Mismanagement worldwide, Israeli BS and other biosolids

12 July 2025

Only 20 years too late, last week saw the publication of Sir Wyn Williams’ inquiry into the attempts of the Post Office and Fujitsu to blame their own Horizon computer system’s faults on the people running their post offices for them.  It took Williams 225 days of hearings and evidence from 298 witnesses to discover that about 1,000 people were wrongly convicted, their lives destroyed.  Some of them were sent to prison, at least 13 of them of them committed suicide or self-harmed, and all of their families suffered alongside them – an estimated 10,000 people were affected by the corporate denials.

What makes it all that much worse is that both the Post Office and Fujitsu were aware of the problems with the Horizon system.  One postmistress made 256 calls to the helpdesk about Horizon problems but still ended up in prison, and many others had asked for help when the system produced inaccurate figures.

The report described the scandal as “profoundly disturbing” and said that those who had been unjustly accused were victims of “wholly unacceptable behaviour perpetrated by a number of individuals employed by and/or associated with the Post Office and Fujitsu”.  It has also opened the door to include families in the wider net of those eligible for compensation.

So far, not one of the managers of the Post Office or Fujitsu has been held accountable but the next stage of Williams’ inquiry will look at the question of blame, and a police investigation is in progress.  Perhaps they’ll remember corporate manslaughter was made a specific criminal offence in 2007.

The government is taking another step in the right direction with its proposals to ban the use of non-disclosure agreements when somebody has taken advantage of their seniority to grope, hassle, patronise or otherwise discriminate against another person (usually junior to them).  Until now, if the employer felt a complaint is justified, they could give the person some money in exchange for their promise never to tell anyone else about the abuse, thereby supporting the abuser and risking a repeat performance;  it’s hoped the new proposals will delete this restriction from previous NDAs.

It would be nice to see the government also taking action to stop other abuses of ‘the system’ by organisations like Nationwide Building Society and Thames Water.  Nationwide, a mutual society owned by its member, has refused to allow us to decide if its chief executive, Debbie Crosbie, is ‘worth’ a 43% pay increase to £7m.  It’s argued that, since it took over Virgin Money, it should compare its executives’ pay with the big banks but it hasn’t said why it’s happy to live with pay controls that are less restrictive than banks.  Is Crosbie suddenly ‘worth’ 43% more?  Didn’t it even occur to anyone making the comparison that bankers are overpaid?

Thames Water is equally profligate but with government money.  Having been given an emergency loan to keep the company alive, they gave almost £2.5m of it to just 21 managers and plan to give them the same again in December, as well as a further £10.8m next year.  The chair, Sir Adrian Montague, claimed that creditors had “insisted” on these payments but it was then discovered he’d lied about this and the Guardian has seen and quoted from the minutes of a Thames board meeting defining payments as “retention payments” so as to avoid the legal ban on performance-related bonuses.

This, remember, is the company that is on the verge of bankruptcy and pleading to be let off paying huge fines for mismanagement.

In America, Amazon, the well-known tax dodger, is asking employees to come to work voluntarily (i.e. unpaid, but no pressure …) to help out with ‘Prime Day’.  Will anybody give me odds that managers and board members will be sacrificing several days pay to show solidarity with the people that do the work?

America’s chief executive consistently shows similar signs of incompetence, swaying like a pansy vin a hurricane.  His havering over tariffs has left most of the world in financial limbo, wondering what they’ll be.  The latest is his imposition of a 35% tariff on imports from Canada.

Luckily, or possibly not, the UK has already agreed a deal with Donald Trump that increases the costs of stuff we sell to America by 10%.  UK exporters are not lining the streets and cheering.

Trump still has to announce what tariffs he’s going to impose on imports from the EU but, if they’re more than 10%, Brexiteers can point out that we might have had to wait 9 years, but we’re now doing not as badly as the EU.  Errr ummm.  “Not as badly as …” is something to be proud of?

Trump and his former BFF Elon Musk have fallen out and Musk is now forming his own political party to oppose the Republicans, something that worries Tesla investors who wiped another 10% off the shares on hearing the news.  It’s rumoured that the Democrats are delighted about a new party that will split the Republican vote. 

Israel takes a slightly different approach to their repeated attacks on civilians and aid workers.  Medical officials, humanitarian workers and doctors in Gaza say they’re struggling to cope with thousands of people injured and 800 killed by the continuing Israeli attacks on Palestinians seeking aid.  Israel military has repeated it does not target civilians, takes all feasible precautions to avoid harm to non-combatants and abides by international law.

The UK has gone beyond bullshit and has been spreading human waste on farmlands, calling it “biosolids”.  It’s actually the sludge which is left in the bottom of the tank when the sewage has been treated, well, sort of treated.  They leave the smell unchanged and it still contains flame retardants, pharmaceuticals, microplastics, heavy metals and toxic waste as well as ‘forever chemicals’ which briefly enrich the soil before seeping down into aquifers and running off into stream and rivers.

Down here, the sludge is put in huge tanks that are towed along local roads by tractors that are so large the drivers don’t need any special training because they know they’ll crush anything they hit. 

An accident would be interesting, if fragrant. 

The dangers of Trusk, casinos and politicising space exploration

22 February 2025

Somebody recently accused me of hating Donald Trump so I thought I should point out I don’t know the man so I can hate him?  I am, however, very nervous about what he’s been doing since he came to power, and what an unholy mess he’s creating for the next generation and their offspring.  I know he and I will both be dead before the full effects of his destruction can be seen but that doesn’t cheer me at all.

