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. 

Jewish compassion, banks, eco-systems and privatisation

31 May 2025

The tragedies in Gaza have moved Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, a leading authority on Judaism who feels the people of Israel are “like an extended family”, to write an impassioned article about Gaza.  Their people, he says are “caught between the contemptuous nihilism of Hamas and Israel’s attacks” and that Israel’s blockade, threatening many thousands of people with starvation, “runs counter to Judaism’s values of justice and compassion. It contradicts what we have painfully learned from our long history as victims of persecution, pogroms and mass murder:  that, despite the hatred to which we have been and often still are subject … we must endeavour not to treat innocent others as we have been treated.”

Shalom Aleichem, Rabbi Wittenberg.

Which? magazine has recently drawn attention to the closure of two thirds of the country’s bank branches since 2015.  The banks claim that they’re no longer needed as more people rely on online and mobile banking but the Financial Conduct Authority found that three million people in the UK continue to rely on money.  As a result of these closures, if I want to pay cash into my account, I have to drive 10 miles to the nearest branch, pay for parking, and then walk to the nearest branch to do this.  How do people with disabilities cope?

Another banking wheeze that seems to have been given little publicity is that the security given by ‘chip and PIN’ cards has largely disappeared.  Beg, borrow or steal somebody else’s card and you can spend up to £100 just by swiping the card without needing a PIN, and you can continue to do this in different places until either the card’s credit limit is reached or the owner realises it’s missing and cancels it. 

Other triumphs of the banking sector include Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, the disgraced former boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland who was forced to surrender half his pension payments and had his knighthood stripped from him after he’d run up record-breaking losses and allegedly shredded a whole heap of incriminating paperwork.  The ‘wealth manager’ Quilter estimates that Goodwin’s now having to scrape by on an annual pension of just £598,000, poor old sod, how he suffers for his sins.

In March 2023, while he was trying to convince people that, this time, he’d make a good president, Donald Trump said of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that “There’s a very easy negotiation to take place. But I don’t want to tell you what it is because then I can’t use that negotiation.”  In May that year, he added that he’d stop the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” if he was elected.

Well, he was elected and more than four months after he took over, Trump still has to prove this while Vladimir Putin is trying to establish what he calls “a buffer zone” by invading Ukraine’s north-east Sumy border region.  If Putin wants a buffer zone, why doesn’t he create it in his own country?

Meanwhile, the Financial Times writer Robert Armstrong has created an acronym to describe Trump’s policies – TACO, from ‘Trump Always Chickens Out’.  Particularly apposite when you look at his repeated U-turns on import tariffs.  I wonder if his brain’s big enough to grasp the information he’s been given about the climate crisis rather than encouraging companies to “drill, baby, drill” and actually accelerate the collapse? 

One of its symptoms is the increase in the number of endangered species, even those we’ve taken for granted all our lives.  We haven’t seen swifts, swallows or martins here for many years although a few swallows have nested a couple of miles away in the town by the river;  however we do have greenfinches, which are supposed to be getting rarer, but nobody’s told ours who are aggressive little buggers and control other species’ access to the birdfeeder.

Now the Labour government has withdrawn a provision in the planning bill to require housebuilders to fit at least one hollow ‘swift brick’, which provides nesting space for swifts, house martins and other birds to help boost their declining numbers.  Well, it would have cost housebuilders about £35 per house and we couldn’t expect them to pay that, could we?

Other companies just poison wildlife (and humans) by pouring untreated sewage into our waterways but at least Thames Water, the UK’s largest water company, has been fined £123m by Ofwat with a condition that it’s to be paid by the company and its investors, not by customers.  This total includes an £18.2m fine for continuing to pay dividends even though they’d failed to meet the required minimum financial and environmental standards.

Thames Water’s response was, naturally, to plead to be let off the fine because the management that had run the company to the brink of bankruptcy and renationalisation where it is now poised thought it would make it harder for the company to find a buyer.  Did the directors admit their guilt, return the money paid to them and resign en masse?  Is the Pope a Muslim?

Scotland is currently debating a bill that would criminalise environmental offences classed as “ecocide” and allow company directors who caused severe or reckless danger to be imprisoned.

In New York, there was an explosion on board a barge carrying raw sewage to the works where it is treated.  One worker died and one was injured and the clean-up afterwards can only be imagined.  It calls to mind a popular saying involving fans …

Better news comes with the White House’s official confirmation that Elon Musk will be leaving Donald Trump’s ‘cabinet’ and the Department of Government Efficiency.

If we had a DOGE over here, so many services have now been privatised and made their buyers’ fortunes while they bankrupted their companies that there’d be nobody left to run them if they were renationalised.  Ideologically justifiable, privatisation has (broad generalisation coming up) proved unworkable in practice.  Remember even Maggie Thatcher thought privatising the railways was a step too far.

