Saturday 4th November 2023

It is hard to imagine that it could rain any harder or for longer than it did on Thursday, but it seems Saturday had other ideas.

We went to Tesco first thing, and it was already raining and blustery, but as the day progressed, it got wetter and windier.

Jools went into town to meet with Ang, but only just got back due to standing water on the roads, later, the A2 was closed because of flooding, and as darkness fell, the rain began to fall in earnest, and did until well after bedtime.

The A2 still flooded this morning.

So, we stayed in, I did some cooking, and for entertainment we scattered some catnip around.

I made a fresh batch of ragu, which took the best part of the middle of the day, some four hours. And there wasn't any football to watch, other than Celtic, so instead I followed Man Utd's progress, sealed with an injury time winner at Craven Cottage.

The to settle on the sofa with Scully to follow the main batch of games, listen to the radio and follow the videprinter on Final Score via the telebox.

Outside the rain fell ever harder as the day turned to night, even coming close to drowning out the soul and funk on the wireless.

And it was still raining when we headed to bed at nine.

Friday 3rd November 2023

The day after the storm. If you look carefully, you can see the olive tree laying on its side, the only damage we received, despite being so near the cliffs.

The winds died over Thursday night and into Friday morning, though it was still raining when I put the bins out. I had slept through the alarm, and only woke when I heard Jools leaving at quarter to six for yoga.

Fridays are a day for meetings, so I had two quick coffees to make sure both braincells were awake, and set the office up, logged on ready for the first meeting.

After that, not much really to report, phone calls, meetings, mails.

All done by one, when I packed away, ready for when Jools came home so we could go to Jen's for the afternoon cards.

Now that the clocks have gone back, sunset is at twenty past four, and on cloudy days, like Friday, getting dark by four.

The rain of the morning returned, throwing it down on Jen's new roof over the dining room table.

Jen won, big. Or as big as it gets, and so with the kitty claimed at quarter to four, we call it a day and we leave for home. Too early to collect fish and chips on the way home.

The rain continued as we drove back, roads just about passable, so it was good to get home, lock the door, draw the curtains and defrost some spag bol and pour a glass or three of red to go with it.

It feels like winter, which it is, really.

The evening was spent watching a local team, Sheppy FC, in the Cup, sadly they lost 4-1, but was a good game. Not quite the magic of the cup, though.

But it was the weekend.

Thursday 2nd November 2023

Storm Ciarán swept in Wednesday night, and deepened through the night, so by dawn it was raging at its full force.

Despite living less than a mile from the coast, we are up on the downs, so flooding was never going to be an issue, also, the storm moved slightly to the south so the worst of the winds passed us by, even still, Langdon Hole recorded gusts of up to 75mph.

The garden survived, with just some pot plants tipped over, and by lunch the winds dropped, and then the sun came out.

But we and the house survived.

We slept OK through the night, the double glazing keeping the worst of the wind's howling down, but once up, and dawn brought the sight of trees, bushes and hedges swaying violently from side to side.

By eight, it was the height of the storm, rain lashed down from the west in sheets, driven by near hurricane force winds, I took several videos, as pictures just don't capture the sheer violence of the winds.

Just after 11, the winds begin to ease, not by much, just to 40 or so mph, and the clouds lifted.

Cats went out, and birds returned to find the feeders had been blown out of the bushes, so I went to collect them, put them back up and fill them.

Most roads into Dover, Deal and Sandwich were blocked by fallen trees at some point, but Jools had left at six, and got to work, safely, even if it had taken an hour to get to Hythe, on the other hand, I was unaffected at the dining room table, except when we lost the internet for half an hour.

And so the exciting day faded, not much to report from here. But on Jersey, battered by 100mph winds, roofs ripped off houses, coast roads closed, and in northern France, even worse conditions as winds topped 110mph.

The day faded, and I made Caprese with the oil from Borough Market and the leftover foaccia from Tuesday.

