SureStart, cannabis, Trusk, burqas, Starling Bank and Taylor Swift

7 June 2025

The Child Poverty Task Force is recommending the government reincarnates the SureStart service, first introduced by Labour in 1998 and mostly closed down after under-funding due to George Osborne’s austerity cuts.  It used to offer child health clinics, breastfeeding support, groups for new parents, sleep and weaning workshops, speech and language therapy, drop-in physio sessions, parenting courses in child development and mental health, stay and play sessions (including specifically for dads and male carers), music therapy classes, support groups for women and children who have suffered domestic violence, a housing clinic, groups for children with SEND and cookery courses.  Bring it on!

While they’re at it, perhaps the government could have a look at the report of the independent commission that researched cannabis regulation in London.  The report finds that reclassifying cannabis as a Class B drug was disproportionate to the harm it can cause and that penalising people for possession of the drug for personal use “cannot be justified”, recommending that, while its production and supply chains should remain illegal, “natural” forms of the drug should be reclassified.

London tried this in Lambeth in 2001 when a Scotland Yard borough commander told his officers to caution rather than arrest people carrying small amounts for personal use.  The scheme was inevitably controversial but popular in the borough where, in six months, more than 2,500 hours of police time were saved on processing cannabis arrests while arrests for in connection with class A drugs rose by almost 20% and non-drug-related crime fell by almost 10%.  Almost two thirds of people thought the scheme had improved relations between the community and the police.

The experiment was ended after a year when some of the media made allegations about the commander’s private life which they later admitted were unfounded but, by then, the commander had been transferred elsewhere.

Some American states have already legalised some forms of cannabis and a recent survey showed that wrinklies have taken advantage of this:  cannabis use by the over-65s increased by nearly 50% in the two years 2021 to 2023.  The increase was mainly in wealthier groups and it has become so much more acceptable in helping people cope with chronic pain, stress and other conditions that medics have to remind users that its use is not without risks and daily use of skunk, a strain of cannabis with high levels of THC, can dramatically increase the risk of becoming psychotic.  However, they say a couple of joints at weekends are unlikely to do much harm … 

I do wonder if the increased use among older people is because they are the generation who spent much of their youth stoned, then stopped while they were working, and are now happy to enjoy cannabis once again.

I also wonder if some could be slipped into Vladimir Putin’s and Donald Trump’s favourite drinks to help them chill a bit.

Putin was so embarrassed by Ukraine’s destroying heavy bombers at an airfield in Siberia that he ordered a nighttime drone attack on Kiev, not renowned for housing Ukrainian military bases, to show what a big willy how powerful he is.

In America, the two Trusk protagonists have parted and are posting acrimonious tweets about each other.  Elon Musk has called for Trump’s impeachment because he was (Musk claims) named in the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s files that are still withheld.

With his usual maturity and compassion, Trump responded by calling Musk “crazy” and saying he was “wearing thin” at the White House. This spat could prove interesting.

Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand, has just published her memoirs and one critic described her style as being “gently funny” about Trump, saying he was “taller than [she] expected, his tan more pronounced”. She also describes a moment when her mike was still on and she called the ultra-right-wing New Zealand politician David Seymour, “an arrogant prick” but, when she heard that she’d been recorded, she said she was relieved to hear what she’d actually said because she thought she’d called him “a fucking prick”.

Over here, the chair of the Reform UK party, Zia Yusuf, has resigned because the party’s newest MP asked the government to ban the burka.  Yusuf, a Muslim, said this was a “dumb” thing to have done, even after Nigel Farage had said on GB News that it was time for a debate about the burqa.

All Farage really needs is the chutzpah of somebody like Raman Bhatia, chief executive of Starling Bank.  The bank was fined £29m by the Financial Conduct Authority in October after the watchdog discovered “shockingly lax” financial crime controls at the bank (which the bank admitted were inadequate).  It also admitted it had to write off £28m on injudicious loans to businesses made without proper checks which, in the words of the FCA, “left the financial system wide open to criminals and those subject to sanctions”.

So Starling’s board of directors increased its staff bonus payments from £5.3m last year to £24.6m this year, including £6m to themselves, to reward their incompetence.

Another rip-off is apparently practised by record labels who do not let unknown artists own their recordings and then, if the artist becomes famous, sell these rights to a third party for a large profit.  Until they encounter someone like Taylor Swift;  she re-recorded all six of the albums whose rights she didn’t own, calling them “Taylor’s Version”, thereby devaluing the original recordings and becoming huge hits in their own right.

She has now bought back her rights to the early albums from Shamrock Capital, who had bought them from Big Machine Records who first recorded her, and thanked the private equity firm for being “honest, fair, and respectful”.

I haven’t heard much of her music, which seems pleasant enough though it doesn’t seem to justify the (to me) incomprehensible fame and adulation she’s achieved worldwide;  but I have to admit I admire her determination to recover what she should surely have owned in the first place, perhaps opening a door for less powerful artists.

Lucky Wilbury, rapists, UK prisons, genocide, Trump’s latest gaffe, Brexit and dodgy lawyers

24 May 2025

Today’s biggest news is, of course, that Lucky Wilbury (aka Bob Dylan) has made it to his 84^th birthday.  Who said mind-altering drugs were bad for you?  They helped him become the greatest lyricist in the last 100 years …

Other goodish news this week (at least for us sadists) came when Shabana Mahmood, the Lord Chancellor, was reported to be considering chemical castration for the most serious sex offenders.  I know of two young women who were violently raped and suffered permanent damage and wonder if this goes far enough;  I’ve heard enough about these two people to be tempted to support the use of a pair of blunt bolt-cutters.

They’re also considering releasing and tagging killers and rapists half-way through their sentences.  Surely these are exactly the wrong people to release.  Shouldn’t they be releasing (and tagging?) non-violent offenders to release overcrowding in prisons and perhaps never giving first offenders custodial sentences if their crimes didn’t involve violence against people?

