiratory viruses worked their way through the population?

    A braver Prime Minister would be declaring that the pandemic is over, as the Danes have done. The vaccination programme has taken the place of early childhood exposure to the virus as the basis of life-long immunity, renewed by periodic mild reinfections until quite late in life when our immune systems begin to decline. This is what happens with other respiratory viruses that we live alongside. There should be no truck with the notion of trying to eliminate respiratory viruses as a class of infections, which is plainly held by some in the scientific world. This is the first step in defusing the all-pervasive fear that has been sustained and amplified over the last 18 months.

    The great German poet, Johann Goethe, wrote of his anxiety that, in the future and motivated by good intentions, the world would become one great hospital with each of us the nurse of the other. This is the last battle of the pandemic: who defines what lives we shall live? Will it be a scientific and medical elite or will it be the processes of democracy? Which side will the Prime Minister take?

    Robert Dingwall is professor of sociology at Nottingham Trent University and a former government adviser

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/15/boris-should-have-declared-pandemic/

    “…a former government adviser.”

    Sacked for being off-message.

        1. Mine was by appointment only; the door was locked and you had to attract their attention to open it, which they only did if you were expected.

  18. Morning again

    Decorous dining

    SIR – As teenagers in the 1920s, my mother and her two sisters attended a small formal dinner (Letters, September 15) given by their parents.

    The main dish was crown of lamb, each rib end of which was topped with a decorative miniature paper chef’s hat. To my grandmother’s astonishment, the wife of the guest of honour ate not just the meat, but the hat as well – so my grandmother glowered at her husband and children until they too ate their paper hats.

    The dinner was a great success.

    Richard Longfield

    Weston Patrick, Hampshire

    SIR – Some 55 years ago my wife and I invited guests round to thank them for their assistance at our wedding. We decided to serve meat fondue (all the rage then) and, as I was a chef, it was left to me to prepare all the sauces to go with the strips of raw fillet steak.

    We assumed everything had gone well until, on leaving, one guest said: “That’s the first dinner party I’ve been to where I had to cook my own food.”

    We haven’t heard from them since.

    Gray Wilson

    Crowle, Worcestershire

    SIR – I remember the moment at one dinner party when a large crash came from the kitchen.

    Not a word was said as the hostess carefully removed the spoon and fork from everyone’s place.

    Stuart Asbury

    Sutton Waldron, Dorset

    1. There was story that at a State dinner the guest of honour did not use his finger bowl until the end of the messy course. Everyone was sniggering when he emptied his bowl by drinking it.
      Seeing what had happened the King also drained his bowl, forcing all those present to do the same.
      Apocryphal, who knows?

      1. A similar story is told about Queen Vic when she was visiting a crofter household. The host drank his tea from a saucer, so QV did the same to save any embarrassment.

    2. Long ago the wife decided she would host a dinner party and would prepare the food at the table.

      Of course, she went for wagu beef with a sushi starter. Now, I can’t eat fish it makes me very ill. Junior doesn’t like it, so we had a ‘just in time’ tagliatelle that I’d sorted before hand.

      I was specifically excluded from assisting – despite being the usual cook and said nothing as all sorts of timers ticked away, as the sauces caught, as onions were chopped while wearing some stupid dress, garlic turned to mush…

      Bless her, she tried, but when the tag was exposed as a ruse and a large pot of it produced (not at all pre-planned), the daft dress binned in favour of a jumper and a large glass of wine in hand the evening ended quite well.

  19. Joe Biden forgets Scott Morrison’s name during historic pact announcement. 16 September.

    Scott Morrison has been called many things, but “that fella down under” may be the one that stays with the Australian prime minister the longest.

    The blunder came as the US president, Joe Biden, announced a trilateral security partnership with Britain and Australia, called Aukus. It will see the US share nuclear technology that will help Australia create a multibillion-dollar fleet of nuclear-powered submarines.

    If you put all this in a book, a Demented POTUS. A corrupt UK Prime Minister. A fake virus emergency. A Cabal intent on Global Domination. It would be laughed off the shelves!

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/16/joe-biden-forgets-scott-morrisons-name-during-historic-pact-announcement

      1. Boris Johnson, Joe Biden and Scott Morrison have formed a security pact. I bet Xi Jinping is shitting himself.

        [Sorry: I meant pissing himself!]

  20. Oh dear.

    COMMENT
    If you’re starting to feel sorry for Shamima Begum, here’s why you shouldn’t

    The ex-IS widow may have apologised, but justice will only be served once she is made to go on trial back here in Britain

    MELANIE MCDONAGH
    15 September 2021 • 8:02pm

    She’s looking good, Shamima Begum, isn’t she? Long, sleek hair, a cool vest and cap; whatever you think an IS widow should look like, she’s the opposite. The presentation of her case is almost as polished as her manicure. “If I have offended anyone by what I did, I am sorry”, she said in her first live TV interview with the BBC this morning. “For those who have even a drop of mercy and compassion and empathy in their hearts, I tell you from the bottom of my heart that I regret every, every decision I’ve made since I stepped into Syria and I will live with it for the rest of my life.

    “No one can hate me more than I hate myself for what I’ve done and all I can say is I’m sorry and just give me a second chance.”

    It’s hard to refuse forgiveness to someone who asks for it – at least it is if you’re any sort of Christian – and it’s hard not to accept an apology when someone says they are sorry, even if the people who can actually grant forgiveness are the victims of IS: the Syrians who lived in the IS hell that was Raqqa or the casualties of horrors like the Manchester bombing or the Bataclan massacre in Paris.

    Perhaps she’s right that she’s a different person now from the 15-year-old who ran off to Syria; in the news stories, she’s forever an “east London schoolgirl”. She says that she’d die now rather than sign up for IS again. Many people are different at the age of 22, which she is now, from their 15-year-old selves. Yes, it’s possible to feel compassion for Begum, mother of three dead children, deprived of British citizenship, remote from her family, desperate to escape the consequences of her actions, apparently remorseful for her sins, to all appearances a different and more sympathetic young woman.

    But then she declares that she is “willing to go to court and face the people who made these claims and refute these claims, because I know I did nothing in IS but be a mother and a wife”. It’s then you wonder if she has learned a part, and learned it well.

    When she was first interviewed as an IS widow in the al-Hawl refugee camp in 2019, she was very different; she hadn’t yet been groomed by unseen advisors about what to say and how to say it. She showed little remorse for joining the extremists. At one point, she even appeared to suggest the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, which left 23 men, women and children dead, was justified.

    And while we do change as we get older, we’re moral agents even in our teens. My daughter is 14, a year younger than Begum when she left for Syria. She knows the difference between right and wrong – in fact, she is, like many 14-year-olds, quite categoric about her judgments, agonisedly woke, terrifically keen on social justice and startlingly alert to developments on social media. You do idiotic, quixotic things when you’re a teenager; but you’re not a child. I asked her whether someone of her age could know what she was doing in joining an organisation like IS; she rolled her eyes: “Are you dumb?” she replied.

    In going to Syria, even the 15-year-old Begum knew she was joining a terrorist group; that was probably what made it attractive. But it’s what she did later, during her years with IS, that should also concern us.

    The rumours about her record in Syria are very different from the portrait she paints now, of a simple wife and mother. There are reports that she worked as one of the morality police for IS, enforcing a Draconian code of dress and behaviour. Claims that she had sewn IS volunteers into suicide belts. All suggesting she was more than merely passively compliant with the project; she was one of the activists.

    Sajid Javid, the former Home Secretary has said that the information in the Government’s possession is such that he wouldn’t dream of allowing her back into the country. “I won’t go into details of the case, but what I will say is that you certainly haven’t seen what I saw,” he said. “If you did know what I knew, because you are sensible, responsible people, you would have made exactly the same decision – of that I have no doubt.” Perhaps we should know more about those details.

    Did you see that devastating docu-drama about IS in Raqqa, The State? If you haven’t, you should. That was an account based on multiple witness accounts of the caliphate which makes clear precisely how morally culpable the foreign volunteers were who joined the project. They made Raqqa a living hell for its inhabitants.

    Young women like Begum wouldn’t have been involved with the decapitations of hostages or the genocide of the Yazidis and the taking of their women and girls as sex slaves, but they could be, and were, cruel enforcers of the IS code in Raqqa. The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is 16 and in fact you can be held responsible for some criminal acts from the age of 12; she was 16 and older when she was active within IS.

    In fact, I think that she should be, as she suggests, brought back to Britain and put on trial. Syria has problems enough of its own without playing host to radicalised foreigners who were, according to many of those who encountered IS, worse than the native Islamists. But it should be a real trial where she faces charges that relate to what she is accused of doing, not just of running away for an adventure. Right now we should be gathering information of a standard that would pass muster in a court from witnesses who were in Raqqa and within IS at a time when Begum was active in the organisation.

    Some will be dead or now dispersed to other countries, but not all. It’s not enough for the Home Secretary to be privy to this information; it should be tested in court. And if she is found guilty of being an accessory to murder, for instance – which is what sewing volunteers into suicide belts is – then she should be punished.

    She is, in fact, a very plausible young woman. She talks now about helping the Prime Minister deal with the radicalisation of “dumb” and impressionable young people like she was. The more frightening possibility is that she is, was, not an aberration – that the disaffection and alienation from the state that she represents was quite shared among a significant minority of radical young Muslims at that time.

    But she is a British problem; she was a product of this country’s schools, its immigration system, its multiculturalism, its willingness to ignore the dangers of religious extremism. She and others like her should come home, not as a victim, but as one accused of being a player in the worst atrocities of our time. Yes, you can feel compassion for her. But let her face justice first.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2021/09/15/starting-feel-sorry-shamima-begum-shouldnt/

    1. The ex-IS widow may have apologised, but justice will only be served once she is made to go on trial back here in Britain.

      I don’t want her coming back here for any reason whatsover!

      1. Minty, you said recently that Russia manages to live in harmony with its muslim population. What’s the secret?

          1. Morning, Araminta.

            If muslims can adapt to the Russian culture; why can’t they adapt to the culture of any other country they infest?

          2. Morning Grizz. Time and history I think is the explanation. The Russians, as Chechnya tells, us will not tolerate dissent!

    2. And when and if she is found guilty, what then? A few years in prison and then on the streets of Britain, even more bitter and twisted and impossible to remove.

        1. Yes, I suppose if we got rid of all MPs who are not Conservative, the country would be in a much better state, at one with itself.

          2. I doubt there would be anyone left; most of the Conservatives in Westminster are anything but Conservative.

      2. Why incarcerate Shamima? The UK is already a virtual prison for those who reject the vaccine orthodoxy.

        1. Why not put her up yourself, I’m sure she’s also a trained sex-slave.
          Just don’t tell her where you keep the knives and keep the wheelie bin locked up.

          1. She would certainly be more amusing as a house guest than Theresa May or Ms Cressida Duck (for example).

          2. Blimey, if I mix bottle and cans the bin men won’t take the stuff away.
            Maybe if I put human heads in the food caddy, the trash would be removed.

      1. The law isn’t big on compassion. She allegedly committed at least one offence on UK soil and should be prosecuted along with anyone who may ahve assisted her.

      1. No, I was commenting on how the Pakistanis and Bengalis had finally reacted against the incessant attacks by robbing gangs of Black youths.

        1. Interestingly, the MSM has avoided publicising the Tower Hamlets assault, just a brief mention in Evening Standard or Metro. Makes one wonder as to the extent of government influence on the press.
          Was the victim a Christian, future football star and a member of his local Community Protection Group?

    7. The problem with this suggestion of returning her to Britain is that once she is here it will be impossible to get rid of her.

      The Home Office has found it near impossible to get rid of any foreign born criminals once they’ve completed their sentence.

      Why would Shamima be any different?

      You also have the thought that someone in a terrorist organisation (probably ISIS) considers it important to invest lots of time and money on

      coaching her to deal effectively with the Press.

      What is ISIS expecting as a return on their investment?

    8. The age of criminal responsibility used to be, sensibly, much lower. In Scotland it is now 12, previously 8. The Catholic Church recognises that children can tell right from wrong at the age of 7. The legal age of criminal responsibility has been reduced across the UK by the same anti-social evil forces that have wrecked our country. Crimes comitted by young people over the age of criminal responsibility, but not yet adults are treated very leniently.
      In this case there is no possible excuse. Of course, our BBC strongly take her side. When the IRA were bombing us it was forbidden to show the terrorists’ faces or broadcast their real voices. Our government should be explain why she is still alive. Given their enthusiasm for bombing places in Syria, I’d have thought that she would have headed the list for violent removal, being a traitor.
      Instead, she is being set up and groomed for rehabilitation, forgiveness, and reintroduction to society, no doubt with lucrative TV appearances and a book deal. How beautiful a viper can be, yet cannot be trusted, and remains ever deadly. How treacherous our government and the people in our national broadcaster.

