Thursday 7 April: Western Europe must stop buying the Russian gas that finances Putin’s evil war

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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

632 thoughts on “Thursday 7 April: Western Europe must stop buying the Russian gas that finances Putin’s evil war”

  1. Good morning all.
    Dull and blustery but at least not raining at the moment after last night’s downpour.
    A bit cooler this morning with 2°C on the yard thermometer.

    2. Sorry BoB! I cant get rid of the downvote! I think it must be the tarts!
      Done it now!

    3. Sorry BoB! I cant get rid of the downvote! I think it must be the tarts!
      Done it now!

  8. Western Europe must stop buying the Russian gas that finances Putin’s evil war

    Buy it from the USA instead and finance their Globalist War on the nation state

    2. I suppose the person who wrote that line thinks that Western Europeans should Freeze for Freedom then? That slogan didn’t get far against reality…

      1. Morning all.

        Our own politicians thinks that Western Europeans should freeze. But not for freedom.

    3. As far as I recall, the EU decided to buy its gas from Russia because the USA wanted twice the price of Russian gas.

      Anyone got any info. about this?

    4. I read that the USA are buying Russian gas to sell to Western Europe. Much like carbon ‘offsetting’ of our heavy industries to others, the end result is that we pay even more for the same end product as Western European politicians gain brownie points with their Leftwaffe chums.

  10. A convenient moment for war crimes claims. 7 April 2022

    I DO not know if Russian troops carried out civilian atrocities in Bucha while they occupied it. What I do know is that I do not for one minute trust President Zelensky, western politicians from Joe Biden down or the corporate media to tell the truth in a one-sided propaganda war.

    This is not to say that the Russians are not guilty of crimes. But it is well known that truth is the first casualty of war, an axiom that may have originated from Aeschylus, and also that truth matters even in war and especially this war.

    Biden and the EU are using Bucha to tighten their sanctions screw on Russia in order to intensify and manipulate public anger against Vladimir Putin which is already high. Regardless of where the real blame lies for this war – and the origins are complex – everyone is on the side of Ukraine.

    I doubt this whole Bucha story. The distribution of the bodies, the lack of Russian ones, the claims to massacre and “Mass Graves” that are a staple of war zones the world over; but most of all the Ukraine narrative with its overhyped and facile claims to Genocide and that it is worse elsewhere and that one suspects is being prepared for our viewing. This is not of course to deny that individual acts may have taken place; in fact it would be surprising if they had not.

    This war has already passed the stage where it can end in reasoned negotiation. The West has decided for Attaque à outrance, that is, not simply to defend Ukraine but to destroy Russia. In such a struggle there can be no half measures. We are embarked on the path to Armageddon.

    https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/a-convenient-moment-for-war-crimes-claims/

      2. Me neither. It produces a grim silence when we are told to pray for the Ukraine in church.

    3. Sadly, it is shocking to see that a DT letter writer is accepting of nuclear war. We have entered full Ukraine derangement syndrome.

    1. Morning Bob. I believe that they do. It comes in a package along with accomodation and a limited Social Security credit card.

      1. It is a big saving for Soros as he has been the one buying the phones and paying the phone bills up until now.

  13. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    SIR – I find it extraordinary to hear Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, suggest that the answer to the cost of living crisis is to cut VAT by 2.5 per cent.

    This suggestion is only possible because we have left the European Union, which the Liberal Democrats wanted us to re-join – in which case we would have no power to reduce VAT.

    Philip Christopherson
    Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

    Quite so, Philip Christopherson. The suggested reduction comes from the puffed-up nonentity who leads the Limp Dumbs, and therefore can safely be disregarded.  Indeed, everything about him is ‘extraordinary’; his nonsensical policies, his lack of ability and his belief that anyone, apart from a few supporters, is listening to him. In any event, 2.5% will not make any appreciable difference.  Never mind, he got his media headline and can now move on to the next ineffective gimmick…

    1. I am not so sure that Philip Christopherson is correct, because the Germans lowered VAT by 3 percent temporarily during the corona time, and that’s probably where Ed Davey got the idea from.

      1. That’s because the EU is fundamentally a boondoggle for France and Germany.
        Everyone else has to obey orders.

        1. I am no fan of the EU, but that’s not how they work. Britain was a net contributor, which gave us as many rights as the other net contributors. They are currently tightening the screw on Hungary and Poland because they give them money – citing failure to uphold the EU’s democratic principles – when there is mandatory vaccination for over 50s in Italy, and they are debating the same measure in Germany today!!
          I can’t help feeling the EU are making a mistake by waiting until the day after Hungary’s elections to announce sanctions – making it very clear to the Hungarian people that the EU expects obedience in voting!

          1. If the Hungarians don’t know that the EU expects obedience in voting they haven’t been paying attention – referenda in France, Denmark, Ireland (vote twice or else) and their attitude to our voting to leave should have given them plenty of clues.

          2. It’s the same in Poland though – they want the lovely money, plus the chance to go freely to western Europe and earn a lot. The globalists think everything can be bought – let’s see if they are right or not.

  14. SIR – The revelation that some 2,921 town hall officials earn more than £100,000 necessitates an urgent inquiry as to how local authority salaries are assessed.

    While some staff are responsible for large budgets, these funds are received from council tax and government grants. There is no need for local authority officials to generate the profits that must be earned by private-sector managers.

    The skills required to allocate money to long-established budgets do not justify parity with salaries earned by those outside the comfort zone of local government.

    John Dickinson
    Chipperfield, Hertfordshire

    The BTL posters, so far, are in full agreement:

    Simon Bell10 MIN AGO

    John Dickinson puts into words what I have always felt. There is no special business acumen required to take money raised through compulsory taxation and spend it. It is merely an administrative role. The size of public sector budgets merely shows how bloated they have become.

    Angus Long6 HRS AGO

    “…The revelation that some 2,921 town hall officials earn more than £100,000 necessitates an urgent inquiry as to how local authority salaries are assessed…”

    Extract from the letter by John Dickinson.

    I have long felt that senior public sector managers, councillors etc are overpaid. They claim they need a fat cat remuneration to attract the best executives.

    Total nonsense, most couldn’t run a bath. They are largely unaccountable and totally useless wastes of time and money.

    There should be a salary cap of £55k and no bonuses.

    If they don’t like that, then they can ply their executive skills in the private sector.

    I’d give most of them 2-3 weeks in the real world.

  15. And now for something far more serious:

    SIR – Anyone hoping to enjoy a ride on a steam train should bear in mind that, after Easter, there is a real chance that the entire railway heritage movement will have little or no coal left to burn.

    This season, the various railways will start relying on their existing stocks of coal, but replenishing them will be a major problem. The last remaining source of coal in Britain is no longer able to supply the right kind of “steam” coal. Some railways had been using coal imported from Russia. That source is now closed to them.

    Even if satisfactory coal can be sourced, the prices being asked for it are likely to put the finances of many railways in serious jeopardy.

    It is possible to convert steam locomotives to burn oil instead of coal, but that is a complicated and expensive process. If such conversions were made, once again the cost of fuel would be prohibitive.

    Martin Baldwin
    Allerton Bywater, West Yorkshire

    This country invented the steam locomotive, and we are said to be sitting on a coal reserve of around 300 years, some of which could power our locos without having to drag it half way around the world.  Oh, the irony of it all!

    2. Steam coal. Not all coal is suitable for raising steam in locomotives. Not sure if anthracite works.

  18. SIR – I recently wrote to M&S Bank asking for a small increase in the credit limit on my M&S card. In reply I received a one-line unsigned letter telling me that I must contact the call centre to discuss the matter.

    When I contact call centres of large organisations, I almost always have to wait an inordinate amount of time for my call to be answered, and when I do eventually get through I am often dealing with a junior employee who is working from a script. An inquiry such as the one I made should surely be actioned by a senior person, and a politely worded letter saying yes or no to my request would have been much more appropriate.

    Why are large organisations so averse to entering into correspondence?

    Paul Blundell
    Daventry, Northamptonshire

    In my experience it is even worse than that, Mr Blundell.  Many organisations seem to actively shun any kind of contact because they hide their contact details to make them as difficult as possible to find.  The bigger they are, the worse it is.  And as for government departments…

    2. I have been trying to contact Shell Energy (run by Royal Dutch Shell). Their complaints email which it took me ages to get hold of bounces.

  19. SIR – I lived in London throughout the Second World War. It would have been unthinkable then to be buying gas from Nazi Germany while it was slaughtering millions. Why is Russian gas not sanctioned?
    John Jenkins
    Bath, Somerset

    Erm…perhaps because the lights will go out in much of Europe, Mr Jenkins, thanks to myopic governments that have failed dismally to understand that relying on foreign powers for their energy security really isn’t a good idea? Just a thought.

    2. So what, Mr Jenkins? We buy gas from the US whose foreign policies have slaughtered millions in my lifetime. We buy loads of stuff from China who slaughter and oppress thousands every year. Why are you getting so upset about Ukraine alone? Is it because the Shriekometer has told you to?

  21. From today’s DT:

    Boris Johnson’s energy plan backs big increases in nuclear, wind and solar power

    Prime Minister says ‘bold’ steps will ‘reduce dependence on power sources exposed to volatile international prices’

    By
    Ben Riley-Smith,
    POLITICAL EDITOR
    6 April 2022 • 10:30pm

    Boris Johnson will on Thursday reveal plans for 95 per cent of Britain’s electricity to come from green sources by 2030, with vast increases in nuclear, wind and solar power.

    Up to four new nuclear power stations and scores of smaller “modular” reactors are set to be built to quadruple the country’s nuclear energy capacity.

    Thousands of new wind turbines will be constructed at sea, including on vast floating platforms, bringing a fivefold increase in offshore wind capacity.

    The effective ban on new onshore wind farms in England is set to be lifted, with a consultation on planning changes and energy discounts for people living near developments, although specific targets have been dropped.

    Major increases in solar energy capacity and the use of hydrogen have also been set, with even the possibility of tapping into tidal and geothermal energy to be “aggressively” pursued.

    Currently, 55 per cent of electricity in Britain comes from low carbon sources, meaning the adoption of a more rapid switch away from fossil fuels than previously planned.

    The announcements will be delivered in the energy security strategy, designed to boost energy independence. But there are no extra measures to help households with the immediate increases in energy bills in the cost-of-living crisis.

    Mr Johnson said: “We’re setting out bold plans to scale up and accelerate affordable, clean and secure energy made in Britain, for Britain – from new nuclear to offshore wind – in the decade ahead.

    “This will reduce our dependence on power sources exposed to volatile international prices we cannot control, so we can enjoy greater energy self-sufficiency with cheaper bills.”