Talking of criminals inevitably makes me think of Benjamin Netanyahu who is committing war crimes in the name of Zionism and then accusing his critics of being anti-Semitic.  I don’t know enough about him to know if he actually is that stupid or if he’s intentionally manipulating the truth because he wants people to think he’s slaughtering Palestinians in the name of a religion rather than for political reasons.

Gary Lineker has been fired by the BBC after re-posting a pro-Palestinian video criticising Zionism on social media .  Unfortunately, it included a picture of a rat which was, apparently, used by the Nazis to associate Jews with vermin.  Lineker later apologised and said he would “never knowingly share anything antisemitic” and he’d deleted the post “as soon as I became aware of the issue”.

Still, it’ll save the BBC a fortune because they grossly overpaid him.

Even the UK is taking a stand and the Foreign Secretary David Lammy has suspended negotiations over a free-trade deal saying calls from some of Israel’s cabinet ministers to “purify Gaza” by expelling Palestinians were abhorrent, and he condemned their refusal to allow thousands of aid deliveries to reach starving Palestinians.

Israeli troops fired what they called “warning shots” at an international group of diplomats from 31 countries who had been invited by the Palestinian Authority to see what was happening in Gaza.  Israel’s explanation was that the group had deviated from the route they’d tried to impose on the delegation in a country which they’d invaded where they have no legal rights to impose a tax on bread.

The leader of the Israeli opposition has said Israel “kills babies as a hobby” and even Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister of Israel, has said what Israel “is doing now in Gaza is very close to a war crime”.  “Very close”? What haven’t they told him?

Netanyahu’s apparent lack of intelligent reasoning seems rather like Donald Trump’s more stupid outbursts which last week included accusing South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa of “white genocide” which Trump ‘proved’ to his complete satisfaction with pictures taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Ramaphosa himself remained dignified and stood up to Trump by drawing attention to his apparent attachment to far-right conspiracy theories.

Trump could, I suppose, have responded by saying that one of his latest ploys has been to suggest that women with more than five children should be awarded a National Medal of Motherhood in attempt to increase the population.  Doesn’t this sound like something Mao Zedung would have done if he hadn’t been encouraging people to kill flies though I don’t think even Trump would believe Mao was on the far-right so his at least his delusions are balanced.

Over here, my Conservative friend is trying to convince me that, because Brits voted for Brexit, it’s undemocratic for Keir Starmer to be negotiating with the EU to remove some of its daftest consequences.  However, he refuses to accept that an even greater majority of Brits elected Starmer’s party, which empowers the prime minister to reduce some of the inconveniences such as queuing with other ‘aliens’ to enter an EU country, and allowing EU citizens to be given visas and permits to work in the UK, a right that already exists for young Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders and South Koreans.

In a different arena, another friend recently discovered the unfairness and misleading claims of ‘no-win, no-fee’ lawyers.  They had a perfectly good case against their landlords (a housing association, also registered as a charity, with assets of almost £1bn!) who took 5 years to act on reports of damaged window frames.

Unfortunately, one of these firms managed to convince them they could get compensation from the landlords so they drew up a case which went to Court on the day before the Easter weekend when people wanted to rush things and get home early.  I accompanied her as a McKenzie friend and discovered that the solicitors, who are based in Liverpool, had instructed a barrister from Cardiff (well, Cardiff, Exeter, they’re all south of Crewe aren’t they) to represent her in court.

I know some KCs and this one didn’t impress me nearly as much as he impressed himself. He didn’t discuss either the case or what sort of compensation they would accept with my friend, instead talking about his personal life and showing us pictures of his house.  He also ignored a specific instruction that costs were to be in addition to compensation (since he didn’t know what the costs would be) but, after some to-ing and fro-ing with the other side, he announced that he’d agreed a settlement out of court, without saying what it was.

This turned out to be a lump sum which included costs totalling more than 80% of the total so the actual compensation was derisory and, so far, the lawyers have ignored the Court’s instruction that payment should be made within 21 days and my friend has so far received nothing.

I’m now trying to help my friend put this right but the main lesson I’ve learned is never to use no-win no-fee lawyers because at least some of them don’t know what’s written on their tin.

Good news about bookie lookalikes, U-turns, intelligent millionaires and climate action

12 April 2025

Lots of cheering news this week, including that wonderful picture of Donald Trump holding up his tariff board and looking exactly like a bookie on the hill at Epsom on Derby Day.

Amy Coney Barrett, a Republican member of the American Supreme Court has, for the second time in recent months, voted against her Republican colleagues in a ruling against Trump to put justice before politics.  Who’d have guessed she still had the integrity to do that.

Trump did a Liz Truss by imposing a 10% levy on imports from Ukraine and the UK, and 20% on imports from the EU (and 0% on imports from Russia), financial markets worldwide crashed and he was forced into a humiliating U-turn, which just goes to show that if you say “Boo!” to a bully, they’ll chicken out.

Jaguar Land Rover had immediately suspended all further exports of their cars to America, thereby boosting the owners of ones already over there by increasing their second-hand values.

Trump’s tariffs also provided a wonderful excuse for our Labour government to rethink its economic policy and Keir Starmer has said “old assumptions should be discarded” so they can forget their crazy undertaking not to raise taxes.

All over America, there were demonstrations against Trump’s “authoritarian overreach and billionaire-backed agenda” with an estimated 500,000 people taking to the streets in Washington, Florida and about 1,000 other places, including state capitals.

There have even been rumours that Elon Musk will be leaving the Department of Government Efficiency, possibly because people have sussed that he thinks cutting expenditure must automatically improve efficiency.

Both Trump and Musk were started in business with inherited capital but, while Musk has increased his with some successful businesses, Trump has lost a large amount of his inheritance with his unbelievable incompetence in running businesses – remember his casinos were bankrupted, beating the odds that were stacked in his favour by the rules of the games.

Another millionaire who inherited wealth is Abigail Disney, one of my heroes, who has acknowledged she is rich “only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else.”  She has for many years been giving large sums of money away and a member of The Patriotic Millionaires, an American organisation dedicated to changing the system so that its members and others with even more money pay more tax.