    9. Interesting that the 14 year old didn’t answer the question. Nor, likely, understands the nuance of peer pressure to do something that is clearly wrong, the need to fit in, to be part of a group, nor that the consequences are vital as punishment for those decisions.

      I doubt the ‘startlingly woke’ teenager understands that most of her peers are ignorant fools who think themselves worldly and wise when really, the wise just want to be left alone. They’ll think that more is good, so giving money to the NHS is a ‘good’ thing, yet don’t understand where it goes, but would happily push more into it – until they start working, of course.

      Children don’t know much of anything. If they did, they wouldn’t be children. Sadly they’re also not taught to think, either. Nor are they taught their ignorance through the debate and discussion of every side of the argument. It is easy to respond with ‘are you dumb’ because that is the child dismissing the question in the surety of their conviction. In reality, you should never be sure because you can never truly know enough to make the right choice. You can only ever do what you believe is right – for others, the right choice may be markedly different.

      There is a comfort in ignorance and arrogance. I envy such – just as I pity it.

      Begum chose to make a life in a desert warzone with the enemies of this country. If only more of the dross would leave.

    10. She may be widowed but she is now married to a dutchman, she can booger of with him when he is let out of jail.

    1. Can’t get it to work. Am assuming it was coming down like cats & dogs etc. Never rains but it paws?

    2. It looks as if you’ve received it via a personal gmail account and the link is to the gmail.

      Even logging in won’t allow it to run for me.

      1. Bugger. That is what it was. It just showed a deluge with muddy water pouring down the road and across a vineyard. As you will know – it is the suddenness with which these “events” arrive.

        1. They certainly appear to be much more intense. Our most recent one arrived and left in a bit over an hour. Judging by the pool level we had the better part of two inches and we’ve had a few heavy ones since.

          2. I have often wondered whether someone with the technical expertise could hack the linked gmail account. I suspect that they could.

          4. Not per se, it asked me to log-in, there was not indication as to the source, in this case presumably BT or the person who sent the link to BT. My security settings then blocked it, showing a temporary error.

  24. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    How the Battle of Britain changed everything
    SIR – Lt Col I R Bercham (Letters, September 15) is right about the crucial role played by sailors in the Battle of the Atlantic, which took place from the first to the last day of the European conflict in the Second World War.

    It is, however, natural that the Battle of Britain is held in such high regard – for it was the first time Hitler’s all-conquering war machine had failed. Unlike the Battle of the Atlantic, this was not just down to the bravery of young men; it was the result of major government investment in aerial defence and very effective forward-planning by the Royal Air Force.

    The training and equipment programmes of the late 1930s enabled the RAF and the Observer Corps to defeat a superior force with a sophisticated secret early-warning system, sufficient high-performance aircraft, and highly trained and motivated young men. Looking through my father’s logbook from the time, I see that he and his colleagues were protecting convoys as well as engaging enemy bomber formations.

    It took the Royal Navy nearly three years to counter the submarine threat in the Atlantic. Had the RAF been as unprepared in 1940, the Battle of the Atlantic would have been much shorter and our lives irretrievably altered. This is why the Battle of Britain remains so important.

    Incidentally, if casualty statistics must be used as a comparator, more bomber than fighter aircrew were lost during the Battle of Britain in their attacks on German invasion preparations – like the sailors in the Atlantic, forgotten heroes all.

    Dr Michael A Fopp
    Soulbury, Buckinghamshire

    Reference to our “secret early warning system” should always include the role of ACM Sir Hugh Dowding, who oversaw the development of Chain Home, the forerunner of today’s RADAR. No wonder his remarkable foresight and determination resulted in his ashes being buried in Westminster Abbey. He may have been known as “Stuffy” but the effect of his achievement is incalculable.

    1. Reference to our “secret early warning system” should always include the role of ACM Sir Hugh Dowding, who oversaw the development of Chain Home, the forerunner of today’s RADAR.

      He was of course sacked for being so smart and showing up all the numpties!

    2. There are many forgotten heroes. He mentions bomber crews; I hope he means those from both Bomber and Coastal Commands, who in total had twice the number of men killed on Battle of Britain targets such as ports, airfields and supporting infrastructure.

      For example, Coastal Command anti-shipping crews had only a 17% – 1 in 6 – chance of surviving a short tour but volunteered and carried on despite the odds. The chance of surviving 2 tours was 3%, experience seemingly of little benefit to survival.

  25. 338906+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,

    Thursday 16 September: Will the country ever be given the chance to learn to live with Covid?

    ” Will the Country ever be given the chance” wrong question / rhetoric.

    When will the peoples of the Country decide to reinstate the Country as was with a “beginning” campaign against what is showing out as a political coup.

    We are to my way of thinking currently touching the forelock in recognition of any passing Mp, many out there would be for also giving the same politico’s a knee job in obedience.

    We are witnessing in no uncertain manner the results of supporting / voting for a faux (ino) coalition, in short an odious, treacherous trio
    in the lab/lib/con mass uncontrolled immigration / paedophile umbrella cartel.

    In a great many cases the peoples ARE getting what they voted for after seeing these party’s past track records, anti decency / patriotism ALL the way.

  26. Tony Benn once said that we should ask the powerful people who govern us the following simple questions: ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? How can we get rid of you?’

    I think this would be Boris’s and most of the Western worlds governments responses to those questions.

    ‘What power have you got? – Infinite under emergency powers.
    Where did you get it from? – From a Parliament that works for globalism
    In whose interests do you exercise it? – Plutocrats, big Corporations, the Chinese, WEF etc
    To whom are you accountable? Those that fund us, see above
    How can we get rid of you?’ – Bloody revolution is all you have left.

    1. 338906+ up ticks,
      Morning B3,
      Revolution by all means but peaceful revolution via the polling booth in regards to the General Election / council
      elections and any opportunity to vote.

      The forces against decency is amounting on a daily basis via DOVER & with what is here already would make for a formidable political overseers protectorate.

      1. Paper revolutions will be of little use, Ogga, until there is a credible, powerful enough alternative party to vote for, rather than meekly marking the ballot with NOTA.

        I fear that the nation’s patience is being sorely tested and, while I’m too old, there will be many who can organise, recruit and mobilise a revolutionary party that will go nowhere near a ballot box but will start locally – council offices, local TV stations, local newspapers and this groundswell will grow and grow, taking down Mosques and Madrassas, before descending upon Whitehall to great bloody effect.

        Be afraid, Boris and your cohort, be very, very afraid.

        1. 338905+ up ticks,
          Afternoon NtN,
          Surely NOT that sorely tested to stop the majority of the electorate following the same voting pattern that openly set us on the road to doom , repeatedly, these last three decades.

          At last count I would have had trust in 3oooo plus members under Batten leadership who were not only
          fighting the political enemas but peoples of the lab/lib/con supporters persuasion also.

          The BIG man once said jaw,jaw, beats war,war, I make him right.

          It is down to the peoples to realise you cannot support & vote for a party then rhetorically condemn them, that has proved to have serious repercussions these past 30 years.

          People want better in the political field, then as a show
          of seriousness tear up party membership cards en masse
          send to 10.

          It is a proven fact, what difference would it make if lab got in ?

          They are a coalition, of the same ilk,one initiated mass uncontrolled immigration / foreign paedophilia, the other continued it ongoing.

          1. There is currently no viable alternative, Ogga and the sooner you realise that, come out from yesterday’s lost hope and see what might be done TODAY!

          2. 338906+ up ticks,
            Evening NtN,
            There are to many peoples NOT prepared to listen & learn from yesterday, you can see those same people about to put their trust in the same treachery merchants again today.

            They just refuse to admit they have been turned
            over … again by the very same peoples / party’s … again.

            You have to BUILD a party to benefit the Country as the coalition lab/lib/con coalition was built to destroy it.

            Why would anyone want to continue to support / vote for political cartels that have caused their kids to be raped & abused, others to be murdered, knifed, etc,etc, and their country to be overrun by foreign aliens , ongoing.

          4. 338923+ up ticks,
            Morning NtN,
            As a long term member I was in Birmingham on the 27/2/2018 at the EGM to vote in Gerard Batten the best leader UKIP ever.

            Batten enhanced the party standing to one of fear among the lab/lib/con coalition & others who realised a very credible party was shaping up.

            The result was to trigger treachery revealing the double dealing of the nEc / nige ALL on record, as seen

            https://youtu.be/Fc7iuUHk3Yk

            He marched them up to the top of the hill then he marched them……

            My post regarding the real UKIP are NOT cries of “come back Shane we love you” but warnings regarding who you trust in the future.

            Did you check out the last Anne Marie Waters post I put up ? many won’t because it could, with peoples construct
            come betwixt them & the family tree vote.

  27. ‘Morning again.

    Gourd old days

    SIR – I thank Dave Alsop (Letters, September 15) for his marrow recipe. It brought back wonderful memories of my Aunty Lily’s Mock Goose. A stuffed marrow, it was sliced lengthways – one half filled with a stuffing of choice and the other with sausage meat.

    It was then baked in the oven.

    Richard Stewart
    Bridlington, East Yorkshire

    Not so long ago we enjoyed a baked marrow at Janus Towers. Still surprisingly good. The trick is in the seasoning.

      1. Plenty of stuffing and sauce to disguise the marrow….might as well serve the filling and sauce without it.

  28. From the DT:

    Penny Mordaunt has announced she is leaving her role as a junior Cabinet Office minister, as Boris Johnson’s Cabinet reshuffle continues.

    Many of the top jobs in government have already changed hands, with Liz Truss appointed as Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab demoted to Justice Secretary and Michael Gove moved from the Cabinet Office to Housing, Communities and Local Government.

    On Thursday morning Ms Mordaunt, a former Defence Secretary, said she was leaving her post in a series of valedictory tweets.

    “Thank you to @cabinetoffice colleagues and partners for the last 20 months and all we achieved. Especially proud of the overhaul of the risk register, 1HMG cyber and the new resilience strategy. We are on track to be the most resilient nation,” she wrote.

    “Good luck to my successor and…look after the cats!”

    Sorry to see her go. The fact that she announced her departure and not Johnson suggests that she’s had enough of the Cabinet Office and/or Johnson?

    2. When the shuffles were announced there were almost as many posts as in a real deck of cards.

      Honestly, you look at that and realise why bugger all gets done. Too many competing egos, too many mouths to feed, all in the name of patronage and guile.

      Sack 70%, just get rid of the posts entirely. Reform the civil service to be lead by that coterie of no more than 8 people. If that leaves a department without a minister – such as DCMS – then destroy the department.

      1. You only need to see the number of faces around the table at a cabinet meeting to know that the whole thing is out of kilter. With 650 MPs and 800+ Peers the result is that we are grossly over-represented.

        Turkeys…Christmas etc.

        1. Then we have county, metropolitan district, borough, town, parish ….
          Throw in myriad quangos, health boards, development councils etc.. and soon we’ll be talking about real over-governance.

          4. The Shortbread Senate is a fine example of that. Under Foghorn Dreghorn, ministerial positions have grown from 16 up to 27 (or around 20% of MSPs as our meeja might point out if they weren’t so cowed). The last two ministerial positions created in the past fortnight to encompass the job-sharing Green Party MSPs, thus quelling any opposition.
            Effectively, it’s using taxpayer funding to maintain power for her own schemes and avoiding any awkward questions as the Nationalists ‘transform’ from an oil-based argument for an Neverendum to a ‘greener’ approach to the same head-banging nonsense. All the while keeping the auditors at arms length.
            The Republic of Nippystan rolls on, with the ongoing failures in education, health, policing, local councils…and the costs continuing to grow.

            STOP PRESS: apparently the Great Nictator is considering calling in HM Forces to deal with the NHSS ambulance crisis!

      3. In industry, the rule was that a Manager only had six subordinates, less means too much responsibility on one pair of shoulders, more means in-fighting and Empire Building to sustain one’s position.

    3. I have long regarded Penny Mordaunt as the best talent Parliament has, and should have been promoted long ago into a senior position to get some decent experience at top level. Why has she jumped ship? Does she judge that a job in Westminster is not worth the candle?

  29. Good morning all

    What do you think of this delicious concoction of words?

    “Exit the schemer. Gavin Williamson was the gormless- looking minister whose boyish smirk and Frank Spencer voice has always belied a more shadowy nature.

    Regarded as distinctly untrustworthy by both colleagues and opponents, he glides through the corridors of the Palace of Westminster the way a python slithers around the jungles of Borneo.