Nor do I hope for his death, though I wouldn’t be upset if he died;  as Clarence Darrow, the 19^th century lawyer, once said “I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”

Trump once wrote (ghost-wrote?) a book about deals but clearly hasn’t a clue about what a deal is.  For me, a good deal is when both sides are happy with the solution and are happy to work together from there on even if they didn’t get all they had asked for.  Trump’s idea of a deal seems to be to get an outsider to talk to one of the parties and then impose the ‘deal’ on the other party.

Remember this is the man who bankrupted a casino, which is pretty hard to do because the one thing known about casinos is that, in the long run, the house will always win.

It’s based on Bernoulli’s Law of Large Numbers.  In the case of the roulette wheel, this law says that, if each spin is random, there’s no way of knowing what number will come up next but, over (say) a million spins, all the money placed on about 27,000 of them will go straight to the house.  Now multiply that by the number of times each wheel spins in 24 hours (remember casinos don’t have clocks in them so there’s no way of knowing if it’s night or day and people just keep on playing); and again by how many wheels there are, then add in the ranks of one-arm bandits and blackjack tables and side entertainments.  That’s a lot of money, so it takes somebody really stupid to break a casino.

And this is the man, an American, who’s trying to decide with Vladimir Putin how to end Russia’s war on Ukraine and he expects Ukraine to accept whatever they agree.  Trump even said last week “[Ukraine] should never have started it”.  Since the second amendment to the American Constitution gives citizens (limited) powers to own guns (I paraphrase), this means that, if somebody goes into a neighbour’s house uninvited and shoots somebody, Trump will decree that the dead person’s family should never have started it.

Incidentally, his current wife was born in the part of Yugoslavia that is now Slovenia and is a naturalised American.  Do Trump’s new orders mean that their son Barron will be deported because Melania is an immigrant and her son therefore has no right of residency in the US?

Trump has also claimed Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s approval rating is only 4% in Ukraine but when has he ever let facts spoil a rant?  A February poll in Ukraine showed Zelenskyy is trusted by 57% of the population (so he’s supported by a lot more of his people than Trump is by his).

Trump’s even described Zelenskyy as “A Dictator without Elections”, something that he’d never dare say about Vladimir Putin, even though an anti-war singer, Vadim Stroykin, fell from a ninth-floor to his death during a recent visit from security services.  Rumour has it that defenestration is now rising up the charts of the most common causes of death in Russia.

Even Nigel Farage said “you shouldn’t always take things Donald Trump says absolutely literally… Let’s be clear, Zelenskyy is not a dictator”.

Trump’s psychopathy has a certain academic fascination and somebody recently suggested he’s not a narcissist but a solipsist, so he’s the only thing that is real and everything else is unreal and he can ignore the Constitution and laws of America because they only exist in his head.

This does seem a little extreme but so are his media posts:  after he’d cancelled Manhattan’s congestion charges, clearly a matter of huge concern to the entire world, he posted “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”  Whaaat!  Keep taking the pills Donnie boy, I think you’ve been forgetting them.

Another critic attributed his stupidity to the fragile ego of a sullen and resentful old man, which seems equally valid.

Meanwhile, with the other evil twin, he is selflessly cutting federal spending and Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE*) is closing government agencies and firing everyone who is still stupid enough to believe in democracy and the rule of law.  The compensation for what we would call the ‘unfair dismissal’ of these people could be astronomical.

Musk is open about suffering from Asperger’s and he shares Trump’s disconnect between the bits of his brain that think and those that speak:  he recently accused Joe Biden of abandoning two American astronauts at the International Space Station for “political reasons”.  Andy Mogensen, one of the astronauts, responded “What a lie …” so Musk called Mogensen “fully retarded” nyah nyah.  (Their return had been scheduled for February but was delayed till March because of delays in preparing the spacecraft by SpaceX).

But is Musk clever or just rich?  He thinks he’s clever, but he’s ‘worth’ $400bn and is 56.  This means that, if he lives to be 96, he can afford to spend $27,400,000 every day if he never receives another cent.  He can therefore throw unimaginable sums of money at his ideas, some of which are successful and bolster his reputation, like Tesla Inc (and SpaceX – see above), and some of which are stupid and forgotten.

However, while he is funding his ideas, he’s giving a lot of money to the people who work on them and supply their needs, from infrastructure to rocket engines, so it’s not all bad.

If only he’d devote as much money to slowing climate change …

*          Remember the Doges of Venice were the rulers of a city which is sinking slowly into the mud.

“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

The biggest anti-Semite, Trump the Felon, Labour dithering, bank’s irresponsibility

1 June 2024

The most effective anti-Semite is now proving to be Benjamin Netanyahu.  This week, he excelled himself by killing about 50 people living in tents by bombing the Rafah refugee camp.  He argued that Hamas terrorists could have been hiding there and what are a few innocent lives worth compared with the death of a terrorist.  He didn’t put it in quite those words but the man is obviously bonkers.

His actions have even caused America, until now one of the biggest supporters of the state of Israel, to pull back and limit their support, particularly since reports have claimed the bombs used in the attack were made in America.

Even those of us who were appalled and horrified by Hamas’s unheralded and murderous attack on Israel in October have been even more horrified by Israel’s wholly disproportionate response that has been extended into a genocidal attack on everybody living in Gaza.  People who have unwisely compared this with the Nazis’ holocaust are missing the point:  no desire for racial purity is being claimed, just Netanyahu’s desire to delay his ending up in a criminal court.

We also heard this week that Israel has been using its intelligence agencies to “surveil (sic – how I hate that word, backformed from surveillance), hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior staff” of the International Criminal Court by intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents, for at least ten years, so Netanyahu had advance warning of what they were thinking.

Isarel also made it clear that “we know where you live”, sending pictures of their families to people who didn’t seem to believe the sun rises in Israel and were seeking an arrest warrant for Netanyahu himself.

