Wednesday 15 May: There’s no quick fix for the bad habits now baked into the British diet

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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841 thoughts on “Wednesday 15 May: There’s no quick fix for the bad habits now baked into the British diet”

  2. Good morrow, gentlefolk. Today’s (recycled) story

    WHERE DO RED-HEADED BABIES COME FROM?

    I can honestly say I never thought of this answer…

    After their baby was born, the panicked father went to see the Obstetrician. ‘Doctor,’ the man said, ‘I don’t mind telling you, but I’m a little upset because my daughter has red hair. She can’t possibly be mine!!’

    ‘Nonsense,’ the doctor said…’Even though you and your wife both have black hair, one of your ancestors may have contributed red hair to the gene pool.’

    ‘It isn’t possible,’ the man insisted. ‘This can’t be, our families on both sides had jet-black hair for generations.’

    “Well,” said the doctor, “let me ask you this. How often do you have sex?”

    The man seemed a bit ashamed… ‘I’ve been working very hard for the past year. We only made love once or twice every few months.’

    ‘Well, there you have it!’ The doctor said confidently….

    “It’s Rust!”

  3. Morning, all Y’all.
    Packed, waiting for taxi to station. Trip to UK awaits!
    Lovely weather here, a tad chilly, but fresh.

  5. I thought this article was very good and only at the end realised Rupert Lowe, the author, is Reform’s Business and Agriculture Spokesman.

    “The demise of London as a financial centre can be clearly correlated to the imposition of excessive regulation and the rise of executive regulators.
    In the same way that it is always the state that drives inflation through their monopoly of money creation – most recently through quantitative easing – it is always overzealous regulation that destroys risk-taking, entrepreneurial activity, and effective human innovation. The number of bodies with a regulatory function in Britain is simply extraordinary, their size and scope expanding all the time.
    London has the Bank of England, the Treasury, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority.
    Together, they have a combined budget of more than £2bn and 15,000 employees. Worse, the reporting lines between the bodies are often unclear, with duplication common. As such, none takes overall responsibility for the catastrophic decline of London’s capital markets.
    The FCA, taking a leaf out of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), is introducing a series of non-financial misconduct rules. On its website, the FCA explains that its aims are governed by the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, and similar recent “caveat acts”, such as the FCA’S secondary aim in 2023 to make UK financial services more competitive.
    But where do these new rules come from? It is certainly not from Parliamentary legislation. Instead, it seems to be the undemocratic and self-appointed righteousness of the FCA, despite the fact that “non-financial misconduct” is what the law is already there for.
    All this underlines that the Government has fundamentally failed to oversee the proliferation of regulators, allowing regulatory creep largely driven by a legal industry obsessed with irrelevant detail rather than the big picture. The lawyers will claim profit plays no part in it, of course – but who really believes that?
    All this is worsened by the fact that Parliament has become a self-serving circus supported by the Civil Service, which now ploughs its own woke furrow while its employees work from home. The question we should all be asking is: do our regulators really need more powers? Many solicitors have already been struck off by the SRA for a range of non-professional activities, and I have witnessed the FCA making anonymous subjective judgments about people in the markets.
    Must we see a further push towards the Orwellian world of whistleblowers, social media monitoring and unaccountable decision-making behind closed doors?
    Far from being expanded, regulations should be being reduced. The FCA has already done immense damage to the financial sector by removing caveat emptor – the principle that the buyer alone is responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods before a purchase is made.
    Are they now about to formalise the removal of the fundamental foundation of democratic freedom, “innocent until proven guilty”?
    This is before one really examines in detail the quality and ideology of the regulators, who see fit to hold themselves responsible for the judgment of others. The FCA regularly promotes woke initiatives openly on its Instagram feed, and has a director of Stonewall as a senior member of staff who recently ran the “consumer duty” initiative.
    How can we have confidence that those who will stand in moral judgment over thousands of authorised personnel are of sufficiently high moral standing themselves?
    The Government has allowed regulators to do and say what they please. Yet we already have the law of the land, widely accepted by the population, so why do we need to go ever further by having so many different authorities? How can it be right that authorised financial personnel can be being monitored by so many different authorities? If nothing else, it’s incredibly confusing and difficult for the average person to comprehend.
    Ultimately, the financial services industry has to stand up for itself and demand some accountability from the Government, regulators and exchanges for the damage to London: one of the major contributors to the UK economy. The demise of the capital as a global financial centre would have far-reaching effects on all of us, and once liquidity has been completely lost, it is profoundly difficult to rebuild. Events move markets for investors, but liquidity failure destroys the markets themselves.”

    1. The irony of these people is quite bizarre. A huge state body designed to organise ‘markets’. A financial conduct authority that promotes wokery. It’s comical. The state is there for the state, not the citizen. It’s a lumbering, pointless leviathan that does not serve because it no longer understands why it has to.

      1. 1789 springs to mind. The beauty of the English (and I use that term advisedly) was that it was historically more pragmatic than the rigid systems used by our Continental friends. Unfortunately after only 50 years of their influence, we have succumbed to this rigidity and lost our pragmatism. We are doomed.

    2. Must we see a further push towards the Orwellian world of..

      And just got worse yesterday as Dutch court sentenced developer Alexey Pertsev to 5 years in prison for developing an open-source tool that allows people to keep their crypto transactions private.
      And before anyone groans and parrots the pub-bore response.. “cryptos? scammers and drug dealers the lot of em, so what?”
      You should be aware that everything, yes everything will be tokenised within the next two decades. Everything you say, think or do will involve the transaction of data using blockchain technology, especially when IOT & CBDC are fully implemented.
      So the EU ruling is basically saying that anyone that desires privacy or writes code for privacy will be jailed.

    3. Must we see a further push towards the Orwellian world of..

      And just got worse yesterday as Dutch court sentenced developer Alexey Pertsev to 5 years in prison for developing an open-source tool that allows people to keep their crypto transactions private.
      And before anyone groans and parrots the pub-bore response.. “cryptos? scammers and drug dealers the lot of em, so what?”
      You should be aware that everything, yes everything will be tokenised within the next two decades. Everything you say, think or do will involve the transaction of data using blockchain technology, especially when IOT & CBDC are fully implemented.
      So the EU ruling is basically saying that anyone that desires privacy or writes code for privacy will be jailed.

    4. Should be noted that DEI hire, FCA Apparatchik, Chair and Trustee of Stonewall, attendee at every single trans rights march ever.. Sheldon Mills.. the guy that refused six times to investigate the debanking of Nigel Farage.. is still very much in charge.
      As he previously said.. “the debanking the Bad Boys of Brexit still has much work to do..”

      1. You’d hope such wasters would turn their boundless energy to doing something creative and economically useful… such as jumping into a nuclear reactor.

    5. This is what the Tory government has done: outsourced all decision-making to obscure, myriad, unaccountable quangos or people with questionable moral judgement. Basically, because most politicians are lazy, incompetent, secret saboteurs and/or perverts.
      We must ensure that MPs have to pass some kind of training/examination process; that they really are fit and proper people with our country’s best interests at heart. We must have a referenda based governance which would bypass potentially corruptible or coerced MPs. Yes, a fresh party would be great but we need to bake in armoured protections for long-term democracy.

      1. Why? MPs know nothing. If they were useful they’d be doing that.

        All that’s needed is radical reform of the democratic system – namely, to exclude politicians from it. Take an example:

        Cameron says ‘gay marriage is now legal.’
        The public says ‘No, it isn’t. We don’t agree with it.’
        Cameron says oh come on, what are you, bigots?’
        The public sack Cameron and forbid him working in the public sector ever again and keep careful watch over his after office jobs for corruption and fraud.

        Another:

        Brown says ‘I’m going to remove pension tax relief.’
        The public say ‘Ha! No, you’re not.’
        Brown says ‘Yes, I am.’
        Brown is instructed that inn fact he will be extending pensions tax relief to an even higher level.
        Brown really, really doesn’t like this so he splurges welfare on teenage single mothers – or tries to.
        The public prevent him doing this.

        Brown, Cameron… the lot of them are paralysed into inactivity until the public permit them to act. That’s democracy. What we have at the moment is a farce where every 5 years a bunch of sewage lie to us about how bad the other lot are and why letting them screw everything we’ve built up and worked for is vital. That bunch of corrupt half wits then ruin our lives without control or by your leave and then complain that they be given another chance as there was nothing they could have done differently.

        1. Yes, 100% referenda for everything. The country would become hugely successful within a couple of years. We just don’t need them. They block democracy.

    6. This is what the Tory government has done: outsourced all decision-making to obscure, myriad, unaccountable quangos or people with questionable moral judgement. Basically, because most politicians are lazy, incompetent, secret saboteurs and/or perverts.
      We must ensure that MPs have to pass some kind of training/examination process; that they really are fit and proper people with our country’s best interests at heart. We must have a referenda based governance which would bypass potentially corruptible or coerced MPs. Yes, a fresh party would be great but we need to bake in armoured protections for long-term democracy.

      1. Sussex overseas. Just about to leave to go to the Farm Shop. You appear to be in good order.!!!

  8. There’s no quick fix for the bad habits now baked into the British diet

    Yes, far too many people with their elbows on the table and talking with mouths full.

    2. Good morning,
      Far too many slobs seem unable to hold/use their cutlery correctly, though this is hardly a recent problem. When older son went to play and have ‘tea’ at a classmate’s house, he was appalled that, not only did nobody use a knife and fork, but the family had no table.

    3. Good morning,
      Far too many slobs seem unable to hold/use their cutlery correctly, though this is hardly a recent problem. When older son went to play and have ‘tea’ at a classmate’s house, he was appalled that, not only did nobody use a knife and fork, but the family had no table.

  10. Good morning, chums. Another day, another dollar. Enjoy your day. And thanks for today’s site, Geoff.

    Wordle 1,061 3/6

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    1. Good Morning, Elsie.

      Wordle 1,061 3/6

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      1. Good morning
        Wordle 1,061 4/6

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  11. The rising cyber threat to Britain. 15 May 2024.

    The increasing willingness of the Kremlin to seek to undermine Britain and its allies, using methods that fall just beneath the threshold of open aggression, has become dangerously apparent in recent months. Earlier this week, it was revealed that Russia’s intelligence services were recruiting extremist groups in Europe and the US to carry out attacks. The threat of deniable cyber operations remains ever-present. Russia even appears to be probing British interests in the Antarctic, with reports that its survey ships have found vast oil and gas reserves in areas claimed by the UK.

    Complete fantasy.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2024/05/15/cyber-threat-uk-china-spying-hack-russia/

    1. If we had found oil and gas reserves you can guarantee the Left wouldn’t allow us to dig them up, so what are they complaining about? Russia would just say let us dig them so we can sell them to you!

      We’ve gas reserves here. he Left just won’t let us use them. Yet again, this is why the Left should be put outside without any of the trappings of modern civilisation. Let’s see how far they cope without oil then.

      1. Morning Wibbles. A Russian survey ship was carrying out research. One would have thought that their best move would be to have kept quiet and snaffled it for themselves.

        1. They were probably being decent and said ‘Oi oi, did you know about this?’ and our lot being fools said ‘Yes, now stop playing in our back yard!’

    2. Rising? The Russians have always been at this sort of game, probing our defences looking for opportunities to exploit. They might call it “The Real World”.

      We could get paranoid about this, or we could live with it, not allowing them any easy way through and generally just keeping a watchful eye.

      They liken Russia to a bear, and it is a fair comparison. I remember this Canadian who had a good rapport with the local bears, even mothers with cubs. He would have his bribe ready – some honey, or a tasty titbit. He would shout out “Hey, Bear” and wait for Mother Grizzly to amble over to claim her bribe. In return, she would relax and even let him play with her cubs. He never turned his back on her though, and knew very well that a cuddly teddy one minute could be all teeth and claws the next.

    3. The enemy is within. Imported by our sodding governments for quarter of a century.

    4. “ its survey ships have found vast oil and gas reserves in areas claimed by the UK”. We may as well let them have the oil and gas, after all we will not want them in a few years’ time once we are net zero…

  12. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/15/lazy-councils-plumbing-new-depths-entitlement/

    Quite simply, when a council does this the obvious is to stop paying them. That too must be enshrined within law. Poor service? No pay for it. Easy. Apply that to all taxation and suddenly it becomes a market rather than a rip off.

    However, this is also why councils and government thinks they can behave this way: the state isn’t a market. It’s an appalling, overpaid, feather bedded waste of time which behaves as it chooses with impunity.

    1. There are notices all over Heathrow ordering the wretched passengers not to annoy the staff.

      It’s not their fault, the place is like a prison with a labyrinth of airless, windowless, joyless corridors manned by glowering security greeting legitimate visitors or those returning home from fleeting paradise. It is not their fault that their IT systems tell you to look for bags in Carousel 7, when in fact they have been put in Carousel 3. It is not their fault that they commissioned a state-of-the-art facial recognition that grinds up and down with the speed of a stairlift for several minutes per passenger before declaring that this is not a face and to seek assistance. The standard response from any humans present is “think yourself lucky you are not in Manchester”.

  13. Good morning all.
    A dull 9½°C outside with a very light drizzle.

    Well, Son arrived yesterday afternoon for a visit and we decided to go to Matlock Bath for an acoustic music session in the Old Bank.
    Caught the bus and, because we were rather early, went for a walk up High Tor.
    An enjoyable but rather busy session, I only sang one song, but it was one I’ve just finally learnt the words to, the old drawing room ballad “Tom Bowling”, Quite a good effort I thought! At least I don’t need a bucket to be able to hold a tune.
    Then we walked back home the short way, over Masson Hill via Jacob’s Ladder and Ember Farm!!

    3. Matlock Bath (just 11 miles from where I lived) is an old stamping ground from my youth. The Fishpond pub is worth a visit for live music (and decent ale).

      The town has been a popular rendezvous place on Sundays for hundreds of motorcyclists since the 1940s. They line up along the promenade (not many non-coastal towns have a promenade).

      1. Quite a few decent and varied hostelries that do decent beer, I’m glad to say.

        1. I can’t remember the name of the pub but it stands on the dog-leg bridge at Whatstandwell and that is worth a visit for ale and live music from locals.

          1. I’ve just looked it up: it’s no longer a pub, alas, it’s a ‘family’ restaurant.

          2. Derwent Hotel.
            I first went in there in the early ’80s when we stopped there for B&B.
            After moving up here and paying a visit I was nearly in tears. The pub-gutting machine had visited in the intervening years and the lovely old traditional interior was goen.

      2. MB and I were surprised by that.
        Matlock Bath is a nice place, but we did wonder what was the special attraction for bikers.

        1. A nice ride out, from all over the north and midlands, to a central location; and the ability to park (and show off their bikes) on a long stretch of promenade where there are quite a few cafés.

        2. The local roads are very scenic and can be demanding on the riders’ skills.

  14. Peru officially classifies trans community as ‘mentally ill’

    THE Peruvian government has officially categorised trans and intersex people as “mentally ill”. The health ministry said the decree was the only way the country’s public health services could “guarantee full coverage of medical attention for mental health”.

    The move has provoked outrage in a society where gender and LGBT rights have been under sustained assault in recent years.

    If only someone in government in the UK and other European countries had the bollocks to do the same. They could then go further and declare veganism to be the mental disorder that it clearly is.

    1. I am not convinced that this is a psychiatric problem rather than a perversion of the normal state of the human condition.

      Very few of us are immune to persuasion from a skilled sales operative, and indeed this is how they make their living. It requires a lot of bloodymindedness to resist determined sales patter, and for most of us life is too short. Young people lack the experience, authority and resilience to see off someone talking them into things. It is a double-edged sword, since it makes schooling of the young a lot easier than training up old dogs, but it also make the young vulnerable to coercion.

      Gender ideology is a form of coercion that depends on it being accepted by society as an orthodoxy that we are told must be instilled in the young. In times gone by, they might have instead have been “coerced” into getting married and raising kids when grown-up, but times change…

  15. 387448+ up ticks,

    Wednesday 15 May: There’s no quick fix for the bad habits now baked into the British diet

    Morning Each,

    I take it this is appertaining to fodder filling, as in a good many cases a pill or JAB is unnecessary, common sense in food selection, fill in boredom / comfort chomping spaces with useful actions, try walking to the shop 100 yards away instead of the car.

    Well meant advice,
    At all times accepting meal times,and saying something intelligent, keep trap firmly shut.

    As for the political diet the jab solution proved to have a great many dire side effects such as, death & life long injuries the electorate must surely be weaned off of putting the party before the Country / best of the worst vote selection and READ THE SMALL PRINT where it says, you are condoning more of the same.

    1. There is no money to be made from self control.
      Pills and jabs, on the other hand, are a nice little earner; not only for Pharma companies, but for all the bods involved in dishing out medication and filling in the reams of paperwork.
      (Remember the price per clot shot earned by GPs?)

      1. 387445+ up ticks,

        Morning Anne,

        Totally agreement, there is a long line of pushers servicing the
        pharmaceuticals.