Last year, she wrote that “Extreme wealth concentration in the hands of a few oligarchs is a threat to democracy the world over.”  She accepts that instituting a global minimum tax on the very rich will be complex, but not impossible, and she pointed out that, four years ago, 136 OECD countries “joined an accord to enact a 15% global minimum tax on multinational corporations”.  She added that “If we can institute a tax floor for the world’s largest corporations, there is no reason we can’t do the same for the world’s wealthiest individuals”, pointing out that a 2023 survey found that even millionaires in G20 countries support the idea.

More good news over here is that the planning application for a deep coalmine in Whitehaven, Cumbria has been withdrawn after the High Court ruled that the permission granted by Michael Gove when he was in charge was unlawful.  This follows another, earlier decision by the Supreme Court that quashed planning permission for an oil well at Horse Hill in Surrey on the grounds that the impact of burning coal, oil and gas must be included when the climate impact of a proposal must be included.

The Labour government is also proposing to extend restrictions on the burning of peatland which has led to the degradation of 80% of them in England.  They are comparatively uncommon but, when they’re allowed to remain undisturbed, they store huge amounts of carbon – an estimated 3.2 billion tonnes in the UK alone.  The Conservative government started with a small step in the right direction by limiting the burning to areas of ‘deep peat’ (over 40cm deep) in Sites of Special Scientific Interest in conservation areas and some even smaller sites.

Labour’s plans include reducing the definition of deep peat from 40cm to 30cm and would do away with the limitation to conservation areas, increasing protected areas by two thirds to a total of 368,000 hectares, but this still leaves almost half the total area unprotected. 

Needless to say, organisations like the Countryside Alliance are up in arms.  They don’t care about the wildlife, such as adders, toads, and ground-nesting birds, that are killed when land is burnt but they’re horrified that this will restrict the land where otherwise relatively normal people pay a lot of money for the sheer delight of blowing the heads off the grouse that live there bringing up their families.

I have no real problem with somebody shooting something to take home to eat (actually, of course, picking up and eating roadkill avoids the slaughter and is much cheaper, but remember fresh blood is good, maggots aren’t) but shooters don’t even get to keep the birds they killed without paying for them;  and what worries me more is the thought that some people actually get pleasure from killing, and are willing to pay to be allowed to do it.

Still on the subject of corpses, I’m always fascinated by the facial reconstructions of Neanderthals and other people who have been for tens of thousands of years just from a skull that’s been dug up by an archaeologist.  I know pictures are sometimes drawn using similar techniques in attempts to picture the faces of bodies that haven’t yet been identified but I wonder whether any research has been done reconstructing the faces from the skulls of people who’ve died more recently, and of whom there are photographs, to see how accurate they are? 

They’re welcome to use my skull for a test when I’ve finished with it because I find it hard to imagine how they could guess where my wrinkles are from the underlying bone so it would be an interesting test of their system.

Speed, matricides, Anora and hearing problems

8 March 2025

Imagine a car travelling at a legal 60 mph on a straight country road and an identical car, also travelling at 60 mph, coming towards it and they collide head-on.  The effect on each car will be like driving into a brick wall at 120 mph, their speed relative to the other car. 

Now imagine you’re standing beside the road where they collide.  If we ignore the small variation caused by the angle between your line of sight and each car’s direction of travel, you will see both cars travelling at 60 mph relative to you.

Now imagine you’re in a helicopter travelling at exactly 40 mph at right-angles to the road and you pass over the place where they crash at exactly the moment they do.  As you approach the road, the speed of each car relative to you will change even though their speed and yours remain constant relative to the road.

Now imagine your helicopter is approaching the point of impact at an angle of less than 90^o, or approaching in a regular curve round a central point 1 mile from the point of impact.  Now calculate the speed at which each car is moving relative to you.

At this point, I have to tell you I failed my A Level maths quite impressively so I don’t even know how to start calculating the relative speeds of the cars and the helicopter but there are two important things to remember:  (a) the speed at which anything is travelling can only be measured against an external point, which might help explain Einstein’s idea that nothing can travel faster the light and (b) if you’re driving, it’s not just the speed shown on your speedometer that decides how bad a crash will be.

Another horrifying number that really needs some sort of comparison to give it a context is that, of 2,000 women killed by men from 2009 to 2021, 170 of them were killed by their sons or grandsons, 70% of whom had mental health problems.  The research was carried out by Prof Rachel Condry and Dr Caroline Miles, from Oxford and Manchester universities, in collaboration with the Femicide Census, and is to be published shortly so the full report may give a perspective by comparing the figures with the number of men killed by their sons or grandsons in the same period, or equivalent numbers from other countries or different time periods.

It was glad to hear that the film ‘Anora‘ won several Oscars, because I’d seen and enjoyed it – none of the ‘villains’ was actually that villainous, Anora herself was believably naïve and some of the scenes had me laughing out loud.  What I didn’t notice was that the F-word is apparently used 479 times, an average of almost 30 times a minute over the 140 minutes of the film, or once every two seconds, which is a new record.  Just imagine it:  “What do you do for a living?” / “I count the number of F-words in movies.” / “Are they good films?” / “I don’t know, I’m counting the effing effs.”

Mind you, with my hearing as bad as it is, I struggle to understand the ‘normal’ dialogue so I probably missed the swearing.

There was an interesting article this week by Rachael Groessler, a writer who lives in Brisbane who first noticed hearing problems when she found she could no longer eavesdrop on people at neighbouring tables (which was also one of my favourite hobbies).  Groessler suffers from a specific and rare form of deafness but I have had similar problems for many years as I’ve gotten older:  in crowded rooms and bars where a lot of different conversations are going on, I find it very difficult to separate the voice of the person I’m talking to from the background noise.

Curiously, the consonants go first while the vowels remain, giving rise to some surreal mishearings.  When I turned the radio on in the car last week, I landed in the middle of a programme about Roman gods which didn’t make much sense until I realised they were talking about Venus, not a Penis.

