Tuesday 18 June: Why even exasperated Conservatives should be wary of Nigel Farage

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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425 thoughts on “Tuesday 18 June: Why even exasperated Conservatives should be wary of Nigel Farage”

  3. Good morrow, gentlefolk. Todays (recycled) stories.(a repeat from Monday's page.)

    NAG, NAG and NAG

    A Lawyer arrived home late, after a very tough day trying to get a stay of execution. His last-minute plea for clemency to the governor had failed and he was feeling worn out and depressed.

    As soon as he walked through the door at home, his wife started on him about, 'What time of night to be getting home is this? Where have you been? Dinner is cold and I'm not reheating it'. And on and on and on.

    Too shattered to play his usual role in this familiar ritual, he poured himself a shot of whiskey and headed off for a long hot soak in the bathtub, pursued by the predictable sarcastic remarks as he dragged himself up the stairs.

    While he was in the bath, the phone rang. The wife answered and was told that her husband's client, James Wright, had been granted a stay of execution after all. Wright would not be hanged tonight.

    Finally realizing what a terrible day he must have had; she decided to go upstairs and give him the good news. As she opened the bathroom door, she was greeted by the sight of her husband, bent over naked, drying his legs and feet.

    'They're not hanging Wright tonight,' she said.

    'For The Love Of God Woman, Don't You Ever Stop?'

  4. Good morrow, gentlefolk. Todays (recycled) stories.(a repeat from Monday's page.)

    NAG, NAG and NAG

    A Lawyer arrived home late, after a very tough day trying to get a stay of execution. His last-minute plea for clemency to the governor had failed and he was feeling worn out and depressed.

    As soon as he walked through the door at home, his wife started on him about, 'What time of night to be getting home is this? Where have you been? Dinner is cold and I'm not reheating it'. And on and on and on.

    Too shattered to play his usual role in this familiar ritual, he poured himself a shot of whiskey and headed off for a long hot soak in the bathtub, pursued by the predictable sarcastic remarks as he dragged himself up the stairs.

    While he was in the bath, the phone rang. The wife answered and was told that her husband's client, James Wright, had been granted a stay of execution after all. Wright would not be hanged tonight.

    Finally realizing what a terrible day he must have had; she decided to go upstairs and give him the good news. As she opened the bathroom door, she was greeted by the sight of her husband, bent over naked, drying his legs and feet.

    'They're not hanging Wright tonight,' she said.

    'For The Love Of God Woman, Don't You Ever Stop?'

  5. A second good morning all.
    Tuesday the 18th of June 2024 and it's 7°C outside on a beautiful morning.
    No rain last night for a change too!

  6. Good Morning yet again, normal overcast start to the day here in Co Antrim.

  7. Good morning from Audrey and Me, floating in on a scented breeze as the sun breaks through the early morning mists. It's quite cloudy actually but supposedly summer has turned up on this the longest day .

      1. Good morning Tom, yes I meant to say the longest day is in a few days time, Oops 😊

  8. 388663+ up ticks,

    Anything is possible via the "experts" marvellous peoples.

    The industry body’s new report said: “It is possible wind (onshore and offshore) will be the largest supply source of electricity this year.

    They would say that wouldn't they.

    In my book we really should unleash the Holy Grail in gas, SHALE

    1. Depends how you look at it. If these fools destroy the majority of our generating capacity and don't build a new plants then yes, off shore wind will produce the 17% of electricity it currently does. Of the 360 odd terrawatt hours of energy the UK needs we'll get about… 3% of that and not only will the lights go out but so will absolutely everything.

      A modern, advanced economy is built on energy, not bricks. We need energy, masses of it at cheap prices. In fact there's an argument for it to be free. The Left wing state will keep reducing energy production until the economy stops. Then, without the power to build anything we're properly screwed.

      No – think about that for a minute. You can't power the diggers to build new plants. The drills, the welding materials. This isn't just 'oh, there's some.. it's the end. A proper hard stop. Our civilisation ceases to be. No more freezers – hell, no damned food chain.

      This useless government has ensured that farmers, rather than planting crops are planting flowers. They're making diesel expensive deliberately. Fertiliser is now made in one place in Europe, and is the most expensive element of farming. Why? Because 'nitrogen'. In reality, it's because the state simply wants to stop the farming industry altogether.

      At every turn, the state is hellbent on making the absolute wrong decision. The idiocy and damage big government is doing is horrific. Those dystopian futures where folk are eating the dead? Where you're allotted specific exercise times, living in a box except to work? Unable to drive anywhere because of fuel rationing? Spied on, monitored, controlled on what you spend so the state can see it? It's here. Every single thing wrong with this country is the fault of the useless lumpen wasters in Whitehall and Westminster.

      2. I once read that the cheapest way to invest your way to prosperity is to pay off the mortgage.

        For all this talk about windmills, battery cars and solar panels over once-productive farmland, surely the most efficient way to invest in energy resources is to use less?

        Not just loft insulation, but living closer to one's place of work, and with families actually living together rather than going in for lifestyle divorces, might make a huge difference, and save the cost of a few windmills.

      3. Good post, W.

        The PTB are without doubt all for AI and total control of literally everything via digital means. Those plans will require vast amounts of electricity to power the servers, the database centres etc. The idiots don't understand that without power their dystopian plans can't work.

        Over in the USA, Dave Walsh, ex head of Mitsubishi Power in the West, knows a bit about power and he has been saying that the USA power situation is in a bad way, not unlike the UK. The USA's grid is not in good shape and Walsh hold's the opinion that the USA doesn't have the engineers to improve the grid even if the companies wanted to. And as for the increasing demand? Not a chance without massive investment. Politicians with their unrealistic policies have created a perfect rock and a hard place situation.

        …not only will the lights go out but so will absolutely everything.

        When the above happens the politicians et al. will have a great deal more to worry about than 'naughty' words about a certain religion. I doubt that gated residences will be sufficient protection from what will be a more than furious population. Bunker mentality will have a whole different meaning for these morons.

  10. 22 minutes ago
    388553+ up ticks,

    🎵,
    The parties over,
    The indigenous piper MUST be paid via the courts in regards to
    services rendered by political / pharmaceutical top rankers concerning excess deaths and ongoing life long injuries.
    That has surely got to be an over riding all else, concern.

    Bare in mind the majority of those below are trying to erase
    everything genuinely English

    English Proverbs for "Practicality"

    … have tangible actions and accomplishments rather than merely impressive words or empty promises … if ifs and ands
    were pots and pans (there'd be no work for .

    Farage vows to reform ‘biased’ BBC and scrap licence fee
    ‘Wasteful’ broadcaster’s levy is ‘taxation without representation’, says Reform UK manifesto

    1. Part of the vaccine roll out was to push responsibility (and liability) on to officialdom (which is immune) from the drug companies.

      There is nothing that can be done. They'll get away with it. The state always does. It doesn't matter how heinous the crime, how many lives are ruined – think the MoD's refusal to buy modern armoured vehicles and continue using the Snatch landrover in Afghanistan. Look at the post office farce. Not a single MP will face censure.

      1. 388663+ up ticks,

        Morning W,
        If that was an undeniable fact then surely ongoing sad to say rough justice will take an increasing hand, only human nature, even the meekest, weakest in the land will retaliate in time to a punch in the gob twice a day.

  11. Good morning all (77th too),

    Not quite clear blue above Castle McPhee. The chem-trailers have been out. Wind's gone North again, 11℃ rising to 18℃ so cooler again after one nice day.

    They really don't get it at Conservative HQ, do they? They want to bring back the 'Potato-in-a- Wig'.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d0188ef0a96bb428d22a7d9074b0854ff7ee6c71425982f20d64093e3b1ca4f9.png https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/06/17/tories-turn-to-boris-johnson-counter-reform-election-threat/

    They ought to take a look at the comments.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6ae837e5cbfe03450a9723ff8fbab5f47d44fa092cd9aab557b27ef5373260d6.png

    1. Boris entered office under the slogan of getting Brexit done. The public had seen the bickering, back stabbing tedium of the political class – a rats nest of squabbling brats – and rejected it. They had said, firmly – "while I might not agree with the choice, get on with it and stop defying us."

      However the Tory party didn't understand this, or didn't bother to listen. It ploughed on with the same petty bickering, whinging, infighting and defiance of public will it had before.

      The state machine fought Boris and Brexit's intent at every turn and very quickly he stopped bothering altogether and went along with the groupthink, which was the green mania – an EU law, in case folk don't know.

      The pub sec saw green as a way to stop Brexit in any meaningful sense and did so, knowing the people would get bored and fed up with the tax hikes, waste, incompetence, laziness, steadfast lack of change and improvement, which pub sec could then blame solely on Brexit. After all, they did tell us this is what would happen (after they made sure it did). Having successfully blamed Brexit, the Ukraine war, engineered infighting and fought the government at every turn the mandarins knew Labour would get in so they could get back to their big state, high tax agenda with far less bother from annoyances like democracy.

      1. A televised debate between Farage and Johnson would be interesting.

        Both are bombastic – but one is coherent while the other just dribbles muddle-headed balderdash.

        1. We had this very thing back in 2016 when Vote Leave was vying with LeaveUK for the role of prime representative for the various Liberation Front of Britain groups.

          Eventually, we got Johnson and Gove kept in order by a sensible German socialist representing Birmingham. Farage was always the true believer though.

      2. Unfortunately, the masses who worshipped the very air Johnson breathed are still completely taken in by him.

      1. 388663+ up ticks,

        Morning JBF,
        Tis the power behind the mask we should be wary of, and the fact that it could return at any given time to pacify the gullible.

          1. 388663+ up ticks,

            JB.F,

            A great many politico’s are pushing it, mainly from behind.

      2. I still see them in the Wigmore Hall. The same affluent middle class folk who can never find their seats because they either can’t count and don’t know their alphabet or are just too vain to wear their glasses.

      3. We very sadly have a Uke flag flying from our local Church and also from our local council offices.

  13. Watched a clip of Starmer and Khan chatting away like old mates. it was sickening. So the future is two tier, two tier justice with the indigenous population right at the bottom. Those creatures would sell the families for votes. I despair for the white grandchildren of this country.

      1. How I hate
        Apartheid
        But how I love to Demonstrate.

        (From a 1960s Protest Protest song)

    2. The mere fact that this is being pursued and could well become law shows that all those who had a distrust/fear of Islam, and Muslims promoting it, were correct to be concerned about what it might bring.

      1. How justified must a fear or dislike of something be before it is no longer called a phobia?

        1. When it is clear to any rational observer that the dangers exceed any benefits?

    3. Hate to say it Smiling but it's like that now. The judiciary steadfastly promotes the diversity over the locals.

    4. Starmer is graduating from going down on one knee to two knees, forehead on ground, bum in the air.

    5. Starmer is graduating from going down on one knee to two knees, forehead on ground, bum in the air.

  14. SIR – Robin Platt (Letters, June 13) reminds us of Harold Wilson’s wit. In 1966, he asked reporters if they had “noticed how England only wins the World Cup under a Labour government”. Will Sir Keir Starmer be able to say something similar on July 14?

    Robert Culshaw
    Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire

    It seems that no other Labour PM has matched Wilson's football 'wit' when discussing the football World Cup. England did not even bother to enter the first three stagings of that competition in 1930, 1934 and 1938, only trying their luck for the first time under the Labour administration of Clement Attlee in 1950 (the first post-war World Cup). They lost to the Yanks!

    In 1998, 2002 and 2006 they failed to win three times successively under Tony Blair; while in 1974 and 1978 under Wilson (again) and Callaghan, they didn't even qualify for the finals.

      1. Didn't some loud-mouthed American tennis player say something disobliging but true about female tennis players?

      3. I'm with Mola. I can't stand lawn tennis, nor the jumped-up prima donnas who play it.

        Nor those clowns who insist on calling a major championship a "grand slam"; it isn't! Rod Laver (in 1969) and Steffi Graf (in 1988) are the only two players in the professional era who have won a grand slam.

        1. Steffi is also one of very few who manage to have a successful marriage. She and Andre Agassi have been married 23 years and apparently still going strong, which is an achievement for folks of their ilk.

          1. Andre Agassi? Oh you mean that fool who used to wear an utterly ridiculous wig?🧔‍♀️

          2. Yep but Steffi loves him and they have two offspring and an apparently commendable family life :-))

  15. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3326e591f53f51d7ebf70e25ff02f8972ba1f3bc98f4d02926f9a84d423d5cf8.png
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/jobs/welsh-labour-given-up-on-growth-prosperity/

    Underneath this tale of misfeasance and malfeasance in public office there is a comment that sounds the alarm.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/88d67d20066fec4cc4ef884dc06355305c49f1578b30c51a67ae17833c5a685d.png
    Things are going to get very much worse before they begin to get better.

    1. It profiteth a man nothing if he gain the world and lose his soul – but for Wales!
      (Of Sir Richard Rich in 'A Man for All Seasons': Robert Bolt)

    2. It's (almost) amusing, Fiscal – Farage seems to have found himself the poster boy for a number of journos – I wonder where they've been hiding these past years!