Nearly the weekend.

Wednesday 1st November 2023

From passion flowers, passion fruit grow.

Wow, that's deep, man!

Wednesday in the Ugly House, and with bad weather already here, and worse to come, there wasn't going to be much going on outside. Maybe the skies would clear just before dusk.

Maybe.

Jools went swimming at six, well, before six in fact. I was just up and she was gone, but there were podcasts to listen to, coffee to drink, and watch the skies lighten to the point I could see the rain running down the outsides of the window of the kitchen.

I got a call at seven, my colleague, Henrik, who is Brazil working, and there it was the middle of the night. His Mother passed away in her sleep that night, the day before he was due to travel home.

This comes two weeks after my other colleague, Rune, also lost his Mother, and a Flickrfriend lost hers too.

There are no words I can say, of course, just listen and be there for them.

We are all doomed to become our parent's carers, or to be the adult in the relationship as they become frail and cautious.

And then they're gone.

And life goes on, though we have the same tasks to do, the paperwork. Always the paperwork, and the sorting out, and the telling friends and family the news.

And life goes on.

As does work.

Being the start of the month, a new round of monthly meetings start, with us comparing the inaction of this month with the inaction of last.

And outside the rain continued to fall.

Even after three when the rain stopped and I had finished for work, the sun did briefly shine bright, but the wind was already picking up, in preparation for nine and later when gales and worse would sweep through.

There was league cup football to watch, and the ongoing comedy festival that is the current Man Utd season carried on, with Utd losing 3-0 at hoe to Newcastle at the Stadium of Revised Expectations.

And thoughts returned to how rich Man Utd are. How does the club compare to a supermarket, my guess is that the club makes little more than a medium sized Tesco.

And with the internet, its possible to find out.

The last year there is figures for, Utd had a turnover of £648 million. Finding how much the average Tesco, but easier if it were Ikea.

Ikea in the UK had a turnover of £22.2 billion, and has 22 stores, meaning, on average, each store has a turnover of £100,000,000.

Or that 6.5 Ikea stores have a larger turnover than Man Utd.

The point?

Man Utd is big, but not that big. In the scheme of things.

A real change

Over the years I have written about how May's, Johnson's, Truss's and now Sunak's Governments just do not have the skills, knowledge to be able to drive policy forward, or even to understand their briefs.

And then the Prime Ministers themselves, how people clearly so unsuitable to be PM or leader of the Conservative and Union Party, that issue needs addressing.

May was a compromise candidate, and struggled with the divisions in the Party. Divisions that Johnson dealt with by expelling all who disagreed with him. The so called "one-nation Tories", who voted aganst Johnson before the election, were kicked out f the party, even Churchill's Grandson was gone.

We thought May was a bad communicator. Heck, we knew she was. Her robotic dance, attempts at humour. But even before becoming PM, it was her policy as Home Secretary that invented the hostile atmosphere for migrants, legal or illegal.

Michael Gove knew Johnson would be a dreadful PM, so scuppered his leadership bid in 2016 when May won, but did nothing three years later when Johsnon stood again.

Johnson is a serial liar. Sacked twice for lying, broke marriage vows, once when one wife was in hospital with cancer. We don't even know for sure how many children he has sired. Its some kind of State secret.

Like in the US, the UK under Johnson became a place where "post-truth" ruled. Post truth is lying in a fancy coat. Who cares if its a lie, it feels right.

And if the lie supports your belief, then what is the harm?

As an auditor, evidence based decision making is key things I look for. What inputs to a decsion, what outputs have you drawn from that consideration. Instead, Brexit was about belief. That's all it was, and if it didn't work, its because you din't believe in it enough, and if it failed when you were PM, then it was because you were really a Remainer.

As PM, Johnson gave the then Monarch, unlawful advice, which the Supreme COurt overruled. That should have been a resignation matter, instead he ignored the fact and called an election.

