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?”
Lesser Mutterings 