      1. Perhaps Farage has spotted "a gap in the market" and placed Reform as the group that will attack special interest groups
        Green lunacy? Vote Reform.
        Immigration out of control? Vote Reform.
        High tax? Vote Reform.
        Woke madness? Vote Reform
        etc etc etc. Vote Reform.

        1. Exactly, sos…I’ll believe it when I see Blair backing him, that would indeed be worth something.

  16. Good morning dear people , humid morning , 12c , the air is still.

    How many of you have heard about this incredible Saudi project costing BILLIONS .. a new world called Neom , where only the wealthy will have access to , a protected area stretching for hundreds of miles .. https://www.neom.com/en-us/regions/magna.

    All run by wealthy Arabs , as they say a Dubai on steriods .. a new Arab world , where poor old Europe and the UK are the filters for the detritus of the Muslim world and the incredibly rich have their own world to play in ?

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/neom-saudi-arabia-smart-city-mohammed-bin-salman-b1114036.html

    2. My friend is working out there. Earning a fortune. It looks hideous. If that is the future of living, i don’t want to be part of it.

    1. A few admirers assert that, in office, Johnson will reveal an accession of wisdom and responsibility that have hitherto eluded him, not least as foreign secretary. This seems unlikely, as the weekend’s stories emphasised. Dignity still matters in public office, and Johnson will never have it. Yet his graver vice is cowardice, reflected in a willingness to tell any audience, whatever he thinks most likely to please, heedless of the inevitability of its contradiction an hour later.

      Like many showy personalities, he is of weak character. I recently suggested to a radio audience that he supposes himself to be Winston Churchill, while in reality being closer to Alan Partridge. Churchill, for all his wit, was a profoundly serious human being. Far from perceiving anything glorious about standing alone in 1940, he knew that all difficult issues must be addressed with allies and partners.

      Churchill’s self-obsession was tempered by a huge compassion for humanity, or at least white humanity, which Johnson confines to himself. He has long been considered a bully, prone to making cheap threats. My old friend Christopher Bland, when chairman of the BBC, once described to me how he received an angry phone call from Johnson, denouncing the corporation’s “gross intrusion upon my personal life” for its coverage of one of his love affairs.

      “We know plenty about your personal life that you would not like to read in the Spectator,” the then editor of the magazine told the BBC’s chairman, while demanding he order the broadcaster to lay off his own dalliances.

      Bland told me he replied: “Boris, think about what you have just said. There is a word for it, and it is not a pretty one.”

      He said Johnson blustered into retreat, but in my own files I have handwritten notes from our possible next prime minister, threatening dire consequences in print if I continued to criticise him.

      Johnson would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade. In a commonplace book the other day, I came across an observation made in 1750 by a contemporary savant, Bishop Berkeley: “It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.” Almost the only people who think Johnson a nice guy are those who do not know him.

      There is, of course, a symmetry between himself and Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn is far more honest, but harbours his own extravagant delusions. He may yet prove to be the only possible Labour leader whom Johnson can defeat in a general election. If the opposition was led by anybody else, the Tories would be deservedly doomed, because we would all vote for it. As it is, the Johnson premiership could survive for three or four years, shambling from one embarrassment and debacle to another, of which Brexit may prove the least.

      John Griffin, founder of Addison Lee, pictured in 2016
      Boris Johnson row: top Tory party donor joins calls for explanation
      Read more
      For many of us, his elevation will signal Britain’s abandonment of any claim to be a serious country. It can be claimed that few people realised what a poor prime minister Theresa May would prove until they saw her in Downing Street. With Boris, however, what you see now is almost assuredly what we shall get from him as ruler of Britain.

      We can scarcely strip the emperor’s clothes from a man who has built a career, or at least a lurid love life, out of strutting without them. The weekend stories of his domestic affairs are only an aperitif for his future as Britain’s leader. I have a hunch that Johnson will come to regret securing the prize for which he has struggled so long, because the experience of the premiership will lay bare his absolute unfitness for it.

      If the Johnson family had stuck to showbusiness like the Osmonds, Marx Brothers or von Trapp family, the world would be a better place. Yet the Tories, in their terror, have elevated a cavorting charlatan to the steps of Downing Street, and they should expect to pay a full forfeit when voters get the message. If the price of Johnson proves to be Corbyn, blame will rest with the Conservative party, which is about to foist a tasteless joke upon the British people – who will not find it funny for long.

      Max Hastings is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard

      https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/boris-johnson-prime-minister-tory-party-britain

      1. I still can't quite believe the photo of him in Downing St, the one with Azov guys and their flag…surely must be a fake?!

      2. I agree now, as I did 5 years ago, with Max Hastings' judgement of Boris Johnstone.

        1. Agree with you Mm.

          For heavens sake , if the police can use strange tactics to stop a young calf running along a road , surely a tranquilising gun should be used on foreign menaces like the b—-r sitting on the roof .

    2. Should have hurled the bricks back with the intent of knocking the scum off the roof – a crate of beer for the one that does

      1. I was one of the chorus blokes doing the can-can for a production 'The Merry Widow' in Droitwich last year.

        That scene was a game of chicken (and very fine chickens we were!) with the edge of the stage. During one rehearsal we got to within an inch of going down into the orchestra pit before the director suggested we did not step forward quite so far with each phrase.

        The following year, for 'Die Fledermaus' the same director got us to do the Drunken Conga in a spiral that ended up with the cast piled up on one another before getting arrested. That was considerably safer. Perhaps.

        1. Back in the 70s when I was an art student learning to make clothes on a fashion course there was a very popular model, a beautiful girl, who it turned out only had the courage to venture on to the catwalk when drunk. She was hired for one of our end of year shows and was fine at the rehearsal but then she went off for lunch, came back pissed and duly fell off the catwalk into the ornamental shrubbery in middle of the show.

    3. Good morning Sue ,

      Moh and drove up to Portland Bill (half an hour or more from here) and breathed in the fierce salty air .

      There were large groups of teenagers chattering and admiring the view , one of the group came up to us and and asked politely , in English , with a lovely accent whether one of us could take a group photo of them all with a phone camera ..

      Moh obliged , and there they were smiling happy nicely dressed teenagers, with back packs .

      I asked them where they had travelled from , Hungary, and yes they loved Britain , but I expect they all say that .

      I suspect they would have been very shocked by London and our bigger cities .

      Did I mention that when one of my South African sisters visited us a few years ago , she visited Westminster Abbey , and burst in to tears because of the cacophony of noise created by tourists chattering and clomping around .

      Have any of you experienced similar annoyances when visiting some of our great ancient buildings?

      PS I AM NOT a South African .. I hate Africa.

      My siblings and late parents took out citizenship, but kept their passports and are part of Africa.

      1. I found it most noticeable some years back in the Sistine Chapel. At regular intervals someone would clap and yell at everyone to shut up and the noise would die down only to steadily build again.

      2. I love the Africa of my youth, and wish very fervently that the Africa of today would sort itself out. I've even been willing to help, and visited Tunisia, Libya, Sudan a decade or so ago to help them make a success of it.

        1. Idiotically , years back I contacted the Sudan embassy several times , in fact I did so when all hell broke loose out there last year , each time a moron has spoken and asked me for aid money .

          Nah , they are corrupted with power and modern weapons and all gentle naivety that once was is no longer ..

  23. Some would say that since the BBC has told its cameramen not to do so many up-skirt shots in women's tennis at Wimbledon the coverage has lost many of its attractions.

  24. Three questions for this election:

    1. What institutional protections exist against conflicts of interest, be they commercial, factional or ideological with their favourites and well-remunerated lobby industry, and their bogeys, the losers who try to get by without well-remunerated lobby professionals?

    2. We hear so much reported from children or partners of those no longer capable of looking after themselves, but who speaks up for the vastly increasing number of people living alone, with no loved ones remotely interested in their welfare?

    I knew such a person – a gentleman a few months older than me who went down with dementia. Even though in his prime he ran an IT consultancy and did a lot of work for charity, he had nobody interested in his welfare, other than the Alma Deutscher fan club he set up online. We had not heard from him for a while, so I drove to his last known address in Cardiff. It had a 'For Sale' sign outside, but a neighbour told me he had been taken away by Social Services. I tracked him down to a home in Cardiff. The staff did their best, but it was a grim prison stinking of urine and constant groans from bedridden inmates. All that was left of his past life was a framed education certificate and a picture of his parents. Presumably everthing else went in the skip. He was pretty far gone, and only for brief sparks of connection could I get anything cogent out of him. He seemed to be aware of where he was and who he was, but seemed otherwise completely locked out mentally. The staff were grateful that at last there was some group, the fan club, who could say something about him. I got Alma Deutscher to do a short video greeting for him, which is treasured.

    I am all too aware, being divorced with estranged children, no grandchildren and just a mother approaching 100 who might not outlive me, that there for the grace of God…

    3. We hear plenty of pledges from all parties to spend a lot of money on goodies, most of them desirable and necessary, along with equal pledges to freeze or even cut taxes on hardworking people to pay for them, relying on "efficiency" and "Growth", and citing the logic of the Laffer Curve whereby the less tax is levied, the bigger the revenue to the Treasury. It's like suggesting to the shopkeeper – I'll pay you less and you can give me more. Now these special offers may work up to a point, but how do they pay for everything that's needed?

    Taking it to logical extremes, does that mean that a shop constantly raided by industrial gangs of foreign shoplifters, who can get cheap prices for more, mean that such Growth makes these shops far more viable than they would be if they charged and got RRP?

    1. I know of 2 elderlies who were sent home at midnight to release bedspace in hospital , sent home with out a care package , but what the hell is a care package .. 3 hours of care a day .. an 21 hours of utter loneliness.

      What twattery decided that land lines might soon be extinct , and what idiot will have left loads of elderly people with out the facility of that amazing emergency button they wear around their neck on a lanyard, to summon help in an emergency .

      No one matters.. society has dumped elderly people because the family unit is messed up and fractured . Is the rest of Europe experiencing the same problems?

      We need MORE day care centres , many closed pre Covid . Day care elderly units are valuable assets to a community .

      All new housing estates should have a village hall and a day care unit for elderlies .. these places work , and are all embracing and are so valuable.

      1. I set up a voip phone at home in addition to my landline after my provider tripled the price for landline calls, and I tend to spend an hour a day chatting with my elderly mother in London, who is lonely.

        Much of the time it works, but sometimes GCHQ or some hacker in America or Russia breaks in, and I get a two second lag, accompanied sometimes by an echo that makes conversation impossible, mostly “Hello, hello, are you there?” The landline is always reliable and clear.

        Really, the internet needs to work better, at least to the vastly better standards of 20 years ago, before the software and OS upgrades, and before analytical and targeting algorithms (and soon AI) bloated the bandwidth and then “sunsetted” anything that worked or was pleasant to use.

        1. Totally agree with that. Tech was much more efficient ten years ago. And I strongly believe that many prefer to work at home because of inefficient tech. You just have to grin and bear it in an office. At home, at least you can get up and escape it for a while without people getting the wrong impression.

      2. My only tiny argument with what you wrote, Belle:
        "All new housing estates should have a village hall and a day care unit for elderlies .. these places work , and are all embracing and are so valuable."

        1. One enterprising community combined childcare duties with care for the elderly. 4-year-olds were let loose on the old folk, choosing one to be a plaything, rather like the toys in the box. Distribution was fairly even, since there was a premium in having one to oneself. One lad commented "he's a bit smelly and grumpy, but he's funny and tells good stories". I had a grandmother who liked to throw Murray mints at the children. She was quite a good shot and could hit one at ten yards. Not that we minded.

          The staff went off for a cup of tea and a natter and left their charges to it.

    2. Where's the inclusion and diversity here? A lonely old boy vs a cute bloke dressing as a woman – who gets the attention, the flags and the parades?
      Mother's dementia began during lockdown. Very few people visited her anyway, but up to that point, her friend would drop by daily for tea and to do some gardening. Then – nothing. AFAIK, only I called her on the phone. Then in came dementia, and she now lives in a (very nice and kind) home, not really knowing who I am or where she is. I believe that, had she had company, she would have been mostly OK even now.
      Diversity and inclusion, my arse. It's about showing off and feeling that you're seen as virtuous. Nothing to do with being human at all.

    3. Long before I met her highness I had an awful cough and kept bashing on. This had gone on for 3 or more weeks. I got out of the shower and coughed so much my throat closed up. I remember thinking 'this is it. I'm going to die.' It was just me. I know what you mean.

      Government spending is ludicrous. So far over the hill it's no longer funny. We need a high skill, small population and a services sector that feeds it. What we don't need is a massive population of low skill individuals doing odd jobs in the services sector and an even larger group sat on welfare doing nothing.

      For 2 – should you ever feel yourself in that position, reach out. Shout, ask for help. I don't know what I or we could do, but you won't ever be alone.

    1. The people who administer the injections must be held personally responsible. I also know someone who was jabbed despite saying they didn't want it.

      1. Give due warning when approached, and if that doesn't work, adopt violence in self-defence.

    2. They're doing it to young people who get the flu jab too. Aren't children now eligible for the flu jab (mass vax at school?). A friend's daughter (18) went for flu jab, at Boots, and asked if Covid jab was being given too. Was told yes. She said no to Covid jab and it ended up in a bit of a row. So be prepared to stand your ground and be prepared when giving consent to child vaccinations at school. When sent form state Covid jab not to be given – unless child is vulnerable.

