Anomalies, Labour policy, tax, smoking and birds

28 June 2025

Another of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starships has exploded on the ground while its engines were being tested.  SpaceX said the rocket “experienced a major anomaly while on a test stand at Starbase”.  How long before we hear traffic news warning us that traffic is being delayed by a major anomaly on the motorway?

In a recent article, the New Statesman’s editor searched for a definitive answer to questions about Keir Starmer’s ideals and finally came up with “human dignity”.  For those of us who hoped that a new Labour government would usher in a brave new world after the 14 years of depredations inflicted on us by the Conservatives, this seems a bit feeble.  And sad because Starmer seems, at heart, to be a decent man.

However, he does have the strangest ideas, last week’s being the brainwave that he could remove what dignity remains for some of the poorest in society by tightening the eligibility criteria for some benefits.  The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a charity (and therefore not allowed to lobby or take a political view), has estimated that some households would be up to £12,000 a year worse off.

Luckily, a lot of his own MPs are not supporting him and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has said his proposals would “destroy the financial safety net” for millions of people.  Starmer has now watered down his proposals in the hope they’ll be passed next week but whatever gave him the idea this was a good idea in the first place while he’s spending more on nuclear weapons that are, at best, irrelevant?  Perhaps he thinks the poor should be responsible for paying for the things while the rest of us who pay income tax don’t have to contribute.

The new nuclear weapons are to be manufactured and tested at the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. We’re assured that the testing will involve only tiny amounts of material, perhaps a few millimetres in size, and will be triggered in a vacuum by a set of 12 lasers which will simulate the effects of a nuclear explosion.

A scientist involved in the project has said the energy involved is “no greater than boiling a teaspoon of water” and there was “no danger of blowing up Reading”.  Why does my skin crawl when I hear this sort of stupid ‘joke’?

To maximise the chances of a nuclear ‘anomaly’, the nuclear warheads will then be manufactured at a nearby site before being taken on a lorry to Coulport in Scotland, fitted into missiles and loaded onto submarines at the Faslane naval base.  No risks there then.

Way back, I went to Aldermaston twice to take part in the annual CND marches to Trafalgar Square.  Tens of thousands of us walked behind a banner, slept in vast marquees and on hard school floors.  I still have a photograph I took of a sign inside the fence round the nuclear site saying “The taking of photographs is punishable by death” (or words to that effect).

Fat lot of good we all did.

At about the same sort of time, the top rate of income tax on ‘earned’ income was 83%, with an extra 15% taken from investment income.  (Remember the Beatles’ song ‘Taxman’:  “it’s one for you 19 for me, ‘cos I’m the taxman”?)  There were no millionaires rioting in the streets and the (Conservative) government wasn’t overturned by the rich;  I actually knew somebody back then who paid the top rates and said they got a lot of income from their business so it was fair to pay a lot of tax on it.  When did people start equating their bank balance with their personal worth?  (I know who I blame …)

Elsewhere in government, the Home Office is now refusing asylum to Ukrainians who have left their homes to find safety in Britain on the grounds it’s safe for them to go back to Ukraine.  With unbated breath, I await the Home Office’s decision to refuse asylum to Gazan refugees on the grounds it’s safe for them to go home.  It almost makes Priti Patel’s attempts to deport refugees to war-torn Rwanda look slightly less stupid – can somebody remind me what that stupid cock-up cost us?

Despite the obscenely rich forever giving hollow promises to leave the UK if they have to pay another penny in tax, another charity, the Equality Trust, has pointed out there are now 165 billionaires in the UK and that ‘private’ wealth has grown eight times faster than the wealth of governments in the last 25 years. 

The journal Heart has summarised and published the results of an analysis of the medical records of some 200 million people and have reported that the regular use of cannabis increases the risk of acute coronary syndrome by 29% and of stroke by 20% as well as doubling the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease (CVD).  I haven’t been able to find comparable research into increases in the incidence of CVD in tobacco smokers but one American study showed they were three times more likely to die of CVD.  It would be interesting to relate these results to the relative numbers of cannabis and tobacco smokers but I would guess that tobacco smokers cost the NHS considerably more than cannabis smokers.