    Following the exams fiasco – and a supine capitulation to unions over reopening schools after lockdown – the 45-year-old’s sacking as Education Secretary yesterday was, on the face of it, inevitable. Yet it’s been said that successive PMs have been too scared of ruffling Gav’s tousled curls.

    After all, here is a man who never tires of reminding colleagues that he ‘knows where the bodies were buried’. To quote Lyndon Johnson – who said it of J Edgar Hoover – Boris thought it better to have Williamson ‘p***ing out of the tent than p***ing in’. Until now.

    For such a calculating figure, one might have thought that Gavin enjoyed one of those mysteriously vague careers with impressive credentials. In fact, prior to becoming MP for Staffordshire in 2010, he was manager of fireplace firm Elgin & Hall.

    His subsequent rise up Parliament’s slippery pole has fascinated colleagues, who marvelled at his ability to switch allegiances speedier than slurry off a shovel.

    He once vowed Johnson would never get the top job as long as Gav was around – yet wily Williamson ended up running his leadership campaign.

    Under Theresa May he ran the whips’ office, where colleagues likened him to Francis Urquhart in Michael Dobbs’s political satire House Of Cards. Dobbs even gave him a copy of his book with the inscription: ‘This is a work of fiction, not instruction.’ Despite not knowing a cruiser from a carrier, he was promoted to Defence Secretary. He set moustaches twitching after the Salisbury poisonings by telling the Russians to ‘go away and shut up’.

    Those loose lips are said to have got him sacked during the Huawei hoo-haa over Britain’s 5G network – although he denied being the source of a leak about the deal.

    He didn’t lurk on the sidelines for long, as Boris soon rewarded him with the education brief.

    Yet rather than any political legacy, it is Gavin’s taste in pets that seem most likely to live long in the memory. Always desperate to portray himself as a Cabinet enforcer, he kept a tarantula on his desk called Cronus – after the Greek god who devoured his own children.

    Sadly, Gav’s eight-legged friend departed for that great cobweb in the sky some time ago. After yesterday, it appears his master’s career is dead too.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9995243/HENRY-DEEDES-bids-welcome-goodbye-Education-Secretary-Gavin-Williamson.html

    1. Morning Belle. That he was ever a Minister tells you more about the Government of the UK than a million words!

      1. The Peter Principle is running amok in British (and world) politics these days!

        I can’t think of a single politician … anywhere … that has not been promoted to the level of his/her incompetence.

        1. We are living in a decadent and dying polity at the end of what was a great civilisation. Competence would be an anomaly!

    2. ‘Morning Belle. I think we Nottlrs know 5-star gold-plated incompetence when we see it. Just a pity that it took the PM so long to do so.

  30. More from the DT…why am I smiling?

    Whoops! We didn’t meant to upset the French, says Wallace

    The Defence Secretary has said the Government has “no intention of doing anything to antagonise the French” after its new submarine contract with Australia sparked anger from Paris.

    Mr Wallace said it had been a decision for Australia to replace their submarines from diesel/electric models to nuclear.

    Last night France said it regretted a new security partnership between the UK, US and Australia, and accused the countries of a “lack of coherence”.

    “[The decision to] push aside a European ally and partner like France from a structural partnership with Australia at a time we are facing unprecedented challenges in the Indo-Pacific region … shows a lack of coherence that France can only acknowledge and regret,” said one French minister.

    France had been expected to produce new diesel submarines for Australia at a cost of $35bn, but that deal has been cancelled.

    Mr Wallace said the decision to change submarines was for Australia.

    “We have no intention of doing anything to antagonise the French, he said.

    “The French are some of our closest military allies in Europe. We are sizeable and comparable forces, and we do things together in West Africa.

    “We are all together – we are providing Chinook squadrons to help them in their counter-terrorism fight, I get on extremely well with my French counterpart.

    “Only recently myself and the foreign secretary, went to visit them in Paris, and we will continue to work where we have common interests, both in the Pacific and here at home.”

    3. The French are not an ally. They’re cowardly, snivelling two faced worms who are happy to stab you in the back but don’t believe they warrant the same attitude.

          1. I believe the £54 million was in addition – in addition to what? Just how much is the taxpayer paying to French politicians, who not only provide no service in return, but actively forbid their military and coastal defence forces from stopping the traffic in illegal immigration. The Royal Navy should be mining the French coast and turning back the RNLI ‘Laffboats’ who are ferrying them to the benefits offices and 5 Star hotels.

    4. What’s with this woke usage of ‘myself’ surely it should have been ‘the Foreign Secretary and I….’

      1. I used to enjoy openly reading that on the Metro, when I lived in Paris and worked in La Defense.

    6. That’s good, coming from a country that kicked NATO out of Paris and insisted on going it alone.

      That was a great success, culminating in the white flag factories working overtime.

      1. 1 French rifle for sale. Only dropped once.

        Which is unfair on those partisans who gave their lives fighting the Germans.

        The bit my primitive brain doesn’t get, is having defeated an enemy intent on destroying our way of life, the governments of Europe (and I specifically include Germany here) are so intent on importing a different invading and even more destructive force.

        1. I wonder how much the fear of another Verdun influenced the French collapse in 1940?
          Rather substantially I would think.

        2. …and what do the cheese-eating surrender monkeys do?

          Rather than tackling a home-grown problem – push ’em off to Les Anglais, who we hate anyway, because we are so indebted to them for liberating us and our 147% Maquis partisans.

          Bah!

      1. These things come out of nowhere. The water in the snap is actually an instant “river” flowing from right to left across the vineyard

    4. That’s dreadful Bill.
      The French are obviously not paying enough in Green Tax otherwise, as we all know, that could have been averted.
      Can’t see too many XR followers sitting down in protest. 😀

    5. That’s dreadful Bill.
      The French are obviously not paying enough in Green Tax otherwise, as we all know, that could have been averted.
      Can’t see too many XR followers sitting down in protest. 😀

      1. These things happen two or three times a year – every year. Every ten years or so, there are “extreme” events. 1999 they had 3 feet of rain in 48 hours. The flooding lasted for eight weeks. 2018 we had a foot in a few hours. By a miracle the walls along the “stream” – normally a trickle – held. The water was 15 feet deep – six inches below the parapet. At the time it is very alarming, not least the noise of the rain on the roof.

        Further hydrological information is available…..! And photographs….

        3. Any idea what is going on in the Francis Danby picture, starting at 2’17”? Looks a bit like someone levitating!

  34. Lemon Kurd rises to the top!

    Nadhim Zahawi, founder of YouGov and multi-million pound property owner, ex chief strategy officer for Gulf Keystone Petroleum, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for COVID-19 Vaccine Deployment and close ‘friend’ of Carryon Johnson, has been promoted to Secretary of State for Education. Came to England as a refugee aged 7, without a word of English, now controls the education of ten million pupils. What a remarkable rise to prosperity and importance. I wonder how he managed that. Couldn’t possible be the prospect of someone else’s monetary advancement via russet coloured message carriers, could it?

    https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/09/16/08/47989947-9995359-image-a-12_1631778400285.jpg

        1. I seem to remember he tried to claim the heating costs for his stables. Can’t his horses just put on another jersey?

    3. She has very peculiar taste in men!

      What is worse – for a man to wear a toupée or to shave his head completely and put polish on his pate so it shines?

      Carrie clearly has a penchant for the two Middle Easterners in her husband’s cabinet (Squalid Jawdrip and Nadhim Zahawi) who have taken the second option because they can come off the substitutes’ bench when her current, temporary thatch-headed paramour is off foraging elsewhere.

  35. Morning all an article about the deckchairs being arranged on the UK Titanic, I can feel the water starting to lap around my chest.
    The last sentence in the article proves without any doubt that the names may change, the agenda remains the same!
    BTW Oliver, you can tell the buffoon he can call an election in 2 or 20 months, you will not be getting my support at any time, I would prefer to vote for a conservative minded political party, and that is sure as hell not you or your mates!!

    Exclusive: Get ready for a general election, says Oliver Dowden

    By Christopher Hope, Chief Political Correspondent and Tony Diver, Political Correspondent

    New Conservative chairman tells party staff that the fight for votes starts now, with a poll as little as 20 months away
    Conservative party staff were told by Oliver Dowden, the new co-chairman, on Wednesday night to start preparing for a general election which could be in as little as 20 months’ time.
    Oliver Dowden, who was moved from Culture Secretary in the reshuffle, walked into Tory HQ on Matthew Parker Street in Westminster shortly after leaving Downing Street, and addressed party staff.
    “You can’t fatten a pig on market day,” he said, days after MPs started debating a law to scrap a requirement to hold elections every five years. “It’s time to go to our offices and prepare for the next election.”
    And in a nod to his humble background as the son of a retail worker, he told staff: “I feel like the kid that was stacking the shelves and now has the privilege of running the shop.”
    Mr Dowden’s priority will be to ensure that the party’s election organisation is ready for the expected general election that must be held before the end of 2024.
    The working assumption inside Number 10 is that Boris Johnson will go to the country in May or June 2024. However, The Telegraph understands he is also eyeing up a year earlier – May or June 2023.
    This may explain why Mr Dowden, whose experience in the party stretches back to the Conservative research department (CRD) nearly two decades ago, has been appointed, given his knowledge of the party’s structure.
    Mr Dowden, whose official government role is a Cabinet Office minister, and who will work closely with his co-chairman Ben Elliot, was largely unknown before he was given the plum role of Culture, Media and Sport Secretary in February last year.
    However, since then, he has won plaudits for the way he negotiated a £1.6 billion bailout for the culture sector at the height of the Covid-19 crisis.
    Mr Dowden protected Mr Johnson from the fallout over football’s failed European super league by “playing a blinder”, according to friends.
    Mr Dowden also delighted the party’s base by taking the fight to the heritage sector in the so-called “culture wars”, criticising the National Trust’s controversial report that linked its properties with slavery.
    One ally said: “People see him as a dull ‘back room boy’ when actually he is quite fun. He is able to keep a healthy sense of perspective.”
    He grew up in Bricket Wood, Herts and went to Parmiter’s School, a state secondary school, near Watford, before reading Law at the University of Cambridge. After teaching English in Japan, he dabbled briefly in lobbying before becoming head of the political section in the CRD in 2004.
    Mr Dowden picked up the nickname “Olive” at the CRD – after a misspelt sign-off on an email – which he carried with good humour into Downing Street when David Cameron was prime minister.
    Boris Johnson and Oliver Dowden try out the Caper App at the London Tech Week Showcase
    Boris Johnson and Oliver Dowden try out the Caper App at the London Tech Week Showcase Credit: Andrew Parsons
    Mr Dowden – who still commutes to work in London from his family home near St Albans – entered Parliament as MP for Hertsmere in 2015, defeating Rishi Sunak, now Chancellor, in the selection process.
    In the 2016 EU Referendum he was a Remainer, but in the immediate aftermath he supported Mr Johnson for leadership, which infuriated Theresa May’s team.
    In the summer of 2019, Mr Dowden, Mr Sunak and Robert Jenrick interviewed Mr Johnson for an hour at Mr Jenrick’s house, after which they put their names to a joint article supporting him to be Tory leader.
    Mr Dowden, 43, still advises Mr Johnson on debate lines ahead of Prime Minister’s Questions every Wednesday, as he did for the three previous Tory leaders: Mrs May, Mr Cameron and Lord Howard of Lymphne. He is married with two children.
    In a message on Twitter on Wednesday night, Mr Dowden said he was looking forward to meeting activists at the party conference in Manchester in a fortnight’s time, adding: “I can’t wait to support the Conservative family to level up the country and build back better.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/09/15/exclusive-get-ready-general-election-says-oliver-dowden/

  36. It’s good to be back – my wife and I have have just walked the Coast-to-Coast from Tynemouth to Bowness on Solway along Hadrian’s Wall. What’s been happening in my absence?

      3. Jings! That was the first thing that came to mind. Good thing your comment was not further down.

      1. Great time and great weather – it only rained once for an hour while we were in the pub having lunch.

        1. Good that the weather was nice. That part of the world can be hell when its miserable weather. Did you take photo’s?

          1. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a3f35ee45ae83a5bdcc7acb1062353d31ecd99369ab7e62aa055ff6e88dcd764.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/165c03767a52131bb18e71584919f127aeaaf047fb5769bf3c535b029774ebe9.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4fc38384d77d55521099080ebb051a7f78fa32bb7dd237af2bc07d995d4e021a.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4da91280f6ef95635bd9432df9c1950fd5cbe2c5e45eb37d5c0495e9d32543e0.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/21870a525e17520e6f2580ebbf7ae388149bbe504d01a9688f02c0c773cf1d4f.jpg

          2. Thanks for photo’s Sean. It looks wonderful and gloriously empty of people. Must be so peaceful to walk along there. Not even sheep?