    1. I prefer to call it Diversity, Inclusiveness and Enrichment, in that Order witch gives it the proper acronym (DIE)

    2. Good morning from Audrey and Me.. JD, Byzantine Emperor on this sunny day, I’ve changed my username to K’s Roman Holiday as the Squire said it’s my film 😁

    3. Surprised comments are allowed while the trial is running.
      The DT’s policy on commenting seems – to put it politely – rather variable.

    1. Can’t feed? Don’t breed.

      Of course, there are people who fall on hard times, but all too many breed as a career.

      1. Maximising benefits so they can buy 2 Mtr TVs, fags, drugs and MacDonalds

      2. Especially those who rely on state hand-outs.

        Dr Henry Eugene Tracey built a large house in Devon. When asked why he wanted such a large house he replied: “Because I’m going to fill it with little Traceys because the world needs a better quality of people in it.”

        My grandfather went on to have eleven children four of which were medical doctors, once a Doctor of Music, one a colonial administrator, three farmers in Africa, a horticulturalist, a headmistress and the eldest son, a lieutenant, who lost his life in the trenches in WW1 at the age of 19.

    2. Good morning all.. Can’t stop them having children, it’s the allowance that keeps them in fags. Parents not the kids (yet).
      Cloudy day here in Madeira, but still pleasant.

    3. Good morning all.. Can’t stop them having children, it’s the allowance that keeps them in fags. Parents not the kids (yet).
      Cloudy day here in Madeira, but still pleasant.

    4. 387448+ up ticks,

      Morning JBF,

      If the voting pattern is not changed drastically,
      then shortly they can be used as bartering material or sold on for any odious purpose.

    5. Define poor JBF. I would re-phrase that as stopping anybody who has been unemployed for over a year having children. That would also have the advantage of reducing the Muslim birth rate.

    6. Do you remember Peter Sellers’s parody of a party political speech in 1958. This video clip updates with pictures and is well worth watching?

      https://www.google.com/search?q=What+about+the+working+classes+Peter+Sellers&oq=What+about+the+working+classes+Peter+Sellers&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigAdIBCTE2NTI4ajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:b5e41615,vid:Uw15MsGlxuc,st:0

      Heckler: What about the workers?
      Politician: What about the workers, indeed, Sir.

  19. Good morning lovely people who I’ve known for 6 years or so time does fly 🙂
    Blessings from Mercia, Olympus – Audrey and Me. Not such a sunny day, but hope springs eternal that Helios will stretch his arms and throw us a few rays .

    1. Good morning DoMO. The days are long but the years are short. Grey and gloomy here.

    2. Whom?

      (I must apologise. Something seems to have brought out my inner Peddy)

  20. On the plane home on Monday, we were told not to eat nuts as one of the passengers had a nut allergy. I wondered if this ban applied to coconuts.

    1. By that rationale, if you were on a plane where everyone had a different food allergy, would you be banned from eating altogether?

      This sounds a bit like the ‘scientific advice’ from a few years’ back that stated having an injection of an untested substance would protect everyone around you. When I had my poliomyelitis and diphtheria jabs back in the 1950s, I wasn’t told that by doing so I’d saved the entire school from catching those diseases.

    2. I have a friend who has a nut allergy.
      She is of Indian origin (via Malawi and Canada). When she was a child, her hair was dressed with coconut oil after every hair washing.
      When she was 19, she was hit by the allergy and ended up in hospital.
      Since then, she has to check every ingredient including spices like nutmeg.

  21. Good Moaning …. for ducks.

    A Spekkie article to mull over.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-are-important-covid-documents-not-being-released/

    “Why are important Covid documents not being released?

    14 May 2024, 3:43pm

    The most important stories from the Covid Inquiry are found in the written evidence and submitted statements. However, the Cabinet Office is refusing to release vital evidence that the Inquiry isn’t interested in, in case it ‘excessively focused’ the public’s attention on lockdown-decision making. If neither side change their position, the British people will be left in the dark.

    Last November, I reported in the magazine that the witness statement of Ben Warner – who had been brought into No. 10 as Head of Data by Dominic Cummings – revealed that not only was an erroneous graph used to justify the second lockdown but that senior figures, possibly including the Prime Minister, knew that the graph was wrong but decided to broadcast it to the nation anyway. What we still don’t know is how specifically this decision to hoodwink the public was made. Warner’s statement references a number of documents which might answer this question. Those documents are:

    The presentation created by Warner with projected Covid deaths that was emailed around No. 10 contained ‘a very simple story to show why we need to take action, and that doing nothing is not an option.’

    The email discussion surrounding that presentation.

    The document from Sage modellers on which Ben Warner had viewed on the same day.

    A briefing document that had been created for the Prime Minister by another aide.

    Emails between Warner and chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance that were sent in the run up to the Halloween press conference announcing the second lockdown.

    At the time The Spectator tried to obtain these documents from the Inquiry. However, the 2005 Inquiries Act only allows it to publish evidence if the Chair, Baroness Hallett, decides that a particular document should be put into evidence or if that document is shown in an open hearing. I understand that because none of the core participants at the Inquiry requested for these documents to be entered into evidence, Lady Hallett has not done so. She may change that decision in the future or include them in her final report, but this is an inquiry with no end date. The latest, I’m told, is that evidence hearings are planned well into 2026. Waiting years to see these crucial documents that played a role in locking down millions is intolerable when the next pandemic could come at any moment.

    I next went to the Cabinet Office (who had submitted the documents to the Inquiry) to obtain them under the Freedom of Information Act. At first the government refused to either confirm or deny whether it possessed the documents. It used this excuse to extend its response deadline five times over six months while it sought legal advice.

    Finally, at the end of last week, the government made a decision. Yes, it has some of the documents requested and yes, it agrees that publication of the documents would be in the public interest but it would still not publish them. To do so, the government said, would leave the Inquiry ‘adversely affected’. It said that publishing the documents ‘would create expectations around that topic, which could undermine public confidence in the Inquiry’. But most strikingly the government seemed to worry about the public’s reaction to the documents, saying:

    There is the potential that if the material was released, it would result in public interest being excessively focused on this specific aspect of the lockdown decision-making process, to the detriment of a more holistic examination that the Inquiry is aiming for.

    But the Inquiry is entirely independent of the government. So, what business does the Cabinet Office have in worrying about the public’s ‘focus’, excessive or otherwise? The FoI response suggests little confidence in Baroness Hallett too:

    Moreover, [publishing] could negatively influence the ability of the Chair to decide which aspects of the decision-making process around lockdown affecting other factors of the pandemic response that will be examined in future modules.

    It seems to be quite unlikely that a former Court of Appeal judge with a legal career that started in the 1970s would or even could be ‘negatively influenced’ by the public’s response to anything.

    The Spectator will be appealing the FoI decision, but it seems unlikely that the Cabinet Office will budge. The Inquiry, for its part, is bound by strict legislation and only the Chair can make the documents public from their side. If the government sticks by its position then it could be years before these documents ever have a chance of seeing the light of day.

    A spokesperson for the UK Covid-19 Inquiry said:

    The Inquiry, which is entirely independent of government, has so far published tens of thousands of pieces of evidence and will continue to do so. The Inquiry plays no part in the response of government departments to FOIA requests.

    A Cabinet Office spokesperson said:

    It is absolutely right that we allow the COVID Inquiry to carry out its important work. It is for the Inquiry Chair to handle the publication of evidence relevant to the Inquiry, and the Cabinet Office will continue to assist the Chair and the Inquiry in this regard.”

    1. As I posted under that article:
      The whole thing stinks. It’s a con and a conspiracy to deceive the public hiding behind a very expensive cover up. The ruling class (or is it caste) obviously wanted to test totalitarian lockdowns and used a covid pandemic pretty harmless to most people to do so. Almost everything we have been told about that pandemic is a lie, and now they are intending to hand our sovereignty over to the corrupt, incompetent WHO when next they cook up another pandemic.
      And they are still pushing the potentially lethal mRNA jabs onto us.

        1. Hope you told them to shove their jab where the sun don’t shine Ndovu.

          1. I would tell them succinctly to go and urinate elsewhere.

            And if they did not follow this instruction I would tell to to find other places in which to fornicate and commit acts of sodomy.

    1. Yes , I know those things but still very formal, never mind, big hugs from Audrey and Me x

    2. I am ‘under the weather’ this morning. I’m mowing the lawn under a cloudless sky and warm sun.

  23. Read Isabel Oakeshott’s piece in the DT and weep, or kick the cat to release the inevitable anger. Oxford’s useless, incompetent but tyrannical council has given itself the right to ignore any resident of that sorry place if they get up the nose of council staff in any way shape or form. Who voted for that? Ignoring this sort of stuff, and Oxford’s attempts to coral folk into 15 minute ghettos, really will lead us way down the road to serfdom.

    1. Given that the state already takes over 50% of most working peoples’ income by one means or another , and gives ever less back in return, we are already serfs. Labour will complete the process and make us slaves.

      1. The medieval serf only worked three days a week for his lord and master. Workers now have to put in at least half a day more for theirs.

        1. But what of the modern masters, those who employ the poor serfs who balance chips on their shoulders. What of those who employ the serfs ? Pay higher taxes to support public services, pay wages – those ghastly wealth providers many of which struggle with their own businesses, those who work a 12 hour day – tell me who is the serf and who is the master now .

          1. The Masters are the ruling caste, the quangocrats and apparatchiks of the civil service and those dark shadowy figures who ‘donate’ to woke causes. They are very little different to the nomeklatura of the USSR, the ‘system of names’, often hereditary, that ruled with an iron fist while having a vastly better lifestyle than the mass of the people.
            The serfs are those who work for a wage or salary who pay for the above.

      2. Annoying to you JD, but the majority of voters want the Lib/Lab/Con Uniparty to continue

        ruling the way that they’ve been doing.

        I would agree with your sentiments, but the majority don’t.

        1. Most don;t want it in my experience, they’ve just given up on anything changing.

          2. In recent times the only example of voting changing things was the 2015 GE, when nearly 4 million votes got us a referendum. Obviously the referendum result wasn’t honoured but just for a while it felt good.

        2. Resignation is not the same as compliance. Trust has been utterly smashed.

    2. I’m thankful we are too poor and mean to live in Oxford.
      Though given the numbers of empty cycle lanes proliferating in Colchester, no doubt we are heading the same way.

    3. Most council staff (politicians, per se) could do with a damn good kicking.

  25. ‘Free world is with you’: Antony Blinken plays guitar in Kyiv bar. 15 May 2024.

    Antony Blinken on Tuesday picked up a red guitar at a basement bar in Kyiv with a message for Ukraine.

    The US Secretary of State joined band 19.99 on stage at Barman Dictat in the Ukrainian capital. They played Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World, a rock anthem released in 1989 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

    “Your soldiers, your citizens – particularly in the northeast, in Kharkiv – are suffering tremendously,” he said. “But they need to know, you need to know, the United States is with you, so much of the world is with you and they’re fighting not just for a free Ukraine, but for the free world. And the free world is with you, too.”

    Of course I, and most Nottlers, can actually remember the Free World. It didn’t look anything like this. You really could say anything you pleased provided it were not obscene. If you read the comments in Newpapers they were almost certainly from genuine correspondents. The very idea of Nudge Units and their Trolls would have been regarded with horror. The Government would have fallen on such a revelation. It has all gone now and the civilisation that held these beliefs will soon be gone too. It must be the first; though one wonders if there were not elements of it in those that preceded us, to destroy itself so completely.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/05/15/antony-blinken-guitar-neil-young-ukraine-kyiv-bar/

  26. That portrait of the JWK unveiled yesterday. He seems to be looking out of the flap of a blood-red climate change global boiling net zero tent!

    2. The portrait just plain creepy.
      All it needs is “O Fortuna” blasting out to complete the demonic impression.

        2. That isn’t a butterfly, it’s part of his right ear. His ears grow so quickly they have learned to shed like deer’s antlers.

    4. It has its fans on this site but I’m not one of them. If you look closely at the face, it appears to’ve been dead a while.

          1. One of my most favourite musical pieces. I sang this with a grand ad hoc choir in a concert hall in Harrogate about 35 years ago. The power and reverberations of the music brought deep emotions – impossible to explain. The full concert went on for a couple of hours. Super!

        2. I rather like the portrait. I believe the butterfly symbolizes the death and resurrection of Christ. Putting the portrait on a depiction of the apocalypse is the childish reactionary problem of the person who did that in the first place. That person, I suspect, could not paint a decent portrait in order to save his bigotry, let alone his life.

          1. Indeed. That exquisite portrait is the result of the talent of a proper artist. Trouble is I will never change the minds of the philistines who cannot (or will not) recognise the skill of the artist or the beauty of the result. Many of the adverse comments I hear are simply people making a noise because they can.

    5. Nah – Simple explanation is that he, Charlie, is so wet the paint wouldn’t dry.

    1. Message received and being dealt with by the MR (as Caroline suggested!)

  30. @squireweston:disqus Good morning wishes to Snowdonia from Kitty and my inner muse with Audrey. I hope Helios brings the sun to you. Btw if I need your rifle to shoot vermin, I hope you’ll keep a promise .

  35. Make election pact with Reform, Rees-Mogg tells Sunak
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/05/15/rishi-sunak-latest-news-tories-reform-rees-mogg-election/

    BTL

    JRM has it the wrong way round: he should join the Reform Party and take all the conservative Conservative MPs with him.

    Boris Johnson refused to make a pact with the Brexit Party but even so the Brexit Party did not stand candidates in seats held by Conservatives even though many of these MPs were remainers. The Brexit Party was betrayed and in spite of a large majority Johnson did not deliver a proper Brexit by betraying Northern Ireland and British fishermen.

    Once bitten, twice shy. The Conservative Party should not be trusted one inch.

    1. It’s just a ploy to disarm the Reform Party.

      If JRM really wants to improve British politics he can get rid of the many LibDems infesting

      the ranks of the Conservative party.

      1. JRM’s dogged loyalty to the Conservative Party is both unrealistic and tedious. It does him no credit whatsoever.

        If he disagrees fundamentally with the way in which Sunak has allowed the party to drift further and further to the left he should leave the party and strike out on his own or join a party with a political philosophy more in line with his own.

      2. I used to trust JRM but he always defends a PM and government policies come what may. I tend to think of his as spineless or as without principle. I think he would defend the Conservative Party even if there were only two M.P.s left and betray anyone else while doing it.

    2. There are some 65 Conservative PPCs standing in seats won by the Conservatives in 2019, but who are standing down. Does anyone know the calibre of these people?

      It was a mistake by Farage not to put up candidates against Conservatives in the 2019 election, but understandable since Johnson was pledged to do Brexit properly this time, and the other parties were hell-bent on frustrating the will of the people, and left Parliament in a state of anarchy through most of that year.

      The problem I had with it was that Farage forgot that not all Leavers were Right Wing Thatcherites. A third of Liberal Democrats voted Leave (especially the local parochials in the West Country), as did the “flat cap” Red Wall Labour traditionalists within Momentum. I think that Corbyn was a closet Leaver, inspired by 1970s Socialists such as Michael Foot, Peter Shore and Tony Benn, but daren’t upset the Remainer student wing of his movement, nor give his enemy Blairites led by the backstabber Keir Starmer any more ammunition. There are also Greens who may like EU regulation protecting the environment, but are deeply sceptical about the true intentions of corporate lobbyists in Brussels. These votes are also up for grabs by Brexit/Reform, and may make the difference between getting MPs and not getting any into Parliament.

      I think it is at last dawning on Conservative Central Office that there is little appetite with the public for Starmer’s brand of “More Blair, More Brown, More Cameron, more May, More Truss” style of gutless granted taking. Reform would be lucky to improve on UKIP’s 2015 performance. If the new Conservatives have something better to offer, then there might be a lot of nose-holding come the General Election.

      1. Farage made the grave mistake of trusting Johnson who was interested in getting votes and not remotely interested in achieving a proper Brexit.

        1. I don’t think Boris Johnson was ever a true Brexiteer in the way that Farage most certainly was. When Johnson took over Vote Leave, it was primarily as a negotiating ploy to get the EU to improve their terms, and had they complied with British demands, I don’t think Johnson would have pushed for Britain to leave the EU.

          However, he had a Churchill complex, and couldn’t resist taking over when Theresa May made a hash of negotiations, largely due to her being browbeaten by Michel Barnier. After 42 Tory backbenchers crossed the floor, the Conservative Government was untenable, and had it not been for the ludicrous Fixed Term Parliament Act, which was really only supposed to keep the Coalition alive for five years, Boris Johnson should have been allowed to call a General Election rather than attempt govern without getting a single bill past the Commons. Key to this was the treacherous position taken by the then Shadow Brexit Secretary, a North London lawyer eager to cause trouble and blame it on the Tories. A snake in the grass the media is talking up as our next PM.

          My own reservation when I voted Leave in 2016 was that Britain’s national institutions and civil infrastructure had atrophied since the 1970s, since so much was being covered by Europe. First priority was therefore to restore a nation fit to be governed. I really think this was done lamentably. We lost the capacity to think, as if thinking had fallen out of fashion, and therefore not trending on the smartphone.

          The same could be said for Scottish independence: unless Scotland and Britain each had a military and a reserve bank fit for purpose, undoing the union was like separating conjoined twins without bothering about bits that might not separate easily without preparation.