    3. They're doing it to young people who get the flu jab too. Aren't children now eligible for the flu jab (mass vax at school?). A friend's daughter (18) went for flu jab, at Boots, and asked if Covid jab was being given too. Was told yes. She said no to Covid jab and it ended up in a bit of a row. So be prepared to stand your ground and be prepared when giving consent to child vaccinations at school. When sent form state Covid jab not to be given – unless child is vulnerable.

    4. The pharmaceutical suppliers have immunity – granted by the political class. The political class have immunity from such due to office.

      No court will touch it. No lawyer fight for it. It's done. They've got away with it. There may be justice in the future, 30, 40 years from now but for now they've got away with it.

      1. 388663+ up ticks,

        W,
        There is always someone who will rise to the occasion as there are many a way to skin a cat,The SS chaps believed they had a thousand years for starters.

        This odious issue could very well turn into, as we have witnessed once before the covert
        hunted / hunters, borders no problem.

        What is “Mirandas”current protection bill ?

  26. Morning all 🙂😊
    Two sunny starts in a row.
    Just a quickie.
    Thank you all for your good wishes for today.
    I've just heard on the news that 4 million people haven't registered to vote and registration ends at midnight tonight.
    Perhaps one of the many languages was missing. Or there was a spelling mistake !

    2. What really p!55es me off when these figures get bandied about is that there is no discussion of the fact that it is a legal requirement to register all eligible voters in your household. At least its says so on the form I get sent annually by the council. Some people will have moved recently and not yet registered in their new abode but, if so, it’s unlikely they took themselves off the register for their last home so I don’t think that explains 4 million ducking the electoral roll..

      1. I once had a landlady who refused to register me at her property because she wasn't paying tax on the income from letting. I wonder how many bogus entries there are to compensate for those who could register but don't.

  27. Good morning folks.
    Thanks to the driver of the Spanish HGV who decided to take his lorry for a drink in the canal my boat has become a static caravan!
    Currently moored at Burbage Wharf awaiting the arrival of the Queen of Sheba as I’ve decided to call the dredger that is apparently on its way to clear the debris that has become lodged in the canal.

    The CRT inform me that another vehicle has collided with the canal bridge at Limpley Stoke. It seems to me that this is becoming a bit of a habit!

    1. Ps for the Horny Thologists: lots of swallows and pairs of House Matins nesting locally and Buzzards and Red Kites overhead

    2. An area we know well. A good friend of mine lived at Conkwell for a time, I was at prep school in Bath and went for 3rd Sunday breaks to a friend who lived at Limpley Stoke, my wife went to university at Claverton Down and my father went to Monckton Combe School.

    3. Why can these vermin not be got rid of? They're disgusting. The correct response to dealing with these criminals is to prevent them ever getting into the country.

    4. That sheer savagery is beyond imagination. And in broad daylight on a busy bus.
      What the hell have the government/Border Farce/RNLI unleashed on this country.
      The infestation is seeping into and poisoning every part of this country with the full approval and encouragement of our government.
      This invasion has to be stopped and every single one of these creatures needs to be disposed of. For national security, and the safety of decent people, they need locking up in very secure compounds under the most basic conditions until they can be removed.
      If every benefit/freebie handed out to these filthy sub-humans was to be stopped, the flood would more or less cease.
      NONE are genuine asylum seekers/refugees, but every lying sob story they make is believed.
      I am so angry at what is happening.

      1. I am angry as well.

        I used to get night terrors , and they came and went even when I married Moh .and I sometimes wake up with nightmares .. Why because of what I saw as a child , and my parents used to insist my sister and I hid under our old fashioned beds when black gangs with machetes and guns went on the rampage through the streets , that happened in Africa. Their noise and jabbering makes me anxious .

        I hate crowds , and I always feel uncertain .. if and when I am in a crowd situation , which is rare these days .

        1. How awful that experiences from childhood can still put you in a state of fear,
          Their violence, thuggery and savagery is obviously in their genes, and while it may be relatively recent here (and other civilised countries), your experience shows it is part of their 'culture' for generations. These 'people' should never have been allowed to live here, or at least should immediately be deported as soon as any crime is committed, with no right of appeal. In an ideal world, 'Right to remain' or citizenship should only be granted conditional to abiding by our laws, and their descendants to be subject to the same in perpetuity. So even if they are 2nd, 3rd or whatever generation, they go back to their homeland.

  29. Failed – Too many potential answers.
    Wordle 1,095 X/6

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

      1. Thanks Phiz but you can keep the cap. It's your size and you've had it so long you'd really miss it. 😛 😛 😛

    2. yep we had the same problem but got lucky
      Wordle 1,095 5/6

      ⬜⬜⬜🟩⬜
      ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
      ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
      ⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

      1. Me too. I ran out of viable first letters.

        Wordle 1,095 5/6

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

    3. Four

      Wordle 1,095 4/6

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

  30. Fun fact: 69% of single female voters pulled the D lever in the USA2020 elections, not realising/ignoring the increase of their odds of being raped, robbed, or murdered.

    And so.. illegal alien gang member Victor Antonio Martinez Hernandez who entered the US under President Biden's open southern borders was credited with last year's high profile murder of a Maryland mother of four.

    ah, now the Leftie globalist solution..

    Premier of the Australian state of Victoria has created a new ministry tasked with the purpose of changing and perhaps even controlling men.
    Jacinta Allan announced this month that state MP Tim Richardson would serve as the inaugural Parliamentary Secretary for Men’s Behavior Change – the first position of its kind in the country.

    2. The Cortez creature walked away from a journalist saying 'you don't agree with me, so I'm not talking to you.' Can you imagine that sort of pathetic petulance in anyone else but a spoiled, entitled, pathetic utter non-achiever?

  31. The truth about Starmer’s ‘changed’ Labour has just been exposed
    It is high time the Party gave unequivocal support to MPs who have stood up for women’s rights, including Rosie Duffield

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/17/the-truth-about-starmers-changed-labour-has-been-exposed/

    BTL

    Every single political judgement that Mrs May made was wrong.

    One of the most blatant was when she said: "The Conservatives are the nasty party."

    True – the Conservatives are repulsive, they are treacherous and mendacious, they renege on their promises, they are incompetent and they cannot be trusted one inch. But for sheer nastiness the Conservatives cannot hold a candle to Labour.

    1. Theresa May's reasoning fell apart when she deemed that all that was needed to put everything right was to be nice to gays.

      At least the Tories limited their nastiness to those who were "not one of us". Labour is quite capable of being horrid to their own, to the point of withering them to uselessness. Is this what Starmer means by "CHANGE"?

    2. But, as much as it pains me to argue Mrs. May's case, she never did say that but it is an example of how The Left will take a tiny snippet, add a couple of words and then release the lie.
      If you refer to Theresa May's speech to the Tory Party Conference in October 2002, (it's on the Grauniad website) Far from saying "We are the nasty party," she actually said: "You know what some people call us – the nasty party. I know that's unfair. You know that's unfair but it's the people out there we need to convince – and we can only do that by avoiding behaviour and attitudes that play into the hands of our opponents."

  32. Sees the target, fires well wide…

    Migration betrayal will push the UK into a French-style political collapse
    –
    Pray that the Tories and Farage can fix immigration and stagnation. Otherwise a nastier force will emerge
    –
    SHERELLE JACOBS • 17 June 2024 • 8:09pm

    Amid the rough and tumble of our general election, some have paused to puzzle over the peculiarity of Britain being about to hand a massive majority to a humdrum technocrat, just as the hard-Right surges in Europe. One could endlessly dissect this "British exceptionalism", from the Tory party's self-immolation to the distortions of first-past-the-post. And yet, unless Britain changes course, we too could be ruled by the hard Right in five to 10 years' time.

    This may seem far-fetched. It is tempting to dismiss France – where Marine Le Pen is heading for a dramatic electoral showdown with a radical Leftist alliance – as a unique basket case, for instance. It has a formidable history of impassioned polarisation.

    The country's ghettoised banlieues, ravaged by anomie and nihilism, are the outcome of a conceited post-war technocratic project to build Le Corbusier-style concrete cities for the working class. France's guiding philosophy of laïcité, rooted in an Enlightenment philosophy that vehemently opposes obscurantism and pious display, is irreconcilable with Islam and its adherents' demands for religious "respect".

    The rise of the hard Right in other European countries can be explained away in a similar fashion, from Italy's previous dabblings with fascism to Germany's enigmatic Eurasian mindset, a powerful country situated between East and West. And yet there is also a common story. These countries are drifting to the Right because their ruling classes have failed to tackle the twin existential issues facing the West: economic stagnation and unsustainable mass migration. Europe is a warning of where we could soon end up if we don't confront these issues ourselves.

    True, Britain has long prided itself on its relaxed attitude to migration. Yet polls suggest that views are hardening. Repeated broken promises have made mass immigration a symbol of elite deception. Uncontrolled borders have become emblematic of a country where all commitment to order, all will to fix problems, has withered away.

    Nor should we be blind to the toxic peculiarities of the British migration problem. Our elites' carnivalesque fondness for multiculturalism, coupled with their disdainful indifference to "left-behind" areas, has led to a highly distinctive form of British "chain migration", with virtually self-contained communities being transplanted from abroad to inner city tenement blocks and Northern towns.

    Very soon all this is going to explosively intersect with stagnation. Britain may be tipping into a dangerous paradox, whereby mass migration drives GDP growth and at the same time – because we are incapable of building infrastructure to support population growth – undermines living standards. [Crap. The population has grown by well in excess of 12% in the last 20 years with negligible GDP growth, even before the calamity of covid.]

    What is alarming is that, as pressing as these issues are, the coming years under Labour will almost certainly be a write-off. The key question is: to what extent? Keir Starmer is in many ways an irrelevant nonentity, the tedious point B that the mechanistic laws of linear time demand comes between A and C. But the question of whether his interregnum is mediocre or shambolic may well decide the course of history.

    An optimistic take is that Labour can lay some useful if limited groundwork, before being ejected from office due to its timidity once the Right has got its act together. Perhaps it will make a start on planning reform and bring some order to asylum. But somehow I suspect that the Left will, as usual, respond to the great challenges of our age with a mixture of pomposity and paralysis.

    For one thing, Europe's Right-wards lurch threatens to upend Starmer's "velvet glove" approach to migration. His hopes of managing asylum flows through multilateral cooperation are already in ruins. His pledge to scrap the Rwanda policy is disastrously timed.

    A perception that Britain is softening its borders when Europeans are moving to shut theirs may well result in a spike in Channel crossings. If Starmer does try to pivot to a harder deterrent plan, there is a serious question over whether his party – full of human rights lawyers and refugee activists – could sink to such an act of national pragmatism or would prefer to heroically fall on its sword, committing political suicide.

    Nor does Labour have a growth plan that might help it evade the migration challenge. Ultimately, this country has stagnated because big business has ceased to innovate. The next reforming government will have to knock our corporate laggards into shape through the removal of subsidies and, in the case of Big Pharma, reform of overly indulgent intellectual property laws.

    With Labour so desperate to position itself as the "party of big business" and so gullible towards corporate blather about Brexit being the root of their ills, the elephant in the room will continue to be ignored. Any notion that Labour can get around it by building a few more houses and wind farms is absurd.

    The scenario that the country should fear most is one in which Labour fails and the centre Right is still out for the count. That is why there is a lot riding on whether Reform is able to either swallow the Tory party or force it into an electable form.

    Some are aghast at the growing influence of Nigel Farage. But if he does not win the ideological war on the Right, a far nastier, more nationalistic movement could appear. [It's far more likely that the nastiness will be provoked by that which the good and the great dare not name. The idea that defending your patch and your way of life against hostile and parasitic forces is nasty is in itself a nasty opinion.]

    Unless a party emerges that is willing and able to slash migration, within a few years the demand to reduce numbers could morph, as it has across Europe and America, into talk of the need to actively deport illegal, criminal, non-assimilated and even non-white foreigners.

    The window in Britain for a populist movement focused on not just giving the people what they want, but fixing deep problems is also steadily closing. In Europe and America, a socialist brand of populism is taking hold which indulges in the obscene falsehood that the West would be a land of milk and honey were it not for scrounging immigrants and greedy corporations.

    For now, Reform has opted for the more accurate message that Britain's problems include immigration but they also transcend it. Faragism, with its desire to cut migration but also to reduce public spending and overhaul the NHS, stands for an intriguing mixture of mass empowerment and Thatcherite tough love.

    But if this fails to make headway, whoever moves into this space may well adopt the dangerous magical thinking of Le Pen's National Rally, which rails against vital changes to pensions, or the anti-capitalism of Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy, which favours squeezing big business to fund public goods.

    That Britain is heading for a period of turbulence is an understatement. We may be about to live through the most important juncture in our history since the Second World War.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/17/migration-betrayal-push-uk-into-french-political-collapse/

    1. My late father had a pithy response to what he used to call "bleating": "well, what are you going to do about it then?".

      Taking the above post on board, I ask that question to all the parliamentary candidates, and the one that actually answers the question gets my vote, regardless of the colour of the rosette.