            I really have to learn how to transfer photos to computer and how to upload them so others can see.

          3. More cattle and horses than sheep. The trail was fairly busy especially over the weekend when the day trippers come out, particularly near Once Brewed.

        2. Hoe long did it take? Are there hostelries where one can stay overnight? If you parked your car at one end did you have to walk back to get it?

          1. We decided to do it over ten days in order to give us time to stop and smell the flowers, metaphorically speaking. The distance is ostensibly 90 miles but Strava tells is it was over 120 miles after factoring in detours of the path for overnight stops. We found it was cheaper to fly to Newcastle from So’ton than drive and park, or to rail it. Then, at the other end, we hired a car in Carlisle to get home. Ironically the satnav told us the quickest route home was via Newcastle and the A1, not the M6!

          4. We weren’t mercifully though had we been, I’d have got in a couple of swift kicks before the police would have dragged me off.

          6. No – rather thinking of South Downs Way (close to home) or the Spey Trail (lots of distilleries).

    4. Treason on the part of the Joint Chief of staff of the USA. China miffed because the USA,UK and Australia have formed an alliance in which Australia gets nuclear submarines. French throwing a paddy because there useless Subs have been cancelled and China is throwing a strop. The usual stuff. Armageddon is booked for next Thursday week.

    5. Treason on the part of the Joint Chief of staff of the USA. China miffed because the USA,UK and Australia have formed an alliance in which Australia gets nuclear submarines. French throwing a paddy because there useless Subs have been cancelled and China is throwing a strop. The usual stuff. Armageddon is booked for next Thursday week.

    7. I have taken a leave of absence for about a month and has just returned to the front. In my absence Johnson has cancelled HS2 and saved about £200bn, toughened up in the Channel and is turning boats back to France, decided against jabs for children and any form of restrictions, announced plans to reopen coal & gas power stations and abandoned net zero in all forms.

      JUST KIDDING, I am planning to become a fiction writer and thought I would get some practice in. 😏

    8. Good day to you.

      You have missed nothing – except that the end of civilisation is a great deal nearer. You were wise to get out and about. I envy you your closeness to Hadrian (though he was a slightly dodgy chap). Oh, I do hope you and your OH wore your masks at ALL times and kept six feet apart…{:¬))

      1. Of course we did, Bill! Do you take us for a pair of anarchy-loving right-wing extremists who are calling for the downfall of the BBC and our beloved leader and his all-knowing empress?

    10. Great stuff, Sean and Mrs. Sean! As a Geordie exile, I envy you and have fond memories of Youth Hostelling along the Wall sometime in the early ’70’s! I also fell into Crag Lough retrieving a block of butter…don’t ask!

  37. Good morning, everyone. I have been watching the Space-X Dragon launch. Elon Musk certainly has bragging rights over Branson.

      1. A chum complained that trickle down economics wasn’t happening. I pointed at space X.

        He still refused to believe that Besoz not having this much wealth would be a good thing.

        Personally I don’t care, but the money he’s made has – indisputably – created jobs.

      2. The difference between the men and the boys
        Is the size and cost of their silly little toys egos.

  38. Good Moaning.
    Or, at least not a bad one. If the Beeb weather forecast proves to be wrong and I end with a line of soggy sheets and pillow cases, I will personally, in person, scorch up to the Great Wen, burn down Beeboid buildings and sow the sites with salt.

      1. I put some on overnight to catch the sun’s rays. I do not appreciate my great plans being frustrated.

    2. “scorch up to the Great Wen, burn down Beeboid buildings and sow the sites with salt.”

      Do it anyway!

      1. OK. After Spartie has had his check-up at the vet.
        (Nothing wrong, just to check that his Apoquel is working: it is.)

    3. A sunny day in West Sussex Anne. Today someone is going to start building a lean to greenhouse to cover my bedroom windows so I can look out onto glorious flowers in the winter. First order of business when it is done, hyacinths. Also Disa orchids, which I grew and flower winter/spring and are almost hardy.
      Disa’s
      https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-k0Az-7f_uPg/XOOAOUfsBDI/AAAAAAAADUg/d3OAQgaDMgc-IXB-aNkK-tdVzFkC9iXyQCLcBGAs/s1600/6038331816_2dc949a241_b.jpg

      1. What a lovely cheering picture.
        The sun is also shining on my linen line. The drawback is that I now have no excuse to expunge the Beeb. Well, not for its weather forecasts.

  39. Question Time

    Boris Johnson goes to Washington for a meeting with Joe Biden. After dinner, Biden says to Johnson, “Well Boris, I don’t know what you think of the members of your Cabinet, but mine are all bright and brilliant.”

    “How do you know?” asks Johnson.

    “Oh well, it’s simple” says Biden; “They all have to take special tests before they can be a minister. Wait a second.”

    He calls Nancy Pelosi over and says to her, “Tell me Nancy, who is the child of your father and of your mother, who is not your brother and is not your sister?”

    “Ah, that’s simple Mr. President,” says Nancy, “it is me!”

    “Well done Nancy” says Biden and Boris is very impressed.

    Boris returns to London and wonders about the intelligence of the members of his Cabinet. He calls in Michael Gove and says,

    “Michael, tell me, who is the child of your father and of your mother, who is not your brother and is not your sister?”

    Gove thinks and thinks… but does not know the answer. “Can I think about it a bit further Boris? May I let you know tomorrow?”

    “Of course,” says Boris, “you’ve got 24 hours.”

    Gove goes away, thinks as hard as he can, calls in his team but no one knows the answer. Twenty hours later, he is very worried, still no answer and only four hours to go. Eventually he gets an idea, “I’ll ask Riki Sunack, he’s clever, he’ll know the answer.”

    He calls Sunak. “Riki” he says, “tell me, who is the child of your father and of your mother, who is not your brother and is not your sister?”

    “Very simple,” says Sunak, “it’s me!” “Of course” says Gove and calls Johnson. “Boris” says Gove, “I have the answer, it’s Riki Sunak”.

    “No you idiot” says Boris, “it’s Nancy Pelosi!!!!!!”

        1. No, they named him Rishi because it sounds a bit like Rich-y, but his pals call him Rikki, as in Rikki Tikki Tavi, the brave little mongoose who befriended a British family.

          2. More land-based, his surname is a homophone for the word for ‘dog’ in sanskrit: शुनक zunaka.
            Married to a Brahmin lady, he may qualify as a Brahmin, but am not 100% certain.

        1. A nitpicker’s nitpicker sez, Gove might know the answer to the question but still not know who he is. But… “the baby that had arrived into the world as Graeme Andrew Logan is now named Michael Andrew Gove”.

  40. What the BBC really means by ‘diversity’. Spiked 16 September 2021.

    The BBC has pledged these vast sums of money despite the fact that there is no evidence the BBC is lacking in diversity. Data from the latest Creative Diversity Network survey show that 26.5 per cent of on-screen contributions on programmes broadcast by the BBC are made by ethnic minorities. This is drastically higher than the proportion of ethnic minorities in the country at large (14 per cent). The BBC is also more ethnically diverse than any of the four other terrestrial broadcasters, according to the survey.

    How I hate this organisation and everything it stands for! That it uses my money to spread its message makes it even worse!

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/16/what-the-bbc-really-means-by-diversity/

    1. Did you see Rod Liddle on GB News last night? He always has a cigarette in one hand and a glass of something in the other.
      Rod thinks that any job with diversity in its title or job description should be abolished.

      1. If he wants to smoke, fair enough, but it is a disgusting habit. On the diversity nonsense – he’s right. It is simply divisive. Like all these Left constructs, we were making such progress then the progressives wanted to profit from it and drove the two apart.

          1. I used to renew my licence at the Post Office and then decided to do it online to save my legs. I logged onto the BBC website and filled in the form to renew it. It all seemed simple and straightforward. I subsequently found that I had signed up to something like a Direct Debit but it was one from which I could not withdraw. Before you ask, I consulted my bank and they told me I was in and there was no getting out!

          2. Hmmm. That’s a new one on me, haven’t any suggestion about that. There has to be a way out of it. Anyone have an idea?

          5. A few months back, I and my fellow POAer, went to the bank and cancelled a whole lot of appliance insurance DDs that elderly chum had signed up to.
            (She must have bought her fridge, telly and washing machine several times over.)
            We indicated on the statement which ones we wished to stop, and it was done by the bank chap as we spoke.

          7. BT might be able to confirm or deny, but I would have thought that that was an unfair term and condition and should be null and void.

    3. Rod Liddle
      In defence of Jess Brammar
      From magazine issue: 18 September 2021

      Inoticed with interest that Gigalum island — off the Kintyre peninsula in Argyll — was up for sale for half a million quid or so. Nineteen rather barren acres, slightly warmed by the Gulf Stream. These little parcels of desolation quite often become available for purchase and I do wonder if Gigalum should be purchased by the state for the dumping of toxic waste. Gruinard island, further north, was used by the government during the second world war as a site for testing militarised anthrax, for example.

      My proposal for Gigalum is that it should be a repository for everyone in the country with the word ‘diversity’ anywhere in their job title. The taxpayer would provide tents and low-quality food and the new inhabitants would be invited to employ their professional skills on the many colonies of seabirds which abound. Boat trips could be arranged so that normal people could view, through binoculars, the likes of June Sarpong lecturing a gannet about its inherent privilege, as a bird born with white feathers.

      Some people may be offended by my use of the term ‘toxic waste’ for these people, but I mean it quite literally. This newish and fecund industry is, to my mind, wholly toxic, sowing division between people who would otherwise happily get along and treating certain sectors of our ethnic minorities as if they were needy children. And ‘waste’? Boy, oh boy. The money we would save by just housing and feeding these people instead of actually employing them in their chosen roles of making the world a slightly worse place. Various NHS trusts have been advertising for diversity co-ordinators recently, at up to £70,000 a pop. Yes, that’s the perpetually cash-strapped NHS, spending millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on these asinine appointments. The aforementioned Ms Sarpong trousers £267k per year in her important work — three days a week — to make the BBC even more race-obsessed and cringing than it is at the moment. So off to Gigalum with them. And if they don’t like it, they could transfer, free of charge, to Gruinard. It’s probably fairly safe now (and this might be a useful way of finding out for sure).

      I assume that Ms Sarpong was somewhere behind the quiz recently given out to BBC employees in order that they might understand the very real nature of their hideous white privilege. This thing, ‘The Ally Track’, takes the form of a race in which each ‘player’ is asked whether they are white, male and can express their ‘sexuality in the workplace’. White, straight blokes would find themselves winning the race easily, you see. Except that is not the reality, is it? The BBC regularly advertises posts open to ethnic minorities only, for a start, so no honky’s going to win those particular races. Further, a survey by the Creative Diversity Network (off to Gigalum with you lot) showed that ethnic minorities and homosexuals were significantly over–represented in BBC productions. So, in other words, Ms Sarpong is perpetuating a downright falsehood.

      If you are a black, transgender amputee you would, in the modern BBC, win the Ally race by a furlong. Nor did this absurd confection pick up on any of the other stuff which enables people to progress swiftly within the corporation. It did not ask: ‘Are you a public-school-educated middle-class tosser with a social science degree?’ Nor: ‘Do you subscribe to a catalogue of inane left-liberal shibboleths which defy rationality?’ Nor ‘Do you think Israel is evil?’ Nor ‘Brexit’s just ghastly, isn’t it?’

      I wonder how Jess Brammar would have coped with the Ally test? Jess is about to become executive news editor for the BBC. Her appointment has caused controversy and provoked Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC board, to reportedly text Fran Unsworth, the sadly departing head of news, objecting to the appointment on political grounds. This is because Ms Brammar is exactly the sort of person who would win my version of the Ally race. Subscribes to a catalogue of inane left-liberal shibboleths which defy rationality? You betcha. A former boss of the appalling, left-wing, HuffPost UK and a former deputy editor of Newsnight, she has become famous for a series of idiotic tweets — hundreds of them, now hastily deleted — in which she pours scorn on the Conservative government and Boris Johnson in particular and of course disses Brexit. Oh, and she is ‘in a relationship’ with a Guardian journalist, according to that font of inaccuracy, Wikipedia. In other words, she ticks all the right boxes. As a consequence it is not just Robbie Gibb who is getting hot under the collar: the right, in general, is outraged.

