Special Guest Blogger: Gregg Allman

You’re likely wondering what it’s all like. The other side. Is it all clouds and harps? I can tell you now, if I hear one more bloody harp, I’m going to set it on fire. It’s all a bit too polite for my liking. No whiskey, for starters. They offered me something called Nectar of the Gods which tasted like watered-down tea so I told them where they could stick their nectar.
When i died all i left was a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a collection of songs that people still insist on playing far too loud in their cars, and a liver that officially resigned in protest.
My voice may have been a bit gravelly, a bit sweet, like sucking on a peach that’s been rolling down a dusty road and I spent a good thirty years trying to kill it with smoke and spirits but after a few bands, and the unfortunate accident where I avoided being drafted into the Vietnam War by shooting myself in the foot, we became the Allman Joys and then the Allman Brothers Band and made the album Fillmore East which made us so rich and famous that we could now afford to get high on a much better class of drugs.
Crikey, we were on fire on that album and I’m still rather proud of it. My brother Duane… well, Duane was untouchable. The rest of us were just trying to keep up with the bloke. Being an Allman Brother was like being in the world’s most brilliant, most chaotic and most likely to explode at any moment family. We loved each other dearly, which was a good thing, because we frequently wanted to kill each other but Duane got in first and was killed in a motorcycle accident not long after we hit the big time.
As for the hard-living, tortured soul bit, it's a bit over the top, i had a great time and it was more  of a profound and sustained lack of common sense.  Debauchery for us, it was just… Tuesday. You’d wake up, nudge the tattooed stranger sleeping alongside you and think, Right, seems the day is underway.
As for my tragic descent. It wasn’t tragic! It was absurd. Was I vain? Of course I was bloody vain. I had cheekbones that could cut glass and a fabulous wardrobe, my only regret was not taking more pictures and i got to marry Cher, yes that Cher!
Everyone seems so terribly solemn about my grand exit. They said i died surrounded by love and i did but  I also died because my internal organs decided to form a union and go on permanent strike with my liver the ringleader.
It wasn’t some painful, dramatic scene. It was more of a gentle winding down. One minute I’m on the bus, wondering if we have any pickled eggs, the next I’m being greeted by a chap who looks suspiciously like my old tour manager, handing me a clipboard and a white robe. A bit of a letdown, to be honest. I was rather hoping for a hazy, psychedelic light show and the opening chords of Dreams. Instead, it felt more like arriving at a rather dull spa where you’re not allowed to smoke.
I was just a man who loved music, and women, and alcohol and occasionally, in the quiet moments, loved himself just a little too much. I made some beautiful noise, caused a spot of bother, and looked damn good doing it.

Poor Showing By Labour

I am getting too old for these all nighter's but unfortunately the Polls don't have the decency to shut at a decent time and the counters are not fast enough to let us get home at a decent hour.
What the Local Elections did show was that the Labour Party are in trouble, losing almost 1,500 seats on English Councils but more worryingly, Reform adding almost the same number to their payroll so will have to see how handing the Councils to a bunch of racists works out. As one commentator said, the Council is all about bin collections and getting the street lights fixed so its not easy to blame Immigrants for any of those, although as that is the only solution they have for everything, i'm sure they will give it as go.
For the first time in a century the Welsh decided Labour suck and voted for Plaid Cymru which means with Nationalist parties in Scotland, Northern Ireland and now Wales who have all whispered leaving at some point, the United Kingdom could soon br a thing of the past.
Keir Starmer has come out and said that he isn't going to just walk away and the right thing to do is rebuild but he may not get the chance because although no cabinet minister has mooted a bid to replace him, Labour MPs are furious with dozens calling for him to either resign immediately or set out a timetable for his departure.
The problem with Keir, as i see it, was that he was far too catious and instead of coming in with a Labour Party Socialist agenda to wipe away the stain of the right wing politics the Conservatives disastrously foisted upon us, he tried to keep everyone happy and just managed to annoy everyone and then the Peter Mandelson affair, that was just an outright catastrophe.
I can't see how he can survive after be so comprehensively rejected by the British public but as usual with Prime Ministers, he will try but if we dont have a new face peering out of the 10 Downing Street door within the next few months, Labour are sunk and we face the uncomfortable situation of possibly having Nigel Farage and his bunch of deplorable's making the  rules, and you only have to look across the Atlantic to see what happens when a bunch of racist dimwits take the steering wheel.  

