Wednesday 6 September: A witness to local authorities’ wilful wastefulness and procrastination

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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526 thoughts on “Wednesday 6 September: A witness to local authorities’ wilful wastefulness and procrastination”

  1. Good morrow, Gentlefolks, today’s story

    Does That Answer Your Question?
    Some men in a truck drove into a Builder’syard. One of the men walked in the office and said, “We need some four-by-twos.”

    The clerk asked, “You mean two-by-fours, don’t you?”

    The man said, “I’ll go check,” and went back to the truck.

    He returned and said, “Yeah, I meant two-by-four.”

    “All right. How long do you need them?”

    The customer paused for a minute and said, “I’d better go check.”

    After a while, he returned to the office and said, “A long time. We’re gonna build a house.”

  4. ‘Morning All

    Medley Time

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c20fb75a04c5454aeb147c0657c8391776e3d15042dcb71a044ca37496519f3c.jpg

    https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRhBhe60fxrz-aXFI2OZl9cc4kiPhGPYYH6SXYlh3XuV1eauKnlExbC145OKIA17egQCsbUtLH-eDBtip2ONTUL-l47NeqxQrvKY5le-Lk20HsAFPVYsKslKuJ-t2h9pkzugpEfv9tUbQ7Jgtm7yRd3I0QQAyyen4u7uwC1zjowN_m57dBXCUeyztNdQV8/s540/90milesdcc567fcab39fe1f3b57c4068033dfc5_654ec5ec_540.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/51e762548826b459bf104ffa034e48a0b06f7b9afc1cd5f9e147efb3bdfd1cdf.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2c1cafd8c432af6817183a3c9789e3c746612b7a1673326125c6e72e194d387f.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/a75c788a21c69719e2075e24e42125e19ad9e661b2c3b93b4bb0934847de8859.jpg

    https://scontent-lcy1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/371119999_683224607168682_4897415167146364707_n.jpg?_nc_cat=1&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=49d041&_nc_ohc=tajJExA5h8wAX8I-PEr&_nc_ht=scontent-lcy1-1.xx&oh=00_AfCBDVn6tRfB-tyTRTXXtFD2mAWEKr58M7o7ltqkt8KcfQ&oe=64FBE887

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c7c25ec5cbe301141c1083bc5739243e3b7fb5ce5e1f5b984b3114085b9dab39.jpg

        2. The one with the scarecrow on the beach? During lockdown plod was out in force harrassing people who were alone miles from anywhere or anyone.

  6. A witness to local authorities’ wilful wastefulness and procrastination

    Ulez cameras going up faster here than people can pull them down.
    I was wondering where the nerve centre was for processing all this information, it must take a lot of computing power for it to work.

    1. Morning Bob. They must be waiting to ambush some of these people and make an example of them!

  7. Good morning all.
    A bit of a misty start that will probably burn off once the sun gets going. 11½°C on the yard thermometer.

  9. Grammar school boy sent white nationalists guides to making bombs, court hears. 5 September 2023.

    Wheeler, a pupil at Marling School in Stroud, Gloucestershire, was 15 when he began sharing terrorist manifestos, a jury heard.

    When his home was searched by police they allegedly discovered publications titled the Terrorist Handbook, the Anarchist Cookbook and Homemade Detonators.

    His electrical devices were also seized and revealed to contain a “hoard” of Right-wing material, literature and manifestos of known terrorists, the court heard.

    Of course as soon as I read the headline I looked in the text for the Anarchist’s Cookbook; it being an unmistakable sign that someone is being set up on spurious far-Right charges. The book itself is over fifty years old and is available on Amazon to anyone who can stump up the princely sum of £13.25. It has sold over two million copies since it was first published and one can only assume that the “White Nationalists” are either misers or have no access to a computer or they would have bought their own.

    These “far-right” trials are surprisingly common, there are two or three every year; they are a way of maintaining the myth that there is some vast organised right wing conspiracy planning to come and rescue us from this Marxist Tyranny. Unfortunately this is not so.

    There have been many politically motivated explosions and murders in the UK over the last twenty years but most are by Islamists. It looks as though the term far-Right has itself become redundant, probably due to its overuse in the European political sphere and has now been replaced by White Nationalists!

    No Comments Allowed! For obvious reasons.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/05/school-student-white-nationalists-bomb-instructions-court/

    1. RIGHT WING material???
      In my day it was Left Wingers and Anarchists who circulated this stuff.

    2. I begged my two not to buy the Anarchists’ Cookbook or google how to make bombs from the internet connection registered in my name when they were that age.

      1. Morning BB. I’m sometimes thankful that I have never bought Mein Kampff (something I have always meant to read) or I think that by now MI5 would have torn the place to pieces. Lol!

        2. Although it would perhaps shed some light on the thoughts of a man who influenced twentieth century history, I bet it’s probably a long-winded dead bore!

      2. Morning BB. I’m sometimes thankful that I have never bought Mein Kampff (something I have always meant to read) or I think that by now MI5 would have torn the place to pieces. Lol!

      3. Morning BB. I’m sometimes thankful that I have never bought Mein Kampff (something I have always meant to read) or I think that by now MI5 would have torn the place to pieces. Lol!

  10. An early threee for meee
    Wordle 809 3/6

    🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜
    🟨🟨🟨⬜🟨
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Five here

      Wordle 809 5/6

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

      1. It’s all down to luck of the choice of first word, innit?
        Do you start with the same word each day?

    2. Ooh you be good

      Wordle 809 4/6

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

    1. “I’m not a lady, I’m a theydy”

      One who has trouble controlling a razor, judging by HER eyebrows.

    3. Yeah, but you are not “non-binary” are you love, because “non-binary” doesn’t exist.

      Although I accept you are certainly no lady.

  13. Good morning, all. Dull overcast at 6 but the now rising Sun will hopefully work its magic.

    Government waste shock!

    This sub-scam of the main covid scam is certainly waste by our profligate government and its agents but someone, or more than someone, will have benefited from a £6 price tag for a new and unused hospital bed.
    I’ve added two comments that sum up the feelings of dismay and anger to this news.

    https://twitter.com/JimFergusonUK/status/1698980425111048660

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/477a917160f1967a63ff63601a29da0c9262e1d7bcae8d9ee2cc9f0dfae01442.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9e8eac0aad2cd448bd7bdd579f80d5fd9d0ba233770a83f6b8e9d47f94451fdb.png

    1. Who bought them?

      My response to a comment last night was that nothing surprises me anymore,
      . The same goes for this undoubted scam.

      To save pixels, from now on I shall coin the abbreviation NSMAM.
      Uncopywritten, use at will 😀

    2. The government simply don’t care, it’s not their money.
      But that’s how MFI started. Mullard Furniture Industries.
      Donald Searle and his business partner Noel Lister from Edgware, bought surplus hospital beds from the government and sold them to Poland.

  14. Ukraine gets tough on medical exemptions from military duty. 6 September 2023.

    Ukraine has clamped down on the number of medical exemptions it allows for men to avoid being called up to the army.

    Kyiv will no longer permit conscripts with mild mental disorders, HIV+ status or hepatitis to skip military service.

    The defence ministry issued the decree, first reported by the Ukrainian Military Pages on Sunday, after president Volodymyr Zelensky hit out at corruption in the exemption system.

    Other conditions cut from the list include treatable tuberculosis, slow-progressing blood disease, and mild thyroid gland diseases.

    This makes for ominous reading. It makes scraping the barrel look respectable. The implication surely is that they are running out of troops!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/09/05/ukraine-medical-exemptions-military-duty-russia-invasion/

    2. I wonder how pleased the Ukrainians, and particularly their females, are going to be when Ukraine is the recipient of huge swathes of fighting age Africans and Middle Easterners to replace their menfolk who have been killed or maimed.

  15. ‘Morning, Peeps. Another humid day in prospect, with 28°C, although on Thursday we exceeded the forecast temperature by 3.5°, so today isn’t looking at all good. Early brekker and dog walk followed by a quiet day is on the cards.

    The DT has yet to report on yesterday’s debate on the Energy Bill, preferring instead to tell us that Ms Markle went to a concert without her clot of a husband…

    The reports on the radio had all the usual suspects – Lucas, Milliprat et al – blathering on with their lies about the wonderful benefits of wind power. All this on a day when nearly 11,500 bird and bat choppers could only provide 12% of a very modest 34 GW demand at lunchtime, with the remaining coal capacity pressed into service, on top of around 60% from gas. It’s pathetic, and yet these muppets think that wind is the best thing since sliced bread. They have no idea how bad it will be if the same current high pressure system arrives during a really cold winter.

    Yesterday’s ‘debate’ was, for the vast majority, just another golden opportunity to virtue-signal without having the slightest clue about the subject. The only exception was MacKinley and his chums in the Net Zero Watch group, who unfortunately remain just voices in the wilderness. We are truly done for.

    1. As we’ve said on here before, but it’s worth repeating, that is 12% of electricity. Electricity is less than a quarter of total power demand.

      1. 12% of demand at that particular moment. In a year, electricity provides about a fifth of total power requirements and of that, wind turbines about a quarter i.e. about 1/20th (I don’t think it has ever reached 5%).

        Earlier this year, the BBC wet itself with excitement when reporting that in the first quarter, wind turbines generated more electricity than gas (32.4 to 31.7). This was misinterpreted by some in the media as a permanent state.

        Electricity may be only one-fifth of our total requirement but it’s the most important. So much that we do requires it, even if in small amounts, so a reliable – and cheap – supply is paramount. Millipede & Co just don’t get that.

        1. Indeed it is, WS. The main key to prosperity is a cheap and reliable source of electricity. Unfortunately most of those clowns in the H of C seem to think that the very opposite is the case.

    2. The Tory MPs who rebelled over the matter of planning permissions for land-based wind turbines did so because they want the country to have ‘more cheap electricity’.

      1. And according to the moronic Milliprat, the moratorium for onshore bird-choppers has cost every family £180 and has deprived us of badly-needed ‘energy security’.