When I realised I was going deaf, I did of course get (free) NHS hearing aids.  These improved some things but not the full spectrum and the top three keys on the piano still made only a clicking sound and produced no audible note.  An added complication of hearing loss is that, if your ears are different, you misjudge the direction a sound is coming from, which is particularly annoying if you’re trying to find the bird with that unusual call.

Then of course, one’s nearest and dearest sees an advertisement and suggests you look at the miraculous hearing aids offered by people who’ve graduated from used-car sales training and are tremendously keen to get their commission.  So I went to a private shop and they convinced me their hearing aids would do everything the NHS ones did but much better, and all for only £3,000 because they have a special discount on this week (you know the spiel).

What they failed to mention is that their hearing aids are just one step ahead of the NHS ones and the NHS will catch up quite quickly. I gave them a year or so to improve my life and, after failing to notice any real difference, I had a long fight with Boots to get 50% of my money back.  To be fair, you can pay for prettier ones that are less obvious from outside if you care about people seeing them, but I don’t.

Talking of what one hears, I read that Timothée Chalamet spent a long time working with a professional harmonica coach so, when he played Bob Dylan in the film ‘A Complete Unknown’, he could make it sound exactly like someone has accidentally trodden on the cat.

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled” *

3 August 2024

Just outside our front door, immediately beneath the letterbox, is a large notice saying “This is NOT [house name] or [road name] or [postcode]” in 24pt bold type.  Guess the address on the packet left by this notice on Friday.  And guess which courier had abandoned it there.

That’s right:  Evri.  As in “We Screw up Evri Delivery”.  They used to be called Hermes until they were judged to be Britain’s most unreliable courier when the management decided the obvious solution was to change their name.  So Hermes became Evri. 

I also had a delivery due here between 6 and 7 one evening last week.  I gave up at 7 because I was going out and already late. Then, as I drove out into the road at about 7.15, an Evri van arrived, blocking my exit.  Guess if they were apologetic.

Time for another name change methinks.

I’m also having an argument with Boots to whom a duplicated delivery was returned but they’ve only refunded 30% of what I paid for the stuff.

And, while I’m having a moan, I mustn’t forget vets.  Our local veterinary practice was privately-owned and provided services in two local towns.  When our last dog died, the vet who came here and gave her the injection charged £184.  At some point in the following three years, the old vets apparently sold their practice to one of the avaricious national groups but – here’s the clever bit – they didn’t tell anyone and they kept the same local name so, when I called them out last week to give Toby his final injection, they charged £336.

I queried this and was told prices have gone up.  I asked if the person I was talking to was now getting paid 80% more than they were 3 years ago and they said “I wish”.  They did say they were now using a different crematorium (for which they charge £95 instead of £35) but couldn’t explain how putting, say, ten dead animals into a furnace could possibly cost £950.

Perhaps it’s me, getting annoyed by greedy pigs assuming they can fool all of us all the time.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have friends on universal credit who have to choose between paying the rent and having supper.  Perhaps I just should find a sugar mummy (even though this might be a little difficult at my age) so I’d no longer care.

Our new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has discovered that her predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, had been economical with the truth about the state of the nation’s finances.  Hunt has claimed this is a stunt to justify future tax increases. 

Much of this posturing is to be expected when a new government comes in and blames the government that was just chucked out for all the problems it can find.  This argument is often weakened by the fact that the opposition also had already had access to most of the information at the time but, in this case, it does appear that the Office for Budget Responsibility only became aware last week of the additional spending pressures.  It has now confirmed that the figures quoted by Reeves had not been published before, that the £6bn cost of housing asylum seekers hadn’t been included in the last budget and it has launched an enquiry into the omission.

It’s widely accepted that Hunt wasn’t the most competent of Chancellors but it’s probably unfair to remember that he was also the minister who did such huge damage to the NHS while he was in charge of health some 12 years ago.

In America, things are writ much larger with what looks like a Kamala Harris / Donald Trump duel in November, if the gods don’t intervene.  Many of the accusations Trump levelled against Joe Biden have now been rendered powerless and Harris has gained huge financial support from the Democrats’ funders since she took over as their front-runner.

For all that we don’t know about Harris, there’s a lot we know about Trump:

• he’s 78, the oldest presidential candidate ever
• he’s the first president to have been impeached twice while he was in office
• he’s a convicted felon, having been found guilty on 34 criminal charges
• he could still be sent to prison
• he’s still got 54 more criminal cases to face
• a civil case found him guilty of rape and ordered him to pay millions of dollars
• his speeches ramble incoherently, containing mistakes and errors of fact, and he answers difficult questions with abuse
• he’s promised to rule as “a dictator” if he’s re-elected.

At a panel hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists on Wednesday (for which he arrived an hour late) the first question was ““Why should Black voters trust you?”  In reply, he said “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner … I think it’s a very rude introduction … I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln”.

This aggression just makes him look more foolish than ever. More ‘insiders’ are speaking out about him and next week will see the publication of Nancy Pelosi’s book ‘The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House’.  In this, she says that, at a 2019 memorial service for a prominent psychiatrist, a succession of “doctors and other mental health professionals” unexpectedly approached her and volunteered their concerns that they were “deeply concerned that there was something seriously wrong [with Trump] and that his mental and psychological health was in decline”.

His niece, Mary Trump, a qualified clinical psychologist who has known him from childhood, is also publishing a second book about her uncle in September. 

Of Kamala Harris, Trump has said “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black.”  But Harris has sussed him and said it’s “the same old show … America deserves better” and that what Trump and JD Vance have been saying about her was “just plain weird”, thereby reducing their burblings to the absurd and laughable.

Moral:  always look past abuse to see the weakness behind it.