    2. From Coffee House, the Spectator

      In praise of Nigel Farage’s war on banks
      Comments Share 18 June 2024, 8:13am
      Why did it take Nigel Farage to suggest clawing back some of the super profits pocketed recently by British banks? Why hasn’t Labour thought of stopping the Bank of England paying interest on the deposits of commercial banks?

      There is, after all, plenty of money for the taking. In 2023, HSBC reported a record net profit of over $30 billion (£24 billion). Lloyds made around £5.5 billion and Barclays trousered £6 billion. The UK banks have never had it so good.

      They have been coining it because of high interest rates which acts like a reverse ATM machine. The Reform election manifesto, sorry ‘contract’, proposes accessing some of this by getting the Bank of England to stop paying interest on the £700 billion in deposits of commercial banks held under quantitative easing. This is not some naive Marxist idea cooked up by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. It is a reform that has been discussed for years in financial and academic circles. Indeed, there is something approaching a left-right consensus that it is time to halt this particular public subsidy to the financial sector.

      This is precisely the kind of stealth tax – as lucrative to the exchequer as it is hard to explain to voters – that Gordon Brown would have brought in
      Ending central bank interest could bring in around £35-£40 billion, according to many economists. The Institute for Fiscal Studies say the measure would likely yield only half of that. But that would still be more than the £18 billion black hole they have identified in the financial prospectuses of the major parties in this election. At any rate, it seems worth a shot.

      We have a windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industry, so why not on the banks? Labour seems to think it can build the new Jerusalem by taxing non-domiciled businessmen on their non-UK earnings. But these guys are already making plans to move their activities to more favourable tax regimes. The clue is in the name: ‘non-domiciled’. Footloose plutocrats can go where they please. Even if they remain, taxes on their UK earnings will bring in less than £3billion.

      Why resort to piddling taxes like abolishing VAT on private schools, which is going to bring in pennies, when you could be creaming off some of the recent gains of the very financial institutions that helped cause the 2008 financial crash and who had to be bailed out by tens of billions from UK taxpayers?

      Most popular
      Sam Leith
      The terrible consequences of the Hay Festival grandstanding

      This is precisely the kind of stealth tax – as lucrative to the exchequer as it is hard to explain to voters – that Gordon Brown would have brought in when he was chancellor in the late nineties. The stealth tax he did introduce back then, abolishing dividend tax relief on pension funds, brought in money alright, but it suppressed the living standards of a generation of pensioners. This stealth tax would hit the pariahs of the capitalist economy.

      This measure from Farage is not the politics of envy, still less is it taxing enterprise. Indeed, halting central bank interest isn’t really a tax. It would simply stop banks earning interest for doing nothing.

      Quantitative easing was introduced after the financial crash, you may recall, to salvage the banks from their own reckless avarice. It was also supposed to stimulate investment and economic growth, as well as prevent another systemic collapse of the financial system. It failed in the former and the jury is still out on whether the UK banking system has learned its lesson and is now crash-proof. Those 100 per cent mortgages that the banks are handing out again do not inspire confidence.

      The 2008 banking crash was caused by irresponsible lending on sub prime mortgages by commission-hungry commercial banks. It was based on the expectation that, if it all went pear shaped, the government would step in to rescue them because they were ‘too big to fail’. Are they also too big to tax? Apparently. The Tories have even lifted the cap on banker bonuses just at the very moment that banking profits have gone through the roof.

      The commercial banks never used to earn interest on central bank deposits before 2006. It has only really become the norm since the crash. The.bankers and their lobbyists will, of course, claim that this move would cause liquidity problems and make the system less stable. Equally, it might just make them work a little harder.

      I think Nigel Farage is onto something here. The banks have had a very good deal from the taxpayer for many years. It’s time for them to put a something back in. We’re all in this together.

      1. The idea of taxing interest from savings would collapse the banking system. If folk see no return (as they will when the digital currency is forced on us) then they'll simply stop depositing and there will be nothing to lend (which is why the state wants to remove cash).

        While government will cover the fiat lending initially, that'll just destroy the currency completely leading to what Venezuela does, where a trained doctor becomes a taxi driver because dollars pay more than the worthless currency.

        However the forcing of digital only ensures you cannot take your money out at all, so the state traps you, solving it's problems without the annoyance of the citizen having any choice.

        1. ‘The idea of taxing interest from savings would collapse the banking system’
          I’ve never understood that interest was tax free.

    3. I'm tired of being called 'Hard Right', Far Riht or some other lie.

      Most of our problems – economic and social come from the diversity.
      Our laws are idiotic and unfairly applied .
      The police are politicised.
      The NHS doesn't work.
      The roads are a mess.
      The trains are too expensive.
      The state wants to stop us driving/eating/spending (except on what it wants).
      It is increasingly socialising the costs of unrelaible energy sources while happily privatising losses. This failed in the 70's.
      We haven't enough energy capacity because big fat state wants to run that down.

      Taxes are too damned high for what we get. The 17,000 pages of the tax code are simply abusive and pointless, creating loop holes and get outs and lumbering workers with dreadful carnage.

      We have to change course to a rational, sensible future. One that starts out providing a doubling of our energy generating capacity and not using unreliables.

      If we do not start to do what needs to be done the nation will disappear and dissolve to anarchy. I likely won't see it, but is Junior going to face a future that's the same as the Winter of Discontent every single day?

      1. What the hell is “far-Right”?

        I wish the press would cease using idiotic, made-up, descriptions such as the risible (and eminently unprovable) term, "far-Right" (or “extreme-Right”, or "hard-Right"), which simply does not exist. “Far-Right" is a mythical concept invented by the far-Left (which does exist) to provide a smokescreen to cover the excesses of the various opposing factions of their own wing.

        Being called “far-Right” is simply an absurdity.

        Being labelled ‘far-Right’ is preposterously idiotic. If you are on the Right of the political spectrum it means you shower, work, know the words to the national anthem, belong to a family, voted Brexit, eat meat, and prefer single-sex lavatories. Have I missed anything?

        Oh yes, I've missed a lot. It also means you love life, liberty, freedom and the pursuit of happiness. You are an independent, self-sufficient and self-reliant individualist who has aspirations and are innovative. You are a knowledgable, entrepreneurial, enterprising and hard-working individual who enjoys low taxation and small government. Moreover, your preference is a free-market economy, and you do not go in for mob-handedness, rioting and civil disorder. You expect these positive attributes to be encouraged and rewarded. Your self-esteem, your family, your locality and your country come first, and you are prepared to kill (and die) to defend them.

        In a nutshell, you are NORMAL.

        Therefore it logically follows that to be ridiculously labelled as being ‘far-Right’ means that you must be extremely free, extremely happy, extremely independent, extremely self-sufficient, extremely self-reliant and an extreme individualist; who is extremely aspirational, extremely innovative, extremely knowledgable, extremely entrepreneurial, extremely enterprising, extremely hard-working, and enjoys extremely low taxation and extremely small government, etc.

        If that is the case, then you may call me extremely ‘far-Right’ until the cows come home.

        Moreover, the curious expression "Right-wing populism" is a facile, puerile fallacy. Being on the so-called "Right" side of the political spectrum is as far removed from populism as it is possible to get. Populism = collectivism = socialism. Those on the polar opposite to the accepted "Left" believe in individualism, not populism.

        1. Politics is fully stocked up with imaginary words nowadays, Grizzly, since whenever it tried to use factual ones it always got caught out. Far right can go onto the list with gender, community, identity, Islamophobia, British values, our NHS, et al., none of which carry any currency with our political classes and journos, but which we are expected to tolerate every day.

          At least we always knew up front that estate agents were selling us a fantasy with their, "benefits from spectacular views of the sea" and so on.

  34. The front page of the Daily Mail can be summed up as

    Don't eat meat
    Don't drive
    Don't go on a foreign holiday
    You WILL be interested in the doings of sleb nonentitites.

    Oh and this gem:
    "Second asylum-seeker is flown to Rwanda on a commercial flight and given £3,000 in taxpayer cash to leave the UK under Rishi Sunak's migrant crackdown"

    Some crackdown!

    1. That piece about Lidl Chicken has raised some fearful comments – and the poll indicates 62% of people are afraid of buying supermarket meat.

      1. No need to be afraid. We stopped buying it years ago on the basis that it's clearly useless in the main

    2. Did we take his fingerprints and face recognition stats so that, if he tried to come back here (how much is a flight back from Rwanda?), we can refuse him entry?

  37. Museum hides mask ‘not for women’s eyes’

    The Daily Telegraph18 Jun 2024By Craig Simpson

    A UNIVERSITY of Oxford museum will not display an African mask because the culture which created it forbids women from seeing it.
    The decision by the Pitt Rivers Museum is part of new policies in the interest of “cultural safety”.

    The museum has also removed online photos of the mask made by the Igbo people in Nigeria, which would originally have been used in a maleonly ritual.

    Masks are a central part of Igbo culture, and some masquerade rituals carried out by men wearing the ceremonial objects are entirely male-only and carried out in secret away from female spectators.

    The policy, a first for a major British collection, comes as part of a “decolonisation process” at the Pitt Rivers Museum, which is aiming to address a collection “closely tied to British Imperial expansion”.

    An online trigger warning on the museum’s collection database states that the Igbo mask “may be culturally sensitive” and “not normally be used in certain public or community contexts”.

    The wooden mask has been given the label “must not be seen by women”, is not on display, and has no photographs available to view online.
    A note on the museum website explains that, while photographs exist, curators “are unable to show the media publicly”. This effort to ensure that women do not see the mask follows a suite of policies aiming to ensure “cultural safety” with regard to taboos around secret ceremonies, human
    remains, nudity and gender roles. A set of policies drafted earlier this year state that trigger warnings must be added to the museum database for objects which could be “culturally sensitive”, and particularly sensitive items should be hidden from view.

    Other items traditionally intended for men, including a mask from Papua New Guinea, have remained on display, but are marked “sensitive” and their photos are not shown on the museum website.

    A warning for the collection overall states: “At the Pitt Rivers Museum, we take cultural safety seriously. We aim to keep everyone informed by providing a cultural advice notice.”

    Other warnings apply to individual objects, an “isikira”, a head ornament and “extremely cultural sensitive objects” worn by Maasai girls after undergoing “circumcision” (otherwise known as female genital mutilation).

    The Pitt Rivers collection of shrunken heads, or “tsantsa”, believed to contain the souls of the Shuar and Achuar people of Ecuador who made them, was removed from display 2020 in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

    The museum has pledged to hand over its collection of Benin Bronzes to authorities in Nigeria, and agreed the return of a 15th century statue to India.

    A spokesman for the Pitt Rivers Museum said it was working with groups around the world whose artefacts are represented in its collection, to ensure they are selectively displayed.

    Ruth Millington, an art critic, said denying all women sight of something because it is taboo in one culture was “an extreme stance”. She said: “Women should be given the right to decide, after reading about any cultural sensitivities.”

    That "culture" should be told, in no uncertain terms, to mind its own business go back to what it does best.

    Making yoghourt!

    2. None of the trash has any genuine cultural, aesthetic or intellectual value. It's there because some pea brained relativist decreed that it has the same value as the treasure of classical Greece and Rome. Which is nonsense. Burn the lot and to hell with the pagan gods. They won't fight back because as supernatural deities, they don't exist.

    3. Cambridge considers cutting ties with banks

      University is exploring alternatives to Barclays and Lloyds owing to concerns over fossil fuel investments

      The Daily Telegraph 18 Jun 2024 By Poppy Wood. Felix Armstrong and Lauren Welsby-Riley

      The University of Cambridge is considering cutting ties with Barclays and Lloyds amid concerns over the banks’ investments in fossil fuels, leaked documents have claimed. Minutes from a recent council meeting at the university’s King’s College, leaked to student newspaper Varsity and shared with The Telegraph, suggested Cambridge was exploring “alternatives to Barclays and Lloyds”. The council notes included an update from a King’s College’s bursar.

      ‘We are focused on finding products that do not contribute to the expansion of fossil fuels’. ‘The sums invested or banked are not large in the scale of wider institutional pools’.

      THE University of Cambridge is considering cutting ties with Barclays and Lloyds amid concerns over the banks’ investments in fossil fuels, leaked documents have claimed.

      Minutes from a recent council meeting at the university’s King’s College, leaked to student newspaper Varsity and shared with The Telegraph, suggested that Cambridge was exploring “alternatives to Barclays and Lloyds”.

      The council notes from May 28 included an update from a King’s College’s bursar. It claimed King’s was “part of a concerted effort, with the university and other colleges, that has been engaging with and putting pressure on the major UK banks (particularly Barclays and Lloyds) to improve their practices”.

      It said that “to escalate this work, the university launched a tender for cash and money market products that might present alternatives to Barclays and Lloyds”.

      The document claimed that “the focus of the tender was on bank financing of fossil fuels in particular – but was a more general warning to the major banks that many institutions might withdraw their business if a more ethical approach was not adopted”.

      It suggested that a call-out to find alternatives was “now progressing, with 24 respondents and 14 proposals able to move forward to the next stage of evaluation”.