        These people are dangerous and need locking up!

    3. I keep getting notifications from my (County) council that, due to the “amber warning” for a heat wave, bin collections would start at 6am. When I went out this morning at 08.45, neither of my bins (it’s recycling day) had been emptied.

  16. Home Office to declare Wagner group a terrorist organisation. 6 September 2023.

    The Wagner mercenary group will be declared a terrorist organisation, the Home Office has announced.

    A draft order will be laid in parliament on Wednesday, which will make it illegal to be a member of or support the Russian group in the UK. The group has played a prominent role in the Russian invasion of Ukraine since it began in February 2022.

    It has also been active in conflicts in Syria, Central African Republic, Sudan and Libya.

    The Home Office said the decision had been taken to proscribe the group under the Terrorism Act 2000 due to “the nature and scale of the organisation’s activities as well as the threat they pose to British nationals abroad”.

    More meaningless posturing!.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/05/home-office-to-declare-wagner-group-a-terrorist-organisation

    1. But meanwhile they have been aware of the real terrorist who threatened Britain and have done absolutely sweet FA about it. More or less encouraged it.

    2. They’ve done Vlad a favour. All he has to do is incorporate the group into the Russian Armed Forces….

  17. Morning all 🙂😊
    Not much sunshine yet but on its way.
    Local authorities are pretty good at destroying the green belt by allowing many thousands of new homes to be built. Mainly for people who are escaping from kahnts new and huge area of London.
    And of course thousands of new homes for people who can’t afford to pay rent and live on benefits and do absolutely nothing to repay the huge debt they owe to UK taxpayers.
    Just sayin’ 🤗

    1. If Richly Suntanned had any gonads he would seek to extend the franchise for the election of London Mayor to the whole of Khant’s new kingdom – you know, no taxation without representation and all that very basic stuff…

    1. Morning Tom. I don’t think that things are as rosy for Vlad as this guy thinks but there is no doubt that the war has backfired considerably on the West. The German economy in particular (though they keep it out of the MSM) has suffered catastrophically from the American destruction of the Baltic Pipline.

      1. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the supply of LNG from America vs from Russia prior to the “invasion” and the pipeline destruction.

        1. Morning Sos. There have been a couple of articles that have mentioned it peripherally. From memory the US deliveries now fill around a half of Germany’s requirements but at a vastly increased price!

          1. A 40% mark-up by the US was mentioned shortly after Nordstream was attacked. Probably cheaper to buy Russian products via India or China.

    2. Not quite sure how they include India as part of the West ?
      But yes another cock up by people in politics who are not capable of even running a bath.

  19. From Canada, but we can relate:
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/aa7063193ef8bc59ae8078d13a1f97385ccc8a76d41fc28479a54866ad20806f.jpg

    US government interest payments on national debt…wouldn’t trust them to be in charge of my household finances…oh wait…
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/21b3d489d0adcb2cfdb547a6a02d7e57dae21a4a1e42c95268784ed2d8d7e867.jpg

    this calls for desperate measures
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7869b34d1df01a3e41a5a51746591f61f41efb98b83fc634fa4c333a28a54f42.jpg

  20. Right, spending too much time sat on my arse here, so going to do some work up the “garden”.
    Back later.

  21. Good morning all

    The mist is vanishing , very still air , Moh golfing 2nd day in a row, this morning .. He copes very well with the heat , and looks like a migrant now .

    BIRMINGHAM BANKRUPT: This is the inevitable result of the Tory/Labour/LibDem/Green uni-party throwing money down the drain on climate alarmism, net zero, migrant welfare, diversity and dodgy developments, rather than core services and fixing potholes.

    https://twitter.com/davidkurten/status/1699058647991775438

    2. Surely the automatic removal of the elected members on any bankrupt council should accompany the serving of a Section 114 notice? And then barred for life on account of their gross incompetence?

      ‘Morning, Belle.

        1. Maybe just pass legislation making the councillors personally liable for any debts? Rather than having an investigation that takes years to come to a conclusion? ILIH. (I live in hope).

  22. Good morning all,

    Slightly hazy but clear skies at McPhee Towers this morning. Wind in the Nor’-East, 18℃ and it’s going to be ‘scorchio’ again – 28℃. Looks like this Bharati summer will be going on past the weekend.

    Gillian Keegan may be regretting her ‘potty-mouth’ moment as it seems it has attracted some attention that she and her husband may have been escaping.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/05/gillian-keegan-arrogant-stance/

    After her first marriage ended in divorce, she married Michael Keegan – the son of former Tory MP Denis Keegan – who acts as a liaison between the Government and the weapons manufacturer BAE Systems.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/30/boss-overseeing-post-office-now-whitehall/

    He is also a non-executive director of the IT firm Centerprise International, and last year it emerged that the company had been given 17 Ministry of Defence contracts worth £24 million between Oct 2019 and May 2020. The Cabinet Office said at the time that Mr Keegan played no role in awarding contracts to suppliers.

    Together the couple live in Petworth, West Sussex, but also own a flat in London and holiday homes in Haute-Savoie, France, and Nueva Andalucia, Spain.

    Overseeing government contracts – nice work for those who can get it. No temptations there are there? I wonder if that’s why so many Tories have turned on her?

  23. Right everyone. I’m off to the dentists. Hopefully I will be back in a couple of hours!

  24. Good morning, all. Sunny.

    Whoops – last night. Lovely resto. Brilliant mussels EXCEPT the bad one. Fun started at 11 pm – both ends. I’ll leave it to your imagination. Finished about 2 am. Taking it gently today.

    Any news about anything?

    1. Oh dear…. don’t read Bob’s post about the person with the shits on the plane.
      Take it easy today Bill.

        2. I haven’t flown since 2001. I’ve lost all desire to resume. I’m not at all a nervous flyer but it seems that a succession of events, whether evil, disputatious, accidental or natural, have contrived to make air travel a gamble. We’ve had terrorism, strikes, storms, volcanoes, war, pandemics, malfunctions, you name it, leaving air travellers more at the mercy of events beyond their control than I can recall from earlier times.

      2. And don’t look at that repulsive enrichment specialist in the phone box that someone posted here a couple of days ago!

        1. The mussels and the oysters on the north coast of Brittany are amongst the finest available because the tidal range of up to 40 feet is so very wide that the crops can be regularly watered when the tide is high and harvested when the tide is low.

          In Saint Jacut they hammer large posts into the seabed and create a forest of mussels:

          https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4ce3639b192ac39e824c2998dea2a18a9d6dfddf431a1e5e65aad39c589c81d5.png

          and in Cancale the oysters are in beds which are harvested with the use of special tractors:

          https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c4bfbe3f012ae119bc2a3d3bc3c15af65e20ad84a88e5ea1c6dc405dc711da6d.png

          1. Very kind, Richard but we have to go direct to Calais in a day so as to get back on Sunday.

          2. We hope we’ll see you again one day!

            The Great Covid Con killed off Dinard Airport which used to have daily flights from Stansted and killed off Flybe which used to have regular flights from London to Rennes.

            Christo (ex-Gresham’s) now lives near Bedford and Henry (ex-UEA) lives in Lancaster so we don’t come to Norfolk very often.

          3. We stayed at St Caste le Guildo a few years ago and had the simplest but best prawn and shrimp lunch ever with a glass of white wine at a little restaurant by the quayside. They were on the point of closing and Charles hadn’t been well – he was in early recovery mode. We went for a walk along the footpath by the sea and came along a little restaurant, we hadn’t set out with the intention of getting lunch – they were on the point of closing but said they would put something together for us. Their kindness, the delicious simplicity of the meal and the ambience – hazy late spring sun over the sea – lives long in our memory. It was wonderful.

      2. Morning Caroline.
        When I was travelling with two friends along the southern coast of South Africa. Our car was stuck in sand just off the beach in the middle of nowhere.
        We had some beers in the car but no food. The three of us waded into the Indian ocean and linked arms the person in the middle bent over after the waves had past and pulled dozens of mussels of the rocks, putting them in the front of their tee shirt.
        We lit a fire and cooked the catch in hub caps of the car.
        Next day we had help from farm hands to push the car out of the sand.

        1. Phew, for a moment there Eddy I thought you were going to say that the mussels were dodgy and you were back in the sea ‘bent over’…

    3. ‘Morning Bill. Going through the eye of a needle at 50 paces? Not nice! No news to speak of, or that is remotely believable. Betty Swollox remains on the rampage and she’s not finished yet.

    4. If both ends are affected you must keep hydrated or you can go down hill very fast. Keep drinking water even if you are throwing it back up.

    6. Oh dear. I’ve been there – a dodgy fish lunch in Sidmouth, at the poshest hotel, three years ago. It does take about three hours of activity, with three hours or so warning stomach/abdominal pains as well, prior to the starring main event. We had to be out of our self catering accommodation and on our way by 10.00 am the next day which meant stripping the bed, clearing the fridge of the final remains and leaving the whole place spotless (it is a point of honour with us, leave no trace). You must feel wrung out, you do need to take it gently, I recall thinking I was too old for that sort of activity. Boiled, then cooled good quality lemonade sipped slowly would help hydrate, lift blood sugar levels and revitalise – (it is boiled to remove the effervescence). I love mussels but I am very wary of them and all shellfish these days.

      1. I like prawns and have never had any trouble with them but I can’t face eating mussels, for some reason.

        1. Have you tried whelks? You can chew one for 5 hours, take it out of your mouth and it’s still the same size

          5. I was told it it would be “like diving into the sea” – it was – and I can’t swim. It left me gasping, though that could have bee the dash of Tabasco I had with it.

          6. We were in Thanet last week and walking towards Margate’s harbour arm when I was suddenly struck by dry heaves. The tide was low exposing rotting seaweed in the town’s little harbour. The stench was overpowering. I had to turn back to the promenade. Ahead of me on the harbour arm were numerous others. How they were immune to the stink remains a puzzle.

