Wednesday 27 December 2023

Barry and Julia Christmas Letter 2023

We are all still the right side of the grass! As we get older this is sadly not always the case with our friends and family. Early in the year we travelled to Norfolk for the funeral of our cousin Barbara. Sadly she was not the only one we lost during the year. We pray for those we have lost and offer our love and prayers to their family and friends. As we get older, we are susceptible to aches and pains! Julia has been diagnosed with Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). She is having therapy for this and hopefully by the New Year there will be an improvement.
Our year continued much as always. Various trips to our lodge in Devon. Meetings with our friends from college days. A family lunch in Stratford–upon-Avon (more or less equidistant for all of us). Church was somewhat busier than usual as our parish priest was ill for several months which meant we all had more to do. Hopefully he is well on the road to recovery and will be back in harness before Christmas.
The ultimate event of the year was the surprise family gathering for Julia’s “21st” birthday celebration which we held on the last weekend of October. She knew that Lawrie, Emma and the grandchildren were coming down as it was Henry's and Georgia's half-term. What she did not know was that Hélèna and Sam were also coming down from Stockport, staying with Andrew and Gaew. Julia and I had celebrated the actual day with a few days away in Norfolk.
We all gathered at our place on the Friday. Then on Saturday/Sunday we had a family party, helped along by a large delivery of food and drink from Waitrose. The Monday saw some of us at Horniman's Museum at Forest Hill - well worth a visit if you have not been. The unexpected highlight of the trip was meeting the pest controller!! He had a Harris Hawk which was being used to keep the pigeons away. He was a lovely guy and let the children get close to the bird. Tuesday Lawrie and I took Henry and Georgia to Greenwich Park, the Maritime Museum and a walk under the Thames, a great day. This coming Christmas and New Year will be spent at “Mellish Mansions” along with the family for all or part of the time.
Wishing you and your loved ones a very Happy Christmas with Good Health and much happiness for 2024.
With all our love and prayers, Barry and Julia

May be an image of 7 people

Sunday 10 December 2023

The Boat People

 The news is full of stories relating to boat people, Rwanda, International Law, has Rishi done enough or has he gone too far? There is no doubt that there are lot of problems in the good ship the United Kingdom: There are not enough houses, the NHS is struggling with not enough beds and not enough staff. We are bursting at the seams and it is all the fault of the boat people!!

If we stop the boats we solve the problem, at least that is the narrative that is being portrayed.
The only trouble with this is that the migration figures do not stack up. The provisional estimate of total long-term immigration for year ending (YE) June 2023 was 1.2 million, while emigration was 508,000, meaning that net migration was 672,000; most people arriving to the UK in the YE June 2023 were non-EU nationals (968,000), followed by EU (129,000) and British (84,000).
Net migration for YE June 2023 was 672,000, which is slightly higher compared with YE June 2022 (607,000) but down on our updated estimate for YE December 2022 (745,000); while it is too early to say if this is the start of a new downward trend, these more recent estimates indicate a slowing of immigration coupled with increasing emigration.(Figures from the Office for National Statistics website).
So all the focus is on circa 50,000 boat people out of a total net migration number of 672,000. There is a lot that the politicians, of all parties, are not telling us. Blaming migration is an easy way to avoid confronting the reality that for years we have underfunded the NHS, that we have not built enough homes and that it is overlooking the fact that many in the caring porfessions are migrants.
Many of the systems in the UK need a complete overhaul, we need a long hard honest discussion about the type of country that we aspire to be - but is is so much easier to blame the foreigner!

Wednesday 20 September 2023

Russel Brand

It appears that he is/was a loud obnoxious character who glorified in "bedding" as many woman as possible. We may think that his behaviour is reprehensible and that he should be avoided at all costs, particularly by women. But these are not criminal offences. I seriously wonder if it is possible for him to obtain a fair trial if criminal proceedings are brought against him. 

So far there are "allegations"  and these might well be true. But there are no official criminal charges. Yet in the "Court of Public Opinion" he is guilty! I do wonder why Channel 4 Despatches and the Sunday Times didn't go to the police, perhaps making a profit and creating a "buzz" was more important to them than justice and the criminal law.