*          Mark Twain

Local electioneering, serial killers, Swedish TV interviews and rockets

8 June 2024

Our local MP called the other day.  No, not that one, the other one because the constituency boundaries have been changed.  I told him he’d get our vote because I wanted the other lot out and said he could put a poster up on our fence, one of the most noticeable sites in the village, and that he could put it on top of the Ukrainian flag we’ve had up there for a couple of years.

Two days later, I noticed a raggedy piece of paper, defacing the election poster, on which someone had scrawled in an obviously uneducated hand “Disgusting [party name redacted] putting a poster on top of the flag”.  It was obviously intended as the sort of reasoned debating point beloved by the [party name redacted] because they had taken the trouble to bring some Sellotape to stick their note to the flag. 

Because I feel rather sorry for people who feel the need to do things like that. I just removed the scrap of paper but I did wonder if it was the same person who stole the first two flags we’d put up there when the war started.

I’m now looking for a house with a note on their fence saying “Don’t vote for [party name redacted] because they’re disgusting”.

Frank Figliuzzi, a former director of the FBI, has just published a book called “Long Haul: Hunting the Highway Serial Killers” which claims long-haul trucking is a happy hunting ground for serial killers.  In 1994, Robert Ben Rhoades was given a sentence of life-without-parole having agreed to plead guilty to two murders in exchange for the death sentence being waived and he remains in the maximum-security Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois.

While they were trying to identify Regina Walter, one of his victims, an Illinois state trooper publicised her details nationally and asked for information about Caucasian females aged 13-15 who had disappeared nine months earlier.  He got more than 900 replies.

Further investigation showed that, over at least 15 years, Rhoades had kidnapped, tortured, raped and killed as many as 50 suspected victims before being caught and jailed.  His victims were almost all sex-trafficked women who’d hitched a lift at a truck stop.  He’d then assault and kill them in another state and dump their bodies in a third state, which complicates investigations in America where each state has its own jurisdictions.

Having learnt that at least 850 murders in the last few decades have taken place along the country’s highways with more than 200 of them still unsolved, Figliuzzi argues that it’s a much wider problem than odd truckers here and there.  Twenty-five long-haul truckers are in prison for multiple murders and he claims the FBI has a list of about 450 suspects, many of whom are truckers.

 An entire mythology surrounds these drivers.  In Figliuzzi’s words, they see themselves as “Part cowboy, part fighter pilot, and part hermit, long-haul truckers” while they actually “glide along the edge of a certain seam in the fabric of our society – the seam that separates their reality from ours.”

(Think of ‘Duel’, Steven Spielberg’s first film, originally made for TV in 1971, the one that made him famous.)

The drivers spend so much time alone that a tendency to sociopathy probably helps but the big question involves chickens and eggs:  do psychopaths choose the work for the opportunities it offers or does the job itself tip borderline psychopaths over the edge?

It’s tempting to assume it couldn’t happen in the UK because settlements are so much closer together and the country is so much smaller (just remember the state of Texas, which isn’t even the largest state in the Union, is almost three times the size of the UK) but remember what the Yorkshire Ripper did for a living.

On a more wholesome note, Stina Lundberg Dabrowski is renowned and respected for her documentaries and interviews on Swedish television.  She’s produced documentaries on contentious subjects such as Cuba and Colombia, the Zapatist guerillas in Mexico and a family who are members of the Ku Klux Klan, but she’s best known for her studio interviews with an eclectic bunch of people such as King Abdullah and Queen Rania of Jordan, Yasser Arafat, Benazir Bhutto, Hillary Clinton, Leonard Cohen, the Dalai Lama, Clint Eastwood, Jane Fonda, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tom Hanks, Eddie Izzard, Madonna, Nelson Mandela, Diego Maradona, Dolly Parton, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Margaret Thatcher, amongst many others.  At the end of her interviews, Dabrowski asks her guests to jump and a freeze-frame from the jump closes the programme.

Over the years, only three people are known to have refused to jump: Bhutto, Mandela and one other.  I can’t imagine why the Harvard- and Oxford-educated Bhutto didn’t, one can excuse Mandela if his knees were anything like mine are now (although the Dalai Lama jumped and he’s no spring chicken) but the third was a person renowned for a total absence of any sense of humour who was either so arrogant or so insecure they didn’t want to lose what they perceived as their dignity.  You guessed:  it was Thatcher, who claimed it was “a silly thing to ask”, and “puerile”.  Her briefing for the interview had obviously failed to warn her about the jump (and, when she refused, she’d forgotten any Latin she once knew).

At this point, for the sake of my sanity, I feel an irresistible need to change the subject so let’s congratulate China on the first soft landing of a space probe on the far side of the moon – a world first – where it’s hoped it will collect about 2kg of rock and soil samples from one of the oldest craters on the moon.  And let’s also congratulate Elon Musk who has at last managed to get one of his American rockets to reach the edge of space and return safely without exploding.

Media influences and people with worries about gender

13 April 2024

Isn’t it worrying how we develop opinions about people based on just what our favoured media tell us about them!  What brought this to mind was Thursday’s news that OJ Simpson had died (two months after saying was receiving chemotherapy for prostate cancer).

I haven’t read a transcript of the proceedings of his trial and saw little more than headlines at the time so all I know is that, in 1995, he was tried for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman, and was acquitted;  and I’ve only just discovered that the OJ stood for Orenthal James.

It seemed clear at the time that many people had formed their own opinions about whether or not he did kill them.  Some thought that, because the defence showed he couldn’t get a pair of blood-stained gloves onto his hands, it couldn’t have been him, though I don’t remember hearing any evidence about DNA evidence taken from the inside of the gloves before he tried them on.  Others thought the prosecution case and his flight from the police (even though it was carried out in slo-mo) were sufficient to convict him.

In another case, Oscar Pistorius shot his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in 2013.  Pistorius didn’t deny having fired the shots that killed her but said he shot through a bathroom door at what he thought was an intruder.  The prosecution case highlighted apparent inconsistencies in his story and he spent near 9 years in prison after being found guilty after a trial that might possibly have produced a ‘not proven’ verdict had it been held in Scotland.