Memories, a funeral, how to beat scammers, and pain

8 February 2025

As the full horrors of TruskWorld are glooping up from the middens of their minds, here are some distractions.

Fifteen years ago, we moved down here from Hampshire and last week, for the first time since we left it, I revisited the country town where we’d lived.  I’d left plenty of time to get to a funeral in Winchester so I could do this if the traffic wasn’t bad, and it wasn’t so I did.

We’d lived there for a few years and I was surprised how familiar it wasn’t, but what I really wanted to see was how the depredations of the local water company had affected the local chalk stream.

Here my spirits lifted:  the shallow water was still crystal-clear and flowing over the oxygenating weeds.  I didn’t see any of the grayling or pike that used to hover in it, facing upstream and waiting for lunch to arrive, but it was still beautiful.

The town is one of those where the men wear plum-coloured corduroy trousers, the women are all called Fiona and antique shops outnumber food shops.  The charity shop is given so many flashy clothes that they hold special ‘label days’ for people who care about those things.

I then sat at the back of a massive church for the funeral service; I couldn’t hear a word so I was able to relax before the drive home.

My friend didn’t quite make her 90^th birthday and had been ill for some years but she was still in touch with enough people to warrant a memorial service in central London in April. I won’t be going to it because I’ve paid my respects to her family and feel no need to go to London.  Actually, at the last memorial service I did go to in London, I ended up holding hands with Joanna Lumley but only, I hasten to add, because I find it easier to hear people I’m talking to in a noisy room if I’m holding on to them.

Thinking of grandmothers reminds me of some wonderful news I heard this week about Daisy.  She’s an elderly woman who chats about knitting patterns and recipes for scones and finds modern technology very confusing.  She’s also an AI chatbot created by O2.

O2 released a recording of one of her calls when a scammer said her computer was riddled with viruses.  Daisy witters on about finding her glasses and how you turn the computer on while she says things like “You know, back in my day we didn’t have all this technology. Everything was much simpler. What about you, dear?”   And so she rambles on until the scammer realises they’ve been had.

As far as I know, she’s not being made available commercially but it’s something we can all do for ourselves.  I once kept an American spammer on the phone for 17 minutes.  He’d started by saying “How are you?” so I gave him a 5-minute spiel on how funny it was he should ask that because I’d actually been having some problems with my back and no medication seemed to touch it and I wasn’t sure about physiotherapy and my knees and I wondered if it was all to do with the weather, with the endless rain, and what was the weather like where he was because I always reckon we get more than other areas and by the way did he see the match last night …  I think this was the one who finally lost his cool and said I sounded like a 90-year-old with no teeth and no friends so I naturally said “Sounds good to me” and he rang off.

I also once had a long chat trying to convince someone that, if I was owed a lot of money for a motor accident (though they didn’t know where it was or when), all they had to do was put a cheque in the post.  “It doesn’t work like that” they said so I pointed out they’d got my name and number so they obviously had my address, and could post it to me.  Actually, they didn’t have my real name (that’s another story) but I didn’t feel the need to enlighten them.

You can often faze callers from India or Pakistan, where it’s late afternoon or evening, by asking them what the time is, explaining you’ve got to go out for lunch.  Sadly, I rarely have enough time to enjoy these calls to the full.

Perhaps it really is to do with the time.  A recent study led by University College London into responses from 50,000 adults over two years (published in the journal BMJ Mental Health) showed that people generally feel brighter when they first wake.  During the day, they deteriorate and are pretty low by midnight.  Mental health also tends to be more variable at weekends and more stable during the week but the day of the week and the season also have an effect. Hmmm.

I also read this week that Richard Osman (of The Thursday Murder Club fame) had been in hospital with what he described as the most painful experience of his life.  Aha! I thought, betcher it was a kidney stone.

I had one once and we ended up calling the ambulance.  When I said it hurt, the young doctor who checked me into A&E blithely told me they’re as painful as childbirth.  I said I wanted to hear this from a woman. 

As it happened, the consultant who came round in the afternoon was a woman who had experienced both.  She thought for a moment and said yes, that sounded about right.

Mine damaged my ureter (not the urethra, which is wider) as the stone scraped its way down to my bladder but Osman’s was bigger and he needed an operation to remove it.  Isn’t it merciful that the memory of pain fades so quickly.  You can remember that something was the worst pain you’ve ever felt but you can no longer remember what the pain was like.

It’s why some mothers have more than one child.

US electioneering,UK’s leaders, radioactive peaches and oysters,

14 September 2024

Last week saw the first – and only? – debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and immediate reactions, even from Fox News, were that Harris had won:  a snap poll by CNN showed 63% for Harris and 37% for Trump.  The Democrats no doubt also benefitted from the contrast between this debate and the earlier skirmish between Trump and Joe Biden, which Biden fluffed so badly.

