Suella The Racist

Officially, being English is a matter of nationality and residency so anyone born in England or holding legal citizenship is legally and culturally English so that seems clear cut, unless you are Suella Bravermann of the Reform Party who made the bizarre claim on BBC Question Time that she isn't English despite being born here as she has an Asian Heritage.
Credit to the man who then argued with her that he has spent his whole life being told he is not English by racists because he is Black and she is therefore reinforcing the racists arguement for which she  dismissed because that would mean she is being racist towards herself for which he shrugged and said, 'You are'.
She repeatedly refused to answer the presenter’s direct question of does she mean that you only be English if you are white but Suella was always a right wing nut so it is no surprise she stepped across to the even further right Reform Party and is coming out with nonsense such as this.
To my mind she is setting it out to her fellow Reformers that people with brown and black skin can’t be English and she agrees with them, and she is a brown woman herself which is toxic and bizarrely, appealing to the sort of people that would throw her out of the country without a second thought.
To be fair i would throw her out also but not because of the colour of her skin, but because she is vile and always has been.

New Age Spirituality Not The Same As Religion

Back in the dark day's the Church knew everything and the Earth was flat, the Sun revolved around the Earth and that woman with the black cat and the wart was definitely going to end up in the lake because the Church said so but then along came people like Galileo, Copernicus and Issac Newton and the grip on the masses began to slip but for science to really make headway, what it needed was to get rid of that pesky God character so take a step forward Charles Darwin.
Since then the Church has never regained the dizzy heights of its popularity but some on the religious side of the fence keep trying and the Evangelical Alliance (Together we are making Jesus known) has launched a guide for Churches to: 'Take advantage of New Age popularity in the Supernatural'.
I assume, and i know this guide wasn't issued for my eyes, but the idea is to piggy back on the rise of all things New Age and say 'Nice Crystals and Venus being in the House of Pluto means there is no better time to read the Bible and come to the Church'.
Somehow, Christians and their ilk see what the Bible Society called: 'A Quiet Revival' which suggested a huge increase in religion although it is not turning into newly filled pews as it is growing online and its opponents are not necessarily religious.
Religious things may not be my bag but they very much are the bag of my blogging partner and he explained that although New Age spirituality with its astrology, crystals, meditation and impersonal cosmic energy or universal consciousness, is not the same as a traditional religion with God as a distinct creator.
Maybe to the Evangelical Alliance the line between New Age Spirituality and Religion is blurred or it is concerned that its flavour of Faith is being replaced and it wants to bring the New Agers into it's fold to keep its stranglehold on the believers tight by deliberately conflating what they believe with that the New Agers believe although it patently isn't.
My personal view is you can believe what you want if it helps or brings comfort to you in some way but a God or the position of a Planet is too wacky for me to take on board because the latest God is just a copy and paste of many earlier Gods and the Planets do not give a flying one about you and if you had said they had a couple of hundred years ago, you would be looking down from the top of a pyre from the same people now trying to recruit you.   

Special Guest Blogger: Inuit goddess Sedna

Every time someone bites into a succulent piece of blubber or dons a warm sealskin parka, they are, quite literally, enjoying a piece of me.
I was the daughter of Anguta and Isarrataitsoq, which is a lot of divine pressure for one girl to carry but both my parents were always on about me finding a nice hunter to settle down with but my main priority was mainly, eating. I had this Great Hunger, an appetite that could swallow a caribou whole. I occasionally tried to nibble on my parents while they slept but we’ve all made mistakes in our rebellious teens. Some kids dye their hair blue, I tried to consume the architects of the universe but instead of getting me a therapist, dad decided the best course of action was a scenic boat trip and
throwing me overboard into the freezing Arctic Ocean.
There I was, treading water and I did what any sensible person would do, I grabbed the side of the kayak but Dad was having none of it took out his knife and snip, snip, chop, chop and as my finger joints slipped away into the abyss, they didn’t just sink. They transformed with the knuckles becoming the ringed seals, the middle joints Walruses and the tips those magnificent, blubbery whales.
I watched my own digits sprout flippers and swim away which is a strange feeling to see your pinky finger blow a sprout of water and swim off.
My body became the foundation of an entire civilization’s survival and it’s hard to stay mad at your dad for being a homicidal maniac when you realise you’ve just accidentally solved world hunger for the next ten thousand years.
After the finger-chopping fiasco, I sank to the bottom, grew a tail (very mermaid chic)  and founded Adlivun, the underworld which is like a gated community, but for the dead, and the gates are guarded by some very grumpy sharks.
As the Mother of All Marine Animals,  if you want a seal for dinner, you have to stay on my good side and the power trip is immense, when i see a whale swim past my window I feel a strange sense of pride but it’s not all glamour, there’s the hair because the downside of having sea-creature fingers for a legacy is you can’t hold a comb so i summon a Shaman to do it for me.
Having a shaman travel through the spirit world to the bottom of the ocean just to comb your hair is the height of luxury but take it from me, if you are feeling peckish see what's in the fridge, especially if you have a father who owns a kayak and a sharp knife.