It is no doubt coincidental that the governments of Ireland, Norway and Spain have decided to recognise the state of Palestine.

How long will it be before Netanyahu joins Donald Trump in having to offer a defence to a court?  Perhaps he’ll do the decent thing and have heart failure first.

Trump himself has been found guilty of all 34 of the offences he was charged with after only 12 hours of deliberation by the jury.  Even though his crimes were committed to hide things from voters deciding whether to elect him in 2016, he’s unlikely to be given a custodial sentence because telling lies in politics and falsifying business records are ‘white collar’ crimes, but he could have to report regularly to New York’s probation department.  If he is – God forbid – re-elected as president, you can imagine it can’t you:  “Sorry Benjie, I can’t meet you next Tuesday, I’ve got to report to my probation officer”.

What amazes me is that his poll ratings have hardly reacted to his exposure as a liar and a thief and devout Republications everywhere are claiming it’s a stitch-up.  I wonder how many of them have read all the documents presented to the court and listened to all the arguments before making this judgement.

Worryingly, his conviction doesn’t prevent his becoming president again.

Which reminds me that the largest and most complete Stegosaurus fossil ever found is coming up for auction at Sothebys in the summer with an estimate of $4m-$6m.  I haven’t seen any reference to the costs of posts and packing but perhaps it’s ‘buyer collects’.

Which reminds me Jeremy Hunt has promised that current tax thresholds will stay the same for six years, thereby forcing millions more to pay more tax, but he’s said wouldn’t increase taxes.  Anybody else spot the self-contradiction?

The Labour party has been getting its knickers in a twist by refusing to let Diane Abbott, who said something stupid and apologised, stand as a Labour candidate but, luckily, commonsense has prevailed and they’ve changed their minds.

Whether Angela Rayner’s intervention, saying she couldn’t see any reason why Abbott shouldn’t stand for Labour, made any difference, we’ll never know, but it stopped Keir Starmer’s dithering.

Rayner had previously been accused by Tories of having dodged tax on the sale of her former council house but she was given absolute clearance this week by the police, the local council and HMRC.  HMRC of course says it never comments on an individual’s tax matters but, somehow, what a surprise, its conclusions were made public and they stated categorically that she had done nothing wrong.

And a final apolitical thought:  have you ever realised how banks have become less and less interested in securing the money they hold on trust for their customers?  These ‘touch and go’ cards mean that anyone with somebody else’s card can use it to spend up to £100 without permission.  Again and again, until their credit limit is reached (or the card’s owner realises and cancels the card).

Well, the banks will no doubt say, it’s just like cash, which anyone else can spend if you lose it.  Except that it isn’t because the chances of dropping several hundreds of pounds in notes in a public place are very much less.

And, if your account is hacked and your money is transferred to an unknown account, will the banks chase it and refund it?  Will they buggery.  You should have had a second level of security, they say.  Why?  Because (they won’t say) their first level of security is grossly insufficient and they don’t have any control systems that pick up things like a first-ever cash transfer to Switzerland, or repeated payments to betting companies that you’ve never made before.

But why should they take care of the money you’ve entrusted to them?  It’d just increase costs.

This has all happened to a friend of mine recently so, if you’re thinking of changing banks, avoid Barclays like the plague.

Sociopathy in leaders, the Peace March and Linnean classifications

11 November 2023

Why is it that the motivations of people who reach ‘the top’ are rarely obvious until it’s too late?  Looking round the world today, we can see that most so-called leaders are sociopaths, and can only guess which were born sociopathic, which learned sociopathy and which had sociopathy thrust upon them.  I wonder sometimes if their sociopathy is what makes them want to be low on the totem pole*.

One of the most recent and obvious examples is Benjamin Netanyahu who is happy to continue slaughtering civilians en masse, including children, until Hamas releases the hostages they’re holding.  He admitted earlier this week that he wants to retain “indefinite control” over the Gaza Strip followed but, two days later, he U-turned and told Fox news “We don’t seek to conquer Gaza, we don’t seek to occupy Gaza, and we don’t seek to govern Gaza.” 

Of course actions of the leaders of Hamas who ordered the 7 October attack are just as unforgiveable and their holding civilians as hostages and reportedly torturing and murdering Israeli people is condemned by all right-thinking people.  As are Israel’s claims – if they’re true – that Hamas leaders are sheltering in and under hospitals and refugee camps so it’s OK for Israel to kill hundreds of medics, patients and refugees in the hope of killing a Hamas leader.

Nor must we forget the sociopaths Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and the leaders of oppressive countries like Afghanistan and Myanmar and North Korea and rather too many in Africa.  At least in America and the UK, there are still enquiries and courts that expose the extent of the sociopathy and, in both countries, former leaders are being proved dishonest and untrustworthy.

However, in Donald Trump, America not only found the classic sociopath but elected him as president and, despite all his crimes and misdemeanours, there’s a terrifying chance they might elect him again.  We can only hope that, by election time, he’ll be in prison and bankrupt and something in the Constitution can be used to prevent a convicted criminal being president.

Our home-grown sociopaths pale into insignificance beside people like these but Boris Johnson came close – somebody who knows him well said they wouldn’t trust him to feed the cat – and Suella Braverman, our sociopathic Home Secretary, is emulating him with some the daftest comments we’ve seen for some time. 

All over the world, pro-Palestine demonstrations have taken place to plead for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza and today’s Peace March in London attracted an estimated 300,000 people (or tofu-eating, Guardian-reading, left-wing wokerati as Braverman might have said).  The organisers, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, had invited “all people of conscience to join us in peacefully marching” and confirmed they were working with the police to ensure public safety.

In an article in the Times on Wednesday, Braverman described the event as a “hate march” organised by and for “left wingers” and “pro-Palestinian mobs” and she told the police to prevent its happening.  Using suitably diplomatic language, the police reminded her of their operational independence and told her to piss off.