It is also interesting that so many people are now saying, "I always knew he was a bad one"; "It was common knowledge in the industry how he behaved". Yet nobody did anything at the time. It would appear that when he was about thirty he was able to use BBC car to ferry a sixteen year old girl to and from his bed. Not illegal but why did the BBC go along with it?

We are living in amoral times.


PS - Where is Albert Pierrepoint when you need him?

Unhappy Times

 These are not happy times. Across the West, the vast majority of voters are fed up with the status quo, furious at the political class and desperate for alternatives. They believe society to be broken, that the post-industrial economy and globalisation generally aren’t working for them, and are angry at the vast cultural, social and technological changes that they feel have been foisted upon them. 

Almost wherever one looks, from New Zealand to the Netherlands, hundreds of millions no longer feel in control, valued or even consulted by the self-satisfied ruling class. In the UK, 70 per cent believe the country is moving in the wrong direction, a YouGov poll reveals. An NBC poll found 74 per cent of Americans saying their country is on the wrong track. 

We have entered the lengthiest period of prolonged popular disenchantment since the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of democratic politics, a disturbing state of affairs that urgently requires addressing if countries aren’t to fall prey to demagogues. It has become rational to be pessimistic, especially when elections don’t change anything. 

Life expectancy may have peaked; economic growth has been feeble for years, as have real wages; certain groups have seen their prospects plunge especially severely; home ownership is increasingly out of reach; the family is under extreme pressure, and women are having far fewer children than they tell pollsters they would like; loneliness is exploding as it becomes harder to form and stay in long-term relationships; secularisation has left an unfilled spiritual void across the West that is being met by dysfunctional ideologies and social movements; and crime is far too high. 

In many countries, university over-expansion has created a toxic two-tier society, fuelling elite overproduction. Woke storm-troopers have seized control of culture, education and business across the English-speaking world, imposing nihilistic gender extremism and critical race theories. The governing classes have got it shockingly wrong on many other issues, from foreign policy to Covid to money-printing, and never atone for their mistakes. 

In Europe, including Britain, there is a popular consensus that there has been and remains too much immigration. In France and several other countries, integration is widely understood to have failed. There is growing scepticism of the rush to net zero: while Western publics are very concerned about climate change, they aren’t prepared to see their living standards decimated to deal with it. There is an increased suspicion of the surveillance society and of the war against cash, and a growing urban-suburban his sense of alienation is especially prevalent among the working and lower middle classes, as well as the young, but no element of society is immune from it, other than perhaps multi-millionaires. As ever in times of dislocation, a small minority has embraced outright conspiracy theories (such as on 9/11) or despicable prejudice (such as anti-Semitism), fanned by rabble-rousers with no real solutions. 

But even for the sensible majority, the belief in progress that used to define the Western psyche has faded, with hope replaced by despair, bitterness and fear. The political phenomenon of our times is mass discontent, and yet this crisis continues to be largely ignored by an unempathetic ruling class. Its only answer is more of the same: higher taxes, more social-democratic tinkering, more power to unaccountable bureaucracies such as the EU or WHO, increased immigration, and even greater social engineering. 

In the past, when the ruling elites were conservative, such estrangement might have led the public into the arms of the Left. Contemporary elites are centre-Left utopian technocrats, and today’s counter-revolutionaries are on the Right. Almost everywhere, that is where the populist energy, the desire for change, lies. 

In America, Oliver Anthony, a previously unknown musician who has shot to fame with Rich Men North of Richmond, symbolises this shift. He rails against low pay, welfarism, state-subsidised obesity, woke social control and rich Left-wing elites. His song, now number one on Apple ahead of Taylor Swift, encapsulates how Right-wing populism has become the anti-establishment movement globally. It is no wonder that the Republican party has been taken over: even if Donald Trump is destroyed, his second and third-placed rivals, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, are revolutionaries. 