Another move in Harris’s favour came from Taylor Swift whose AI-generated image had been broadcast by Trump and appeared to show that she and her fans were Trump supporters, and an earlier post that had called her a “childless cat lady”.  Having stayed away from the tussle so far, this brought her into the open and she has now endorsed Harris for president, saying “she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos”. 

She included a picture of herself with one of her cats and signed off as “Childless cat lady”.

Harris succeeded by being well-prepared and leading Trump into his usual, incomprehensible rants about unrelated topics.

It’s a bit like how to reply when somebody is aggressive and swears at you or insults you:  leave a slight pause and ask what they said.  They then repeat it and you say “I thought that’s what you said” and you stop, turn away and walk off, ignoring any attempts they make to amplify the original comment.

One of the ads that pop up on my computer claimed that there are 10 different measures of intelligence.  I naturally didn’t click on it but I did have a vision of Trump getting one answer right in each of the 10 tests and then claiming he scored 10 out of 10, or 100% …

Me, I’d vote for Harris because she’s beautiful, looks intelligent and has an irresistible smile.  My Conservative friend would vote for Trump because he’s not Biden or his protegé.  Aren’t they both great reasons for helping elect a new Commander-in-Chief!

Out in the field, the Republican candidate for the Senate in Montana, a state that could decide which party controls the Senate, is busy rewriting his CV.  Records written at the time show he left the military because of injury, disillusionment over military personnel policies and refusing the offer of a desk job but, on the campaign trail, he’s now claiming to have been “discharged” because of wounds suffered while he was on duty.

Over here, OfCom, which fined Royal Mail £5.6m last year because it failed to deliver 20% of its first class post on time, is now saying they might let Royal Mail off delivering second class mail on Saturdays, reducing the contractual commitments they demanded of Royal Mail when the service was privatised.  This seems stupid since postal workers will still have to do their rounds on Saturdays to deliver first class mail so why not take second class letters as well?

The aim is presumably to reduce staff costs while increasing profits for the owners while, quite coincidentally, its parent company is currently considering an offer (which is subject to a national security review) from the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky.

I no longer understand quite how the Post Office, Royal Mail and Parcelforce are now related.  I stamped an envelope recently and took it into the local post office to add the extra costs of ‘Signed for Delivery’.  We can’t do that, I was told, because the stamp is Royal Mail and getting mail signed for is the Post Office.  Or possibly vice versa. 

The decision to remove the winter heating payment from people who don’t receive pension credits has been widely criticised and it does appear that it might not have been properly thought through.  One commentator has pointed out that the £1.3bn saved will barely cover 8 weeks’ spending on “the useless HS2 – spending that is set to continue for the next five years”.

They go on to say that Keir Starmer must stop rubbishing the Tories and show how Labour can save “prisons, hospitals, schools and care homes” (something the Tories so disastrously failed to do in 14 years).

On the other side, there seems no great enthusiasm within the parliamentary party for any of the Tories who want to take over from Rishi Sunak (and the rest of us couldn’t give a hoot).

In Japan, they are still facing problems over the removal of 880 tons of extremely dangerous radioactive material that is still in Fukushima after the 2011 earthquake destroyed three of the nuclear plant’s six reactors.  Radiation levels in the debris are still so high that the Tokyo Electric Power Company has had to develop specialised robots to extract a tiny sample for testing.

They’re also promoting food grown in the Fukushima area and Harrods now sells Fukushima peaches (£80 for a box of 3, but that’s Harrods for you).  The peaches are apparently known for their juicy, sweet taste – and possibly because they glow in dark kitchens when night starvation takes you in there for a fruity snack.

Now here’s a confession:  I’ve never liked oysters.  Apart from a feeling of distaste at eating something that’s still alive, twitches when you dribble lemon juice on it and has the consistency of fresh snot, all you can taste is salt (and lemon juice). 

Anyway, conservationists are now employing oysters’ skills at filtering water (an adult oyster can filter 200 litres of water a day) to create oyster reefs which will attract other species to the filtered water and help rebalance the marine ecology.  Thames Water will probably start selling packs of three oysters for £80 because they won’t just taste of oyster but will have the added gustatory subtleties extracted from untreated sewage and retained in their bodies.

The next, obvious step is to do away with all those expensive sewage treatment plants and create oyster beds in the outflow systems.

I’m now going to find a quiet place and lie down for a bit.

Terrorism? book burning, clean energy, sewage and GitHub

17 August 2024

It was reported last week that Israeli soldiers have been dressing Palestinian prisoners in Israeli army uniforms, tying their hands together, attaching a camera to their jackets, then sending them into buildings and tunnels in Gaza that Israel has bombed and now fears might have booby-trapped. This was reported in Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper published in English and Hebrew and distributed with The New York Times International Edition.

Haaretz has also claimed the head of the Israel Defence Forces is aware that this is happening.

