Proceedings of the Castle Aching Parish Council, 1905

[Hroth]

2 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

This coming winter we’ll be measuring the intensity of lamps in Candlepower again, because carrying one from room to room will be the only affordable way to light our homes.

Candles will be for the upper crust, the rest of us will be fighting at a cut-price supermarket over the latest consignment of rushlights.

 

[Nearholmer]

There’s a sneaky national lighting programme going-on through primary schools, you know? They all get a go at making tallow candles during “Tudor Week”.

[Edwardian]

38 minutes ago, Regularity said:

It shows how far we have fallen as a nation: the usual act of a failing dictator (and let’s face it, BJ does act like one, with complete disdain for anything other than his own selfishness) is to find something populist to divert attention away from scrutiny.

Putin: tries to annex Ukraine.

The Argentinian Junta: invade the Falkland Islands.

BJ: creates rumours of abandoning a worldwide standard of measurements.

 

Not quite in line with Henry IV's advice to Prince Hal, I mean, neither of the conflicts you mention were actually invented by a UK leader to busy giddy minds at home.

 

However, it certainly helps the current government. Bozza will see this as his Churchill moment and he and La Truss are certainly playing up to it. It has, and will, save him. 

 

That's annoying because I think any likely British government of today would have done much the same in policy terms. It's the French and Germans who are being flaky; Germany because it's just too damn cosy with the Russians and France because Macron thinks that he and France (to the extent those two things are distinguishable in Macron's mind) should have the credit for delivering a solution. 

 

In terms of the British response, however, I don't see Bozza as the necessary right leader at the right time the way Winston probably was in 1940. Rather, its an opportunity for him to play to the few strengths he has and, with the advantage of consensus support, even he can't f-ck this up.  I can certainly see Kier Starmer pursing the same policy in support of Ukraine; Corbyn, not so much, which is a painful reminder of how Labour, ever vulnerable to a takeover by the ideologues of its Left, sometimes cannot be trusted with defence and security. That is not to say the current administration and its predecessors has a sparkling record over defence, having cut and cut the armed forces leaving us with a vanity aircraft carrier project and not a lot else, and certainly not what we need to help face-down an expansionist power at the gates of Europe. As the parties stack up presently, however, any conceivable UK government would be doing much the same as the present administration, but without some of the inflammatory grandstanding that Bozza and La Truss have engaged in. The only grown up in this room, so far as I can see, is Ben Wallis who says sober, sensible things and practices resolve without rhetoric.  

 

In other aspects of policy, the present administration has demonstrated the same vacillating incompetence that cost so many unnecessary deaths during the recent pandemic; fearing the 'absolute morons' of the Brexit/Libertarian right of Parliament and the disapprobation of the Telegraph and the Sun, Bozza and Rishi-Rich have held out against a windfall tax and any effective help to households facing fuel poverty (remember they wanted to loan us the money?) only weeks later finally to do the needful thing. 

 

As for Sue Grey, the crux of the issue is that she, completely unnecessarily, decided to stop investigating the worst Downing Street parties because the police had investigated them, leaving Bozza off the hook. The wrong people are born lucky!

 

 

[rocor]

2 hours ago, Ian Simpson said:

Next time Bodge gets caught out doing something dodgy, he'll probably suggest going back to £ s d. 

I expect we'll be back to groats and hides of land by 2025.

If I sound a bit grumpy today, it's because I've just found out I model in a scale of 0.1378 inches to the foot.

 

Or even 11.4829mm to the metre.

[rocor]

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

There’s a sneaky national lighting programme going-on through primary schools, you know? They all get a go at making tallow candles during “Tudor Week”.

 

There will be particular need to look out for the wellbeing of your pets this coming winter, as the neighbours may be eyeing them up as a potential source of protein and lighting.

 

(That has come out a little darker than I had at first envisioned).

[Nearholmer]

Probably best to eat them all, before they become carriers of Monkey Pox, which apparently is best transmitted by squirrels, monkeys just getting the blame. Imagine being a Spanish Monkey, eh? You’d get blamed for every disease of humanity.

 

So, are monkeys actually fun, we ask?

[rocor]

23 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Probably best to eat them all, before they become carriers of Monkey Pox, which apparently is best transmitted by squirrels, monkeys just getting the blame. Imagine being a Spanish Monkey, eh? You’d get blamed for every disease of humanity.

 

So, are monkeys actually fun, we ask?

 

Probably not.

 

 

[monkeysarefun]

1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

So, are monkeys actually fun, we ask?

