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 …
Lesser Mutterings 