Why are we and America still supporting Israel with weapons?  Surely this sort of action means we’re supporting the perpetrators of terrorism, war crimes etc?  And not just in Israel …

In the free world, the American state of Utah leads the way in repression by having ordered the removal of some books by certain authors to be removed from public school libraries and classrooms in all its 41 districts.  Authors whose works have been banned include Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, Rupi Kaur and Sarah J Maas who Utah thinks write books containing “pornographic or indecent” material.

Setting aside the question of who put their own immortal souls at risk by reading the things and deciding they are unsuitable, I wonder if they realised that the authors concerned are likely to be jumping for joy as people buy lots more of the banned books and smuggle them across state borders to see what all the fuss is about.

I remember reading ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, or rather bits of it where the book fell open at well-thumbed pages, before it was legally available in the UK.  It normally came in brown paper covers on which some wag had usually inscribed ‘The Bible’.  Years later, I tried to read it (and other D H Lawrence books) from the beginning, but I couldn’t get on with them and found his writing unimpressive.

In New York, 63-year old John Mark Rozendaal, a professional cellist and climate activist has been arrested for playing a Bach solo (one of those gorgeous cello suites?) in the public park outside the offices of Citibank, one of the world’s largest funders of fossil fuel expansion.  The charge is “criminal contempt” in connection with a peaceful protest;  he was arrested, with 13 others, by police in riot gear.

Elsewhere in America, Eversource Energy recently opened the country’s first networked geothermal energy source pilot project in Framingham, Massachusetts.  They’ve drilled a hole down some 200 metres to a level where the temperature is a constant 13^oC and now pump a mixture of cold water and propylene glycol* down to this depth and then pump rather warmer mixture back up again and use the warm liquid to heat or cool 24 residential and five commercial buildings. The pumps are apparently powered solely by ‘clean’ electricity.

Another source of clean energy is nuclear fusion which is thought to be some 30 years away (as it has been for the last 50 years or so).  Nuclear fusion involves bonding atoms together and is basically the opposite of nuclear fission, which involves banging atoms together until they break (non-scientists should note I am oversimplifying things slightly here;  scientists will already have spotted this).  Fission releases immense amounts of energy that powers our nuclear power plants and can vaporise entire cities in a split second.  Its by-products are so deadly that, in the case of iodine 129, it will remain dangerous for about 15 million years.

Fission has been demonstrated on an atomic scale but no human has yet found a way to scale it up to be useful (stars can do it, it’s what keeps them working).  Let’s be optimistic and say when (not if) they succeed in doing this, fossil fuels can be completely phased out. 

This will allow new ways to generate and store electrical energy, replacing batteries whose basic chemistry goes back about 200 years and which make electric vehicles (a) very heavy and (b) very expensive.  It will also allow advances in medical technology and to defuse stuff like iodine 129 by converting it to iodine 128, which has a half-life of under half an hour, or just time for a nice cup of tea.

I’d actually be prepared to bet a lot of money that politics and economics will suppress, delay and over-price it in order to protect governments’ and large corporations’ interests in fossil fuels but I’m unlikely to be around in 30 years to collect on the bet …

Down here in the street, we can’t even deal with humanity’s waste products and this week has seen the erection of signs on two of our closest beaches, including the one where I swam a couple of weeks ago, warning that South West Water has yet again been pumping more raw sewage into the sea. The RNLI has confirmed people should not enter the water and it even made the national news, but at least you can’t say South West Water don’t give a shit. 

Somebody has said that the more people who write to the local council to complain, the greater the fine that SWW will have to pay, so pick up your quills good people.

By the way, something I was doing on the computer the other day wanted me to choose how to open something and one of the options was GitHub.  Naturally, I looked this up and it claims to be “The world’s leading AI-powered developer platform” but obviously doesn’t know what ‘git’ means in English – even the American Merriam-Webster dictionary knows that.  And I thought the I in AI stood for ‘intelligence’.

Quotation of the week came from Donald Trump in Monday’s interview with Elon Musk when he said “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.  The biggest threat is nuclear warming.”

Have you noticed that ‘Elon Musk’ is an anagram of Leon Skum?

*          Propylene glycol is used both in anti-freeze solutions and as a food additive which presumably means that, if you freeze to death, your stomach is the last bit to seize up so you don’t die feeling hungry.

More drugs, water companies, sewerage, and prisons

13 July 2024

Following my brief mention of cannabis in last week’s mutterings, a friend said their son was surprised to get a receipt when he bought some cannabis in one of the American states.  I hadn’t thought of that before but I’ve never been offered a receipt when I’ve bought cannabis over here.  I wonder why.

The illegal drug market is flourishing in Britain and some people believe that legalising cannabis for recreational use will stop users from having to buy from dealers who have a vested interest in converting them to more unpleasant and expensive drugs like cocaine (which, as far as I know, hasn’t been legal since the beginning of the 20^th century when Coca Cola had to stop putting it in their fizzy drink.)