      The internal document from King’s College suggested that its aim was to identify potential alternatives “in Michaelmas” – the start of next academic year. It claimed that if alternatives to Barclays and Lloyds were found, “there is likely to be a coordinated action across the collegiate university”.

      It also claimed that Cambridge may not actually go through with threats to ditch the banks but instead hoped to bring “reform from within”.
      “The main lever held by the university and colleges is reputational impact on corporate institutions; the sums invested or banked are not large in the scale of wider institutional pools,” it said. “This has been one of the reasons why no university or college has withdrawn from Barclays.”

      A Cambridge spokesman said claims made by King’s College were not representative of the wider university. They told The Telegraph that Cambridge is involved in a broader coalition called the Banking Engagement Forum (BEF) that reviews its banking arrangements.
      “The BEF, which includes a number of collegiate Cambridge institutions, has been working with close to 70 higher education peer institutions to carry out a cash request for proposals,” they added.

      A statement from Cambridge chief financial officer Anthony Odgers on the BEF website states: “What we and our partners are focused on with this mandate is finding financial services products that do not contribute to the expansion of fossil fuels – in particular, new coal- and gas-fired plants which lock in demand for decades.”

      The majority of Cambridge’s 31 colleges are thought to bank with either Barclays or Lloyds, and the university’s relationship with Barclays spans more than 200 years.

      If any of you still retain any lingering doubt that our top seats of learning — first Oxford, now Cambridge — have not been taken over by the Woke Leftist destroyers of civilisation, then you may be in seriously urgent need of medication.

      1. I suggest Cambridge do avoid convention fuel funds. They'd swiftly find themselves bankrupt as the Left wing woke drivel doesn't provide a return.

      2. More madness. The Grand Arcade in Cambridge was mostly funded by the Universities Superannuation Scheme or USS. The scheme pays the pensions of university staff.

        My late father in law was Treasurer at Corpus Christi and had direct access to Barclays Bank via a corridor and hatchway into the rear of the bank. Suitcases of cash and other documents were transited via this means daily.

        Colleges and major banks have long and historic links through investments. It would be highly disruptive to deliberately damage those associations.

    4. Why can't they let women make the choice? I implies they're so weak they can't cope with the mask.

    5. They need asking if any female staff at the museum have been permitted to "appropriate the culture" with their eyes after hours. I do hope no female curators, volunteers, crate handlers or other exhibit "molesters" handled them. If they have, I recommend they be stoned in the public square for their blasphemy.

      We should be told!

    6. They need asking if any female staff at the museum have been permitted to "appropriate the culture" with their eyes after hours. I do hope no female curators, volunteers, crate handlers or other exhibit "molesters" handled them. If they have, I recommend they be stoned in the public square for their blasphemy.

      We should be told!

    8. I am glad I was able to visit these 'terrible' museums before all the insanity started.
      Once these once great museums have returned all their exhibits to their countries of origin, will there be anything left to see?
      As for “cultural safety” , what a ridiculous load of bollo**s. (I feel very sweary today ….)

    1. And everything else. Over pay a loan and big government can reverse it if it chooses to.

  39. Only Nigel Farage is telling the truth about the NHS
    –
    Embracing private healthcare while training British doctors is the sort of radical reform we need
    –
    KAROL SIKORA • 18 June 2024 • 11:12am

    When attempting to gather political support for my campaign to reopen our empty cancer centres, I emailed a great number of MPs from the Tories, Labour, Lib Dems and others. I was hopeful they would share the same sense of urgency as me. Getting these facilities reopened would have saved countless lives during the worst cancer backlog I have ever witnessed. I was wrong. The vast majority ignored me, a handful made a token effort but nothing more. One MP genuinely did his best, Sir Graham Brady, and I’m very grateful.

    I sincerely asked for help and most couldn’t even be bothered to reply. The election comes round, and all of a sudden I have politicians knocking at my door. Where was that interest when it was needed?

    I went into this election with a low opinion of Westminster politics. I was asked to examine the various plans from the main political parties on healthcare and the NHS. Did I expect much? No, not really. More of the same, zero admission of a crisis, general platitudes accounting for nothing and the usual worshipping of the holy shrine of our NHS. There were simply no innovative ideas.

    Labour will always be held back by its fanatical devotion to Bevan’s original concept. At least Wes Streeting wants change and seems very capable. But he will be held back by the party’s leftist origin. Its manifesto is packed with the usual humdrum, with no genuine commitment to the radical change that’s required. After 76 years every system surely needs a major overhaul.

    The Conservatives? Speaking honestly, I almost didn’t bother reading it. They’ve had fourteen years to sort out this mess, and have objectively failed on all counts. I don’t trust a word they say. There are a few murmurings in their plans which I can agree with. But why should we believe them now? If they thought their changes were so necessary, why haven’t they already been implemented?

    I judge people on what they have delivered, not what they say they will deliver. Under their watch the bureaucracy of overpaid apparatchiks sitting in fancy offices well away from the frontline appears to have grown beyond all recognition.

    From the Liberal Democrats, there are a few interesting ideas, particularly on a commitment to named doctors for the elderly and sick. But where would these doctors come from? That patient group requires a lot of time. Just try to get a GP appointment for yourself – it’s not so easy, and they are surely too scared of rocking the professional boat to make the big changes needed. On the whole their plan lacks ambition.

    And then I read Reform’s plan. I could have written it myself. Sharp, concise, controversial and radical. We do need something different to get us out of the mess we’re in, and it’s certainly that.

    Lifting frontline staff out of paying basic rate tax for three years – common sense. It will help to stop the brutal brain drain we’re experiencing and actually encourage more British youngsters into healthcare. Clever, too, as more senior staff will still pay tax as they are in a different bracket. Ending training caps for medical students and writing off student debt following ten years service. Good idea. Capable staff with ambition, skill and determination can ascend from the bottom to the top. Hospital porter to brain surgeon may at last really be possible. This is a long term plan which won’t see fruition for 5 years – but that’s just the attitude we need.

    Tax relief of 20 per cent on all private healthcare and insurance. Fantastic. It will make healthcare a consumer good leading to far more innovation in its delivery. The usual suspects will moan about privatisation, but quite frankly if hardworking families want to spend more on private healthcare then it should be welcomed and encouraged. It will benefit everyone, freeing up space in the NHS for those who need it. Alongside it is the commitment to properly embrace private healthcare, which would surely help clear the backlog.

    Patients within the NHS who can’t see a GP within three days will receive a voucher for private treatment – again, a good idea. Patients should be treated like valued customers, rather than a nuisance to be dealt with.

    Finally, and perhaps the most important, cutting waste and unnecessary management. From someone with half a century experience of dealing with the NHS, let me tell you – it is rife with incompetent bureaucrats who contribute nothing to the smooth running of the system. They deliver nothing for patient care, and disrupt the activities of frontline staff doing the actual work.

    Armies of PR spin agents, diversity officers and intrusive management, many now working from home. Layers and layers of bureaucracy starting with the top in NHS England and the Integrated Care Boards need to be slashed away. That money needs to be redirected to the frontline.
    Make no mistake, the NHS is in crisis. We need radical ideas for radical solutions. Reform offers something different. I applaud their efforts.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/18/reform-nhs-plan-nigel-farage/

    1. Reform understand that labour should not be taxed but that corporations should be taxed. Revenue should return to the application of tariffs on imported goods.

      The security of the UK relies upon our ability to manufacture. We should not be flogging off everything into foreign ownership and need our own healthy workforce able to invent and make things.

      The ability to forge virgin steel should be retained (Port Talbot) at all costs.

  41. Our private healthcare costs about £200 a month for the three of us. Getting 20% of that back is not much. Make the entire lot tax deductible and it'd be a start.

    What I – and I imagine many medical folk find – is that the NHS is really two organisations. One is the monolthic government department. It is wasteful, inefficient, intrusive, arrogant and useless. The other is the medical side which makes every effort to do it's job .

    He says, with the kidney stones the hospital were no longer being bothered by still causing me pain.

      1. Or, if they simply cut taxes across the board the cost would be far less a proportion of our net income.

        1. Do you mind me asking which private healthcare provider you recommend, please, wibbling?

    2. You must be young and very healthy apart from the renal stones. I know one couple who have taken out private health insurance in their late 60s but they are loaded (both retired on big pensions plus a big inheritance and no prospect of grandchildren). Everyone else I know in their late 60s or early/mid 70s who previously had private insurance has abandoned it because the premiums are so enormous.

    1. Very much a cult film in the mid1960s. The white Ford Mustang was one of the stars as was Deauville and the music.

      https://www.google.com/search?q=Un+Homme+et+Une+Femme+Muisc&oq=Un+Homme+et+Une+Femme+Muisc&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQABgNGIAEMggIAhAAGBYYHjIICAMQABgWGB4yCggEEAAYCBgNGB4yCggFEAAYCBgNGB4yDQgGEAAYhgMYgAQYigUyDQgHEAAYhgMYgAQYigUyDQgIEAAYhgMYgAQYigUyDQgJEAAYhgMYgAQYigXSAQkxNjIxM2owajeoAgCwAgA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:9707dfa6,vid:M3y8tsDUl0s,st:0

    1. I eat rice. What's the problem?

      Does that include Rice Krispies, Egg-Fried Rice and Rice Pudding?

      What about Italian Risotto and Spanish Paella? Are they all to be banned?

      1. READ the comment properly ..

        Rishi says We shouldn’t be reliant on foreign food. Buy British.

        British rice, come on Grizzly, wise up!

        1. Where is this "British rice" grown, Margaret? The Paddy Fields of South Armagh?

          1. I believe there's a gadget called a "ricer", for use with boiled potatoes. So, Paddyland would be a potential source…

          2. No , you answer me George , Rishi said we shouldn't be reliant on foreign food , buy British .

            You answered me stupidly , quite childishly and I retorted read the comment .

            Rishi is a twerp, rice is the staple diet of how many million in the UK but it is imported FOREIGN food ..

            How the hell can you buy BRITISH RICE .

            Go back to sleep George , and carry on doing what you are doing !

          3. Your comment wasn't phrased very well, Margaret. I only responded to what I had read.

            A for "mealie eaters", what the hell does that mean?

          8. I had to look up mealies, as it's not a term I'd come across before. You've lived in Africa of course. Interesting that it's a staple food there, given that it's barely digested and well, passes through looking much as it went in?

          10. They tend to pound the sweetcorn, so not left as pellets. Makes them more digenstible, especially after boiling for a while.

          13. It is possible to buy British quinoa. I bought some in February 2020 in Waitrose while wasting time before a charity committee meeting that I was early for. I recall the date because I left my shopping at the meeting venue (a friend’s house) and got the quinoa back about 18 months later. Mercifully, in the interim, the friend had eaten the mushrooms I’d bought.

          14. I did know that, but never miss a chance to abuse globalists. Seriously though, it is perfectly possible to grow a lot of foods in bulk in the UK normally grown abroad out of our winter season. Mr Dyson’s plans for tomato growing greenhouses are particularly impressive. Quite happy to eat tomatoes in winter grown in England freshly.

          15. It is possible to buy British quinoa. I bought some in February 2020 in Waitrose while wasting time before a charity committee meeting that I was early for. I recall the date because I left my shopping at the meeting venue (a friend’s house) and got the quinoa back about 18 months later. Mercifully, in the interim, the friend had eaten the mushrooms I’d bought.

          17. I’ve forgotten what it tasted like. A surefire way to make me move on.

          18. It reminds me of the time a waiter asked me if I’d like some cous cous. I told him I wasn’t that hungry so could I just have some cous.

    2. Sunak and his ilk wish to destroy farmers. Apart from Tescos, where will the food come from then?

    3. Has the utter cluckinng wanquer actually read his 'food strategy' guide? has he bothered to read that it's singularlly designed to push the demented drivel of 'climate change' over food security? In fact, it seems that if you slap 'security' on any government document or policy what you're getting is the exact opposite.

      Here's real farmer Harry Metcalfe talking about it in a polite and measured fashion.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJCrfujVZIk

    4. Has the utter cluckinng wanquer actually read his 'food strategy' guide? has he bothered to read that it's singularlly designed to push the demented drivel of 'climate change' over food security? In fact, it seems that if you slap 'security' on any government document or policy what you're getting is the exact opposite.

      Here's real farmer Harry Metcalfe talking about it in a polite and measured fashion.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJCrfujVZIk

  46. Own up, which NOTTLer was this? (Grizzly, try to resist the temptation…)

    Nicholas Mullan
    @NicholasMullan_
    Sat in the waiting room at the vet and a lady just came walking in and goes “oh fuck, I’ve left the dog at home” 😂😂
    5:27 PM · Jun 17, 2024

    1. Good on yer June, same here. “Scamdemic/plandemic” was a pack of lies from start to … ah, it hasn’t finished yet! Just the excess deaths figures to worry about.

      1. 388663+ up ticks,

        Afternoon VW,
        “Just the excess deaths figures to worry about”.
        Plus those who manipulated the excess deaths and life long injuries.