Eurovision Week

Eurovision week and it's off to Vienna to watch 34 European nations and 1 honorary one sing and dance to work out who is the owner of the crystal microphone for another year.
The Competition has a reduced amount of contestants this year because several are boycotting it (Ireland, Spain, Netherlands, Slovenia and Iceland), due to the Eurovison Committee wrongly not having the cojones to ban Israel for their genocide and while they should not be there, they have had the decency to submit an absolute shite song and the Austrian's have said they will not ban protests and demonstrations against the country so should be entertaining when they perform, last year the Swiss turned down the crowd's booing noise on the broadcast so this year Eurovision fans can make it clear that we think Israel's actions suck.
The UK entry is a bit of a strange one, Eins, Zwei, Drei by Look Mum No Computer, which is a bit of a 90s techno throwback and probably won't bother the left hand side of the board but luckily we get a pass straight to the final so we won't have the indignity of being kicked out at the semi-final stage.    
I have picked my top 8 but some will fall by the wayside before the Final so will hold fire on listing them but i have tipped France to win the whole thing but then i don't think I have ever picked the winner so that's the death knell for the people of Paris having to find a big enough hall next year.

Special Guest Blogger: Castor

Ah, hello there. Yes, I see you’re reading this. Don’t worry, I’m not haunting you. Much. It’s just that, in death, one develops a rather keen interest in legacy. Especially when your legacy involves twins, horses, and dying in a rather undignified manner involving a spear and someone’s poorly timed boast.
I'm half of the famed twins along with Pollux, the other one of the celestial tag team better known as the Gemini. Though, let’s be honest Pollux always got the shiny end of the constellation. Literally. He’s the immortal one. Me? I’m the mortal twin with the tragic backstory and a head injury that, frankly, still throbs.
Now, you might be wondering: “Castor, you were a Greek god! Or at least part-time divinity with excellent cheekbones—what’s there to moan about?” Well, plenty actually.
I was born, or rather, hatched, under mysterious circumstances involving a swan, a king, and a scandal that would make modern tabloids blush.
My mother, Leda, had a thing for divine poultry. Zeus, in one of his many questionable fashion choices (feathers? really?), showed up as a swan and, well, let’s just say the morning after was awkward for everyone.
Out of that feathered debauchery fiasco came four children. Me, my mortal sister Clytemnestra, and my divine siblings: Pollux (ever the golden boy) and Helen. Yes, that Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships and Family reunions were tense.
Being the mortal twin in an increasingly immortal family was tricky. Pollux could shrug off a charging bull like it was a mildly annoying toddler. I, on the other hand, once tripped over my own sandals during answering the door and faceplanted into a sacrificial pile. Not dignified.
So, I did what any self-respecting brother of a demi-god would do and became the original horse whisperer.
Horses are strong, majestic creatures, prone to kicking you in the solar plexus if you look at them funny but I didn’t just ride horses,  I bonded with them.
Pollux, of course, went the boxing route but the gods were never much for subtlety. And so, as with all good Greek tales, mine took a tragic turn. Mostly because of cows.
It started small. My cousins, Idas and Lynceus, stole some cattle so Pollux and I got on out horses and charged the cousins and demanded justice and that's where it all went pear shaped.
Idas was, frankly, built like a temple column and a fight broke out. Spears flew. Horses panicked and next thing I knew, I was flat on my back, staring at the sky and realising I’d been fatally stabbed.
Now, here’s the thing about having an immortal twin: they don’t take 'well, I’m dead now' as a final answer.
Pollux was devastated, understandably so, and went straight to Dad with one demand: 'Swap places with him. I’ll be mortal. He can be immortal. I don’t care' and Zeus was so touched by the unselfish act that  he split the immortality.
Now we take shifts. One day I’m in Elysium sipping ambrosia and next I’m back in the Underworld, playing dice with Hades and trying to avoid Cerberus and thus the constellation Gemini was born. Two stars, twinkling side by side, one bright, one slightly dimmer, like a celestial reminder that one of us was technically better at not dying.