Ain't Nothing Gonna Break Our Stride

For some bizarre reason, Newton's third law of motion always stuck in my head from my schooldays long after most of the rest of what we were taught has been replaced by what day to put the bins out and 80's song lyrics (who needs to know Henry VIII's wives when you can still sing along to 'Break My Stride' 40 years later) but Newton's third really stuck.
As anyone who just hums along to Matthew Wilder's classic tune can tell you, Newtons 3rd Law of Motion is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction which is why Rockets can launch from Earth because when a rocket's engine expels exhaust gas in one direction, the gas pushes back on the rocket with an equal force in the opposite direction and up it goes, ain't nothing gonna break it's stride, nobody gonna slow it down, oh no, It's got to keep on moving as it were.
That lengthy introduction through 80's nostalgia is a happy segue into news that NASA are looking to introduce Nuclear Engines to their Space rockets which will half the time it takes to get to wherever we point it towards with Mars being the most obvious destination in what was a 6-9 month trip now reduced to 3-4.
So what you may think, our nearest Solar System is 4.37 light-years (about 25 trillion miles) away from Earth and would take roughly 75,000 years traveling at our current top speeds so half that is still 12.5 trillion miles and a 37,500 year long trip which is a fair point which is why nobody is talking about that, it's the Red Planet we are looking at and who knows, they may be looking right back and thinking Gawd, i hope them awful Earthlings don't come here.
There has long been debate about life on Mars and if there is life underground, inside it's salt crusts or in a dormant state and we know from our own planet how resilient and adaptive life can be so I am all for anything that can improve our odds of getting to Mars and back again because we're on a roll and we pray it lasts, yes the road behind was rocky but now we're feeling cocky and we can look at Mars and we see our past, that's the reason why we're running so fast as some curly haired performer almost said.

Special Guest Blogger: Black Sam Bellamy

Greetings landlubbers, they called me the Prince of Pirates and say I was the wealthiest swashbuckler to ever grace the Golden Age and a man of the people and honestly? They’re right. I was fabulous.
Before I was the Prince, I was just Sam. A teenager in the Royal Navy, which, let me tell you, is a fantastic place if you enjoy eating biscuits made 40% of weevils and I fought in some battles, saw the world, and realised one very important thing, that the legal life is a total scam.
You work for the King, he gets the gold and you get scurvy which is an awful business model.
So, I decided to go into independent and started with treasure hunting. My friend Paulsgrave Williams and I headed for the Florida coast to find the wrecked Spanish Plate Fleet. It was going to be easy,just pick some gold off the seafloor and retire but we found nothing. Not a single doubloon and that’s when we met Pirate Captain Benjamin Hornigold and his first mate was a guy named Edward Teach who you might know as Blackbeard.
Now, Ed was a lot. Fuses in the beard? Check. Multiple pistols strapped to his chest? Check. A general aura of I might bite your legs off? Absolutely.
I learned a lot from them, mostly that I was much better looking than they were and that I had a better philosophy. Hornigold refused to attack English ships because he still loved the King and although the ships crew told him the King doesn't even know you exist unless he’s signing your death warrant he refused so eventually, the crew voted him out and I was made captain. I was in my late twenties, I had a ship and while everyone else was wearing those ridiculous itchy wigs, I just tied my long black hair back with a velvet ribbon. Simple. Elegant. Aerodynamic and Black Sam was born.
I didn’t see myself as a thief. I saw myself as a wealth redistribution specialist and my crew called themselves Robin Hood’s Men.  I was merciful and generous, i lived by a rule that if you didn't fight back, I didn't kill you and I might even give you your ship back after I took all the good stuff.
In just over a year, I captured 53 ships and then came the Whydah. She was a beautiful state-of-the-art galley built for the slave trade and we spent months raiding the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast and I was the wealthiest pirate in history. I was winning at life.
I even had my own flag. Most pirates go for the basic skull and crossbones which is a bit cliché, if you ask me. Mine was a skeleton holding an hourglass in one hand and a speaking trumpet in the other and everything was going perfectly. I was heading back to New England with a ship full of gold and a crew of 145 men who thought I was a god, then came Mother Nature.
She didn’t care how many ships I captured. A storm hit us off Cape Cod and the weight of all that gold made us into giant golden brick and the ship capsized and out of 146 men, only two made it to shore. I wasn't one of them. I went down with the ship, the gold, and my very nice velvet hair ribbon.