I’ve mentioned before the government’s failure to insist that swift bricks are installed in all new houses.  The need for them was highlighted (I always wonder if that should be ‘highlit’) by a recent survey that showed a decline in their numbers of two thirds between 1995 and 2022.  When did you last see a large flight / bunch / herd of swifts screaming around in the sky above you?  Even if they’re not occupied by swifts, other birds are happy to use them, including house martins, tits, nuthatches, house sparrows and starlings.

But there is good news:  locally ‘extinct’ birds can be reintroduced.  The bittern hadn’t been breeding in the UK since the 1870s after its natural wetlands had been drained for farming but, with habitat restoration, some 280 bitterns were spotted last year.

It may never happen / It already did

1 March 2025

On being challenged this week over having previously called Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a dictator”, Donald Trump said “Did I say that? I can’t believe I said that.”  Then, yesterday, the self-acclaimed dealmaker failed to bully Zelenskyy into signing a deal in an unedifying performance that left me greatly relieved and (still) rooting for Ukraine; which just goes to prove either that one swallow doth not a summer make or that a successful comedian makes a better president than a failed nepo baby.

In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger identified a psychological condition that leads some people to overestimate their abilities.  Now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it isn’t related to intelligence but it deals with somebody’s ability to judge their competence in a particular area.  People of low ability in a particular field tend to think they’re more skilled than they actually are, which leads to overconfidence and consequential errors of judgement in the field. 

On Wednesday, Volker Türk, the UN head of human rights presented a report on the human rights situation in Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem saying “Nothing justifies the appalling manner in which Israel has conducted its military operations in Gaza, which consistently breached international law” and that “Hamas has indiscriminately fired projectiles into Israeli territory – amounting to war crimes.”  So they’re both horrid, which is no surprise but little consolation to the many innocents on both sides who have lost families, friends and homes.

Medics and general healthcare workers are protected under International Law but hundreds of them who were working in Gaza have been captured by Israel.  Some have now been released under the ceasefire agreement but at least 160 are still being held prisoner and some of Gaza’s most senior doctors who were released have said they were tortured, beaten and humiliated in Israeli prisons.  In exchange, Hamas is returning hostages it took during its surprise attack on Israel that started this latest episode of the war between them;  some of them are even still alive.

Further south, with a touch of west, it’s estimated that, so far this year, about 7,000 people have been killed in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including hundreds of women who were raped and burnt, when M23, a Rwandan rebel group, freed male prisoners from the Congolese city of Goma.  Despite the decades-old conflict, Rwanda continues to deny any official links with M23 or any interest in land to the south of Goma in the DRC which (quite coincidentally) has rich mineral deposits.

This is, of course, the same Rwanda that the last government believed would be a good place to send migrants who had risked their lives crossing the Channel to reach safety in the UK.  In 2022, a UK court accepted comments from a Foreign Office adviser who had said “Political opposition is not tolerated [in Rwanda] and arbitrary detention, torture and even killings are accepted methods of enforcing control.” 

When asked about this, Priti Patel who was Home Secretary at the time, replied “You are referring to comments made from officials in a different government department but of course it is the Home Office who has led the economic development migration partnership which is our resettlement partnership to Rwanda.  Rwanda is a safe country and all our work with the government of Rwanda shows that.”

Patel resigned later that year.

According to a recent report from MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, HS2 is “a casebook example of how not to run a major project” and it is “unacceptable that, over a decade into the programme, we still do not know what it will cost, what the final scope will be, when it will finally be completed or what benefits it will deliver”.  Did it really take a bunch of MPs to discover this?

This week, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association reported that, in January, sales of new Tesla cars in Europe were 45% lower than the same month last year, dropping from 18,161 last year to 9,945 this year.

Tesla is now keen to discover why this happened.  It’s known that, after the initial excitement, Teslas earned a poor reputation for reliability and many more manufacturers have introduced electric models to compete with them but analysts are now trying to discover whether Elon Musk’s lurch to the political right might be putting people off buying his cars. 

They also need to remember that the early adopters have already bought the things and many of us who like the principle of electric vehicles are waiting for more advanced technology that won’t leave piles of dead batteries full of toxic waste in ten years’ time.  Some of us also suffer range anxiety if we have family and friends at the other end of the country. 