          The EU was never going to make it easy – that furore over Ireland points to the difficulty in having two separate and conflicting trade agreements going at the same time. I would have left it to the Irish to come up with something imaginative. The current spat over Danish fishing rights, whereby they scoop up the North Sea in order to feed their pigs, points to how lawyers will endeavour to make any environmental concerns about starving puffins a matter of agricultural treaty, and therefore irrelevant to any objection the UK may have as their fishing waters are cleared of life. The Danes assert bottom trawling is “sustainable”, so I suppose a legal assurance is ok and binding, if we are to trust the lawyers.

  36. Good day all and stalwart troopers of the 77th,

    Lovely morning here at McPhee Towers, wind Sou’-Sou’-East, 12℃ and going up to 19℃.

    So, obesity is theme of the letters today. The top one:

    SIR – Successive governments have chosen to ignore Britain’s obesity problem (“Fat people are costing us all billions. It’s time to get tough”, Comment, May 14). Tackling it would cost votes because modern, ultra-processed food (UPF) is very tasty (packed with sugar, salt, emulsifiers, stabilisers and many other chemicals) and cheap. It is designed to be irresistible, and hence we overeat.

    Cooking and domestic science have been removed from school curriculums, so children are not taught about food, healthy eating or even how to prepare simple meals from natural ingredients. Readymade meals prevail in many households.

    The Government should incentivise manufacturers to change their food production models so they factor in benefits to health. However, this will be extremely challenging, and many people are going to die of UPF-related ailments in the meantime.

    Peter Wickison
    Driffield, East Yorkshire

    What Peter should have added is that added to the UPF are chemicals designed to make people crave more of the same ‘stuff’ so they pick it up again next time they are in the supermarket. “Big Food” like ‘Big Pharma” with which it works hand-in-glove has a lot to answer for. It makes people ill, the NHS identifies the ill and “Big Pharma” supplies the pill to alleviate the symptoms (but never cure), all paid for by the tax-payer. What’s not to like if you’re a food/NHS/pharma exec or a retained politician with shares to keep bouyed in the market.

    It never seems to strike people that human beings are not meant to be the size and shape that very many of them are.

    2. That’s the result of socialist medicare – freedoms are lost and an overbearing nanny state in created.

    1. A little known fact was that until 1982, it was perfectly legal for a landlord to refuse to serve women as pubs were seen as ‘ a male domain ‘. Most took little notice of this law but it existed. I do recall my feminine presence floating into a pub in the Yorkshire Dales in the 80s – there was sawdust on the floor – I wandered in and some men at the bar said ‘ are you in the right place young lass ‘ i didnt mind, i thought it charming not sexist.

      1. 🤣 Did they invite you to spit on the sawdust floor?

        There was a pub in Norwich that still had a sawdust floor in the 1990s.

        1. I was of the packet of crisps and can coke age – 🙂

      2. Many pubs in Sunderland and Co. Durham had men only bars, and a ‘snug’ where women were allowed. Most also refused to sell women pints.

          1. The Glasgow street-corner shebeen is/was something else. They’re often quaintly called a lounge bar.

        3. In the colonies there was always a “ladies lounge” and while woman could go into most bars, only ladies of a certain repute did so!

        1. It was near Askrigg – James Herriot country – it looks as I’d imagined it did in the 1930s – including the pub ! Just looking to see if they served food – I was being helpful ( there was others in the car outside ) they sent little me In . The pub was didn’t sell food – just beer 🙂

    2. John Betjeman deplored the fact that the village inn had become over-commercialised.

      The Village Inn by JOHN BETJEMAN

      “The village inn, the dear old inn,
      So ancient, clean and free from sin,
      True centre of our rural life
      Where Hodge sits down beside his wife
      And talks of Marx and nuclear fission
      With all a rustic’s intuition.
      Ah, more than church or school or hall,
      The village inn’s the heart of all.”

      So spake the brewer’s P. R. O.,
      A man who really ought to know,
      For he is paid for saying so.
      And then he kindly gave to me
      A lovely coloured booklet free.
      ‘Twas full of prose that sang the praise
      Of coaching inns in Georgian days,
      Showing how public-houses are
      More modern than the motor-car,
      More English than the weald or wold
      And almost equally as old,
      And run for love and not for gold
      Until I felt a filthy swine
      For loathing beer and liking wine,
      And rotten to the very core
      For thinking village inns a bore,
      And village bores more sure to roam
      To village inns than stay at home.

      And then I thought I must be wrong,
      So up I rose and went along
      To that old village alehouse where
      In neon lights is written “Bear”.

      Ah, where’s the inn that once I knew
      With brick and chalky wall
      Up which the knobbly pear-tree grew
      For fear the place would fall?

      Oh, that old pot-house isn’t there,
      It wasn’t worth our while;
      You’ll find we have rebuilt “The Bear”
      In Early Georgian style.

      But winter jasmine used to cling
      With golden stars a-shine
      Where rain and wind would wash and swing
      The crudely painted sign.

      And where’s the roof of golden thatch?
      The chimney-stack of stone?
      The crown-glass panes that used to match
      Each sunset with their own?

      Oh now the walls are red and smart,
      The roof has emerald tiles.
      The neon sign’s a work of art
      And visible for miles.

      The bar inside was papered green,
      The settles grained like oak,
      The only light was paraffin,
      The woodfire used to smoke.

      And photographs from far and wide
      Were hung around the room:
      The hunt, the church, the football side,
      And Kitchener of Khartoum.

      Our air-conditioned bars are lined
      With washable material,
      The stools are steel, the taste refined,
      Hygienic and ethereal.

      Hurrah, hurrah, for hearts of oak!
      Away with inhibitions!
      For here’s a place to sit and soak
      In sanit’ry conditions.

    3. A couple I have been to in the St Albans area, The Old Fighting Cocks.
      Bottom of Holywell hill.
      That cane close to closing a couple of years ago. But the Barleymow ex CAMRA favourite at Tytenhangagar,
      gone.

    4. Good morning Grizzly,

      I found an old book at a fete, on coaching inns and pubs and how they got their names . The book was 100 years old , I contributed £5 to buy it .

      A book collector whose hobby was the history of of pubs etc was interested in my find , so I donated it .

      “In the British Isles, as well as in Northern Europe and North America, the dried or mummified bodies of cats are frequently found concealed within structures and are believed to have been placed there to bring good luck or to protect the building and its occupants from harm.”

      https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/21401996.suffolk-pubs-hotels-mummified-cats-walls/

        1. I used to frequent there for a decent evening meal in the late 60s. IIRC they had a glass floor over the mill stream

      2. There’s one in a building in Rouen. The other thing that’s often found is a shoe, often a child’s shoe, in the roof.

    6. White wine for more modern ladies, Grizzly. Get up to date, please!

      1. I think I am up-to-date, Mr Gatehouse, but when I jump into my time-machine and go back to a time just before I was born, I remember what the mores of that era were.

      2. Seem to remember that women drunk something called babycham. Being a non-drinker have no idea what that was. Does it still exist?

        1. Oh wow, that’s dredged it up. Yes they did and as far as I know it still gets drunk. My aunt, 18-yrs old in the sixties used to like that. My wife used to drink that other old favourite too: Cherry-B.

        2. It’s a Perry, by the way. Made from pears, therefore and is carbonated

  38. That’s some big effing She liar mate.
    I can’t wait to speak to My mate Bruce about that.

  40. Morning all 🙂😊
    Grey but warm.
    I’m not exactly sure what the bad habits baked into British diet are.

    1. What is the British Diet? It used to be things like egg & bacon, but now appears to be fattening junk.

        1. Indian diet is healthier than the usual British diet. The suspicion is its the spices. Alzheimer’s is a rare disease in India. To quote: Indian food supports immunity, inflammation, brain function and several other functions in the human body. ”
          Regrettably, perhaps, I don’t care for Indian.

          2. That’s the fruit intake, especially dried fruits. Same with the Moroccans who put fruit into just about everything!

          3. I eat dates almost on a daily basis, flat bread and dates for breakfast,. so I’m confused. I thought that fresh fruit wasn’t the problem when it came to diabetes?

          4. Although they are good for you, dates have a very high sugar content especially as they are dried. Fresh fruit isn’t the problem with diabetes, the type and quantity of intake of it is though.

          5. An awful lot of modern medicine is based on what ancient cultures knew about the healing properties of plants, aspirin for example. Much of it is made synthetically now on the basis of bulk and cost, but if we regularly incorporated a lot of the herbs, spices etc. into our diets we would most likely be a lot healthier.

          7. I’m just reporting what dieticians and others say. As I said, I don’t particularly like it. Very rarely eat curry.

      2. Everything in moderation.
        I can only remember two noticeably
        fat people through my whole childhood and right up to when I left school. But things have become far worse since.

        1. There was a fat girl at my village primary school and her mother was huge as well. One or two big girls at my senior school but not many. Not like you see these days.

    2. Yes, my thoughts too. I think it’s not so much the habits of the consumer, but those of the processor in need of examination.

      It wasn’t the consumer who asked for industrial levels of salt to be added to their food. It wasn’t the consumer who asked for cornflour to be removed from everything so that a range of exotic gums found in far off lands could be used as thickeners, instead. If I’d wanted saccharin or aspartame added to drinks in order to make me feel thirsty so that I’d buy more of the rubbish I’d have added it myself. If I wanted gallons of water added to ropey meat in order to make it look healthy on supermarket shelves, or insisted upon forced taste-free tomatoes from Spain in January then I’d be happy. And for the future, no, I’m not happy to eat locusts instead of deer, just because some conman half way across the world says I should in order to increase the size of his bank balance. Etc… etc… ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

      A bit of reframing of the Telegraph’s headline might be in order, methinks.

        1. It’s tempting to do so, thanks; however, I tend to steer clear of journalism and all its scribblers. I’m sure if they think hard enough they’ll get there in the end; should they want to, that is ..

          1. I just hope some of these morons outthere keep up with public opinion although the way they wreck everything they come into contact with. I doubt it.

    1. Not sure i will trust BoJo again, especially as long as he is married to that ghastly woman.

      1. We should never, ever, trust any politician, and that includes Farage, Trump, Mogg and others whose stated opinions we might agree with. Politicians and government must always be placed on a short leash and taught to fear the people. If they are not watched, we lose our freedom.

        1. Absolutely so. Spot on.

          I’ll vote Reform next time, because they, a) say they will do some good stuff, b) deserve a chance to occupy that side of politics given that Lib / Lab / Con are various shades of Left and so should be allowed to carry out the proposed “good stuff”.

          However… short leash at all times. Forever. There is no evidence that any of our politicians down the ages have ever done enough to deserve our trust. They haven’t earned anything remotely resembling trust, in fact. Even when they somehow manage do so in some utopian future, the leash stays very short on all these chancers and spivs with over inflated senses of their own importance.

          1. I’ve already decided and realise this will be the last democratic election. There won’t be ‘ next time ‘ . Islam is the elephant in the room. Labour’s soon to be new Muslim MPs will dominate the House of Commons – even over indigenous Labour MPs . There is also a huge amount of antisemitic hate which will increase and a growing hate for Christianity. Islamphobia and anti Trans will be a crime- Lawyer Starmer will make that so and Immigrants from the EU ie not natives will be able to fast track vote. There isn’t going to be a next time .

          2. Labour died years ago and as I have kept repeating to my friends since about 2001, it’s only a matter of time before the maggots feeding on its rotting corpse emerge as flies. That time has arrived.

            The only sick pleasure I take from it is the thorough kick in the nads mainstream wokeys are going to get once it all comes to fruition. They don’t know the half of it.

        2. Absolutely so. Spot on.

          I’ll vote Reform next time, because they, a) say they will do some good stuff, b) deserve a chance to occupy that side of politics given that Lib / Lab / Con are various shades of Left and so should be allowed to carry out the proposed “good stuff”.

          However… short leash at all times. Forever. There is no evidence that any of our politicians down the ages have ever done enough to deserve our trust. They haven’t earned anything remotely resembling trust, in fact. Even when they somehow manage do so in some utopian future, the leash stays very short on all these chancers and spivs with over inflated senses of their own importance.

      2. Domestically he was incapable of behaving decently towards his wives and paramours and this spilled into his public life when he betrayed the nation over both Brexit and the Covid fiasco.

    2. The Potato in a Wig, as Katie Hopkins calls him, is not a conservative. NOTHING with him involved would get my vote.

    3. Not Johnson.
      There is only one guiding principle for him; well, two if you count money.

    4. Make Tommy Robinson a Tory candidate. It would be interesting to see what the public think.

      1. 387445+ up ticks,

        Morning Pip,
        I would have had Tommy
        Robinson as a UKIP member under the Gerard batten leadership NOT as personal advisor.
        Tommy Robinson, the football lads, the veterans, Gerard was building a force to be reckoned with.

        2. The stabbing in Gerards back by Farage out of jealousy and petty revenge because of Tommy Robinson, is something that has soured me on Farage to this day. I still don’t trust him and can’t help but wonder who he really works for, or is he a psychopath just out for himself?

          1. 387445+ up ticks,

            Afternoon JR,
            In retrospect take South Thanet he lost to his pal craig mackinley,
            In my book, he being a covert in place tory was better running an opposition party of UKIPs status
            than of being in parliament.
            Many other actions of his has given credence to my belief since Thanet.
            In 2019 farage went into the Grand old Duke mode,
            the ukip party nec / farage
            treacherous input done these Isles one hell of an injustice.

  42. You might enjoy this song of Jeremy Taylor’s:

    https://www.google.com/search?q=This+pub%27s+not+the+same+any+more+Jeremy+Taylor&oq=This+pub%27s+not+the+same+any+more++Jeremy+Taylor&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQIRgKGKABMgkIAhAhGAoYoAEyCQgDECEYChigATIJCAQQIRgKGKAB0gEKMTUyMTMxajBqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:f2cfb466,vid:ad2Jcfui-SQ,st:0

    This pub’s not the same any more
    Since they slapped that red paint on the door ….

    1. Years since I heard anything by Jeremy Taylor! He was a sort of Victoria Wood of his era.

  43. BoJo is very definitely WEF regardless of that (ghastly – she is) woman. Good morning, Mir!

    1. I would like to know how many of the current crop, of all parties, are not tied down by a WEF affiliation.

      1. All of them, I shouldn’t wonder, all of them paid to keep their mouths shut with promises of future glory in their brave new world, which is why I keep having crises of confidence regarding Andrew Bridgen. Time will tell. ‘When the people need a hero, we will provide him’….

    2. BoJo is a complete and utter time waster. He’s that car salesman good at selling you something, but who you realise has conned you as soon as you drive your new car out of the showroom.

  45. Following a petition submitted by Muslims and their useful fools demanding that the government “create a Palestinian Family Visa Scheme for Palestinian people affected by war,” left-wing MPs of all parties, including the Tories, backed the notion of allowing Palestinians to come to Britain. These people care nothing about our society or safety, and will happily infect us further with the Islamist virus, this time in its virulent Hamas strain, known to be vicious, deadly and prone to attacking the vulnerable.

    Anyone who votes for any MP in favour of this lunacy is worse than a turkey voting for Christmas.

    2. Goodbye UK, Hello Gaza 2023..
      or Hello Lebanon 1982.. or Hello Jordan 1971.. or Hello Egypt 1955..
      it all ends in tears.

        1. It’s a tough one, isn’t it? I cannot think of anything that they might possibly have in common.

    4. They’ll only have to wait until this autumn when Labour will be the government. There will be a huge incoming of Muslim MPs in Northern areas ( Muslims vote for Muslims above indigenous local MPs ) and we can see that with the recent council elections. There will soon be a predominant Muslim section within the House of Commons making our laws and they’ll be the government.

        1. Islam was always a political movement which is why they want there own courts etc. Islam just hides behind the shroud of religion as you say . It’s their aim to have a UK Party of Islam but in the meantime they have the useful Idiots in the Labour Party who don’t quite realise that after the next general election there will be more Muslim MPs on the government benches then indigenous MPs.

        2. I have been watching a lot of the Islam Christian debates at Speakers Corner available on You Tube. In watching I wonder where the religious part of Islam, is, it all seems to be shouting the opponent down and threats of violence. Type in SOCO films if you want to see.

    5. To be fair, there are Christian Palestinians who should be given refugee status. But of course, they would be ignored even though they are persecuted. Knew a couple of families in California, very nice people. But such people are left to sink while our stupid politicians virtue signal by importing Muslims. There are few people worse than Muslim Palestinians, they are all brought up to be sociopaths.

        1. There are approx. 50,000 of them and all are horribly persecuted. Christian girls are frequently kidnapped and raped by Muslim men and then forced to convert and marry their victimizers.

          This is a practice not confined to Palestinians. It is part and parcel of Muslim “culture”.

          1. I cannot believe that, JD – we are repeatedly assured by our esteemed “elite” that the alternative religion is one of peace, and tolerance, and we have nothing to fear from it…

      2. There are precious few Christians in Gaza Jonathan. There were over 3,000 in 2007 when Hamas took control. There are thought to be less than a thousand now.