    The strategy is the result of weeks of negotiations in Whitehall as ministers balanced their desire to overhaul energy supply after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the cost implications.

    Mr Johnson, a new evangelist for the potential of nuclear power, got his way over the Treasury about the scale of increase in capacity to be targeted.

    By 2050, the UK will have a nuclear energy capacity of 24 gigawatts under the plans, up from 6GW currently. It means that, year round, a quarter of UK electricity would come from nuclear.

    Funding for one new nuclear power plant, Sizewell C in Suffolk, has already been announced by the Government. Two more will secure funding in the Parliament after the next election.

    In total, up to eight more nuclear reactors could be built in the UK. That means four new nuclear power stations given that each new station tends to have two reactors, according to a government source.

    The clearest signal yet will also be given about the locations of the next two power stations – Wylfa, on the Welsh island of Anglesey, and Oldbury, South Gloucestershire.

    Offshore wind is the second major plank of the energy overhaul, with a new target of 50GW of offshore capacity by 2030. Currently there is around 11 GW, meaning a major increase in eight years.

    In the last week there has been growing nervousness on the Tory benches about the scale of onshore wind developments being sought. The Telegraph revealed last week that a tripling of onshore capacity by 2035 had been the aim, but that specific ambitions has been scrubbed from the plan.

    Instead there is a commitment to launch a consultation about changing the planning rules in England, which effectively allow new wind turbines to be blocked by a handful of local objections.

    Communities will be offered “guaranteed lower energy bills” if they approve nearby wind farms and will also be able to reject projects, although it is unclear exactly how.

    There will be no lifting of the fracking moratorium, but an “impartial technical review” on the safety of shale gas extraction will be carried out by the British Geological Society.

    The Government will also formally confirm that a new round of licences to drill in the North Sea for oil and gas is coming in the autumn. Ministers see the option as better than importing Russian oil and gas. There are also aims to double “low carbon” hydrogen production capacity to 10GW by 2030.

    The strategy includes few hard number commitments to new spending, likely to see critics question its deliverability.

    Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, said: “We have seen record high gas prices around the world. We need to protect ourselves from price spikes in the future by accelerating our move towards cleaner, cheaper, home-grown energy.

    “The simple truth is that the more cheap, clean power we generate within our borders, the less exposed we will be to eye-watering fossil fuel prices set by global markets we can’t control.”

    * * *

    In all this flannel I can’t seem to find any apology for getting us into this mess in the first place. The BTL’s are scathing:

    David Allen Smith
    JUST NOW
    Whe we get through to this clown that wind turbines are useless when then wind doesn’t blow or blows to strongly; and solar panels don’t work very efficiently for most of the time in this country?
    We don’t have the geography for hydro- electric and tidal is hugely expensive to build.
    We must use our own gas now and develop our nuclear power station fleet.

    Julie Bower
    8 HRS AGO
    A well thought-out strategy, fully costed and simple to implement within the chosen timeframe. Yup, that was the objective, and what we have is exactly the opposite. The man is an imbecile.

    Augustine Longmanche
    8 HRS AGO
    Nope not good enough Boris, try again tomorrow with another leaked energy proposal announcement – might have it right by Christmas
    Energy strategy made up on the hoof.
    Not sure why they keep trialing their energy proposal via MSM, when its obvious what the electorate wants – FRACK now.

    Paul Butler
    8 HRS AGO
    Utter, total ‘green’, useless, madness.
    GET RID of Boris, before we all go down with him ( or more likely, on our own with him looking down on us).
    A complete idiot….fracking and our own resources under the sea are our only way forward right now.

    David Lonsdale
    8 HRS AGO
    Germany is building 25 coal fired power stations. They should have stuck with nuclear, but their politicians are well aware that wind is not a reliable source of energy with which to run an industrial economy. The children in BEIS and Number 10 are still listening to the green blob which infests the civil service. Can someone please tell them that in 2030 the wind will be no more reliable then than it is now.
    As for the British Geological Survey doing an impartial review, of course it isn’t. Its report will reflect what Crack Pot Kwarteng wants to read.

    Andrew Hicks
    7 HRS AGO
    95 per cent of Britain’s energy to come from green sources by 2030? Don’t be ridiculous! We need to be self-sufficient in energy whatever the source, green or otherwise. Build nuclear, start fracking, grant more North Sea licenses. We need energy not more hot air!

    1. Please, Bozza: find yourself a nice sensible mistress who is not spoilt princess.

    1. She has gone very weird. She used to be an interesting read on East Europe affairs.

    1. However Anne, it does show that EV chargers are not hack proof.

      Think very carefully before entering your credit card details.

      1. Good point. Thank goodness I am too poor and cynical to be bothered with souped up milk floats.
        However, thinking about the electric car driving smugsters round our way, this item gave us a good laugh. It would either give them a heart attack or revived dim and distant memories.

      2. Have a separate debit card just for paying the charger. Only top it up when you need to recharge. Keep your money safe.

    3. Great comment “Electric vehicle owners were left shocked … Who writes this stuff?”

  25. 351866+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,
    The decent peoples of the United Kingdom are fighting on multiple fronts as in political
    investors supplying arms to one side of a conflict whilst trading with the other,

    The political need for more offshore scam money mills & extending the war by dubious double dealing is a cert wonga
    creator.

    Casualties of war are the footings for many a fortune, collateral damage / death pays well.
    The other fronts facing the decent brigade are the lab/lib/con supporter / voters going
    into divine wind mode for the May elections
    addicted to political shite & seeking more.

  26. ‘Now there are far more people who have gone into POLITICS with the aim of getting a job in government and they have been of rather poor material.’
    Norman Tebbit.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6a51f048b0852e16fb7c1e20ce66e6948ed800272c6f536a93ee2db7ebd71e0f.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/73449b471dd66207681231cd46d9ef04ba3130d5762e6614b11f0a04c1a2a00c.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f1b900e527f939ee5431a354706c412b43d8c7f7729ee9a13a68d34d0669c8fc.png
    I don’t know if anyone read this wonderful article, in last Saturday’s DT Magazine, but I hope it shows up properly on this forum.

    1. Morning, Girzz; here it is in a more legible form.

      https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/04/02/norman-tebbit-many-people-politics-today-rather-poor-material/

      Norman Tebbit: ‘Too many people in politics today are rather poor material’

      Once dubbed the ‘Chingford Skinhead’, the recent retiree talks about the IRA, losing his wife and his first impressions of Margaret Thatcher

      By Simon Heffer 2 April 2022 • 5:00am

      Norman Tebbit

      The soothing charm of Bury St Edmunds, with its refined Georgian houses and elegant public buildings, is not a setting one might immediately associate with a man who made his name as the great political street fighter of his generation. But it is in the shadow, appropriately, of the Suffolk town’s great Norman Tower, in one of these handsome houses that another great Norman has chosen to spend his retirement after stepping down from the House of Lords last month: Lord Tebbit, the Chingford Skinhead, the ‘semi-house-trained polecat’, the man who told the unemployed to get on their bikes, the Tory who was more Thatcherite than Mrs Thatcher herself.

      Tebbit and I have been friends for so long that I can’t recall when I first met him: it was, I think, just before the 1987 general election, when he had returned to be chairman of the Conservative Party after recovering from the devastating injuries he sustained in the IRA’s attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984, during the party conference. The footage of him and his wife Margaret being pulled from the rubble early on that eerily still October morning still has the power to shock; not only had the Tebbits nearly been killed, but Margaret’s injuries were so severe that she spent the remaining 36 years of her life in a wheelchair.

      In all the years I have known Tebbit we have never discussed this life-changing moment, so it is somewhat surreal to hear him today, at 91 – spare figure stooped with age, neatly dressed in a pullover and tie, brilliantined hair white – recollecting such a dramatic event from the serenity of his drawing room.

      ‘The bombing did make an enormous difference to me,’ he recalls with trademark understatement. ‘Margaret and I had gone to bed. I’d not really wanted to stay on that Thursday night – I just wanted to get home – but I thought it might look a bit untidy on the platform if I wasn’t there. We were woken by the explosion – it was not a big bomb, but big enough to destabilise the big brick chimney, which collapsed. Margaret and I were injured, bleeding, tangled up, and I doubted whether we were going to survive.’

      He owes his life, he says, to Fred Bishop, a fireman. ‘He was on the lead engine that came out. They ran through what they thought was sea mist [it was smoke from the bomb] to see the hotel with the front torn out. Fred said to his team, “Chaps, you know the rules, if that was a bomb we can’t go in until the bomb squad have cleared it of booby traps. I think it was a fire in the kitchens, don’t you?” And they said, “Yes, it was a fire in the kitchens.” If Fred Bishop hadn’t done that, a lot more would have died.

      Not only had the Tebbits nearly been killed by the bomb in Brighton, but Margaret’s injuries were so severe that she spent the remaining 36 years of her life in a wheelchair Credit: Shutterstock

      ‘We were semi-conscious, Margaret and I: there are those famous pictures of me being dug out. A bloke in the back of the ambulance with me, as they took me to hospital, remembers saying to me before he gave me a painkilling injection, “Are you allergic to anything?” and I replied, “Oh yes, bombs.”’

      Tebbit cracks jokes whenever he can. But as he rattles around his big house, there is a sadness about him that suggests life’s heavy toll sometimes catches up. He was widowed just before Christmas 2020; he and Margaret had been married for 64 years, and their loyalty to one another was fierce. When we speak of Margaret’s death he remains stoical, but the pain is still evident.

      ‘It was pretty devastating,’ he says. ‘I woke in the night, put my hand out to her and found she was cold, and that she was dead, and that was quite awful.’

      The pair met in 1955 when he was a young pilot in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force (RAuxAF) and she a nurse. Young Tebbit had originally, at 16, gone to work at the Financial Times, where, with the help of his school, Edmonton Grammar, he had landed a job putting together the share prices page. ‘The great objective was to see if one could get through an obscene sub-heading for a paragraph,’ Tebbit recalls with a chuckle. ‘All the successes were posted on the wall. Phillips’ rubber soles were very useful in that respect.’

      After a national service stint in the RAF, however, the appeal of rude headlines had waned. ‘I got bored,’ he admits. He went off to sell advertising, but kept his hand in as a pilot in the RAuxAF, joining 604 County of Middlesex Squadron. ‘I entered another new world – my flight commander was a partner in a leading firm of solicitors, the CO was a Lloyd’s underwriter. I then began to grow up.’

