Typos, Wills, climate change, wild animals, housing and Janet Airlines

15 March 2025

Over the years, I’ve collected cuttings and notes of things that have interested or amused me.  Most of them get copied into my commonplace book but some really need to be kept in their original form so you can see the context.  For example, while I was weeding files, I came across a whole-page advertisement in the Guardian of 22 February2022 which was headed in large capitals across the top of the page “The Majority of the UK Adult Population dosen’t have a Will” (page 31 if anybody thinks I make these things up).  OK, we all make mistakes but the ad was for ‘The Society of Will Writers’ who would have supplied the artwork for the advertisement ready to be slotted into the paper so you can’t even blame the Guardian’s reputation for typos.

Would you use them if you want a Will wirtten by them?

Have you actually got a Will?  If you haven’t, check the hoops your survivors will have go through to free up your assets – house, bank accounts, cat etc – if you’re leaving more than a small amount;  and check who’ll get what’s left after the government’s taxed it and legal fees have been paid.

(And make sure your survivors know where it is!)

It’s depressing to discover how many family feuds arise from disputes over somebody’s Will … 

Here endeth the first lesson.

Another page I’ve treasured from much further back appeared in the Personal columns of Nine to Five, a magazine that was handed out free in London.  On 24 January 1983 (which shows just how far back my fascination with trivia goes), amongst the entries that said “Oxford graduate 49, seeks …” and “Two nice young ladies wish to meet …”, was the following:   “English male aged 36 single and lonely seeks female for friendship and marriage any nationality, interests walking in the countryside, landscape photography and spanking.”

This inevitably brings to mind an animal, once more living wild in the UK, which uses its tail to slap water to warn of danger.  “[Their heads have] various retractable walls that let water in or keep it out. They can close valves in their nostrils and ears and [have] a special membrane over their eyes; their epiglottis … is inside their nose instead of their throat; they use their tongue to shield their throats from water; and their lips to shield their mouths – their lips can close behind their front teeth.

“Their back feet are webbed like a duck’s; on land, their front feet act like hands, digging, grasping and carrying things from the riverbed to the surface – rocks, for example, tucked under their chins and cradled by their arms. When they swim, they do so while holding their front paws to their chests …”  Of course you recognise a beaver from this description.

I tend to be optimistic but all the news, at home and abroad, is increasingly making me wonder how justified this is.  Worldwide, sea levels have risen by 20cm due to climate change, and the increase is not about to stop.

At a local level, we all know the Houses of Parliament are in an increasingly dangerous state of decay due to damp, rats that eat the insulation of electrical wiring, dodgy plumbing and jerry-builders, not helped by the shaking caused by the bomb that exploded in its underground car park and killed Airey Neave.  If you’ve ever been in the dingy rooms and corridors in the bowels of Westminster, you’ll know why tourists aren’t allowed there. 

For years now, there’s been talk of relocating parliament, possibly for as long as a decade, while the building’s being repaired but perhaps someone will realise that, as water levels rise and flooding becomes more common, the whole thing will flood and ultimately disappear underwater, perhaps within this century.  So why not design and build an entirely new government building on higher ground, relocate everything and open the old building to scuba divers?

If this were located more centrally in the UK, perhaps somewhere near Birmingham, which already has good road and rail links and a reasonable airport, it would have the incidental advantage of allowing HS2 to be scrapped because who’d then want to go to London?

Some London Boroughs have at last realised the short-sightedness of Maggie Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’ scheme and have already spent £140m buying more than 850 properties since 2017 in towns and cities across England to be used to house homeless people and families.  How sad that so many of the pre-Thatcherism council houses were sold off and are no longer available for people in need.

Now one final curiosity: Janet Airlines.  Next time you’re at Harry Reid Intl airport, Las Vegas, take a look around the airfield and you’re likely to see some white-painted Boeing 737s with a red strip running along the side but no logos or even the name of their operator painted on them.  They’re part of a classified fleet of aircraft used by the United States Department of the Air Force to shuttle people daily from a private terminal building to or from various government sites over the country.

It’s not clear how many places they serve but it is known that they go to the Nevada Test and Training Range, including the Tonopah Test Range, which is, according to Wikipedia, “a secret highly classified military testing facility where the U.S. Air Force has historically stored and developed secret weapons”.  Some people also believe Janet Airlines flies to the famous ‘Area 51’.

Since we can all track every aircraft that’s in the air at any time (if that’s what turns us on), real enthusiasts track these flights only to find some of them suddenly disappear from their screens because they’ve turned off their transponders.  This is possibly because they’re flying to classified military sites where new weapons and planes are designed and tested but I find myself asking why they don’t just build accommodation for workers at these sites rather than fly them there and back every day.

Perhaps there really is something spooky in the greenhouse (John Martyn fans might even think it’s the gardener).

Good and hopeful news with lessons for us all, and the value of kindness

15 August 2021

With the big hairy misogynist Taliban men re-taking Afghanistan (I wonder why they’re so frightened of people – such as women – who have different views), I’m looking at the good news this week.

The recent report from on climate change the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change didn’t contain any great surprises about just how close we are to the point of no return.  All the world’s governments have accepted the views of the hundreds of the world’s top scientists who contributed to the report that the climate emergency has unequivocally been caused by human activities and is unequivocally already affecting the planet’s land, sea and air.

But, it says, there is still hope that, if we can get to net zero CO₂ in time, global warming should stop and might even go into reverse.  It’s a big IF, of course, and it’ll need international cooperation to cut emissions to zero before the 1.5^oC increase which will be reached by 2050.  This means halving emissions by 2034, which seems likely to need a complete change in the mindset of politicians and businesses worldwide.

