Support your local chemical weapons factory

A handful of people are making the most of the snow before it eventually disappears. Ken Loach lives in one of those houses. I have put off installing the bronze woodland creatures until tomorrow for obvious reasons. Tomorrow is the Spring Equinox, so it had better be gone by then. Today, I am washing my smalls.

H.I. scuttled off to teach this morning, but nagging away at her is the fear that there will be a flood right over her bed in this compact but adorable city apartment. It is my fault - in part - because I put a seed of doubt in her head by referring to the last time this happened and paying someone to climb on to the roof to clear the drifts from the front end of the Beast from the East, but this weekend we are feeling the effects of the arse-end of The Beast which was nowhere near as severe. It must be a bloody big beast.

Talking of Beasts from the East, I see Putin won the election by a landslide. What a surprise. I think that he does actually have a lot of support from ordinary Russians, but Hitler had a lot of support from ordinary Germans. Before you start complaining that I am comparing Putin to Hitler, let me say that I am not. Well, not much anyway, and it is not as ridiculous as comparing Trump (or even Corbyn) to Hitler.

Today, international chemical weapons experts are going to Porton Down to try to establish once and for all where the Salisbury Novichok (a Russian word meaning 'newcomer'...) emanated from. This is probably because Putin has suggested that it was made by Porton Down itself and used by British agents to poison Sergei Skripal and his hapless daughter. It a twisted sort of way it would make sense. Porton Down is eight miles from Salisbury city centre. Why pay more for inferior Russian imports?

It seems that the chemical was put into the air intake of his car's heating system, which would explain why there is no CCTV footage of the perpetrators and why his daughter was given the same dose without anyone witnessing someone running up and shoving it in their faces as they did when Kim Jong Un killed his brother.

Porton Down is so shrouded in secrecy and mystery that is has been the subject of many fictional stories and films, the last one being an episode of 'Sherlock'. Considering the awfulness of what it actually does on a daily basis, it is viewed with an almost romantic patriotism by many Brits.

I know of one experiment there to test the effects of water-cannon on unruly crowds. They wanted to know how much damage water-cannon could inflict on human beings, so they anaesthetised some sheep and blasted them with high-pressure water (wool = clothing, etc.). It turned out that it can be lethal at close range.

They have messed around with Anthrax is the past too, so if ever Porton Down was sold as a brown-field site for housing development, the clean-up bill would put Brian Aldridge's in the shade.

Anyway, non of this has put me off our new Russian water-heater. It works very well and was amazingly inexpensive. I hope this testimonial doesn't brand me as a traitor in the months to come. Oh heck - what am I going to do for spare parts if it needs them in the future?