In both cases, many people seemed to believe that one or both were guilty, or innocent, and that justice was, or wasn’t done.  But how do they come to these conclusions?  From the bits and pieces given to us by the media, or from the fact that Simpson was a good-looking man and Pistorius was an Olympic champion despite having lost the bottom half of both legs?

Many people seem to have the same problem with various aspects of the LGBTQ+ acronym, despite never having been there themselves. However, before muttering, I must make two confessions:  I wasn’t committed to a boarding school and surrounded by bullies and pederasts and I spent far too much time trainspotting to pass through the homosexual phase that many boys are supposed to pass through.

So I don’t really understand why some people get so exercised over people who are in one of the groups that they’re not?  Take ‘trans’ people, who seem to have been getting a lot of press coverage recently.  We all know that, at birth, the genitals can appear quite similar and medics don’t necessarily spend a lot of time assigning a gender to neonates.  Indeed, even adults’ visible genitals come in a wide range of shapes and sizes and, internally, their structure is very similar;  and that’s a few of their physical differences.

Inside their heads, people experience life very differently and, from a very young age, some believe their gender was assigned wrongly at birth and they’re inhabiting the wrong body.  (The debate about nature versus nurture is different.) 

There’s also a huge overlap between masculine and feminine. While a group of us at work were chatting once, one of my staff said she thought I was a very feminine man.  I said “Thank you, I take that as a compliment”, she said “It was meant to be” and the conversation moved on.  I wonder how I’d have felt if I weren’t comfy with being as I am.

But there are people out there, including one famous author, who believe that people with penises are men, even if they choose to live as women;  and, presumably, men who have surgery and chemicals to reconstruct their bodies, are just as disgusting as women who choose to live as men. 

If it makes them happy, why should anybody else care?  Surely people are kind and thoughtful or selfish and cruel regardless of the shape of their bodies;  and, if they spend time worrying about gender identity, perhaps they’re a bit uncertain about their own identity and are over-compensating.

Donald Trump appears to be a good example of uncertainty, believing that women exist to have their fannies groped so men can share the experiences in locker rooms, and women shouldn’t be allowed to have abortions after being raped, even though the foetus is 50% rapist. 

Actually, Trump probably isn’t the best example because there are so many loose connections in his head that it’s never clear whether he does feel insecure or is just ‘neurologically divergent’.  Consider Trump’s criticism of Joe Biden in his Georgia response to the State of the Union (in this unedited quotation, you can actually hear his synapses making random connections):

“Somebody said he looks great in a bathing suit, right? And you know, when he was in the sand and he was having a hard time lifting his feet through the sand, because you know sand is heavy, they figured three solid ounces per foot, but sand is a little heavy, and he’s sitting in a bathing suit. Look, at 81, do you remember Cary Grant? How good was Cary Grant, right? I don’t think Cary Grant, he was good. I don’t know what happened to movie stars today. We used to have Cary Grant and Clark Gable and all these people. Today we have, I won’t say names, because I don’t need enemies. I don’t need enemies. I got enough enemies. But Cary Grant was, like – Michael Jackson once told me, ‘The most handsome man, Trump, in the world.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Cary Grant.’ Well, we don’t have that any more, but Cary Grant at 81 or 82, going on 100. This guy, he’s 81, going on 100. Cary Grant wouldn’t look too good in a bathing suit, either. And he was pretty good-looking, right?”

This is somebody who could become America’s next president thanks to a bunch of idiots and an electoral system that is even more dysfunctional than Britain’s.

Exit through the gift shop.

£100,000 a year, social care costs and the ethics of electioneering

30 March 2024

The vast gulf between the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s beliefs and his grasp of reality was terrifyingly illustrated in a recent tweet in which he said £100,000 is “not a huge salary” for people in South West Surrey.  He was even stupid enough to repeat this fantasy to Laura Kuenssberg in an interview last weekend when he said £100,000 a year “doesn’t go as far as you might think” and added that “even on those higher salaries, people are feeling under pressure” because of housing costs, childcare and taxes (oh, come on, all of us whose income is high enough pay taxes).  And childcare?  What about the helicopter?

This is the sort of “pressure” many millions of people would sell their soul for. 

The median pay for a full-time worker last year was £34,963, which means that half of all full-time workers were paid less than that. 

I have a friend, a single parent of a 6-year old, who only gets Income Support and Child Benefit totalling just over £13,000 a year.  They live in a tiny housing association property paying rent of £6,000 a year plus energy bills, car insurance, phone etc, which leaves almost exactly nothing for food, clothing and treats such as a sandwich from Greggs.  I give them what I can to help but, according to a recent survey, there are 4,300,000 children in the UK below the official poverty line;  sadly I can’t help them and the government won’t. 

In a feeble attempt at self-defence, Jeremy Hunt* did say the UK had been through a “very very tough patch”, caused primarily by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  Excuse me!  How long have you people been in power?  And whose austerity policies started the decay?

It’s no better in America where, according to research by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, senior management at 35 of the largest companies were given more than their companies paid in federal taxes between 2018 and 2022; and, in the UK, Chris O’Shea, Centrica’s boss, will be getting £8.2m this year, nearly double what he got last year when he said his pay was “impossible to justify”.    No doubt he’ll trouser it anyway.

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, this makes me very angry, and what makes it worse is that there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it …

At the other end of life, the problems are just as great when someone becomes unable to take care of themselves, even if they’ve paid their taxes all their lives.

A series of three programmes shown recently on TV told the story of a well-known broadcaster, Kate Garroway, as she watched her husband, Derek Draper, decline and die, needing increasing care as he weakened.  The trilogy started in May 2023 with her husband saying he wants to be on camera and “I want to be heard” even though he already needed intensive, round-the-clock care.

Since only people with very low incomes and high needs qualify for state-funded care, care for his basic needs cost £4,000 a week before the additional costs of therapeutic support.  Needing care is an expensive business because, in the absence of government funding, capitalists have pounced on care services and make themselves huge profits by bankrupting the needy. 