          7. I was down there the week before!
            After camping the night at Reculver, I drove a fairly short distance and parked up about a mile from the sea wall at a place called “Chambers Wall” and walked alongside the Wantsum to the sea wall, then along towards Margate for 1½mile or so before turning back inland to loop back to the van.
            A lot of rather good apple trees alongside where I walked too!
            The Wantsum:-
            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ffdaa76d915c830e385b9024e69d576af10f41522d6e95db51875685df3f46a9.jpg

            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ab912b6f693ab42a1bd194e574a74f644ca2140abf47372dda04be8d7914c356.jpg

            One of the apple trees https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9c95717ffea98cc0cef2cf5c5857899a6e3aeae653b56ba01ad15912415f8fe8.jpg

            A bit fenced off for nesting birds:-
            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/efe7302b2715758b0f708d36109c1eea849aa3b2a04f984107716f6b59109b57.jpg

            Looking towards Margate:-
            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fe50aaf705a7330a6f24ed8f1045193bc7196fc139893eca853463d1a9939497.jpg

            Some of the local wildlife:-
            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d5c93eb04b6b49222567411edfe10fa818d950c13ec047e45588135a36a989bb.jpg

          8. I was down there the week before!
            After camping the night at Reculver, I drove a fairly short distance and parked up about a mile from the sea wall at a place called “Chambers Wall” and walked alongside the Wantsum to the sea wall, then along towards Margate for 1½mile or so before turning back inland to loop back to the van.
            A lot of rather good apple trees alongside where I walked too!
            The Wantsum:-
            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ffdaa76d915c830e385b9024e69d576af10f41522d6e95db51875685df3f46a9.jpg

            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ab912b6f693ab42a1bd194e574a74f644ca2140abf47372dda04be8d7914c356.jpg

            One of the apple trees https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9c95717ffea98cc0cef2cf5c5857899a6e3aeae653b56ba01ad15912415f8fe8.jpg

            A bit fenced off for nesting birds:-
            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/efe7302b2715758b0f708d36109c1eea849aa3b2a04f984107716f6b59109b57.jpg

            Looking towards Margate:-
            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fe50aaf705a7330a6f24ed8f1045193bc7196fc139893eca853463d1a9939497.jpg

            Some of the local wildlife:-
            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d5c93eb04b6b49222567411edfe10fa818d950c13ec047e45588135a36a989bb.jpg

          11. New Zealanders have taken to farming abalone. Sea water tanks like aquaria with the water refreshed constantly. They take about 5 years to mature and are an expensive delicacy. They also add grit to them to created beautiful blue stones like pearls.

          12. The tastiest food I have ever eaten is the oyster. Wonderful foodstuff: delicious, nutritious and healthy.

          14. When I was on exchange in NZ, I ate something called a paua fritter from chip shops. These are made from mince up abalone. Quite a strong taste but very nice.

        2. Years ago, on a drinking holiday in Holland and Belgium, my friends had the mussels in a Bruges restaurant. One sample was enough for me. There was something off-putting about the squidgy texture, quite apart from the taste. Yeeuch!

          Waterzooi and carbonnade (beef and pork) was usually the order of day.

        3. I can’t stand the taste and as they repeat on me, I am constantly reminded that I don’t like the taste!

      2. I like prawns and have never had any trouble with them but I can’t face eating mussels, for some reason.

    7. Had a similar experience with prawns years ago – haven’t touched any shellfish/molluscs since

  25. Somebody was gloating on GB News last night that the British economy had outperformed the German economy recently.

    The Germany economy has stalled because of the disruption of their energy supply by the Americans’ destruction of the Baltic Pipeline.

    But in Britain it is the British politicians, the British MSM, the Net Zeroists and the British civil service that are determined to inflict mortal damage on the British economy by ruining our own energy supply without the need to employ the Americans!

  26. The Birmingham Bankruptcy.
    I do hope some people will investigate how many people over the past few years and have suddenly become more wealthy than their personal earnings would have suggested.
    This is usually one of the causes for organisations like councils to go broke.
    Badly run by self grandiating counsellors.
    I hope they don’t have any schools with RAAC problems in Birmingham

    1. 375917+ up ticks,

      Morning AS,

      Capital city fallen, second city on the way down.

      Full take over due to be revealed next General Election would not surprise me.

    2. I was approached 3 weeks ago to do some work for Birmingham CC. The lady I spoke to outlined the major problems.
      1) they had uncovered a further equal pay issue which was going to cost them 750m on top of the 1bn which they had already paid out.
      2) They had commissioned a new Oracle finance system for which they were originally quoted 19m but had cost them 40m by the time it was completed and found to be useless. The remedial cost estimate is a further 60m!

      Everything went quiet after our conversation (annual leave etc) and now I have taken another assignment.
      Think I dodged a bullet?

          1. They know the bureaucrats will keep changing the specs adding more costs and delays. They do it every time.

      2. Good thinking.
        Don’t do that You’ll never be paid. 🤔
        I wonder how much of all that extra money
        became handy for bungs.

  27. 375917+up ticks

    Morning Each,

    Wednesday 6 September: A witness to local authorities’ wilful wastefulness and procrastination

    We are all witness to local councils, in most cases we voted them in, take for instance the rotherham council i would consider their actions, years prior to the JAY report, to be wilful
    criminality rather than wastefulness, with sixteen plus years
    of coatings of cover up procrastination.

    Some of the paedophile fraternity get their arses felt to give some semblance of the law working, but in the main they are
    under the lab/lib/con coalition protective umbrella.

    Currently peoples are getting what they truly deserve via the polling stations, tis why I cannot understand ALL this ” they can’t do that” when your kiss of consent X tell them they CAN.

  28. I defend my decision to vote Leave in 2016, and reflect on my reason for doing so.

    I have not been impressed by the manner British institutions have been allowed to atrophy under the umbrella of the EU, and had hoped that freed from that particular vassaldom, our laws and procedures would serve the nation rather more than they do global business interests whose lobbyists have the ear of lawmakers in Brussels.

    One experience I had in the 1990s, when working for a property management agency, was over Quality Assurance, which became mandatory for issuing contracts. My job was to transfer work from in-house workforce to subcontractors on the approved list, as directed at the time by the Major Government. This was following the doctrine of privatisation set up by Thatcher, and later enthusiastically perpetuated by Blair.

    One day, the EU issued a Directive on Quality Assurance, which of course had to be complied with under the various Euro Treaties and trade agreements. I looked at the document, which covered two sheets of A4 and was a statement of principles. Follow these, and you’d get the “E” stamp of approval. Germans would comply to the letter and think no more of it. The French would ignore it, and the Italians were chaotic and waved their arms about. Nobody knows if they complied.

    What I was confronted with was an instruction to read an 8-volume behemoth of Rules and Regulations, two foot thick, drawn up by the City & Guilds Institution, on which we would be examined. On the day the inspector turned up, it was my first day in a new office and I was the only one there. I knew nothing, which is the only way really to get anything done. I never saw him again. I think he had easier fish to fry.

    The whole point of the exercise was to drive small independent competitors out of business, clearing the field for select corporations to offer any service at any price, and the Client had to lump it. A couple of years later, some cowboy subbies blew up an Army base, but I’d resigned by then. At that point, the Army gave up on military bases and sold the land to developers.

    So we come to the present day. 2021 was some five years after Brexit, so I had hoped that the British institutions, free of EU interference, could act honourably and sensibly. Fat chance!

    I am trying to get my gas tank filled at home. I have had a bulk tank since 1994 and it was moved to its present site in 2006. It has a fill-up every summer.

    This year, I got a letter from Flogas (one of four surviving suppliers after they bought out Countrywide, which went bust). The other three are Callow Fuels (the only small independent), Avanti (of West Coast Line fame) and Calor (the BT of the gas world, who charge silly prices for rotten service).

    They said that under Health & Safety, I was required to clear vegetation from around the tank, which I have now done, putting as per the guidelines upon which my contract is based, one metre away from any combustible material or overhanging branches, and three metres from any building or “fixed source of ignition” which I took to mean anything electrical or anything that makes sparks, such as a vehicle. Fair enough.

    However, when I tried to get a quote from Callow Fuels in the Spring, I was told that the Rules had been updated in 2021, and that trees and shrubs were now deemed to be “sources of ignition”. I challenged this, and was effectively told to get stuffed. According to their rep, the only compliant place I could now site my tank was in the middle of the lawn, and I wasn’t going to do that.

    I think the whole purpose of throwing Health & Safety at me was because those silly little bottles, being the only alternative, make the company a lot more money, and so Management has instructed to use Updated Regulations as a ploy to make more money. It is the American way, and we must do things like the Americans if we are to stay on trend.

    Now, I have long expected that sort of behaviour to occur under the smokescreen of the EU, but I have now realised that the problem was not in the EU, but in the UK.

    I tried to get hold of the 2021 Regulations at source. These are Codes of Practice laid down by Liquid Gas UK, the trade regulatory body: liquidgasuk.org-stroke-codes-stroke-how-to-buy. Each section has a number of volumes for sale at £90 each, or one can buy bundles for a few hundred. Any enquiry online is met by a referral to the Codes, which are available for sale. There are so many ways to interpret these rules, they can be used for any Management purposes, whilst presenting it as a Safety Issue, and therefore cannot be argued with.

    City & Guilds Quality Assurance all over again.

    It therefore confirms to me that the raft of nonsensical rules coming out of Europe since the 1970s are the work of British legislators, rather than anyone on the continent.

    1. i think that you are both right and wrong.
      The rules came out of the EU initially but in order to justify their existence the British instructions and Civil Service gold plated the rules.
      We have escaped from one swamp – now we need to clean out the second one.

    2. “This year, I got a letter from Flogas (one of four surviving suppliers after they bought out Countrywide, which went bust). The other three are Callow Fuels (the only small independent), Avanti (of West Coast Line fame) and Calor (the BT of the gas world, who charge silly prices for rotten service).”