      Well, here’s the thing. I think the right should calm down a little, take a chill pill or whatever the popular term is. There is no rectitude whatsoever in barring someone from a position of employment on account of their political views. In a democracy such as ours, for that to happen is an outrage. It was an outrage, for example, when the late philosopher Roger Scruton was kicked off a government commission on housing because of his political views (as misrepresented by a juvenile oaf). It was an outrage when a similar fate befell the excellent Toby Young. It is an outrage that almost no social conservatives are allowed into positions of power because they are immediately howled down by the dogmatic, totalitarian left.

      But that is what the liberal left does, and it is immoral and sickening. And we do not do it, for that very reason. Jess Brammar’s political beliefs should not prevent her from becoming a BBC news executive. The real problem, of course, is that almost everyone in the BBC thinks exactly the same as her. That’s the real issue with which Director-General Tim Davie must wrestle: Brammar is the least of it.

      http://www.spectator.co.uk/article/in-defence-of-jess-bar

      3. Robin Aitken has written about Brammar for today’s DT, suggesting that her appointment is an act of such contempt that it will be counter-productive and harm the BBC.

      4. “My proposal for Gigalum is that it should be a repository for everyone in the country with the word ‘diversity’ anywhere in their job title.”

        What’s wrong with central London? HIghgate Cemetery, alongside Karl Marx, is much more suitable.

        1. Save the island for a concentration camp to house the illegals, pending their deportation without any legal representation.

          2. Who cares? I don’t – I’m not interested in their comfort.

            Sorry to appear harsh but, as has oft been said, “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

          3. They didn’t have to have much room, just enough to squeeze everybody on it (and then leave them there).

    4. Over three years ago, I was sent my new tv licence and, realising that I hadn’t actually viewed livestream tv since the previous year, I cancelled my DD.
      There followed a short flurry of correspondence, ending in them sending me a ‘Notification of No Licence Necessary’. This ‘document’ had a two year limit on it, arbitrarily set by the bBC.
      Thus in March I began receiving letters of an increasingly terse nature from the bBC in their best cod-legal terminology. All of which I have ignored as I am not a customer and the bBC sales database is not a Census.

    1. Long story but about 15 years ago I helped to guide an artic driver from a yard where he was completely stuck, to his destination a few miles away. Not only was he African with english as a second lanuguage, and recently qualified as class 1 HGV, but there was no satnav and the local town bigwigs had in their infinite wisdom replaced several key roundabouts with traffic light junctions, so almost nowhere available for him to change direction. And it was night time.

    2. The British Council’s income in 2014–15 was £973 million. It is sure to be much more now – a total income of £1.25 billion 2018/19. It supports the Palestine Festival of Literature, also known as PalFest. PalFest’s website states that they endorse the “Palestinian call for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel”. The British Council has been running a teacher training programme in North Korea since 2001. In July 2014 the British Council signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

      Who’s side are they on?

        1. As anybody can become “British” these days, Johnny, I would limit that to they hate the indigenous.

  47. https://twitter.com/True_Belle/status/1438465667796246533

    Villagers have reacted with horror at proposals to flood a ‘huge area of good farming land’ in Oxfordshire to make a reservoir to serve London with drinking water.

    Water companies in England are planning to build three major new reservoirs with a total capacity of 100,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools as well as using canals to transfer supplies in response to climate change.

    The biggest of the three reservoirs is set to be located in Oxfordshire, south of Abingdon, which would serve London and the Midlands – while two other smaller sites will be in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire.

      1. Because it’s cheap NTN. And of course low lying.
        The carbon foot print of farm land take away the recent and other work that may had been carried out for centuries is very low. But build on it and the CP goes off the scale. But Boros never mentions that in his climate change rants.
        Everything that has happened in this country since Blair became PM has and will have a long lasting and disastrous effect, i’m not just blaming Blair, I blame all of the idiots since those ‘bastards’ kicked out Thatcher.

      3. It is the destruction of our arable farmland that they want. It will play its part in the civil unrest that is coming towards us from down the line.

    2. What a terrible price we are all paying in the country to house illegal migrants and others who in reality simply can not be bothered to even try and put ‘their own houses’ as in their own countries in order.
      The huge sacrifices our parents and grand parents made were all in vain and have become pointless due to our political elite wrecking our once safe well ordered and cultured nation. They should be lined up and disposed of.

      1. Don’t worry. By the time you get old enough to need care in old age the state actively tries to steal your home because heaven forfend it should properly plan and budget using the money you have already paid.

      1. Yes, if someone blows a hole in the side. This will be a bunded reservoir, not a hole in the ground filled with water.

    5. Oh bloody hell!

      We NEED reservoirs. For th first time in decades we can build them. While chained to the EU we weren’t allowed to.

      Reservoirs are a GOOD THING. They encourage all sorts of wildlife, provide a place to store water to prevent hosepipe bans and prevent flooding.

      Please, please build more blasted reservoirs. Hopefully dozens more.

    1. Instead of fronting up to his problems this moron is living in fear of every knock on the door!

      1. To be fair, having lived in the USA. I would avoid like the plague too. Attorneys and others attached to the legal system are political appointees or looking to be elected to one thing or another. This particular case will be used and abused for political grandstanding and self aggrandisement by people not dissimilar to Kamala Harris, also an attorney who had ambitions. It is a corrupt system without any scruples. I would not be in the least bit surprised to find out that the prince is entirely innocent and that they know it already. Interesting that they wont let Ghislaine Maxwell testify on his behalf. I would say that is because she is the only one that would know the truth of the matter.

        1. It’s astonishing to think that in two months’ time it will be 30 years since Cap’n Bob Maxwell popped his clogs.

          The same month and year that that Farrokh Bulsara died too.

          1. I suddenly feel old. Is it 37 years since I saw him perform at Sun City in Bophuthatswana?

          2. I’m designing a card for friends’ Golden Wedding.
            Among my 1970’s researches, I discovered that Scooby Doo first appeared in 1969.
            I’ll get me Zimmer frame.

        2. Agreed. Very often it matters not if one is innocent or guilty, being dragged through the system is the punishment.

      2. When one has to rely upon the impartiality of elected judges and sheriffs, one asks is the US justice system fit for purpose?

      1. You were born with hands for that purpose, woman! Why spend money on that cheap plastic crap when you can do the same job with an upturned glass and a piece of card. Do not kill spiders, just put them outside.

        1. Oh Grizz, you just don’t know me .

          I am not spider phobic .. I leave them alone or put them outside .. /

          I was in Lidl or the other one , and if you saw me laughing behind my mask at such a daft idea as a spider catcher ou would have laughed as well ..

          Moh just took the pic .. and there it is .xx

    2. While I have an abundance of various spiders in the house, I can honestly say I have not seen a single mosquito or wasp so far this year, despite having windows open 24/7.

    1. I’m pro-vaccination for all but the youngest, IMO vaccination helping ward off Covid and reducing the risk of side effects such as blood clots and heart problems that Covid produces. However, I was sceptical until I saw the data from trials and early adopters. The prospect of a safe booster looks to be taken for granted is being pushed out of complacency and political pressure; until I see proper trials I will not be taking one.

      2. I just trust my prescient thoughts that say, “Wait for the long-term results.”

        My dickey heart agrees.

    2. I’m trusting my instinct in not trusting Government nor the ‘Science is Settled’ brigade.
      I trusted them once with statins that nearly destroyed my kidneys. The Neurologist I saw said I should never have been prescribed them and doctors should prescribe for the individual patient and not by government diktat. Wise words, IMO, that I follow.

  53. Where’s Philip?

    Time to make some beef stock (broth). 7 lbs beef bones [11 marrow bone pieces and a whole oxtail]; 5 carrots; 2 onions; 1 head of garlic; 2 leeks; 4 sticks of celery; 3 Tbsp black peppercorns; 2 Tbsp cider vinegar; 8·4 pints water. This will make 5·6 pints of beef stock. No added chemicals or crap. I’ll season it when reduced.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/45b469d2c02eebb00f676f6747105fb074e9adef548e2b61f40f0b2eb482e8b9.jpg

    3. Looks great , but you appear to have gone native with the garlic, I would use 2 cloves, but than I am from Lancashire where you can be locked away for using garlic.

      2. Coop in Simrishamn (10 miles east of here) always has a stock of marrow bones and oxtail, Spikey. Lamb is not a popular meat here but I’ve found a source at a sheep farm where they butcher their own.

  54. For those interested in some light reading on Covid, https://www.covid-arg.com/post/australia-catches-a-third-wave links to the Institute Of Actuaries Covid Group’s latest bulletin, here considering Australia, with some information appropriate to the U.K.

    Australia’s ‘cases’ are relatively low and distinct, allowing analysis that would be impossible in most of the U.K. How people caught and passed on Covid appears to have little consistency, some not catching Covid despite being in close contact for some time yet others catching it from only the briefest of interactions. The risk of close gatherings is illustrated by one person with Covid’s attending a birthday party where 27 of 40 then caught Covid.

    I find interesting, due to the relative absence of Covid attributions that cloud the picture here, that Australia’s deaths from all causes is 3% lower than expected, with the biggest contributor being a fall in respiratory illnesses and with a big fall in dementia attributions.

    1. We all know people who catch every bug going and others who sail through life and catch a cold about once a decade.
      But then, I’m not following the science.

      1. It’s interesting. Germ Theory is the prevailing orthodoxy and we’ve all been raised to accept it as a given but a little digging reveals that it has never been universally accepted or comprehensively proven.
        “Germ Theory Deniers”, like “Climate Change Deniers” and “Anti-Vaxxers” are fashionably derided but who knows, in time all the present orthodoxies might be trashed as primitive superstitions!

      2. In the last 5 years i have.
        Cracked my skull.
        Bruised a rib.
        Swollen bollocks size of a tennis ball.

        High Blood Pressure
        Collapsed disc in neck.
        Ischaemia in lower leg.

        No coughs, colds or cold sores though.

        I think there was a two week period where nothing was wrong with me.

        1. Life for me has consisted of staggering from one ‘virus’ to another. I am the human eqivalent of a lightening conductor for the little beasties.

  55. Chickens coming home to roost.

    A
    key electricity cable between Britain and France has been shut down
    after a fire, sending wholesale prices soaring. The fire will reduce
    imports from France until the end of March 2022, the National Grid has warned.

      1. Perhaps the green nonsense will go up in smoke?

        I just don’t see the sense in moving pollution around and claiming that we’re somehow heroic because instead of producing metal waste and lithium mines, and using energy to make the battery locally we ship it to China and claim we’re green because we’ve an electric car instead of a petrol one on the road.

    4. A good excuse to hike prices and promote greeny power.

      It was a good ‘accident’ to have at just the right time – almost orchestrated.

      1. Most likely as the end goal is chaos from which they can, altogether folks, ‘Build Back Better’. In their own interests, of course.

    7. The coal fire power stations will be kept burning and gas will play a significant part in keeping the lights on. Our PM’s ludicrous zero carbon target is beginning to show its pitfalls.

    8. A colleague – someone I don’t like much – has reminded me that ‘renewables’ includes the diesel generators running.

      1. Don’t forget the subsidies and compensation payments when the wind is too strong for wind farms to work.

      1. Just to warn her that, although Covid doesn’t seem to affect Tasmania, she is part of the Neo-fascist Federal Govt.

    2. Poor Oz! I thought it was the most wonderful place when I was there in the seventies. It seemed to breathe Freedom! Now just a Globalist Fascist State run by corrupt imbeciles!

  58. I mentioned the raspberry “September” yesterday. Monday I picked 3½ lbs; Wednesday 3½ lbs; today 1½ lbs.

    I am beginning to get funny looks from Cook when I bring in yet another bowlful… Especially when I tell her that I can see another 3+ lbs which will be ready on Saturday….

  59. Haven’t see anything of Ashesand etc.

    Last I read she was risking going to annoy the over-worked Metropolitan Perlice Farce by demonstrating up Lunnon.

    I wonder if she WAS arrested and is now in custody waiting for a ship to Australia….

    2. She was on Twitter today. It was short and to the point….. I agreed with her. If I find it again (honestly, trying to find things you’ve seen on Twitter is like trying to find the proverbial needle in the haystack) – I’ll put it on here.

  60. “John Whittingdale has been sacked as culture minister, tweeting that he was “sorry to be stepping down”. “

    That’s good. Not quite so “IMPORTANT” now, eh, Mr Wanqueur?

  62. Miss Wittank

    23 hours ago

    The Leftwaffe argue that 4 year olds are sufficiently mature enough to understand the social construct of gender and make a decision about taking life altering medication. The Leftwaffe also argue that a 15 year old (Shamina Begum) from a multicultural part of London did not know beheading people was wrong. 🤯

    https://www.youtube.com/post/Ugxu6D8iF2kp939NViF4AaABCQ

    1. I like this one:-

      matt hill
      1 day ago (edited)
      This is like asking if Gary glitter should be allowed to work in a school

    2. Your police must be taking lessons from the Canadian lot. For several years, favoured group natives are allowed to block the main railway for days on end with the police standing idly by but if you protest something on the liberal agenda, watch the heavy mob arrive to arrest you.