Every time I file my own electricity meter readings, I’m treated to a piece of fascinating but trivial information by QI Elves and yesterday it was “The Sun rotates around its axis every 26 days but, because it’s made of gas, different bits rotate at different speeds.”  This worried me.  If different bits rotate at different speeds, which bit do you choose to measure the speed of its rotation?

While talking about the sky, I assume you were all stargazing yesterday evening when seven planets lined up in a ‘planetary parade’ (which means they appear in a straight line when we look at them from here), a rare sort of super-syzygy that won’t happen again till 2040.

Some worrying news this week came from Luton where a 19-year-old has admitted murdering his mother and two younger siblings and other offences including the possession of a kitchen knife in a public place.  Since this last one is obviously a criminal offence, I’m now feeling very nervous about popping into Lakeland to replace an old kitchen knife.

But, distracted by something else, I did find one interesting piece of information this week:  Kristian Matsson, a Swedish singer-songwriter who performs under the stage name ‘The Tallest Man on Earth’, measures 1.7m (5’7”) from end to end.

Henges, poison pen letters, murder and Rwanda

28 September 2024

Thomas Hardy, who I’ve always found to be a miserable author (with the honourable exception of Under the Greenwood Tree), because he wrote about stupid people doing stupid things:  I’ve only recently come to wonder if he was influenced by some psychic emanations from a prehistoric henge that lies under the land on which he built his house in Dorchester.

No signs were visible on the surface though remains of Roman and iron age burials were discovered during its construction.  He also found a large sarsen which he called a “druid stone” and erected in his garden. 

When a new road was being built near the house in the 1980s, archaeologists excavated a large circular Neolithic enclosure, or ‘proto-henge’, nearly 100 metres in diameter, that was built around 3,000BC, about the same time as the earliest circular (earth) bank that now surrounds the stone circles at Stonehenge.

But the roadbuilders carried on and asphalted the new road before what was left, including the section under Hardy’s garden, was listed and protected as a scheduled monument, now owned by the National Trust.  Another dig in 2022 discovered that the site had been in use some 500 years earlier than originally thought;  this meant it was built at about the same time that work started on Maiden Castle, one of the largest and most complex Iron Age hillforts in Europe, a couple of miles away.

(It’s thought that the name ‘Maiden’ developed over the years from the Celtic ’Mai Dun’ which means ‘great hill’.) 

Perhaps there’s a yet undiscovered henge under Shiptonthorpe in East Yorkshire where people have been getting poison pen letters.  More than a dozen letters have been received by different people in the village over two years, and despite police enquiries and many local suspicions, the writer(s) has not been identified.  They are possibly inspired by some old argument over the parish hall but they feel personal when they hope the recipient gets “run over by a bus on the A1079”.

I suppose it depends on how sensitive you are, and I’m obviously not.  Many years ago, I was volunteering on a helpline in the days before we would terminate calls and a caller said “I hope you die slowly of a painful cancer or crash and kill yourself on the way home”.  I naturally asked why they said this because they must know it wouldn’t make any difference to whether I got cancer or crashed and they said “Because it makes me feel better”;  to which the only possible answer was “I’m glad something does”.

Not long after that, when I’d refused to follow another caller’s agenda, they said “I’ve spoken to you lot quite often and there are some really lousy volunteers there but you’re the f-ck-ng worst of them all”.  They then rang off before I asked them why they kept ringing us if we were so bad.

Perhaps I’d feel differently if I got a poison pen letter from somebody who obviously knew where I live, but I’d probably just think it was their problem not mine and give it to the police.

At least, nobody is yet attempting to assassinate anybody over here (ordinary people aren’t assassinated, they’re murdered).  There seem to have been two attempts on Donald Trump, though one the shooters apparently set up the gun and then pottered around till Trump appeared in the right place on the golf course, during which perambulations, he was apprehended by a discharged firearm while proceeding in a southerly direction … (isn’t that how police word their reports?)

While I believe the world would be a much safer place if Trump got out of politics and was left to run his own business down in private, I don’t want him killed because I don’t think anyone should take anybody else’s life.  If they really get a buzz out of murder, why don’t they form a gang and kill each other, with a prize going to the last man standing (can you imagine a gang of women doing this?)