        1. I’m aware of that but this legislation is for Palestinians in general. Is it not? Be that as it may, they have a homeland, its Jordan, they should go there except the Jordanians want them as much as they want the bubonic plague. In any event, they should not be offered refuge in the UK. As I said, they are sociopaths, brought up to be so by the most vile propaganda, educated to be killers from birth. Talk about heaping up trouble for yourself.

          1. Agreed. And until the British Mandate, Jordan was part of Syria, and the ‘Palestinians’ up to 1948 thought of themselves as Syrians.

          2. My stepfather was in Palestine during the British mandate and before the creation of Israel. He always insisted that the idea that the Palestinians were the natives of the land was false. He said that most of them arrived from elsewhere attracted by the prospect of jobs due to the British presence and the increasing presence of Jews settling there. He backed Mark Twains account that it was mostly an empty area, occupied by scorpions and Bedouin. It was so lacking in amenities that he and the rest of his troops lived in tents because there were no buildings to commandeer. He did not like the Jews because they were killing British soldiers but he admired them for their tenacity and determination to build a nation. After the 7 day War he became fanatically pro Jewish and Israel . But he despised the Arabs as parasites, hangers on and compulsive liars that you could never trust. We lived (the family) next door in Libya. My stepfather liked the Libyans but he thought of them as quite different from the chancers that had turned up in Palestine.

          3. Yes. I’ve read that that the majority were from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt came to Palestine because it was safe and there were jobs. Before that Palestine was empty. Read Mark Twains report of his visit to the Holy land in about 1860. One i=of its most fertile valleys was empty.

    6. We need more Muslims (especially Palestinians) in the UK like we need a hole in the head.

      1. And if we get many more Aeneas, more than a few will end up with a hole in the head, a real one, even Trojan heros like you.

      2. I tried that, Phil, but I ended up with enlarged but still blurred letters.

  49. Morning all,

    British Gas has suggested that smart meters should become mandatory and not voluntary.
    Furthermore the Government has passed legislation permitting appliances to communicate with smart meters to allow them to be turned off should the utility company be unable to supply sufficieny energy.

    This interview challenges the publicised impression that those who allow smart meters to be fitted to their home with be saving energy which ciuld be even cheaper if they use it when they don’t want to:

    https://youtu.be/-wZn9FFWIig?si=UkoWIEj5GoXLEX_Y

    1. The whole green industry is premised upon the notion that one day it will all be free and unlimited in supply. Smart meters, we are informed by some sort of ersatz Einstein on the telly that it’s a no-brainer to be able to “control your own usage”. Trojan Horse I call it, but I tend towards the Classics, not Science.

      Silly old me, eh.

      1. I don’t need a smart meter to control my usage; I switch lights off when I’m not in the room, switch off appliances when I’m not going to be using them, only boil enough water in the electric kettle for what I need, do a batch cook if I’m using the oven and freeze the extra.

        1. Me too, who wouldn’t if they’re sensible. These companies aren’t human versions of care bears just trying to look after us and nanny us. A false premise gulling us into believing we’re wasting power and a smart meter will save our pockets. Another little hook to get us hoiked into the pen.

    2. We are no longer a first world country. We have imported enough of the third world to downgrade our status.

    1. He’s right of course. However embarrassingly crass and clumsy TR might be, he’s pointing to a real problem and the authorities responsible will always target the person who speaks out and not those who cause the problem.

      1. TR is a prime example of being the person who has the courage to stick his head above the parapet. I only wish I was half as courageous as him.

        1. Sorry, you will have to wait your vaxxing turn. We are being inundated with scare stories about bird flu and camel flu, not forgetting the covid variation that apparently has a runny nose as the main symptom.

          So probably no Vax, just a fine for free speech.

          3. Well, blow me down. They can’t even get that right. Administrators, eh.

    3. I am the second person in England who doesn’t have an opinion on the England Colombia score!

        1. Ha ha however I did pay attention to today’s news that Wolves are the most disadvantaged team on the Premier League and are launching a mission to get rid of VAR. Me being a Wulfrunian and all that.

    4. OK, Mr Murray trots out a decent reply. Stand up for your rights type thing. But Douglas does quickly tap dance the direct question of Tommy Robinson which doesn’t get examined. So what has this Robinson bloke ever said that has made him such an untouchable?

      1. The answer to that is simple. He told the truth to the embarrassment of politicians, the police and other members of the establishment who are to cowardly to do anything about the Muslim problem and its cultural enrichment of England.

  51. SIR – Since I turned 60, young women think it’s fine to address me as “my lovely”, or something similar, when serving me in pubs or cafés. Young men address me as “mate” or “buddy”.

    They don’t know me, but seem to assume that instant familiarity is appropriate. I don’t expect anyone to call me “sir”, but surely there’s a happy medium.

    Richard Cheeseman
    Yateley, Hampshire

    I just don’t see the problem, Dickie.

        1. KJ, where have you been? Nice to see you!

          Indeed yus.. yer wot entirely appropriate, I find.

          2. We certainly have, Peta. We most certainly have. Precious difficult to find sensible on the internet sometimes, I find.

          3. Me, sensible, James? Well I never…many thanks, Kate x…..and back at you re: sensible 🙂

          4. Thank you so much, PJ, I’ve missed everyone too (and especially your good self:-)

          6. Running my Speccie sub to the exit, James, exchanging mails with a few other old ‘uns, ones I’ll miss. Not the place it was, a number of new names I don’t recognise, perhaps yet another Disqus problem ..

          7. I ran mine to the end a while ago, too. You still aren’t allowed to have a conversation then, I guess?

          8. You just made statement posts in a box but rarely have a live conversation and have no notifications. Geoff Graham realised a while back that with this new set up Robert Bidochon is officially an agent provicator he gets upticks from Fraser Nelson and is there for the clicks and stirring stuff up .

          9. Yes, I’m slow to bite when it comes to conspiracies but I’m afraid I can well believe that. Bidochon / Harman I simply refused to respond to, because he is inane. I can find out everything he thinks by stopping any random resident of London in the street and asking him / her about three questions on current affairs. Carter was I reckon just a Labour Party apparatchik who cut and pasted onto the discussion whatever the party wanted him to say. I had to tell him twice to please not bother me until he had something relevant to contribute. Hide as thick as a rhino, that one.

            One must never forget that as good as the Spectator is and it is good mostly, it is run by journos. They are generally very conformist types these days and get quiet easily frightened when the powers that be say “boo” to them. Shame really.

          10. I can for now, although as you say I couldn’t at one time pre-exodus. I’ve been told that Disqus is a pick n mix software of which certain features can be purchased/rented at a price. Maybe that contributed to Nelson’s thinking. Seemed to happen similar time to the Redbird (non) bid, I suspect during which time discovery made the message board used by Telegraph subscribers who weren’t also Spectator subscribers, maybe skewed the subscriber numbers. But I’m guessing, and likely wrong. Others suggest it was something to do with allowing comments on the Spectator App, there are comments there now. Hope this makes some kind of sense to you, James:-)

          11. There were comments still, when I left, but you couldn’t refer back to what you had written. I made comments after the “dreadful day”, but I cannot find them anywhere. I found a lot of my comments were being disappeared, in any case.

            You’ve been informed right, KJ. It’s up to the buyer what is allowed in their package from Disqus. I actually find Disqus is generally in the clear when it comes to this sort of thing. The list of prohibited words is I believe set by the the purchaser of the platform, so I’m not really ready to forgive and forget.

          12. Comments were thin on the ground for a good while, still no Disqus button, or alert. Yes, my numbers all disappeared too, upticks/comments. I can only communicate through Geoff’s blog (here) or through TCW (was lucky to see Peta there, how I rose from the dead :-D) bit bonkers to prohibit certain words, we can always get round those (Father Jack etc…).Peta has I think tried to contact me through Disqus but thought for a while I’d blocked her, I hadn’t – on the current version of Disqus linked to Spectator there is no option to block or unblock anyone, or at least not obviously, so quite possibly Spectator has somehow managed to banish certain comments/posts. I wouldn’t mind so much, but emailing Nelson brings replies that seem more like lies.

          13. Yes, about my experience too KJ. Banning words is prudishness, basically. Yes if you want to regulate the discussion by all means throw out trolls, but censorship because a toilet-based word was used occasionally or worse, because the idea being expressed was in someone’s reckoning inappropriate? No thanks. I always express myself in ways they cannot manage if they’re unprepared to let me speak in the mainstream world.

            People banned from the conversation don’t actually cease to exist, just because they cannot be seen.

          14. Exactly so, James, all counts. We’re not wilting flowers, you and I, although we have lines drawn 😀

          15. Do you know Disqus Disscus ? I can send a link.
            It’s the actual disqus site where you speak to disqus staff about disqus issues, issues with accounts and problems on sites and issues for editors . I spoke with an English member of Disqus staff called Kieran and told him about the Spectator changes. He said with these accounts ( this one here ) disqus.com is used of which has accounts that have features and can be used on multiple sites that have disqus as their host. Keiran said the Spectator don’t now use disqus . com they have their own basic single site method of simple reply boxes with no features and no accounts ( its the same as newspaper reply boxes ) they have full control and totally separate from this .
            Their site cut all ties with disqus.com and started as a new comments system in March without any previous records kept. But this account of yours never belonged to the Spectator it belongs to you and disqus – you can with this account trace back your post history for years at the Spectator because this is your disqus.com account. The Spectator comments system is now totally separate.

          16. I don’t know that site, thanks. It sounds good.

            I do know computing very well, though and had laid some little traps in order to discern who was censoring whom. I’d already worked out that Spectator isn’t doing Disqus, also that Disqus itself is a lot more permissive as a rule than people think.

            Interestingly, during the first day or two of the clamp down they were actually using a revised Disqus “@spectator” account. I suspect purely while they transferred all the subscribers into their in-house database, (best guess). After that, once they’d burped them into their own system things changed drastically.

            All my comments right up to that day are still shown in my Disqus account, no problem. I can see 20.3k of them. That’s far too many in some people’s opinion 😄.

          17. https://disqus.com/channel/discussdisqus/ The official disqus site where anyone who uses disqus / site owners, bloggers with disqus issues with their accounts ie notification box not working etc write down what their issues are. I struggled changing my user name and they helped.Owners of sites that use disqus might type in their ussues. Its practically ignored by people on UK sites even if they all use disqus accounts, I only found out about them because I used to post on a small Conservative American site and they told me. The Spectator use some basic form of whatever but it’s no longer disqus.com . People who only ever posted at the Spectator never realised that they could post anywere with their disqus account – they thought disqus belonged to the Spectator. When The Spectator dumped disqus.com ( in a very devious manner) and went ahead with it’s own single site comment system – people were saying what’s Fraser Nelson done with our accounts , what’s Fraser Nelson done with our Avatar pictures – as If Fraser Nelson owned Disqus – he didnt it was just a hosting sysyem he used before they went their own way without explaining this to those who’ve been subscribing and those posting via disqus ( who didnt subscribe ) but loyaly posted there for many decades and made it the vibrant site it once was.Fraser Nelson has behaved disgracefully .

          18. Yes he has behaved disgracefully, because it was all very underhand. And deliberately so. That editorial he put out was disingenuous, because it didn’t really explain what was really intended. Someone I remember soon after saying about the avatars and I wrote that I thought he would be given the ability to reinstate them. Even if it’s not Disqus the Spectator is using I cannot think of a single social media hosting effort that doesn’t have in its basic functions the ability to handle pictures, links, replies, account management, etc. I would bank on the Spectator’s new system having it, in fact. The reason it’s not there is because they wanted it turned off, quite simply. In contrast I doubt Disqus allows even at the basic level the user rights to switch off that much stuff, because after all the point of Disqus is to generate discussion. It’s their mission, because discussion generates media sizzle, which in turn generates revenue.

            Thanks yes, I shall bear that link in mind.

    3. When I was growing up in Yorkshire it was the norm to address everyone as “luv” regardless of age, sex or status.

      1. In Sheffield the qualifier “owd” (old) is often applied.

        “Nah den, owd luv, a’ tha’ gonna pay for that, or wat?” [‘wat’ rhymes with cat].

          4. Sheffield (South Yorkshire): “Luv”. Chesterfield (Derbyshire): “Duck”.

          3. It is still a term of endearment in the North Midlands: Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire especially. My mother would invariably greet people with a warm, “Hello, duck.”

            Many Scots use “Hen”.

          4. No one, in the North Midlands, has ever pronounced duck as ‘dook’. ‘Dook’ rhymes with moon, fool, and boot.

            They pronounce it do͝ok [dʊk], which rhymes with suck, f•ck and muck.

    4. This over familiarity has plsgued the UK for eons since we’ve become Americanised. I loath strangers calling me by my given name Kitty – this informally was encouraged by Blair who decided politicians are our friends and ‘ call me Dave “. You see nurses calling their elderly patients by their Christian names instead addressing them respectfully. What has happened to courtesy and good manners, dear Pip * hides * 😁

      1. The building manager where I live always addresses me as Miss Edison but on one occasion when he wanted me to sign a petition (I think it was when Hammersmith council were going to move a bus stop so that it would have been right in front of our building) he called out to me, “Sue, will you…”! I did sign, because he was making a good point that affected all of us in our block of flats. I don’t know whether his usually formal approach has anything to do with his age or him being Pakistani.

      2. After forty something years living in Canada, the informality of a greeting is something that I readily accept.

        Our financial advisor still uses my surname, maybe he is old school but that certainly grates when I hear him speak .

    6. Or in Cockney slang. “My old cock.”
      He should be thankful for “my lovely” or “mate”

    7. When someone says there you go sir I reply ‘I’m a duke not a knight! It’s your grace!’

    9. My beef is when a complete stranger addresses me by my Christian name. If one starts off on “ultra familiar” terms, how does one later suggest – if appropriate – that the acquaintance has turned into a friendship? It used to be by asking the other person to stop calling me Mr Thomas (or Sir William, or Sir, or My Lord) and call me Bill.

      Another beef is the effing GP surgery who insist on calling me William -(because that is the name on their compooter). The only people who call me that are my first wife (whom I left 47 years ago) and my late mother…. I have told them time and again that, if they must be familiar (and I would rather they weren’t) the name is Bill.

      1. Look , I call everyone Darling, because I sometimes cannot remember names , and I use it as an appeaser .

        Moh has always been Darling , but he hasn’t a pet name for me .. and has always been uncomfortable calling me Darling .

        My father called everyone Darling , as did my mother , both my sisters in SA use darling , my brother not so ..

        But … and I mean this , I hate my first name being used by Doctors etc. My Dentist , who I have known for years always refers to me as Mrs S ..

        1. The Scottish chef Jeremy Lee calls everyone darling. A bit camp but endearing.

        2. I really dislike being called by my Christian name (it’s not my first name, as it happens, but that is another story) by anyone I do not know. I understand that this is a practice within the nhs in order to better control the clientele. I always want to say ‘I’m Mrs F…. to you if you don’t mind because I mind very much! Edit: As I have got older I have less and less cause to use the nhs, but I think I now have sufficient years behind me to warrant a tart reply should need arise.

          2. Me too. My hairdresser, probably 25 years younger than me, always refers to me as Mrs F…. and that is the way we like to keep it – when one is having a political conversation a certain distance is required!

          3. I don’t particularly mind people using my Christian name, what really ignites my ire is when they mispronounce it (it’s foreign). I correct them and they continue to mispronounce it – grrr!

        3. The only person whom I call ‘darling’ is Caroline. I always called our boys by their Christian names: Christo (short for Christopher) and Henry.

    11. Remember being called “Moi Luvver” by an old crone in Bristol once.

          1. The problem is, there are many black parents who don’t condone this behaviour but because it is tolerated (the racism of low expectations) their children risk being caught up in it as children do what their peers do to “fit in”. We ought to be supporting the decent people not throwing them to the wolves.

          2. Erm yes…ahem.. new, enriching forms of entertainment for us all to learn.

    1. Thank you – I was intrigued as it’s a geocaching name that I know all too well having struggled with many of his puzzles!

    1. Maybe the problem isn’t the city but the population. After all, get rid of the black savages and knife crime in London plummets. Get rid of muslim terrorism from the UK stats and we’re a remarkably peaceful country. It’s not the places. It’s who lives inn them.

      1. Most of my recent run-ins (on my bikes, push- and motor-) have been with non-natives.

        An Italian on a Vespa drove past me so dangerously close this morning (in his haste to squeeze through the gap between me and a lorry) that if I had had the smallest of wobbles, we would both have been dead. I caught up with him as he was parking up and told him he had scared me by passing me so dangerously close, and he shrugged. I told him it was unacceptable and he said something weasly (which is why I know he was foreign).

        Yesterday on my motorbike I saw a motor-scooter driver driving incredibly dangerously over Putney Bridge in rush-hour with a 6-ish year old child as pillion. The deiver was weaving in and out of thee lanes of tradfic including on-coming traffic and was almost squashed by an oncoming bus. At the lights, after I had (safely) caught up with him, I told him he needed to be more careful when carrying a child as pillion. I know it was none of my business but this was a young child. The man (presumably the lad’s father) snarled at me (which is why I know he was foreign). I said, I don’t care about you but you have no business endangering the child’s life or that of the bus driver for that matter.