      Not that his childhood until that time had been without event. Tebbit grew up on the borders of Enfield and Edmonton, where Hertfordshire and Essex meet. His father had fought on the Western Front in the First World War, and the post-traumatic stress, or shell shock as it was then, meant that ‘the rest of his life was just useless. He couldn’t cope with anything, really.’ It was his mother, the daughter of a butcher, ‘a very tough lady’, who ‘managed everything. In 1926, at the heart of the general strike she was delivering meat to customers in a pony and trap when a picket line tried to stop her. She simply whipped the pony first and, as they rode through the line, whipped the pickets too.’

      Tebbit was eight when war broke out. ‘Probably my most powerful early memory was being at home with my parents and hearing Mr Chamberlain in 1939 say that Herr Hitler had not responded to his ultimatum, and therefore we were at war. And I remember rushing to the window and looking out to see if things looked any different.

      ‘At the beginning of the war, my brother, who’s three years older than me, and I were evacuated to South Wales. It was so heavily bombed we were brought back home.’ But there was bombing there too: ‘We had a lot of air raids and had to use an outdoor Anderson shelter, which was bloody awful.

      ‘Towards the end of the war, during the flying bomb raids, my parents were in the shelter and my older brother and I were sitting outside when we heard a doodlebug. When the engine cut, if you didn’t hear it coming down it was going to be pretty close. Well, when it came down, the door flew open, and several houses on the other side of the road were destroyed.’

      His father’s experiences were what made him choose the RAF for his national service. ‘I didn’t want to risk what my father had gone through. Remembering that we had nearly lost the Battle of Britain, not because we were running out of aircraft, but because we were running out of pilots, I volunteered – I had been highly impressed by the Battle as a child. I got my wings, and started flying Meteor fighters.’ His subsequent return to the RAuxAF sounds idyllic. ‘Somebody once asked me what I did with my childhood. I replied, “I delayed it.” My childhood was spent growing up in 604 Squadron.’

      As he talks about those days it is clear that it was the camaraderie, and the chance to meet people outside his normal suburban circles, that he found the most appealing. Not least because it also led him to Margaret. He was not entirely oblivious to the opposite sex, thanks to his time at school. ‘It was unusual for those days in that it was a mixed school. There were these girl things, which was interesting because I hadn’t got any sisters, and so one talked to girls.’ Margaret was the daughter of a tenant farmer from Cambridgeshire. They married six months after they met, in 1956, at which point Tebbit decided to put his practical skills to better use in order to fund their married life. He took a job with BOAC, flying mostly on routes to Africa, the Far East and down to Australia.

      Although he had landed an enviable job, the strains on family life were soon apparent once their first son, John, was born in 1958. Like many pilots, Tebbit found he was rostered to be away on special family occasions, and this became more apparent after their daughter Alison was born two years later; William, their third child, was born in 1965. By that stage Tebbit had taken the initiative. ‘I noticed many pilots would simply call in sick when they wanted to be at home, which was causing chaos. I suggested that we be allowed to take control of our own rosters. We did, and it worked: absenteeism dropped like a stone. It was a lesson for my life in politics – always look at the roots of a problem and not just its symptoms if you want to solve it.’

      Despite this, life with three small children took its toll. After William was born, Margaret suffered from postnatal depression and ended up in hospital, leaving Tebbit in charge of a seven-year-old, a toddler and a newborn. ‘I managed.’ It would not be the last time he would do so.

      A ll his life Tebbit had been influenced by his upbringing, by a clear understanding of the link between effort and reward, and by the importance of seizing opportunities when they presented themselves.

      Even before his national service, he became a Young Conservative, because, ‘I realised I was not a statist.’ This was during the period when the Attlee administration, which had ruled since Labour’s landslide victory in 1945, had started to nationalise industries it considered strategically important and to provide cradle-to-grave welfarism. Tebbit had been forced to join a print union when he worked at the FT, and it had given him a loathing of the power of the closed shop. Everything in his upbringing – not least the self-reliance of his parents – had taught him that it was the growth of the individual, and not of the state or of collectives, that was the key to a successful future. However, during the 1950s and 1960s, the leadership of the Conservative Party did not always think like Norman Tebbit.

      The parliamentary party had, though, ceased to be the preserve of the privileged classes, exemplified by Ted Heath – from a similar background to Tebbit – becoming leader in 1965. Tebbit, as a party activist in Hertfordshire, disapproved of Heath’s consensual policies, and increasingly in the late 1960s of his management of the party. In a fit of frustration, he wrote a letter of protest to Iain Macleod, a leading member of the shadow cabinet and former party chairman on whose judgment Heath relied heavily.

      ‘After Margaret died I thought whether I should sell this place, and go and live in sheltered accommodation. Then I realised I might not like that, and I’d have buggered it all up’ Credit: Tobias Harvey

      Years earlier, Tebbit had been on the selection committee at Enfield that had chosen Macleod. ‘I wrote to him, presuming on our acquaintance, telling him what was wrong, and what should be done to put it right – I was a young man and so knew all these things! He replied that, if I thought things were wrong and I knew how to put it right, why didn’t I go and help them do it? And I remember saying to my wife, “I bloody well will.”’

      This was quite a leap from being an airline pilot, but Tebbit had acquired a taste for wider political involvement at a time when his party wanted people such as him – self-made men and women who could relate to an electorate increasingly full of voters with a similar background. Once he had made his decision, Tebbit threw himself into the process of trying to become an MP.

      ‘I knew I had to fight a hopeless seat, do well, and then get a safe Tory seat. I decided the place for me was Epping, which included Harlow New Town, which was a rather Corbynista place,’ he observes. ‘Ninety per cent of the housing was owned by the New Town Commission or the council, and the Labour Party went round at election time to help people put their posters up – or rather, to tell them they were going to put their posters up.

      ‘I think their majority was seven or eight thousand. We fought a good campaign: Stan Newens, my Labour opponent, was very indignant about my first piece of election literature. It was a picture of me standing beside a civil aircraft in my uniform, and it said: “Why does a man with one of the best jobs in Britain want to do something else?” The only place where the word “Conservative” was mentioned was in the imprint at the bottom.’

      The contest was tight. ‘On the night of the count it became obvious it was close. A recount was called, and I was duly elected: which was not the plan at all. I woke up the next morning in bed in a hotel in Epping and said to my wife, “Oh Christ, what have I done now?”

      ‘She was very supportive, but was a bit shattered about it too. It meant a complete change in our life. She had to go back to nursing to help make ends meet.’

      The Tory party of the early 1970s was a turbulent place. ‘It was soon quite clear that Heath was making a balls of it. And Airey Neave took me to one side to ask me who I thought would make a better leader. I said, “I don’t know enough.” He replied, “You’d better come and talk to Margaret Thatcher,” whom I’d never spoken to before.

      ‘Having met her, I agreed that she was the one. We had quite a long conversation. What struck me about her was that she was the daughter of a lower-middle-class shopkeeper in middle England. She was a qualified scientist and had worked as one. She was a Christian and she had a powerful intellect. You could guess where she was going to go.’

      Since he has mentioned Christianity, it occurs to me that there is another conversation we have never had in all these years, but which, given all he has been through, might be relevant. ‘Do you consider yourself a religious man, Norman?’

      He looks especially contemplative. ‘I started off as an atheist and slid across to being an agnostic: I felt that one couldn’t be certain whether God existed, but I thought it would be rather a good idea if He did, and took more of an interest in our affairs. I have gradually slid to being on the believer edge, so I am an occasional attendee at the cathedral here.’

      As for whether particular experience of the bomb had affected his view of God, he says, ‘No, I don’t think so. I remember coming round in hospital and finding a nurse sitting next to me. She told me what had happened. I’d suffered a hell of a lot of injuries – broken collar bone, several broken ribs, some had penetrated my chest cavity and my lungs, several vertebrae though not, thank God, my spinal cord, the top of my left hip, and all sorts of bits and pieces.’

      He was moved to Stoke Mandeville to be with Margaret, who was in the spinal injuries unit there. He was made to eat all he could to build up his body tissue. ‘The doctor said to me, “It’s bloody awful food, so to assist you I’ll send you in a case of red wine, which you can keep under the bed.” It was the health service at its best.’

      Severe though his injuries were, they did not compare with his wife’s. ‘I realised that she was very badly injured right from the beginning. It was clear that she was never going to walk again.’ It was six months before he could return to work, so he ran his department, with the help of officials, from his hospital bed. Considering the extent of Margaret’s handicap, did he consider leaving public life at once?

      ‘No. That would have been to give the IRA another victory… The only occasion when I was ever cheered from all sides of the House was when I came back in after the hospital to take my seat.’

      At the time of the bomb, Tebbit was Secretary of State for Trade, running the Thatcher programme of privatisation. He was seen as a natural successor to her: he had already become ‘the Chingford Skinhead’ – a coinage believed to have been made by Private Eye and, thanks to Michael Foot, also a ‘semi-house-trained polecat’. Did he mind? ‘No. Not really. It made me laugh. I remember calling Foot a fascist. He was upset about that. He was even more upset the next day when a newspaper said, “Tebbit was right: Foot is a fascist.”’

      He declined to serve, however, in the cabinet after the 1987 election. ‘It was because of my need to earn more money to look after Margaret.’

      Above his desk there is a photograph of Tebbit, sleek and dashing in white tie and tails, looking tenderly at Margaret as she dabs her eyes. It was taken when she went out in public for the first time after the bomb, at a smart City dinner. One only needed a few moments with Margaret to gauge the extent of her heroism, but Tebbit’s, in overcoming the attempt to murder both of them and then devoting much of the rest of his life to caring for her, is no less immense.

      The bombing remained with him. A couple of years ago, he finally gave up game shooting: I used to see him twice every season at a pheasant shoot in Norfolk where his Danish son-in-law Paul was the estate manager. I can testify to his accuracy – and he was rumoured to mutter ‘Adams’ or ‘McGuinness’ every time he pulled the trigger.

      ‘I was once asked what would I do if I bumped into Adams and McGuinness. I said that as long as I was driving a heavy truck when I bumped into them I would laugh. The IRA were the great beneficiaries of the Good Friday Agreement. They were all given get-out-of-jail-free cards by Blair, while they continue to prosecute the soldiers who were trying to protect people against the IRA: monstrous, absolutely monstrous.’

      He thinks public life has changed ‘for the worse’ in his half-century in Parliament. ‘There have always been bounders of one kind or another. But now I think there are far more people who have gone into politics with the aim of getting into a job in government, and they have on the whole been rather poor material. There are one or two who’ve got ability and integrity. I think the leader of those is the Chancellor. But I think you could make a better cabinet, a smaller cabinet, and a cabinet principally of people who had not been career politicians all their lives.’

      So what now for Tebbit the polecat? Now that he has retired, will he slide gracefully into the sunset? He has full-time carers and he is close to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Tebbit family values remain cast-iron, and all three of his children provide a serious support group for him.