“Last man standing” reminds me that the Labour party had its annual conference last week and its new, innovative plans to revitalise the UK can be summarised as

More news came from a United Nations report published last week which says that, even as an election nears in Rwanda, tensions have increased between them and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  DRC ‘M23’ rebels are being supported by Rwandan forces and have attacked refugee camps and other highly-populated areas in the DRC because the DRC has been basing military units close to them.  The fear is now that the border skirmishes which have killed and displaced millions of people over recent decades could escalate into a full-blown war between the two countries.

Luckily, the new government has stopped the plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda that the Conservatives were proposing, possibly because the Tories thought the M23 was just the easiest way to get from the M25 to Brighton.

What is so difficult to understand about the fact that nobody risks their life to seek asylum somewhere else if they feel safe in their own country?  Paranoia?

Recent research by a Dutch team has modified a 2011 study that the average Conservative’s brain has a larger amygdala, which is linked to threat perception, while the average Liberal’s brain has a larger anterior cingulate cortex, a region linked to decision-making.  The latest tests found no evidence to support the latter claim but accepted there is a (much smaller) increase in the size of conservatives’ amygdala.

However, this conclusion was accompanied by a ‘chicken and egg’ warning:  are people with a greater tendency to paranoia more likely to be conservatives or is growth in the amygdala caused by feeling more threatened?

Does anyone else get irritated, if not actually threatened, when people talk about ‘teams’ such as ‘Team GB’, ‘Team Road Safety’, ‘Team Piddle Brewery*’, ‘Team Smart Parking Company Rip-off Merchants’ etc?

*          It’s a brewery based in Piddlehinton near Dorchester









































*          It’s a brewery based in
Piddlehinton near Dorchester

Paying more tax, a lettuce and Banksy

24 August 2024

We have a new government and many people will be paying more tax.  One of the new Chancellor’s first decisions was that the Winter Fuel Payment of up to £300 to pensioners who don’t receive pension credit or other means-tested benefits is being scrapped for all.  (I hope its withdrawal will be subject to ‘marginal’ adjustments so that somebody who gets, say, £10 more than the means-tested limit doesn’t suddenly lose the £300.)

However, I must admit that I applaud the principle.  We have received this in the past but didn’t really need it ourselves so we gave ours to friends who needed it more and to a charity such as The Trussell Trust (who, incidentally, give a list on their website of household goods most welcomed by foodbanks, and where your nearest collection point is.)

Other hopeful signs that our new leaders realise that, once the family silver has all gone, you need to cut unnecessary costs and find another source of income.  Limiting winter fuel payments is a positive step towards the former, as is the decision to write off the £700m already spent by the last government and cut the £10bn they had planned to spend over 6 years sending asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Rachel Reeves has also indicated that the autumn budget is likely to be tough but at least some of us are hoping she’ll feel able to unfreeze the ‘personal allowance’, which people can receive before they have to pay tax;  the Tories thought this was a brilliant wheeze because it was worst for those who didn’t earn very much – which is exactly why I hope she will unfreeze it so people on the borderline do start to get some help meeting the ever-increasing costs of life’s little luxuries, like food and heating.

Spain’s socialist government tried an interesting experiment in 2022 when it introduced a “temporary” solidarity wealth tax to be collected in 2023 and 2024 from those whose net wealth exceeds €3m (£2.6m).  It’s estimated that it will only apply to 0.5% of the households in Spain.

The Tax Justice Network is a British group of researchers and activists, founded in 2003 which “believes our tax and financial systems are our most powerful tools for creating a just society that gives equal weight to the needs of everyone.”  It focuses on tax avoidance and tax havens and has calculated that a similar tax imposed worldwide would free up trillions of dollars to give help where it’s most needed, from relieving those suffering from starvation and ill-health to helping slow climate change.  If it were introduced just in the UK (which Reeves has sadly ruled out), it could raise some £25bn a year …

This is of course a dream, but what a wonderful one!  Let’s start with small steps and, full disclosure, I’d be happy to pay more tax despite not being in the top 0.5% of Britain’s wealthiest people, but nor am I in the bottom 0.5%.  There’s enough wealth in this country for everyone to be able to live comfortably so why don’t we spread it around more evenly?

Reeves has said she is inheriting the worst financial position in 80 years and has accused the Conservatives of being economical with the truth about a forecast overspend of £22bn in government departments.  While nobody really believes her predecessor was the sharpest pencil in the box, it is traditional for the incoming Chancellor of a new government to make things look as bleak as possible to throw the blame onto the previous government so we must expect some over-reaction in her first budget.

