So special...

 

Pilgrim's Way (1956) | BFI National Archive

Roman

 

Just a simple message

 I am writing on behalf of Tom Stevenson.

He wanted to tell you that he has been ill for the past 5 weeks and he is still recovering and will need help from therapists for a while before he will be able to  contact you.

Hopefully he will speak to you sometime in the future.

Best wishes,

Jackie (her indoors)

Wound-licking

I have not been listening to the Conservative's Party conference much (or Labour's) but I continue to be impressed by Liz Truss's astounding lack of contrition and thick-skinned insistence that she should have been left to do billions of pounds worth of  more damage to the economy just to prove a point.  She is not licking her wounds.

I worked in Salzburg about thirty years ago so it is no surprise to me that Austria is having a lot of success with far-right politicians. Ordinary citizens will shout at you for parking on double yellows, even at 2.00am in a vast, empty square.

Sound advice

I have just bought a little endoscope. This is the second one I have owned, but I sold the first on very quickly when I realised that it was not suitable for what I needed doing.

It was a large box and screen with a thick cable attached, needed charging and cost about £90. The new one is a thin cable which plugs into your phone, has an adjustable lighting system and cost under £14. The images are on the phone screen and can be saved as stills or video. At some point it is going to be very useful, but even if not it doesn't matter for that price. I will have fun with it at least.

On the instruction leaflet it warns you that it is not suitable for personal use, which is Chinese for 'don't stick it up your arse'.

When a man is tired of London...

When I kick the bucket, nobody is going to say of me, 'He never complained about anything, he never moaned about his problems and he always looked for the best in everyone'. It actually makes me laugh to even imagine it.

So to carry on where I left off, I am in constant pain now and only ever comfortable when lying down. This makes me bad tempered and irritable. When I go out for a walk in the streets, I begin with a positive state of mind, but within minutes I am resenting anyone who gets in my way because I can no longer change direction quickly. Everyone seems to walk around using their phone and peripheral vision, not noticing obstructions until they force me to come to a dead stop.

Loud noises - ambulance sirens, the air brakes on lorries and busses etc. - are sometimes verging on unbearable. I sometimes have to leave cafes because I cannot bear listening to other people's conversations - especially if they are through the loudspeaker of a mobile phone. Amplified buskers drive me nuts - especially if they are playing crap music. I went on a one-hour river cruise through the countryside a few weeks ago and it was peaceful and calming until one of the crew began a monotonous and banal commentary which lasted all the way out and all the way back. The speaker was right above my head.

I enjoy sitting outside in town with a coffee just watching passers-by, but after a while everyone begins to look freakish and unattractive. I notice more and more obese men, women and children and my heart sinks until I have to go back home to escape the visual overload.

On my occasional visits to the pub, I begin to enjoy the company after a couple of drinks and and a taste of Class-A drugs, but I am aware of the dangerous illusion and know it cannot last.

I love living in town but I would also love to have an escape hut in the countryside. Sitting under trees in a park is very soothing.

Ok, that is off my chest for another few years.

Spam

 Just to say I have found a lot of your comments in my spam bin which I have now released. Not my doing, honest. I looked because some of mine are in yours.

Everyone's a critic

What do you think? 

Do you recognise this man?

Right now I am in charge of a renovation building project which involves climbing up and down tall scaffolding. I don't normally get involved in things like this, but... well it's a long and boring story. All I will say is that I am too old for it now and have vowed never to do it again. Honest.

Some weeks ago in the early evening, I looked out to see the man above climbing around an even larger scaffold and took this photo of him when he finally got down. He did not use the ladders, but clambered about on the poles of the structure. Very dangerous. I did not bother to call the police as they probably would not have bothered themselves and besides, he looked like an ordinary nutter rather than a cat-burglar.

My job includes setting a scaffold alarm which is controlled from an app on my phone. When someone sets it off by walking in front of one of two detectors - front and back - the outside siren howls and my phone makes a sound like we are all under nuclear attack. When you go to the app it shows a series of one repeating video and two stills of the intruder. 

Last week at around dusk it was set off at the rear. I went to the app and saw a picture of someone's legs walking along the bars in the gloom. It has infra-red but the image quality is very poor and small. Basically it lets you know if there is a human or a pigeon outside.

I went to the window and found a man climbing up the scaffold, unheeding my shouts telling him to get down. I recognised him, It was the man above.

Pretty soon there were many police shining torches up from the ground.  They sent a fireman up to investigate, which I thought was cowardly and unfair. I reset the alarm to catch the man going back down, but all I got was a photo of the fireman. Somehow he disappeared without trace. After an hour, everyone gave up and went home.

At least I know what happens when the alarm is triggered.

The kindness of stranglers

I have had to get a newer iPhone in order to take the control panel app for the alarm system which has been installed on the scaffolding that has just been put up on our house. That is a lot in one sentence and I won't bother to say any more unless someone really wants to know.

I will say this though. For years I have been using all sorts of methods to transfer the data from the old phone to the new, and for the last few times it has been done using iCloud. Other Cloud systems are available.