The latter two are great, but not all of the Right-wingers riding the international populist wave are good news. Some would be a disaster; others fantastic. Some rising parties are anti-capitalist, a grave error. In other cases, public concerns about the volume of immigration are being hijacked by politicians with an atavistic hatred of the other. Germany is in deep trouble, thanks to Angela Merkel, but it is hugely troubling, including for historical reasons, that the AfD is getting 22 per cent of the vote. Marine Le Pen has moderated her policies, but I’m unclear how her statist economics would save France. 

Yet the global Right-wing revolution is gaining ground regardless. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni is prime minister. In the Netherlands, the anti-net zero farmers’ party has surged. Across the Continent, including in Scandinavia, mainstream parties are adopting once unthinkable policies on immigration. In Spain, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, a rising star, is advocating Thatcherite populism. In New Zealand, the centre-Right is ahead in the polls and the libertarian ACT party has rocketed. In Argentina, one leading presidential contender is an anarcho-capitalist. In Paraguay, the Right-winger Santiago Peña has won the presidency. Benjamin Netanyahu regained power last December. 

There are, of course, exceptions to the global shift to the Right: Brazil, where Lula’s neo-communists are back, and, of course, Britain, thanks to Tory uselessness. Brexit was the first domino to fall, the start of what will prove to be many international counter-revolutions against the Blob. The Tory party had a golden opportunity to channel this insurgency into a mainstream yet drastic programme of renewal. Boris Johnson could have been in power for a decade, yet he, together with Rishi Sunak, blew it, embracing net zero and social democratic profligacy and failing to control immigration and the public sector. 

Keir Starmer will win, and then seek to impose Left-wing solutions on to an increasingly Right-wing world. 

Wednesday 14 June 2023

House Prices

 There is a great deal in the media about the decline in house price inflation and the fact that in some areas the price of housing is in decline. I couldn't give a damn about the valuation of my house. Why? Because it's all a complete con and I am an house owner of 52 years. 'So your house has gone up £25k (or whatever), well what are you actually doing with it?' The great drawback about the one house I live in as an investment is that I can never get access to the money (unlike other assets like bank accounts, equities etc. that can be drawn out and spent) - and that seriously limits its use as an investment. And I am not interested in downsizing or Equity Release. The main beneficiaries of house price inflation are bankers, estate agents, housing investors, house builders and the government. House price inflation does not benefit most of us. Throughout our lives it amounts to nothing more than an unrealised paper profit, making us feel they are richer than we actually are. The way most of us eventually cash in on our one house is by dying - and that is generally not considered a win.

Sunday 4 June 2023

My Godson is Fund raising - please help if you can.

My Godson, Joseph Taylor, is raising funds to enable him to go to the World Scout Jamboree in Korea. He needs to raise £4000. The money is not only to pay for his trip, but also to part fund a less well off scout from Hampshire and scouts from third-world countries. If you are able to spare a "Couple of quid" please donate; click her for the link to GoFundMe page 




Sunday 28 May 2023

Phillip Schofield - A sad reflection on life today

 Phillip Schofield - I wonder what is driving the widespread tabloid coverage? Why the prurient interest in his life? What has his brother's conviction got to do with things - he appears to be convicted of the crime of guilt by association. He is "just" a TV presenter after all - is he really the most important thing on the planet? Judging by the press coverage the answer is yes!

Personally I have rarely seen him on TV. The shows that he has presented do not interest me, and if I watch breakfast TV I prefer the BBC offering. Therefore I cannot comment on how good he is.
It just seems to me a sorry reflection on the current state of the country that so much time and effort are spent on the personal life of one person. In all honesty the only people that should have any interest are his ex-wife, his family and his close friends. On that point am I any better posting about him?
On that note I shall end and say a prayer for him.

Friday 26 May 2023

A Reflection on Pope Francis

 During the past hundred years the proportion of Catholics has remained fairly steady at about 16% of the world's population which has more than trebled. However, the centre of balance of the Church has dramatically changed. In 1910, Europe was home to about two-thirds of all Catholics, and nearly nine-in-ten lived either in Europe (65%) or Latin America (24%). By 2010, by contrast, only about a quarter of all Catholics (24%) were in Europe. The largest share (39%) were in Latin America and the Caribbean.