If every one of us does what we can, however small, and if politicians start to look beyond their chances of re-election, and if fossil fuel industries start thinking of their grandchildren rather than spending every evening counting the bawbees in their piggy banks, it can be done.

We can each make small changes at home (such as using green energy tariffs, LED lighting, improving insulation, replacing gas boilers with electric heat pumps and so on) and if the motor industry can improve electricity-powered vehicles, especially HGVs and PSVs – and reduce their cost – we’re making a start. 

I wonder if anybody has done any sums that relate the number of vehicles using UK roads and their annual mileage to the time taken to recharge their batteries so they’ll know how many charging points will be needed and the maximum distance there will need to be between them.  You only need one battery to go flat in a queue for a charging point …

On house prices, there’s good news and bad news.  The good news is that you can buy an average house in Londonderry for 4.7 times the average annual salary there;  the bad news is that an average house in Winchester costs 14 times the average salary there.  (In London, you ‘only’ need 11 years’ salary.)  

The survey was done by Halifax, the UK’s biggest mortgage lender, and shows the north / south divide to be alive and kicking:  of the ten most expensive towns, Cambridge was the furthest north while, of the ten least expensive towns, six were in Scotland, one was in Northern Ireland and the other three were Carlisle, Bradford and Hull.  The lowest average salary was £27,730 (Hull) and the highest was £59,391 (St Albans).  There’s something very wrong somewhere.

How did I get here while doing good news? 

Let’s think about beavers.  Not only do we have two local colonies (in Dartmoor and East Devon) but beavers are becoming increasingly established in Scotland with a survey by NatureScot, the government conservation agency, estimating a wild population of 1,000 beavers in Scotland, and their river management skills have been proved to reduce flooding with minimal loss of farming land.

Advised by the indigenous Klamath Tribes, America’s Nature Conservancy (a not-for-profit body, roughly equivalent to a UK charity or social enterprise) has preserved the Sycan Marsh Preserve, a 30,000 acre wetland thick with ponderosa pines in Oregon.  When the recent Bootleg fire rampaged through the forests, it slowed right down when it reached the Preserve, giving firefighters time to get ahead of it and steer it away from a research station.

The Klamath Tribes have also been working with the US Forest Service to bring back their pre-colonial forest management techniques such as clearing out undergrowth and lighting small, controlled fires that rejuvenate the soil and make firebreaks that limit ‘natural’ fires.

America’s Senate has finally passed Joe Biden’s $1tn infrastructure bill with bi-partisan support which included the infamously inconsistent Mitch McConnell.  Its aim is to update the country’s power grid and to support greener policies such as expanding networks of charging points for electric vehicles.  And a group in the House of Representatives want to allocate even more money for elderly care, childcare and other social welfare policies so there’s hope there too.

Incidentally, did you see that a tobacco company is trying to take over a vaping specialist so it will not only produce highly addictive cigarettes but also the chemical infusions that are supposed to be so good at stopping people smoking.  Why does this make me think of the ouroboros?

A man from Leroy in Canada (wouldn’t it be great if his name was Leroy?) wanted an ice cream cake so – as you do – he hopped into his helicopter and flew to the nearest town to buy one.  He parked in the Dairy Queen’s car park and was apprehended as he proceeded in a southerly direction towards his vehicle in possession of the said comestible.  He appears in court in September charged with dangerous driv operation of an aircraft.

As Cop26 nears, the UK government has discovered that another problem caused by Brexit – the queues of lorries waiting to do the paperwork in Dover – can easily be solved by converting one lane of the main route to Dover into a lorry park, and they have now removed the original time limit on this arrangement so it can become permanent.  This will naturally increase costs for UK and EU transport companies which will make them look at alternative ways of getting goods across the Channel and they will obviously think of using trains which will dramatically reduce the contribution Kent currently makes to global warming.  Brilliant!  And I believe in fairies.

Meanwhile, a right-wing American broadcaster was urging his audience not to get the vaccination right up until June, when he got Covid and changed his mind.  He died on 4 August.

During the Olympics, Hansle Parchment, a Jamaican hurdler, went to the wrong place and a volunteer paid for him to get a taxi to the Olympic Stadium, where he won a gold medal.  Afterwards, he traced the volunteer to thank her and repay the taxi fare.  Jamaica’s minister for tourism, Edmund Bartlett, has offered her a free trip to Jamaica saying “We want to reciprocate the kindness shown to one of our own.” 

That’s what kindness does.  It brings rewards that can be far greater than the original act, not necessarily to the same person but if you get a warm feeling from a kindness that somebody’s done you, you’re more likely to be kind to others and, in time, kindness will spread through society like a pyramid, from a small point at the top right down to the bottom where it covers the entire earth.  That’s my vision anyway.  Will you tell the Taliban or shall I?

Somebody else’s vision was neatly illustrated by a women’s rights demonstration in America which featured a woman holding up a placard saying “Men against abortion?  Have a vasectomy”.  Perhaps those of us who have had one should be given a badge saying “I’ve been done”?

After the horror of the shootings in Plymouth last week, I asked my Conservative-voting friend if he thought that anybody who’d had a gun licence suspended until he’d taken an anger management course should never ever be allowed to own a gun again even after taking the course;  he said he thought only police and the military should be allowed guns.  This would also prevent people who get their kicks from going out with guns to blast the heads off gods’ creatures (which he said was “silly”), a benefit I hadn’t thought of, though I’ve always worried about the mental health of people who actually enjoy killing things.

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that perhaps all drugs should be legalised, controlled and taxed.  After I’d written this, I realised that big pharma, who would have a vested interest in protecting their profits, would suddenly start using their international power to prevent the production and distribution of drugs that they hadn’t manufactured, thereby putting drug barons out of business overnight.  Go for it people!