      Back in May, our little prince Trudeau ordered Canadian flags to be flown at half staff, they are still lowered and pretty boy is saying that they will not return to normal until first nations leaders all agree. Anyone objecting to this is now being called racist, even the conservative leader is getting tagged that way when he says that enough is enough.

    3. Heard it rumoured that some drivers are buying itching powder, while others are waiting to see if addresses are released so they can do some driveway blocking.

  68. Tried to get some flowers to Mother, in horsepickle at Llandough, near Cardiff.
    Would you believe that flowers are banned? No reason given… so, no Freesias for Mother, her favourite flower.
    WTF is that all about?

    1. Germs.

      “Flowers have been banned in most National Health Service hospitals in the UK since 1996, on the basis that their water contains bacteria. There has never been a confirmed case of these bacteria infecting patients. The risks of spillage, broken glass and pollen are more practical reasons for the ban.”

      Google: https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg24332371-300-does-having-flowers-in-hospital-wards-harm-patients-health/
      for lots more info….

      3. The NHS is not so hot at dealing with their own germs. Hospitals with one air conditioning system for the entire hospital. Areas open to birds, Legionnaires disease, winter vomiting, the list goes on. Hospitals have been built on the cheap to minimise running costs, by concentrating expensive machinery, and maximise the possibility of “job sharing” and “work/life balance” policies. The lives in question are those of the staff and not the patients. Patients have died in new Scottish hospitals as a result of poor design.
        Now try sueing the NHS. You have to pay a lawyer £500 hour to the limit of your financial resources. The NHS have unlimited resources to deny your claims. They don’t have to win, as they can delay a hearing until you run out of money.

        1. If you go to a hospital here in Norway, there are many notices about telling reception if you have been in a UK hospital, so you can be quarantined for MRSA! Not even Congo gets that treatment!

  70. For those of you who are interested in real numbers: I’ve just come across this little website which has gathered Covid information from European and American official stats and collated them in interesting comparative charts – an easy overview of what is really going on with Covid and with vaccine-related problems.
    https://www.data-like.com/

    Under the “French mortality from all causes” you will find “Compare two mortality curves”. The page that comes up generates curves for 180 days starting at the two dates you specify on the left.

    I played around with this and found the following:

    Comparing 1st Jan + 180 days in 2017 and 2020 : 1058 more deaths in 2020.
    Comparing 1st July + 180 days in 2017 and 2020 : 11 896 more deaths in 2020.
    Comparing 1st Jan + 180 days in 2018 and 2020 : 4584 more deaths in 2020.

    BUT

    Comparing 1st Jan + 180 days in 2017 and 2010 : 29 455 more deaths in 2010.

    I chose the last dates completely at random.

    My conclusion is that excess deaths caused by Covid are statistically negligible.

    So what on earth is all the fuss about?

    2. This number smithing is everywhere.
      If you look at covid in Florida, some are screaming numbers to show that hospitals are overflowing and they are in crisis, at the same time the governor is using numbers to show that the cases are declining and everything is just peachy.

      Then they wonder why no one trusts them.

  71. #HateFacts from Spiked

    This is odd, to say the least, because these people normally never

    pipe down about ‘bad’ people being ‘platformed’. Sunetra Gupta only has

    to utter the words ‘Good morning’ during an appearance on the Today

    programme and instantly an online mob forms, chastising the Beeb for

    giving airtime to the woman who was wrong about the IFR of Covid. If a

    climate-change sceptic wonders out loud if we might, in fact, have a

    little more than 10 years to save the planet, there will be ceaseless

    online petitioning demanding that his foul views never be allowed to

    sully the airwaves again. As for feminists who think only men have

    penises – apparently having these heretics, these witches, on TV is

    tantamount to genocide against trans people. Cast them out.

    And yet here was Ms Begum, who a few years ago devoted herself to the

    most extremist, hateful, intolerant movement on Earth, a movement for

    which the term ‘fascistic’ is not inappropriate, chatting away on

    morning TV and there wasn’t a peep of protest from the woke. In fact

    there were expressions of sympathy. ‘We don’t have to like Begum or her

    cynical glow-up, but we must try to understand her’, said the headline

    to a column by a leftish writer for the Evening Standard.

    Imagine if a right-wing newspaper published a piece like that about a

    former Neo-Nazi. ‘We don’t have to like this skinhead who loathes black

    people and Jews, but we should try to understand him.’ Just picture the

    furore.

    https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/09/15/stop-this-moral-rehabilitation-of-shamima-begum/

        1. Certainly the state has become even further Left wing, but in reality, no matter that people want it, leftyism always loses. it causes nothing but suffering and pain.

  72. Not sure if has been mentioned here earlier, but Farage on GB News 7pm tonight will be illegal migration special. Latest ploy by the illegals has been to jump into the water when French boat (they – the French – say) tried to turn them back. Instead of being fished out by the French they were somehow able to hold them off until Border Force rescued them half an hour later. Seems as though they can now pick and choose who rescues them.

    Am sure Nigel will have plenty to say about this. I’m hopping mad!

      1. Sky on channel 515, Freeview channel 236 and Virgin Media channel 626. It will also broadcast on Freesat channel 216 and YouView channel 236.

  73. Matt cartoon …..anyone?

    BBC ‘Today’ this morning revealed the content of Matt’s cartoon. I covered my ears……wake up BBC cartoons are visual!!!

  74. That’s me for today. Strolling round the garden, we found two shrubs that had given up the ghost. Saw and ladder tomorrow.

    Have a jolly evening – I shall be thinking about what position Miss Mordaunt could fill.

    A demain.

    2. As much as I like the freedom aspect of this, it is a retrograde step that won’t make life better even if, as I think essential, the metric weight is listed on the price. Time has moved on and it’s been a long time since school kids have used imperial measures, leaving it as another issue where old fogies want to disadvantage the young, and for what? – metric measures are so much easier to use.

      Time to look forward, not back.

      1. “Time to look forward, not back.”

        Guff. This petty criminalisation of British culture was an early sign of the true nature of the EU, although it was enthusiastically aided and abetted by our establishment – some local authorities (notably Sunderland and Surrey) couldn’t wait to get out there and punish the wrongdoers.

        There was never any need to attempt to abolish customary weights and measures. Both systems had existed side by side for some years (our generation coped perfectly well) and some simple and intelligent rules on dual labelling would have been enough. It was just another unnecessary cost for UK businesses. One of the EU’s commissioners (Gunter Verhoeven (sp?)) later said it was all a bit heavy-handed.

      2. As the metric system was invented by the French Revolutionaries, using it is also looking back. At least imperial has the advantage of being body friendly rather than arbitrary.

      3. ‘where old fogies want to disadvantage the young’, no, just make them think a bit, take their minds away from being so woke.

      1. Not while Boris and the Carrion are still in thrall to the EU.

        I just cannot wait for that corrupt heap of shit to collapse upon itself. And I include Boris and the Carrion in that homily.

          3. You take care with him.

            He might touché you up.
            Allegedly
            But on the plus side he does a great side line in gastronomic delicacies.

            Allegedy

          4. I was taken in by a young lady at a party. She asked me if i had heard of a water bra. Which i hadn’t. She asked me to feel it. Which i did.

            How naive am I ? And i didn’t even need to feed her any nibbles…

        1. Vile.. They are often over salty. I do like making my own stocks and sauces. Food is my life. Not forgetting cocktails of course.

          A well made beef stock has a depth of flavour that no stock cube can reproduce. Use the stock to make a Madeira sauce and serve over Tournedos Rossini and the guests will be talking about it forever !

      2. It’s not just the scum. Bone marrow produces oceans of fat. I find it easier to let the fat go cold and congeal on top, then simply lift it off.

        1. They even do next day delivery. I’m also using New forest stores because they have a similar ethos. Pipers seem to do a fuller range which interested me.

          1. You should have told me. I would have had a reward for a recommendation and you would have had a discount. Do try their lamb’s liver – it’s the best liver ever!

    2. Don’t you chill the stock between 10.00 p.m. and 8.00 a.m., Griz?

      ‘Tis an attractive nutrient medium for many kinds of bacteria …

      1. Not easy to chill 8 litres of boiling stock very quickly. All harmful bacteria will be killed off by 12 hours’ simmering tomorrow in any case. Even then it will take some time to cool down before any can be chilled/frozen. I shall have a cup of it on Saturday for my meal and the rest will be frozen as cubes.

        1. Bacteria produce toxins which remain even if you were to boil it.

          Not that your method would poison anyone but in the trade you would pour it into deep roasting tins to cool down quicker.

    3. Don’t you chill the stock between 10.00 p.m. and 8.00 a.mm., Griz?

      ‘Tis an attractive nutrient medium for many kinds of bacteria …

      1. Beef Consommé if he chooses to clarify it. Out of this world. You can’t buy quality like that. You have to make it.

      2. A cup of it will be my only meal on my fasting days, Paul. Today I haven’t eaten any solid food. Just a cappuccino at midday, a cup of hot bovril late afternoon, and just water at all other times.

          1. I’ve not felt hungry all day. Tomorrow I’ll just eat my normal one meal. I’ve never felt so good in my life. I’m more alert and sleeping like a log.

          1. I eat plenty of roughage on the other six days of the week: many salad items and leafy vegetables by the ton. One particular favourite is when I sauté a thinly sliced onion and two finely chopped cloves of garlic in a little lard; when softened I add some finely shredded green cabbage and stir fry it together (no water required) with just sea salt freshly-ground black pepper to season it. Utterly yummy and high in fibre.

            I use lard because it is tasty, healthy and nutritious and not a poison like all the seed oils are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2UnOryQiIY&t=1532s

          2. I love cabbage… sauerkraut, coleslawed, boiled, fried with bacon, raw… problem is, family aren’t so keen.

          3. Me too. Have you tried salted beef thinly sliced, on rye bread, with emmenthal cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing? This is a Reuben sandwich, which I first had in a New York Jewish deli. It is one of my all-time favourite sandwiches.

          4. Never tried tah, but already planning an assault on the shops at the weekend! Looks fabulous! Even the ingredients on their own are grand!

  79. Evening, all. I apologise in advance for the inevitable typos; I’ve been to the opticians and have had drops in my eyes which make me look as though I’ve been doing drugs all day 🙁 Walking home in the bright sun, even though I was wearing shades, was not nice. As for the headline, will the country ever be given a chance, never mind to live with Covid?

      1. I have to have it at every check up because I need to ensure that everything is well internally as well as externally.

    3. I had that problem six weeks ago, Conners; I couldn’t make the judgement to cross the street to my flat – I had to ask a pedestrian (a nurse wearing badges and stuff) to accompany/ steer me across the street !

      PS: Good chat-up line “I’ve got drops in my eyes …”

      2. Fortunately, where I live, traffic is light. By dint of squinting I managed to make it safely across the one and only road.

    3. This reminds me of the story of the girl who had an appointment with her gynecologist who first made an appointment to visit the beauty
      parlour for a bikini wax and when she got there she asked for a Brazilian.. When asked why she did so she replied that on appointments with her gynecologist she always liked to look her best.

  81. I am feeling unusually mellow. Why you might ask?

    A few days ago I bought ten lemons, squeezed them for juice which I put in an ice cube tray which I put in a freezer. At the same time I put a bottle of vodka, a bottle of tonic water and a bottle of Cinzano Rosso (must be Cinzano NOT Martini) in the fridge.

    After hard work in the garden this afternoon I came into the house and selected a tall glass which I half filled with vodka, Cinzano and a couple of frozen lemon juice cubes. I then topped it up with tonic and drank it. This is why I am feeling mellow.

    This evening they are showing a production of Three Men in A Boat on a TV movie channel (Freesat Ch 306) so I advise my friends to arm themselves with a Swiss Army knife with a can opener attachment and a tin of pineapple slices and enjoy the show.

    2. A Man after my own liver, Rastus. A well made drink is infinitely better than one just thrown together.

      1. Indeed.
        Forward planning and quality ingredients, properly prepared and at the right temperature.

    4. Post script

      Too much vodka in the mix – I should have said BBC 4.

      In the event the story was better in the book than on the screen.

    1. Most of those countries on the Red list need our tourism – or would you like to ban everybody from going to any of them ever again?

      1. True, but I’m not bothered by “ours” going back and forth as tourists; I am worried by “theirs” coming in as gimmegrants and terrorists..