 

This change was reflected by the installation of Pope Francis, the first non-European pope for over a thousand years with his different, non-European, cultural background. Additionally. as the first Jesuit pope with their charisms of being grounded in love for Christ, focus on discernment and animated by the spiritual vision of their founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, to help others and seek God in all things it is not surprising that his modus operandi has come as shock to many in the west. 

What has Pope Francis done? To start, the pontiff has achieved a great deal by living simply, speaking his mind, promoting frugality, and working for peace and justice. Pope Francis makes the news regularly with his latest reforms and proclamations. He has simplified annulment rules that have been overly complicated for centuries, threatened to shut down the Vatican Bank if it didn't embrace transparency and reform, and moved toward liberalizing the Vatican's stances on the environment, and the economy. He has also placed women in high positions within some of the departments. It must be noted that he has not altered or changed doctrine or dogma rather he has modified the way it is implemented.

In the process, he's angered conservative Catholics around the world, and traditionalists who feel he's going too far, too fast. But the reforms continue apace, and likely will for Francis's entire papacy. 

 

His first encyclical  published in the year 2013 the Apostolic Exhortation “Evangelii gaudium”, is the true ‘guiding manifesto’ of his Pontificate, in which he calls for a new evangelization characterized by joy, as well as the reform of ecclesial structures and the conversion of the papacy, so that they may be more missionary and closer to the purpose intended by Jesus. For this reason, also in 2013, the Pope established a “Council of Cardinals” whose task is to study a project to revise the Apostolic Constitution “Pastor bonus” on the Roman Curia, dating back to 1988.

 

Since this beginning he has published other encyclicals dealing with the family, Amoris Laetitia,” and the duty of care that we owe to the world, Laudato si’ on Care of our Common Home.”

 

Like all of us Pope Francis is not without fault, but nobody can doubt his determination and zeal to carry on with the work and mission of his predecessors who have sat in the Chair of Peter to evangelise the world. His determination to carry on with his work can be seen by the start of his “Synod on Synodality” that will come to fruition later this year.

Tuesday 25 April 2023

Virgin to Sky!

For various reasons, mainly increasing in price I decided that I was leaving Virgin Media and joining Sky for TV, Broadband and TV. I am now, eventually, on Sky and this is the Saga!!

Leaving Virgin was not easy to say the least. The first telephone call ended with me completely losing my rag, and slamming the phone down. The issue being that the person at the other end of the phone kept trying to persuade me to stay, questioning the details of my new package with Sky and refusing to listen to what I was saying (I probably wasn’t listening to him either). The second call went much better and I thought that we had agreed a disconnection date; but the next day I received a letter (printed not email), detailing my new revised contract with Virgin. On the third call we did agree a disconnection date (a couple of days after the sky installation date, just to be safe).

 

What I hadn’t appreciated is that there are really only two main providers of broadband and telephone infrastructure. Virgin Media who have an all-fibre infrastructure and currently do not let other companies use it or sell it. The other is BT/Openreach who use a mixture of fibre and copper and do let third parties, including Sky, sell it.

Install day came. The TV dish etc were installed ok and work perfectly. As always there are differences in how things work but we now, more or less get easily get what we want. My main gripe is that being red/green colour blind I cannot tell whether the Sky box is on or off.

 

The broadband/phone is another story. The first installer was a subcontractor to Openreach who said that for various reasons he needed a cherry picker to get to the top of the nearby telegraph pole and then left.  Eventually on the 20 April (install date was meant to be 3 April) a crew that included cherry picker, mobile hoist on the back of a truck plus engineer arrived and everything was installed and now works ok. My main complaint, and I have raised this as an official complaint is that I ended up managing it all including asking Virgin to keep my service active for another few weeks. If Sky sell it then they should have been on top of the process. The Sky help desk team have been very helpful, but my non-installation should have been picked up and someone should have been contacting me, not me doing the chasing.

 

Broadband so far has been reliable, albeit much slower, around 35 mb/sec compared to 200 plus that I was getting. As I am not a gamer or run a home business what I get is quite fast enough for me and the household. That is one thing that Virgin do not understand; that for oldies like me superfast speeds are not needed. If we had five or so heavy active users than maybe 200 plus is required. Putting my prices up by around £40 per month, then offering 500mb/sec by way of compensation is not for me.