Other people don’t think this is such a good idea and say there is some evidence that legal drugs would have to be subjected to quality controls and tax, which would make them more expensive than illegal drugs.

I obviously don’t know which way it would go but cannabis buds are hard to ‘dilute’; it’s much easier to cut cocaine with salt, bleach powder or other white crystalline substances.

Perhaps there’s a case for legalising cannabis and letting market forces decide whether stoners will pay more for a purer product or will take the risk by continuing to go to their friendly neighbourhood dealers where they can place a side-order of amphetamines.

We now have a new government so, while I don’t think their manifesto mentioned rationalising the drugs market, we can always hope.  The chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has told business leaders Labour will “fix the foundations” of the British economy so why not practise by starting here? It’d be easier than trying to sort out the sewage problem.

Thames Water is the biggest water company and is threatened with bankruptcy after the water companies in England and Wales were sold to the highest bidder in 1989 in the dying throes of Maggie Thatcher’s government.

In the following 36 years, the privatised companies rewarded their shareholders and executives handsomely while, as ‘wild’ swimmers all over the country are suffering, failing to deal with any of the big problems.  Ah but, says Thames Water, many of their water mains and sewage pipes are Victorian.  So?  Weren’t they Victorian when they did their due diligence before buying the company?

Thames Water had no debts when it was privatised but owed £14.7bn in 2022.  Its pension fund was £26m overfunded in 2008 but was £260m underfunded by 2015.  Much of this is down to Macquarie, which started as a small Australian bank in the 1960s and grew enough to become an asset stripper and buy Thames Water in 2006.  

It immediately rewarded itself by paying out £656m in dividends (mostly to itself of course) even though the company only made a profit of only £241m, grabbing the shortfall of £425m from the company’s reserves.  

It broke Thames Water up into a complex structure of inter-related companies, including subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and added insult to injury by taking approximately £2.8bn out of the company before it sold Thames Water in 2017.

A Macquarie spokesperson said: “During the 11 years in which our funds were shareholders in Thames Water, we oversaw the largest investment programme in the company’s history and the highest rate of investment per customer in the industry.”  They didn’t mention that they’d taken out all the money and been forced to borrow huge sums from lenders, paying them large amounts of interest, to provide the money for what they claimed was “their” investment in the industry.

Robert Maxwell, come back, all is forgiven.

Like Maxwell, Macquarie proved between 2006 and 2017 its dedication to ripping off everybody in sight, including the pension funds of the staff who actually do the work.  The company has been described by one commentator as “a powerful totem of mismanagement, corporate greed and lax regulatory oversight”

Only 9% of Thames Water is now owned by UK investors.  The rest is owned by investors in Canada, Abu Dhabi, China, Australia and the Netherlands and these shareholders recently decided the company was “uninvestable” and refused to throw good money after bad to bail the company out.

Of course, Thames Water isn’t the only water company to abuse a monopoly but, as the biggest water company, it offers a costly warning to governments not to repeat the stupidities of Thatcherism.

Oop north, another private company has let so much filth into Lake Windermere that the algae it produced on the surface of the lake can be seen from space.  Scotland doesn’t seem to have fared too badly but its water companies were never privatised and what is now Scottish Water is still owned by the Scottish government.  In 1988, when water privatisation was being considered, it was rumoured that the Loch Ness Monster had applied for accommodation in Lake Baikal.

(By the way, did you know there’s more water in Loch Ness than there is in all the lakes, rivers and reservoirs in England and Wales combined?)

Labour’s manifesto also promised to make life easier for victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence and are now (I hope) trying to find a way of keeping these people in prison after the last government recently came up with the brilliant idea of reducing overcrowding in prisons by effectively reducing criminals’ sentences and letting them out early.  Why don’t they take up my earlier suggestion not imprison ‘white collar’ criminals but to bankrupt them, transferring all their assets to the state, and make them live on state benefits?

With everything else that was severely damaged during the last government’s 14 years in power, like the NHS, education and social care, Labour will need to prioritise actions and I suspect the purification of what we ingest and egest is an even lower priority than the classification of drugs.

The last government seemed to believe that privatising and sub-contracting services would bring more money back into the economy because of taxes on their profits and on wages paid to their staff;  this would then allow further investment in infrastructure, such as waterproofing roofs in schools and hospital buildings.  They also seemed to believe there are fairies at the bottom of my garden but I haven’t seen any yet.

Schadenfreude, Glastonbury, Gwyneth Paltrow, drugs and the election

6 July 2024

Out here in the sticks, there are a lot of narrow roads with high banks on each side and few verges.  There are also a lot of huge tractors that travel for long distances on them, normally towing huge trailers full of farming materials and sometimes, more unnervingly, huge tankers full of what smells like something our local water company is paying them to scatter over fields so it can then perfume the air for miles around before running off into our local rivers.