That Johnson would be have in that way surprised few who knew him, so those who worked beside him either as journalists or as MPs, really should have known better than to elect hm leader. But they did anyway. Johnson repeatedly made false statements at the Dispatch Box, failed to correct the record, even when Government Institutions pointed out his untruths.

It was, of course, one of these lies at the Disptch Box, and his failure to correct the record, at the earliest opportunity that brought him down, in relation to the unlawful gatherings in Downing Street.

And then along came Liz Truss.

Cheese and jam loving Liz Truss.

Liz Truss was PM for 34 days and cost the UK economy and taxpayers some £74 billion pounds for the "growth" budget. Everyone's ension was going to to be worthless.

But it was all a plot. Apparently.

She was just too clever, and not given enough time.

She could barely string two sentences together she didn't read off an autocue. There is the recordings of the round of interviews she did for BBC local radio the week before she resigned.

She had been an MP since 2010, other Conservative MPs knew she was dreadful, even when May and Johnson made her a Minister, she was dreadful.

The only people it seemed to surprise was the MPs who voted them both as leaders, and the right wing newspapers that over-inflated their abilities and promised they would deliver the world. Or Brexit. Truss as some kind of 21st Century Mararet Thatcher.

Apparently.

Now we have Sunak.

Dr Death.

The billionaires husband.

Who is giving the rich more tax cuts.

Until the system that made them leaders of the Conservative Party and so PM, is changed, such people, unsuitable for high office, the highest office, will continue to rise to the top. If I want to apply for a new job as a quality manager, I have to prove I am capable, have the education, the knowledge, the experience. Grant Shapps has been Minister of State in 5 Departments, in less than a year what did he know about any of theose departments or areas of the economy?

Chris Grayling actual boasted it helped him be Secretary of State for Justice without having any kind of legal background. He privatised the parole system, anong other things. Later, Michael Gove appeared to be statesmanlike by simply reversing Graylings policies.

The Mail, Express, Times, Telegraph, the political editors of the BBC and ITV know how unsuitable these people were and would be bad at their jobs, yet cheered them on anyway. Those who pointed out the lack of clothes on these emperors whoere accused of talking Britain down.

If you pointed out the flws in their policies, you were doing the same, or enemies of the people.

How I yearn for a return to normal policits, where decisions are based on evidence, and MPs are promoted on knowledge and experience, not just for their belief in a flawed policy of their unwaivering support for the winner in the leadership election campaign. Until this system changes, and its pretty much the same over in Labour, we will get the MPs, Ministers and Prime Ministers we, as a country, deserve.

People voted for Johnson. We deserved what followed.

Had he not been elected, maybe a family member, friend, work colleague or neighbour would still be alive today. Don't tell me votes don't count.

Tuesday 31st October 2023

It was Halloween, the last day of October, and yet most leaves are not only still on the trees, but most are still green.

With all the weather, most paths and tracks are wet too muddy for all but the best prepared to venture down, and so it is ever easier to make some excuse not to go out at all.

Tuesday, another day that began and ended with rain, but between there was sunshine. In fact there was a gap in clouds at sunrise allowing a fine view of the angry red sky and clouds.

Once Jools had gone to work, I started work, and soon had caught up, so come ten I thought I could be spared for half an hour.

On with the boots, coat and grabbed my camera, then walked along the street to the track and across the fields.

Only new flowers in bloom is the Annual mercury, but not enough to make a shot out of yet. And either side of the path, the two fields of lucerne had nothing in flower and so no butterflies.

I only walked as far as Fleet House, then back along Collingwood and down to home again. Only insect I had seen was a single wasp sheltering in a hedge, which I snapped.

Through the afternoon, I tried a new recipe for focaccia, one that required no kneading, but lots of folding. I followed the recipe, and the resulting dough was too wet to knead anyway, which is what was supposed to happen.