Down here we are.  We have just  handed the keys to  a shiny new government; our version of Donald Trump spent 100 million  of his own bucks and his antivax "Freedom Forever" party  didn't win a single seat; our kids don't get shot in our schools and then have our right wing politcians blaming it on schools having too many doors; we aren't being invaded by Russia; we aren't about to introduce a system of measurement only our grandparents can remember and any talented new Zealander who has the wit to move here  we get to claim as our own.

 

And finally it's winter so the snakes and spiders have flown  north or whatever it is they do this time of year  so we can walk happily around without stepping on them all the time.

Edited May 29, 2022 by monkeysarefun

[Nearholmer]

This seems appropriate to the week of The Royal Jubilee: Young Queen meets Spanish (well, Gibraltarian) Monkey.

 

 

[drmditch]

I note that the weather has turned much colder today.

I presume that the Government (Mr Rees-Mogg?) has confiscated the warm summer as not being 'traditionally British' enough.

[drmditch]

17 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

This seems appropriate to the week of The Royal Jubilee: Young Queen meets Spanish (well, Gibraltarian) Monkey.

 

 

I thought that these were Apes?

Have you no sympathy for your fellow primates?

Apologise at once or you will be reported to the Librarian.

[Schooner]

Oook!

[Nearholmer]

6 minutes ago, drmditch said:

I thought that these were Apes?

Apparently, they are macaques, which are taxonimalogicaly (I made that word up, I think) Old World Monkeys, or maybe Olde Worlde Monkeys if they adhere to quaint, outdated customs (or, perhaps that’s the royal family).

[Nearholmer]

28 minutes ago, drmditch said:

the weather has turned much colder today.

We’ve had a nasty, sharp northerly breeze for most of the week. 
 

The most recent Royal Jubilee that sticks in my mind was the one in 1977, and I’m sure the weather was a lot nicer then than it is now. Mind you, the main reason I remember it is that I fell off my bike rather spectacularly, in front of a lot of people, when departing from a street party. I blamed lots of loose gravel at a turning in the road, but some unkind souls suggested that maybe I’d been partaking of festive ale.

 

 

Edited May 30, 2022 by Nearholmer

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, drmditch said:

I note that the weather has turned much colder today.

I presume that the Government (Mr Rees-Mogg?) has confiscated the warm summer as not being 'traditionally British' enough.

 

Nothing better than a damp Street Party, with soggy sandwiches. After all, it is traditional to have a Wet Whit!

 

[alastairq]

On the topic of

22 hours ago, rocor said:

 

There will be particular need to look out for the wellbeing of your pets this coming winter, as the neighbours may be eyeing them up as a potential source of protein and lighting.

 

(That has come out a little darker than I had at first envisioned).

 

On the topic of dark-ages lighting?

I foresee Lincolnshire folk identifying a source of lighting fuel, in their seals?  Nowt like a blubber-powered lamp? [Ask any Eskimo?]

 

The folk I feel 'sorry' for are those living on the vast housing estates that blight our urban environment....no choice but to freeze in darkness...especially when our generating power fails, as it will, over the coming years [Nobody wants to mention the fact that non-fossil fueled power generation is actually unreliable, and insufficient to meet the needs of our townies....]

At least more rural dwellers have options.....or I do, at any rate.

 

 

[Nearholmer]

This all reminds me of c1974 (there’s a lot of 1970s vibe around currently), when my father used to make dire prognostications of a similar kind. Brothers and I used to tease him endlessly about it, and we invented a catchphrase for him that summed-up his forecasts: “We’ll all be living in mud huts!”. Whenever he started on, we’d all go around shaking our heads and muttering said phrase.

 

Whether he really enjoyed having three teenage sons, I’m not totally sure, but he did spend a lot of time in the makeshift study/man-cave that he’d created.

[Johnson044]

40 minutes ago, alastairq said:

On the topic of

 

On the topic of dark-ages lighting?

I foresee Lincolnshire folk identifying a source of lighting fuel, in their seals?  Nowt like a blubber-powered lamp? [Ask any Eskimo?]

 

The folk I feel 'sorry' for are those living on the vast housing estates that blight our urban environment....no choice but to freeze in darkness...especially when our generating power fails, as it will, over the coming years [Nobody wants to mention the fact that non-fossil fueled power generation is actually unreliable, and insufficient to meet the needs of our townies....]

At least more rural dwellers have options.....or I do, at any rate.

 

 

Yup. The new Poundburies that are springing up with their GRP chimneys with brick slips glued to them are not readily adapted to burning whatever odd bits of timber that can be got hold of. It's all rather frightening.