She’s already said she’s planning to raise more revenue from inheritance tax and capital gains tax and to cut public expenditure.

She’s likely to face the usual threats from the very rich to leave the country if they have to pay more tax but, despite similar threats when three Scandinavian countries introduced wealth taxes, only 0.01% of the richest households did actually move out.  That’s one in ten thousand of them.  Pessimistic estimates of similar migration rates from the UK in similar circumstances reckon that 0.02% (one in five thousand) of the richest families might leave the country.

Bon voyage!

(At this point, I realise that I can now expect an outraged email from my Conservative friend who believes that entrepreneurs should be allowed to grow businesses from scratch and build them up into huge corporations, becoming unconscionably rich in the process.  Of course his opinion is valid, I just disagree because I don’t think it’s in the best interests of the greatest number of people.  Nor do I believe that everybody receiving state benefits is milking the system and should just get on their bikes and get a job.)

Luckily, some people retain a sense of the absurd and the satirical artists’ collective ‘Led by Donkeys’ recently lowered a banner behind Liz Truss while she was giving a speech supporting Donald Trump’s attempts to get re-elected, showing a lettuce over the words “I crashed the economy.”  (Remember The Daily Star newspaper featured a lettuce while she was prime minister to see if it would still be alive when she had to resign as prime minister, and it was?)

Led by Donkeys had predicted she’d say “That’s not funny” and storm off the stage.  In fact, she said “That’s not funny” and stormed off the stage, adding that the group were “far left activists” and “I won’t stand for it”.  Sit, lady, sit.

Another iconoclast is Banksy who has been active for longer than most of us realised.  He’s done thousands of pictures, many of which just raise a smile but some of his works make clear social comment which is then endlessly analysed by critics who want his work to have deeper meanings.  He remains anonymous, he doesn’t obviously do his work for money, and he seems to accept the transience of all graffiti.

Bob Dylan 83 not out, Independence Day and election

25 May 2024

The big event of the week was of course that Bob Dylan celebrated his 83^rd birthday yesterday (if anybody that age still actually celebrates birthdays).

It seems impossible to believe that it’s some 65 years since he left the mining towns of the mid-West and headed for New York with his guitar and complete confidence.  What’s even more impossible to believe is that, like Keith Richards, he’s survived so many drugs that are supposed to leave us all toothless and dead.

I first came across him in a TV play called ‘Madhouse on Castle Street’.  The BBC – as was the policy in those days – wiped the tape and recorded something else on top of it so no copy of it remains and the Holy Grail of his fans is to find somebody who’d taped it as it was shown and has the tape in an attic somewhere.  The only thing that sticks in my mind about the play is that one of the characters didn’t say anything but just sat on the stairs and picked away at a guitar and I liked his music so much that I remembered his name. 

Actually, I misremembered his name and thought for a while he was Bob Yellin of the Greenbriar Boys but a friend then lent me Dylan’s first two albums.  I wasn’t that impressed by his voice and returned the records but the songs stayed with me and, looking back, I wonder if it was the sheer energy of his first album.  A guy in his late teens had the chutzpah to take old blues and folk songs, make enough changes to get his name on the record as writer, pick up a guitar and harmonica and blast them into the microphone with the power of a Little Richard.

His second album was mostly songs he’d written himself although, even back then, he was more a lyricist than a composer and re-used old tunes for some of his words (‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ uses the tune of ‘Lord Franklin’ and ‘Masters of War’ uses ‘Nottamun Town’).  It also included what’s probably his most famous song, ‘Blowing in the Wind’, although this was made famous by Peter, Paul & Mary.

His disdain for reporters and press conferences became obvious very early when he gave answers to stupid questions,  One hack asked him how many real folksingers he thought there were and he came straight back with “A hundred and thirty seven” (if I remember the number correctly).

He’s been through umpteen incarnations and still has the ability to surprise everyone by producing a good album after years of rubbish.  His voice hasn’t improved on the way and is now so wrecked that his latest albums involve his doing little more than talking his way through the lyrics to the accompaniment of a cello, a guitar and soft percussion. 