Since I now only have a tiny bit of storage space left on iCloud, they will not let me erase all the old stuff and I do not want to pay Apple a monthly fee to get more, I have been looking into alternative ways of doing it.

The altruism of thousands of YouTube contributors always amazes me. I searched for a solution and found a man who tells you things which all the other commercial companies do not - especially the ones who are trying to make money from your ignorance. This is what you do if you are working with Mac, but I am sure similar things are available for everyone.

You plug your old phone into the USB hole of your Mac and bring up Finder. Click on the phone icon and ask it to backup. That takes about three seconds. You then plug in your new phone, go to Finder again, click on the phone icon, then ask it to 'restore'. In about 10 seconds all the data has been comprehensively and effortlessly put into your new phone and it is ready to use.

THEY DON'T TELL US OLD PEOPLE ABOUT THINGS LIKE THIS.

I saw the magazine above in the rack at our Waitrose recently...

Sod off, Elon Musk

The landline rang yesterday and a woman in a busy call centre was on the other end. She had an Indian accent.

"Am I speaking to Mr Stephenson?" she asked. I lied and said that she was, so she launched into her script about being from the Microsoft security department. I interrupted her by saying that she was not from Microsoft - she was a criminal.

"YOU ARE A MOTHERFUCKER!" she screamed. "MOTHERFUCKING JERK!" She was obviously having a bad day but it was an entertaining start to mine.

Yesterday I suddenly realised what the social atmosphere in this country at the moment  reminds me of. All of us who voted to remain in the E.U. in the deeply depressing days following the referendum were being told that we were bad losers, we were moaners and we should just accept the will of the majority and look forward to all the golden opportunities that being independent from our closest continent would bring.

Now that Labour have got in, the only people who are not behaving like the spoilt children we were accused of being are the Conservative Party themselves. They have been positively gracious, but under the circumstances there is not a lot else they can be.

There is the usual blame being dished-out by Labour for situations that neither party could have had any control over, and dire warnings about a grim future are being given by the Right this time, not the Left, but it is business as usual in the long run.

Starmer has been forced to hit the ground running by the spate of riots across the country and - by Jove - he is doing a good job in arresting hundreds of them and sending them to prison for long stretches in record time. He has convicted some anti-fascist rioters as well as the fascists themselves, so no more bollocks about two-tier policing please.

Elon Musk has been causing more disgraceful damage than even that git in a five star hotel in Cyprus by promoting the accusations of two-tier policing in Britain, claiming that Britain is building concentration camps against free speech and predicting that civil war in Britain is 'inevitable'.  He is just another embittered right-winger, but the difference is that he has 190,000,000 followers on the platform he hi-jacked by buying it, and there is no moderation available on his tweets.

We are often accused of meddling in U.S. politics when we make reasonable observations about Donald Trump, but the thing is that the President of the U.S.A. is the most powerful person in the world and the decisions made by him/her affect all of us - for good or ill. It IS our business.

The murder of those children has brought a lot of scum to the surface and even gave a very dubious excuse to normally moderate people to begin showing support for the rioters. Yes, there is a problem with mass immigration to this country, but stop looking for scapegoats. It will take time to sort it out and civil war will not fix it. 

Heat and hatred

The long hot Summer is panning out as self prophesied, with really nasty, far-right thugs getting more and more support from idiot bloggers like Colonel Blimp (and others) who sits on his arse in a foreign country and says things like 'I don't support Tommy Robinson, but...' when complaining about his own country going to wrack and ruin. The man who thought that Rishi Sunak was a Moslem also thought - for the brief period before he re-wrote his piece - that the 17 year-old Welsh child murderer with Rwandan parents was one too. As if our Rishi would have sent all those asylum seekers to a country which is not predominantly Christian!

Rachel Reeves knew there was a massive black hole in the finances long before the election. Of course she did - we all did. She knew that spending had to be cut and taxes had to rise too. Of course she did - we all did.

Everyone lies now as a matter of course, and we all know they do. They know that we know of course, but developing a thick skin is mandatory in modern politics.

Stop supporting stupid, nasty men who attack people in the streets and their places of worship. 

Opening ceremony

 God, that was fucking dreadful.

My back yard

When Barak Obama was elected there was a magazine (I forget which one) which posted a large photo of him on the front cover, a giant bulls-eye with a hair-line, gunsight cross covering his chest. 

I found it quite shocking when I first saw it, because it showed that an assassination of the first black Democrat President of the USA by the right-wing was almost to be expected, and the magazine seemed to fall just short of encouraging it. Well, it never happened.

I was quite shocked by the attempt on Donald Trump too. His supporters were furious with the media present at the time, because they blamed the hatred and vitriol aimed at him by half of the news reporters as being the all encouragement needed by the young man who put a hole in his ear. They do have a point, and now even the ex-President himself is saying that the negative heat should be taken out of campaigning in general. It's a bit rich coming from the man who specialises in dividing the nation though.