This inevitably leads to long queues of vehicles behind them and I have a theory that their drivers have a competition to see how many they can pile up behind them.  “When oi got to the top o’ the hill today, oi could see about ‘alf a moile of cars and vans stuck behind me, oi I reckon about 40 on ‘em.  How’d you do, moi lover?”  “Oo ar, oi only catched about 25 behoind me but one on ‘em were a bus.”

Anyway, I saw one on the edge of town on Tuesday that had taken the corner too fast (in a 30 limit) and its trailer had toppled sideways, scattering a huge pile of hay bales over the hedge into the field beyond.  Luckily, the tractor had stayed upright and the driver was standing by it, looking at the chaos and scratching his head, while the tourist cars full of fractious children and white van drivers with nails bitten to the quick made their way past it, waving thank you and other hand signals as they passed.  (That’s ‘passed’ as in ‘passed’, not as in ‘died’.)

Do you know that white vans (some of which are black) are limited to 60 mph on all roads except motorways, even dual carriageways?  Neither do their drivers.  I keep meaning to ask our local police HQ how many white van drivers were prosecuted for exceeding 60 mph on the county’s roads last year.  I reckon less than one.

Further up-country, roads have been busy with the traffic going to Glasto, which seems to have put on a good show with Seasick Steve playing to blues fans.  (A friend told me that he was asked why he called himself Seasick Steve and he replied “Because I get seasick”.)

It was also good to hear that the actor Michael J Fox played guitar with Coldplay.  What a brave man to show thousands of people how devastating Parkinson’s Disease is.

Also appearing was Janelle Monáe, wearing an outfit designed to look like a vulva.  The crowd loved it and shouted about vaginas.  What’s wrong with people?  The vagina is an internal muscular tube while the vulva is what you see from outside and … oh, who cares.

Coldplay’s lead singer is Chris Martin who was born in Exeter and spent 10 years married to Gwyneth Paltrow, an American actor and nepo baby (I noticed her first in the brilliant film, The Royal Tenenbaums, and she has subsequently won an Oscar and a Golden Globe).  Paltrow is now more famous for creating ‘Goop’, a company selling hugely overpriced goods claiming dubious health and well-being benefits that celebrate and enhance female sexuality.

One of her more famous products is, or was, a jade egg that is inserted into the vagina to … I’m not quite sure what it’s supposed to do but have a feeling you’d need to be very careful next time you go to the loo.  She also sold candles supposed to smell like a vagina (that’ll be $75 please).  Personally, I can think of several scents I’d rather candles produced, including that of tankers full of effluent being towed behind local tractors. 

There has even been talk of benefits to be gained from some of the drugs that are currently illegal in the UK despite increasing medical evidence of the benefits that some can offer, such as the analgesic effects that the psychoactive components of cannabis can have on the pain caused by Multiple Sclerosis.

In America, the Drug Enforcement Administration has proposed that cannabis should be considered a medication rather than a narcotic.  It is already legal in some states but its reclassification would mean that it would still need approval by the Food and Drug Administration and a doctor’s prescription in the other states and would remain more controlled than alcohol and tobacco even though cannabis is safer than either.  It would also make it easier to study its effects in the medical field.

We did of course have an election in the UK last week, on America’s Independence Day, and the choice of date proved gratifyingly accurate.  Its results were summarised using exactly the same words in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the i:  “Labour Landslide”.  This seemed a trifle unfair since, while there was undoubtedly an overwhelming shift to Labour, it was clear from the number of seats won by the smaller parties that the result was more a well-earned condemnation of the party that has damaged Britain so badly in the last 14 years.

Even Scotland followed suit and, after several uncomfortable years, the Scottish National Party was decimated.  Actually, it was worse than that because “decimated” originally meant to defeat one tenth of ‘the other side’ and the SNP lost a lot more than a tenth of its MPs.

Even the new Reform party got some seats, including Nigel Farage who, after changing parties several times over his career, was finally elected an MP on his 8^th attempt.  It’ll be interesting to see how the new parliament works with such a wide range of views because it seems closer to representing the views of voters better than previous parliaments.

My diehard Conservative friend and I occasionally discuss the de/merits of Proportional Representation and he recently asked if I was still in favour of PR if it let people from parties I don’t like become MPs.  I replied that he was missing the point because that was exactly what a properly constructed and regulated PR system would achieve.  Just because I don’t like some parties’ policies doesn’t mean that I think they should be excluded from debates and, indeed, I believe that the more different points of view are discussed, the better the ultimate conclusion is likely to be.

Still, its’s going to take a few years to rebuild Britain and I just hope that Labour realises many of us would be happy to pay more tax to rebuild health and social care services and, if it impoverishes the privateer contractors who’ve been ripping billions of pounds out of public services, tough.