        London is a hell-hole totally overrun by ill-mannered and inconsiderate foreigners. I am beginning to loathe it.

        2. *London is a hell-hole totally overrun by ill-mannered, inconsiderate foreigners and Robert Bidochon.

      2. Maybe the problem isn’t

        The stats, the maths and methodology are problematic.
        Stop reporting crime for starters..
        As for Bradford.. implement Anneliese Dodds’ Islamophobia Bill.
        Problems solved.. so easy when you follow the Leftie Up-is-Down, Left-is-Right manual.

      3. Maybe the problem isn’t

        The stats, the maths and methodology are problematic.
        Stop reporting crime for starters..
        As for Bradford.. implement Anneliese Dodds’ Islamophobia Bill.
        Problems solved.. so easy when you follow the Leftie Up-is-Down, Left-is-Right manual.

    2. And Bradford wins the ‘Golden Machete Award’ yet again. Who says the UK is not a world leader?

  55. I used to prefer ConservativeHome when Tim Montgomerie was editor,
    Paul Goodman is an authoritarian leftie, I do remember he thought he was quite funny when he used to say, Kitty, you’re running out of your 9 lives of which he said very often. It was when all my right wing Conservative friends and UKIP friends were banned that I left. I still look in occasionally but I don’t recognise any names – it was a lovely place once and we’d all chat about about anything we liked. Now you can only speak about politics. Why do these lefties take the soul out of everywhere in life and online .

    1. Indeed, they delight in sucking the joy out of life, don’t they? They just can’t help themselves.

  56. 387445+ up ticks,

    Nadia Whittome MP
    @NadiaWhittomeMP
    https://x.com/SattyMootien1/status/1790656003186319405

    In the real world would read as,

    Many families across the UK worry day and night for the lives of their relatives in England

    We need an English family Scheme that’s free, accessible and inclusive in dealing with, first and foremost any issues appertaining to indigenous peoples
    first & foremost before ANY foreign nationals.

    1. I’ve a better idea. To reunite the family let’s send the ones here back there.

      1. But Egypt has closed the border with Gaza, they cannot cross from there. Not that Egyptian control of the border should send a message to the elite.

        Don’t worry the pressure should be off the UK soon, the Canadian foreign minister bimbo is on a five day trip to the region where she will be spreading taxpayers money around and inviting the dross of their society to Canada.

  57. Bonjewer!!! My computer is in CSM (Civil Service Mode) and working so slowly is almost motionless, and when it does condescend to respond doesn’t come up with the answer requested. Is it just mine?

    1. All speed here. Which is rare, as there’s usually at least two complaints a day about the wifi. Shunting domestic traffic on to it’s own line helped an awful lot.

    2. Just this site? just the internet? the whole computer?
      How full is your hard drive and how much RAM are you using?
      Windows explorer – C drive – right click – properties
      and
      ctrl – alt – del – Task Manager – Performance – memory

        1. Can you check with another computer on the same internet connection to see if it’s just your computer, if it doesn#t clear up?
          I store nothing on my computer, so that I can reinstall the operating system if I can’t figure out what’s wrong, but that’s probably a bit amateur!

        1. Uncomfortable though, the mattress is an enormous slice of buttered toast.

    3. God damned tacky beyond belief. One enjoys a breakfast but doesn’t want to sleep In a breakfast- even pigs In blanket.

    1. Something fishy about them and not just the kippers bedspread.

    1. Although Jewish himself Soros once said that the happiest time in his life was when, as a young man, he had to chase up Jews to be sent to the concentration camps.

      No wonder he is so very much loved by the likes of Cameron and Blair.

          2. He certainly has an agenda, and the wealth to go with it, jonathan. Now passed to his son. Alex. What would you do with ~25bill?

          3. Do my best to counteract the destruction of this country by the left. Clear up education for starters, make all schools follow the Michaela Community School programme. All teachers to be trained in that method.

          4. Well said. I suspect we may need an army, and double the amount. Today, both parents often have to work to keep afloat, and the fortunate have grandparents to steady things. Admire KB for her stance.

          7. :))
            Maybe, citizenship by invitation only so I’d have to find enough kindred spirits!

          8. Carve off a bit of the land where you currently reside? I look out my window here and reflect on the hills where apparently a local king resided on each and every one, prior to Alfred. That’s the English for you 😀

          9. Hmm, maybe find an island, or remote mountain spot from which I can quickly spot marauders like the ancient local kings? :DD

          10. Buy the Palace of Westminster then charge politicians rent to use it. £1 million a day sounds about right.

          11. Good idea…is that for rental only exclude heating, eating, drinking, building repairs..and more 👍😊

        2. There are many online rumours re Soros, from his wealth and what he does with it, to his background as a young man – one of which is the above and debunked by others.

      2. He’d have to have been a very young man at the time, a child in fact, he was 14 years old come VE day in 1945.

        1. If, of course, the date of his birth is the one that is on biographies of him.

        2. Apparently he was a child at the time.

          I remember there was quite a controversy about it at the time. I shall see if I can find a link.

      1. “Pact for the Future’, a “concise, action-oriented outcome document” that will better prepare “the world” to “manage the challenges we face now and in the future, for the sake of all humanity and for future generations”.”

        I m convinced that the challenges are purely man made by the politicians determined to take control and make redundant the electorate.

        Was watching, this morning, a report about British farmers who are in increasing difficulties because of policies being imposed by the politicians. These policies mean less food and more expensive.
        Farmer issues warning to Rishi Sunak over industry struggles – ‘Without us it’s ANARCHY!’
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRRfk4ibxBA

  70. Britain takes back 50 migrants from Ireland
    Republic has complained about surge in asylum seekers crossing the border
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/15/britain-took-back-50-migrants-ireland/

    An excellent BTL comment by a poster called Someone Else

    How about we help would be migrants and asylum seekers on boats leaving French shores to complete their journey and land in Eire? Food and provisions can be given at sea and a tow if needed. This would save them a lot of time and inconvenience going through the UK first and would of course mean there is then no obligation on the UK to take them back as they never passed through the UK originally. Eire could always negotiate with the French if they so wished.

  71. The Spectator ha an article up about the plastic tops on bottled water.
    We only drink bottles water – buy the large packs of 6 and smaller plastic bottles to pour into a cooling bottle when out. Tried the britta filter jugs but the water still tastes like tap water and it takes ages to fill up and cool . My problem Is the plastic bottle lids have shrunk, it’s very difficult to open them and they get in the way – I end up breaking them off. A ludicrous idea and I don’t care about the recycled reasonings .

      1. Exactly what I drink Pip. Although I mix it with Orange Lucozade. I’m obliged to drink at least 3 litres of water per day. It’s tough going.

          2. Vimto Real Fruit Squash Original No Added Sugar Mixed Fruit Juice Cordial Drink, Blackcurrant, Grape & Raspberry, 1 Litre Bottle £1.20

      2. We have Firstborn’s farm water, straight from the well, no treatment. Tastes lively, not like swimming-pool water.

          1. I don’t, it reminds me of alka seltzer, it’d give me too much wind and I don’t like the taste. My husband doesn’t mind slightly sparkling mineral water and will have a bottle on the table when eating out at lunchtimes but at home it’s just spring water.

    2. M&S, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Selfridges sell spring water in glass bottles with metal tops.

      1. Glass bottles are not practical and very heavy when in a rucksack when out for a walk for the morning rambling or on a geology dig .

    3. Why does everyone carry bottles of water with them. Its crazy. Have a drink when you arrrive where you are going.

      1. Transport for London broadcast messages on their public address systems telling passengers to always carry a bottle of water in warm weather. As if we’re going to become fatally dehydrated in the course of a tube journey. All part of the fear project.

        1. What a load of tosh. I used to play outside all day and drink when I went back home. boy did I drink.

      2. We are very much walkers, ramblers, birdwatching and geology digs – one needs water but yes I know what you mean. Sometimes you see people on trains etc with bottles of water in town which is a nonsense .

        1. We used to fell walk in The Lake District and the water was back at the car. You do not need to be sipping water all the time.

        2. Caroline has one just like that.

          We have our own well water which is pumped up electrically.

      4. This is why i drink bottled water…

        Hundreds are struck down with diarrhoea, vomiting and stomach pains in Devon seaside town as South West Water insists tap water is fine

        A suspected outbreak of cryptosporidium is believed to be affecting Brixham.

        https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13420895/Hundreds-struck-diarrhoea-vomiting-stomach-pains-Devon-seaside-town-South-West-Water-insists-tap-water-fine.html

        There have been two outbreaks of cryptosporidium in my town

    4. Try using a pair of old fashioned nutcrackers, they will give plenty of grip and enough leverage to open the bottles fairly easily.

    5. I agree with you entirely.

      I always get a pair of scissors and a knife as the cap is a bally nuisance and can get in the way when pouring and make a mess.

    3. Possibly that is the only reasonable and justifiable argument for censorship.

      1. The Shorter Version
        Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into Hell, Satan and all the other evil spirits, who prowl throughout the world, seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

        I need to adapt that as a Protestant prayer, i.e. not to St Michael but directly to God…

        1. Remember: God helps those who help themselves.
          So, sitting back and leaving it all to God will not produce the desired result!

          1. A very Protestant viewpoint…we can still pray for God’s help though…if it’s good enough for the then Pope it’s good enough for me!

      2. As you know Sue, I’m Orthodox. One of my icons is of St. Michael the Archangel. I have a particular affinity with him. Perhaps because I do believe that Christians need to unsheathe the sword and combat the Islamic enemy in our midst. I am not a pacifist and I think it is high time that Christians pay attention to the Church militant and return to real Christian values. In England, no such luck due to Anglicanism which will kill Christianity by becoming overwhelmed by Islam. I think that only Orthodoxy will hold and maybe Catholicism and that is because they, especially the Orthodox, have been. historically, on the front line between Christendom and the encroachment of Islam. They really understand the danger.

        Archangel Michael according to the Orthodox Tradition
        https://orthodoxprayer.org/Angels/Michael.html

  75. This is courtesy of Facebook, I didn’t know badgers were hunters of humans. Perhaps there were young in the vicinity. This is on the High Street through the village, a rat-run during rush hour and v.busy during times of A10 closure, but mostly peaceful otherwise.

    BEWARE OF THE BADGERS‼️
    For anyone who happens to be out at night in Bxxxx there are some rather aggressive badgers about😝
    I was chased for approx 50m last night as I cycled along the road through the village green between Mxxxx and Bxxxx Lane. Two of the wee bastards, snarling and snapping at my heels. Could well have been a nasty one. No substances/alcohol involved btw! Thankfully I was able to outpace them due to my supreme athleticism you see 🚴‍♂️🦡🦡
    Might want to avoid that patch at night the moment, no joke!

    1. Badgers, people forget are actually a member of the same family as wolverines, ferrets and polecats. Hunting, snapping at weaklings dragging their heels at the edge of the herd, or taking cubs who got lost is their stock in trade. Not saying we are all badger prey, but “go figure” as the Americans say.

      Either way, failing to manage the environment properly, e.g. by rewilding willy-nilly, is a very irresponsible thing to do.

      1. I understand that hedgehog numbers are plummeting because badgers are a protected species. Badgers eat hedgehogs, nothing eats badgers to keep their numbers down, so humans have to do that to preserve hedgehogs.

        1. You understand correctly. It’s all a balance, isn’t it.

          In extreme cases animal rights activists, say, release mink, because they claim to love mink, but it seems they must hate every other living creature that inhabits the river bank. Seal rescue sanctuaries want to save seal pups, because they say they’re lost. Actually they’re abandoned deliberately by their parents mostly, but anyhow, they must hate the fish of your average freshwater river, since many seem to find their way upstream after release. Same with otter introduction. Who doesn’t love an otter? The same with all these things, but if you’re not prepared to make the hard choices needed to manage wildlife properly, instead relying on misguided sentiment or some mush along the lines of aw leave it alone nature can sort itself out, then don’t get involved in wildlife protection is my response to them.

          Upshot is that badgers among others are in need of urgent and responsible intervention.

    2. We have a municipal facility near us where we can dump garden waste as well as other rubbish. We have a card the size of a bank card which electronically activates the barrier and lets you enter with your car and trailer.

      The French are always looking for new words and our local council has come up with the verb:

      BADGER

      this means you must hold your badge against the machine to open the barrier to gain admittance.

      (Il faut que nous badgions)

  77. On the bbc lunchtime news, they had an article on the problem of patients in hospital being left in beds in corridors for sometimes days on end.
    Shortage of nurses are a problem. But it seemed the conclusion the reports reached, it has all been a result of an aging population.
    Surely this ‘aging syndrome’ has been happening since life began. But of course it’s nothing to do with millions of people arriving in our country who have never paid a single penny into the system and are allowed treatment what ever their situation might be. Or of course doctors and nurses so fed up with the growing pressures within the NHS, they have moved to the private sector.

    1. Or nothing to do with making nursing unnecessarily into a degree level qualification about 25-years ago, thus excluding many perfectly capable candidates down the years. No wonder they cannot get the staff.

      1. Not only that, by making nursing a degree qualification it has encouraged into the profession far too many people who aren’t remotely interested in actually doing any nursing, but in rapidly moving into management roles. Instead of experienced, competent ward sisters and matrons the NHS now has an army of “theoretical” nurses with very little experience running the show.

        1. My mother always 2anted to be a nurse but wasn’t able to go through the training when she was young. She eventually worked as a nursing assistant before training as an SEN.

          No need for a degree in those days, just interest and support from the hospital staff.

          1. You just needed a couple of “O” levels and a kind and generous nature and you could be working on the wards as a qualified SRN at the age of 18.

            But in those days you could leave school after “O” levels and join an accountancy of firm of solicitors and work as an articled clerk for 5 years and be a fully qualified chartered accountant or solicitor at the age of 21.

          2. My mother trained as a nurse as well and as you say, no need for a degree. She actually wanted to be a doctor but she left school during the war and most medical schools were only taking men.

        2. I don’t remember. Did matrons have qualifications or did they work through the ranks to wear their wonderful deep blue uniform and white headdress?

        3. Yes indeed, spot on Peta. My daughter is a perfect example. She’s a very highly qualified intensive care nurse who is quite happy to confess that she’s in it for the very technical type of nursing. She’s attracted like a vampire to blood, gore, massive levels of trauma, monitoring blood gases and so on, and doesn’t have the slightest interest in treating anyone in a position to answer back. Suits her fine, but even she says she never needed a degree to do what she does, albeit she’s very glad to now possess one in passing.

      2. Blame the RCN for campaigning to abolish the State Enrolled Nurse Role in favour of degree nurses and Health care Assistants. Staff nurses were often recruited from women wanting to go back to work having had a family but didn’t want to study for a degree. How much more appealing the tile ‘State Enrolled Nurse’ compared with ‘Health Care Assistant’ Bring back the SEN Nurse says I.

        Edited for correct Role title.

        1. SRN, SEN, both worked fine in the way they used to be. You can fancy it up as much as you like, but nursing is basically the same job as it has been for hundreds of years. To my mind the more technical elements that come about because of advances in medicine do not warrant degree levels of learning. But then politicians have managed for their own gain to corrupt both medical care and Education in their haste to get their own way.

          As for the RCN, they ought to have known better.

        2. SENs were the backbone of wards.
          They knew they wouldn’t rise above that role and therefore were not jostling for promotion.

    2. Convid ‘lockdown’ was used to solve overpopulation by oldies, by sending them to (don’t) Care Homes

      2. It’s a bit of a worry because it’s still around where I went this morning someone sent an apology for not being able to be there because he’d tested positive to covid. He may have even saved some lives.

    3. Convid ‘lockdown’ was used to solve overpopulation by oldies, by sending them to (don’t) Care Homes

    4. I saw that and was disgusted. Same with the bit about overcrowding in prisons.
      The general drift is more money and less old people!
      Honestly, I’d really love to see the actual demographic raw unadjusted data on who uses these “services “ most.
      I think we are being sold a pup and those of us who are over sixty seem to be the next cohort to come in for some serious guilt training!

    5. One of my dear old ladies aged 100 in July, crisp as radish, sharp as a needle , computer literate , owned her own business until 15 years ago , wife of a Normandy veteran , now widowed .

      Poor lady lives 12 miles from me , I see her every so often , because a good friend of hers helps her with shopping, changing bed covers , and is around when she has a shower.

      She has worked all her grown up life , cooks delicious meals , grows all her vegetables in raised beds and is a wise old bird .. her family are in the midlands , her brother is 96 and still as active and alert .

      2 days ago she was taken into hospital with Covid .. slight breathing difficulties and generally not well.

      Yesterday afternoon a weak raspy voice phoned me , they discharged her on Monday night at 11pm in the rain and sent her home by private ambulance , no care plan in place .. Nothing .

      She was desperate , so I phoned her doctor and requested a visit , she had a phone call from her doctor , who said they would send out a nurse today to look at her .