      He feels comfortable in Bury, and plans to spend the rest of his days there. ‘After Margaret died I thought whether I should sell this place, and go and live in sheltered accommodation. Then I realised I might not like that, and I’d have buggered it all up. So I’m going to stay here. It’s a lovely house. I’ve got my office and I’ve got my library, and I get a huge number of emails.’

      It seems that there will be no sliding away for Norman Tebbit, whose iron resolve will doubtless cause him to seek controversy outside the Lords just as he did inside it. ‘My coat of arms,’ he tells me with a twinkle as I leave, ‘has a polecat on it.’ “

      2. I did read it last weekend- he’s an inspiring example and a great contrast to current politicians.

      3. A nugget of gold in amongst all the sh1t of what is called the Conservative Party.
        KBO Norman.

  27. Allison Pearson has been going through the motions, a procedure with which many Nottlers will be very familiar:

    COMMENT

    I popped my poo in the post – and now I can’t wait for the results

    After a warning from my doctor, I let the experts examine my digestive system… I just worry they’ll find mainly Jaffa Cakes

    ALLISON PEARSON6 April 2022 • 5:00am

    My poo is in the post. I wish I could tell you that was a metaphor, but my poo actually is in the post – or it was. I sent the “stool sample” – ugh, why does stool manage to sound even worse than poo? – to Viome, a company in the US that uses artificial intelligence to analyse microbes and mRNA from samples, and then uses something called a “gene expression database” to identify chronic diseases. At least, that’s what it says on the box you put the you-know-what in.

    Getting the sample itself was what the kids would call “Eeuw, gross, Mum”, although I thought I managed the hammocky paper thing you hang across the toilet bowl quite well. There may have been rather too much, er, sample, but you don’t get to negotiate quantities, do you? “I’ve started so I’ll finish,” as dear Bamber used to say.

    After that bit is done, you carefully take a pea-sized piece of poo, put it into a test-tube full of chemicals and shake. I gave Himself a padded envelope containing the sample to post.

    “So, what address is this going to – the House at Pooh Corner?”

    “Oh, ha ha, very funny. You never support me when I try to improve my health.”

    “That’s not fair. Who handwashed your Nutribullet when you were living on duck s—?”

    “Kale smoothie, actually.”

    I’ve been on a strict health regime since I consulted the sainted Dr Rob, a private GP who is besieged by people who still want to see a GP in person – not to be told by their GP that they are seeing patients in person. (They really aren’t.)

    Dr Rob explained that I was at a fork in the road. If I took one path it would lead to type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer and death. But, if I took the other path and gave up sugar, I would lose weight and, most importantly, not be diabetic or dead. Well, not for a while.

    When a doctor gives you a diagnosis and tells you you can avoid a nasty condition if you just improve your diet it makes you think of all the people who get diagnoses that no change on earth will rectify. Or that’s how I felt anyway.

    Two months later, with blood sugar notably improved and a dress size down, I thought I’d graduate to the gut microbiome “the most important scientific discovery for human health in decades”. Bigger than the average human brain, the gut microbiome is “a bustling community of trillions of bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses. It is massively complex and its residents vary enormously from person to person.”

    Residents? I’m worried they’ll find mainly M&S Mini Jaffa Cakes in mine.

    Analysis of the poo sample follows shortly. Meanwhile, I get perky emails almost daily from Viome. “Would you like to know how your stool is progressing?”

    No, I really wouldn’t, thank you.

    Nor am I that keen on what they call the “assessment of your overall gas production activity”.

    Unless, that is, it can somehow be harnessed to power the central heating.

    Not unexpectedly the BTLs are worth reading:

    Roger Roger22 HRS AGO

    My three year old girl asked me:

    “Where does poo come from?”

    I was a little uncomfortable but decided to give her an honest explanation. So I said “you just ate breakfast, yes?”

    “Yes”she replied.

    “Well, the food goes into our tummies and our bodies take out all the good stuff, and then whatever is left over comes out of our bottoms when we go to the toilet, and that is poo.”

    She looked a little perplexed, and stared at me in stunned silence for a few seconds and asked “And Tigger?”

    Andy Fewings23 HRS AGO

    Nice one, had a good giggle reading this, but then, as an ageing male teenager over 60 years old, anything poo related makes me chuckle..

    Ford Prefect21 HRS AGO

    Written in the dust on the back of a sewage truck;

    “No stools kept in this vehicle overnight”

    Boots The Chemist
    20 HRS AGO
    NHS offers bower cancer screening if you’re in the right age range. The system they use is similar to that described here. But before they used plastic-coated cardboard tabs, smaller versions of what you get left over after eating a magnum.
    Wife and I called the process ‘playing poo sticks’

    1. And me.
      Wordle 292 4/6

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

      1. Wordle 292 3/6
        ⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
        🟨🟩🟩⬜⬜
        🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
        I seem to be on a roll.

  31. Good morning, my friends

    The ultra-Remainers are mobilising to prepare the ground for rejoining the EU
    It is so important to get on with our own reforms to improve productivity and growth. All the levers are now in our hands
    David Frost : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2022/04/06/ultra-remainers-mobilising-prepare-ground-rejoining-eu/

    I wonder if Boris Johnson is aware that if the Northern Ireland Protocol is not scrapped in the next few months then the Conservative Party is dead, Brexit is dead and his own career is dead.

    I am beginning to think that he is fully aware of these things and it is what he wants.

    But I wonder if he thinks that his current wife will stay with him a moment longer once he is no longer prime minister?

  32. And, with a ton of concrete ballast to shift up the “garden”, the bloody rain has started.
    So here is a couple of pictures of one of my amaryllis plants. 3 trumpets open and a 4th ready to burst.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0a333d41f6009b8c9f5a23a8aa17046dba68334a27bbb762c3dc53685d9a4192.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9c9c5b6fe1f6ba2a6ce5244161dc5ae295511197c627e785a2e951c32d9c9de7.jpg

    And can anyone identify the little beastie I saw up the “garden” t’other day? It had a furry body, long proboscis and, from the raggad state of the wings, was just about on its last legs:-

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9e4ac382b195e51378eaaa74469763382b4a833f62f86327e9e5a05d99bc2d80.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ee118dcf4651dc9f37ad5c63c82b0d8e49cb5244fc892a8a5560bfe5f765f687.jpg

      1. I have Amaryllis in my conservatory. Not quite open yet. My mum grew them too. One year she had 16 flowers on one stem.

    2. Morning Bob

      The little creature is a bee-fly, we have a few of them in our garden . They are also great little pollinators , poor thing was probably cold and hungry .

      2. We have a lot of them on the lawn looking for burrowing insect species to parasitise.

    4. My amaryllis is also in bloom, nearly over. Extraordinarily tall stem this year.

    5. Were it not better done, as others use,
      To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
      Or with the tangles of Neæra’s hair?

      The only reason, according to John Milton, for why we should not engage in such dalliance and ‘scorn delights and live laborious days’ is because we seek celebrity or reputation: Fame is the The Spur.

      (Howard Spring borrowed this phrase from Lycidas for the title of one of his novels.)

    6. Nice! Have you seen the new ones, Bob, hardy, you can grow them outside. Was thinking about getting some but since Hippeastrum only flower for a brief period they would strike me as pretty useless in the garden other than as a curiosity.

    1. Aside from on site days I work from home almost all the time. It’s really rare to go into the office at all.

      Am I somehow lazier than those who do go in?

    3. Just another, but more sophisticated version of black robbery which African Americans are famous for. It’s an upgrade from, ‘gimmie yo wallet or I’ll shoot yo ass muvva fukah.’

    1. Just what is CO2e? It’s a pure nonsense, do they mean the chemical compound CO₂?

      1. As the whole concept of human-generated CO2 influencing climate is nonsense, let us not worry about these small details.

        1. But all these terms like Carbon Neutral, Carbo Net Zero, Carbon Credits etc are being used by people as if they made sense.

          1. I agree, but they form a sort of weird sub-set of the English language, in which everyone understands what is meant, regardless of the fact that it would make utterly no sense to someone fifty years ago. As far as I am concerned, the more ridiculous the better, as it might make people finally wake up!

          2. It’s rather like calling the EU, Europe – which it ain’t although it would like to be.

            Carbon is a solid element like diamonds and coal.

            CO2 is a gaseous element, of which there is a 0.04% trace in the atmosphere.

            Will milady be burying her diamonds for carbon points? Thought not.

          3. You know it doesn’t make sense, I know it doesn’t make sense, other rational people know it doesn’t make sense, and honest scientists know it doesn’t make sense. But all of us put together are useless against one propagandist able to whip up irrational and emotional hysteria in the service of politicians doing their best to make us subservient and rip us off for their own profit.

          4. We’d be utterly fucked without carbon. After all. we are all carbon life forms. No carbon: no life.

  39. The headlines giving the top item in the Telegraph’s printed letters that Geoff puts each day on the page (for which we thank him!) amuse me these days. Seeing them on their own makes one realise they are simply part of the Telegraph’s in house branch of the government’s Nudge unit…

  40. About to venture out in the howling gale and rain to get myself a bag of fine bark so I can make up a mix to pot on some of my seedling Clivias. I may be some time…

      1. Don’t worry. I haven’t gone. One advantage of living where I do is that I can see the future weather coming across from Wales some time before it gets here. I shall wait for a clear spell…

      1. No, I’m cheating. I’m buying germinated hybridised seed from a chap who imports them from Australia!

    3. O Rose thou art sick.
      The invisible worm,
      That flies in the night
      In the howling storm:
      Has found out thy bed
      Of crimson joy:
      And his dark secret love
      Does thy life destroy.

      [William Blake]

  41. Yesterday one of our students failed to shut the sliding door of the minibus properly and as we drove off it flew open. The student was wearing his safety belt and came to no harm but if he had fallen out and died it would have been recorded as a Covid death.

    When he asked why I had to explain that before the pandemic struck we were on the point of buying a new minibus but when our business was hit by Covid regulations we decided not to go ahead with the deal. So were it not for Covid we would have bought a new minibus which had a door that did not fly open. So, had he died by falling out of the minibus it would have been a death caused by Covid – and an ‘of Covid death‘ rather than a ‘with Covid death‘ because he was in good health and had no co-morbidities.

    2. I see that this post has been upvoted by Jennifer. Thinking it might be our old friend Jennifer S-P I clicked on her icon and found that this Jennifer (S-P or otherwise) was looking for more men to subscribe to her dating agency.

      I am not looking for a companion of this sort but other Nottlers might be – in which case they should contact Jennifer.

