https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XuKKTtg-Cs

Makes me smile

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF8wgoXZT1E&t=2s

Try again

At a village fete in Northants my then 4yo daughter gave a word-perfect rendition of the limerick ‘There was an old of Ealing’  ….to the vicar’s wife.

Out of the mouths of babes…and all down the back of your jacket.

Bach? Two Violins, Magnificat, Brandenburgs, toccata and fugue in d minor but Beethoven’s (republican!) 9th is indeed an outlier

Riding through the damp smell of autumn

I saw Talking Heads at Manchester University for a couple of quid, seems about right. I wouldn’t pay silly money to see anyone preferring CDs and avoiding crowds.

I’m in a bit of a breakfast club, four of us take turns in cooking every now and then. One of the chaps, early 50s, had a stroke a few months back. He’s now recovered enough to be able to drive so it’s my place on Thursday. Yay! Plus the Tour of Britain goes past the end of the road at c11.05. WIN WIN

http://THE FRIENDS PUB MILANO, Milan – Varesine

Decent cask pint, friendly, very nice vibe. Sounds awful but it’s the best bar I came across on a few trips there.

Er, I think you’ll find Danny Blanchflower was captain of Spurs and we’ll never know if he agreed with MMT, he might’ve though.

He’s a top scorer

If you consider how Starmer has led expulsions and parachuted in candidates into safe seats his aim clearly was to centralise power and control with the LP and the PLP with him at the centre of it. This is borne out by his talking of ‘my Labour Party’. I doubt if Reeves consults much within the party but rather with bankers and financiers. So quite reasonable to refer to them by name, I’m sure they’d be flattered.

Starmer struggled to answer the question of whether he was a socialist but he was clear about his being a zionist. Reeves describes herself as a social democrat. He seems to have been pretty heavy handed with the treatment of left and right protesters plus the arrest of pro-Palestinian campaigners (Medhurst, Wilkinson) for their online activities does paint a rather reactionary picture. I think he’s giving a warning to people not to protest against his policies of austerity and warmongering.

I’ve got my first ever pair arriving today. Needed some grippy soles to avoid my bare feet slipping on the carpet and adding murder to my achilles tendonitis. Fairly essential given that we live in a rather up and down house.

I think people were sick of Tory policies and did vote for radical change, and the LP flagged up (!) vote for change. However, we’ve had the Tory austerity and now we have Labour austerity, that’s the change. People will only get what they fight for, it’s naive and ahistorical to expect anything more.

I bet the sanctimonious going to the non-smoking pub also don’t drink much and parade their screaming kids, see how that works out. I go outside the pub about once a month and scrounge a rollie and it’s bliss. Each to their own. As Robert Puttnam found, longevity can be a toss up between giving up smoking or enjoying social capital.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIAOG9nhrt8

Thing is Hitler did go in for genocide whereas other fascist dictators like Mussolini, Salazar or Franco were awful oppressors but not quite in the same way. Israel has always been iffy about defining its borders due to its aspirations for an expansionist ‘greater Israel’ since 1948. I remember discussing this in a tutorial with Michael Clark (RUSI etc, hardly a leftwinger) in 1977, it’s nothing new. Perhaps we should tone down the hyperbole by referring to Israel ‘mowing the lawn’ (sounds quite green doesn’t it).

Careful with galvanized steel, it seems the expansion and contraction throws off paint pretty quicky. Seek advice.

I worked with a bloke who bagged a 1 yr fully paid for (ILEA) masters course. Knowing that he was down the rugby club every night on the lash I asked him how he did it: ‘Treated it as a nine to five, if I didn’t have a lecture I was in the library and knocked off at 4 every day.’

I’d say with the discipline of having worked and maybe the horror of going back to an unsatisfying job you’ll be flying.  The few mature students dotted about when I was a student were held in respect if not a bit of awe.

Anthony Seldon reckons Johnson was even less suited to the role of PM than Truss. Just ponder that for a moment.

‘Smell my finger’

Er, Danny Blanchflower was a longstanding member of the Bank of England’s MPC and is currently professor of economics at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

You may be right Revs, I was just paraphrasing Keynes, Prest and Coppock. Think beer, fish and chips.

I put carbon bars and ergon grips on my HT and that reduced the battering.

We both had a 320d Touring and both did a trouble-free 200k+ miles, (nearly) free motoring! WNTL?

‘The rich’ are much more likely to save or buy imported luxury goods eg Mike Lynch’s Italian-built boat whereas the poor are much more likely to spend money on domestically produced goods. So, if you want to stimulate the economy you give more to the poor. Sadly, Starmer and Reeves seem set on the opposite.

Terminal case of ******’s cramp perchance?

I should think Starmer has a reasonable grasp of international law but as he stated  “I support Zionism without qualification” he clearly couldn’t care less for it and the ‘without qualification’ bit gives them free rein for genocide with arms supplied from this country.

I think they want apartheid gone and the Jews won’t need a safe haven but can live from the river to the sea in a secular democratic state like most of the rest of the developed world.  Afrikaaners didn’t need a safe haven after apartheid ended, you just have to get used to treating ‘the other’ as an equal and not a ‘human animal’.

At 15 I was hitch hiking down to Cornwall from London and  virtually every weekend up to Derbyshire for the next three years climbing at Stoney Middleton. I then graduated to hitching around Europe and then southern Africa. I  lived to tell the tale, great positive experiences and very few scrapes (although there were a few). It was an education and took me to places I would otherwise never had had the money to visit.

https://www.justgoride.co.uk/ext/routes/278

Lassagne

Echoes

Medoc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IsSpAOD6K8

I used to buy the cheap Specsaver type specs, they never worked brilliantly and I was always pushing them back on my nose. My better half persuaded me to get some top quality (German) varifocals, not at all cheap but completely transformative. They do everything and go everywhere and are light which is good as I can’t stand carrying extra bits around. Have just bought some Rayban varifocals which have alerted me to how good the German ones are, they’ll stay in the car. However, I do use cheap +2 safety glasses on the bikes. Splash out and be happy and as my Mrs says ‘cost per wear!’

This ‘bucket list’ thing implies something terminal. We just keep bashing away.

You’d have to be a cycling classic helmet to wear one of those.

‘Maybe HP employing secret agents?’ You are a saucy boy.

I wonder what an aphantasic would see or experience if given a psychedelic drug, feelings rather than images?

I’m sure I’ll suffer the wrath for this, but. Make sure you have very deep pockets, enjoy slow driving and getting on first name terms with the mechanic. After my VW camper van episode I’ve always had large estate cars that take tents, bikes, surfboards, and everyting else. We combine camping with AirBnBs, hotels and it still works out cheaper and happier than a camper van.

It’s a shame they stopped doing hardtails. We took our Core 40s to France this year and had an absolute blast in Les Landes.