      My last firm carried out corrosion inspections on those tanks for most of the clients mentioned. As well as checking anode currents, and potentials etc, We would carry out visual inspections around the tank. As long as the tanks were accessible, there were no concerns .bout anything. Some had decking around them which was of no bother to us, as well, presumably, for the delivery drivers. I haven’t done any such visits since 2014, so It looks like your supplier is has gone a bit over the top.
      We did inspections for Flogas, Callow, Calor and Countrywide but the “restrictions” you mention were not something we looked for.

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d86814ab16d56b26bf6d8524bd57a3eaeb9737feccdc162b647c7effef1d5124.jpg

      1. An update – Flogas came out to deliver to my neighbour and I managed to persuade them to fill mine too. All well for another year.

  29. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1fe2600073c62932824a66657e8d17bdfa676348e8b7f97b65230a96a55fc3ee.png
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/20771eda40aad4194625a0a711269d34e34abb5c4387dff9d4a25ef1f338b1f7.png
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2023/09/05/meghan-duchess-sussex-beyonce-concert-los-angeles-no-harry/

    A couple of BTL comments:

    BTL – Simon Smith

    Each time she is photographed she seems to be darker-skinned than she was before.

    Reply to Simon Smith – Percival Wrattstrangler

    How long before she decides that red-headed Harry is too hideously white to be her husband?
    And of course Harry is only a prince and is unlikely to be promoted. There must be some African kings she could look at to replace him!

    1. As soon as there is a truly credible partner who could become POTUS for her to make a play for she will be off.

      Harry will be stripped of sufficient wealth for her to be a multi, multi millionairess.

      1. But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

        [Bob Dylan]

    2. “…spotted with an array of famous friends.”‘

      Maybe famous to some but to me they’re all non-entitys.

  31. Morning all,

    Governments have known since Tony Blair took over in 1997 that RAAC (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) had a lifespan of about 30 years. The problem facing the current Government is the lack of expertise, particularly in schools, capable of identifying RAAC.

    With reports that cleaners are being asked to identify crumbling concrete, the difficulty of recognising RAAC is further complicated by the fact that all crumbling concrete is not necessarily RAAC – is could be just AAC (without internal reinforcement).

    Here Skill Builder explains to cleaners how to recognise AAC cracking up which is slightly different from how RAAC falls apart.
    Cleaners will be unable to tell if it is in fact RAAC unless they drill a hole in it which is not really a good idea when the concrete is about to collapse

    https://youtu.be/TCAIZiQu3W4?si=MtGWuylPYjhk7tNV

    1. When we built the extension to our house in 1991 we used concrete ceilings supported by steel reinforced beams and special breeze blocks. The integrity of the whole structure was assured by the fact that we poured the concrete over the beams and blocks and over more iron grids and the whole thing set solid and strong. You could get betostyrene (a concrete with little pellets of polystyrene in the mix) delivered in a tanker but not everybody was convinced that it would last forever without crumbling so we decided to go a time tested strong mixture of traditional concrete.

      1. Very wise, if I may say so Rastus.

        What could possibly go wrong with polystyrene or air injected concrete to make it lighter, cheaper and presumably weaker too? What a surprise that was…

    2. This morning I had the misfortune to catch a few minutes of R4’s Toady. Sgt Bilko was doing his level best to dump the RAAC problem at the door of this government. He made several references to the reduction of Labour’s school rebuilding plan under the coalition, but if I recall correctly this programme was on the basis of ‘nice to have’ (not exactly unusual for socialists) rather than addressing a critical situation brought about by the failure of RAAC. Indeed, I cannot recall any mention of this dodgy method of making concrete at that time. Still, he must be right, ‘cos he was pushing the BBC’s Verify we-know-better-than-you scheme, so that’s alright then. Besides, how could I question something invented by the British Brainwashing Corpn, just because its forerunner – Fact Checking – crashed and burned in fairly short order??

          1. There’s little thought for the aesthetics of street amenities. Modern lamp posts are now merely functional but look at those of the Victorian and Edwardian eras for an appreciation of how an attractively designed and made lamp post adds to the visual pleasure.

          2. We still had gas lamps in the road I grew up in. They had been converted to electricity by my time but were still quite decorative.

      2. Phil Silvers is infinitely more pleasant and entertaining than the odious Nick Robinson.

    1. Good morning! We have a few absentees due to illness but for my part, I’m as well as can be expected for my vintage! How are things with you?

        1. The NHS think I’m cheating them by reaching 68 (next month) without being on any regular medication, Bill! A good friend is 3 years younger and already on statins. Why, I really don’t know. She thinks she has “an irregular heartbeat” but mine has a syncopated rhythm. It’s tuneful. So what?

          1. I’ve reached 75 without being on any medications (apart from the anti breast cancer drugs I took for several years). Yesterday I received a text from the surgery inviting me to book my flu and covid jabs. i will ignore it and any reminders.

            However, I can’t fault our surgery for the way they have kept OH going – he had a call this morning from Natasha, the pharmacist, and she’s on the case now with the cardiologists.

            Does your friend know the GPs get a premium for each patient on statins? I’m convinced they are not only useless (especially for women) but actively harmful.

          2. I am convinced that statins are designed to carry us off earlier and that they are the edible form (in a manner of speaking) of the injections.

          3. Dr Kendrick has all the info on them and also Dr Aseem Malhotra. I’ll keep my cholesterol as it is, and not risk damaging my liver with statins.

          4. When the government decided that we should all be on statins I was put on 80mg of Simvastatin. When I realised something was wrong and I stopped taking it I was too late and my memory was damaged quite badly.
            I did some research and found that when they tested it on rats that had been trained to carry out certain tasks in order to reach food, the rats given Simvastatin couldn’t remember the sequence of tasks.
            Then I read about the work of Dr Stephanie Seneff. She has studied statins for over ten years and thinks there is a link between Statins and dementia.
            Twenty years ago I didn’t know anyone with dementia and now I know half a dozen.
            I don’t take any statins now and am a fit and healthy 87 year old.

          5. 80mg is a high dose! My OH came out of the JR hospital with a bagful of meds, including Atorvastatin 40mg. I’ve tried to tell him they are not beneficial, but he obediently takes everything he is prescribed. He stopped taking Amiodarone after the pharmacist contacted the cardiologists on his behalf, as they were making him feel terrible. He’s a lot better but still with the very high heart rate, which the Bisopralol doesn’t seem to shift.

            Dementia is a potential nightmare – his mother had it for quite a few years before she died. His memory has never been very good, but he seems ‘normal for him’ so far. Was your memory permanently damaged, or did it return to normal?

          6. I’m afraid it is permanent. It is awful for my wife as I can’t remember words having had a good command of the English language. I was eventually persuaded to accept 10mg of Atorvastatin. I researched it first and found no danger. After reading Dr Seneff’s report I stopped taking statins. Period.

          7. Doc put me on Simvastatin as my cholesterol was a little high (according to him), Told him where he could park the statins and I got it down with a healthier diet and it’s now normal – whether I am is a matter of conjecture

          8. I ditched Simvastatin for that reason. I was persuaded to take Atorvastatin instead, but my cholesterol is largely kept in check by porridge for breakfast, and I now throw away more statins than I take. My cholesterol is fine…

          9. I turned up for my appointment (with a nurse) this morning only to be told, “there is no paperwork, no record of your appointment with the doctor”. Well, that’s hardly my fault, is it? At least some good has come of it; I shall have a Doppler test for my circulation, which will hopefully find out the cause of my lower leg oedema.

          10. My medical appointments are nearly always preceded by text message reminders, some requiring confirmation, or otherwise, that I will attend. Not once have I arrived unexpectedly.

          11. I was on the system; I put in my details on the screen and it came up with my name and who I was seeing so I logged in. It was only when I saw the nurse that she discovered there was no paperwork.

          12. I have twice turned up for pre-op assessments, when the diabetic nurse conducting it (note: not a diabetes specialist nurse, just a diabetic land whale who – by comparison – made me feel sylph-like. “Why are you here?” First time, I suggested it was because the consultant had ordered a biopsy on my big toe. But I’d already agreed with him that – having fallen asleep in front of the telly late one Friday night, and stood up awkwardly, that the immediate pain was because I’d broken the toe. Two days of Ibuprofen later (with a bit of help from diabetic neuropathy), the issue had gone away. The consultant agreed, but this didn’t filter down sorry – up, to the admin staff. Incidentally, she went through my meds, and it turned out she was looking at the record of some other unfortunate patient who shares my surname.

            A week later, they phoned me, inviting, nay, instructing me to attend a pre-op assessment. ‘I’ve just had one’ apparently wasn’t an acceptable answer. But I argued my case.

            The second pre-op was in advance of my “extreme chiropody”. Rather more professional, including an ECG (which is a bugger if you have a hairy chest). Turned up on the fateful day, only to be told that ‘I hadn’t attended my pre-op’. Naturally, I argued that they were wrong. But that counted for nothing. So I had to go through the whole process again…

            Frimley Park is among the better hospitals (despite its RAAC roof slabs). Some of the staff are military, since the Cambridge horse spittle at Aldershot Garrison was closed down. I have nothing but praise for the medics, but the admin is bloody awful…

          17. I seated you especially as you have music interests and being single had nothing to do with it. Honest.

          19. Hope you enjoyed yourself. I was joshing with you about you being sooo late. Though John did suggest we order…and then you arrived !

          20. No worries, Phil. Most enjoyable. I should have checked on Guildford traffic before getting a taxi from there. Racked up a substantial fare without exceeding walking pace. I live in a taxi/Uber desert. Othewise I’d have not bothered with the train…

          21. Seriously, Sue, I’m gobsmacked. I would have thought you were several years my junior.

            A friend of Dianne the Ex (71) recently introduced her to some sort of wizzy meter, which proclaimed she had an irregular heartbeat. Since she has anxiety issues at the best of times, I’m not convinced this was helpful news…

      2. I am fine Susan thank you. On the basis that idle hands are undesirable I keep working to stay out of trouble – and finance the horses.