His lyrics have always been his real strength and he is often a sublime wordsmith.  He even got a Nobel prize for literature and what is widely believed to be his neuro-divergence / Asperger’s left him not knowing how to respond.  He’s certainly never given any signs that he cares what anybody else thinks of him and even a “thank you” at the end of a gig is now pretty rare.

There is a theory that, because he often changes words and adds or omits new verses in performance, he’s a perfectionist and constantly trying to get exactly the right word;  others (like me) thinks he just tries different words because it seemed a good idea at the time.  He sometimes even seems not to decide on a word until he’s singing it:  in ‘Series of Dreams’, he sings “Past the – tree of smoke” and there’s a microsecond pause before “tree” as if he didn’t know what the word was going to be until he sang it.

The other argument against perfectionism is that he’s written some really terrible lyrics and just left them as they are.  Strange really how he’s become so godlike to some fans.  Why His Bobness and not, say, The Boss?

Anyway, Bobbie, happy birthday for yesterday.

The other, comparatively minor, bit of news this week was that we’re going to have a general election on the 4^th of July, Independence Day in America.  Perhaps we can remember all the achievements the Conservatives have wrought over the last 14 years and choose our own independence from them.  But let’s recall their achievements before we vote: Dave introduced the disastrous austerity years and then asked the wrong question about Brexit, thereby getting the wrong answer, and resigned;  Theresa drew red lines which were likely to be drawn in blood in Northern Ireland and resigned;  Boris didn’t take Covid seriously until far too late and resigned;  Liz tanked the economy and resigned and Sunak vowed to “Stop the Boats” by deporting people to Rwanda.  This last pledge has been so effective that the thought of being deported to Rwanda has led to a record number of people crossing to the UK so far in 2024.

The day after his announcement of the date, all four of the serious papers – the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Times – ran banner headlines on the front page that used the words “bet” or “gamble”, despite Sunak’s new pledges to delay his £500m scheme to fly nasty people to Rwanda till after the election, and to stop his brilliant no-smoking plans that would have been so profitable for the free-black-market.

Sunak even stooped so low as to visit a warehouse where a number of people wearing hi-vis jackets so they looked like workers asked some questions.  It turns out they were actually Conservative councillors and asked really tough questions like “Do you agree you’re the best person to be the next prime minister?”  (Nobody asked if we are all better off after 14 years of Conservative misrule but we all know the answer to that:  according to umpteen surveys and analyses, it’s “No, unless we were already rich and overpaid in 2010”.)

This was after he’d abused Keir Starmer and the Labour party for a lack of policies and solutions to all the problems that had arisen during the last 14 years of his own party’s government.  I sometimes think Sunak isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box.

Defections, deterring asylum seekers, Zionist credibility and press freedom

11 May 2024

What a curious thing, when a defection from the Conservative benches to the Labour benches upsets some Labour MPs.  Natalie Elphicke, previously a far-right MP, crossed the floor, apologising for the nasty things she’d said, blaming her ex-husband, also on the far right, who’d been imprisoned for sexual offences.  And some Labour MPs were up in arms, saying “We don’t need people like that”.

Isn’t it a bit like a Jehovah’s witness making a convert then, on returning to the Witness Box (or whatever they call their headquarters), being told “Jehovah doesn’t want that sort of person”?   What happened to Luke’s “Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance”?

We know politicians are not always the sort of people one would want to meet at a dinner party so we can let them be them and us be us, though we could perhaps make an exception and blackball the Tory candidate Susan Hall who lost her bid to be London’s mayor by a record margin.  With the complete disregard for facts, Hall said she will “never forget” how she “so nearly” defeated Sadiq Khan (who overwhelmingly won an unprecedented third term).  She added “I will never forget what we so nearly achieved”, thereby adding a whole new dimension to the word ‘nearly’.

My own recent excitement came a couple of weeks ago as my bout of man-flu was starting.  I’d been feeling a bit rough and decided what I really needed was have a bath and bed (this all at about 8pm).  So, as one does, I took off all my clothes and had a sudden attack of hypothermia, trembling so much I couldn’t stand upright or turn the taps on or get toothpaste onto the brush.  Anyway, the fascinating thing was I saw that the end two joints of all my fingers had gone chalky white and I thought how clever it was that my body had withdrawn blood from my extremities to concentrate on heating up my torso;  which was why, I realised, the extremities are the first bits of the body to get frostbite.