      1. I see I’ve been “auto-upvoted” by Brandi and Antonia so far today – we had a spate of this a while ago and it seemed to have stopped, but …

        {Edit – and there’s another auto vote]

      2. I see I’ve been “auto-upvoted” by Brandi and Antonia so far today – we had a spate of this a while ago and it seemed to have stopped, but …

        {Edit – and there’s another auto vote]

      5. My uptick was from a cooness called Jessica, clicked on the name and my anti-virus flagged it as ‘dangerous’ and blocked it.

  42. BBC website headline: “More Nato weapons needed to save lives – Ukraine”
    Do they ever read, or consider what they are posting? We need weapons to save lives? How does that work? I thought that the purpose of weapons was to take lives?
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news

    1. The West is disgracefully and irresponsibly prolonging this war, the final outcome of which is in no doubt, for their own cynical motives.

    2. No, no – the weapons will only be taking Russian lives, so that doesn’t matter, and as an added bonus the UK can claim another virtue signalling token!

    3. The purpose is to use the Ukrainians as useful idiots in order to exhaust Russia and bring it to its knees by a long war of attrition in which it is irrelevant how many people die. Russia is a major obstacle to the sort of world envisioned by the New World Order, the European Union and the rich, corrupt both private and governmental in the USA. The same people who are unhappy about Victor Oban’s re-election are the same murderous people responsible for this war and unless Russia inflicts enough damage on Ukraine so that it decides peace is preferable, the war will continue.

      1. I have no doubt that Putin knows exactly what is the West’s aim. It will be interesting to see how it all pans out.

    4. Morning all.
      My initial reaction was more weapons, more provocation. But what do i know ?

    5. I havent seen one main commentator, churches or governments suggesting a push for serious regional peace talks. The only factor that is preventing WW3 is Vlad’s restraint in attacking Nato supply lines into Ukraine.

      2. Reminds me of some big cheese perliceman saying (in an Ian Paisley voice), “We must STAMP OUT violence”.

  43. 351866+up ticks,
    There are two types of squeeze, the mass herd squeeze that is in many casess self inflicted suffering, and the squeeze suffered by sunak’s squeeze is the recommended squeeze of choice by, sunak’s squeeze.

    https://gettr.com/post/p13zzeec67b

      1. But not very fair to others. And but again, if they want to they can easily disguise their apparent duplicity towards the balance of the hard working British tax payers.

  47. Bluss – there is a gale blowing. Walking from the car to Morrisons, I was nearly blown off my feet. Delighted to note masks aplenty in said shop. Can’t be too careful, y’know.

    Squalls of sleet/snow between the sunshine. Fortunately, the wind is so strong that the showers pass very quickly.

    Are you not delighted that Fishi RIshi’s missus is able to enjoy a lucrative tax break? Warms the cockles….

    1. Managed to escape the rain on my little trip to buy crushed bark. Worst thing though is that I can hardly lift a 100litre bag of the stuff any more. The last few years have taken their toll. I remember in the 80s buying and taking home 200litre Grower’s bales of peat. Then in the 90s, there was presumably a new EU rule about max weights and you could only buy 100litre packs. They were fine until lack of exercise struck in 2019. Now, they too are a bit heavy!

      1. #MeToo. My local garden centre will bring it out and put it in the boot for me.

        1. Which leaves the problem of getting it out of the boot and transporting it to where it should be…

      2. Same here.

        Also discovered that last year’s 60 litre bags of potting compost have miraculously turned into 50 litre bags – but at the same price…..

      3. 100 litres of water would weigh 100kg.I can squat 100 kg (if it’s loaded before taking the weight) and chest press about 150kg and that’s my limit. Lifting 200kg of peat?! Sronky trousers!

    2. So bluddy strong that the contractors cannot fix our fence, blown down in the last hooley.

  48. Another strange story from the BBC, regarding a man and his son who were killed in a landslide in Australia. Mehraab Nazir, was a lawyer who lived and worked in Singapore as he had done for more than ten years.
    The article describes him as British.
    I wonder if a British passport has become a “passport of convenience” like those of Panlibonco* as described by Eric Ambler in “The Light of Day”?

    *Panlibonco: Panama, Liberia, and two other counties – I may well have garbled this a bit. I read the book forty years ago…

    Addendum edit : I’ve now had the comments about Mrs Chancellor of the Exchequer. Well, keeping it in the family… but do they not share a marital bed?

    2. I guess it depends WHO one knows in the FO, and whether bought passports awarded have the same value as a bought Knighthood .

      Your instinct could be correct , HP

      Mrs Chancellor of the Exchequer can afford to fly to the moon , yet she watches her over productive homeland sink further into corruption ( the smell has followed her to the UK)

    3. No, it is simply a tragedy whatever the ethnic heritage of the father.
      Mr Nazir’s parents in law have flown out to Australia from UK, and as their Christian names are Rex and Susan, I really don’t think it is fair to associate the death of a respected international lawyer with the subject of ‘passports of convenience’. Mrs Nazir was also critically injured.

        1. It’s Diane Abbott trying to count. And I claim the prize for the correct identification.

    2. The embryonic questing mind…A few hundred more generations and Planet of the Apes will come true.

  50. Good morning. As we crouch under the massive, brown torrent of rubbish coming out of the government and the media on the Ukraine, and hear the EU parasites and the White House pronouncing that Viktor Orban is an autocrat, we should I think find the irony, already rich, of such vapouring even greater with the news that yesterday marked the first summary acquittal of many to come of the many people who have been imprisoned without trial and often in conditions as bad as many notorious regimes after being arrested during the events of 6th January 2021 in Washington DC.

    It is hard to recognise, given the Cold War culture legacy, that for all its failings Russia is now a beleaguered bastion of conservative
    values. And by all accounts so is Hungary. Those very values that Telegraph readers held, and many still hold, dear. Here in the West those values are being attacked viciously by a Godless crew of ruthless determinists who think we are no more than machines. They are urinating on our civilisation, and we have all been drawn into materialism to a point where many will drink the Koolaid and lose their souls. The true war is here, and it is now.

    2. Exactly Jonathan. If you are a real Conservative you must support Russia and Poland. Hungary too. The West is going left and the aim is to destroy all the institutions that make as proud to be Westerners. The aim is the subjugation of the West, our societies, and all we traditionally stand for. We are being, slowly but surely, enslaved.

  51. We are continuing to watch the fake Ipcress File (the MR likes it, having never seen the film).

    The plot has become quite incomprehensible – but I am delighted that despite being tortured, hosed, beaten up and dragged and thrown around, the child playing Michael Caine still has undamaged spectacles. Amazing, that.

  52. Pertinent article by Widders in the Express- right on the money as usual.
    Brace yourselves….MH will be filling in his form later to take when he goes for his scan. Top of the form has his name- MALE and the 3rd question down, “Could you be pregnant?”
    Get the bunkers unlocked- I shall be hiding under the table 😉

    2. Was at the hospital yesterday. Was rather disappointed, I was not asked what sex I was or anything even vaguely like it. Apparently the Royal Surrey has yet to catch on.

      2. Just got the cook book you recommended. £2.70 with free postage. It’s a bit battered though. Not that i mind.

    3. Seeing as though it is now Ramadan. are there any questions we should be asking NHS consultants and their cohorts… are they safe to operate?

      1. A scan is relatively harmless and the doctor who did my biopsy was a white woman and very nice. That’s not a concern- their lack of follow up is.
        Calling the GP again later.

      2. In all seriousness, I would try to avoid having operations during Ramadan. I am sure they mean to be pious, but without food and drink, they cannot be as reliable as a properly nourished person would be.

    1. Do you spend your whole life looking for this stuff?

      I wouldn’t know where to begin!

  56. Wow, the wind is strong , sun is shining , still brr factor .. ne’er cast a clout till May be out weather… yet the post lady has been wearing shorts all through the seasons as she pushes her parcel post pram thing up and down drive ways

    Moh is cutting the grass now because the rain has held off all morning .

    Strange as I have just said the sun is shining , huge clouds are gathering from SW. Rain rain go away , come again another day .

    1. Took the van down for the MOT the insurers asked for to confirm it’s still safe to drive and took the DT with me as she had a parcel to post. Walking home was a mix of rain & sunshine with a bloody cold wind!

      1. Lovely. Is the brown foal the one with the flash on his/her face? The markings on the black and white one are beautiful.

    3. We’re off to talk to Iron Acton WI about hedgehogs…….. first talk since last September.

    4. There was a strong, bitterly cold wind here and heavy showers interlaced with snow. Global warming, dontcha know.

  60. The half blind old guy next door woke me up this morning and said there was a kangaroo in my garden. It was my greyhound having a shite.

    Oh look ! My coat.

    1. In the old music hall days, they used something like a shepherd’s crook to haul bad acts off the stage. Must find one….

      1. I used to pretend to have one years ago when the open mic night wasn’t so good.

  61. Has anyone any experience with the Ikea Ivar series? I’m looking at more efficient storage systems for the Warqueen’s desk and the vertical space seems ideal.

      1. Surely once built, they’re not intended to be un-built therefore it isn’t entirely unreasonable that they broke when she tried pop off the pins? I once stabbed myself in the nose by trying to prise out an IKEA pin that I’d popped into the wrong hole. Needed a stitch and got a black eye!

          1. It gave the policeman my neighbour called a good laugh too. She heard me scream and thought I’d been attacked so called the police but when the guy walked in and saw the IKEA assembly plans spread out on the living floor and the blood on the carpet, he realised immediatley what had actaully happened. He laughed and gave me a lift to Hammersmith Hospital.

        2. Putting together furniture can be a nightmare. My ex and I were assembling some bedroom furniture years ago- MFI, I think. Anyway, part of it swung back and hit me hard on the knee. Swelled up like a melon and turned blue and purple. And we were going to a party that night. I wore trousers but could barely walk. A few beverages soothed the pain;-)

        3. 🤣Easily done, Sue. Easily done!

          Do you remember the flat-pack emporium in the UK that was commonplace before IKEA raised its head? MFI (Made For Idiots). Their advert stated that a five-year old child with a screwdriver could assemble their flat-packs in ten minutes.

          I trawled the town for days but couldn’t find a single five-year old with a screwdriver anywhere!

      2. I can live with th epins being in there, and a broken shelf or two I don’t care about. It’s a stop gap measure.

    2. We had this in our study at our previous house. Easily dismantled and remantled(?) at our new house. Very sturdy. Maybe the design has changed though. We did the same with some wardrobes.

    4. Yes. It’s good for domestic stuff – books, etc. Too light for workshops. You can get stain to colour it to suit the location – we have a dark red one in the hall doing service as a shoe rack.

  62. Did anyone else catch the BBC news summary on R3 at 7:00 am? It’s being reported that some folk who have had Covid are experience Blood Clots months later. Odd I thought to myself. Wasn’t the ‘jab’ being suspected earlier of causing blood clots? I’ll guess we will never know unless large numbers of jabees who have never caught covid are diagnosed with clots and strokes …..