    3. Lovely morning here Nagsman! Good to see you and I hope all’s well. We haven’t seen Citroen for a while either.

    7. Welcome back, Nagsman. Great to see you. But the sad truth is that not all of us are well.

      Plum, Datz, Lacoste, others, but most of all, Lottie, who has really drawn the short straw from the lottery of life (otherwise known as the NHS)…

    2. I think he was always well aware of “Critical Race Theory”……..and has spoken up about it before.

  35. Building work was scrapped at 13 schools with RAAC
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-66723054

    This story comes from BBC’s laughable ‘Verify’ office. It echoes the Guardian article that I posted last night linking cuts to school refurbishment funding with RAAC. Nowhere does it state explicitly that those cuts affected work on RAAC although Geoff Barton makes that connection.

    3. There’s an expression, something along the lines of “the process is the punishment”. There was little prospect of the couple facing criminal charges, but they have been vilified, shamed, inconvenienced, their lives disrupted and have lost both their pub and source of income. Others will now know what they could face in similar circumstances and will refrain from anything which might bring it about.

      Note, also, the proud boastfulness of the police in proclaiming how thoroughly this case has been pursued and investigated. Do shoplifting and theft receive such exceptional devotion to duty? I think we all know the answer to that.

    2. No need to dredge for sand – my car boot is full of it after a day spent on the beach with the grandchildren.

    3. The UNEP recommended that sand dredging should also be banned from beaches to protect coastal resilience and economies.

      Sand is essential for constructing buildings, roads, hydroelectric dams and solar panels. It can also play an important environmental role, protecting communities from rising sea levels.

      Are these two paragraphs linked? I think it possible that sand in shallow waters and along beaches might moderate the impact of turbulent seas along sea shores.

      While I do not condone the practice, a counter-thought in my mind suggests that lowering the sea floor by scraping away the sand might marginally moderate sea levels.

      Is there any objection to using the sand readily available in the vast deserts of the Sahara? Maybe it’s the wrong kind of sand.

    4. Everything has something to do with ‘climate change’ as far as the UN and WEF is concerned. Absolutely everything.

  39. With the recent revelations about RAAC (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete), some questions have formed in my mind.

    Concerns about this building material have centred on crumbling schools. Has it not been used in any other type of construction? I think that rather unlikely. While I understand that worries about children’s safety are naturally uppermost in many minds, I’d expect other types of building, both public and private, to come under scrutiny at some time.

    When this construction material was chosen, was it initially a cost-cutting-exercise with little thought given to the modest lifetime expected of the buildings which would result from its use? Perhaps it allowed for speedier construction than would have been possible using more durable materials. Or was it that the buildings were thought unlikely, at the outset, to have little functional purpose after 30 or so years and that using more expensive materials would be a needless extravagance?

    My instincts tell me that using RAAC was muddled short-termism and that any ensuing difficulties would be someone else’s problem after those who chose to use it had long since retired or departed.

      2. Sorry, Jools. I don’t believe this can be blamed on the builder. See my post just above. That’s not to say that I’m proud of the industry’s achievements between 1975 (when I joined) and 2009 (when I escaped), but I’m mostly proud of the projects I had a hand in. And – as far as I’m aware – only one has been demolished.

    2. The same as Net Zero, bird choppers, solar panels, experimental injections. Please add other things that the perpetrators will be log gone before reality is realised.

    3. Kicking the can down the road. Extra expense for someone else later – SEP – and a cheaper CAPEX.

    4. To put this in perspective, David, I spent my working life in construction, and never encountered RAAC. It has simi;larities to the High Alumina Cement scares, years ago. From limited research, RAAC seems to have been used mostly in structural roof slabs, which – thankfully – are rather less load-bearing than floor slabs. Cost was clearly a driver. Now, I’m no structural engineer*, but it seems to me that a precast aerated, and therefore porous concrete slab, reinforced with as little steel as possible, may be absolutely fine if kept free from moisture. Flat roofs, however, are not exactly known for the longevity of their waterproofing. And (having recently quantified the cars I’ve had in 49 years) I can confirm that steel rusts. Especially when it’s fashioned into an Alfasud, but I digress…

      I’d be interested to hear John (corimmobile’s) take on this. When I saw the first report in the DT, listing actual locations of this, the first two locations were the West Suffolk Hospital in Bury st Edmunds, and the James Paget Hospital in Gorleston, Great Yarmouth. I instantly knew that my local abbatoir, Frimley Park, would be equally conpromised. FP and the WSH were more or less identically constructed. Scrolling down, I was right.

      Clearly, RAAC is an issue, but it affects a tiny proportion of the built environment. But let’s blame Gillian Keegan and Rashid Sanook…

      1. I’ll just add that the period in which RAAC was used in public sector projects, was mostly earlier than the more recent fashion for ‘Design and Build’, and PFI. So I’m levelling the blame at local authorities and/or Civil Servants, rather than contractors.

        And I wholeheartedly agree with your final sentence…

      2. I have worked as a Chartered Architect for forty years and have never used RAAC.

        My early buildings in London caused me to deal with the Westminster District Surveyor (William Angus Black) and the London Building Act. In the case of Bessborough Gardens Pimlico for the Crown Estates Commissioners and Richmond House Whitehall for the DoE all fire precautions came under the Home Office Fire Inspectorate.

        I was glad of this because the advice given by these experienced highly qualified persons taught me a great deal of sound knowledge and understanding of construction and its risks.

        The principal use I have come across of aerated concrete was as concrete pumped Into the ground to stabilise uncharted mine workings such Park Hill in Sheffield where the development was otherwise threatened. More recently the material is being use to fill mine workings in the Combe Down area of Bath where buildings are threatened.

        As regards modern buildings I am aware that lightly reinforced RAAC roof slabs or planks supported between reinforced precast dense concrete beams was in common use in public buildings and mostly for flat roofs. The vulnerability is of course when the felt or rubber roof covering fails as the RAAC components are prone to weakening and rusting over time.

        RAAC panels have also been used for wall claddings but with a protective face covering. Both roof planks and wall panels will have been chosen for cheapness, speed of erection and for the enhanced insulating properties over traditional dense precast concrete.

        There are other components produced as lightweight concrete including a number of proprietary RAAC blocks for internal walls of cavity walls. These will be stable under compression provided due account is taken of thermal movement and suitable padstones and lintels are incorporated to spread beam loads and provided lime mortar and slip ties and bed reinforcement are built in.

        Mortar should always be weaker than the block work and this cardinal rule also applies to external brickwork.

        In historical terms RAAC planks succeeded pre screeded edge reinforced wood wool planks such as Woodcemair. Needless to say as with most cheap novelty materials problems will occur.

        In the UK we experience heavy rainfall from time to time so I avoid felted flat roofs and advocate for steeply pitched roofs with deep run iron gutters sitting outside the external walls.

          1. No problem Geoff. It so happens that in my first office in South Kensington viz. Whitfield Partners, we shared the office with a professional quantity surveyor, an elderly man who gave me lots of advice. He would say that when writing a specification I should put myself in a darkened room and think about the order in which the building would be erected. To literally build the building in my own mind and to describe every operation and base my specification on that process. That I should leave the rest to him viz. Preliminaries and so on.

            His name was Robert (Bob) Bye and I owe him a debt of gratitude. Other excellent quantity surveyors I worked with in my London days were Reynolds & Young, Crosher & James and Ash Preston & Partners. Others I would have to refer to my archive to be accurate.

      3. I have worked as a Chartered Architect for forty years and have never used RAAC.

        My early buildings in London caused me to deal with the Westminster District Surveyor (William Angus Black) and the London Building Act. In the case of Bessborough Gardens Pimlico for the Crown Estates Commissioners and Richmond House Whitehall for the DoE all fire precautions came under the Home Office Fire Inspectorate.

        I was glad of this because the advice given by these experienced highly qualified persons taught me a great deal of sound knowledge and understanding of construction and its risks.

        The principal use I have come across of aerated concrete was as concrete pumped Into the ground to stabilise uncharted mine workings such Park Hill in Sheffield where the development was otherwise threatened. More recently the material is being use to fill mine workings in the Combe Down area of Bath where buildings are threatened.

        As regards modern buildings I am aware that lightly reinforced RAAC roof slabs or planks supported between reinforced precast dense concrete beams was in common use in public buildings and mostly for flat roofs. The vulnerability is of course when the felt or rubber roof covering fails as the RAAC components are prone to weakening and rusting over time.

        RAAC panels have also been used for wall claddings but with a protective face covering. Both roof planks and wall panels will have been chosen for cheapness, speed of erection and for the enhanced insulating properties over traditional dense precast concrete.

        There are other components produced as lightweight concrete including a number of proprietary RAAC blocks for internal walls of cavity walls. These will be stable under compression provided due account is taken of thermal movement and suitable padstones and lintels are incorporated to spread beam loads and provided lime mortar and slip ties and bed reinforcement are built in.

        Mortar should always be weaker than the block work and this cardinal rule also applies to external brickwork.

        In historical terms RAAC planks succeeded pre screeded edge reinforced wood wool planks such as Woodcemair. Needless to say as with most cheap novelty materials problems will occur.

        In the UK we experience heavy rainfall from time to time so I avoid felted flat roofs and advocate for steeply pitched roofs with deep run iron gutters sitting outside the external walls.

  41. Poppiesdad has ‘done his back in’ and is, as they say, ‘laid up’ carrying a sack of bird seed from the front of the house to the outhouse round the back for winter preparation. I have torn the cartilage in my left knee playing with new doggo in the garden. Knee support arriving today courtesy of Amazon. Common denominator in both incidents being the garden….. it can only be the fault of the garden then.