  50. from Coffee House, the Spectator

    Putin’s alliance with Kim Jong Un is cranking up a notch
    Comments Share 18 June 2024, 11:50am
    As Vladimir Putin prepares to land in Pyongyang for his first visit to North Korea in 24 years, this second meeting of the two dictators in under a year – Kim Jong Un visited Russia in September 2023 – should not be ignored as mere showmanship. Even if the summit simply brings more bright lights and wet-ink signatures, the message from the two leaders will be clear, namely that an anti-Western coalition is not merely a fiction, but a worrying reality.

    Back in 2000, North Korea was six years away from conducting its first – albeit far from successful – nuclear test and struggling to recover from a devastating self-induced famine. Pyongyang was also feeling betrayed following the end of the Cold War in 1991. Only a year earlier, much to North Korea’s ire, the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations with South Korea, what the North has long-called a ‘puppet state’ of the United States. The North’s trade with its Cold War patron would no longer take place at friendship prices. In another blow to Pyongyang in 1996, Russia pulled out from a 1961 treaty between the Soviet Union and North Korea, the Treaty on Mutual Friendship, Cooperation, and Assistance, which pledged mutual assistance in the event of any military attack on either party.

    The two are sending a clear message to the West: any efforts to isolate Russia or North Korea will fail
    Putin’s ascendancy to power in March 2000, however, would please then-North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. The two states signed a new, vaguer, treaty committing both sides to ‘friendship, good neighbourliness, and cooperation’. Trade relations improved dramatically. Soon after Kim Jong Un became the North Korean leader in December 2011, Putin agreed to write off 90 per cent of North Korea’s Soviet-era debt, amounting to a not-so-insignificant sum of nearly $11 billion (roughly equivalent to £12 billion today). With the deal sealed in 2014, it was no surprise that months earlier, North Korea backed Russia’s justification for its invasion of Crimea. Even despite Russia’s subsequent support of United Nations Security Council sanctions on North Korea, the time would come when rhetorical support would extend to something more.

    Fast forward to the present day, and how things have changed. Not only is North Korea now a nuclear-armed state with missile capabilities of increasing sophistication, but its rapprochement with Russia has reached new heights following the latter’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In an article published on North Korean state media only yesterday, Putin pledged that his visit to Pyongyang would place bilateral relations ‘on a higher level’. The Russian President’s spokesperson went one step further, saying that ‘a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty’ would be signed. And whilst both countries are renowned for their bluster, we should not dismiss such statements completely.

    Thus far, the relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang has been largely one of mutual convenience, with both countries exploiting the ongoing war in Ukraine to their advantage. North Korea has supplied Russia with nearly 7,000 containers of munitions – amounting to several million – and even short-range ballistic missiles, in exchange for food assistance, cash, and military expertise and technology, not least satellite technology. And we only need to look at Kim Jong Un’s visit to the Vostochny cosmodrome last September, to realise that it is the technology he values the most. Ever since that visit, Moscow and Pyongyang have repeatedly affirmed the ‘invincible’ nature of their relationship, with Russia actively helping North Korea evade multilateral sanctions, especially by supplying oil directly to the hermit kingdom. Together with a cautious China, they have successfully reduced the United Nations Security Council to little more than an impotent talking shop, unable to constrain neither Russia nor North Korea’s actions.

    With the substance of this week’s Kim-Putin summit predictably unknown, one looming question is whether the two states will actually upgrade their relationship to that of an alliance. Doing so would be antithetical to North Korea’s ideology of juche, which underscores independence in the realms of politics, economics, and military defence, and actively opposes any form of reliance on other countries. The only country with which North Korea has any type of defence treaty is China, the North’s largest economic partner. Whilst Kim Jong Un has sought to move away from being dependent on Beijing, Xi Jinping will no doubt be watching the outcomes of the Kim-Putin summit closely, particularly since this year marks 75 years of relations between the two communist Northeast Asian states.

    Even if amidst the handshakes and smiles we only see a statement affirming unity between Russia and North Korea in opposing what Putin called the ‘aggressive enemy’ of the United States, we would be naïve to view these words as vacuous. By reciprocating Kim’s visit to Russia under a year ago, the two leaders are sending a clear message to the West, namely that in their minds, any efforts to isolate Russia or North Korea will fail, and that an anti-Western alignment is no longer a figment of the West’s imagination, but an actuality.

    With the red carpet rolled, and the streets of Pyongyang festooned with Russian flags and portraits of Putin, it would be unwise to be distracted by the optics of the next two days. A banner on Pyongyang’s Sunan International Airport reads that ‘the friendship between North Korea and Russia is eternal’. This is why we should be worried: even if Russia no longer needs North Korean artillery in a post-Ukraine world, something says that this alignment of rogue states will not go away in a flash.

  51. 'Afternoon All
    Piss Boiling!!
    https://x.com/thellen72/status/1802766965137604887?s=46&t=hhgqHE2v9cQf9vH3lgsgTg
    Rest
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d54c794c03babd71d404bd36cf4c98d4b706a8567ada1bc6d90e8e5ba1b098a9.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6d4b811a9eca9b5634d338cb0cb5847dc08190285db3eea97c76c860d05c7183.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/f4f8b574010990d9e78bf8fb7f394f02375b509378b4f01eaa7a8857f9357608.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/49b20af23c9ac9a11fa7adda0a1805072c3cbd027aff215a513bd987d0965f1a.jpg
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2bf1a68e88b39da9852ddea9baa3e684d86b1403160d053e10f849fc04aebe1d.png

    3. Look at the salary for the RBL diversity post! I know it includes London weighting but … That's them off the list.

  53. Why is Rishi selling a John Deere tractor and a bale of hay?

    Wherefore Massey Furgosen?

    1. Don't like Fergie tractors. The gearshifter(s) between the legs is awkward, IMO. Prefer the shifters on the right of the driver's seat.

  54. Watch: Pro-Palestine activists ransack Kent military technology factory. 18 June 2024.

    Members of protest group Palestine Action have vandalised a factory in Kent and a Canadian bank’s office in the City of London that it claims are linked to Israel.

    Seven people were arrested after activists filmed themselves breaking into Instro Precision in Sandwich in the early hours of Monday, throwing stock to the ground and smashing computers with a crowbar.

    The protesters, wearing orange jumpsuits, were seen in video footage crawling through a smashed window.

    Palestine Action said some had used rolls of spikes called stingers to stop vehicles getting into the site while the break-in took place.

    It speaks of informed and organised sabotage.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/17/pro-palestine-group-smash-computers-windows-factory-bank/

    1. I remember a pro tennis player – one of the Wimbeldon fellows said that he wasn't returning the current serve, he was 4 or five plays ahead.

      2. You’ve obviously never played bowls. Incredibly skilful but indoor bowls is very slow and exacting.
        We play lawn bowls from mid April until the end of September. At club level the profile is 60 through to 90+. A great social and skilful game. It also has a great social side to and is a lifeline for many elderly people on their own. We also have winter activities that are well attended and well attended by those on their own. That might be called proper social cohesion.
        We have a clubhouse that is restricted, by fire regulations, to 60 people but have a membership of over 100 members. Perhaps you should give it a try.

        1. I tried bowls at an open house once I thought that it might be a summertime alternative to curling. At first glance the delivery looks similar to delivering a curling stone but without the satisfying slide from the hack and that just didn't feel natural.

          it sounds like the social side is similar, we have a number of members in their eighties that are still curling several times a week. In recent years we have been working on attracting younger members into the club, I started a learn to curl program about ten years ago and that is now attracting younger, working age participants. Maybe it is the fact that we have the cheapest beer in town helps.

          Obviously a few hours wasn't enough time to reach any level of competence. I can normally deliver a curling stone to within a foot of the target but if I could get a bowl within ten feet I was happy.

          Actually my response was just a cheap shot against all of those that run curling down but have never tried the game.

          1. I like watching curling but that only occurs in Commonwealth games years. I tried it once when on a sales conference in Scotland, probably 40 years ago. I always think of it as bowls on ice. We do have a few under 60’s but the committee are predominantly 70+.
            We have 8 bowls clubs in and around Woking and our club has the largest membership. Our nearest curling club i s probably 400 miles away in Scotland.

  57. A moderately active sort of day.
    4 x loads of washing done for Stepson and now hanging up the "garden".
    I've also has another go at removing the residual glue from the sign writing transfers on the side of the van. At least it's cleaned off the grime that was sticking to the adhesive ang looking like the original transfers.

  58. Anyone looking for a home restoration project:-
    https://fidler-taylor.co.uk/index.php?route=property/view&property_id=6220

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/40f7f26de2f6f78ea7d97ace19940dcf85993307255d54eea0c2a5569362f064.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/933fe37154f14b24f1035215425d2717f498817f2cfe57e443668c075383465a.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4b2f9141a7baf6a3eabe1009dd9cb246b7f1d436fdcbad4474e76e18bbb61f5c.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8fbc9b2b4bb675c045f27ef593d7e0b96f8db77cfc4b82d0ecc5b9ee42cd7104.jpg

  59. A dreaded Double-Bogey Six!

    Wordle 1,095 6/6
    ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
    ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨
    ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
    ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
    🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  61. Five for me.

    Wordle 1,095 5/6

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

  62. 5 for me, one of those tricky ones.

    Wordle 1,095 5/6

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

  63. Russia accused of beheading Ukrainian soldiers . 18 June 2024

    The beheaded body of a Ukrainian soldier was discovered by an aerial reconnaissance team on top of a damaged military vehicle on Monday.

    It came as Ukraine’s prosecutor general said he had “horrifying evidence” of a new Russian policy of beheading captive soldiers instead of detaining them.

    This is another uncorroborated atrocity story by the Ukies designed to demonise the Russians. This propaganda campaign, that takes place in the comments as well, has convinced me that the US is determined to provoke a full scale conflict in Europe.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk…

  64. Russia accused of beheading Ukrainian soldiers . 18 June 2024

    The beheaded body of a Ukrainian soldier was discovered by an aerial reconnaissance team on top of a damaged military vehicle on Monday.

    It came as Ukraine’s prosecutor general said he had “horrifying evidence” of a new Russian policy of beheading captive soldiers instead of detaining them.

    This is another uncorroborated atrocity story by the Ukies designed to demonise the Russians. This propaganda campaign, that takes place in the comments as well, has convinced me that the US is determined to provoke a full scale conflict in Europe.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk…

  66. In yesterday's UK Column News Brian Gerrish had an interesting segment on political party funding. Here are a few screen shots from a website by the name of Open Democracy (sounds suspiciously Soros-spawned). https://www.ukcolumn.org/vi… The segment starts at about 35 minutes.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/dde14961b4dc05cad1c0fe3abbdc10b532b5775ec23212f66da7796220613655.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c1f1cfb28c67a08f2149714b5bf02f875cb9d1e8832bb34de1690cfc2b4c4b57.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/90bbb0b1bbe8e212993d5feab66a6b983b0a89d86a01ceb5914f317e79aaf94c.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/df32c17c166183c60e4bc94b3ad3afbf4c049a23dac84a17ce0aa0c191ff86b8.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0e8d0fe706edfdf7e6ff464879ae3e9fb38ec9482239e9e8a6471463bad9c2b1.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/703d1404a3d001f39e5c7db7ceb1fc9067a0cb4c74770d5a12b1ecdd6ba10903.png https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e5b800dff21389019fd238d6e0709b6a26f6f43ea2ec54b7dd286ac9971fd9da.png
    Anyone still think your MP works for you?

        1. To say " me " without a courteous good evening was somewhat rude but of course good evening to him too 🙂

      2. You forgot your manners and didnt say good evening but of course to you " me " too . 🤣

  68. I was lucky with an eagle (it's a par five today).

    Wordle 1,095 3/6

    ⬜🟨🟨🟨🟨
    🟩🟩🟨🟩⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩I

  70. I hope that Ready Eddy has had a successful day and will soon be able to look in!

  71. From the Guardian

    Vermont Republican secretly poured water into colleague’s bag over months
    Mary Morrissey apologizes after being filmed dumping liquid into backpack of Democratic legislator Jim Carroll

    Gloria Oladipo
    A Vermont lawmaker was compelled to apologize publicly after being caught on video pouring water into her colleague’s work bag multiple times across several months.

    The bizarre behavior is allegedly a part of a campaign of harassment that one legislator aimed at another who represents the same district in the Green Mountain state, independent outlet Seven Days first reported.

    The Republican representative, Mary Morrissey, 67, confessed to dumping water in the bag of the Democratic legislator Jim Carroll, 62. She later apologized during a Vermont state house session on Monday, Boston.com reported.

    “I am truly ashamed of my actions,” Morrissey said.

    Morrissey did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.

    She and Carroll both represent the city of Bennington, about 25 miles outside of Manchester. Morrissey has served 13 terms in the Vermont legislature while Carroll has served two.

    Carroll told the Guardian that Morrissey had poured cups of water into his bag since January.

    Carroll says he first suspected Morrissey as she had been “nasty” to him for several months despite the two knowing each other since childhood and even attending the same church.

    “[She] would say demeaning things in front of other legislators,” Carroll said.

    But Carroll had no evidence, so he decided to launch his own investigation. For weeks, Carroll secretly recorded footage of his backpack to catch the person in the act.

    In two videos Carroll captured, Morrissey is seen dumping a cup of liquid into Carroll’s green tote bag. Morrissey’s face was not captured in the video, but fellow lawmakers were able to identify her by her gray hair.