    2. Afternoon Stephen. We will have to wait a few years for the full story to seep out!

    3. Are the people who have had Covid but have not been jabbed (like Caroline and me) more or less likely to have Blood Clots than those who have had Covid having been jabbed?

      If the unjabbed are less likely to get the Blood Clots then it is a good argument in favour of not being jabbed.

      1. If there was a scintilla of evidence that a side effect of the jab is to cause blood clots then those in authority wold be dead keen to find another plausible cause and get the findings out early so it becomes the received wisdom…

      2. If there was a scintilla of evidence that a side effect of the jab is to cause blood clots then those in authority wold be dead keen to find another plausible cause and get the findings out early so it becomes the received wisdom…

    4. I rise at 8.00 am and put Radio 3 on a 8.05 am, purposely to avoid the “news” report. There isn’t one at 9.00 am and I leave for work at 9.15.

      1. I am reminded of Burlington Bertie from Bow which I performed at a school variety show.

        I’m Burlington Bertie, I rise at 10 30
        And saunter along like a toff,
        I walk down The Strand with my gloves on my hand
        And I walk down again with them off….. & etc

          9. It was very good. Not a bad price considering. The two Vodka Martini’s cost more than all the food. :@(

    5. My husband’s issues right now are because his shunt is blocked with clots. I blame the second AZ jabs which we both had and, as you may have read here, I too have had side effects. He’s going for a scan this weekend to determine if it is blocked and what the next step will be. Not caused by covid but the so-called remedy. Grrrr!

      2. SWMBOs brother was blocked permanently. Massive and fatal heart-attack March last year, shortly after being vaxxed.

    6. When the vaccine was introduced. If you did your research before it was removed I read all about this. With the indemnity also being removed we concluded they were not safe for us to take and would be a greater risk than covid. We have never worn masks after about 2 weeks as again we concluded from research that they would do more harm than good. The masks are for use with splash not virus. It has been a great dissapointment that more people did not reach this conclusion and decided to trust the NHS and government. I could not believe how many people did the clap for the NHS. just playing into their hands to make matters even worse. Still there are many people still wearing masks. no wonder we have such poor governments when you look at the poor quality of the voting public.

      1. #wetoo. Alf and I have never worn masks, had the injectates, or clapped for the NHS. We too researched aas well as feeling all along that 8/9 months to “produce” a “vaccine” was just nonsense. If only people had thought about it. None of it made any sense. 3 weeks to “flatten the curve”, a few more to flatten the sombrero or whatever, and eventually mix and match your jabs, 6montly boosters orn4 monthly – it was all quite ridiculous. Masks were useless at first, then mandatory … on and on the stupid rules and regulations. And, of course, right from the start on the government’s own website the exemptions, including “if it causes extreme distress to wear out on/take off a mask…”. Really. To me that was black and white nobody needed to wear a face nappy.

        1. We printed that out, from the govt’s website, and I carry it in my handbag. There are so many interfering arses about that, in the event anyone challenges me, I will produce that paperwork and tell them to discuss it with bloody Boris.

          1. I did the same and took it with me for several months after but the only challenge came from a Waitrose “guard” on the door. I simply said I was exempt and that was that.

      2. In my part of North Essex and Suffolk border the same folk who clapped for the NHS and displayed ‘Thank you NHS’ signs are now hoisting Ukrainian flags and displaying other yellow and blue rags.

        We have a spate of ‘Covid’ cases in our village. Needless to say most villagers rushed to take the jabs and booster(s) and most have now contracted ‘Covid’. It never occurs to these poor folk that the jabs have weakened their innate immune systems. They opine that it could have been worse than a week at home in bed had they not taken the jabs.

  63. Russia braces for first debt default since Bolshevik Revolution. 7 April 2022.

    The Russian government has been accused of effectively defaulting on its foreign debts for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution after being forced to use roubles to make payments to creditors.

    Insurance on Russia debt signalled a record 99pc chance of default after foreign banks rejected payments in dollars for two bonds following the tightening of sanctions by the US.

    This is like someone being penalised for failing to pay their rent because someone has stolen all their money. This is what the UK and US have done with this act of Grand Larceny. Russia held its Foreign Reserves abroad, as countless others do and have done, on the understanding that it would be forthcoming when they needed to draw on it. This protocol that has underpinned the World Economy and the Dollar Hegemony has now been destroyed. No matter what the future result of the War in Ukraine this short-sighted act of self- harm will far outlast it in its consequences.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/04/06/russia-braces-first-debt-default-since-bolshevik-revolution/

    1. It is utterly pathetic isn’t it. How the west can accuse Russia of defaulting when they are responsible is beyond me.

      1. Afternoon Jack. The entire policy of the West is thieving on a grand scale. There is nothing beneath their notice. Yachts, Houses, even the children’s possessions are not safe!.

        1. It happened around 2012/13 in Cyprus, by the EU if I recall.
          Bank deposits were raided on a percentage scale, depending on how much was deposited.

    2. A few weeks ago, I read an article that said more or less that via some complicated financial trickery, if Russia defaulted, Germany would have to carry the can. Or the can’t, as the case may be.

      Here be Worms?

  65. Postman just been. Tax return…. They can take four months to answer a letter – but they never fail to get THEIR forms out prontissimo.

    1. Exactly as I said to Alf earlier. Reminder for car tax. They never fail do they when it comes to taking our money.

  66. Russians fed twisted picture and one voice – that of Putin. BBC. 7 April 2022.

    To switch on Russian TV has, for weeks now, been to step into a weird parallel universe where glossy presenters and well-dressed pundits chronicle a successful “special military operation” in Ukraine. There is no war, just heroic Russian soldiers defending the motherland while taking care to avoid targeting civilians.

    It was just the same here until I stopped watching the BBC!

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61008293

    2. Down the river the ducks all glide,
      It’s quite the easiest way to ride.
      Their legs get wet
      Their tummies get wetter,
      I think after all the bus is better.

      Spike and he wrote swans not ducks.

    3. We slowed down on the way home for three mallards to cross the road – a duck and two drakes.

  69. NS&I recalled a transaction i made for £5000 and the money has disappeared. :@(

    I didn’t get a win this month either.

        1. Maybe there’s a discount – kinda like “buy one get one free.” There are a few I’d like to harpoon right now.

  70. Boris Johnson’s energy plan backs big increases in nuclear, wind and solar power. 7 april 2022.

    Thousands of new wind turbines will be constructed at sea, including on vast floating platforms, bringing a fivefold increase in offshore wind capacity.

    The effective ban on new onshore wind farms in England is set to be lifted, with a consultation on planning changes and energy discounts for people living near developments, although specific targets have been dropped.

    BELOW THE LINE.

    Craig Wellum.

    Why does no one in government realise that if the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine that windmills and solar panels are totally useless?

    Is it because they are as thick as planks, know something that the rest of the population doesn’t or there is a big brown envelope waiting to be collected?

    Yup!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/04/06/boris-johnsons-energy-plan-backs-big-increases-nuclear-wind/

    1. The key word is ‘capacity’. An empty glass is still empty, be it of half pint, pint or quart capacity.

    5. Without Fracking, there will be no slowing – or reduction – in soaring gas prices …

    6. If they couldn’t profit from it personally or tax it publicly, they wouldn’t give a hoot about the weather.

      This bunch are the modern day King Canute. – only they believe they *can* turn the tide.

  71. Update (0900ET): In what appears to be a major blow for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Bundestag has rejected a bill that would have made COVID vaccination mandatory for all Germans over the age of 60.

    Scholz had managed to build broad support for the bill among members of his ‘stop sign’ coalition, but when it came time to vote, 378 out of 683 parliamentarians voted against the bill, while only 296 voted in favour. The failure of the vote elicited cheers from AfD lawmakers, Reuters reported. It was a free vote, with lawmakers instructed not to follow party lines.

    The Chancellor pulled out all the stops for the vote, even summoning his foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, to leave a NATO meeting in Brussels to return for the vote.

      1. They rejected a motion to repeal the mandatory vaxxes for medical and care personnel though.
        Frederick Merck voted for that back in December; just remember that when he’s Germany’s next Bunderskanzler.

        Also, they are steaming full speed ahead onto digital ids, a national register of who is vaxxed and who isn’t, and vaxx passes linked to the id.
        I think the motion today was defeated because it isn’t compatible with the contitutional laws, which ought to guarantee bodily autonomy. A lot of lawyers pointed that out. Also, they didn’t have a majority of the people supporting it. If they had passed this insane law to forcibly jab, they would have declared war on a sizeable part of the population, and they would have got a fight too.

        But they will try again, and not just in Germany.

        Their mistakes this time: the vaxx kills too many people, the virus is not deadly enough, information wriggled out on the internet.
        They have a history of learning from their mistakes – lovers of freedom have no reason to relax.

    1. Wordle 292 4/6

      🟨🟩🟨⬜⬜
      ⬜🟩🟩🟩⬜
      ⬜🟩🟩🟩⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
      I thought that I might get a 2/4 but the obvious common word i had in mind wasn’t allowed … c’est la vie …

    4. Wordle 292 4/6

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

    1. It illustrates the fact that a Muslim’s primary loyalty is to other Muslims, not to the country in which they are living.

      1. I think it clearly shows just how dangerous they are. They’re just not like the rest of us. They’re fanatics.

    1. The tweeter is right though. They are exploiting a sick man, in plain view, and like all abusers, they are silently daring anyone to say anything.

      1. That Kenyan fucker Obama is running the show. Biden the Bastard is a mere finger puppet.

        Biden’s government comprises the same old Obama retreads, shuffled from previous Obama appointments, who wrecked the States prior to the corrective policies of President Trump, except now they are completely out of control and hell bent on socialising the country.

        I just trust that the Clinton, Obama and Biden crime families are ultimately brought to book for their grifting. Guantanamo awaits them all, and that would be lenience given the immense damage they have caused both to the States and many other countries.

  77. HAPPY HOUR – Listen up Hippies – Free Ganja !

    Where do we sign ….?

