:lol: Meant to post over in that place actually Av, but somehow must have hit the wrong button. Don't get old - or rather do so, but just do it better than me! ;) Yes Logan is good, but then they all are. And goodness knows how, but I'm finding myself in sympathy with Glokta! What does that say abou...

Quick post. Very significant development that Ireland, Norway and Spain have all come out with declarations recognising Palestinian statehood yesterday. Signs that other European countries might be ready to join them as well. This will be disconcerting news in Jerusalem indeed. Perhaps the beginning...

Just a heads up guys. The UK general election has just been announced and I'm setting up a designated thread over on the General Council thing. I'll be concentrating on this for the next 6 weeks or so and will likely only post here on things not election related. There'll probably be odds and sods, ...

Sometimes I wonder how we got here. It shouldn't have been possible given the sheer scale of the damage we faced. Lands blasted and torn asunder, rivers choked with scum and refuse, air so full of carbon dioxide and methane that the temperature was rising measurably almost by the year, never mind th...

There is a groundswell of public awareness building about what was done to us during the pandemic and people are angry. I'm certainly angry, and I won't stop talking about it until the end of my days. Remember - this whole thing has occurred since the 2019 general election. The last time we went to ...

:lol: Read a few of those books myself - quite often the 'Picadilly westerns', westerns written by UK authors who'd never set foot in the US, but simply wrote following the format of the genre. But at present I'm reading a series of fantasy novels by Joe Abercrombie, The First Law trilogy. Harsh and...

The five years in the coming Langstaff report on the infected blood scandal merely confirms what we already knew about the State we live in - that it's rotten to the core. Neither at its center, nor further out in its institutions, does it ever acknowledge being wrong or making mistakes, and further...

Near every paper in the country today features something on its front page regarding 'the greatest scandal ever in NHS history, the worst treatment disaster in history, the biggest ever miscarriage of justice in the history of our nations health service. They refer not to the true biggest scandal of...

The Sunday Telegraph runs a headline Russia and China 'manipulating UK voters' with social media war . The story tells us that bogus social media accounts are being set up in their thousands in order to falsely increase the profile of pro-Palestinian influencers on YouTube and other platforms online...

I watched Kier Stamer stand in front of his selected audience, with a backdrop of his shadow cabinet and big Labour players yesterday, and give us a lachrymosal display of nothingness, the type of which we can expect in bucketfulls, should he win the next election. He's come up with a new trick, exc...

Devon seems to be the place to go for bargains these days - and the shits, but more of that later. I opened a Sky News story on my Google feed page (ie the first Google page that comes up automatically when I switch this thing in my hands on each day), and alongside the childishly simplified story o...

I'll bet Rishi Sunak is wishing he'd never heard the name Rwanda as his wonderful deportation scam unravels around his ears, getting worse with every day that passes. The Tory right and it's client media was near swooning with joy when it finally got its Safety of Rwanda Bill through the House the o...

:lol: If only that were true Av. Alas small shops are breeding grounds for resentment and petty backbiting, largely due to the necessity to create 'entertainment' or diversion from the tedium and repetition of the work. Big fish in small ponds, all chiefs and no Indians, petty grievances grown large...

Good advice Av, and I'll follow it. :) Trouble is that on the rare occasions I've had any dealings with people who don't identify in the traditional (to my generation) manner, they've seemed to want to make an issue of it. On one occasion - a busy Saturday - in the shop, I was serving queues of peop...

On the censorship thing Av (and sorry - I missed your post re it's being on the last page and all), it's as much that today it seems like to even debate some issues from the contentious side is taken as being 'anti' in some way or another. Or even not to want to debate it! Case in point. We have a n...

Excellent! Today we've found a new group of people to blame for all our troubles as a nation, and at least in this case they only have themselves to blame for their condition. Fat people. A study in the Times reveals that fat people were responsible for double the amount of lost hours in the workpla...

Thanks to Michael Lambert for explaining the difference between a recession proper and the 'technical' recession, which the media is at pains to tell us isn't quite as bad as a true recession, but from which we have nevertheless been suffering and from which we are thankfully emerging. A full recess...

They say that you're closer to God in a garden than anywhere else. Well it certainly rang true for me as I laboured in mine yesterday in the near summer temperatures that we have been enjoying for a day or two in Cornwall. Taking the more intended meaning, I note that there is no mention of actually...

Yes - Biden doesn't seem to think that his 'red lines' have been crossed as yet - he describes the Rafa operations conducted to date as being "On the border" (I think he means territoriality re high population zones, rather than metaphorically in respect of said lines ) - but has neverthel...

This time it appears to have been the other way around Av. If I'm getting it right Hamas had accepted a set of proposals for a ceasefire in which they agreed to the release of three hostages per week as long as the ceasefire persisted. I think that the conditions were brokered by the US, Qatar and E...