    1. Oh dear……..hope the injuries soon recover or the doggie will run rings round you both.

      Time to go outside on this bright and sunny day and see what the garden can do to me.

          1. I have ended up with several Bosch 18V tools. I gave a couple away when I moved. I still have three batteries. Dianne bought an 18V strimmer, which died within warranty. The replacement has also just died. As did mine, with smoke coming from the motor. I worked out that I could buy a replacement motor from Bosch, but a new ‘bare’ strimmer wasn’t much more expensive.

          4. Our strimmer was a wedding present (in 1997) from brother & sister in law. Apart from the shield having broken off, it is still in working order.

    3. Tell Poppiesdad to get himself a sack barrow to save his back. They fold flat so are easy to store. Hope you both feel better soon.

      2. Er, one can put one’s back out manoeuvring the sack trolley (adds a voice of experience…)

    9. Sorry to hear of your injuries, ‘Mum.
      The Management and I survived a pretty vigorous badminton contest in the garden on BH Monday (when we thrashed the grandchildren…okay, so the youngest was 3 yo and the oldest 11) so perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that our limbs are still functioning, albeit with a little stiffness.

      What is the new doggo??

      1. The new doggo is a Yorkiepoo. Very fast, agile, nimble and soundless when moving, he is like a ghost in the desert, suddenly he’s there by your feet when you thought he was down the garden. The third photo is of him in the bath – he rolled in a dead crow and then he picked it up and ran with it, laughing as he did so…! By the time we got it off him it was half a dead crow.

        Delighted to read you thrashed the grandchildren, whatever their age – they need to know their place… https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fca90039205ec6225e626da78f091e014a93227105edf10ffd47617590e7a226.jpg
        https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4f6f16bca88bb0235e6397e2d3e6f7a5b0df2ca7689d6a8b0f25a9513e1ad5fc.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8d85279455df5dc95e14f6f15689ad3563d99c5ac397eaddb55e580eb1e2e419.jpg

        3. I’m convinced that the only reason folks buy poodle crosses, is to be able to have ‘poo’ in the name of their mongrel.That, or ‘doodle’…

          OK – I’m being rather harsh. My dear departed Mum had a succession of three Poodles. All of which were highly intelligent animals, but ‘lady’s dogs’, and they all trained her to perfection. They and I tolerated each other, while my street credibility took a hit on walks…

          1. I never realised what delightful little dogs are poodles. Rico is very poodley-looking, his ears are pure poodle; his nature is that of a tenacious terrier.

    10. Sorry to hear of your injuries, ‘Mum.
      The Management and I survived a pretty vigorous badminton contest in the garden on BH Monday (when we thrashed the grandchildren…okay, so the youngest was 3 yo and the oldest 11) so perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that our limbs are still functioning, albeit with a little stiffness.

      What is the new doggo??

      1. It depends,Eddy. Bob complied with a speciication. Design and Build hadn’t really happened in those days, so speak to the client and their in-house consultants…

  44. I absolutely despair for the future of our grandchildren.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/migrant-gives-thumbs-up-while-another-flashes-a-v-sign-as-group-is-driven-away-from-border-force-compound-in-dover-and-number-of-asylum-seekers-arriving-in-uk-tops-21-000-this-year/ar-AA1ge4Fq?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=8ebbb74c5cdf4d6cb3a1c97069af0b0e&ei=157

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/furious-tory-mp-blasts-rishi-sunak-after-u-turn-on-asylum-seekers-in-his-own-patch/ar-AA1ghcSz?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=5764eb0ff8524c50892477f0b7317455&ei=40

    1. They will have to go somewhere -another1,571 in just the past four days. And with weather like this they will need treatment for sunburn/sunstroke. Good job it’s all free. When are the consultants and the junior doctors turning their backs on patients and, presumably, leaving some to die?

      1. FOAD has been in action since the outbreak of covid. I have an appointment on Friday this week. Twice since April cancelled. Doctors strikes. I’ve been in trouble with my left knee for more than 30 years. A surgeon has told me I should have a replacement.
        But they do nothing. I’ve been fit all my life, the only health problems I have had have been cause by inaction from the NHS. I paid into the system for more than 53 years.
        My theory is these strikes are being stirred up by our government to help in their efforts to bring the NHS to its knees. It’s no longer affordable.
        These illegal immigrants are a massive problem they are destroying our culture and social structure thus well known fact is being totally ignored by our useless disaster of a government.

  45. Derbyshire County Cricket Club is today hosting a finals day featuring teams of cricketers with different kinds of impairment. Sky Sports is broadcasting it and a match is on television right now. There are rules governing how many in each team must come from each of the disability groups and how they are deployed in cricket’s player disciplines of batting, bowling and fielding.

    https://www.skysports.com/cricket/news/12123/12953543/disability-premier-league-final-all-you-need-to-know-ahead-of-wednesdays-big-game-live-on-sky-sports

  47. Phew! It’s warm out there! I started off with the hedge trimmer – not for long though as the battery soon ran out. Now waiting for it to charge again. I then went round the bits I’d missed, with the secateurs, and then attacked some ivy, before picking up and bagging the bits and coming in for a glass of water and a sit-down.

    OH is knackered too as he’s in the middle of rebuilding the shed. It might have been cheaper, and certainly less trouble, to order a new one, but it keeps him busy and active.

  48. As predicted at PMQ – Max Headroom accuses The Fakir of cutting spending so that ‘children are quaking in fear in their classrooms’. As discussed earlier, the two issues are quite separate. The Fakir’s defence was pitiful.

    1. Everything Sunak does is pathetic. What will never be asked is what Starmer would do differently, given these schools were built under Labour’s watch.

      In short, it’s no one’s bally fault. It’s a minority of buildings that are having problems and those are solely down to the cretins in local government who paid for them to be built, pocketed half the cash for ‘advisory’ roles and other twaddle tax payer graft jobs.

      Find the areas where the schools are having problems, find the council chiefs and hang them. Metaphorically, of course. Then take their salaries for the time period as payment for the repairs. Chances are there will be plenty left over.

      1. Those council chiefs who approved the use of this material will be long ago retired now, or even dead.

        1. Quite. The slabs have exceeded their design life by a factor of two, They started using them in the 1950’s. I joined the construction industry in 1975, and never encountered it. I doubt whether anyone responsible is still alive (or in possession of their faculties).

      2. Those council chiefs who approved the use of this material will be long ago retired now, or even dead.

  49. The Labour Party’s head and leading honchos are striding forcefully to rescue Britain from the clutches of the Tories i.e. the Davos based globalists.

    So wrapped up in their zealous intentions are they that they forgot that the head honcho is a member of the Trilateral Commission and recently stated that he would rather be in Davos than in the mother of parliaments. Another shower waiting to prove once again that any cadre of current politicians is incapable of running a bath, let alone the UK.

    https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1699088334386045424

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/d0155092a829a00a697ce83966f40b4775766efb6a93482343cd8a3dddfa9073.png

    4. Raynor is 5’6. Call her 5’8 given the ghastly shoes she is wearing.

      That makes Starmer as much of a runt as Sunak. Why are we chained to these incompetent stunted wasters?

    6. They only comment in hind sight and generally haven’t got a clue what they are talking about.
      But they do know everything after the event.
      Going back, Blair wrecked the labour party with his lies.

  50. Is Aircrete – just RAAC without the reinforcement?

    This video tells you everything you need to know about Aircrete.and this concrete substitute is so good and environmentally friendly it’s difficult to see why concrete hasn’t been ditched entirely by the building industry.

    Like concrete it is critical to mix up the ingredients to the right proportions but in Aircrete’s case there are a lot more of them.
    Furthermore it has to cooked for the correct time at the proper oven temperature.

    https://youtu.be/hO62ZfaIrQk?si=Ump8ezWdpGwstftq

    Just one thing about Aircrete – because it’s got crete in its name you can’t take the con out of concrete and expect it to behave in the same way.

    1. ICBA to watch the video.

      There’s a place for all sorts of lighweight concrete blocks, intended for walls.

      Structural slabs, on the other hand,,,

      Just say No…

  51. Sara Sharif’s family break silence from Pakistan hideout. 6 September 2023.

    The family of Sara Sharif, who are in hiding in Pakistan after leaving the UK, have accused the media of “making up lies” about them as they spoke publicly for the first time about her death.

    Speaking in a video released by Sky News, Sara’s father Urfan Sharif and stepmother Beinash Batool say they are willing to co-operate with authorities and “fight our case in court”, but did not specifically state they would return to the UK.

    They murdered her!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/09/06/sara-sharif-family-accuse-media-lies-pakistan-video/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr

    1. Looking at the “wife/stepmother” and at pictures of the little girl, honour killing doesn’t seem too unlikely.

      1. Extreme dishonour, in my book. Visiting violence like that on a child should mean eternal hell and damnation.

      2. I would ask if he married the Polish woman to get access to UK. She does seem like an airhead.

        He does seem to be a traditional Pakistani where rape, beatings and honour murder are more acceptable. I wonder in which Court they will be tried…

        1. I’m also guessing that the ‘family court’ which handed the poor child to the father may have been chaired by someone of the same persuasion. B*stards!

          2. You mean like all the thousands of Rotherham grooming and rapes weren’t official?
            We must respect other religions and allow them to continue as they have always behaved. Beating and secluding women and the rape of children is perfectly acceptable to Left wing Labour

          3. And don’t forget that the poor child was over the age of Islamic consent.

            I would not bet much against the child having been raped, an Islamic marriage having been consummated…

          4. p.s. If you’re not too sure which stones to use when disciplining your females, your local imam can give you guidance.

          5. That occurred to me from the beginning. No matter how feckless the mother, she would normally get custody in the UK.

          7. I really don’t know, but they are extremely secretive. Christopher Booker ran a one-man campaign to try and get clarity, regarding some of their decisions. His findings were very often horrific!

    3. Nothing suspicious at all when the family legs it to Pakistan and phones up the police next day to let them know about the body in their library! Mr Sharif, on the stairs, with fists, aided by relatives would be my first Cluedo bid.