As I write, it appears a small counter-protest attracted a few burger-eating, Daily Mail-reading, right-wing reactionaries, more than 100 of whom were arrested for violence, but there have been no reports of any arrests on the march itself.

In defiance of the ministerial code, Braverman’s article had apparently not been cleared with Downing Street; various brown-nosed ministers have distanced themselves from her comments but Rishi ‘Never Do Today What You Can Possibly Put Off Till Tomorrow’ Sunak hasn’t yet fired her.

Not that this matters to a sociopath who wants to be prime minister next year;  or, if the Tories lose the election, leader of the opposition, and is probably one of those stupid people who believes that any publicity is good publicity (what about the Yorkshire Ripper?)

At this point, I must admit to a personal feeling of sympathy for the sociopaths who are so insecure that they need something like power or money or admirers to give them any sense of self-respect.  I also have great difficulty in believing that some people really are narcissists and wonder if they really think they’re wonderful when they’re constipated, or have diarrhoea. 

But I do find it difficult to name powerful people in recent history who didn’t tend that way and, after some thought, could only come up with Barack Obama and John Major.

I also wonder how much of the damage they’ve suffered is down to their parents.  For example, we know that Boris Johnson’s father never really achieved much (who’d even heard of him before Boris appeared on the scene?) and I suspect he’s one of those people who thinks it’s a compliment if somebody calls him ‘incorrigible’ which, while it seems to be used as a reluctant, semi-admiring description of somebody who is unable to change their ways, it actually means “incurably bad, or depraved” (OED) or “incapable of being corrected or amended” (Merriam-Webster).

Sociopathy and brown-nosing even enters the world of botany and zoology.  The naming of newly discovered plants and animals follows an internationally accepted two-word system set up by Carl Linnaeus on the 18^th century:  the first word identifies the genus, the second the species, often using the discoverer’s name or that of another well-known figure.  Some of these names are now being reviewed because their names related to people who have since been discredited, like a beetle named Anophthalmus hitleri in 1937.  Actually, since it’s brown and eyeless and looks rather like a very small turd, that one seems OK to me, as does a moth discovered in 2017 that was christened Neopalpa donaldtrumpi because it has blond head scales and small genitalia.

Then, last week, the American Ornithological Society said it was changing the names of birds named after racists, slavers and misogynists.  Perhaps Britain could follow suit and the Great Tit, currently Parus major, could become Parus Johnsoni.

*          Despite ‘a low man (sic) on the totem pole’ being used colloquially to indicate low status, the importance of people pictured on a totem pole actually increases downwards.  Well, you wouldn’t want to be the chief and have your image carved at the top where nobody could see it would you?

Liars, pronoun problems, BRICS, raisins and Cormac McCarthy

17 June 2023

Wasn’t it fascinating last weekend to watch the UK’s best-known liar resign because he believed somebody had lied to him after he had himself been judged to have lied to (“misled” in parliamentary language) the House of Commons.  Followed by his remaining fan stamped her little foot and resigned, saying she was “heartbroken” (!) because she wasn’t given a peerage, except her resignation letter has not yet been received.  It’ll be interesting to see how ‘the people’ vote in the by-elections the resignations caused.

Reactions to Boris Johnson’s petulance were predictable, and occasionally laughable. 

One of the more serious views was that “As a master of public manipulation, Boris Johnson has few equals … The announcement [of his resignation] has familiar characteristics: ‘convicted by a kangaroo court’ [and] ‘undemocratic’ is difficult to square with the ultimate responsibility that the committee places on the House of Commons. The Labour chair is thrown into the mix to give his friends in the popular press a hook onto which to hang their anti-Labour propaganda … He can continue to cause damage to the party as he has done so conspicuously in recent years, because he retains a following in the country.” 

This could have been seen as sour grapes from one of the tofu-eating wokerati had it not been penned by Lord (Michael) Heseltine, deputy prime minister in John Major’s Conservative government from 1995 to 1997, who is clearly keen to reunite the Conservative party.

On the lighter side, the Sunday Times quoted one of his close friends who said “He is making loads of money.  He needs money. He likes money.  I think he’ll use the money to try to buy back all the people he lost in his life.” 

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Or, as Bob Dylan wrote “All the money you made will never buy back your soul.”

A different view was taken by Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, who has said – apparently with a straight face – that people need to live within their means as the Government works to bring down inflation;  and that public sector pay rises risk increasing inflation and making everyone poorer.  She then produced a classic example of ‘the pronoun problem’ and said “We too must show restraint when it is needed”.

Where does this “we” come from?  Is that “we who struggle through on six-figure pay packets” or we whose existence she denies, like a friend of ours who is a young (= no pension) single-mother with a challenging 5-year old who found it hard enough to survive on child support and universal credit even before she got long covid and prices went through the roof and she can’t get a job that fits round school hours and holidays?

Not quite as unrepresented is the former American president Donald Trump who apparently had difficulties finding lawyers to represent him after several had declined to defend him at his latest court appearance.  After all, who’d use a law firm that had unsuccessfully attempted to defend prisoner 41283649 Trump Donald.  “Well, we only did it for the money” doesn’t impress.  “We did it so we could all admire his new haircut” would be better.

That evening, Fox News showed a live broadcast of Trump’s speech and, towards the end, split the screen to show side-by-side pictures of Joe Biden and Trump under which one of Trump’s loony fans in Fox had written the chyron “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”  The text remained up until the following programme and Fox News said they had “addressed” the situation – possibly with a bottle of champagne?  Fox rivals CNN and MSNBC had declined the opportunity to broadcast Trump’s rant.