Every half an hour, with oiled hands, fold over the dough four or five times, each time, capturing more air, so that o the 5th such folding, bubbles had begun to form.

One last fold and tipped into a well oiled tin, then with oily fingers

Dimple
Dimple
Dimple
Jiggle
Jiggle
Jiggle

create little valleys into which oil and herbs would gather.

And after one final hour-long rise, into the oven for 25 minutes, and the resulting loaf was very light, super crispy on the outside, and very yummy.

I du out the last of the guanciale and made a pan of carbonara, which was perfect, and with the bread made a feast of Italian flavours.

And we had wine.

Outside the rain hammered down again, the wind blew, and the cats waited for us to go to bed.

The wrong crisis for this Prime Minister with his skill set

So said Johnson's former Director of Communications.

The thing to say here is what, exactly, did he think Johnson's skill set actually was? Because when elected I called him a clown, and histroy has gone on to show who his indecisiveness cost tens of thousands of peple their lives.

Later, Cummings, the "walking brain" and Johnson's former head of staff, stated there was no plan for the pandemic.

Not once the crisis hit.

But there had been, we know this because the Government of Singapore said they had followed it. I seem to remember writing that the Pandemic Response Unit was disbanded by Johnson as he saw no value in it, and the lessons learned of the excercise, Operation Phoenix I think it was called, showed that the NHS was suffering in 2016, a sevre shortage of PPE, which was never addressed.

If Johnson should ever had been Prime Minister, it should have been during a period of calm, with his having to do nothing except not to fuck it up, though I'm not sure he is capable of not fucking everything up, he really is KIng Midas in reverse, turning everything and everybody he touches into literal shit.

Johnson was enabled by a pliant media, staffed by people he went to school and university with, people he had worked beside on the Telegraph, and they had seen hi sacked, twice, for lying. Once to his editor and then to the Leader of the Coservative Party. The point being they knew what kind of person Johnson really was, how he had fucked up London in his time as mayor; closing fire stations, police stations, pushing for a garden bridge that was cancelled but still cost £53,000,000, buying water cannon for the police that was against the law to use in the UK and sold for scrap, pushing for an airport in the Thames Estuary, despite environmental damage that would have cost.

His fellow MPs and former ministerial colleagues knew what kind of a person he was, and what kind of Prime Minister he would make. They made him leader of the Party anyway, because they thought, correctly, he would win an election.

Yesterday, it was revealled that Johnson wanted to let COVID "rip" through the population, suggested early on to encourage COVID "parties" to speed up herd imunity, and most damning of all, was prepared to sacrifice the older generation for the economy as COVID was nature's way of dealing with old people, and they should "accept their fate."

Only, this didn't apply to his own Father, who was double vaccinated by early 2021, when most of the country had no vaccine.

Despite the documented evidence of the above revealled at the inquiry yesterday, The Mail, The Express, and The Telegraph focussed on Dominic Cummings or backed Johnson still, the Mail giving the impression of an interview with the disgraved former Prime Minister. So, still protecting "their" guy, Johnson.



Since leaving office and then resigning his role as an MP before he was recalled by his Uxbridge voters because he mislead the Standards Inquiry into he misleading Parliament, he has gone on to earn millions from speaking engagements around the world, proving that crime and incompitence pays.

It seems that people like Robert Peston have been asonished or surprised by the revaltions coming out of the inquiry. I am not. I wrote about COVID, and Brexit, and so despite being an ordinary member of society, I undertood the lies and bullsht whenever Johnson or Hancock spoke. Peston is literally the Political Editor for ITV and used to be the Political Editor for the BBC, someone, in other words, who is an actual journalist who should have known this shot when it was happening to hold Johnson's feet to the fire, but he and Laura on the BBC acted as though the Government, and Johnson in particular, where their friends, and repeated his lies without question.

The old addage about is one side says its raining and the other side says it isn't, its the job of a journalist to stick his head out of the windo to check.