      1. The mother saw her bruised face when she identified the body. That poor little girl must have suffered for days. I don’t suppose the mother was allowed to see the worst injuries and what killed her.

        I think the child must have put up some resistance to their plans to give her to the uncle.

        1. Yes. Given that picture of a 10 year old tarted up to look double her age, I suspect she’d been promised to a close relative.

          1. I preferred your original, if you read his biography he had a sneaking suspicion that he might be.

  53. Just joined the jet set with full fibre broadband, BT full fibre 100:
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/51ec667d62ab4b5a4ae9d18569d4ed5f1ac613b96d53e8e49ed3d5d16406e98b.jpg
    Nearly a disaster. Chap from MJ Quinn found the chaps who had laid the ducting had done a ‘cowboy’ job, when he tried to pull the new fibre through it just jammed. That was after he had taken away the master socket and cut the incoming landline cable off! Talk of having to call out the chaps, as an emergency job, to sort it out which would have left me without broadband and phone until who knows. Eventually after a bit of wiggling he succeeded, all wired up and good to go.

    I think the digital voice phone is working, got my mate to ring it from his mobile and it worked. But when I try ringing from my mobile it immediately cuts out. Then found I couldn’t ring anything, hit by it seems problems on the EE mobile network.

    1. Digital Voice uses the Router as a Base Station for the cordless handsets.

      I mention this, since a local parishioner asked for help. At least six BT ’employees’ visited hin, and couldn’t resolve the fact that the phone only worked in the Kitchen.

      But the router was in a virtual outbuilding at on end of his long and narrow c17 house.The Wi-Fi Discs worked happiy, throughout the building. But Digital Voice uses the Router as a base station for the phones. (I repeat).I’ve offered tomove the router, via Cat 6 cabling, to a more central position. But – since I also helped with Wi-fi Calling on his mobile, it’;s no longer an issue.

      1. The router CAN work as a base station for a cordless handset. It also works, as I have done, with the separate phone base unit plugged into the phone socket of the router. Still needs the router and base station close together. EE seem to have fixed there problems now, can ring it from the mobile and have had the usual couple of spam loft insulation calls – diverted to answer machine…

        1. I agree, Dave. But the multitude of dysfunctional handsets that BT left with them, work only with the router as a base station. No-one at BT suggested using a non-BT cordless setup. I have offered to relocate the router, via Cat 6 cabling, to a more central location, but they’re still ‘thinking about it’. Their internet is brilliant, throughout the property, via BT WiFi Discs, and blisteringly fast. I showed them how to set up their mobiles for WiFi Calling (they have a negligible mobile signal – same here), and they’ve rather lost interest in the ‘landline’; phones…

          My point was that six separate BT engineers visited, and were defeated, since they didn’t appear to know that the standard Digital Voice product relies entirely on the router as a cordless base station…

          The last tenant here must have been susceptible to spam phone offers. since – when I moved here – I was getting half a dozen or more such calls a day. I don’t use the landline for calls, preferring the mobile, but I bought a BT Call Blocking cordless phone, so the occasioal genuine call gets through – I remain blissfu;;y unaware of the rest…

          1. We’ve got a set of four BT cordless “call guardian” phones so we don’t get any spam calls. Our house is fairly spread out so I’m not looking forward to having to change to Digital Voice. Our router is in the downstairs room underneath our bedroom but some distance from the rest of the house. I don’t like using my mobile for calls and nor does OH.

          3. We’ll have to cope with it as best we can when the time comes. Our neighbour helped when the telly lost internet access a few weeks ago.

          4. There are no plans to roll out FTTP in this Surrey backwater. All the mobile providers are also rubbish here. But my broadband from Vodafone (via Openreach) is good enough for my needs, and they knock £3 off each monthly bill since they don’t reach the mimimum advertised speed. Virgin Media has cable on the estate, but two attempts at getting a quote have disappeared into the ether. And they tend to be more expensive, anyway.

          5. The contractors have been busy all around here putting in pipework for fibre – our little road was closed for most of June, and only today they’ve opened the larger road we can see from here – both ends of our lane open onto the main hill road and it’s been closed for the last six weeks or so. I hink it’s then up to each householder as to whether to be connected or not.

    2. I would double check th incoming calls lark. Fibre’s pretty boring but reliable. It’s the conversion of digital outgoing calls (mobile) to analog (BT’s systems) and back to digital that might be the issue.

      I do find BT – and other providers – tying themselves in knots as they have to admit that their previous products were actually vdsl – or copper – and not fibre at all.

    3. Sky Mobile won’t call PlusNet Fixed Phones
      There’s a little-known kink in the Broadband Suppliers’ system. I got fed up with Sky’s sky-high Entertainment and home Phone price increases. But I kept their Mobile contract as I was able to bully them down to just £5 a month, same as Tesco Mobile which I’d used some years ago before Sky. I switched my Broadband and home phone line to PlusNet (the cheap end of BT actually) and my speed went from 15-17 Megabits per sec to 47 ‘just like that’. And just over half the price of Sky Broadband. I have 4 cordless handsets on the home phone line.

      After a few months I had calls to my mobile from a couple of friends who asked if my home phone was off the hook. After quite a lot of futzing around I tried phoning my home phone from my ‘Sky’ mobile phone. It rang once, then dropped the line every time. The friends who had told me they’d had trouble contacting me on my home phone (though they got through OK on my cellphone) were all Sky Mobile users.

      So there is an unresolved and unrecognised problem calling TO a Plusnet home phone if you’re a Sky Mobile user.

      I thought I’d just switch to PlusNet’s Mobile service and ‘shop in one place’, but PlusNet are getting out of the Mobile phone supply business imminently, so I’ve gone back to Tesco Mobile and all is well.

      1. I was with Plusnet for years, for broadband and – for a while – mobile. I routinely had an issue with folks in the parish using GMX,com. Plusnet appeared to be blocked. Friend Dianne has issues with Gmail addresses. They are rejected. She was (like me) with Plusnet for years. Took advantage of the free domain name (as did I). Her former Plusnet domain is now hosted by 123.com. But messages from Gmail still disappear into the ether. So she has now set up a Gmail address. I did the same, since no-one at Plusnet had the faintest idea of how I could ‘migrate’ my domain name to another provider. Disappointing…

  55. Evening, all. Add to my busy schedule as outlined yesterday, a visit to the vet’s 🙁 Oscar’s eye was inflamed and gungy so a phone call, an appointment in two hours’ time (to give the Gab and Traz a chance to work) and he was seen by the vet, has some antibiotic ointment to add to the Hylo Forte and Evotears I already have to squirt in his eye every day and I am just over £100 lighter 🙁

      1. He is literally feeling no pain at the moment, being drugged up to the eyeballs, so he only made a token resistance.

      1. Zonked out. I have to give him gabapentin and trazadone before any vet’s or groomer’s appointment and they worked a treat today in double quick time. If you couldn’t see him breathing, you’d think he was dead!

    3. Always gets to me when vets say: “JUST apply the eye drops twice a day”, as though one’s animal was sedated.

      1. Currently Oscar is; he’s comatose on the kitchen floor. I had to carry him down to the car and pour him into the back seat. He’s now looking more groomed than he’s ever been apart from when the groomer has shaved him because I was able to brush and comb him while he was away with the fairies.

          1. He is looking twice the size at the moment because I combed him and brushed him while he was out (it wasn’t consensual!) and it’s surprising the difference it made to his coat. That’s the first time I’ve been able to do that without him turning himself inside out.

      2. And clean their teeth daily, for at least 30 seconds, with the mouth closed….. i.e. it’s ‘just’ the outsides of the teeth that need cleaning. I haven’t dared try it yet. Even with Poppie it was a complete no-no.

        1. Chaucer was a saint of a cat.

          He never bit or scratched when we had to give him pills or clean his mouth.

      1. I care about cake. I’m rather fond of it. If I were PM, I’d make it available on prescription. It always cheers me up.

    2. More lying bull shiite from the tory leader.
      When he’s finished which won’t be long. His governments habitual and pathological lying will have destroyed our country.

      1. I sincerely hope you’ll get your wish next year.

        So ‘Labour will be worse’ – I don’t doubt it. But the so-called conservatives need to be eviscerated. Something with genuinely conservative principles will take its place. Hopefully.

          1. I won’t. I may be too old to play the long game, but our broken “democracy” will take time to sort out. Meanwhile, I’ll vote for Reform UK, while acknowledging that under FPTP, they have a snowball in Hell’s chance.

          2. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if they put up a candidate here. The usual choice is Lib, Lab, Con or Grn. Some choice!

    4. What is the driver for so many MPs to behave in this manner over something as serious as excess deaths across the age groups?

      Have they realised that their support for the mass inoculation has resulted in the greatest medical disaster in living history and that the only way out for them is to shoot the messenger? Gutless buggers!

          3. 375912+ up ticks,

            GG,

            That is AKA submission.

            Once you acknowledge this, life becomes easier, there lies the continuing problem.
            For a great many a shite filled nappy is a warm political comfort zone,

    2. Everyone in Middle East and Southeast Asia dead as temperatures reach seasonal average of 40C.
      Some people believe this tosh.

      1. The thing I liked about the cartoon is that the people are just sitting in their deckchairs ignoring the “threats”.

        1. Yes, I gathered that and that’s what my comment was meant to illustrate. It like the climate change warriors talking about ‘global temperature rising by 1.5C whilst packing their suitcases to go on holiday where it’s 15 degrees warmer.

          1. Oddly enough, I believe that the climate is changing.

            As it has done for quite literally billions of years.

            Man has been around for an infinitesimal percentage of that time, and I doubt that man has affected the climate progress in the slightest.

  58. Excellent outing to Guerande. Walled town. Two churches – 13th C. Fabulous glass in the Collegiale St Aubin. Plus an 11th C square granite block with carvings of the Death and Resurrection.