South Africa is supposed to host this year’s BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit to discuss closer partnership between the five countries.  The problem is that R’s president is one Vladimir Putin who is wanted by an international court on charges of war crimes and, as a party to the Rome statute on which the international criminal court is based, South Africa would be required to arrest Putin on his arrival and send him to the Hague for trial.  The summit may therefore be relocated to China or India, who don’t believe suspected war criminals should be arrested.

By the way, a recent study published in the journal Current Biology claimed that worms also get the munchies when stoned.  They soaked worms in a cannabinoid solution and the worms starting eating more.  Actually, I don’t get the munchies but I do get terribly thirsty.

We ordered a food delivery this week and were sent an email saying some items we’d ordered weren’t available so they’d substituted them.  So far, fair enough since we can return unwanted substitutions but we’d ordered a 1kg packet of Sainsbury Raisins, Seedless, and they’d only got 500g packets so they substituted what we wanted with just one packet of the latter.  Wouldn’t somebody, anybody, even someone with the brains of a stoned worm, have realised two packets of 500g would have given us what we’d ordered?

The Pulitzer-winning novelist, Cormac McCarthy, died this week.  His most famous work was probably ‘The Road’, or ‘No Country for Old Men’ both of which were filmed, the latter by the Coen brothers almost straight from the book and the funniest line in a (very violent) film came directly from McCarthy’s words.

One of my favourite McCarthy quotations uses the pronoun problem to much better effect.  It comes from ‘Cities of the Plain’, one of the Border Trilogy, when someone is telling a friend about his plans to rebuild a shack on a top of a hill, miles from the nearest road.

“You think you’re goin’ to be able to get the truck up here?”

“I think we might, could comin’ up the other side.”

“What’s this we shit?  You got a rat in your pocket?”

Two liars, Russia’s defences, new capitalists and dating

3 June 2023

The most extraordinary story this week has been the public enquiry into the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic. 

It’s being led by Baroness Heather Hallett, a retired English judge of the Court of Appeal and a crossbench life peer, who was praised by Boris Johnson when he selected her to lead the enquiry in December 2021.  “She brings a wealth of experience to the role, and I know shares my determination that the inquiry examines in a forensic and thoroughgoing way the government’s response to the pandemic,” he said.

However, as things have progressed, this seems to have been another of Johnson’s bad decisions, for him at least, as the enquiry has demanded his unredacted WhatsApp messages, diaries and notebooks from the time.  Initially, the Cabinet Office and Johnson both refused to release them but, possibly realising that his refusal made us all think he had something to hide, Johnson had changed his mind and handed the material directly to the enquiry himself.

The Cabinet Office has said that, for the first time in history, there are “important issues of principle” around releasing information that might not be relevant.  Happy to ignore an established, centuries-old precedent, the government is claiming this would set a new precedent that could lead to demands for information relating to serving ministers including – tell it not in Gath – the prime minister.

Goodness gracious!  Transparency of government?  Huh!

(Cynics have, of course, now questioned Johnson’s motives in releasing the stuff.)

The saddest story of the week is about Phillip Schofield, the former co-presenter of a morning TV show.  Schofield was a married man with children who has apparently been conflicted about his sexuality and stayed in the closet until quite recently when he admitted publicly that he was gay.

From then on, it’s difficult to know exactly what happened except that he’s admitted having a sexual relationship with a younger man who worked in the team supporting his programme.  They had first met when the other man was 15 (he’s now 21) but Schofield says they had no any further contact until several years when he admits introducing him to people who gave him the job.

Up to this point, WTF, but the tabloids say Schofield lied to his co-presenter and then lied to quite a lot of people about what had happened.  This was stupid and, unsurprisingly, he left the programme.

Perhaps because nothing interesting was happening in the political world (see above) and people were no longer dying in Ukraine and the American economy wasn’t on the brink of collapse, this suddenly became a cause célèbre that sold lots of space in the media.  Comparisons were made with Jimmy “Paedo” Savile and Donald “I can grab any woman’s pussy” Trump although, in Schofield’s case, only one other consenting adults was involved and the real problem was that he had lied.

In an interview broadcast last week by his former employer, it was obvious he’d lost weight and he looked dreadful.  He seemed to answer direct and painful questions honestly and, on a ‘likely to commit suicide’ scale of 1 to 10, I’d have put him around 9.  He actually said that if his daughters weren’t “guarding” him, he wouldn’t be here today.  I also thought there was some comfort to be found in his ‘betrayed’ family rallying around to protect him.

I didn’t know much about him before all this happened but am now feeling sorry for him because of all the shit that’s been thrown at him.  I hope he survives.

More depressing news is that, as of Wednesday, Elon Musk is once again the world’s richest person.  This is known because Bloomberg produce a daily Billionaires’ Index (though they don’t use an apostrophe) which publishes updated figures for the top 500 at the end of every trading day in New York.  Can you imagine anything more pathetic than people who care about this sort of thing?  “Oh look mummy, I’ve gone up from number 472 to number 468 in yesterday’s list” / “Shut up and deal.”

And, in Russia, some missiles of unknown origin were shot down over Moscow, breaking a window and causing a small fire.  Loosely translated, Vladimir Putin’s response was “They came from Ukraine but we’ve proved how effective our air defence systems are”. 

Ukraine is about 500 miles from Moscow so, if they did come from Ukraine, Russia’s defence systems didn’t spot the things until they actually reached Moscow;  or perhaps destroying them over a field in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t have been as newsworthy? 

If the missiles were Ukrainian, we’ve all been shown just how far into Russia they can reach before being detected by Russian defence systems. 

France has one of the highest taxes on cigarettes in the EU with the result that entrepreneurs have set up factories that churn out millions of illegal cigarettes and now, according to research by KPMG, a third of cigarettes smoked in France were bought illegally. 