When I mentioned this to someone a few days later, they said this is why, if you get cold fingers, you shouldn’t try to warm them, you should concentrate on getting your body warm again and the fingers will follow.  Yes, I know, it’s obvious when you think about it but I hadn’t before.

The most recent comedy highlight was the Met Gala which involves a bunch of people parading around in what can only be called a fancy dress parade.  A picture of one of the frocks, a wonderful tent-like structure of varicoloured rags and patchwork, actually made me laugh aloud.

What I don’t understand is that these risible attempts at impressing people are created (if that’s the right word) by ‘famous’ people like a former pop singer’s daughter and the wife of a former footballer – you see, I’d even heard of some of them. 

Since no normal person would be seen dead shopping in Sainsburys in any of the costumes on show, what’s the point?  There doesn’t even seem to be a prize for the daftest costume.

But wait.  Let’s think positively about this.  The government wants to deter migrants and has so far spent an estimated £300m deporting not many people to Rwanda, which claims it will accept “thousands” rather than the 200 people mooted so far, but nowhere near the estimated 52,000 asylum seekers who would be ‘eligible’* for export.  Let’s save 99% of this money and require all asylum seekers to wear clothes that have appeared on catwalks.  If that doesn’t dissuade them from coming, they deserve the right to live here.

Mind you, if Labour wins the election, the Rwandan drain on Britain’s resources will stop because Keir Starmer has said they will end the Rwandan scheme.

Perhaps Gaza would be an alternative.  Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu has slaughtered so many tens of thousands of Gazan civilians, women and children in the hope of getting a few of the militant wing of Hamas at the same time so there’ll be room for more people.  Well, there will be after Gaza’s rebuilt all the buildings Israel’s destroyed, and given the people still squashed under them a decent funeral. 

Surely Israel would be happy to pay for the reparations since they blew everything up in the first place and they’re still delaying a ceasefire in case there’s a catch in what Hamas has agreed (and because they realise their ceaseless rocket attacks have probably killed the Israeli hostages that Gaza was holding).

Israel also shut down Al Jazeera’s local offices last weekend and admitted stealing their broadcasting equipment, claiming the news outlet was a threat to Israeli security.  A BBC team visited the scene but was prevented from filming or recording anything.

Human rights and press groups worldwide have condemned Israel’s action and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel have applied to the country’s Supreme Court for an order to overturn the ban, and the Foreign Press Association has urged the Israeli government to think again.

The problem the credibility of Israel’s announcements was horrifically illustrated in January when a car was shot at and a 6-year-old, Hind Rajab, was trapped under the dead bodies of her family.  She managed to phone the Red Crescent for help but, when the medical team arrived, they too were shot and the child’s decomposing body was only found some 12 days later.

Israel has denied any involvement in the shootings although satellite imagery proved that Israeli armoured vehicles were in the area and the damage caused to the ambulance and the car was consistent with Israeli armaments.

When celebrities are interviewed, they’re sometimes asked what they would choose as a superpower.  Mine would be to make everybody realise that everybody else is somebody’s son or daughter, and nothing else matters whether it’s race, religion, skin colour or shoe size.  Which makes us all brothers and sisters and, unless we’re seriously disturbed, we may argue with them but we don’t kill our siblings.

*          That’s ‘eligible’ in the same way as drivers are ‘eligible’ for a fine for doing 120mph along Piccadilly.

My two bad weeks, migrants and sewage

27 April 2024

Do you ever have one of those weeks when you think that at least next week can’t be any worse, then it is?

Two weeks ago, I was on my way to the local hospital to give a friend and her 17-day old baby a lift home, crawling through traffic and stopping in queues at traffic lights.  When the lights changed, I drove forward slowly, signalled and turned left into a narrow one-way street where a bicycle was coming the wrong way towards me in the middle of the road, so I stopped, but the car behind me didn’t.  According to my dashcam, I was doing 3mph when I was hit, having braked from 11mph in 2 seconds.  From the extent of the damage caused to both cars, the driver behind was obviously still accelerating.

Nobody was hurt and my first reaction was “buggrit, another 24 hours of unnecessary paperwork”.  This has turned out to be a gross underestimate.