Here comes a shameful admission. When I heard that the boy with the high powered rifle had missed from a mere 150 clear yards, it occurred to me that he must have been a very bad shot. Later I found out that he had tried to join a local shooting club but they refused him precisely because he was such a bad shot, and I let out an involuntary rueful laugh. Just the one. It would have been better if they had a notion that he might be mentally unbalanced enough to do what he did. Trump gives credit to Almighty God for telling him to move his head at the last second. The bullet still killed someone though.

So now it is even worse, with Biden's state of mind made even hazier with a bout of Covid and Almighty God telling him not to stand down. I fear for the world.

Not gloating, just laughing

Apparently, Jeremy Corbyn would now be Father of the House if only he hadn't stepped aside in the queue to allow Sir Edward Leigh to go in front of him when they both signed up as new MPs all those years ago in Westminster. That's our Jeremy - gracious and generous to a fault.

It isn't all bad news, though. Diane Abbott is now Mother of the House, having entered Parliament 37 years ago as a young woman. Diane and Jeremy were very good friends once, I am told. It would have been perfect if they could have stood beside each other as Mother and Father.

My MP is a German woman - Wera Hobhouse. She is beginning her second (at least?) season of serving Bath as a Liberal Democrat. The Lib Dems ousted Chris Patten (Conservative) and have never looked back. Tories don't stand a chance here for the foreseeable future.

When Sir Chris was our MP, I was his next door neighbour in a little hamlet just outside town. I really liked him. He was one of the last of the real Tories and we may never see their like again. He served under Margaret Thatcher and called her 'The Wolverine'. He tried to mitigate her more inhuman policies and upset her so much that she made him Junior Minister for Northern Ireland, no doubt hoping he would be killed in the line of duty. He wasn't, and went on to be the last Governor of Hong Kong. He wept when the Union flag was lowered. I used to get Christmas cards from him signed, 'From Chris, Lavender and the kids'.

I am not as elated as others are depressed by the inevitable outcome, I just feel as though I have been holding my breath for the last 14 years and can now let out a very long sigh indeed.

The Mystic Old Git's prediction

The Labour majority will not be as large as hyped. Lib Dem will take more seats in the West and South though, and Reform will get 2 seats in Parliament. I don't know or care about Scotland. None of my business.

Bright New Future

Anne Widdicombe is now a spokesperson for Nigel Farage's Reform Party. At last, something to fill a gap which isn't Strictly. Nigel says that he has had enough of the BBC.

You don't have to be left-wing to dislike the far-right, and you don't have to be right-wing to dislike the far-left. You get what I am saying, I am guessing.

All it takes to help extremists get into power is to take your eye off the ball by abusing democracy and allowing half of your country to be thrown into comparative poverty by facilitating a prolonged period of short-termism during which anything of true value gets stripped while it still can be.

When we wake up to a bright new Labour future on Friday morning, things are going to get far worse.

The liver is evil

Have things ever been so bad in U.S. politics? In the U.K. debate between Starmer and Sunak, a young member of the audience asked, "Are you two the best we have to choose from?" How would she have reacted to the Trump v Biden debate of yesterday?

At least here in the U.K. Parliament has the power to get rid of Prime Ministers if they prove to be irresponsible or a danger to the nation, or stop them from running for office if they have criminal convictions and are proven liars, but I am told that the only person who could get Biden to stand down is Biden himself, and the person with the most influence over him is his wife. In any case, in a year or so he will be too old by law to continue as President if re-elected, so will have to stand down anyway. If Trump gets elected he will just pardon himself immediately.

The current fashionable illness to have here is an E. Coli infection. I have a version of it which has some alarming symptoms which I mistook for cancer, so when I looked them up on the NHS website you can imagine my relief when found that they correspond nicely with those that are experienced by 50% out of a survey of 150,000 cases of the latest strain.

The only way of catching this nasty bug is to eat the shit of infected animals. I am usually quite adventurous with food - and I don't kiss dogs, let alone cattle - but I draw the line at that. I always wash fruit and vegetables before eating as advised, but have been buying a lot of ready-to-eat salad from a top-end supermarket recently.

The packets say, washed and ready to eat, but they do not say what they have been washed in. Some say, washed in spring water, but they do not say how many animals use the same spring.

Up on Solsbury Hill (of Peter Gabriel fame) there is a small stream fed by a spring which rises on one side, where I found a lush little bed of watercress growing amongst the stones. I was about to gather some when I noticed that sheep were grazing close by. There is a bug in sheep's urine which can destroy your liver by eating away at it over quite a short period of time, so I left the watercress.

I once saw a t-shirt for jokey alcoholics which read, 'The liver is evil and must be destroyed!'

Unusual colours

I am not usually one for flower posts, but just look at the colour of this Buddleia I saw yesterday. I love Buddleia - when it is not destroying buildings.

And how about this for an unusual colour. I don't know what you call them, but here in the West of England they are sometimes known (by children) as Choochypegs. They are normally a drab grey.