Tempting as it is to admire these people for following the basic precepts of free market capitalism by finding a new market and making money from it, we need to remember that the only reason the French government is getting upset is that it’s illegal, and the only reason it’s illegal is that the government can’t tax the sales.

Meanwhile, a new development in the ‘hungry singles’ market is the Pear ring*, a turquoise rubber ring that you wear to let other people know you’re on the market or, as the marketing blurb puts it “to show you’re single and open to DMs”.

(Being somewhat out of touch with dating, I decided that Doc Martens wouldn’t be much of a turn-on so I looked it up and gather it now means ‘direct messaging’ on social media, which leaves me wondering how you get a name and contact point so you can DM them and, if it means talking to them, why you don’t just talk there and then and sod the DM?)

*          Pear ring / pairing – geddit?

Lies, conspiracy theories and Intelligent Design

29 April 2023

“I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes”

Thus spake Bob Dylan in 1997 and, 26 years later, nothing has changed and conspiracy theories abound.

How to not-lie was demonstrated by Piers Morgan, a journalist I hold in about the same regard as I do Andrew Neil.  Prince Harry has claimed Morgan knew about the hacking of his mother’s phone while he edited News of the World which reported that Diana had once phoned Oliver Hoare “three times in 9 minutes and hung up as she heard Oliver’s voice”.  This seems remarkably precise a report to have been based on guesswork.  Also, the television presenter Jeremy Paxman, speaking under oath at the Leveson inquiry, said Morgan had once explained how a mobile phone’s voicemails could be hacked.

Morgan is on record as saying “I’ve never hacked a phone nor told anybody to hack a phone” which, without actually lying, carefully avoids saying he knew it was being done but, by avoiding a categorical denial, he seems to admit it.

America of course has Donald Trump who wouldn’t recognise the truth if it jumped up and tore his throat out.  Having been accused raping the advice columnist E Jean Carroll in 1996, Trump, the man who was recorded saying he could grab any woman’s pussy because of who he was, has denied it and said “She’s not my type”.  This probably wasn’t intended as a compliment but I’d have taken it as one.

His defence claims she’s only bringing the case to sell copies of her book What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal but still has to explain why, if this is the case, it’s taken her over 3 years to bring the case because the book was published in July 2019.  When Trump’s team tried to say it was an anti-male treatise, the judge had to explain that it was a satire referring back to Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay entitled A Modest Proposal. 

Another American liar, the far-right Tucker Carlson, has been fired from Fox News by the Murdochs for repeatedly lying about Trump’s having been robbed of the 2020 election.  He hasn’t yet said “I was only reading the autocue.”

Not all lies are quite as obvious, as we saw with last week’s resignation of Richard Sharp’s resignation from the chair of the BBC.  Before he applied for the job, he’d made donations to the Conservative party and discussed the possibility of applying for the job with that year’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, who was also the person who would ultimately make the appointment.  Later in the process, he helped Johnson find a guarantor for a loan of £800,000 because he’d run out of money but he forgot to mention these facts to the appointments panel and has now been found to be in breach of the governance code.

The problem is that, after 13 years in power, the Tories find it difficult to find anything that’s better than it was when they took over (yes, including Brexit) and are constantly replacing incompetent leaders and having to chuck out the bullies and tax-fiddlers they’d promoted.

I think it’s sad that Simon Case, who was for a while his Principal Private Secretary, said of Johnson “I don’t know what more I can do to stand up to a prime minister who lies.”

Lying and obfuscation have become part of everyday life and old-fashioned concepts like honesty and integrity have gone out of the window.  Of course we have all lied at some point, sometimes not even for the benefits of others, but most of us try to keep our honour intact.  My Conservative friend, for example, came out of his box at me recently because he thought I’d said something misleading but he then discovered I’d been right, apologised and made a fulsome apology.

The trouble is that it all gets conflated with group loyalties and conspiracy theories and people would rather support ‘their’ people than step back and take a fresh look.

We’ve been conditioned to accept all of this as normal, just as the truth has been hidden behind weasel words:  we’ve been repeatedly told that the Illegal Migration bill (which the Commons passed last week) is about small boats crossing the Channel.  It isn’t – nobody actually cares about small boats crossing the Channel.  What some of us do care about is the people in the boats who are desperately trying to find a better life.  Talking about turning boats back makes it sound less horrible.

The same thing happened to Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, who supports the Palestinian people.  This has upset Israel who have wilfully accused him of anti-semitism even though Waters himself has repeatedly said he “disdains” the state of Israel not Judaism, which are two quite different things.

The curious thing about conspiracy theorists, and people who can’t admit that a group they support can ever be wrong about anything, is that better-educated people are more likely to believe in cover-ups and dubious motives.  This may be because they tend to be more prevalent at times of stress, national and international, economic and social, when the more intelligent people are wondering how we got here.

Our gullibility may also be affected by our decision-making styles.  At one end of the spectrum are people who do things because it seemed a good idea at the time while, at the other end, are those who don’t do anything until they’ve gathered and judged all the evidence.  Most of us are somewhere in the middle and would love to believe in, say, having a guardian angel but find it difficult to believe that alien civilisations have travelled vast distances to live in a cave under the Andes.

If they’re repeated often enough, false views of ‘reality’ can become more attractive until they become embedded in our belief systems which then refuse to consider contradictory evidence on the grounds that the evidence was fabricated, or due to bias;  and, in the case of conspiracy theories, evidence may be seen as further proof of the conspiracy, invented by people who are part of the plot.

In the absence of evidence for either view, its very absence is itself proof of the conspiracy.

