Book thefts, tax dodgers, assisted dying, odd churches, and unknown visitors

22 June 2025

I’ve been muttering away every week for about 10 years now (although they weren’t published here until mid-2018) and I’ve sent a weekly email about it to the local volunteers of the charity for which I started it. 

I will no longer be warning this hard core of readers that another bunch of my hang-ups has been published but I guess they can bookmark the site, or ‘like’ it, or Google ‘Lesser Mutterings’, or do whatever clever people do if they want to keep up with something.

This also removes my (self-imposed) weekly deadline so I can mutter when the mood takes me or when I need to vent my anger at some of life’s stupidities about things like [fill in your own words here].

So here’s a bunch of fascinating but useless information.

For example, did you know the Bible is the one book most frequently stolen from bookshops (presumably the thieves are people who haven’t read it) and one bookseller in Austin, Texas, has said “The average King James Bible with a zipper is about 35 bucks.”  I’ve got several translations of the Bible, including the King James version, and none of them has a zip.  Perhaps I should go with the flow and steal one with a zip.

Our own HMRC spends a fortune trying to catch thieves.  In 2016, they devoted the time of 2,700 staff to investigating possible tax losses but their priorities are worrying:  five times as many people were investigating benefit fraud, which cost them an estimated £1.3bn a year, as those checking tax evasion schemes which cost an estimated £35bn each year.  Tax avoidance is, of course, OK while evasion is basically fiddling the system so as to pay less tax (I over-simplify slightly …)

(Don’t you love the “estimated” losses?  It’s like saying there are 2,500 undiscovered murders in Britain every year.)

Take Amazon, for example, who seem to have structured their UK business so that, in the last reported year, it only paid £932m (including business rates, corporation tax and national insurance contributions) on UK income of £27bn.  However, we must remember that poor old Amazon has to shunt a proportion of its taxable income over to what it describes as its “loss-making” subsidiary in Luxembourg so not much profit is left in the UK for HMRC to tax.

Curiously enough, our friendly neighbour vet retired a few years ago and sold the two privately-owned practices to a subsidiary of a company also registered in Luxembourg.  This company owns almost 3,000 veterinary practices in the UK and has increased its prices by 80% in three years, including changing the crematorium to one which costs three times as much as the old one.  They refuse to answer simple questions such as whether the new crematorium is part of the same group, or even why their vets don’t know that dying dogs tend to void their bladders.  (Freedom of Information Act?  Not here, mate.)

The Assisted Dying bill has now been passed by the House of Commons and goes to the House of Lords so we humans will soon, subject to some very important controls, be granted the same powers as pet-owners to choose a comfortable death rather than suffer months of slow and painful decline.

We’ve also seen Louise Casey’s report into the influence of ethnicity in gangs of adults who groomed children for sexual exploitation.  Her conclusion was, much to the delight of racist bigots, that a disproportionate number of Asian men were among suspects in the North Midlands even though she made it clear that, at a national level, the data is incomplete and inconsistent so it’s not possible to extrapolate her findings to say that the same is true of all grooming gangs in Britain.

It seems possible that an organisation dedicated to the persecution of Asian men could be registered as a church in America where the IRS only looks at the paperwork, not at the organisation’s aims, so some people have taken the mickey by registering daft churches.  For example, you can become an ordained minister of the Church of the Latter-Day Dude online, for free.  Its beliefs are sort of based on Taoism and entirely unconnected with the film The Big Lebowski but take much the same approach to life as the Dude;  for more details, have a look at https://dudeism.com/whatisdudeism/ . 

One of my readers recently introduced me to the political campaigning group Led by Donkeys which was formed in 2018 as an anti-Brexit movement but has since broadened its base and contrasts what politicians (of all stripes) said in the past and the exact opposite they said more recently.

You know we all find our urine smells after we’ve been eating asparagus?  Well, not all of us do.  About 6 in every 100 people can’t smell the sulphur-containing compounds in the thiol family (which are also found in skunk spray), despite most human noses being able to detect the stuff in concentrations as low as a few molecules per billion.  Even curiouser, it’s thought that about 40% of these lucky people don’t produce thiols at all.  As usual (hem hem), I’m in the majority and am always amazed by how fast my body converts the asparagus I’ve just eaten into these thiols and then releases them with other liquid waste.  (There, isn’t that phrased with a delicacy for which I’m not renowned.)

And here’s a helpful hint if you’re alone in the house and nervous:  keep something impressive by your front door, like electric hedge-clippers or a hand-saw or, even better, a chainsaw.  Then, if somebody you don’t know rings on the bell, pick it up before opening the door and let them see you holding it.  But remember, if you have a chain on the door, stand to one side of the door when opening it because a good kick will tear out the screws holding most chains and, if you’re behind the door, it’ll hit you in the face.