 

If you do have a hearth of some sort then now, folks, is the time to be filling your back garden with whatever you think you can burn next winter. However expensive timber might be at present there's still a helluva lot being thrown out.

[alastairq]

It's the poouur boogahs stuck in blocks of flats that will suffer most, methinks?

Where one's heating & lighting [cooking too] are rather tied up with whatever resource happens to be flowing, at the price demanded.

Cheap chuckaway barbecues sat in one's window box may be the thing of the future, when all the cars being recharged force the system to crash?

If one is lucky enough to have one's own personal garden space, then  now is the time to think of putting together a permanent brick barbie?

Or, clay oven?

 

Where on earth do folks find the money to order their food  over JustEat, I ask?

I can only conclude there must be an awful lot of folk out there with surplus money to fling around willy-nilly?

Perhaps they should be taxed more, and learn to cook for themselves?

[Nearholmer]

50 minutes ago, alastairq said:

I can only conclude there must be an awful lot of folk out there with surplus money to fling around willy-nilly?

Of course there are.

 

There is a great deal of talk at the moment about people who are struggling to make ends meet, only rightly so, and about time too, but there is also a substantial constituency of people who still have plenty of money, and evidence of that is everywhere to be seen, if you simply look.

 

Referencing the 1970s again, one very big difference between then and now is the polarisation of prosperity. With minor ups and downs along the way, the U.K. has spent pretty much the entire period since 3rd May 1979 becoming more unequal.

 

I could take you on an hour bike ride circuit, shorter even, and show you if not the extremes of prosperity then at least 5th to 95th percentiles, and those two look very, very different indeed.

 

Mixed-in with outrage about partygate, one of the reasons that some of the more right-leaning Tory MPs are keen to be shot of BJ and RS is that they have been doing faintly re-distributive, tax-and-spend, things which threaten that inequality, the very inequality which their constituents elected them to uphold and increase. Read the Daily Telegraph to get a flavour of the clinging on to inequality with clenched fingers that is going on right now.

 

 

Edited May 30, 2022 by Nearholmer

[Johnson044]

 

51 minutes ago, alastairq said:

It's the poouur boogahs stuck in blocks of flats that will suffer most, methinks?

Where one's heating & lighting [cooking too] are rather tied up with whatever resource happens to be flowing, at the price demanded.

Cheap chuckaway barbecues sat in one's window box may be the thing of the future, when all the cars being recharged force the system to crash?

If one is lucky enough to have one's own personal garden space, then  now is the time to think of putting together a permanent brick barbie?

Or, clay oven?

 

Where on earth do folks find the money to order their food  over JustEat, I ask?

I can only conclude there must be an awful lot of folk out there with surplus money to fling around willy-nilly?

Perhaps they should be taxed more, and learn to cook for themselves?

The curious thing is that a recognized indicator of a poor area is the large number of fast food places on the High St. The more hard up people are the tendency is to live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself and It doesn't help with tv advertising promoting all the rubbish food.

[Johnson044]

It's so easy to make sweeping statements and to generalise on perceived circumstances and behaviour patterns. A day walking in someone else's shoes! 

[Nearholmer]

29 minutes ago, Johnson044 said:

The curious thing is that a recognized indicator of a poor area is the large number of fast food places on the High St

The curious thing about a middling sort of area is the number of middling sort of chain restaurants, pubs that serve a reasonable meal, and local Indian/Thai/Italian etc restaurants on the high street.

 

The curious thing about a very prosperous area is the number of really very nice indeed restaurants, the sort with named chefs and discreetly obsequious service standards, which are tucked away in former manor houses in landscaped grounds.

 

The really, really curious thing is that we tend to sneer at the customers of the takeaways.

 

 

Edited May 30, 2022 by Nearholmer

[alastairq]

Hmmmm...My Ex has just offered to give me my bi-annual haircut!

 I may be wearing a hat for some weeks to come...

 

 

[Still, saves me a tenner!]

[Johnson044]

8 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

The curious thing about a middling sort of area is the number of middling sort of chain restaurants, pubs that serve a reasonable meal, and local Indian/Thai/Italian etc restaurants on the high street.

 

The curious thing about a very prosperous area is the number of really very nice indeed restaurants, the sort with named chefs and discreetly obsequious service standards, which are tucked away in former manor houses in landscaped grounds.

 

The really, really curious thing is that we tend to sneer at the customers of the takeaways.

 

 

It's very easy to generalise. 

 

It's easy to make sweeping statements- and, as you say, to sneer.