        1. Well presumably they’ll either join the boat people or be in the backs of lorries like the unfortunate Vietnamese acouple of years ago. The rest will be required to show their passports as we do.

  83. I am not one to bring my mishaps to this table, but this afternoon at about 3 pm I overbalanced & had a bad fall in the front garden. No bones broken, but badly bruised, especially in the rib region. Fortunately I had my secateurs in my hand so I was able to cut my way out of the undergrowth. I could not get up, but managed to shuffle myself to the path, where I attracted the attention of a passing schoolboy who alerted my Polish neighbours. They tried everything to get me up, but to no avail, so they called an ambulance, which came on time after the stated 40 minutes. Piotr stayed with me the whole time, he even taught me a bit more Polish, while his wife came backwards & forwards with cushions & drinks. Sofia & Tom (paramedics were brilliant & so patient). In the end I was lifted on a thing like a bath lift & once they got me indoors, they gave me a thorough examination. BP, ECG, both OK, confirmation no bones broken, just very sore ribs, but i can get about.

    1. Oh! Man! :-((
      Glad it went well… even though you were beached.
      Good to know you have kind neighbours… did they ply you with drink beforehand, too? 😉
      Hot bath should relieve many of the aches that will appear overnight.

        1. I don’t know any sweary words in Polish, but I now quite a few naughty expression translated into German. I had a very good Polish friend in Braunschweig – we spoke only German together.

          1. I thought I did but have forgotten most and Swedish is useless for sweary words, hence their reason for using good old English swear words.

    4. Oh gosh! I’m glad your neighbours were in and able to help.

      You’ll be sore for a while, I expect. Take care!

    5. Oh, so sorry to hear this, Peddy. Were ladders involved? An early night for you, you must be all shook up and shocked. If you need assistance in the culinary area (standing over a hob will not be much fun at the moment) then Cook! might be of assistance (online).

    6. When all is taken into consideration you are a very lucky man.
      A vigilant passer-by, good neighbours, and most important, sharp secateurs!

      Get fit soon, good luck

    10. Oooh, ouch! Well done to the passing schoolboy and your lovely neighbours though. Fear you’ll be feeling sore for some time. Be kind to yourself.

      1. Be plenty skin colours – without tattoos!
        Yaay! Blue, yellow, red, even green, in a tie-dye pattern… 😉

    11. I think I speak for all Nottlers, that was dreadful, we hope you are soon better.

      It could have been worse.

      It might have been me/one of us

    12. OMG

      What a terrible shock for you , but your neighbours sound helluva nice people. You must really ache , poor you .

      It is the getting up that is so difficult .. we were only talking about that today , when my vet got down on his knees to give the spaniels their annual boosters .. I offered to give him a hand to get up , but he is a rugby player and built like a tank , and declined my kind offer to steady him up.

      He found a convoluted way to raise himself up after kneeling down , but it is darned difficult, because I know that after I have been weeding , I keep a spade or garden fork wedged in next to me to act as a lever .

      1. The way I ski, I get plenty of practice at getting up from all kinds of weird positions, with planks strapped to feet.

      2. I can sympathise, as if I get up funny my knee snaps and I can’t walk, so I too have some weird breakdancey move to manage it.

      3. I had to clear some suckers that keep coming up in the patch where the cyclamen (see photos posted earlier on) and it’s a very sloping garden. I had a devil of a job to get back up again after snipping away at those.

    13. I’m glad you got the attention you needed. Sometimes difficult nowadays to even get an ambulance to turn up given they are concentrating on new arrivals as opposed to people who have paid taxes all their lives.

        2. Still waiting for the ambulance that was called when MIL fell and was concussed. That must be about five years ago now!

        3. Where we live – 3 miles up a single track road from the main road and a further 5-6 miles to Ipswich Hospital.

          I wouldn’t bother.

    14. Sorry to hear that, Peddy! What a horrible shock for you, and that awful feeling of helplessness.
      Make sure you do as you’re told and take care of yourself. Sending good wishes to you 💕

          1. No, my head didn’t even touch the ground. One of the Choisyas cushioned my fall, but then held me prisoner, so to speak. Hence the blessing of having the secateurs to hand.

          2. I thought perhaps you had a momentary loss, which caused you to lose balance – but the paramedics would have checked for that.
            Choisya can be a bit unyielding!

    18. Looks like you posted this a few hours ago. I hope the soreness is easing off and you’re able to get some res.
      Sleep well.

      1. Bit jittery on my legs this morning, thanks for asking. I shall do as little as possible today.

  84. From the Australian government:
    Already posted on another site – sorry Jules. But needs disseminating.

    https://www.tga.gov.au/media-release/new-restrictions-prescribing-ivermectin-covid-19
    or a verbal anyalisis from a very pro-vaccine Northerner.
    https://youtu.be/_gndsUjgPYo

    In a nutshell:
    IVM is restricted to doctors because –

    1. Some dosages are badly advised on social media… Doctors are too stupid to know how much to give to patients whom they know this anti-parasitic.
    2. There is not enough for other usages – this drug that India manufactures by the ton. Note the tacit admission that so many doctors are using it. A far cry from the common objection to early treatments that if they were useful people would be using them.
    As I have been saying from the outset – the are. Its just the media and government that pretend they are not.
    3. IVM might discourage people from taking vaccines. And here is the nub of public health policy for the past 18 months – Ignore early treatment. Take vaccines. That is it.
    How many people have died and been ruined while we waited for vaccines? How many businesses are still hobbled? How many more families will be berieved? Civil liberties denied?

    And now we know they do not prevent transmission we are still being denied this useful drug.
    Yes. We. Because public health policy is fundementally the same here as there and differes only in degree of oppression and curtailment of normal life – only the Aussies and the French and a few others are aware of alternatives and we are kept in the dark.

    This could be made available to us to manage the coming seasonal surge and it is not.
    For shame.

    1. Ah Yes,the Didier Raoult protocol

      Something to transport the Zinc,HCQ,Ivermectin Quercetin

      Zinc

      VitC&D

      Broad spectrum antibiotic to prevent bacterial pneumonnia

      Quercetin and the others available from many places,

      The banning of drugs used safely for decades used to treat tens of millions of people.

      In India called the Ziverdo kit distributed to millions

      Here the mainstream dismiss all alternatives but the net fights back

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c7e8dfd7dc1008117829ea678dabab9730d6c6a57821a06a1fec91f6d361589a.jpg

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cb088dbebd0603e640dcfa5c256495d5c1cf006b8416ea3747b94ad1c77fdef9.jpg

      1. An up-voter who has recently appeared.
        There are lots who look in and don’t post, I know some Nottlers are wary of trolls but I think the more who look and then post, the better.
        It stops the echo chamber, makes us debate, and often results in new and eventually popular posters.

  87. https://order-order.com/2021/09/16/governments-plan-to-smash-remaining-eu-laws/

    Under ‘modernising the economy

    “Legislating to put electronic trade documents on the same legal footing as paper documents, removing the need for wasteful paperwork and needless bureaucracy.”

    The private sector isn’t the issue. Will government departments start sending documents via email and updates vai text message, or will they continue to intentionally use snail mail?

    As for weights and measures – what the flip is wrong with metric? It’s base ten for goodness sake.

    2. I had to sign electronically at the opticians to say I was over 70 (for my free eye test – the one I’ve paid in for over half a century). It took me nearly half an hour and then it was nothing like my signature. I asked why I couldn’t sign a piece of paper with a real pen and then they could scan it.

    3. Base twelve does allow for easier packaging, I’d rather have 4 x 3 bottles of wine than 5 x 2. I feel cheated with the latter.

        1. Precisely, J, that’s why I prefer the base 12 I was brought up on.

          Wine often comes in 10s on yer continong.

          1. They are a bit too heavy to lift off floor level – we have a case delivered from Laithwaites roughly every three months – I generally empty them bit by bit into the wine rack.

          1. Yet, we buy seconds eggs from the local Gate Farm on a tray of 20 for £2.00 but I’d rather have 24!.

        1. Because they lost Base 12 and decided it was a good way to jack up the price. So true with most confectionary – smaller size, bigger price.

    4. Roger Scruton has written extensively about this subject:

      Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (2000)
      To the outside observer, the English monetary system lacked all logic. To the English themselves, however, it was all of a piece with their weights and measures, which were constructed by division rather than addition, and which therefore presented strange angularities of arithmetic: eight pints to the gallon, fourteen pounds to the stone, eight stone to the hundredweight, twelve inches to the foot, three feet to the yard and 1,760 yards to the mile, amazingly not to speak of rods and perches, gills and tuns. Weights and measures mediate our day-to-day transactions; hence they are imprinted with our sense of membership. They are symbols of the social order and distillations of our daily habits.

      The old English measures once had their equivalents on the continent. But, the French believed, they were symbols of a hierarchical, backward-looking society, a society that paid more respect to custom and precedent than to progress and the future. They were muddled, improvised and full of compromises, in just the way that human life is full of compromises when insufficiently controlled. What was needed, the revolutionaries thought, was a system of measures expressive of the new social order, based on Reason, progress, discipline and the future. Since the decimal system is the basis of arithmetic, and since mathematics is the symbol of Reason and its cold imperatives, the decimal system must be imposed by force, in order to shake people free of their old attachments.

      The distinction between the imperial and the metric systems corresponds to the distinction between the reasonable and the rational, between solutions achieved through custom and compromise and those imposed by a plan. Muddled though imperial measures may appear to those obsessed by mathematics, they are – unlike the metric system – self-evidently the product of life. In the ordinary, cheerful and yielding transactions between people, measurement proceeds by dividing and multiplying, not by adding. The French revolutionaries believed that by changing weights and measures, calendars and festivals, street-names and landmarks, they could more effectively undermine the old and local attachments of the French people, so as to conscript them behind their international purpose. The survival of the old weights and measures in England testifies to the underlying principle of English society – the principle that society should be governed not from above but from within; by custom, tradition and compromise, and by a habit of reasonableness of which the single most important enemy is Reason. English measures were designed for the promotion of comfortable deals and just shares, and not for the convenience of the state accountant. They were of a piece with those great inventions of English law – joint ownership (conceived as a trust for sale) and limited liability – inventions which instead of retarding enterprise, as those with rational minds imagine, put England a hundred years ahead of continental Europe in the search for industrial prosperity.

      1. Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (2000) was an adaptation of this:

        Stupidity beyond measure

        ROGER SCRUTON

        While politicians debate whether to keep one kind of pound, they have silently allowed the disappearance of another. After December 31 it will be a criminal offence to sell products by the pound and the ounce. The reason for this is that the DTI has not bothered to obtain the ten-year extension of our old imperial measures that was offered by the EC as a preliminary to forbidding them. No more blatant example could be imagined of random law-making in defiance of popular wishes. The law compelling us to use the metric system was never discussed or voted on by our elected representatives; and although opinion polls suggest that nine people out of ten are opposed to the change, their desires count for nothing. The Eurocrats have decreed that the metric system will be used, and another foundation-stone is to be removed from the already tottering edifice of our national culture.

        Do weights and measures matter? Those who introduced the metric system – the French Revolutionaries – answered with an emphatic “yes”. Weights and measures mediate our day-to-day transactions; hence they are imprinted with our sense of membership. They are symbols of the social order and distillations of our daily habits. The old measures were redolent, the Revolutionaries believed, of a hierarchical, backward-looking society. They were muddled, improvised, and full of compromises. What was needed was a system expressive of the new social order, based on Reason, progress, discipline and the future. Since the decimal system is the basis of arithmetic, and since mathematics is the symbol of Reason and its cold imperatives, the decimal system must be imposed by force, in order to shake people free of their old attachments.

        The conflict of currencies therefore expressed a conflict both political and philosophical. The distinction between the imperial and the metric systems corresponds to the distinction between the reasonable and the rational, between solutions achieved through custom and compromise and those imposed by a plan. Muddled though the imperial measures may appear to those obsessed by mathematics, they are the produce of life. In ordinary transactions, measurement proceeds by dividing and multiplying, not by adding. It makes sense to divide a gallon into a half, a quart and a pint, or to have 16 ounces to the pound.

        The antiquity of these measures – like that of our old coinage, arbitrarily jettisoned in a previous fit of rationalism – is testimony to their common sense. But the most important fact about them is that they are ours. They are commemorated in our national literature and in our proverbs; they have shaped our eating and drinking habits; they are the lingua franca of all our books of recipes, all our manuals of gardening and husbandry and handicraft, and the subject matter of a thousand schoolbooks.

        The idea that we should be committing a crime by using them, and just because some foreign bureaucrat has said so, is such an offence to the sense of law and justice that we are surely under a moral obligation to go on using them nevertheless. If ever there were a case for civil disobedience, this is it.