On that cheerful note …

More ‘magic’, billions, water companies, justice and immigration

17 May 2025

After last week’s mutterings, a friend suggested migration could be added to the list of currently inexplicable things, which made me realise I’d inadvertently been anthropocentric and ignored insects, birds, fish and mammals that migrate for thousands of miles.

The best known is probably the arctic tern which commutes some 15,000 miles between summers in Shetland and summers in Antarctica but they have the ability to sleep while flying, closing down half their brain while the other half keeps the wings moving. 

Perhaps more impressive is the monarch butterfly which migrates annually between North America and Mexico and, though less well-known, the painted lady butterfly which travels between Africa and Northern Europe.  How do they do it?  It’s been suggested that they use the earth’s magnetic field to control their journeys but this is constantly changing as the magnetic poles move so they have to allow for the effect of the deviation if they want to get to the right place.

However, what I find most impressive is the fact that monarch butterflies don’t live very long and each migration is undertaken by newly-hatched butterflies that have never done it before so the route, and the allowance for magnetic pole movements, must somehow be genetically imprinted in their brains.

What will they do when the magnetic poles swap positions, which the alignment of magnetic particles in ancient rocks has shown they do?  It’s thought the swap doesn’t happen overnight and takes a very long time so perhaps the poles just drift away from the geographical poles until they reach the other end of the earth and the North Star becomes the South Star while the Southern Cross becomes the Northern Cross.  And, of course, half-way they’ll be the Eastern Star and the Western Cross, or possibly vice versa.

Many readers may remember my continuing problem with envisaging large numbers, like anything over 10.  Well, I’ve come across another example of just how impossible it is to grasp large numbers and the differences between them.  To help me picture the difference between a million and a billion, I was told to think in seconds:  one million seconds is about 12 days while one billion seconds is about 32 years.

Aaarrrggghhh!

I hope the people with more billions in the bank than they can ever spend will, if governments are too frightened to make them pay more tax, give it away to those people and countries whose need is so much greater.  I also hope that the wind is changing.  Last week, 40% of Centrica’s shareholders voted against the board’s recommended pay plans.  Chris O’Shea, the group’s chief executive trousered £4.3m last year and, yes, he took almost twice as much the previous year but the energy crisis encouraged them to impose huge increases on their customers’ energy bills, taking many of them even further into debt, while O’Shea (and other senior managers) get away with daylight robbery.

Thames Water (the one on the verge of bankruptcy) has a new CEO, Chris Weston, who took a £195,000 bonus after only three months in post and was asked by the Defra Select Committee to justify this.  “Because I’m worth it” he replied.  Can anybody can think of any sensible justification for saying this?

The government is now planning to block the payment of huge staff bonuses from a £3bn emergency loan to Thames Water, which claims these bonuses are vital to retaining its management and that they are its most valuable asset.  Whaaat?  Aren’t these the same managers that screwed everything up in the first place and led to the company being fined millions of pounds?

Down here, South West Water is owned by the Pennon Group and has increased our bill by 30% for the next year while chief executive Susan Davy generously waived her right to bonuses in the two years to March 2024 leaving her with a paltry £860,000 in the latter year (including the deferred reinvestment of shares).  My heart fails to bleed for her.

There’s also something wrong with our justice system when a peaceful Stop Oil protestor is sent to prison for 4 years and a violent child rapist gets 18 months.

And Peter Sullivan, 68, has spent the last 38 years in prison for a murder that forensic evidence has now decided he didn’t commit.

Another interesting comment came my way this week, something I hadn’t heard before, that the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

So which side should I take on Labour’s latest plans to curb immigration?  Keir Starmer this week spoke of a need to end the “squalid experiment in open borders” in what cynics might describe as an attempt to win Reform voters.  What self-respecting Respect member would be willing to support Labour?  It’s believed Nigel Farage celebrated Starmer’s comments with a bevvy and a fag.

Others saw a connection between Starmer’s view and the ‘rivers of blood’ speech given by the Conservative racist Enoch Powell in 1968.

Next week, all state benefits will be scrapped to encourage recipients to get on their bikes and find work (thank you Norman Tebbit, another ancient Conservative politician, for that suggestion) and the Isle of Wight will be declared an independent territory with 0% taxes through which all UK ‘earnings’ over £250,000 can be channelled tax-free.

And an old story to cheer people up.  The King of Sweden once visited Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize winner who holds 50 honorary degrees and is former President of the Royal Society and Chief Executive and Director of the Francis Crick Institute.  On the royal arrival, the receptionist rang Nurse’s office and said “Gentleman here, he’s … er … watcher say yer king of, mate?”