Books That Inspired Me

Being such a tremendous reader of books, I was asked to write about five that had changed my outlook on life or inspired me and after giving it some thought, i had to admit no books had.
There are some books which i really enjoyed and even thought they contained such a message that everyone should read it such as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, Animal Farm and Of Mice And Men, but inspired or changed me? Not so much.
I assume people of a religious bent will go with the Bible or the Koran or some such religious work but the only religious text i have read was some of the Bible and probably because i came at it with an angle of this will be nonsense, i couldn't take it seriously and was too busy looking for things i could ridicule such as unicorns, dragons, horses with lion heads and fire breathing sea creatures.
Being a proper lefty, there wasn't a book that made me find that political view, i had it before i even knew what a lefty was and found we happily meshed together afterwards so no author could lay claim to influencing my viewpoint, my parents i guess take the credit for that as they were both always up for a demonstration against something or other and protesting something unfair, my life mantra of 'Life isn't fair, so let's make it fairer' was certainly stolen from them and not from a book.
So sorry but i will have to pass on this one because i can't think of one left alone five.  

Triple Lock Now Double Lock

The main take away from Andy Burnham's Labour Party speech is that he will end the pensions triple lock, making it a double lock and using the savings to help fund adult social care reforms in England.
The triple lock means the state pension currently increases annually in line with inflation, average wage growth, or 2.5% - whichever is highest but the average wage growth is being dropped so now it's a rise rise every year in line with either inflation or 2.5%.
There has been a few conversations around the affordability of the UK State Pension recently and since it was introduced in 2010,  it has been raised from £102.15 per week to £241.30 per week with the main increases coming in 2023/24 (10.1%), 2024/25 (8.5%) and 2025/26 (4.1%).
The State Pension has always been a bit of a hot potato because the over 65's are the group which vote the most and nobody wants to tick them off but as Burnham said, someone had to take the political hit and rip the plaster off although the 13.2 million pensioners currently in receipt may have something to say about it although stating that it is being down to fund free Social Care may dull their inevitable argument.    
The age of retirement was raised from 65 to 66 and then to 67 with a rise to 68 penciled in to take place around 2045 but a common fallacy is that the National Insurance we currently pay go into a pot for our retirement whereas in reality our National Insurance goes to pay the pensions of current retirees and our pensions, when we get there, will be paid by those working and paying NI then.
As Social Care  has been a sore point for Governments for years, it is not a bad thing that Burnham is looking to try and fix it and with one in 10 hospital beds occupied by someone who was medically fit enough to leave but were unable to due a lack of social care capacity, it is needed so we can only hope that the Pensioners, uppity at the best of times when it comes to their pensions, don't ruin it by voting for a Party that will undo all this good work.   

Google Guide To Finding A Brit In Your House

An estimated 4.7 to 5.5 million Brits live elsewhere in the World so there is a good chance that one of them may turn up on your doorstep but don't panic because Google has a survival guide just in case you find a Brit inside your house.

You need to find an electric kettle immediately, as your new guest will likely demand a cup of tea within minutes of arrival and then hourly throughout the day and pair it with a biscuit (digestive or rich tea) and use an electric kettle and never microwave the water as this is considered a minor crime and the Brit will exhibit signs of distress upon tasting.
Also be prepared for them to mention the weather within the first five minutes, regardless of what it is doing outside and they will apologise for everything, even if you bump into them

So what does Google suggest if it is an Australian and not a Brit in your living room?
Australians are generally docile when approached correctly but make sure you have a proper cup of tea ready and point them toward the couch, or if it is after 9am, substitute the tea for a cold beer.
Place a jar of Vegemite and some white bread on the table and if they start speaking, do not alarm them by asking for a translation, if they ask for a Chook in the Arvo or ask if you have seen their thongs, then just smile and nod and put some sports on the TV.