        There is another and deeper reason to resist these mad imperatives. The French Revolutionaries believed that by changing weights and measures, calendars and festivals, street-names and landmarks, they could undermine the old and local attachments of the people, so as to conscript them behind their international purpose. The eventual result was Napoleon, who spread the metric system by force across the Continent. In a small way the same is being done to us. The effect of destroying our weights and measures will be not only to undermine the old local loyalties between shopkeeper and customer. It will be to destroy the small businesses that cannot afford the change. And we should ask who would really want such a result.

        The answer, it seems to me, is clear. The supermarkets are international players, who have a vested interest in the metric system, since it is applied in most of the countries from which they import their products. If the measures on which old and local businesses depend are criminalised, the supermarkets will score yet another advantage in their war on behalf of the global government that will do most for their profits. Is that what we want? Surely, it would have been nice of our dictators to ask us, before commanding us to change.

        The Times, Thursday 9th December 1999

        1. Ditto Grizz.

          When I conduct an architectural measured survey I do so using Imperial measurements. This is because the buildings were constructed in Imperial.

          This is particularly essential when measuring mouldings. A sixteenth of an inch is distinguishable from three thirty seconds. This determination is not possible in metric units because they are not as divisible. Twelve is divided by both odd and even numbers to give whole numbers. Ten by contrast is indivisible by three which gives a recurring decimal point which leads to inaccuracy.

          I shall miss Roger Scruton’s insights.

          1. When I renovated my 1875 brick-and-flint cottage in Norfolk it had been “modernised” (i.e. trashed) by previous occupants. They had filled in a small inglenook fireplace with rubble by punching a couple of holes in the chimney breast to pour the rubble through, they had then patched up the holes (made in imperial brickwork) by bodging in some ill-fitting metric bricks! Not to worry, they then covered it all over with some imitation pine cladding.

            After I’d ripped, hllti-gunned, and shovelled out all the crap to fill a large skip, I was perplexed by the ill-matching brickwork. That is, until a builder friend told me of some renovations that were taking place down the road and that there were a pile of old hand-made imperial bricks to be had. Bricks obtained, as well as a good length of seasoned pine 8″ x 5″ from local reclamation yard, I soon restored that fireplace to a former glory.
            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0e98ca3b34ba3326900c777721f230a378339e55773e8282a949b06d579f349b.jpg
            A couple of the reclaimed imperial bricks had deep impressions of a cat’s pawprint in them (a cat had evidently walked over the bricks in their moulds before the sun had baked them). I used those bricks, with the pawprints featured, in a similar, but smaller, fireplace in the dining room. They provided an interesting conversation piece.

        2. Abso-bloody-lutely.

          Typical Americans with their 16 floz pint – a day late and a dollar short – cheating bastards.

      3. I always find it amusing that the French base measure of the metre, cast in brass and univerally acknowledged as the definitive measure, was cast…In England!

        Ta rarrh!

    5. Base ten falls at the first hurdle: you halve ten and you immediately get an odd number (5) which you cannot halve again with a whole number result. Halving is part of human nature and everything in life from prehistoric times has been divided (to be shared around) into smaller whole units.

      An octal (base 8) or hexadecimal (base 16) makes much more sense since you can go on halving, again and again, until you reach unity (1).

      1. We saw them all the time when we sailed from Tenerife to Barbados. Some friends of ours were able to feed their cat every day of their Atlantic crossing on the flying fish which landed on their deck.

        1. Flying fish, yes, but the dorado and birds feeding on them is the amazing bit. The dorado/mahi mahi/dolphin fish are one of the most beautiful fish on the planet. Unfortunately when you catch them their exquisite colours fade very quickly. They are very tasty though.

    1. Now that’s sad.
      I had one of his calculators as a kid at school – excellent wee gadget is was.
      Now, everybody is whizzing round on electric scooters, not sit-ins. Close, and 40 years too soon, Sir Clive.
      RIP.

      1. Had one of his calculators in the final year at school. Useful. Also a ZX81 – my first computer. Rather less useful, but it was a start. Also the “Black Watch”, which was a digital watch in kit form. Rather less successful, since it insisted that it was 76 minutes past 32, or some such… RIP, though.

    2. The Spectrum started me programming. Print HELLO GOTO 1.

      I’m still a rubbish prog, but computers opened a door. This is why Junior has a Chromebook and a P400 pi, and we write scratch programs together.

      1. Me too but I moved onto the 6502 based BBC Micro/Master pretty quickly as I could program that in assembly language directly whereas most of the assembly work on the Spectrum was done by hand, pen and paper and a book of Z80 Op-codes.

          1. Lol I ain’t that old 🙂

            Though I have worked with computers that old. It was quite a shock entering the world of work to find many businesses were using such old kit and operating systems. My first job was a job adding features to some very old code running on CP/M 86, a disk based OS that was over ten years old and had been very superseded by DOS and early versions of windows.

            Then I worked for a welding company and their kit dated back to the sixties. The computer linked to the arc emission testing machine took up an entire room bigger than my lounge. The system storing the records of tests was just as old and its program ran off punch cards. Thankfully that needed no updating.

    1. Thanks Rik. I’m about to go upstairs.

      Btw, Tom, the paramedic, even went upstairs to check that Missy was OK. She slept through the whole thing, but came down when she wanted supper.

  93. Not just a nutty Fox News fantasy, then…

    Is the US army becoming a threat to American democracy?

    American liberals are remarkably blasé about the revelation that General Milly was conspiring against Donald Trump

    MARK ALMOND

    Ever since he broke the Watergate scandal five decades ago, Bob Woodward has been chronicling the inside story of politics at the highest levels in Washington, D.C. Liberals usually take Woodward’s revelations about the machinations of bad guys in the White House, from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump as evidence of how right they are to believe there is something deeply rotten about the Republican Party. Yet Woodward’s latest scoop finds right-thinking American liberals remarkably unfazed.

    The threat of a deranged general seizing power from the duly elected president of the United States and starting World War Three has been a staple of Hollywood polit-films since Kubrick’s nuclear-tipped black comedy ‘Dr Strangelove’ or Burt Lancaster’s deadly serious ‘Seven Days in May’.

    Bob Woodward’s latest expose of power politics inside the Beltway, ‘Peril’, actually has the chief of the US military calling his Chinese counterpart twice to assure him that he’ll let him know if Donald Trump looks set to take military action. General Mark Milley is also described as telling his subordinates not to obey orders from the White House unless cleared by him first. Liberals are remarkably blasé about a general conspiring against his elected commander-in-chief. Gen. Milley’s belief that Trump was “mad” after his election defeat last November and a threat not only to the functioning of the American constitution but world peace doesn’t justify his actions.

    Like the Democrats, Milley ignored that Trump’s bark was always worse than his bite. It has been an article of faith that he was an American fascist and that the bizarre hill-billy people power storming of the Capitol on 6th January was Trump’s Reichstag Fire. That Trump left office tamely afterwards has not reduced this psychosis or Trump Derangement Syndrome.

    Woodard reports the Pentagon’s highest-ranking officer was also a traumatised TDS suffer. Although Milley, with his broad beam and chest of medal ribbons looks more like the sort of Red Army marshal who putsched against Gorbachev than a politically-correct post-modern 4 star general in fact he has been one of the strategists of making the US military as “woke” as any ivy league campus. That’s why Woodward’s revelation that the Pentagon’s chain of command was actively preparing to disobey orders and telling the Chinese about it has been greeted with a shrug in liberal quarters that had gone ballistic when Trump’s nominee for National Security Adviser, former General Flynn, had unauthorised contacts with the Russian ambassador.

    For a nation which prides itself on being ruled by laws and not by men, the willingness of so many constitutional lawyers to regard a potential military coup as OK so long as it was intended to decapitate Donald Trump’s exercise of power sets a dangerous precedent. Because it is Donald Trump who has fired off the charge “treason” against his erstwhile chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff too many liberal Americans shrug or even say “Good for Milley”. A general or any officer who disagrees profoundly with his political superiors and cannot get a hearing should resign and go public with his criticisms. Instead General Milley privately told the People’s Liberation Army!

    In fact, the Pentagon had frustrated Trump’s orders before January. His decision to withdraw US troops from Syria effectively abandoning the Kurds was debateable, but after Trump’s defeat senior officials boasted about how they had misled and concealed keeping US forces there hoping for a Biden victory. The Pentagon got that triumph only to find Biden determined to leave Afghanistan with the generals unprepared for the galloping debacle – though they heroically sacked a Marine for publicly criticising their poor planning.

    Recent Latin American history is littered with generals who were no good at fighting foreign enemies but very effective at making coups against their civilian governments. Does anyone think it is a good idea to let North American generals follow their example and decide when policy is too important a matter to be left to the politicians, whether Republican or Democrat?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/16/us-army-becoming-threat-american-democracy/

  96. Why I’ve given up on TV news

    There seems to be a relentless appetite for bad news, so much so that if there isn’t any actual bad news out there, folk just make it up.

    ANDREW LILICO

    I don’t often watch the TV news these days. So much video content is available via social media and news websites, and written content is so many hours ahead of TV coverage, that the broadcast news just feels out-of-date by the time I see it.

    Every now and then, however, I give it a go if it happens to be on ahead of the football or I’ve just been watching something else. And when I am daft enough to watch TV news, in amidst the strange stories of empty supermarkets (matching no actual data) and never-ending Green Apocalypse, I find its coverage of the Covid pandemic remarkable.

    Last night, for example, I watched Sky News at 10 o’clock. The lack of any resemblance of the coverage to what is actually going on in the world was just astonishing. They had a package featuring a professor from the government’s modelling committee SPI-M-O telling us that cases are rising. But there is no definition by which cases are rising. Cases in England are currently coming in at about 25 percent below the equivalent day last week. On a seven-day rolling basis they are down 20 per cent. And this is not just a short-term thing, something odd about the past week relative to the week before. The average number of cases over the past five days is lower than for any five-day period since July 3rd.

    The past couple of days have seen fervid reporting across the media – repeated in Sky News’ package last night – about a supposed risk that hospitalisations might reach 7,000 per day by the end of October. The possibility of that happening, in my opinion, is vanishingly minute. That is nearly ten times the number of hospitalisations we have at present. Even if multiplying the number of cases by ten were enough (which it wouldn’t be because most extra cases would be in younger people who are less likely to go to hospital than the current mix of cases), that tenfold increase in cases would have to occur within the next five weeks (given the lag from infection to hospital admission). That would require us to go from cases contracting 25 per cent per week at present to, from tomorrow, rising at over 60 percent per week and doing that continuously for five weeks.

    The illustrative model suggesting that as a possible upper-end estimate was produced a couple of weeks ago, before recent falls. It was very unlikely even then. Now, I think, it’s just not feasible at all and the media should not treat it as if it were.

    Media reporting was similarly odd concerning the government’s Autumn/Winter plan. In the run-up to its announcement there were repeated stories about how the Government was planning a new lockdown in October and how new social distancing restrictions might be introduced early, to prevent that. In the event the government’s actual plan was masterful inaction – no new restrictions at all and a stated intention not to introduce any. Indeed, it said that even if things went unexpectedly badly, the only additional mandatory measures it was planning for, as a back-up measure, were face masks and vaccine passports. [That’s bad enough…] Lockdowns should not be necessary, were not anticipated, and would only be introduced as a last result if all else failed. Yet this was widely reported as the government saying a lockdown might prove necessary, with anti-lockdowners condemning the Government and doomsters telling us that since a lockdown was now inevitable we ought to introduce other restrictions immediately! [Some newspaper front-page headlines played up the possibility of lockdowns.]

    Coronavirus cases are way down from their July peak and show little prospect of returning there. Of the 59 days there have been since restrictions ended on July 19th, on 31 of them (ie more than half the time) reported cases were lower than they had been 7 days before. The return to school saw only a very brief spike in cases associated, no doubt, with increased testing. The university return this year should be no problem since, on the government’s own statistics, over 75 per cent of 15 to 24 year olds have either had Covid and recovered or have already been vaccinated.

    Life is returning to normal (or at least our new, working-from-home and using-Amazon-a-lot enhanced normal). Yet somehow there seems to be a relentless appetite for bad news, so much so that if there isn’t any actual bad news out there folk just make it up.

    Don’t listen to the TV doomsters. There’s a wide world out there. It’s time to go and enjoy it, once again.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/16/given-tv-news/

    1. Good night, peddy. I hope you get a comfortable night’s sleep. Take it easy tomorrow, you will be stiff and sore.

      1. Peter’s posts are locked from view (“Get over it”). What has happened to him today?

        PS – No need to reply, I’ve just read about his fall. Take it easy, Peter.

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