    Thousands of people to be given cannabis as a painkiller every day in major new trial that could pave the way for it being prescribed on the NHS
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/37512fa7694fbf62a96285bcf01fb8032bca1f2e4818fb7ed3a563a62e42f7e0.jpg

    The ‘whole plant’ cannabis will be given through inhalers that vaporise the drug
    The trial will involve 5,000 participants with chronic pain taking the drug daily
    The £299 a-month-per-patient cannabis to prevent ‘self-medicating’
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10693867/Cannabis-tested-pain-relief-medication-pave-way-NHS-prescriptions.html

    1. I’m already self medicating- Pinot Grigio and some Maltesers, which I successfully coped with- didn’t chuck them all over the floor in other words;-)

          4. I played the part of Macbeth in 1953. At my prep school. I know the whole play by heart!

          7. Good grief – I was married with two children and a mortgage and just starting my (cough) media work!!

        2. One does one’s best;-))
          Actually, I suspect that many think I am a total piss artist but a little wine relaxes me and eases the pain. Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it;-)

          1. I think juggling small chocolate coated sweeties and a glass of wine is…well..amazing!

    2. Top Comment

      “299 per month? Only the NHS could manage to charge more than your local drug dealer.”
      Too bloody true!!

    3. You can get CBD for pain relief (that’s non-addictive). I’m debating whether to try it.

  78. We’re back from our little excursion to the wilds of South Gloucestershire – Iron Acton is a nice village and the ladies of the WI were chatty and generous. It was good to be out and about again and they bought some of our stuff, and asked lots of questions about hedgehogs. The road was quite quiet – I think a lot of people must still be working from home.

      1. We have hedgehog poo in the garden, Belle! They’ve been hibernating under the shed but must have had a huge shock with the snow and hail in the last couple of days!

  79. Walked the dogs on heathland about an hour ago, strong breeze , blue sky etc .. instructions on gate said nesting season keep dogs on a short lead ..

    Well whaddaya know .. I counted 5 magpies , crows and of course signs of fox poo , and badger setts …

    Doesn’t anyone engage their brains … especially those with countryside warden badges … oh I forgot to mention grazing horses and a few Devon red cattle in the distance.

    1. You should know, Maggie, that for jobsworths dogs and their owners are spawn of the devil. Everything else is okay.

          3. It wasn’t me. I know nothing of these things.
            Now who has got a swamp for a mouth….oh, i know…Sosraboc !

    4. It’s rumoured that the factory that makes the ‘Aperistiff’ (sic) is in Kent and fumes from the manufacturing unit have turned the local population into a hard-nosed lot….

  81. That”s me gone for today. NOT a nice day – gales; very heavy showers….better tomorrow, THEY say. Hmm.

    Have a jolly evening doing something nice – going round turning all the lights out, for example.

    Have to take the MR to horspiddle tomorrow for a man to look at her throat. His Christian name made us both smile: Michaelangelo!!

    So I’ll look in and be gone.

      1. Sharp intake of breath! You mentioned Bill and a ladder in the same sentence;-)

      1. Hope you are well Belle.
        A friend contacted Covid after required jabs and feels really rough. Generally fit and healthy, hoping she soon recovers.

        1. Hi Plum

          How are you doing , I expect you are busy with your lovely garden .. have you managed to swing your tennis raquet around , a little practise perhaps?

          I am having nightmares about what on earth has been injected into me … and now I have reached another age I have been invited to have another booster … and a jab for shingles .. and have been allocated a doctor for my senior years…

          I haven’t lived my best life yet , and am feeling really down in the dumps .

          2. Join the bloody club Belle. I am only 68 and some days I feel so much older. A lot of it is pain which saps energy and the desire to get on with anything.
            I am positive that MH and I have both been seriously affected by these jabs. How can we prove it? I wish I knew.

    4. Why bother? Their English is probably better than some of their hosts’.

    1. He’s a snitch, not an agent. Being a scumbag goes with the territory, I guess.

    3. “… “This is because we firmly believe these are matters of the highest public interest – the issues of coercive control of women, male abuse of power and the failure of state institutions to address these problems,” the statement said….”

      * Men do not control women. That sort of blanket statement is utterly abusive.
      * State instutitions have always been a failure. This is common knowledge
      * Despite endless ‘lessons will be learned’ they’ve utterly failed to A. Cover it up and stop it getting out and B. Dealing with the infitessimal minority of situations where such behaviour occurs.

    1. Fine, Len you plonker – you eat it and I’ll stick to my occasional fry up! And how, pray, is tofu made – I presume it does need farming?

      1. If only they would just stick to eating it themselves, and not try to inflict it on us!

    2. Is the person eating those completely unaware that they’re literally eating excrement?

  85. ““Everyone is asking, ‘what can I do,’” remarked Margrethe Vestager, European Commissioner for Competition. “You can do two things,” she recommended. “Control your own and your teenager’s showers, and when you turn off that water, you say, ‘take that, Putin.’””
    https://www.rt.com/news/553466-energy-embargo-sanctions-putin/
    The article is from RT, so it tends to highlight the stupidest things that have come out of the US and EU, but it’s entertaining.

        1. Such a stunning success! I’m glad we voted to leave (even though we haven’t quite managed to escape completely yet).

    1. True about the scratchy lace, and VS is terrible quality, besides having the world’s seediest advertising, however, I’m not sure that anything promoted by KK is more desirable.

        2. She’s clearly deformed. It can’t be anything but fake, but why shove so much concrete into your backside? It’s hideous!

    3. What women want from undies…. comfort, a little glamour and easy wash, easy dry. That’s it!

        4. Oohh, I know….

          Easy wash, easy dry. I’ve seen my wife in skimpy pants. Doing her laundry is now just a bit boring. The most exciting bit is rotating the just washed to the bottom of the pile.

        1. Rolled shoulder , and very nice it was too.

          2 hours 40 minutes .. Was very reluctant to use my oven , I usually use my gas hob .

          1. Sounds great. Love roast pork with apple sauce and savoy cabbage.

            I have also been looking at ways to cut energy usage so i bought myself a Pressure King *TM.
            It roasts but it also acts as a pressure cooker. Fully programmable. It will do a succulent roast in 20 minutes.

    3. Can you buy dripping in the UK or do you make your own?
      We used to buy wonderful onion dripping in Germany. Heavily salted and utterly delicious.

      1. We can buy dripping in the UK but it has been cleaned up. Normally beef dripping and no jelly or crunchy bits.

          1. From Sainsbury’s. Under the Britannia label but it is just the same as lard. Not much taste to it. Better than most oils though.

          2. I’ll look out for it. The German one was really tasty, and you could get a crunchy variant.

          3. This is bland but it does make good roast potatoes. If you really want good dripping with all the extras you need to do a roasted joint.

      2. I make my own. Dripping is the wonderful tasty fat that renders out when your roast a fatty pork or fatty beef joint.

        Lard (pork) and tallow (beef), on the other hand, are the flavourless clean fats that render out when you heat pork fat or beef fat. Curiously enough I have rendered some pork fat today to give me a tubful of lovely clean (and nourishing) lard for cooking. I bought some pork back fat (called späck here) from the supermarket and minced it with my Kenwood Major’s mincing attachment. I roasted the minced pork fat in the oven and all the lovely lard simply rendered out.

        1. We always had cups of it in the fridge when I was a child, but it was fairly bland. You can buy two sorts in Germany, one is for cooking (goose dripping) and the other one is for spreading on bread and has salt, onions, apples, crunchy bits etc in. It does taste good.
          I applaud your own preparation – I buy lard.

  90. For those of us who remember nice things when our children were youngsters .

    David McKee, author and illustrator who created timeless childhood favourites including Mr Benn and Elmer – obituary
    He attributed the popularity of Mr Benn to children’s liking for the same story repeated: ‘It’s security, they know what’s coming next’

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2022/04/07/david-mckee-author-illustrator-created-timeless-childhood-favourites/

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLSr2ojnjtg&t=40s

    1. Elmer that ruddy stupid elephant who just wants to be like all the other elephants?
      I hated that silly book! and my children weren’t that keen on it either.

    2. I was obviously too dense. All he had to do was transition into another costume and i thought it was another story. :@(

  91. Well you know when you have reached peak MSM mistrust when even my Lefty friends that fell for all the anti Trump stuff, that supported remain, that hate Farage, that had three vaxxes and conscientiously wore masks are now questioning the propaganda coming out of Ukraine.

      1. People often used to say that I looked like Matt Le Tissier back in the day, not much of a compliment, I suppose

    4. I’m surprised, actually. Most Lefties are blinkered because as soon as doubt bashes against the cognitivie dissonance shield their entire world view collapses.

        3. That’s sad. All those beautiful young ladies, all wanting to get to know me better… I thought that, just for once, my luck was in!
          :-((

    2. Bob, thanks for that! I haven’t heard that for years- forgotten no doubt. Lovely.

  94. A thoughtful BTL Comment from The Slog:
    countignatieff on April 6, 2022 at 11:53 am

    “In the novel Dr Zhivago, the character Victor Komarovsky, thrives under both the Tsar, and under Communism, such people will exist around us now. As JW implies, they may well decide that to assume the role of contrarian will better suit their aims in the short term, before they slide into the new establishment. Tony Blair was a Conservative, until he realised that his aims would be better served by switching to the Labour Party.
    The propaganda campaign, and use of behavioural psychology to manipulate the populace, into supporting a sustained war against Russia, is more intense than it was at the height of the Covid campaign. The Ukrainian conflict is being used to push several WEF policies; digitised currency, a stronger EU, carbon zero, and globalism itself.
    The organisations within the UK that are part of this relentless psychological campaign include:
    The Centre for Information Resilience https://www.info-res.org/
    The Institute for Statecraft (Integrity Initiative) https://www.statecraft.org.uk/,
    Full Fact https://fullfact.org/
    Ofcom, https://www.ofcom.org.uk/
    The Trusted News Initiative, https://www.bbc.com/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative/
    BBC Media Action. https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction
    The Behavioural Insights Team https://www.bi.team/
    Nesta https://www.nesta.org.uk/
    Apart from Ofcom, all these organisations are deniable by the UK government, many have charitable status, some have lottery funding, The BIT is directly linked to the WEF through its Chief Executive David Halpern. There will be many other interlinked organisations in the UK (no doubt all western countries have similar groups) filtering, manipulating, and controlling ‘the narrative’, and they are all growing more powerful.
    Ukrainian flags replace NHS rainbows, and as Zelensky replaces carers as the transient secular saint. When virtue is driving a vastly expensive Tesla, and sin is to be seen in a twenty-year old Subaru, when the contrived saccharine slogans of kindness, mindfulness, and caring have been replaced by an induced hatred for Russians, with BBC presenters suggesting that putting on a Russian uniform means the wearer deserves to die, things have become very dark, and we can see a terrifying psychological sleight of mind take place.
    A year ago, ‘cancellation’ was the fate of a man who said he hated a particular type of music, now celebrities can demand hatred of a whole people, as long as it is of Russians, and be praised for their verbal beastliness. In these times Victor Komarovsky would once again thrive.”

    2. Am I alone in suspecting that ‘President’ Zelensky [a Ukrainian politician, former actor and comedian], is a phony, a charlatan and a proxy /puppet of NATO and the EU?