After being told Draper wasn’t ill enough to qualify for state support, Garroway appealed against the decision three years ago but is still awaiting a reply even though Draper died in January.

She has admitted she gets a generous salary but even this wasn’t enough and unofficial reports, not mentioned in the programme, say she’s now some £800,000 in debt.

For those of us who are full-time carers for a family member who is physically disabled and entirely reliant on a wheelchair and hoists as well as suffering from dementia, the costs are still terrifying.  Our ¾ hour of care per day costs more than £10,000 a year and respite breaks in residential care home cost about £1,500 a week;  even full-time care costs about £70,000 a year.  So, for respite care, we’ve chosen a (lovely) care home run by a charity, knowing that greedy owners won’t take a third of our payments straight into their piggy banks (emphasis on piggy, not banks).  It’s also why I’m giving money to friends and other charities now because I won’t be able to afford to when our savings run out.

And, sooner or later, the money will run out and we’ll have to sell the house, claim utterly inadequate benefits and then take the pills.

This makes me more sad than angry.  I paid every penny of tax and national insurance contributions due while I was working and it’s being given to Jeremy Hunt and people running companies on government contracts who believe £100,000 a year doesn’t go as far as you think it might.  Well, mush, it would keep us out of the workhouse for the rest of our lives and we are (or were) relatively comfortable;  just think what it would do to people who are not as fortunate as we are.

And, heaven help us all, the Conservative want to get themselves back into the power they’ve abused so appallingly over the last 14 years.  Since they’ve achieved so little so far, they’re desperate enough to produce ‘knocking copy’ to support the Conservative who’s standing as their candidate to become the next mayor of London. 

Sadiq Khan may not be perfect but does London need a Conservative who produces an advertisement showing scenes of people running away from suspected gunshots through a crowded underground station, captioned “London under Labour has become a crime capital of the world”?  Apart from the caption being bollocks, the pictures were actually taken in New York’s Penn station.

Yes, I know the pictures were removed from the ads after thousands of horrified complaints, but they’re the sort of people who thought it was OK in the first place.

And Shamima Begum remains stateless after latest appeal against the removal of her perfectly legal British passport was removed.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

*          This Jeremy Hunt is of course the same person who screwed the NHS when he was Health Minister all those years ago. 

No bed for Bacon, Brahms v Beethoven, UK’s back door, an unmanned(ish) ship, and assisted dying

9 March 2024

A friend said recently she was “sad about the state of the world.  I think I might ditch the news.”  I know exactly how she feels. 

I scrabble around each week to find some good news to help cheer everybody up but there ain’t much out there and I’m coming to the conclusion that we just have to carry on until we can’t take any more, then give up.  I’m thinking of taking out a subscription to Hello magazine so I can chuckle at the irrelevant and boring activities of people I’ve never heard of. 

I am actually cheering myself slightly at the moment by re-reading a book that makes me laugh:  No Bed for Bacon by Caryl Brahms and SJ Simon.  You probably need to know a little about Shakespeare and the times he lived in to get some of the jokes but it still makes me smile.  For instance, it explains in passing that the Elizabeth’s second best bed, which Francis Bacon wanted, was delivered to a cottage in Stratford.

There are quite a few books on my shelves waiting to be re-read (the ones I don’t want to read again go straight back to the charity shop) so I’m not sure why I picked this one, an old orange Penguin edition.  It might be because I remembered a discussion with a friend many years ago about the relative merits of Brahms and Beethoven;  she said she thought Brahms’s music was much more intellectual and I said that I thought Beethoven wrote better tunes, which just goes to show what a philistine I am.

One piece of good news this week came when the Daily Mail reported that David Neal, the UK borders inspector, reported that 10 private jets a week land at London City airport alone and let the passengers in the UK’s back door, without their having to go through any of those tedious passport checks that make life so difficult for drugs and arms smugglers, illegal immigrants, child slavers, politicians and other undesirables.  The government immediately took the obvious action and fired Neal.

But we must look on the bright side.  After the budget, Rishi Sunak praised the government’s successes in an interview on Thursday and said “we’ve got inflation down from 11% to 4%”.  I found myself squirming as I listened to this hypocrisy.  After all, wasn’t he one of the chancellors who had so dismally failed the repair the damage inflicted by George Osborne’s disastrous years of austerity and the later collapse of Trussonomics?  In fact, when the Conservatives were first elected, inflation was about 3% but saying “we’ve got inflation down from 3% to … er … 4%” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

A similarly cavalier approach to the truth was taken in the triumphant announcement that an “unmanned” ship is being tested in a Norwegian fjord.  It’s 78 metres long, is being controlled remotely by computer operators in Southampton and will only need a crew of 16 instead of 40 or 50 people.  Yes, I wondered that too.  16 crew on board = “unmanned”?  Perhaps they’re all women.

But National Insurance is going down by another two percentage points, from 8% to 6%, in April which means you’ll have to pay 25% less from next month in addition to the 20% reduction you were already given in January.  If you pay it, which the poorest and the oldest don’t …

The amount the government will receive from national insurance contributions will therefore reduce by 50% in a year and Jeremy Hunt promised to remove it entirely in due course.  What?  Where else are they going to get the money from, did you ask?  That’s being passed on to the next government to decide so if, as many people expect, Labour will win, they can take the blame for having to fill the hole Hunt has dug for them.

And look at the wonder of George Galloway who’s been elected as the Workers’ Party of Great Britain MP for Rochdale despite having supported more parties than Winston Churchill.  He seems to be on the left at the moment but he backed Nigel Farage campaigning for Brexit and voted Conservative in Scotland three years ago.

What chance does integrity have when it gets in the way of someone’s ego?

In response to another attempt to legalise assisted dying, the Ministry of Justice has reminded us that “the Government is committed to providing time to the Backbench Business Committee which gives MPs the opportunity to bring forward debates of their choice and MPs also have the option of introducing Private Members’ Bills which provide MPs with an opportunity to address public concerns and to change the law”.  Or, in plain English, no comment.

