26 July 2025
While the bigwigs are trashing societies and economies worldwide, here’s some light relief in a selection of irresistible and utterly forgettable facts.
Have you noticed that Trump’s combover has been gradually re-dyed from blonde to grey? Curiously, the much-published photograph of him with Jeffrey Epstein (which incidentally proves to his complete satisfaction that he was never close to Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell so his name cannot possibly appear in the Epstein files that he’s desperately trying to stop being published) … where was I? … oh yes, the photo shows his hair was originally brown.
During his first presidency, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first four years as president. The Washington Post counted them.
I wonder when Donald Trump will realise his country was named after a filthy foreigner and needs to be renamed. Trumpton would work and Trump could change his name to Captain Flack, the head honcho in Trumpton fire station (younger readers overseas may need to google this).
I generally try not to criticise people for physical features that are not of their choice, like height or physical abnormalities, but I do have great difficulty watching Trump when he purses his mouth into a shape that exactly matches a textbook anus.
A friend of mine has an EE phone. When it broke recently, they bought a new phone that had to be verified by a code which, in a stroke of genius, EE sent to the old phone with the damaged SIM card.
This is the sort of unintelligent disregard for customers you expect from Ryanair. I flew with Ryanair once, some 30 years ago, in the days before they sold flights for a token amount and then gave you the choice of paying extra to sit next to your violent, autistic child or to save money by letting a stranger sit next to them while you catch up on your sleep.
Anyway, our outbound flight was OK apart from landing us at an airport some 15km from Rome and bussing us into the centre. When we left, they bussed us back to the airport before telling us all their UK flights that day had been cancelled but they could book us on a flight 4 days later, which left a lot of irate passengers trying to find other ways home. All other direct flights were full, as were trains, so we had to buy an extra night in the hotel and spend a fortune on scheduled flights back the next day, via Prague.
I naturally wrote to the CEO, Michael O’Leary, about this and asked if could think of any reason why anybody should fly Ryanair. He ultimately answered “reliability and price” so I pointed out he obviously hadn’t read my original letter and told him not to bother to reply.
Ryanair’s attitude to their customers is clear on their website: they’ll fly you to Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, but you’ll actually land in Malmö in Sweden. Likewise, they’ll take you to Florence but you’ll land in Pisa. O’Leary was once famously quoted as saying he’d wipe somebody’s bottom for a fiver, which perfectly sums up his character.
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson to avoid frightening the peasants, is out of prison and in the news again, at least in Epping. Lucy Brown, once part of his inner circle that includes the son of one of the Krays, a Canadian far-right publisher and a criminal convicted of threatening to slash the throat of a shopkeeper during a robbery, has described him as impulsive.
She has said “He’ll just rush in, straight away, whatever feels right at the time. He just does not think. Which is why he falls in [to] prison all the time, because he’s always saying stuff that he shouldn’t.”
More management disdain for the people who pay them was seen at the Nationwide Building Society’s AGM last week when an increase in the CEO’s pay of 43% was ‘approved’ (though voters didn’t actually have the power to stop it) and Debbie Crosbie will snaffle £7m of the assets of a mutual society that belongs to its members (who described the increase as “an obscenity” and “hypocritical”).
Another needy CEO is Trump himself, whose ratings are falling daily. Increasingly, Americans are leaving their home country because they can see Trump destroying it, and many of them are relocating to the Cotswolds (formerly known as the Couttswolds because so many rich Brits live there). One of the latest immigrants (who, according to my taxi driver last week, are the sole cause of all Britain’s problems) is the American comedian and former chatshow host Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, the actor Portia de Rossi.
This seems diametrically opposed to right wing claims that Britain’s millionaires are emigrating in droves to pay even less tax elsewhere, but who lets contradictory facts stand in the way of a good slogan.
A possible side effect of one of Trump’s ill-considered decisions is that he should consider himself to be female. One of his first acts as president was to sign an order that gender is “immutably” defined at the moment of conception, saying “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell …’Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.” Which reveals his total ignorance of human biology.
In fact, for the first 6-7 weeks after conception, it isn’t possible to determine the gender of a foetus because a Y chromosome doesn’t start to develop testes until then. However, most scientists now accept that sex is not immutably anything and gender is much more complex than just being male or female.
Trump’s unrecorded response to this criticism was “Bollocks to that, or not, as the case may be”.
Still, it does pave the way for an antique joke: “How do you tell the sex of a chromosome?” / “Take its genes down.”
Lesser Mutterings 