    Seven Days later used a public records request to obtain footage of Morrissey dumping water into Carroll’s bag. That was after the outlet initially reported on Morrissey’s behavior and an ethics investigation into her.

    Carroll initially refused to release the videos to Seven Days but ultimately changed his mind.

    “I have been very reluctant to disclose the video because I believe it will deeply embarrass Representative Morrissey,” Carroll wrote in a statement to the outlet. “However, it has become clear to me that the media are aware of the details of Representative Morrissey’s behavior and likely will continue to report on that behavior in the near future.”

    Carroll said when he first saw the video of Morrissey, he felt “sad”. “There was no good that was going to come out of this,” he said.

    Morrissey later apologized to Carroll during a subsequent meeting and claimed that she didn’t know the bag belonged to him.

    According to Carroll, Morrissey initially said that she “flicked” water on the bag because she saw a bug on it. But she later added that she didn’t know why she decided to dump water on Carroll’s bag for months on end.

    “At the end of the meeting, I looked at her and said, ‘You know, this has really fucked me up.’ There were weeks when I didn’t know who was doing this or why,” Carroll said.

    “I walked around this place, paranoid of my fellow legislators, racking my brain trying to think, ‘What could I have possibly said or done?’”

    Carroll said that he was still weighing whether he should pursue charges against Morrissey for the harassment.

    As for whether he forgives Morrissey, Carroll said: “I guess I would have to say yes in the spirit of forgiveness, reluctantly. But if I had to be a smartass, I’d say her apology holds about as much water as my canvas bag.”

  72. Todays stupid idea.

    the Washington Post is suggesting that Kamala Harris is a liability and Biden should replace her 2ith Hilary Clinton.

    Supposedly this will get over the Old White Men negative vibe around both presidential candidates. Well she is only 76 and not a real man like Biden, the white appellation may be a problem

    I would like some of whatever drugs they are taking.

    https://nypost.com/2024/06/18/media/biden-should-replace-kamala-harris-with-hillary-clinton-kathleen-parker/

    1. Oddly enough, if true, it would be one of the very few times, OK once, that I would be on her side.

      His appointment stated in CAPITAL LETTURDS you'se be adda blek you needed da trained blek man to explain.

  75. If any other man asked to be allowed to parade naked in a women's changing room at a swimming pool, he would quite rightly be reported and, hopefully in due course, be placed on the sex offender register, or whatever the US version is. Just because this pervert man thinks he is/pretends to be a woman should not prevent him being investigated for gross indecency and sex offences. he is surely a risk to women.
    https://babylonbee.com/news/disqualified-lia-thomas-asks-if-he-can-still-just-hang-out-naked-in-the-olympic-womens-locker-rooms

    1. I dislike this man intensely, but I can't help thinking that this is a disgraceful setup.

  77. The BBC's John Simpson has exposed his bovine ignorance
    –
    Reactions to the unconventional capture of Beau Lucy show the increasing disconnect between rural and urban life
    –
    CLIVE ASLET • 18 June 2024 • 2:45pm

    If you are a broadcaster whose career has been spent reporting on the world's war zones and trouble spots, a calf being hit by a police car may look like small beer. Even so, as a meat eater, I take issue with John Simpson's comment that it is "illogical" to object to such treatment of the poor animal, while still being prepared to tuck into roast beef on a Sunday.

    In Britain, pains are taken to ensure that animals are slaughtered humanely. Admittedly there are few local abattoirs due to the cost of the vets who are required, under our excessively bureaucratic system [EEC/EU, not ours], to attend them. This means that sheep and cattle have to travel long distances on their last journey, causing stress that could otherwise have been avoided – if nothing else, bad for the taste of the meat. Still, the presence of vets is itself evidence of the care that society expects to be taken over slaughter. The creatures don't meet their ends by being rammed by fast-moving vehicles.

    Nor is unnecessary suffering tolerated in other aspects of husbandry. This is contentious to vegans, who have recently begun a poster campaign in the London tube to highlight the fate of "bobby" (male) calves in dairy farming. They are generally surplus to requirements and are therefore killed.

    If you believe, as they do, that taking the life of any animal in order to feed humans is wrong, this is an open and shut case. Personally, I would rather these calves were reared for longer, because to kill them so young disrespects life. It is an also an obvious waste. Better that they should be reared for longer and then eaten as veal.

    But then the market for veal in this country is limited, when it is eaten the meat is "ruby" (pinkish) rather than white. White veal is what our Continental neighbours like in their Weiner schnitzel and blanquette de veau, with veal farms in France and Italy producing nearly 4 million calves for the table each year. Here we rightly expect calves to be given more space and feed than in the EU, and the RSPCA opposes the export of live animals. What are dairy farmers to do?

    The problem is an inevitable consequence of drinking milk. Although consumption per capita has dropped, 98.5 per cent of UK households still buy milk to drink, so nearly all of us are complicit in this system. The best solution would be for consumers to develop a taste for ruby veal but this stubbornly hasn't happened. Besides, government figures show that Britons are eating less meat now than at any time since records began.

    There is, as Simpson would say, an illogicality here, or perhaps more than one. The food chain is rusty in places. It doesn't help that there is so little money in it for farmers. Those who struggle to keep going cannot invest in the most efficient systems, which also provide the best welfare.

    My surprise was that a calf should have been loose on roads near Heathrow Airport in the first place. As a romantic, I like to see cows in the fields. This one – Beau Lucy – escaped from common grazing land on Staines Moor by swimming across a river, suggesting material for the makers of Chicken Run. It then became spooked.

    The farmer in charge of the calf is understandably keeping a low profile, but presumably his operation is small. Large farms – which have become more common as the dairy industry consolidates due to low cost of milk – allow their cows to eat delicious grass, but it will have been quite possibly cut elsewhere and brought to them by the agricultural equivalent of Deliveroo. It saddens me that this should be so. But a cow is something of a couch potato. As long as she is in the company of a social group, kept dry and well-fed, she may be a lot happier than if trudging around a muddy field in the rain.

    What the incident of Beau Lucy – and Simpson's reflection on it – really demonstrates is the disconnect between urban life and the source of our food. Once, there would always have been people around who knew how to deal with a stray cow, but that's no longer the case. Britain has not yet been reduced to the industrial methods of beef production practiced in the US, but premium brands using humane cattle-raising methods are expensive. The ultimate illogicality of the food system is to expect the highest standards on the farm while paying the least possible at the checkout.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/06/18/the-bbcs-john-simpson-has-exposed-his-bovine-ignorance/

  79. Only one reference to you-know-what and even that is oblique.

    Mass postal voting is endangering our democracy
    –
    This Blair era innovation is wide open to fraud. Now Labour wants to introduce votes for 16-year-olds
    –
    PHILIP JOHNSTON • 18 June 2024 • 6:17pm

    Have you voted yet? That might seem an odd question to ask when this interminable general election campaign has more than two long weeks to run, but some people may already have cast their ballot by post.

    June 19 is the deadline for applying for a postal vote, but if you were quick out of the blocks when Rishi Sunak made his rain-soaked announcement on May 22, you could well have had your application approved by now. Once all candidates are in place, the ballot papers are sent out. There was a time, not that long ago, when to qualify for a postal vote required absence from the constituency on election day or infirmity making it impossible to vote in person.

    Then the Blair government – responsible for so many constitutional excrescences – decided in its wisdom to let anyone who wished to vote by post do so. The Representation of the People Act 2000 introduced absent voting on demand, repealing the 1872 Ballot Act, which was passed to end the fraud and bribery that used to accompany elections when voting was open.

    It's simple, really. If people vote in the privacy of the polling booth, they cannot be intimidated and can always claim to have supported a particular party even if they haven't. This is a vital safeguard of our democracy yet it is undermined by postal voting on demand.

    It is ironic that there has been a crackdown on possible fraud at the polling station by requiring voters to bring some form of ID, even though there was little evidence of any widespread abuse. Yet postal voting, which is wide open to all sorts of jiggery-pokery, is not only allowed but encouraged.

    The argument in favour is that postal votes are filled out in the "privacy" of one's own home. But it is not private when family members, candidates or supporters can influence, subtly or otherwise, the way you complete your vote. A secret ballot, however, means that loyalties to families, friends and even community leaders can be maintained in public, but political arguments can still win out behind the curtain in the voting booth.

    I am not opposed to postal voting and used it myself when at university. But absent voting on demand – by post or proxy – seems wrong unless you are unavoidably away from where you are registered or are unable to get out. It is not as if polling stations are miles away.

    At the last general election, 20 per cent of all valid votes were cast by post. Before the new rules were introduced for the 2001 election, the figure was 2 per cent. This increase cannot be accounted for by a greater number of infirm people or by more being at university, though both are true. The fact is that a lot of people apply because they cannot be bothered to make the journey to the polling station and have already made up their minds, so why wait?

    In the first few years, there were so many tales of abuse that the whole system had to be tightened up, with additional identity safeguards. It is no coincidence that postal voting on demand is not allowed in Northern Ireland, where the old adage used to be "vote early, vote often". Good reasons still need to be given in the Province for an absent vote to be permitted.

    Back in 2001, Labour might have hoped that absent voting would help them by encouraging younger people to take part. In reality, they are used more by older people, seen as likely to back the Conservatives, which is why they have failed to reverse this procedure.

    Both parties have tinkered with this system for their own advantages. The franchise has been extended to all British citizens living abroad for whatever length of time, whereas it used to expire after 15 years. Yet so far, fewer than 200,000 of an estimated 3.5 million expats who qualify have applied to vote, so that hasn't worked (and is another reason to question the rationality of Rishi Sunak's snap election decision).

    Labour accuses the Tories of introducing the new requirement to show photo ID at the polling stations to boost their vote. It says ethnic minorities and marginalised communities do not have "the right form of identification", even though there are more than 20 different valid means of doing so.

    Yet Labour is proposing to carry out another cynical piece of gerrymandering by reducing the voting age to 16 if it wins power. The only possible explanation for this is that it sees an electoral advantage, otherwise why not allow 16-year-olds to do everything else they are banned from doing, such as driving, smoking or drinking alcohol, because they are still considered to be children by law. When the voting age was last reduced from 21 to 18 in 1969, the age of majority was lowered as well.

    It used to be possible to get married aged 16 with parental consent, but this was forbidden by the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022. You can still join the Army aged 16, but need parental consent and you must be in some form of apprenticeship or education until you are 18.

    For goodness sake, you can't even buy a lottery ticket or a scratch card until you are 18. How can it be justified to let children, legally blocked from so many areas of life, vote on how they should apply to everyone else? Ironically, the people most in favour of extending the franchise to 16-year-olds are often those who would infantilise them for longer in every other sphere.

    The argument is made that 16- and 17-year-olds are more likely to vote than the cohort a few years above them and thereby become "engaged" in politics. In the 2014 Scottish independence referendum turnout was 20 points higher than in the 18-24 age group.

    But you could make that argument for 14-year-olds. Either extend the same freedoms enjoyed by adults to 16-year-olds or let them vote when they have them. Anything else is simply a piece of political chicanery dressed up as democratic progress.

    There are still two long weeks until polling day, but if millions are about to vote in the coming days why bother campaigning to the end? Moreover, if the aim is to increase turnout, we should vote on Sundays instead of Thursdays, a hangover from the days when the Sabbath was sacred. It won't be long before we can sit at home and vote online or by phone, as with Strictly Come Dancing, which is where some of our leading politicians may well be heading.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk…

    1. I have a postal vote because of my inability to walk to the polling station, but I doubt \i'll use it. as it's just as far to the nearest post box!

          3. 3 above, Sir J….Reminds me of Jeffrey Bernard (Spectator) who used to write a letter to himself, when delivered get a lift with the postie who dropped him at the pub, then prior to getting a lift home posting another letter to himself…and repeat….

        2. Reminds me of Jeffrey Bernard (Spectator) who used to write a letter to himself, when delivered get a lift with the postie who dropped him at the pub, then prior to getting a lift home posting another letter to himself…and repeat….

    2. I've not received my postal voting papers yet; if they don't arrive soon I shall be summarily disenfranchised.

        1. Indeed I do. I had resigned myself to losing it after 15 years out of the UK (I've been here just under 13) but it seems that curtailment has been cancelled and I now have the UK vote sine die.

      2. Our notification that they were on their way arrived yesterday.

        The actual voting papers usually arrive just in time to ensure they can't be returned in time.

      4. Disgraceful but not entirely surprising.

        Suggest you change your name pro tem to Grizzly Mohammed – I'm sure the papers will arrive soon…..

  80. Only one reference to you-know-what and even that is oblique.

    Mass postal voting is endangering our democracy
    –
    This Blair era innovation is wide open to fraud. Now Labour wants to introduce votes for 16-year-olds
    –
    PHILIP JOHNSTON • 18 June 2024 • 6:17pm

    Have you voted yet? That might seem an odd question to ask when this interminable general election campaign has more than two long weeks to run, but some people may already have cast their ballot by post.