In the real world, there is increasing pressure for something do be done in England as its legislation lags behind outliers like Jersey and the Isle of Man.  It isn’t even a political matter and various surveys have shown that about 3 in every 4 people support the principle.  There are of course differing opinions about the various conditions that should be included and the extent of protection for vulnerable people but a change has been backed by an ever-increasing number of famous names including Jonathan Dimbleby, Prue Leith, Terry Pratchett, Esther Rantzen, Diana Rigg and Harriet Walter.

I rather fear a new law might be too late for many of us so I’m keeping my own inherited supply of pills (which I’m hoping haven’t lost their power in the decades since they came into the family) and I will take them if the need arises and, like my mother, die alone if the law hasn’t been changed enough to let someone hold my hand as I drift away.  My only problem is that I need to do so much tidying before I go but I naturally have an up-to-date Will and a DNR just in case.

(Ken Kesey said he wanted to die during an LSD trip.  Does anybody know if he did and, if so, was he able to communicate his feelings as he died?  “Wow man, just look at that!” perhaps?)

Looking on the bright side

23 December 2023

The Conservative government has just made its second genuinely good decision in 13 years of power by announcing it’s going to introduce a new GCSE in British Sign Language to ease the lives of people who can only communicate by using it.  I once asked a signer at a conference how long it took her to learn to be that fluent;  when she said seven years, I gave up the idea of taking an evening class.

(In case you’ve forgotten the other good decision they made was to legalise same sex marriage.)

This week has also seen Michelle Mone getting a lot of stick after she admitted lying to the press and saying that she and her children wouldn’t benefit from the tens of millions stashed in a trust fund if she and Doug Barrowman were to divorce.  Then I saw part of a recording of her interview with Laura Kuenssberg and discovered she has the most wonderful Scottish accent, my favourite accent in the entire world.  She’s innocent I tell you.  I don’t care if she dolled herself up like a tuppeny tart for the interview or went down 28-nil to Kuenssberg.  Nobody with an accent like that could possibly be guilty of anything.

Well, that’s no worse than judging somebody’s guilt by their gender or the colour of their skin is it?

Also this week, the Civil Aviation Authority approved a licence for rockets to take off next year from the land of some of my foremothers and forefathers and Saxavord spaceport in the island of Unst has become the UK’s first licensed spaceport for vertical rocket launches, with the first rockets to take off next year. 

If you don’t know where Unst is, look it up – https://www.shetland.org/visit/plan/areas/unst – it’s as far north of London as Barcelona is south and is on about the same latitude as the southern tip of Greenland.  Of you’re interested in nature or Viking architecture (or space rockets), go there in June and get dive bombed by great and arctic skuas and watch the puffins hovering to see what’s in your sandwiches, and smell the sweet grass and see Edmondston’s Chickweed, marsh marigolds and carnivorous plants, and avoid being spat at by nesting fulmars.  Take warm, windproof clothes and walking boots to get the most out of your visit.

Quite recently, some 700 miles south of Unst, I had to drive down part of the M5 and proved what I’d hypothesised many years ago:  86.21% of the exits off the M5 between Birmingham and Cherbourg take you onto the A38.  Just when the M5 is settling down to the business of going somewhere, the A38 keeps creeping up on it. 

One advantage of using the A38 instead is that you can stop and collect roadkill for supper.  We have a friend who does this and says that, basically, the only rule is ‘fresh blood good, maggots bad’.  In a recent article on foraging for food, somebody who’d eaten fox said “I slow-cooked the fox overnight.  It smelt like wet dog. Tasted like it, too [and] the dogs turned their noses up, which is never a good sign.”  But he did say mouse is very tasty.  I would of course normally test these opinions before reporting them but I don’t eat meat …

Incidentally, did you know that everything about yew trees is poisonous except the red flesh round the stone – just be careful not to touch the stone while you’re nibbling off the covering.

We’re beginning to accept that overpaid chief executives are already genuinely doing the best they can in the job (if they’re not, why are they still CEOs?)  So why has their pay increased so astronomically when compared to the pay of people who actually do most of the work when they’re already doing the best they can?  And why are they so hostile when workers want their pay increased by much more modest percentages?

I was interested to see that 15 years ago, when the then chief executive of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer (who was very well paid), left Shell, he said “If I had been paid 50% more, I would not have done the job better.  If I had been paid 50% less, I would not have done it worse.”  So recognising the inequity of greed as a motivation and its disconnect from ability isn’t a new thing.

Next year, perhaps we can hope that executive bonuses and what is laughingly called ‘performance-related pay’ will be outlawed.

Another comforting thought, at least for those of us who worry about dementia, is that sufferers are generally not unhappy.  They accept that they have it but most seem unaware of what they’ve lost, or the burden – physical, emotional and financial – they put on their families.  I hope that, if it happens to me I will remain aware enough to take a big bunch of happy pills before I forget where they are.

Even more comfort came from America this week when the Colorado supreme court ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible to be re-elected under the constitution’s ‘insurrection clause’ (section 3 of the 14^th amendment).  No doubt the federal supreme court that Trump stuffed with Republicans will put the law above party membership … 

All over the UK, brave swimmers plunge into cold seawater every day of the year but the Portreath branch has recently complained to South West Water about sewage alerts on 26 consecutive days that stopped them squelching their way out into water that was deep enough to swim in.  In the news clip I saw, most of the swimmers were women and are part of Blue Tits Sea Swimmers group, founded and named in 2014 by Sian Richardson in Pembrokeshire – obviously somebody with a sense of humour.

And another joke I saw recently that made me smile:  retired couple, man sitting reading, woman looking out of the window.  Woman says “That couple over the road, every day when he goes to work, he kisses her goodbye.  Why don’t you ever do that?”  Man replies “Two reasons:  one, I’m retired and don’t go to work and, two, I don’t know her.”

Well, it made me smile, probably just because it’s silly, and the world would be so much better if there were more silliness.