      2. All of that and worse. I bristle at the juvenile bleat that Zelensky can’t be a Nazi because he’s Jewish. Being Jewish didn’t stop the Rothschilds bankrolling Hitler. It didn’t stop Soros passing himself off as a teenage Nazi to save his own skin. And it hasn’t stopped Zelensky pursuing his own aggrandisement whatever the cost.

        1. All Zelensky needs to do is to survive just a little bit longer and then he will join the other billionaires. The slimy little c%&t. He doesn’t give a shit about the death and destruction. Just like Soros didn’t in WW2.

  95. I have the best friends in the world. These days, most are in the US. Have been passing on some jokes to one in GA who is loving them and passing them on.
    Two others who are sorry they are so far away and want to come and hang out and laugh and share some wine.
    I love them dearly. How do people manage in their lives without friends?
    And you lot as well- you have certainly helped and continue so to do. Thank gawd for email and some internet.

    1. The war queen doesn’t have a huge number of friends. I think growing up she got a lot of male attention and women were a bit jealous and they then treated her poorly, so she became nervous of having female friends. Her glamour times just made her see men as abusive twits as well.

      I suppose my chums sort of adopted her into our circle, which gave her half a dozen big brothers. As they married (lord knows how) she became friends with their wives and the diminutive Nomi is the matriarch of our little circle.

      She still isn’t very open and can seem cold and aloof. It’s all a defence system.

      As regards the moving away – my best friend lives in New Zealand. We email about once every 2 years, at most. Then each time it’s as if no time has passed. On her son’s 21st birthday we did a zoom thing and shared a bottle virtually. It was good.

      1. Not to boast but I was fairly attractive when young… some girls didn’t like it. Especially when the lads liked you more than them. The teen age years and early 20s are hell.
        Your lady is lucky to have you, as I am with my husband.

        1. Fairly attractive ! Don’t understate yourself. The only reason why those golden age film stars looked so wonderful was because of professional make up and scaffolding !

          1. I don’t wear make up. Gave up on eye make up because of my eyes. Nowadays, it’s maybe face power and a little lipstick. MH doesn’t think I need make up.

          2. Of course he doesn’t. He’s seen you the morning after>>>>>>>>>>>bunker time ! :@)

        2. Early 20s I was bogged down with children. And a husband I knew wasn’t the right one.

      2. That is the way to be .. a few good friends .. as and when .. I have never ever been clingy and am fairly free spirited and enjoy my own company, yet am never ever alone in a crowd ..

        I coped well at boarding school , and when I was training to be a nurse . I think I am a good solid friend to either men or women .. I can keep secrets and mind my tongue .

        I have never ever been high maintainance , but have my own standards . I can be a bit high and mighty sometimes, my defence mechanism !

        1. When you eventually allow me to steal you away for afternoon Tea at the Moonfleet while hubby is immersed in golf you can be as haughty as you wish. Just keep your filthy paws off my silky drawers !

          1. A film. Quite cosy. The star was later caught In flagrante delicto with a street hooker. Nice film though.

    2. You are on the South Coast. Join me for lunch. You can give me a clip around the ear in person.

      1. Not possible right now- too many hospital and doc appointments. The thought of delivering a thump on the ear is very tempting.

        1. I have also been drowned in those appointments. The hanging around drives me mental. I walked out after 7 hours last time even after the Doc had said i was okay i had to wait for the Consultant who never turned up !

          If and when we do meet you get to throw the first punch ! :@(

          Hope you both get some resolution soon.

          1. I know you have. It is hell. What I can’t stand is the pain. I keep quoting the first line of Emily Bronte’s poem ” No Coward Soul is Mine.”

          2. What ‘they’ offer for pain relief just makes us addicts. Just a suggestion but research Ayervedic for your condition.

  96. The Masters …

    Anyone watching the golf .. beautiful Augusta golf course .. it is a nice distraction from all the horrible events on the news.

    4. Is that the course they spend about $20 million on maintenance each year.

    5. I don’t watch or listen to the news, Belle. Much of it is spun half-truths, and winds me up nyway. Stick to local news if you must.

  101. Browsing through my bookshelves, I cam upon this, which I read over 40 years ago. Tempted to read it again:

    PROLOGUE

    In the early summer of 1902 John Barrington Ashley of Coaltown, a small minin
    g center in southern Illinois, was tried for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing, also of Coaltown. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Five days later, at one in the morning of Tuesday, July 22, he escaped from his guards on the train that was carrying him to his execution.

    That was the “Ashley Case” that aroused considerable interest, indignation, and derision throughout the Middle West. No one doubted that Ashley shot Lansing, willfully or accidentally; but the trial was felt to have been bungled by a senile judge, an inept defense, and a prejudiced jury—the “Coalhole Case,” the “Coalbin Case.” When, to top it all, the convicted murderer escaped from a guard of five men and vanished into thin air—handcuffed, in prison garb, and with shaved head—the very State of Illinois was held up to ridicule. About five years later, the State’s Attorney’s office in Springfield announced that fresh evidence had been uncovered fully establishing Ashley’s innocence.

    So: there had been a miscarriage of justice in an unimportant case in a small Middlewestern town.

    Ashley shot Lansing in the back of the head while the two men were engaged in their customary Sunday afternoon rifle practice on the lawn behind the Lansing house. Even the defense did not claim that the tragedy was the result of a mechanical accident. The rifle was repeatedly fired for the benefit of the jurors and was found to be in excellent condition. Ashley was known to have been a superior marksman. The victim was five yards to the front and left of Ashley. It was a little surprising that the bullet entered Lansing’s skull above his left ear, but it was assumed that he had turned his head to catch the sounds issuing from a young people’s picnic in the Memorial Park across the hedge. Ashley never wavered in his assurance that he was innocent in both intention and deed, laughable though the assertion was. The only witnesses were the wives of the accused and the victim. They were sitting under the butternut trees nearby making lemonade. Both testified that only one shot had been fired. The trial was unduly prolonged because of illness among members of the court, and even death among the jurors and their alternates. Reporters called attention to the delay occasioned by laughter, for a demon of contrariety hovered over the hall. There were frequent slips of the tongue. Witness followed witness in a confusion of names. Judge Crittenden’s gavel broke. A St. Louis reporter called it the “Hyena Trial.”

    It was the failure to establish a motive for the crime that aroused wide indignation. The prosecution advanced too many motives and no one of them convincing. Coaltown, however, was convinced that it knew why Ashley had killed Lansing and most of the members of the court were from Coaltown. Everyone knew it and no one mentioned it. Coaltown folk of the better sort do not talk to strangers. Ashley killed Lansing because Ashley was in love with Lansing’s wife, and the jury sent him to his death, firmly and unanimously, with what a Chicago paper called “shameless calm.” Old Judge Crittenden’s admonition to the jury on this point was particularly weighty; he enjoined them—with something approaching a wink of connivance—to perform their solemn duty, and they did. To out-of-town reporters the trial was a farce and it soon became a scandal in the upper Mississippi Valley. The defense raged, the newspapers sneered, telegrams rained upon the Governor’s mansion in Springfield, but Coaltown knew what it knew. This silence about the guilty relations between John Ashley and Eustacia Lansing did not proceed from any chivalrous desire to protect a lady’s good name; there was a solider foundation for silence than that. No witness ventured to voice the charge because no witness was in possession of the smallest evidence. Gossip had solidified into conviction as prejudice solidifies into self-evident truth.

    Just at the moment when public outrage was at its height John Ashley escaped from his guards. Flight tends to be interpreted as an acknowledgment of guilt and questions concerning motive became irrelevant.

    It is possible that the verdict might have been less severe if Ashley had behaved differently in court. He showed no signs of fear. He afforded no fascinating spectacle of mounting terror and remorse. He sat through the long trial listening serenely as though he expected the proceedings to satisfy his moderate curiosity as to who killed Breckenridge Lansing. But then, for Coaltown, he was an odd man. He was practically a foreigner—that is, he came from New York State and spoke in the way they speak there. His wife was German and spoke with a slight accent of her own. He seemed to have no ambition. He had worked for almost twenty years in the mines’ office on a very small salary—as small as the second-best-paid clergyman’s in town—in apparentment. He was odd through a very lack of striking characteristics. He was neither dark nor light, tall nor short, fat nor thin, bright nor dull. He had an agreeable enough presence, but one that seldom attracted a second glance. A Chicago reporter, at the beginning of the trial, repeatedly alluded to him as “our uninteresting hero.” (He changed his mind later—a man on trial for his life who exhibits no anxiety arouses interest.) Women liked Ashley, because he liked them and because he was an attentive listener; men—except for the foremen in the mine—paid him little attention, though something in his self-effacing silence aroused in them a constant attempt to impress him.

    Breckenridge Lansing was big and blond. He crushed everyone’s hand in genial friendship. He laughed loudly; he did not restrain himself when he was in a rage. He was gregarious; he belonged to every lodge, fraternal order, and association that the town afforded. He loved the rituals: tears came to his eyes—manly tears; he wasn’t ashamed of them—when he swore for the hundredth time to “maintain friendship with the brothers until death” and “to live under God in virtue and to be prepared to lay down his life for his country.” It’s vows like that, by golly, that give meaning to a man’s life. He had his little weaknesses. He spent many an evening at those taverns up the River Road, not returning home until morning. This was not the behavior of an exemplary family man and Mrs. Lansing might have had some reason to resent it. But in public places—at the volunteer firemen’s picnic, at the school’s graduation exercises—he showered her with attentions, he broadly displayed his pride in her. It was generally known that he was incompetent as resident manager at the mines and that he seldom showed up there before eleven. As a father he had certainly failed in the rearing of two of his three children. George was held to be a “rowdy” and a “terror.” Anne was a winning child who won by tantrums and rudeness. But these little failings were understandable. Several of them were shared by the most esteemed citizens in town. Lansing was a likable man and good company. What a splendid trial it would have been if Lansing had shot Ashley! What a performance he would have put on! The town would have seen to it that he was first thoroughly frightened—cowering—and then acquitted him.

    https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/thornton-wilder/42607-the_eighth_day.html

  102. Evening, all. Late again because I’ve been watching the racing from Aintree. I shouldn’t have thought Europe, having put themselves in fuel poverty through greenery, could afford not to buy Russian gas.

  103. Meanwhile, in the High Peak tonight: matters came to a head:

    COTE HEATH BY-ELECTION

    Conservative – 55.5% (+8.6%)
    Labour – 39.2% (-14.7%)
    Green – 5.3% (+5.3%)

    Conservstive GAIN – 11.7% swing

    LABOUR LOSE CONTROL OF HIGH PEAK COUNCIL

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