 

Now the pains of leaving Virgin and getting the new system installed are behind me I am reasonably happy. I am due to get some money back from Sky/Openreach due to the delays. I will report back on how easy this process is!!

Wednesday 19 April 2023

Rugby - a once great game slowly fading away

I think that one aspect that many forget is that rugby was never designed to be a spectator sport. I know that we cannot go back to the "good old days". But when my dad was taking me to Twickenham back in the fifties the vast majority of the crowd were either players, former players plus some wives or girl friends and children. The vast majority knew and understood the laws of the game and were appreciative of the finer points and the "dark arts". This was also true of the brave few who stood on the touchline at their local ground on a Saturday.

I would suggest that the majority of the crowds today have never played or not played since school. Do not understand the laws (not sure if I do anymore) and just want a spectacle with lots of "hits" and some occasional deft ball handling. The administrators see ££notes rather than wanting to see people playing the game no matter how ineptly My own playing was not that spectacular to say the least, but I loved it.

What I would love to see from the RFU is a clear concise statement of their vision for the game at all levels. I am also waiting for the pink pigs to come flying past my window.

Tuesday 18 April 2023

The slow ending of Amateur Rugby?

 For sometime now it has been my belief that the Rugby Football Union wants to do away with amateur rugby. That it would like to move to the American Football model of the game just being played at school, college(university) and then a relatively small number of professional clubs.

I doubt if they will do it overnight, but this article in the Guardian suggests that they are moving along that track.

Wednesday 15 March 2023

Thought for the Day!

 Here's a thought for the day - if the world needs to go green before 2030/50  

(1) have you stopped to work out the tonnage of: Silver, Copper, Lithium, Gold, Platinum, Palladium and rare earth minerals its going to take to make the solar panels, wind turbines, EV cars etc?

(2) Have you also worked out the amount of fossil fuels and mining that its going to take to extract, process & transport those metals and minerals?

(3) Have you also worked out that the major metal deposits are on diminishing returns/grades and the average time for a new discovery, say in copper, to come online and produce is over 20 years?

(4) Regardless of whether you're pro "green revolution" or not there's a lot of fossil fuels and mining that's going to happen before the new tech is even useable & it would be refreshing if the media actually told those facts to the populous who seems to think the tech comes "guilt free."

Budget Secrets

 Back in the day" nobody but a few close advisors knew what was going to in the Chancellor's budget. The cabinet were only told a few hours before and people resigned if a "budget secret" was accidentally revealed prior to the speech.

Today it seems as if the world and his wife know what is in the speech days before the main event.
Why did this come about and is it a good thing? Answers on a postcard please or alternatively as a comment to this post!

Saturday 7 January 2023

The Harry and Meghan Saga

 I have desperately being trying to avoid the Harry/Meghan soap opera. But with publication of Harry's book "Spare" it is impossible as it seems to fill every type of media and all the news broadcasts..

One of the (many)things that puzzles me is why Harry felt the need to talk about what he did in Afghanistan, particularly saying how many people he killed. I was born in 1947 and my dad, like many of his generation, fought in the war. Again like many of his contemporaries he had many stories to tell - but none of them had anything to do with fighting. Walking through Blackwell tunnel at night to visit my mum in the Mile End Hospital following her massive leg injuries in an air-raid - dad was at Biggin Hill at the time. Playing "international rugby" for the Shetlands v the Orkneys! A guards drill instructor trying to teach him to change step whilst marking time, he was at an RAF OCTU in Devon at the time. Having his first Chinese Meal (in India)… the list goes on. But never anything about fighting. Whenver I asked him anything about what he really did regards fighting he adroitly changed the subject. All of my friends dad's did the same. According to the stories you would have thought that the war was one long holiday camp interspersed with trips abroad- we all know that the reality was very different. But they never spoke about it.
So why did Harry feel the need to tell? I guess that we will never know why, but in my book it diminishes him.