Cats’ life expectancy, exclusive groups, a backward story and drugs

18 May 2024

Last Sunday, the day after I’d written about Israel realising “their ceaseless rocket attacks have probably killed the Israeli hostages that Gaza was holding”, Hamas announced that one of their Israeli hostages had died from wounds inflicted by an Israeli rocket attack.  I sometimes wonder who reads these mutterings.

Later in the week, we discovered that scientists have discovered an earth-sized planet orbiting a small, ultra-cool red dwarf star some 55 light years away (which, bearing in mind that it takes less than 1½ seconds for light to get from earth to the moon, is a long way away).  It’s about the same size as Earth and orbits its star in 17 days, which means that a year there lasts 17 days and, if I lived there, I’d be well over 1,500 years old.

How do they know there aren’t two planets of the same size relative to their ‘sun’, 180^o apart, on the same plane, that take 34 days to circumnavigate the star?

On earth, a 2019 study of almost 8,000 cats by the Royal Veterinary College has shown that some breeds tend to have shorter lifespans than others and the Sphynx cat, an ugly, hairless little beast bred intentionally (and incestuously) in the 1960s, has an average lifespan of 6.8 years while Burmese and Birman cats live for an average of 14.4 years.  The average lifespan of all breeds was 11.7 years.

There are two obvious conclusions to be drawn if these results are accurate and representative of all cats in a particular breed:

1. if you want a long-lived furry friend, get a Burmese or a Birman cat
2. if you want to get rich, breed Sphynx cats.

Much coverage has been given to the Garrick Club’s decision to allow members to join after almost 200 years and somebody has suggested a list of women who might become members, including people like Mary Beard, Judi Dench, Elizabeth Gloster, Amber Rudd and Juliet Stevenson but it’s not clear whether these people have actually expressed an interest in joining, or even whether they were consulted before their names were mentioned.  It may be entirely misguided on my part but I’d love to have been there when Judi Dench was told she’d been suggested as a potential member.

I’m also puzzled by the people who have been named as members, though I admit some have been embarrassed enough to resign after their membership was made public.  Having turned down invitations to join various clubs over the years, I still can’t imagine wanting to join any club that excluded women but that’s basically because I feel more comfortable in the company of women than I do in the company of men. 

The limited membership problem made me think of Mensa, the organisation whose membership is limited to people who score highly on IQ tests.  I could never see the point of joining a group of people whose only common feature was enjoying doing IQ tests.

But I sometimes wonder if I’m a bit unusual.  I did a bank of tests recently and one question involved listing as many words beginning with P I could think of in a minute.  At the end, I was told I’m the first person they’d ever come across whose first suggestion was ‘pterodactyl’.

I recently read ‘A Spark of Light’ by Jodi Picoult, who presents the story backwards.  It has a thought-provoking plot, is well written and telling the story backwards adds an interesting dimension to it;  the first section is headed ‘Five p.m.’, the second ‘Four p.m.’ and so on (with an unavoidable coda headed ‘Six p.m.’)  An interesting selection for book clubs?

As we age, our senses can weaken, with a need for glasses and hearing difficulties usually the first to be recognised.  Losing our sense of smell can be harder to identify, despite its close links to memory.  Sometimes a particular smell can bring back a vivid flash of memory from decades ago and scientists are wondering if losing our sense of smell might be an early sign of the memory loss associated with dementia.  However, research has been complicated by the loss of a sense of taste, which is closely related to smell, being one of the symptoms of Covid.

Smoking also dulls the sense of smell and I remember when I gave up smoking that I smelt something, possibly cowslips, and realised I hadn’t been able to smell them for years.  This could, of course, be a good reason for smoking like a chimney if one works in a sewage plant or an abattoir.

When I first started work, every office had ashtrays, heaped high with butts and, looking back, it’s shocking to remember that we smoked in department stores, foodshops, aeroplanes, cinemas and trains – even the London underground – had special ‘no smoking’ coaches.  Nowadays, smokers have become social pariahs who huddle together in windy corners and a 2021 survey showed that the number of adult cigarette smokers in America had fallen by almost 50% in the previous 15 years.

This is bad news for tobacco companies but, as good capitalists, they reacted by offering smokeless nicotine pouches and vapes which give the illusion of smoke.  Even more disgustingly, at least to those of us who used to smoke French cigarettes with the distinctive flavour of Algerian black tobacco, vapes now come with fruit flavours, presumably to hook in younger smokers.  The pouches contain anything from 1½mg to 9mg of nicotine, compared with the 8mg to 20mg in cigarettes, of which only 1-2mg is actually absorbed.

To put the dangers of smoking into perspective, according to the Office for National Statistics, about 75,000 deaths in 2021 in England and Wales were smoking-related;  about 21,000 were alcohol-related and about 5,000 were drug-related.  The last figure includes 2,250 from opiates, 850 from cocaine and the other 1,900 from all other class A, B and C drugs, of which about 20 were related to cannabis (though more deaths from other drugs were of people who also had traces of cannabis in their system).