      I rang the hospital A+E to ask why no care plan was initiated .. They said , because she was lucid and ambulant and was considered worthy of being sent home, because there were no spare beds in the hospital . i repeated what I said , but she is 1 hundred years old in July , and she just required some hands on treatment and maybe some oxygen and monitoring .. No No No.

      I suspect the hospital beds are taken up by people with mental issues or drug problems or other self inflicted modern medical issues.

      The staff were kind but firm and said she would be better at home with help , I then commented that she had been at home for 24 hours , and only I had found out and responded at 1700hrs yesterday .

      I had a bad nights sleep last night , no one should be abandoned , and I fretted about her dying overnight .

      She survived and the nurse arrived and showered her, but as yet no care plan , no one to see and supervise her in the morning and in the evening to settle her in her bed .

      May the dear Lord protect us and save us .

      There are many elderly people of a good age who are just abandoned and left .. It is a generation thing , they did their bit during WW2 , suffered under various governments because after the War her Normandy Veteran husband worked for the railways , and along came BEECHING.. so guess what , then had to retrain in other aspects of industry .. Driving coaches to Europe / and our big cities !!!

      2. Please do not blame Dr Beeching. The railways went downhill after the Great War, because army surplus motor transport (and mass manufacturing techniques ) took the wind off their rails: cars, vans, charabancs and lorries were able to travel from starting point to destination, faster easier and cheaper than branch line trains.

      3. I couldn’t agree more TB.
        It’s a terrible reflection on our treatment of people who if they hadn’t worked all their lives and been dedicated to the accepted rationality of life, to make this country safe they wouldn’t have even been born.

  78. Right, off to attend to grandchildren for a few hours. Sunny in the East, weather forecast telling us we have torrential rain going on.

    Jackanory, Jackanory, Jackanory… [fades].

    1. It would probably be quicker to get a job and actually earn some money rather than waiting in that line.

    2. There used to be a chap on this forum called Bill Jones (or was it Jill Bones?) who used to work for the HMRC.

      He loathed those who worked for themselves and ran their own small businesses and wanted them to be taxed out of existence. The gloomy thing is that events seem to have gone his (or her?) way

    1. Boyfriend yonks ago owned one , Austin Healey 3000.. a car of a bygone era .. lovely sound , and why is that one left hand drive?

      1. The Austin Healey 3000 is a lovely car and one that was on my list along with a Jaguar XK 150 when I was a student but I could not find examples of either which I could afford.

        However the 1958 MGA in Old English White (rather than British Racing Green) which I bought for £210 in1967 was, of all the car I have owned, the one which has given me the most pleasure.

        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ff47532fd776cd78480223981553332ef510ad902c1d4f7c209e54d5223bde0f.jpg

    2. My Mini is the right colour but for some reason they call it Forest Green.

      Maybe BMW don’t like the correct name.

  82. Slovakia’s prime minister Robert Fico shotSlovakia’s prime minister Robert Fico shot. 15 May 2024.

    Slovakia’s populist prime minister Robert Fico has been injured in a shooting and taken to hospital, the country’s president confirmed.

    A shooting incident occurred after a Slovak government meeting at a location outside Bratislava, news agency TASR reported on Wednesday, without giving further details.

    I have to confess to some wishful thinking as far as the inhabitants of Westminster are concerned.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/15/slovakia-prime-minister-robert-fico-shot/

  83. Good afternoon, all. Brightening up here in N Essex.

    Came upon this, the most comprehensive presentation on why Climate Change happens and will continue to happen. Cycles within cycles!

    Lots of information that really puts to bed the Carbon Dioxide hypothesis of warming.

    Basically it’s the Earth, Sun, Moon, wobbles in orientation of the Earth, orbits and more. You need a clear head before watching this.

    David Dilley – Global Warming Will be Dead by 2030

  85. Slovak prime minister shot in the guts. A bloke in the crowd pulled agun and fired 4 shots, one of which hit.
    Apparently, the PM not a butt-kisser for Ukraine.

    2. Telegraph blurb on the incident

      Slovakia’s pro-Russian populist prime minister Robert Fico has been injured in a shooting and taken to hospital, the country’s president confirmed.

      According to the Dennik media outlet, Mr Fico was shot outside the House of Culture where a government meeting was being held.

      Mr Fico was speaking to people outside the building when several shots were fired, causing him to fall to the ground, according to reports.

      Four shots were fired and one struck Mr Fico, the state broadcaster said.

      The suspected assassin was overpowered and is being detained by police, who cordoned off the area.

      Mr Fico was taken to the hospital by helicopter.

      Slovakia’s president, Zuzana Čaputová, issued a statement condemning the “brutal” attack and wishing the prime minister a full recovery.

      A Reuters witness said he heard several shots and that he saw a man being detained by police.

        2. Wrong place Belle and wrong title 😊😊😊

          There you go, below Belle. A Grand Duke and his wife and in Sarajevo. Bit further down than Slovakia.

  86. Sigh!
    Archbishop of Canterbury honoured by King for role in coronation

    Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has reflected on his role in the King and Queen’s coronation, as Charles carried out his first investiture ceremony since his cancer diagnosis in February. Mr Welby was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order by the King at Windsor Castle, Berkshire.

      1. This, was the only time that ArceBigHop of CounterBury has acted as a christian

      2. Yes, it’s his job and he has done his job worse than any other Archbishop of Canterbury in my lifetime.

        I have grave doubts about Welby. I cannot believe he believes in Christ and Christ’s teaching. He is a charlatan appointed by Cameron who is almost as great a charlatan as his appointee.

    2. For services to the King, his job is to be a servant of God attending God’s flock. Not receiving knighthood for doing what supposedly is his Job .
      I support the monarchy and am a Christian but i find this queasy and utterly wrong . Welby is a weak little wokiest anti Christ and isn’t even fit to be Archbishop and certainly doesn’t deserve any awards for inadequacy and nor should he be treated as a favorite – those past Archbishops have fallen Fowl of Kings hopefully this one will .

      1. The award is intended to be a magic talisman for when the time comes, an awakening is happening and the liberal sprinkling of awards (Whitty, Vallance, Gilbert and the rest) is an attempt to subvert the baying masses from taking retribution into their own hands. The AOC is already sufficiently recognised in his job title.

      2. If knighting Welby was a personal decision of King Charles then I am afraid it shows a very lamentable lack of judgement.

  87. Awkward………….

    I have no doubt that if some Russophobe were shot in Europe, everyone

    would be talking about the “Russian trace”. But they made an attempt on

    the life of the Prime Minister of Slovakia, who stood out from the

    Western mainstream on the “Ukrainian issue.” Here are his most striking

    quotes:

    “In fact, Ukraine is used only for geopolitical purposes,

    to weaken Russia economically and internationally. I’m afraid that in

    the name of these geopolitical goals, the West will fight with Russia

    until the last Ukrainian soldier, and we are not far from this goal.”

    “I am against Ukraine’s membership in NATO and will veto it. This would simply be the basis for World War III, nothing more.”

    “An

    attack by Ukrainian nationalists on Donbass is for Russia the same as a

    Hamas attack on Israel for NATO. At the same time, in 2014, NATO

    reacted absolutely calmly to a similar attack. But you can bring various

    terrible photos of murdered children, old people, women, which

    definitely prove that the Ukrainian fascists tried to destroy the

    Russians.”

    “We must admit to ourselves and say: Ukraine does not

    have enough forces to turn the situation around militarily; it is not

    capable of any counter-offensive. We can pour all the weapons in the

    world there, all the money, and Russia will never be defeated

    militarily.”

    “The prevailing belief was that if you give the

    Ukrainians weapons and money, the Russians will kneel, be powerless and

    destroyed. This strategy didn’t work. Russia is not on its knees. She

    will be the one who will speak when the negotiations take place.”

    He also publicly rejected the WHO Treaty & was launching an investigation into excess deaths & the ‘injections’…

    2. Yo Rik

      A fiddle, if I may

      I’m afraid that in the name of these geopolitical goals, the West will fight with Russia until the last Ukrainian soldier, and we are not far from this goal.”

      Shirley, that should read

      I’m afraid that in the name of these geopolitical goals, the West will fight with against Russia until the last Ukrainian soldier, and we are not far from this goal.”

      1. And when that last Ukrainian soldier has gone, they will re-commence the fight with the young men of Western Europe, the U.S. and Australia.

    3. Yo Rik

      A fiddle, if I may

      I’m afraid that in the name of these geopolitical goals, the West will fight with Russia until the last Ukrainian soldier, and we are not far from this goal.”

      Shirley, that should read

      I’m afraid that in the name of these geopolitical goals, the West will fight with against Russia until the last Ukrainian soldier, and we are not far from this goal.”

    1. Does Pelosi realise how stupid she sounds, dismissing the Portland riots and pretending still that January 6th was some kind of insurrection. We’ve seen the videos of both. She must think we are stupid, along with the muppets clapping her. “Look at us, we are so Progressive, left-wing, virtuous, caring”.
      They are just contemptible. Marshall is an intelligent young man. Great speech.

    2. Demos Kratos translates as People Power so yes, true democracy can only be populist. It means majority rule. Minority rule is dictatorship. That the ruling minority despise the populus is their problem not ours.

    4. Winston Marshall was educated at St Paul’s Boys’ School; Tommy Robinson was educated in his local comp.

      And yet, although I agree with much of what Marshall said I think that TR was much more at home and much more lucid and fluid in his speech than WM when he went to debate at the Oxford Union some years ago.

      1. which speech? The original one was banned by the police for various reasons.. so he by-passed the gagging order by giving the talk “about his life growing up in Luton.” Even plod begrudgingly acknowledged they couldn’t arrest someone for telling recollections of their childhood.

      2. which speech? The original one was banned by the police for various reasons.. so he by-passed the gagging order by giving the talk “about his life growing up in Luton.” Even plod begrudgingly acknowledged they couldn’t arrest someone for telling recollections of their childhood.

      3. I disagree. Winston Marshall was far more eloquent than Stephen Yaxley Lennon was in putting his points across in a clear, succinct, more easily assimilated, and massively more articulate way.

  92. We truly live in clown world. Apparently Palestine is trying to get FIFA to kick Israel out of the football world cup, for alleged “human rights” violations. Despite 7th October. This seems to be classic narcissistic (Cluster B) behaviour:
    Deny
    Attack
    Reverse Victim and Offender

    1. banana republic.. in the UK you wouldn’t get madmen running amok up and down the High Street attacking people.

    3. “Individual” is another non-committal word used in preference to “man” or “woman”, presumably to avoid the odious sin of mis-gendering someone.

      The assailant is being described as a suspect which, I suppose, adheres to legal technicalities, although the likelihood of the apprehended man being detained in error strikes me as extremely unlikely.

      1. “The alleged assailant”….even though he was seen with the gun before and after the “incident”

  94. From Coffee House, the Spectator

    The plot to erase the Anglo-Saxons
    Comments Share 15 May 2024, 9:44am
    Sea-thieves messenger, deliver back in reply,
    tell your people this spiteful message,
    that here stands undaunted an Earl with his band of men
    who will defend our homeland,
    Aethelred’s country, the lord of my
    people and land. Fall shall you
    heathen in battle! To us it would be shameful
    that you with our coin to your ships should get away
    without a fight, now you thus far
    into our homeland have come.
    You shall not so easily carry off our treasure:
    with us must spear and blade first decide the terms,
    fierce conflict, is the tribute we will hand over.

    So speaks Byrhtnoth, hero of the poem ‘The Battle of Maldon’, telling of an epic clash of arms in Essex against Viking raiders in 991.

    Essex derives from ‘land of the East Saxons’, one of many geographic legacies of the two main Germanic tribes who arrived in Britain as Rome fell. Just to the north was the region which had once been the Kingdom of the East Angles, the other major grouping in the invasion of the fifth century (the poor Jutes, smaller in number, rather get overlooked).

    Ethelred, the rather hapless ruler whose policy of paying off the invaders became an eternal lesson in bad policy, was the great-nephew of the first ruler to unite the people long referred to as ‘Anglo-Saxons’, and who by the time the poem was written had a sense of themselves as one people.

    The Anglo-Saxons lost that great battle, with Byrhtnoth heroically slain, and the only original manuscript was destroyed in the Ashburnham House Fire of 1731, although a copy was found much later, so that most of the poem has been saved. His people famously suffered a far greater catastrophe the following century when defeat outside Hastings in Sussex (land of the south Saxons) led to foreign rule and the suppression of their language. Today, though, the Anglo-Saxons face a new humiliation at the hands of a force far more insidious than the Normans – North American academics.

    Just as the once vanquished Vikings returned in force during Ethelred’s time, sensing weakness, so the assault on the Anglo-Saxons has begun again, with Cambridge last week renaming its Anglo-Saxon England journal ‘Early Medieval England and its Neighbours’. Dominic Sandbrook, for one, was not impressed.

    As Samuel Rubinstein writes in the Critic: ‘Since its foundation in 1972, the journal Anglo-Saxon England, published by Cambridge University Press, has been the most prestigious in the field… The rebrand, its ironically Anglocentric name notwithstanding, promises a “broader approach” and “interdisciplinary scope” alongside the “same high quality” as Anglo-Saxon England. Few who are familiar with the journal in its former guise would accept the implication that Anglo-Saxon England was ever lacking in “breadth” or “interdisciplinarity” (whatever this actually means).’

    The battle began in 2019 when Canadian academic Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm, two years earlier elected vice president of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (ISAS), where she called herself a ‘woman of colour and Anglo-Saxonist’ in her victory speech, resigned her position on account of its supposedly racist name.

    That year, sensing the approaching longships, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists voted to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, ‘in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms “Anglo-Saxon”’. The society concluded that the name ‘has sometimes been used outside the field to describe those holding repugnant and racist views, and has contributed to a lack of diversity among those working on early-medieval England and its intellectual and literary culture.’

    Dr Rambaran-Olm later declared that the field of Anglo-Saxon studies is one of ‘inherent whiteness’, and wrote in the Smithsonian magazine that: ‘The Anglo-Saxon myth perpetuates a false idea of what it means to be “native” to Britain.’

    In response, in December 2019, several dozen scholars wrote a letter defending the use of Anglo-Saxon, declaring that

    ‘The conditions in which the term is encountered, and how it is perceived, are very different in the USA from elsewhere. In the UK the period has been carefully presented and discussed in popular and successful documentaries and exhibitions over many years.

    The term “Anglo-Saxon” is historically authentic in the sense that from the 8th century it was used externally to refer to a dominant population in southern Britain. Its earliest uses, therefore, embody exactly the significant issues we can expect any general ethnic or national label to represent.’

    Tom Holland, one of the signatories, wrote: ‘The term “Anglo-Saxon” is inextricably bound up with the claim by Alfred to rule as “rex Angul-Saxonum”, his use of Bede to back-project a shared Anglian-Saxon identity and the emergence of England. Scholars of medieval history must be free to use it.’

    The Danegeld, however, had already been handed over, and as Rubinstein notes, Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm ‘retreated from academic life in an “act of resistance”, as she grandly called it on her blog. She now appears to spend most of her time knitting — a hobby inspired, she says, by Audre Lorde’s claim that “selfcare is an act of political warfare” — and tweeting… about Hamas.’

    Rambaran-Olm claimed that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is an ‘ahistorical’ term because ‘The people in early England or Englelonde did not call themselves Anglo-Saxons.’ This idea is obviously popular enough that BBC Bitesize have repeated it, even though it’s not true; the earliest usage dates back as far as Paul the Deacon, writing in Latin in the eighth century and using it to distinguish them from the old Saxons on the continent.

    Alfred the Great styled called himself Angulsaxonum rex, and his grandson Athelstan, the first king of England, rex Angulsexna, as well as ‘emperor of the Northumbrians, governor of the pagans, and defender of the Britons’ (his nephew King Edgar had the even grander sounding title ‘Autocrat of All Albion and its Environs’).

    What is bizarre, as Rubinstein pointed out, is that ‘if I were the sort of person to get irked by such things, as apparently Rambaran-Olm does, “England” would trouble me far more than “Anglo-Saxon”. The word “England” dates from the early eleventh century, in use for a generation that could have witnessed Hastings. To speak of “the Anglo-Saxons” for the period between the fifth and eleventh centuries is less “ahistorical” than it is to speak of “England”.’

    Indeed, even had they not referred to themselves as Anglo-Saxons, it would still be a useful and meaningful term to describe a culture chiefly comprising the Angles and Saxons, and to distinguish it from the seismic cultural change that occurred after 1066. Several historical periods are commonly referred to by names that would have mystified the people who lived through it.

    One of the more amusing justifications for referring to this period as ‘early medieval’ is that they didn’t call themselves Anglo-Saxon. Yet they certainly didn’t call themselves ‘early medieval’, medieval being a 19th century term that has its roots in the Renaissance invention of a ‘middle ages’.

    If this all seems like a bizarre way to justify the overt politicisation of history, it is the inevitable result of the extreme imbalance that has developed in academia, one that has made the discipline far more moralising (and boring). Last year it was reported that ‘Cambridge is teaching students that Anglo-Saxons did not exist as a distinct ethnic group as part of efforts to undermine “myths of nationalism”. Its teaching aims to “dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism” by explaining that the Anglo-Saxons were not a distinct ethnic group, according to information from the department.’ The department explained that ‘several of the elements discussed above have been expanded to make ASNC teaching more anti-racist.’