Special Guest Blogger: Luke Howard

If you’ve ever stared up at a sky that looked suspiciously like an elephant or a fluffy cat and wondered, What on earth is that?, then you’ve already taken the first step on the path that led me to my modest claim to fame as the Cloud Whisperer.
You see before 1803 we would speak of high-altitude, flattened, elongated vaporous formations but after my 'On The Modification of Clouds', new, snappier Latin names became the norm.
I began life as a Pharmacist in Tottenham and spent most of my days grinding powders and selling cure-alls that smelled faintly of Cinnamon but despite the sweet scent of medicinal herbs and the clang of glass bottles, I was fascinated by looking out of the large window at the changing amorphous blobs outside and wondered if they could be described, categorised and perhaps even named and this was the genius part.
Scribbling furiously on scraps of paper, I noted there were three main types of clouds and each was at a different height so we have a low fluffy, mid layered and high whispy clouds and using my basic grasp of Latin to describe them, called them Cumulus (Heaped), Stratus (sheet) and Cirrus (Curl) which sounded much more refined than fluffy thing or grey smudge.
Noting that each cloud type could be higher and lower than normal, i then went with sub-naming the cloud types by mashing them together so a Stratus Cloud that was low was a StratoCumulus and a Cumulus Cloud that was high was a Cirroculumlus or a Stratus Cloud that was high was a Cirrostratus. You get the idea and i then threw Nimbus (Latin for Rain) into the equation so any cloud that has rain coming from it, you can have Nimbostratus or Cumulonimbus.
I wrote it all down and submitted the short paper to Philosophical Transactions and not only was it accepted by my cloud name became the official terminology.
Beyond cloud naming, I dabbled in a few other endeavors that may or may not have earned me the occasional look of admiration from my peers such as recording rainfall for a full year in a specially made utensil and showing that rain fell most often in October and my 'Thermal-Stack Theory' which showed that heat rising from London’s industries creating the distinctive stratocumulus formations we saw over the Thames and proved we could therefore actually influence the sky.
My fame grew when Goethe wrote a series of poems about me and my clouds and Constable dedicated to me a whole year of painting nothing but skies.  
The things about clouds are that they’re universally visible. No matter where you travel, be it the bustling streets of London, the rolling hills of the Cotswolds, or the far-flung colonies of the East, everyone looks up and sees the same sky with a now shared language for clouds.
They’re beautiful, absurd, and free. You can’t own a cloud, you can’t control it, but you can certainly enjoy it and Tottenham Hostspurs honoured me by naming two high-level viewing areas in their new stadium, Stratus East and Stratus West, but from recent seasons, looking up at the sky in these areas rather than down towards the pitch would be much more enjoyable.

Claim And Counterclaim Over Strait Blockade

So how did we get here? More than 850 ships and 20,000 sailors are estimated to be trapped in the Gulf since the US and Israel launched their attack on Iran on 28 February and Iran imposed a blockade on foreign shipping using the strait of Hormuz soon afterwards and Trump imposed a counter-blockade of ships using Iranian ports on 13 April.
A Pakistani-brokered ceasefire stopped hostilities but failed to open the Strait and last night the US outlined a plan to guide ships out of the Strait of Hormuz stating it was: 'An humanitarian gesture on behalf of the United States, Middle Eastern countries but, in particular, the country of Iran' although the question was whether it was being done with Iran’s consent or taking place over their heads.  
We got the answer this morning when a statement read on Iranian State TV said the strait was: 'Under the control of the armed forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran' and went on to warn: 'Any foreign armed forces, especially the aggressive U.S. military, that intends to approach or enter the Strait of Hormuz will be targeted' and then news that two tankers, a UAE and South Korean vessels, have been struck with drones.
Trump has threatened to deal forcefully with any interference with the operation and Iran has since claimed to have fired two missiles at an American warship which forced it to retreat and flee the area which has been denied by a US official's so claim and counterclaim but  it very much has the potential to become a very dangerous flashpoint and bring both nations back into direct military confrontation.

Hard To Not Dislike Israel

I get tired of pointing out that Israel and Judaism are two very different things and the two should not be conflated but unfortunately many do which is why we saw scenes such as those in London last week when two obviously Jewish men were stabbed and had many Jews complaining that they do not feel safe in Britain.
When the Government said that they would suspend the Pro-Palestine Marches they are guilty of conflating two separate issues although i have been to some of the marches and the rhetoric does range from people peacefully protesting the ongoing Genocide by Israel in Gaza to pure antisemitism   
which seems to unite some on the left and the right bizarrely.
We can argue whether it is right to stop the rights of thousands protesting because of a small minority with an intelligence which matches their shoe size but it does open the Government up to accusations of siding with a nation run by a wanted War Criminal who is actually committing a Genocide as we watch but that is for them to decide, i would go with more policing and hauling out any moron who waves an antisemitism banner who shouts out anti Jewish slogans myself rather than ban them but Israel has always had much to answer for and I can't see it getting any better.
Annoyingly, i have to give credit to Piers Morgan for a recent interview with Israeli Politician, Daniella Weiss, which summed up just why the problem with Israel is not going away anytime soon.
in his Interview for his show this week, Piers Morgan Uncensored, he asked her how she felt about over 20,000 Palestinian children being killed since October the 7th in Gaza and it quickly spiraled into this:

DW: I said Palestinians, the Gazans, and all Arabs around should stop attacking Israel.
PM:  I just asked you how you felt about 20,000 children being killed by the IDF. How do you feel about that?
DW: I think that that the parents should be very careful before they teach the their children to hate Jews and to kill Jews.
PM:  That wasn't my question. My question was, how do you personally feel about over 20,000
Palestinian children now being killed since October the 7th in Gaza? How do you feel about that?
DW: I think that Arabs, Gazans or Jordanians or Syrians, whoever should be very very careful with the way they educate the children.
PM: That wasn't my question. Can you answer my question?
DW: That was my answer.
PM: You don't care? You have no thoughts about these children at all?
DW: You choose your questions and I answer them the way I believe is right.
PM: Just to be clear, you have nothing to say about 20,000 children being killed? Nothing at all.
DW: I have a lot to say about everything that happened as a result of the massacre of the seventh.
PM: Now I understand you care about Israeli children who died as do I. But I'm able to care about both sides of children who've died. Why don't you care seemingly about the Palestinian children who've died? Why can't you express any sympathy or sorrow or empathy with the children who've died in Gaza? Are you able to do that?
DW: I warn all Arabs from all sides, from all borders, stop educating children to hate.
PM:  So, just to be clear, I've now offered you three times.
DW: I made myself very clear.
PM: Oh, you've made yourself very clear
DW: You asked me five times.
PM: I'm going to give you one last chance to offer some empathy or sympathy or sorrow about the deaths of 20,000 children in Gaza. Are you capable of doing that?
DW: I can tell you that had you cared and I don't believe you that that you care a tiny bit about one killed person if you do not use the means that you have as a media person to stop educating children.
PM: I gave you four chances.
DW: You gave me seven.
PM: You couldn't give a damn, could you? You couldn't give a damn. You don't care. And all you want is all the Palestinians gone. You can barely even bring yourself to say their name. All you want is to take over the West Bank and Gaza. You don't care how many die in the process. You want them all gone. You don't care, do you? That's the bottom line.
DW: As you said, the audience will judge.
PM: Yeah, they will.

With people like this in the Israeli Government, whose solution seems to be for people to just stop hating Israel, i cannot see how that is possible when they have killed a minimum of 80,000 people which means there are now the families of all these who have a reason to hate Israel, ask yourself if the military of another nation invaded your country, killed your family and demolished your house, wouldn't you feel immense animosity towards them?  
How can a people feel anything but hatred towards a nation which has committed a genocide against them and stolen their land for over 80 years? It's a vicious cycle which isn't being helped by the current crop of Israeli smug idiots, morons and simpletons like Netanyahu and Weiss who do not give a damn about the death and destruction they are imparting on other humans in Gaza and the West Bank, imparting so they can steal and take over their land for themselves.
Hamas were wrong for what they have done and have been rightly castigated for it but then so is Israel and we should show sympathy, empathy and utter horror at the numbers killed on both sides but it is near impossible for Gazan's to suddenly stop hating the very nation who have done this and continue to do this to them even during a so called ceasefire which is why even if the killing stopped tomorrow, the legacy will continue and Jews around the World will sadly, and very wrongly, continue to suffer.

The Ever Expanding Trump Waistline

I wasn't sure if it was just me who thought it but then i saw posts on Facebook which seems to point out that Trump is getting even fatter than he used to be.
It has always been with his stupid hair, strange orange skin, childish temper tantrums, warmongering, blatant lying, small penis hands and being a sex pest and (probable) pedophile, his morbidly obese weight doesn't get that much attention but i have long been championing the fact that at 244lbs, 17.4 stone or 110kg with a Body Mass Index over 30 which makes him officially a lardarse (medical term), he is the third fattest President ever to sit his wide load behind the Oval Office desk.
American's are obviously okay with having a President who looks like he would definitely steal chips off your plate when your back’s turned but looking at the recent pictures, 244lbs is optimistic but let's go with that figure which means he is still the third fattest US President after 340 pounds or 24 stones of William Taft who was so large he once got stuck in the presidential bathtub, followed by Grover Cleveland who broke the scales at 280 pounds or 20 stones.
Although he has a long way to go to catch up with the Tubby Taft, if we suspend sense and take the 17.4 stone figure as true, Cleveland is an achievable 3 stone away and if he keeps tucking into the burgers and cola's like he does, then he may be able to add second fattest President to his already impressive CV of firsts including dumbest in front of George W Bush and most perverted ahead of John F Kennedy.
Now i'm not medically trained but i would hazard a guess it's down to him binging on fast food and drinking up to a dozen Cokes a day while following an exercise regime which includes lifting Big Mac's to his mouth as to why he looks like a human shaped wad of cholesterol which has come to life to wreak havoc on the people of own nation.
While there is much speculation about his general health, most of which seems to range from a rapid decline into dementia to him keeling over and clutching his chest at any moment, i for one support Trump's appetite to make the America President not fit into its trousers again because either his waistline continues to expand to Taft proportions or his arteries decide they have had enough and pack up, but i am confident that he has the stomach for a fight even though he has much on his plate and it is an achievement i am backing him for, larger bathtub not withstanding. Go Chubby!!!!