    Only downside – the mediaeval streets inside the ramparts full of shop after shop selling really hideous tat. Thence to the tip of the promontory immediately opposite Le Croisic – watching solitary men with wooden wheelbarrows gathering the salt for which the area is known. Flocks of perhaps 200 egrets. Not many people.

    Then back home for an hour on the beach. The MR swam. Tomorrow to buy some fish straight off the boat. Then to St Nazaire and CWGC cemetery at La Baule.

    Not all bad!

    A demain.

    1. The medieval streets in medieval times would have been selling the same sort of tat too. Just Chinese tat now.

        1. What! You mean my pardon from the East End Pope isn’t valid !?! And i had to buy him eels and mash !

    2. I trust you are fully recovered and have reverted to being an old salt as opposed to a filtered feeder.

  59. Excellent outing to Guerande. Walled town. Two churches – 13th C. Fabulous glass in the Collegiale St Aubin. Plus an 11th C square granite block with carvings of the Death and Resurrection.

    Only downside – the mediaeval streets inside the ramparts full of shop after shop selling really hideous tat. Thence to the tip of the promontory immediately opposite Le Croisic – watching solitary men with wooden wheelbarrows gathering the salt for which the area is known. Flocks of perhaps 200 egrets. Not many people.

    Then back home for an hour on the beach. The MR swam. Tomorrow to buy some fish straight off the boat. Then to St Nazaire and CWGC cemetery at La Baule.

    Not all bad!

    A demain.

  60. Phew!
    Four hours, less a couple of tea breaks, up the “garden” chop sawing a couple of dozen mushroom trays worth of sticks and I was absolutely lathered!
    One cold bath later and I feel much cooler!

    1. I’m not at all a keen gardener but a certain minimum is necessary to prevent rewilding. Today, ahead of tomorrow morning’s garden waste collection, I’ve been pruning and cutting back overgrown bushes and some undesirable plants. I’ve filled the wheelie bin, with some left over to start the next collection for two weeks’ time, but I’m feeling very weary after one of the hottest afternoons of the year thus far. I console myself with the thought that the physical effort is good for me.

        1. At the moment, a mug of tea will have to suffice, but I shall take your advice and have a few cool ones later.

      2. I’ve been out there with the hedge trimmer – had to do it in two goes as the battery went flat after the first session. Now we’ve got fish & French fries in the oven to be eaten outside. OH is still banging away in the shed.

        It’s still very warm – summer at last.

      3. Our garden is fairly wild – we’re glad now it’s no bigger than it is – when we first moved here in 1995 it seemed a bit small.

        It was good sitting out with our fish n chips and a glass of wine.

      4. Our garden is fairly wild – we’re glad now it’s no bigger than it is – when we first moved here in 1995 it seemed a bit small.

        It was good sitting out with our fish n chips and a glass of wine.

      6. Next door on the Cromford side has not been gardened for over a decade and is now a mass of brambles.
        When we first moved here, 32y ago, the couple who owned it, Ken & Maureen, kept the garden in a lovely condition.

        1. Do you collect the berries overhanging your garden? I sometimes pick them from municipal hedges for an on-the-hoof treat. There’s a very good path for collecting bramble berries on the route to my nearest Sainsbury’s, but I’ve not been there for several months as the coupons which arrive by post have not been at all tempting, requiring a minimum spend well in excess of both my grocery budget and what I can carry on foot.

  61. A short while ago I saw a tv commercial for Alpro, the plant-based milk substitute. They’ve made a verb out of the word breakfast. I cannot find the exact advert I saw on tv but this short one on their YouTube page does the same thing.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6jMDSz4LsY

    As does their website..

    https://www.alpro.com/uk/

    Can this be applied to all meal times? For example, I rarely supper as I prefer to eat earlier in the day.

    3. With a very early start the other misty morning coming on a flock of sheep lying across the road, I was definitely breaking fast.

    4. A year after setting up card donation facilities for three of our four churches (and submitting all our charity details to Give a Little, I have now received an email from Sumup’s “onboarding” team, demanding to know what sort of business “SPWPCC” is, and am I in control of it? I lost the will to live at ‘onboarding’…

      2. The lower pic person takes drugs. Though most mugshots show drug or alcohol abuse. Unlike the next President of the United States of America.

    2. How, exactly, does a “terror suspect” manage to get out of Wandsworth? Did someone leave a door unlocked, or did he have a lot of sympathetic help?

      1. It sounds like something out of an Ealing comedy! He escaped in a catering provisions van!! 🙄

      2. While prison escapes are nothing new, that one so young managed it, rather than the more typical old lag, is just another indication that our public institutions are disintegrating. Although he’s a suspect, not (yet) a convict, that he’s been held in Wandsworth (Cat B) suggests he is a serious suspect, not your usual young offender. On the other hand, the specifics of the charges against him don’t yet suggest someone personally dangerous to the public but one capable of assisting others to be so. His means of escape seems ludicrously simple: he had been in the prison kitchen and is thought to have hidden beneath a food truck, hanging from its underside as it exited the prison.

        1. The BBC goes into a lot of detail on their website.

          He joined the Army to get training for future “terror” operations.

          One wonders if he is the only slammer to have joined up for that reason?

        2. The BBC goes into a lot of detail on their website.

          He joined the Army to get training for future “terror” operations.

          One wonders if he is the only slammer to have joined up for that reason?

  63. Good Evening.
    A day that has vaporised merely doing bits and bobs.
    Still, MB now has his new whizzy bird cage for the budgies who have been living on ‘temporary’ accommodation since February. (Rather like prefabs that lasted well into the 1950s.)
    Tomorrow we will be painstakingly checking off assorted screws (“anyone seen the Phillips screwdriver?”) and trying to hold together sides while not treading on feed bowls.
    Watch for a mushroom shaped cloud appearing over Norf Essex.

      1. Talking of which; Spartie’s new donut bed arrived today while I was out.
        Somehow he KNEW the parcel was for him and I came home to an over-excited small dog bouncing around a cardboard box and yelping like a child on Christmas morning.
        How on earth did he know?
        When the bird cage parcel arrived a couple of hours later, he was totally uninterested in it.

        1. Big Cat likes eating his cat biscuits with antibiotic sprinkles… maybe there’s an attractive flavour? Could be that Spartie can smell a dog-attracting odour from the new bed?

          4. Paw bitten by the unneutered tom that lives next door, and is a mean bully. Needs shooting. Then paw went sceptic, so taken to vet who drained the pus from puss and gave him antibiotics. The key to getting them down Big Cat and still keep your head on your shoulders is to grind them up and sprinkle on his cat biscuits – he likes the flavour, so that’s OK.

          5. ,Poor Big Cat! It’s always amused me that the vet pharma people put ‘cat/dog palatable’ on their products! Our cats can’t read!

          6. The limp has gone, and his paw (the size of a small spade) is no longer sore. We’re continuing the antibiotic, as per instructions.

          8. Indeed.
            I’d quite happily shoot the tom with my silenced 22lr, and put the body in the food recycling bin. Problem is, someone’s bound to see, and pooping off guns in a built-up area is only allowed for criminal gang members.

          10. When we first moved into this house 28 years ago, we had two male cats, Pat and Joe. The garden had been taken over by a grey ‘bruiser’ from the farmhouse down below. We had to take both cats to the vet as they both got attacked on the same day. It took our boys some time to establish their territorial rights, and eventually the grey bruiser disappeared.

        3. Did it come from a pet shop? poppie always knew when I had been to the local pet shop. The smell lingers on one’s clothes. The first time she gave me a good sniffing, she jumped off the sofa and her whole excited demeanour declared ‘You’ve been to the petshop, haven’t you? haven’t you??

        4. Did it come from a pet shop? poppie always knew when I had been to the local pet shop. The smell lingers on one’s clothes. The first time she gave me a good sniffing, she jumped off the sofa and her whole excited demeanour declared ‘You’ve been to the petshop, haven’t you? haven’t you??

    2. When you see that the passenger on the flight who’s sitting next to your allocated seat is overflowing into yours it’s easy to see why.

    2. Our spineless politicians won’t use that then they’ll say you didn’t want us to use EU laws. Evil buggers.

  67. Again I know it’s early but after watching my recording of Parkinson and Hollywood’s iconic women, I’m gong to bed.
    It’s very funny take a look. Bbc4.
    And I’ve finished cleaning all the windows in and out.
    Two glasses of my home made cider, as in one litre. And feeling it.
    Slayders. 💤
    “Here’s looking at you kid”.

  68. Don’t see any other Wordle posts, so…

    Par today.
    Wordle 809 4/6

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

    1. Bogey five for me today.

      Wordle 809 5/6

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

      1. And here

        Wordle 809 5/6

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

    4. Strange how it all seems to have started in the USA. Where the main perpetrators exist.
      But it’s spread like the fire in Hawai.

  70. My knee support arrived late afternoon – it has improved the pain in my knee by 50% – 75%. I am happy with that. Poppiesdad is happy with his red medicine.

    1. Hopefully you’ve both strained muscles or tendons that will recover with rest and not done worse damage?

      1. Torn left knee cartilage in my case, Sue. Doc said it ‘should’ be ok in a month or so. I have been slapping Ibuleve on it for two weeks or so with no real sign of improvement, so I took myself off for a visit to the doc yesterday. Miraculously there was a 2.50 pm appt available, otherwise there would have been a two week wait. Poppiesdad woke with pain in the lumbar back this morning after carrying a large sack of seeds-for-the-birds from the front gate round to the outhouses at the back. He seems a bit better this evening after rubbing Ibuleve on the affected area,, followed by Solpadeine early afternoon and two large glasses of SA shiraz this evening (medicinal only, of course, you understand….).

  72. Goodnight, all. Another busy day tomorrow; out to lunch (literallly rather than figuratively) and then going racing at Woollybags.

  73. Good night, chums. I may not put in an appearance tomorrow, as I off to London and may not get back until rather late.

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