    Deliberately making a history course ‘more anti-racist’ is not scholarship, it’s activism. Of course, history is there to be used and abused, and always has been; as Rubinstein notes, ‘Rambaran-Olm’s article in History Workshop criticises those English Protestant Anglo-Saxonists in the sixteenth century who allowed political and theological concerns to interfere with their academic endeavours. Then, without any hint of irony, she states that “scholarly work, even historical studies, are never separate from current social and political realities”.’

    The Anglo-Saxons came to have huge historical importance to many Englishmen in part because of the Reformation, which both drove a new nationalism and also led to the rediscovery of many old works, including Asser’s biography of Alfred, due to the ransacking of the monasteries.

    Anglo-Saxonism was tied up both with internal political battles within England, and its long early modern conflict with France. The Normans stood as perfect representatives of both an autocratic and faintly foreign upper class, and England’s chief enemy.

    Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers, identified his band of radicals as inheritors of Saxon freedom, and in The New Law of Righteousness argued that: ‘Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressour, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake’. This was activism, too, promoting a mythical idea of Anglo-Saxon freedom which wasn’t remotely accurate – it was the Normans, after all, who abolished slavery in England.

    American revolutionaries such as Thomas Jefferson would see themselves as descendants and political successors of the Anglo-Saxons, both in a political and racial sense. Jefferson was a keen student of the period and proposed that one side of the seal of the United States feature Hengest and Horsa, ‘the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honour of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.’ Thomas Paine warned that Americans under the British would be ‘ourselves suffering like the wretched Britons under the oppression of the Conqueror’.

    As the United States came to become globally dominant, often working in tandem with its now junior partner and former mother country, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ came to be used as a term for the English-speaking nations, in particular by those who saw them as sharing common interests (such as Charles de Gaulle). Today it is still used by begrudging friends and enemies alike, including a Russian regime which has an outsized idea of Britain’s influence (one that sadly doesn’t reflect reality).

    Of course, in America the term also came to be used in a different sense, to distinguish those of British and north-west European descent from more recent arrivals from south and east Europe, as well as other groups – and the modern unease on that side of the Atlantic stems from the country’s racial politics. Once ruled by racial narcissists like Jefferson, it is now dominated by a reactive feeling of racial masochism. But this co-exists with a sense of arrogance born of moral certainty, and progressivism in the world’s powerful nation has a sense of global mission that cares nothing for the rest of the world.

    One American scholar argued against the use of this ‘clumsy’ term because ‘as a wealth of scholarship has shown, its cultural baggage – strong traditional association with white supremacy, past and present means that we today have an ethical decision… a majority of people, worldwide, associate the term with the idea of a “white race”. So I wouldn’t call myself an “Anglo-Saxonist” because white people isn’t what I study. I specialise in the oral and written culture, especially religious, of people who spoke Old English (Old Norse, Middle Welsh, Old Irish, Latin, etc). There were a lot of white people back then, but not all – I won’t erase the diversity that was there.’

    Fine – if American progressives have an issue with their country’s English and European heritage, that’s sad, but that’s America’s problem to deal with. I’m not sure we should really care what the majority of people worldwide think of the term Anglo-Saxon, and neither should we be weighed down with other people’s baggage. To do so would be to accept colonisation.

    Of course that cultural colonisation is long established, to the extent that Britain has adopted American ways of looking at our past, pushing a multicultural brand of pseudo-history which is comically untrue.

    This is driven not just by American cultural dominance but by the most powerful force in the world – racial narcissism. People want the prestige of their group raised, and the thought leaders of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world are happy to encourage them. The main reason that I don’t see the woke revolution turning back is because, as Louise Perry argued, the basic drive behind woke progressivism isn’t anything as complex and interesting as Marxist dialects or even a mutated form of Christian pity, but ethnic narcissism. No serious academic really thinks that a ‘racialised’ term prevents people from studying a culture with which they have no ancestral connection, something which has been disproved by countless scholars down the ages. To accept that would be to normalise ethnic narcissism in a field inspired by a sense of universal curiosity.

    Yet because ethnic narcissism and pride is a zero-sum game, such prestige-raising can only be done at the expense of others, so the groups not allowed to indulge in this competition are degraded, to such a point that we placidly allow the very name of our ancestors to be erased. The only thing that can push back against such a powerful moralising force is courage, and there doesn’t seem to be much around. What would Byrhtnoth have thought?

    This article first appeared in Ed West’s Wrong Side of History Substack

    1. The abolition of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ seems to emanate from America. But they don’t seem to have a problem referring to other nationalities, describing themselves as ‘Irish-American’, ‘African-American’, ‘German-American’, Polish-American’ etc. Strange that you never hear any of them describing themselves as ‘English-American’.

      1. My father was American.His mother’s family was of Norwegian origin and my grandfather’s family came from England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. My grandmother never referred to him as an English-American but simply said she had married an Englishman.

      2. Would it be that WASPS regard themselves as authentic Americans, unlike hyphenated Americans?

    1. Petronella Wyatt has never written anything sensible. Some journalists grow wiser with years. She just gets older.

    1. This is played every Christmas, without fail, in Germany. The Krauts can’t get enough of it.

        2. The Albanians wanted him as King, when they couldn’t get C B Fry for the job.

          1. I have his biography – C B Fry King of Sport by Iain Wilton – it’s just an astonishing read!

      2. I’d never even heard of it until I was told about it by some German friends!

  99. A nippy Birdie Three?

    Wordle 1,061 3/6
    ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
    ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Well done. Par four for me.

      Wordle 1,061 4/6

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

    2. You’re on a bit of a roll Lacoste! Boring boring Arsenal 4 for me…..

      Wordle 1,061 4/6

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

    3. Me too.

      Wordle 1,061 3/6

      ⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
      🟨🟩⬜🟨⬜
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

  100. Breaking News – Rishi calls for an end to all Lanyards.
    We will call then Lanmetres instead.

      1. Oh no! Not you using the hideously misused and over-used “awesome” :(( The Northern lights, an exploding volcano, a tsunami, a massive glacier or even, at a stretch, a full eclipse, can be described as “awesome”. A car, no matter how desirable, cannot.

        2. Nonsense!

          Things you can describe as ‘awesome’;
          – Cars, particularly the sports variety
          – Rugby/Football/Cricket games
          – Pints of Beer

          Things you can not describe as ‘awesome’:
          – Cakes
          – Knitting
          – Vastly overpriced dresses, shoes, handbags (particularly handbags!)

          1. I guess I should have known better than to take you on over this! Even I have to admit that the stratospheric price of some fashion items does come pretty close to awesome😆 Mostly I hear it used by the young who think it’s cool, or the not so young who think it will make them seem “cool” like the young, and I find it really irritating 😡

          2. Awesome!! (Hides behind settee to avoid barrage of shoes, cushions and various food items)……

      2. It certainly is 4G, what I see as a real car. I’m very fond of classic cars and often see what’s around at classic car auctions even if I can’t afford too many of them.. or even one 😕

        1. Keep doing the Lottery, Kitty, you have to be in it to win it (apparently)!

  102. Parasites found in Devon drinking water as residents issued with ‘boil notice’. 15 May 2024.
    .
    Households in parts of Devon have been told to boil their drinking water after tests found traces of a parasite that can cause diarrhoea and vomiting.

    South West Water said its customers in Alston and Hillhead, Brixham, should take the precaution after tests found remnants of cryptosporidium.

    I wonder if this is the one that infests the Middle East. All that is needed is for someone infected to urinate in the wild and you then drink from the same source and a week later you are passing blood.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/15/devon-residents-told-to-boil-water-test-parasites-traces/

    2. South West Water told residents yesterday that the water was safe to drink. They’ve been experiencing diarrhoea for several days.

    3. The world has gone mad – stark, staring bonkers. How many are there of these to yet come out of the woodwork?

    5. How does someone, who is demonstrably mentally ill, get appointed to such a high-powered position?

      Are those appointing it also mentally ill, if so, how did they get there?

        1. There you have it. Everyone on the planet is more than aware that Joe Biden is demonstrably mentally ill.

          As are the majority of the 350,000,000 million halfwits who voted him into power in what was once the most powerful nation on earth.

          3. And there is a fighting chance that he will be re-elected.
            God save the planet.

        2. Admiral Levine was never in the US Navy or any of the US armed forces, but is an admiral in the Public Health Service. The mind boggles!

          1. Quite.
            One wonders how far the creature might have risen had it remained a man.

            Not very would be my guess

          2. You will note that I used the words “Admiral Levine” because I couldn’t decide whether or not “he” or “she” was appropriate. I am sure that the use of either of those pronouns would have upset someone or other.

      2. The main, if not only qualification is to be part of the woke globalist cult.

    8. It’s the five o’clock shadow that I find particularly alluring – is he/she/it sponsored by Gillette?

    9. The Land Girls looked like girls; Dr Catherine Barnard. CEO of the World Land Trust doesn’t . . .

      Her life story is incredibly dull.

  105. That’s me for this dreary, damp day. And the weather was much the same.

    It would not surprise me if the slammer drug dealer “lifted” by his mates yesterday in France was taken to a small airfield and has left France for a faraway country of which we know little… It is bad news when Interpol has to get involved.

    Have a spiffing evening.

    A demain (in the rain…)

  106. Remember all the tough talk about not taking back illegal immigrants from Ireland? Entirely predictably, the slimy, treacherous Tories have quietly started taking them back – no doubt having received orders from Brussels.

  108. Putin and Xi are being handed a terrifying victory by gutless Biden. 15 May 2024.

    His underlying arrogance has been exacerbated by his deteriorating physical and mental condition. He acts like a blundering, interfering imperial overlord plagued by the shortest of attention spans. He sends out mixed signals, sucks up to random rogues, relentlessly bullies allies, micromanages complex conflicts from a distance and a position of ignorance, and inevitably angers both sides of every argument. Under his leadership, the world’s supreme economic, technological and military power exudes weakness, self-doubt and moral uncertainty.

    And this is only the beginning.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/15/putin-xi-handed-terrifying-victory-by-gutless-biden/

    2. China could bring down the US any time it wants because China has the gold. If they let the US’s war against Russia go ahead, it’s because they want to. Remember this when our children are being conscripted into the meat grinder.

      1. As Peta recently observed, you cannot eat gold. It is possible that things will really deteriorate to the degree where this matters.

        1. You can kill the (worthless, bloated, debt-based) dollar by backing your currency with gold though.

          1. Well, yes. But when things really do fragment neither will be important. We will be scrabbling for bones.

          4. We are just going into a long economic cycle with a massive commodities bull market. Sure you can’t eat gold, silver, copper, uranium, lithium etc but these things will determine which countries come out on top after the end-of-cycle turmoil, and which families will carry their wealth over to the other side and increase it. So please stop with negativities like “you can’t eat gold.” Central banks all over the world outside the west are rushing into gold in order to retain strength in their currencies precisely in order that their people can eat.

          5. If/when things really do come apart international politics won’t matter either. Everyone will be too busy finding ways to survive.

          6. Is that what you are expecting, world-wide armageddon?
            Excuse me, but that is very unlikely at this point.

  109. The magician David Copperfield has been accused of drugging and sexually assaulting numerous, mostly quite young, women.

    You could have knocked me down with a feather – he always looked/seemed so wholesome!……..

    2. The Guardian is looking for information
      ‘Story tips?
      Do you have any information to share? You can reach the Guardian US securely via behindthemagic@theguardian.com, or (using a non-work phone) use Signal or WhatsApp to message +1-646-886-8761. For the most secure communications, use SecureDrop or see our guide.’

      1. I hope they are offered something that turns out to be false and defamatory and that they publish and get sued to beggary and back again.

      2. He was trafficking them – he called it ‘A Sale of Two Titties’… (I’ll get me coat)

        1. Had a skim of the report, bit he said she said, plus a number of years ago. His photos are a bit creepy, part of his act I suppose. Proof? not much, one family said they’d seen him squeezing a 15 year old’s breast…doesn’t seem they took any action. I really thought you were kidding 😀 I shall in future believe you G4 :-))

          3. Whilst Brandon openly tweaks the nipples of much younger females as he sniffs their hair. Why are all our ruling classes such utter pervs and creeps?

          6. Thx yes figured it out..😖 old s.o.b. Seens knives out for Pelosi, another one.

  110. Evening all!

    I have, against my better judgment, accepted an offer I could not refuse from the Spectator. It’s grim. BTL is almost entirely peopled by obvious inventions and an incoherent system. The articles I was loathe to miss are not there.

    A huge amount of anti-semitic bile BTL.

    1. Hello opopanax, I’m still there for now. I expire end June and will look out for an offer, too. Yes, I noticed the asb BTL – seems to have calmed down a bit to what it was. Still got the blasted EV, still under the tree 😀 Hope to see you, Kate (listed, I think, as KJ200 after Disqus kept kicking me out).

        1. And you my old mucker! :-)) x I’ve had it mansplained to me Disqus can be tailored to buyer’s requirements so possibly down to Spectator. I know fine well I need different Disqus a/c for Spectator. I have another one I use here, and the same one on TCW, which I think is the standard Disqus. On my Speccie Disqus, all my previous posts and upticks have disappeared, plus there is no ability to block/unblock – Peta can’t contact me through Spectator and she thought I’d blocked her..as if….but we chat here and TCW (Gyngell’s mob, love it). Sorry to bang on…take care you and yours 🙂

          1. ;- ) i cannot find any info on the Speccie version about either myself or anyone else. it’s a disaster.

          2. They certainly threw everything up in the air ‘nothing but a pack of cards’ style. Tumbleweed for several weeks in the comments section. It’s built back now to some degree, there are some names I don’t recognise….new subscribers, perhaps, if there’s been a recruitment drive or similar.

          3. I think that a number are fakes, KJ. Like the appalling M Bidochon, who is probably Fraser Nelson in disguise. So perversely thick.

          4. It’s odd…even more odd evenings than days. Could be, I wouldn’t want to work for/with him.

          5. Isn’t he the old Nick Herbert, now Robert Bidochon? Off to my cot..’night 😴 😊

          6. M Bidochon is actually Nick Carter who has been around for a long time. Since the BTL system changed he’s just got a lot more unpleasant though.

          7. *Harman. Geoff, the vicar of this parish knows his work and posted a link to his food review stuff.

          8. Sorry – I meant Harman. Carter, of course, is equally objectionable so in my head I just fused them!!

        1. 😅😅😅 I’m hoping for a mail from on high offering me an offer I can’t refuse…we’ll see. Otherwise Geoff’s place good to haunt…’night PJ see you tmrw 👍

    2. I must admit I haven’t missed since I left, doubt very much I’ll go back to it, even with their offers.

      1. I do now feel an absolute MegaTwat for succumbing. Not an isolated incident in the story of my life, though.

        2. I took up the offer for a couple of quid over the next quarter. If they don’t sort the comment system out by then I am gone.

    3. I’ve noticed an increase in anti-Semitism BTL at The Spectator. One poster in particular has caught my eye called RHD. Hamas adjacent, really hates “zeee Jooooooze”.

  111. The Civil Service is trying to cover up the true scale of migrant crime

    If a social democratic, high-trust country like Denmark can publish data on migrant crime rates, there’s no reason why Britain can’t

    GUY DAMPIER • 14 May 2024 • 1:15pm

    It was sadly predictable that civil servants would seek to block the publication of league tables showing the migrant nationalities with the highest rates of crime. It’s the classic Blob ploy; if the data gives results you don’t like, reject the data.

    The proposal, made by the former immigration minister Robert Jenrick and backed by 40 Conservative MPs, was straightforward: Ministers would present an annual report to Parliament detailing the nationality, visa status and asylum status of every offender convicted in English and Welsh courts over the previous year. Mr Jenrick has warned that Britain could be “importing crime” and called for greater transparency to inform policy and public debate.

    Mr Jenrick cites the example of Denmark, where the regular publication of detailed data has shown that some migrant groups, like those from Lebanon or Somalia, are over-represented in criminal statistics compared to Danes while others, like those from Japan or Argentina, are under-represented.

    When it was announced, the Government was said to have no “ideological concerns” about the plan but was concerned about the practicality of implementing the amendment. Now civil servants have advised that Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, might rule that the amendment is not “in scope” for the Criminal Justice Bill, which is mainly focused on cracking down on crime.

    That is a blatant cop-out. The Bill’s full title includes “provision about the prevention and detection of crime and disorder”. Publishing data on migrant crime would be far more within the scope of that goal than other amendments such as decriminalising abortion. It’s hard not to wonder whether civil servants are just afraid of what they might find if they start looking.

    The good news is that even if the amendment is ruled out, the league table could still go ahead. The Home Office already collects this data, although they don’t organise or publish it. If you attempt to access it through a Freedom of Information request, it will be refused on the grounds that it costs too much to collate. But it would surely be possible for a Minister to access it to aid their decision making – and reveal it to the public.