Two days later, the other car shed its brake fluid (three weeks after it had been changed as part of a service and MOT).  Luckily, we had just got home when the dashboard flashed up a message in unfriendly red letters saying “STOP, DRIVE NO MORE, YOU WILL DIE, YOU’VE DRIBBLED ALL YOUR BRAKE FLUID ONTO THE ROAD, YOU HAVE NO BRAKES, WE’RE SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE THIS MAY CAUSE, THANK YOU FOR HOLDING, YOU ARE NUMBER 117 IN THE QUEUE”.

Followed by writing a report for the insurance company and attaching a map, a sketch plan, details of the cyclist, a witness and the other driver, 7 pictures of the damage, and a video clip from my dashcam.  Did you know that Direct Line’s email address for claims don’t accept movie clips so you have to start again and upload them to a different link?

The paperwork and phone calls from insurers, repairers and the replacement car people, none of whom seem to talk to each other, were followed by a trip to the repairers who took more pictures and said of course they wouldn’t know how much damage had been done until they could see the panels under the damaged bumper.

(Naturally, my policy needs renewing in four weeks so I’m having to confess that yes I’ve had an accident but no I haven’t got the foggiest what it’ll cost.)

This week, the Sainsbury delivery didn’t arrive in the morning when it was supposed to and, two hours later, they emailed to say that all deliveries had been cancelled because their computer system had broken and here’s £20 compensation.  No food, just £20, and no word about why this warning wasn’t sent before the delivery was due. 

Then we went to the hospital for a 6-week check-up on my wife’s eyes – their third attempt at an appointment after they’d cancelled the first two – and got chucked out because they hadn’t read the bit on her file about the need for a hoist to transfer her a gurney / bed.  They then rang later to say the earliest they could do was late May so we had a friendly chat about whether a 13-week gap was OK instead of a 6-week gap (it wasn’t last time).  I asked them to check with the consultant and they finally rang back to say we could come in on Monday and, if we came in 4 hours earlier, they could do two procedures at once.  So I had to ring the dentist to delay the appointment I had booked into that 4 hours.

Next Monday is the day our car is being collected for repair and the replacement car is being delivered.  Guess whether the same person can drive the replacement car here and go back in the (driveable) damaged car.

The whole process is almost as convincing as Rishi Sunak’s law allowing him to send migrants to Rwanda, which he had to bully through parliament this week.  Rwanda is a central African country with lots of sunshine which, despite a history of genocide and human rights abuses, is now united under a democratically-elected leader of immense charm who regularly gets more than 95% of the vote and Sunak’s new law declares it is now absolutely safe for migrants who will probably be accommodated in luxury hotels overlooking Rwanda’s sunlit beaches*.

Sunak has said that, if migrants know they’re going to be shipped from the UK straight out to Rwanda, this will deter them from crossing the Channel.  He doesn’t seem to have thought this through because, if Rwanda really is that safe, migrants will be rushing across the Channel and saying ”Sod UK visas, where’s my boarding card for the next flight to Rwanda”.

Sheer brilliance.  Same as “stopping the boats” or, as the old proverb has it “treating the symptom, not the cause”.  First, many of us don’t care about the boats and think it’s the people in them who are important, and second, if there was an international police effort to remove all the traffickers from circulation, the ‘passengers’ wouldn’t be forced to pay huge sums of money to criminal gangs to risk their lives in leaky boats.

While on a roll, the Conservatives have also forced through a requirement that water companies should prioritise profits over sewage in rivers, lakes and the sea.  This would be OK if they were required to factor in absolutely massive fines they should pay every single time they allowed sewerage to ‘escape’ into our natural waters. They’d owe us money by Thursday week.

Why don’t they just renationalise the lot?  The Tories have already quietly renationalised a large proportion of the railway network, at least one major artery of which now seems to be making more money than when it was privatised despite the same people running it, and Kier Starmer has promised that, if Labour’s elected, they’ll reclaim the rest when their contracts expire.

Hurriedly changing the subject as I rush to the end, have you heard of ‘auto-brewery syndrome’?  Neither had I.  It’s very rare but the bodies of people with it make their own alcohol and risk failing a breath test even if they’re teetotal.

*          As I’m sure you know, Rwanda doesn’t actually have a coast.