Consider the ‘Intelligent Design’ theory which posits that some sort of intelligence was behind the creation of the universe because the whole thing is too complex to have arisen by chance or, in nature, by Darwinian ‘natural selection’.  Others believe in ‘creationism’ (which is different from Intelligent Design in that it tends to start from religious beliefs) but both believe in the existence of a Creator.

Most scientists tend to believe that the universe just grew, pretty much at random, with explosions and implosions, and life on earth developed from the first dandelion that crawled out of the ancient seas and evolved into Boris Johnson as it travelled round the world on continents that separated and collided.

William of Ockham’s view, 7 centuries ago, was that the most likely explanation was the one that involved the fewest variables (I paraphrase) so Intelligent Design seems less convincing because it requires the addition of a Creator.  But who knows?  There’s so much going on that science can’t yet explain, perhaps the answer really is 42 and we will, as we evolve further, begin to understand why.

Alarms, humiliations, Putin’s frailty, and guns

22 April 2023

At 3pm tomorrow, our mobile phones will beep an emergency warning at us for 10 seconds.  This is just to test a system that would warn us if there’s a danger to life, health or property in our area.  Like if Russia’s about to nuke us.  Last time there was a threat of this, somebody decided we only had four minutes left to live so we should always keep some chocolate handy.

I used to know someone who’d been in the army and seen an atom bomb explode on the Bikini atoll.  He said the best place to be if one was dropped would be directly underneath it so you would be instantly vapourised.

One problem with tomorrow’s alert is that, if you’re a victim of abuse and have a ‘secret’ phone hidden somewhere for use in emergency, the beeps might alert your abuser to its existence (and location) so TURN IT OFF tomorrow afternoon.  And, if you know someone who might be in this situation, tell them.

Somebody who’d missed the point said it was taking Britain “back to the nanny state” (e.g. NHS).  This was of course Jacob Rees-Mogg, the only MP who, as far as I know, still has a nanny.

The former Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab (whose middle name was taken from a box of indigestion pills) has gone in a fit of pique revealed in his resignation letter.  Wouldn’t it have been great to be a fly on the wall to hear:

Rishi Sunak:  About this report …

Dominic Raab:  Now listen you nasty little Wykehamist, I’m not entirely stupid …

RS (sotto voce):  Not entirely …

DR:  … Even though I’m only a state school boy, I know my history and Wykeham was a fortification by the river Win and the suburb on the hill was called High Wykeham and the famous cake burner Saint Englebert the Unready is supposed to buried near the cathedral.  And that’s what …

RS (louder):  Er.  About this report …

DR:  Fuck the report!  It’s all a plot by those leftie antisemitic snowflake civil service wokerati to discredit the only person …

(and so on, and on.)

Raab is reported to be “furious” at the report, thereby unwittingly increasing the credibility of the accusations made against him.  Silly man, he should have thought that one through.

Also humiliated this week was Vladimir Putin, when a Russian fighter plane dropped a Russian bomb on a Russian town.

Even Rupert Murdoch got in on the act by agreeing to pay $787.5m (£633m) to settle Dominion’s claim for defamation by his Fox News channel.  Anything rather than admit publicly he knew the network had wilfully broadcast lies that Dominion was involved in a plot to overturn the 2020 election results that ousted Donald Trump.

Which naturally reminds me that Putin recently visited the occupied Kherson region where his body language betrayed that he isn’t as fit as he used to be.  Leaving the helicopter, Putin descended five steps clutching both handrails tightly.

A friend recently reported that a post on Telegram* claimed the Russian government is now trying to hand out callup papers to men in the right age range when they visit all sorts of local government offices, not just the enrolment office.  They’re also issuing ‘electronic’ call ups to people’s phones.  The channel warns men to ignore the emails, they have no legal force, and not under any circumstances to go to the enrolment offices if summoned.  The worst that can happen to you for failing to appear is a fine.  “Don’t under any circumstances let yourself be signed up as a volunteer or a Kontraktnik.  This illegal war is a crime and you will be a criminal if you take part.”

Alexey Savichev, a convicted murderer, was pardoned by Putin last September and released from a prison in Voronezh in south-west Russia so he could join the Wagner group.  He has since confessed to killing civilians, including children, saying “We were told not to take any prisoners and just shoot them on the spot.”  He also said that, with other Wagner fighters, he had killed “several dozen” injured Ukrainian PoWs by “tossing grenades” into the ditch where they were held.  “It’s war” he said “and I don’t regret a single thing I did there.”  That’s the spirit – praise the Lord and pass the ammo.

In America, you don’t even have to join up to shoot people.  In Kansas City, a 16-year old rang the wrong doorbell so the homeowner shot and seriously wounded him.  In Hebron in upstate New York, a 20-year old woman drove into the wrong drive so the homeowner shot and killed her.  In Elgin, near Austin in Texas, a cheerleader opened the door of the wrong car in a car park;  realising it wasn’t hers, she went back to join her two teammates so the man who’d been sitting in the other car walked over to their car, drew a gun and shot at them, injuring two of the women.

It’s about time Joe Biden actually did something about gun control.  Surely this is above politics and both houses should be given free votes?  Or could an Executive Order increase controls without causing a second revolution?

In Philadelphia, thieves stole about 2 million dimes (10c coins worth $200,000) from a lorry parked overnight in the car park of a shopping mall.  It’s thought one of the thieves might have been the person who asked a BMW showroom if they took cash.

Over here, you can get banged up for stopping traffic and two ‘Stop Oil’ protestors have been sent to prison, one for three years and one for two years and seven months, after they’d forced the police to close the QEII bridge at Dartford.  Judge Collery KC said he’d penalised then because “You have to be punished for the chaos you caused and to deter others from copying you.” 

In other words, the judge decided to spend an estimated £500,000 of our money imprisoning two people who believe the future of the planet is in danger and were trying to warn others.  Is he allowed to impose longer sentences just to frighten other people?  Perhaps he should just have locked them in a room with Raab for an hour or two.