    After all, the data we do have suggests that there are significant disparities between migrant groups. The Ministry of Justice already publishes data on Foreign National Offenders sentenced to imprisonment, with the most recent statistics showing that they represent 12% of the prison population. The most common foreign nationality was Albanian, with the group making up 14% of foreign prisoner population – 1,475 people. While a precise population size is hard to establish due to the large numbers crossing the English Channel on “small boats”, just 140,000 Albanians are estimated to reside in the UK.

    That does still suggest that Mr Jenrick is correct that different migrant groups have different impacts on the criminal justice system. A sensible data-driven immigration policy would reduce immigration from nations which are disproportionately involved in crime, with all the attendant costs on the taxpayer.

    It could also inform our asylum policy, where there is evidence that organised crime abuses the system. The National Crime Agency has warned that Albanian criminals are coached on how to use modern slavery laws to avoid deportation, while Albanian asylum seekers can be working on cannabis farms within days of arriving illegally in Britain. Without better data in the public sphere it is impossible to quantify the scale of these problems however.

    Yet the civil service remains resolutely opposed to anything which hints that immigration is anything other than an unalloyed good. It is hard to think of any other reason why this data would be withheld; if we are to build migration policies that lead to greater prosperity for all, and create a happier and more cohesive society, why wouldn’t we want to know more about potential migrants, and choose the people most likely to succeed? It may be inconvenient for critics of the amendment, but if a social democratic, high-trust country like Denmark can do this then there is no reason why Britain can’t.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/14/immigration-crime-cover-up-civil-service/

    1. Another dancing lady, myself Ballet and the glamorous lady who left to do the Tango in Argentina.. I’ve not seen her around for a day or too, I do love her vibrant posts .

        1. Sometimes it’s lovely just to sit around in the background with a glass of wine and just enjoy reading the comments without contributing,
          a listener instead of speaking is rather a nice thing to do.

          1. One of the pleasures of Nottle over the years has been to get votes from people who don’t post, but then suddenly decide to do so and then they become contributors.

            I won’t name names, but there are several of them out there who would now be regarded as regulars.

          3. I always enjoyed reading the posts of the much missed Lady of The Lake, I loved her gentleness and reading about her book recommendations and soup recipes. I also liked reading Mr Vikings ( Peddy ) about Missy and his adventures abroad and many others.
            Even when I’ve not posted much over the years I’ve aways read the comments, I found them interesting, funny and comforting over the years when the world is so chaotic.

          4. Peddy was knocked sideways by Missy’s death.
            Like Plum Tart was when Maud, her dachsie, died.

          5. Having left the UK some 40 years ago, my knowledge of English news and politics make many comments from me to be obsolete!! But I do enjoy finding out what people are thinking, here on Nottletown!

      2. Bless you, my fellow Terpsichorean! I have huge respect for ballet dancers, having worked with a few and made friends with them. Oh, but the feet, the feet!! Puts the Little Mermaid to shame.

        2. As long as you keep wearing that iron mask the rest of us can feel better.

    3. Hola mi amigo!

      All tootling along here, thank you. My life is all learning – tango and the language. Both coming along! And I am really enjoying the process.

      Suddenly turned cold, so I’ve had to buy more layers. Winter is coming…

      I try to keep an eye on this nest of scoundrels, but my phone keeps resetting the site to zero if I wander off for even a few minutes, and, well, bugger that for a game of soldiers!

      1. Glad to hear you are thriving K. I think we had Summer last week as the weather is misbehaving….As far as Nottl is concerned KBO!

  113. Good evening everyone, Audrey and me have walzed In
    I hope you liked the picture of my Continental Red Morgan below- not mine but I’d love it to be. As anyone seen the Squire around – has he lost himself out with that dog of his. If you see him say hello from me. Tomorrow I’ve a fossil thing to attend 😊

  114. I’d not want to be wealthy- a lot of money brings worrying about keeping wealth and very wealthy people rarely seem happy or have a free spirit.
    But if i had more I’d like a period house or Thatched cottage off the national grid with a small amount of land in woodlands.
    A labrador .
    A MG or Morgan car .
    To be able to travel to historical areas, visit a few vineyards and have a collection of old books
    And I’d like to help make other lives better and add joy .

    1. You’d need some firearms to see off the raiding parties from the urban cesspits…

    2. I couldn’t agee more.
      I owned a MGB GT for around four years. And have been to Martha’s Vineyard, Margaret River and many more Vineyards in Oz. Also France.
      Old books in the loft.
      And had a lovely labrador for 12 years. Sadly missed.

    3. You’d need a good pick up truck to go with that life. I know because I chased that dream too.
      The off Grid bit is difficult in this country.

      1. There must be places in this country where one can still be off grid, I know a couple with a private woodland, it’s not too far from me – they’re off grid and with only a track which leads to where they live in the woodland but okay, as soon as they step outside the woodland – we’ll it’s not totally out in the sticks . Scilly Isles, Exmoor, Isle of Bute or somewhere on the Yorkshire Moors . Just a dream really.

        1. There are places where it is possible. Speaking from experience, it is not what it is cracked up to be. Not at all.

          2. And the whole day obsessing about finding, providing and preparing food. No time for creativity – just survival. Not so romantic, is it?

          3. And desperate if one is feeling run-down, under the weather with a streaming winter cold requiring two or three days off one’s feet under the duvet.

          4. That’s disappointing,I had hoped it would be . At one with nature, trees and animals .

          5. Again, #metoo! But it isn’t. It’s visceral and not so naice. Kitty, have you read “The Yearling”? It does sum up the reality of that kind of life, albeit from long ago.

          6. Living in West Virginia, we are lucky to have 7 acres of land, although not off the grid, we do have a generator for emergencies, our own deep well and splendid views of river and mountains. Shops, post office, bank (yes, we still have branches) and doctors within 5min drive away.

          8. Your second sentence sums up how much a pleasant life “off grid” needs infrastructure to remain pleasant

          9. I did say that we are not “off the grid” but for this Brummie born and bred, the sight of deer, wild life and eagles far compensates!!

          16. 😘 I’ve been told off by John Standley for saying the same about him. I’m only teasing, y’know.

            I’m from the same county as people from Derby but they call me a “Yorkshireman”.

          19. Brummie? I lived in Gillott Road for 5 years. My house backed on to the Resser.

          21. Only just. Saved by being on the right side of the street. The other side had a Rotton Park Post Code.

          23. Jillthelass, are you the West Virginia Mountain Mama I hear so much about? Lol.

        3. My OH in his earlier life spent two years running a post office and shop in Scilly. By the end, he and his wife couldn’t stand the sight of each other.

      1. Ah without that, nothing can be enjoyed to perfection.

    5. I have an MG, travel to historical areas and have a collection of old books. House is traditional, rather than period. I can’t say whether I add joy or not, but I try not to make people’s lives worse (I leave that to the government).

    1. By and large, the French deal with the criminals a lot more robustly than the British do.

      1. Sounds very heavy going and scary, maybe I’d have been better off with all those things in times gone by when the country and world were safer places. I’m probably around during the wrong time.

        2. It was a light weight 22 magnum not anything like the Winchester 270 or the Parker Hale 243 I sometimes used.

  117. Oh well some gardening achieved today, cutting new straight lines edges of flower/shrub beds and lawn. Now have a wheel barrow full of grassy soil to process. Not tonight.
    Two Hospital appointments tomorrow.
    Better get some sleep.
    Night all. 😴

  118. Disaster this evening .. Moh was starting on the hedges , electric gear , I was assisting him , tidying up as he cut stuff , I went into the garage to get the big rake .. and OMG .. a huge puddle of water on the garage floor .. I checked both the freezers, nope , no leak .. and heard a small hissing sound behind an old oven we keep saying we must get rid of .

    Moh dropped what he was doing , he was cross , and even crosser when he looked behind the old oven , water spurting from bronze valve , pinprick hole, and a fine spray spurting everywhere .

    I rang the local plumber , he arrived at 7pm , and turned the water off down at the bottom of the driveway .. the mains stopcock was about 3ft deep down , 50 years old and antiquated , which a modern key does not fit ..

    So rang Wessex Water emergency and they will be with us tomorrow to replace the stopcock , and I guess they will have to dig up the road .

    No water this evening , and I was in the middle of doing a white wash in the machine, ready to hang out in the garden tomorrow .

    Son has just gone out to get some bottled water ,

    Drat and double drat.

    1. I know there’s never a ‘good’ time for a household disaster, Belle but I can’t think of a worse one!

    2. Oh that’s dreadful, I feel for you! Drinking water is easy. It’s not being able to flush the loo that stinks, literally! Are you due any rain tonight? I don’t possess a bucket but I should ☹️!

    4. Oh dear, do hope it is sorted tomorrow for you. I don’t know about drinking water – I’d settle for a couple of stiff drinks followed by a dive under the duvet until morning!

  119. Good night everyone, Audrey and I must fall asleep by the light of the moon –
    I actually do so – I like to watch the sky as I drift off to sleep and I face the window in my bedroom, there is never total darkness Sweet dreams and God bless x

  120. Lookalikes.

    Max Headroom (AKA Sir Kneelalot) as a pub landlord in the 1940s (video featured earlier today).

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/b2da3fa69c47023648af8b64bc5b71d40d544f3729d17547d08a326c7d687e06.jpg
    __________________________________________________________________________________

    Call-me-Dave as a trumpeter with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, 2007.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1ed78bd7ba37f33d0d45d17cc5686e1860dcc515eaeb39bb3c79f45dd8299ce6.jpg

    1. Doppelganger from another age – well they say everyone has a double 😊

  123. Evening, all. Rain has arrived in Biblical proportions today; the roads were like rivers. Needless to say, I got nothing done outside.

  124. Caught the bus to Matlock from outside the house at 11 which gave me 1¼ hours in the town before the return trip.
    Got all my shopping done, including buying 2 x boxes of screws and had time for a cup or tea and a sticky bun.
    Caught the bus home, intending to sort shopping out, have mug of tea and get started on the shelves I’m building in the bathroom.
    Sorted the shopping ok and sat down with my mug of tea and promptly fell asleep!!!
    When I woke up it was time to sort out something to eat.
    Did sausage chips with mushy peas and mushrooms.
    Watched the downpour at half 5 and the river running down the road.

    Just listened to The Monteverdi Vespers on Radio 3, live from the Barbican.

    And now I’m off to bed.

    Good night all.

  125. It’s the end of the world as we know it. The Telegraph has fallen.

    Early BTLs are all for a fireworks display.

    Ukraine must be allowed to win

    The Ukrainians are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. The West must provide the weapons needed to finish the job

    TELEGRAPH VIEW • 15 May 2024 • 10:00pm

    The modest gains Russian forces have made in their recent push into territory around the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv should serve as a wake-up call to Western leaders, and their continuing equivocation over just how much support to give to Kyiv’s war effort. The latest reports indicate Russian forces are seeking to exploit Ukraine’s critical shortages of ammunition and manpower to launch attacks on two fronts.

    Western support, especially from the US and UK, has previously contributed significantly to the Ukrainians’ ability to defend themselves from Russian attempts to overrun their country, especially in the initial phases of the conflict when superior Western weaponry made a decisive impact on thwarting the Russian advance.

    Maintaining this support, however, has been increasingly an open question in recent months, particularly in America where the Biden administration’s attempts to provide a further $60 billion aid package to Kyiv was delayed by political wrangling in Congress. Even though the package has now been approved, and other Western allies such as Britain have also made fresh commitments to support the Ukrainian cause, these hold ups mean it could be some time before fresh supplies of ammunition reach Ukraine’s front line, leaving its forces vulnerable to further attacks.

    Another factor that has undermined the effectiveness of Ukraine’s effort has been the reluctance of Western leaders to provide Kyiv with the equipment it requires to maintain an offensive campaign, rather than one that is purely defensive in nature. The West has baulked, for example, at the idea of supplying long-range missiles and warplanes that can strike targets deep within Russian territory, thereby causing serious disruption to Moscow’s military operations. This reluctance stems from concerns that Moscow might expand its war effort, raising the possibility of a direct military confrontation between Russia and Nato.

    As former Nato commander General Sir Richard Shirreff explained earlier this week, this means that the Ukrainians are fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. The Russians think nothing of attacking key Ukrainian infrastructure in their bid to weaken Kyiv’s resolve; Ukraine is perfectly within its rights to respond. If, as Western leaders keep telling us, they are really committed to Kyiv winning the war, then they must provide the weapons needed to finish the job, and not resort to half-hearted measures.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2024/05/15/ukraine-must-be-allowed-to-win/

    1. This war should have been settled at the start. It’s the West sending arms and equipment that has led to the deaths of so many.

        1. That would have been for negotiations to decide but would probably have involved some of the Donbas going to Russia.

      2. And the evil Johnson aided by the senile Biden convinced the corrupt Zelenskyy that the talks should not go ahead.

        The war should never started and Putin is not the only one the West should blame.

        1. It is moot who started it. When Germany invaded Poland, it was in response to alleged atrocities against ethnic Germans on the far side of the Danzig Corridor. A similar justification was used when annexing the Sudetenland, which the British agreed to.

          If I recall, the situation blew up a generation ago with the conflict between the pro-West and corrupt Tymoshenko and the pro-Russia and equally corrupt Yanukovich. The Ukraine which evolved under the Soviets was long equally split between the industrial and coastal regions, which had long been settled by Russians and were sympathetic with the Kremlin, and the large agricultural hinterland centred on Kyiv, whose traditions were linked with Lithuania, and eager to follow it into the EU and NATO.

          The mistake made by democracy was that a bare majority provided a mandate for a move one way or the other. The Tymoshenko and the Yanukovich wings routinely undid one another’s decisions to the fury of their respective supporters, who resorted to direct paramilitary action to make their point. I do recall it was pro-Russian paramilitaries using Russian hardware that shot down that Malaysian airliner.

          it is not the first time a 52%/48% democratic split has caused domestic conflict, and may even be evidence of a healthy democracy which any mature nation must deal with lawfully whilst keeping the peace between the disgruntled groups. It is unhelpful for interested foreign concerns to stir the pot in a spirit of opportunistic advantage. Russian supporters like to point at the West, but they conveniently ignore the beam in their own eye.

          Before 24th February 2022, I argued that if Ukraine wanted to avoid partition, it should adopt a policy of strict neutrality, and even profit by acting as a bridge and a buffer between Russia and the West. Putin’s military chest thumping in Belarus should have been a bluff to push for better terms. Considering Germany’s reliance on Russian energy, he would have been pushing at an open door, and a pro-Russia EU was a serious possibility, isolating Western Europe from an increasingly isolationist America.

          The invasion and subsequent bombardment of Ukraine though was unforgivable and in breach of everything the UN was set up to achieve. It is a pity that NATO, primarily a defensive treaty, should be called on to defend Ukraine from Russian atrocity. It would have been better if the UN had the clout to read the riot act to Russia. Putin calling in the support of India and China is very disturbing, and raises the real possibility of a world war and the devastation this brings as very many cities face bombardment and the mass movements of millions of refugees destabilising their hosts as they go.

          Pro-Russian supporters argue that Putin would be content with Ukraine, but the pattern of internal dissent, followed by supportive Russian military support for one of the factions, is already starting in Georgia, and could break out anywhere national institutions are vulnerable to being subverted. Russia had always been opportunistic and will not baulk at any opportunity to take advantage of a breakdown in national morale. The UK has already been warned

    2. What’s the point of hand-wringing over lack of ammunition and other materiel if, as widely reported, there is a lack of trained soldiers etc. to make use of the West’s war-making goodies?

      If the munitions are forthcoming and the reported shortage of manpower is a concern, how long will it be before the ‘Hawks’ i.e. globalists and their entourage of opportunists, begin agitating for troop sacrifices from Europe, UK, USA etc.?

      Will reports of Sunak’s reluctance to have a war on his record precipitate an early election that he knows he will lose and so save his reputation? Not that there’s much of worth left to save: if anything, the idea of Sunak having concerns over his reputation without a war to mar it shows the disconnect these arrogant people have from the reality of their overall performance.

    1. It’s nothing new. The Danish and Dutch have been scooping up British sandeels for many years, and in the process have destroyed Britain’s marine ecosystem, not just for birds but also for fish. If you allow the scooping up one of the main sources of food for our seabirds and predatory fish you are causing an imbalance to the marine ecosystem. These bastards know this. Just another way to fuck the world up.

      2. Hello MM

        The Condor cross channel ferry at Poole ploughs through sea grass on the Sandbanks side , plus the huge amount of pleasure craft , motor boats, gin palaces etc anchor off Sandbanks and elsewhere off our sandy beaches ..

        Years ago when I ventured out to swim, the sea grass hosted lots of sand eels and sea horses, they just glide through , harmless and beautiful.

        The great pleasure seeking British public are clueless of the damage they are doing to our coastal waters .

        We have puffins at Brownsea island , and many other sea birds , so reliant on a particular food source , but our harbours and safe places are being poisoned and ruined by either polluted water or careless floating rubbish .

  129. I’m of the opinion that Putin would never have been satisfied with the Donbas and nothing that has happened since has made me change my mind. Even if you are right and it wasn’t all of Ukraine he wanted, he would most certainly have wanted Odesa as well and cut the rest of Ukraine off from the Black Sea.

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