    June 19 is the deadline for applying for a postal vote, but if you were quick out of the blocks when Rishi Sunak made his rain-soaked announcement on May 22, you could well have had your application approved by now. Once all candidates are in place, the ballot papers are sent out. There was a time, not that long ago, when to qualify for a postal vote required absence from the constituency on election day or infirmity making it impossible to vote in person.

    Then the Blair government – responsible for so many constitutional excrescences – decided in its wisdom to let anyone who wished to vote by post do so. The Representation of the People Act 2000 introduced absent voting on demand, repealing the 1872 Ballot Act, which was passed to end the fraud and bribery that used to accompany elections when voting was open.

    It's simple, really. If people vote in the privacy of the polling booth, they cannot be intimidated and can always claim to have supported a particular party even if they haven't. This is a vital safeguard of our democracy yet it is undermined by postal voting on demand.

    It is ironic that there has been a crackdown on possible fraud at the polling station by requiring voters to bring some form of ID, even though there was little evidence of any widespread abuse. Yet postal voting, which is wide open to all sorts of jiggery-pokery, is not only allowed but encouraged.

    The argument in favour is that postal votes are filled out in the "privacy" of one's own home. But it is not private when family members, candidates or supporters can influence, subtly or otherwise, the way you complete your vote. A secret ballot, however, means that loyalties to families, friends and even community leaders can be maintained in public, but political arguments can still win out behind the curtain in the voting booth.

    I am not opposed to postal voting and used it myself when at university. But absent voting on demand – by post or proxy – seems wrong unless you are unavoidably away from where you are registered or are unable to get out. It is not as if polling stations are miles away.

    At the last general election, 20 per cent of all valid votes were cast by post. Before the new rules were introduced for the 2001 election, the figure was 2 per cent. This increase cannot be accounted for by a greater number of infirm people or by more being at university, though both are true. The fact is that a lot of people apply because they cannot be bothered to make the journey to the polling station and have already made up their minds, so why wait?

    In the first few years, there were so many tales of abuse that the whole system had to be tightened up, with additional identity safeguards. It is no coincidence that postal voting on demand is not allowed in Northern Ireland, where the old adage used to be "vote early, vote often". Good reasons still need to be given in the Province for an absent vote to be permitted.

    Back in 2001, Labour might have hoped that absent voting would help them by encouraging younger people to take part. In reality, they are used more by older people, seen as likely to back the Conservatives, which is why they have failed to reverse this procedure.

    Both parties have tinkered with this system for their own advantages. The franchise has been extended to all British citizens living abroad for whatever length of time, whereas it used to expire after 15 years. Yet so far, fewer than 200,000 of an estimated 3.5 million expats who qualify have applied to vote, so that hasn't worked (and is another reason to question the rationality of Rishi Sunak's snap election decision).

    Labour accuses the Tories of introducing the new requirement to show photo ID at the polling stations to boost their vote. It says ethnic minorities and marginalised communities do not have "the right form of identification", even though there are more than 20 different valid means of doing so.

    Yet Labour is proposing to carry out another cynical piece of gerrymandering by reducing the voting age to 16 if it wins power. The only possible explanation for this is that it sees an electoral advantage, otherwise why not allow 16-year-olds to do everything else they are banned from doing, such as driving, smoking or drinking alcohol, because they are still considered to be children by law. When the voting age was last reduced from 21 to 18 in 1969, the age of majority was lowered as well.

    It used to be possible to get married aged 16 with parental consent, but this was forbidden by the Marriage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022. You can still join the Army aged 16, but need parental consent and you must be in some form of apprenticeship or education until you are 18.

    For goodness sake, you can't even buy a lottery ticket or a scratch card until you are 18. How can it be justified to let children, legally blocked from so many areas of life, vote on how they should apply to everyone else? Ironically, the people most in favour of extending the franchise to 16-year-olds are often those who would infantilise them for longer in every other sphere.

    The argument is made that 16- and 17-year-olds are more likely to vote than the cohort a few years above them and thereby become "engaged" in politics. In the 2014 Scottish independence referendum turnout was 20 points higher than in the 18-24 age group.

    But you could make that argument for 14-year-olds. Either extend the same freedoms enjoyed by adults to 16-year-olds or let them vote when they have them. Anything else is simply a piece of political chicanery dressed up as democratic progress.

    There are still two long weeks until polling day, but if millions are about to vote in the coming days why bother campaigning to the end? Moreover, if the aim is to increase turnout, we should vote on Sundays instead of Thursdays, a hangover from the days when the Sabbath was sacred. It won't be long before we can sit at home and vote online or by phone, as with Strictly Come Dancing, which is where some of our leading politicians may well be heading.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk…

  82. The theory was that Biden would retire/be pushed after the halfway point of his term, which would have allowed Harris to serve two and a half terms as President.
    By the end of 10 years of a Harris administration the USA would have been turned into a Democrat country in perpetuity.
    It doesn't mean that the plan no longer remains and that they hope Biden can be voted in by fixed ballots to vanish after the magic two and a half term point

    1. I'm not eligible to vote US election, sosraboc, but I'd give serious consideration to supporting RFKJr. He seems fairly decent man.

  84. Off topic
    Ronaldo may well break records in the Euros tonight.
    I've always regarded him as a bit of a cheat, but one cannot deny his skill and longevity.
    I would be delighted if he scored during the competition.

  85. A surfeit of Natalias (and routers)!

    Funny how some things, like buses, come along one after the other after not seeing or hearing from them for yonks.

    T'other day, I saw an article on the front page of the Features section of the Daily Telegraph about a Russian ballerina called Natalia. An hour-or-so later, I noticed I had a reply on a FaceAche article from a woman called Natalia. Later that afternoon while mowing my lawn, a car pipped its hooter and I looked up to see my Ukrainian neighbour, Natalia, cheerily waving at me. That evening I noticed I had a response to a comment I'd placed on a YouTube channel from a Russian woman whose name was given in Cyrillic but it was easy to see that her name was Natalia. Four different Natalias in the space of one day? Much too much.

    I bought a new router today, taking my total collection to seven. They are not all the same , though. Three are a Wi-Fi routers [pron: "rooters"], a make called Deco, which supply my computer signals. The other four are woodworking routers [pron: "rowters"], all of different sizes and performing different tasks. The oldest (40-years old) is a Bosch POF 52 plunge router, which is now feeing its age. The second is a small Makita RT0700C trim router for small fiddly projects. The third is a cheap German copy of the Makita trim router called a VonHaus 15/301, which I have installed, inverted, in my home-made router table. The latest is a Bosch POF 1400 plunge router which is an exponential improvement on the old 1984 model.

    I love my superfluity of routers but I can take or leave a glut of Natalias.

    1. Don’t get me started again on the Terriblegraph’s persistent mis- and over-use of the verb “force”…

      1. I would have thought that living on the south coast you would be swamped by Tristrams.

      1. Not to worry. I do exactly the same when having to read the same old, same old, tiresome repetitive missives, by the same culprits, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, every Groundhog Day, déjà vu; especially those daily genuflecting towards ‘the dear leader’ for his massive efforts, blah, blah, (yawn), blah …

  86. I ve decided to resume playing the violin, it's been quite a few years and I'll be more then crusty .

    2. My favourite violin joke;

      Q, How do you get two violinists to play in unison?
      A. Shoot one of them…..

      2. Hmm. How do you make a violin sound better?
        swap it for a piano .

    3. I have a newfound liking for the violin after starting to listen to tango music. They use the whole range and it's lovely. 🙂 Enjoy yourself!

    4. Some years ago, I had an accident which damaged my left hand quite badly. I was lucky that I had a brilliant surgeon who assured me that I would be "as good as new".

      I said, "Does that mean I'll be able to play the violin?"

      He said "Of course."

      I said, "That's truly miraculous; I couldn't play before."

  88. Andrew Neil was being a little snotty about Nigel Farage saying Farage wrote his ' contract " on the back of a fag packet after downing a few pints . Is he somewhat jealous of Andrew Neil .

    2. I've not forgotten Neil being unable to get the better of Sturgeon in an interview. Also crying on GB News when a piece of kit fell over, or the mic didn't work, very early days.

      1. Quick off the mark too!
        About 60 years ago I won an elocution prize which had a monetary prize which had to be spent on books. And one of the books I chose was “Tales of Norse Gods and Heroes”

    1. He's sharp enough to follow instructions from Davos.
      The Labour manifesto is hair-raising; promising new legislation to give more power to regions, community leaders, faith groups etc. i.e. the end of parliamentary democracy as we know it.knew it.

      1. Shifting responsibility and removing accountability from the centre, where the power should lie.
        I use "lie" in the pejorative sense here.

    2. Only one thing to remember him by, sosraboc, his time as DPP vis a vis the Rotherham et al girls.

    3. Starmer represents the low standards to which members of our legal profession have dropped. The Criminal Courts are populated by morons with little knowledge of the Law.

      Likewise our Supreme Court is stuffed full of lefty morons too. I am thinking of that wretched Spider Woman a typical product of some chaperoned ladies college in Cambridge (Girton).

    4. Starmer represents the low standards to which members of our legal profession have dropped. The Criminal Courts are populated by morons with little knowledge of the Law.

      Likewise our Supreme Court is stuffed full of lefty morons too. I am thinking of that wretched Spider Woman a typical product of some chaperoned ladies college in Cambridge (Girton).

  95. How dare you, KJ, I'm very cultured, check out this one;

    Knock Knock! Who's there?
    Knock Knock! Who's there?
    Knock Knock! Who's there?
    Philip Glass

  96. Over at the Spectator there is an article about walkers ( male) never calling female walkers sweetheart or darling. I don't mind at all. I know different regions use different colloquial terms such as ' pet ' Lass " etc . I liked being called lass when up in Yorkshire and I don't mind sweetheart. I don't like American tourists using the word ma'am as it sounds like a school teachers but most men tend to be weary of what to call a women .

    1. Tbh it never really bothers me, I'd be more concerned about the tone of voice (men, women and especially dogs…)

    3. The Specy has moved to the left like the tory party. Avoid at all costs.

      1. Not read PE for many years, G4, I thought Hislop ruined it. Okapi, beautiful animal…speaking of which time to walk dog. Long day ahead tmrw..ugh..

        1. I know a lot of people think Hislop has ruined it, and I understand why, but I still see it as being reasonably balanced ie they take the p!ss out of everyone!

          I suspect I’ll always get it, as it has become tradition now that my younger son buys a year’s subscription for me every year as a Christmas present

          1. Ok ok you persuaded me, I’ll buy a copy see what I think 😅 my dad was always difficult to buy for – one birthday I bought him a sub to the Oldie..he wasn’t best pleased..oh dear…🤯😄 your boy sounds thoughtful, a keeper. Me? Daughters, grand daughters…apples of my eye…

          2. Interesting, I’m all sons and grandsons – not a daughter to be seen, I think I do actually quite miss that!

          3. Aren’t we a pair 😅 just getting my daily dose of RFKJr.. one politician I’d vote for. ‘Night G, see you tmrw 🤞😊

  98. Well, a pleasant day, largely overcast but with some sunshine, suddenly went very dark and it bucketed down!
    At least we got stepson's clothes in!

    And that's me off to bed.
    Goodnight all.

  99. Train-maker Alstom wins £370m Elizabeth line order
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c29986423x9o

    I missed this announcement on Friday. Good news for Derby but there's just something about the timing of it, don't you think? Well, the Labour Party stole the show today. BBC TV East Midlands reported on a tour of the works with Shadow Transport Secretary Louise Haigh and the Grand Mufti of Londonistan in tow.

  100. 'Night All
    " The Tories borrowed £400Bn.for Convid Not a single politician, journalist or economist said a f****** word.

    Somehow a radical plan to reduce taxes and shake things up that costs £141Bn is totally beyond comprehension and reckless."
    We live in Clown World
    Edit
    Remind me again how much have we spaffed on Ukeland……….

    1. In my opinion i.e. 'covid' is/was a monumental scam organised by a cabal of elites.

      One aim, amongst many, was to asset strip as many countries as had been infiltrated by the elite's agents and create financial crises around the World from which this elite cabal could hugely benefit. To this end, borrowing and spending money that couldn't, in the long run, be properly financed was all important.

      "Ukeland" is essentially another asset laundering scam. Where is the oversight for all the goodies that the government have 'sent' to aid Zelensky's crowd?

      And as for 'Net Zero'? Don't ask!

  101. 388663+ up ticks,

    Pillow ponder,
    If the politico /pharmaceutical hierarchy elements took part in this death & life long suffering campaign waged against the peoples are allowed to get away with it, then we, as a people deserve every odious action taken against us and our families going into the future.

    https://x.com/LeilaniDowding/status/1803177872401768620

  102. Well, chums, it's now WEDNESDAY, so I will send a message to you all, including thanks to Geoff, who has enabled us to post here on what was originally the Monday site (I think that is correct). It's now also 12.35 am on Wednesday, so I will wish you all a Good Night, restful sleep and hope that you all come back rested at a more normal time. Incidentally, my Wordle for Wednesday was completed in 5 today, as shown below:

    Wordle 1,096 5/6

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

    1. Good Morning Elsie,

      Wordle 1,096 4/6

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

    1. ' Morning, Geoff, thank you and cheers for all the sterling work you have done to overcome difficulties. Well done!

Comments are closed.