Canadian's are also easily managed with the right resources according to Google, so say 'Sorry' immediately as in Canadian culture, exchanging 'sorries' is a formal greeting.
If the Canadian appears restless, if you happen to have a Tim Hortons cup nearby, place it within their line of sight to calm them and if you have maple syrup, ensure it is 100% pure because offering them high-fructose corn syrup masquerading as maple syrup will result in immediate, polite disappointment. As with the Australians, the language can be confusing but the formula is that 'Yeah, no' means No and 'No, yeah' means Yes.

As for if it's an American, the advice is not to panic  and immediately fill every available tray with water and place in the freezer as they will expect a glass that is 70% ice, even if it is freezing outside.
Be prepared to intervene at the Kettle as there is a high statistical probability they will try to boil water in your microwave and calibrate your volume as Americans 'inside voice' is roughly equivalent to a public address system.
They might try to hand you cash after you make them a tea or help with luggage as tipping is a cultural thing and never offer them instant coffee as they will just not get it.

Thank you Google.

Did You Bring The Tin Opener Luv?

El Niño is supersizing and is expected to be the strongest since the one in 1877-78 which saw the Pacific Ocean temperatures reach 3.5C and the result was the death of over 50 million people Worldwide through famine and droughts and with the 2026 version already topping 3C and rising and some forecasts predicting a peak of 4.0C in December, it's not looking good. Although a warming planet doesn't cause El Niño, the fact that it is happening in a warmer planet should mean that our Governments are finally taking Climate Change seriously.
For example in China, a 100-day campaign has been launched to prepare for extreme weather and help safeguard harvests against the opposing extremes of drought and intense rainfall. Beijing has plans to upgrade early warning monitoring systems, and in July, it launched a national plan encouraging cities to draw up climate risk maps to help identify areas most vulnerable to flooding and severe heat while in the UK....erm.
The Climate Crisis killed an estimated 35,000 Europeans this Summer, 2,877 heat-associated deaths occurring across the UK during May and June, and Brits are being encouraged to panic sensibly by stockpiling water, tinned fruits and vegetables and loo roll.
Depending on where you live (and the Southern Hemisphere is more in the firing line than us Northern Hemispherers ) you will probably experience storms, floods, starvation, heatwaves, fires and droughts and a recent scientific report projected that this unfolding super El Niño could lead to over 450,000 additional deaths globally from heat and extreme weather through early 2027.
Anyone who still has an old Y2K Survival Guide knocking around, this could be a good time to re-read it or you could move to China who's Government seem the only ones to be actually doing something.  

Special Guest Blogger: Roman God Forculu

Hello, Mortals, I’m the little-known but fiercely over-qualified Roman deity who watches over the doors that separate the chaotic outside from the cozy (or not-so-cozy) inside.
My ancestors called me the Keeper of the Portal but the big guy, Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings and endings gets all the stories about gate-opening and gate-closing, I’m the one who makes sure the wood doesn’t warp, the metal doesn’t rust, and that you don’t end up stepping directly over
a dreaded threshold.
The ancient Romans loved to split up responsibilities. Need a god for the door? Ask Forculus. Need one for the hinge? Cardea. Need a god for the sill that keeps the draught out? Limentinus.
My name literally means the one who watches the door which is not exactly a superhero name but back when Rome was a cluster of huts on the Tiber and a few ambitious road-builders, doors were very basic. A simple slab of timber, a rope tied to a stone, and a prayer to whichever Gods was handy would suffice.
I was assigned to a modest wooden door outside a blacksmith’s shop in the Subura district but fast forward a few centuries and I got promoted to double doors in a public bathhouse. Suddenly, my responsibilities doubled and I had to keep two doors synchronized, ensure they swished open together perfectly and the bathhouse owner paid me in loaves of honey-glazed figs.
Limentinus is the brother who always stands at the exact spot where you transition from one world to another, making sure you don’t trip over the unseen line that separates inside from outside.
Janus is the grandmaster of passages, the god with a face looking both forward and backward and loves to take credit for everything but  Janus gets the statues, the festivals, the poems. Cardea gets a small bronze plaque in some Roman villa. Limentinus gets a stone slab that few notice unless they trip but I’m not a god who demands temples because a door teaches patience. You can’t force a wooden portal to swing open if the hinges aren’t aligned and every door you walk through offers a decision of either staying inside the safety of your house, or venture out into the unknown, i'm easy either way, that's your decision.