What nobody seems to know is the percentage of people actually using these drugs who died so these totals don’t indicate the relative lethality of the various groups (but don’t we wish we weren’t starting from here when classifying and taxing various drugs).

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.

Motion and change, Israeli pogrom and private sewers

6 April 2024

We know that everything is in motion, from sub-atomic particles, to the corpuscles churning through our veins, to the fragmentation of Gondwanaland to the moon revolving round the earth which is revolving around the sun to the expansion of spacetime itself.  We also know that if nothing moved, everything would stop and become no more than a snapshot on the wall of the gods’ dining room on the second floor of the ninth dimension.

We also know that motion changes things, and that change involves motion.  Everything moves all the time, some things faster than others, but everything is in motion.

Just imagine time stops.  No ticking clock, no beating of the heart.  Everything is frozen because things can’t move without taking time to do it.  Or imagine, things stop moving.  How do you know if you haven’t got time to measure that time has passed but nothing’s moved.

All this means is that time and space (i.e. just stuff, from ants’ breakfasts to dark energy) are inseparable and that’s where we live, in spacetime which is constantly changing, so there’s no point trying to resist change.  Or to welcome it come to that;  we just have to accept that things are changing all the time.                                                        

Luckily, our awareness of these changes is limited to those that affect the way we live and those we are hear about here and now.  Of course the past influences us now but, if we did something yesterday that we now regret, we can’t go back and change it.  If it affected someone else, we can apologise and try to put it right but, if we can’t, we shouldn’t worry about it.  People who feel regret or sadness for something that happened are living in the past, which can’t changed.

The flipside is that if we worry about what might happen tomorrow or the next day, we’re living in the future, and all we can do is take precautions today to protect us when tomorrow comes:  save money now for a pension and, if you haven’t got enough money to do this, stop worrying about it;  worry won’t give you a pension fund but it will make you feel bad.

In practice, we need to make some preparations for the morrow, but we can only make them now.  If I haven’t got a clean pair of pants for tomorrow, I’ll do a wash today and make sure they’re dry before I need them;  there’s nowt worse than soggy pants, and I speak as someone who waited till the transfer bus came into sight before I left the sea in Corfu, pulled my jeans over a wet bathing costume, added a T-shirt, picked up my case and boarded the bus.

Six hours later, we were all still sitting sealed in a plane at Corfu airport as it got hotter and hotter while the crew tried to start the engine.  They finally gave up, bussed us to a local hotel and checked us in for the night.  In the room I stripped off my (by then) damp jeans and hung them over a chair on the balcony, then put my wet swimming costume in a plastic bag.  There are some joys in life that we don’t recognise until we experience them.

There seem to have been too many changes in the world recently and the only one that even veers in the right direction is the internal combustion of the Tory party.  Incidentally, of which man was it recently written by one of his own people saying “His madness has been described as “delusional” and “terrifying”, adding “This man is putting us all at risk:  Our future, our children’s future, the strategic alliance that is the keystone of [our country’s] national security.”  Others, also of his own people, have said he’s “off the rails” and an existential danger to [his country].  He must be gone from our lives”?

• Boris Johnson
• Donald Trump
• Benjamin Netanyahu
• Vladimir Putin

The correct answer is Netanyahu but it could be any of them and that’s what frightens me. 

His recent murders included precision attacks on an aid convoy run by World Central Kitchen that killed seven people in three trucks that weren’t travelling in convoy but had up to a mile between them, taking supplies to people who are being exterminated by Israel.  You’d think that, knowing what had happened to Jews in the Second World War, some of the Jewish leaders of Israel would see the similarities with what their state is now doing to Gazans.

Even Joe Biden, hitherto having failed to condemn Israel, seems to have come off the fence and more than 600 UK lawyers, including three former supreme court justices, have warned the government that it’s breaking international law by continuing to send arms to Israel.  A friend has said “Aha, but we import more arms from Israel than we export to them.”  I have no idea if this is true but, if it is, why don’t we increase our imports of weapons from them to reduce the stocks they’re using to kill charity volunteers and starving Gazans who Israel has forced out of their homes into concentration refugee camps?

Back at the ranch, all we can offer is the chance to share what used to be the clear waters of rivers, lakes and beaches with piles of shit, shredded lavatory paper and used condoms.  The water companies that were privatised (surely one of the stupidest decisions a UK government every made) (well, along with the railways) knew they were taking on crumbling Victorian sewerage infrastructure but, rather than plan for its replacement, chose to give a lot of its income to its management and shareholders instead.

Britain’s biggest water company, Thames Water, now seems to be on the point of being renationalised and South West Water blames its problems on having more coastline than any other British water company.  Really?  And this wasn’t known when it was privatised?  You’ll probably find Slartibartfast’s signature in one of Cornwall’s smaller coves.