*          Telegram is a messaging app widely used in Russia for advice and warnings from Putin’s critics despite their being visible to the Kremlin – see https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/ from Wired**

**        Wired is a magazine that reports on how the world is influenced by online technology and other things.

Spring, immolation for profit, government fears and some sad news

18 March 2023

Spring is here and all over the country people are shovelling snow aside and trying to find a rhyme for daffodils (the nearest Wordsworth got was “vales and hills” which doesn’t quite cut the mustard).

My favourite (Brooklyn-accented) verse about spring has been attributed to Ogden Nash but appears in different forms all over the place, though they all tend to share the first line.

“Spring has sprung, de grass is riz, I wonder where de boidies is;  de little boids is on de wing, but dat’s absoid, from what I hoid, de little wings is on de boid!”

Out here in the country we have springtime snowdrops and crocus and primroses and celandine and, as we discovered a few days ago, fibre optic ‘cables’ that zip a telephone call to the telegraph pole outside before sending it the last few feet underground through some antediluvian wires which so distort the signal with crickles and crackles that the end result is incomprehensible.

My theory is that, when it’s rained a lot (which it has), water gets into the junction boxes and signals arc over to the wrong bit of the wire but it’s taken us four attempts to get our supplier to admit there is a fault.  Perhaps it wouldn’t have arced if they’d fitted postdiluvian wiring …  Anyway, they’re sending somebody on Monday to check the inside socket then shin up the telegraph pole and fiddle with things.  (They’ve had to do it twice before so we know what to expect.)

What puzzles me is why it doesn’t seem to affect the broadband signal, but maybe that’s because we’re used to having the signal fail, leaving us to reset the connection or reboot the whole system.  Clever people have smartphones but if you want to use any sort of mobile phone hereabouts, you have to go outside and stand in the road.

At least we don’t have a ghost, although I must admit to suspecting the previous occupier who died here enjoyed apples because, for the first month or two, there’d be a loud smell of stewed apples at bedtime;  but there is a house in Baird, Texas that’s being marketed as an “established and running haunted house”.

The previous owners ‘furnished’ it with coffin-shaped doors and all sorts of stuff that normally disappears shortly after Halloween.  In New York, Noo Joisey, Massachusetts, and Minnesota (but not Texas), sellers are required to disclose if a house is haunted and the decisions in a 1991 New York case (Stambovsky v. Ackley for people who think I make these things up) said “as a matter of law, the house is haunted.”

Perhaps this confusion of law and the imagination explains how emotionally unstable judges like Brett Kavanaugh get appointed to the Supreme Court.

In the UK, some people seem to think it’s OK to sacrifice a few people’s lives in the pursuit of profit, provided it’s not too many.  Michael Gove has (5 years too late but better late than never) introduced a safety scheme requiring housebuilders to replace flammable materials found in mid-rise developments in England and 39 housebuilders have signed up to this.  However, 11 hadn’t by Monday’s deadline, including Rydon Homes, which is related to Rydon Maintenance which led the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower before the fire, which has so far declined to sign up to it saying it only “develops an average of 16 family homes per year” so it qualifies as “a small housebuilder”.  Or, in English, they only worry about safety if they put larger numbers of people at risk. To his credit, Gove has said “Those companies [who haven’t signed up to it] will be out of the housebuilding business in England entirely, unless and until they change their course” and has extended the deadline to allow them to reconsider.

Suella Braverman popped over to Rwanda, with which her predecessor last year signed an agreement to accept 200 unwanted UK immigrants.  In order to show her trip was reported accurately and without bias, she excluded reporters from the BBC and the Daily Mirror, the Guardian, the Independent and the i newspapers and took the Daily Mail, GB News and the Daily Telegraph.  That should do the trick.

As mentioned in these mutterings on 3 April last year, P&O suddenly sacked some 800 UK staff without notice and replaced them with cheap foreign labour not subject to the UK minimum wage.  Amazingly, the UK CEO Peter Hebblethwaite wasn’t fired even after saying “I know what the law is.  I broke it on purpose.  And I would do it again.”

At the time, Boris Johnson, last year’s first prime minister, said “We will take [P&O] to court, we will defend the rights of British workers … P&O plainly aren’t going to get away with it.”  Followed by, on the following Wednesday, the then transport secretary Grant Shapps’ admission that “The government are not in a position to take court action.” 

However, a nine-point plan that includes a seafarers’ wages bill is currently going through parliament and a government spokesperson said they had “reacted swiftly and decisively against P&O Ferries”, thereby giving a whole new meaning to “swiftly”.  Still one year is better than five I suppose.

P&O Ferries claimed at the time it was losing £100m a year. Last week, its Dubai-based owner, DP World, announced record profits of $1.8bn.

More sadly, the former actor Sam Neill has stage 3 blood cancer with no idea how long he’s got left so he’s written a book, ‘Did I Ever Tell You This’.  Rather than surrender to the cancer, he’s revelling in the “strong sense of being this little speck in the universe, of so little significance … but a unique speck”. He dismisses belief in an afterlife as ridiculous and talks about the notion of consciousness (“If it’s an illusion, I’m fine with that”), and the alluring idea of “dissolving and dispersing into the cosmos” saying “I don’t mind that idea at all.”

There’s something to think about if you ever worry about dying.

Even more sadly, Jacqueline Gold, who founded the sex shop ‘Ann Summers’ has died of cancer at the age of 62.  Her obituary mentioned that, with 100 shops over the country, she had made the Rampant Rabbit vibrator into a household name.  Not in this household but if any reader who knows what it is, please don’t bother to let me know – some things should be shared only with your closest friend(s).