Last Chance For Labour

 
I will make a prediction and that is that this weeks Local Elections on Thursdays will see the incumbent Labour Party get a Royal Shellacking and it will spell the end of Keir Starmer who will be replaced by either Angela Raynor, Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham or Ed Miliband but each comes with baggage so it's going to be a scrap for either of them.
After arriving with a massive majority of 174, the Labour Party could literally get anything through the Commons but Starmer has been far too cautious and has squandered his opportunity and unless things change drastically, they could find themselves back out of power again after the next election but  not swapping places wituh the Conservatives as usually happens, because Britain seems to have become a multi party democracy.
In what is beginning to look like a fragmented multi-party system, five parties now poll at meaningful national levels, Labour, the Conservatives, Reform, the Lib Dems and the Greens and that is alongside the SNP in Scotland and Plaid Cymru in Wales.
Curiously what polls show is that combined support for left-leaning parties (Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens) stand at between 43% and 47% since the last election while the right-leaning bloc (the Conservatives and Reform) has hovered between 44% and 49% so it isn't left and right leaning voters switching ideology, they are shifting within their ideology meaning that the overall balance of left and right doesn’t hugely change.
At the last election the Conservative vote left in droves to switch to Reform while the switch from Labour has gone to the Greens and Lib Dems which immediately puts them at a disadvantage as the 43%-47%  is split 3 ways while the right wing 44%-49% is split between two.
Unless Labour, The Greens or Lib Dems can coalesce the left under their own banner, Reform will probably sneak through by default because they do seem to have done a good job of attracting the former Conservative voters to their side and leaving Conservative Party flapping in the wind but  one thing the left do have great success with is tactical voting which may yet save us from the disaster that would be suffering under a Prime Minister Nigel Farage but that is for the next election, this Thursday is going to see Labour get a thumping and one final chance to get it right under another, more Labour Party, leader.

Special Guest Blogger: Lord Henry Darnley

Ah, Retrospective. How quaint you are. Sitting up there on your high horses judging us poor Tudor souls for our dramatic exits and questionable life choices. Let me say this plainly: if you’d lived through what I did, you'd have died too. Probably sooner.
To some i was that husband Mary, Queen of Scots had before the really interesting one, the one who was murdered, blown up in a house which was quite theatrical, if I do say so. A shame I wasn’t awake to appreciate it. Or present for the aftermath. Or, you know, breathing.
It all began with my birth like most lives but i was a great-grandson of Henry VII on my mother’s side and i grew up to be a strapping six footer with the chestnut, flowing  hair of a Renaissance painting and oh how I danced!
I arrived in Scotland in 1561 like a dashing, slightly sweaty knight in satin hose. Mary, my cousin and Scotland’s queen, was newly widowed and in need of a husband. And a baby. And possibly a good chat. I brought two out of three. The third? Let’s just say I wasn’t the greatest listener.
We married in 1565. A match made in heaven or possibly in the fevered scheming of various European nobles who thought uniting two claimants to the English throne under one roof sounded like solid diplomacy but it turned out to be more like stuffing a mongoose and a snake into a velvet sack and leaving them to get along.
At first, all was well. Mary adored me. I adored myself. We had a son (James—later King James VI of Scotland and, amusingly, James I of England). I strutted. I preened. I demanded the Crown Matrimonial, which would’ve made me co-ruler. Mary said no. I pouted. I threw tantrums that would embarrass a toddler denied his pudding.
Then came Rizzio, Mary’s private secretary, friend, and confidant but most importantly someone not me who enjoyed the queen’s attention. I admit, I may have taken out my jealousy in the most dramatic form possible, conspiring to have the man murdered in front of the pregnant queen. Yes. That happened. In a small room. With knives. While Mary watched. Not my best look.
Things went downhill faster than a Scotsman on ice skates. Mary, understandably cross about the whole bloody murder in my dining room incident, distanced herself. I responded by getting even more sulkier. I took to my bed with some mysterious illness and became less of a king-consort and more of a lavishly dressed invalid hiding in his bedroom.
Then, on the night of February 9th, 1567, I was staying at the Kirk o’ Field, a modest house just outside Edinburgh. Mary had gone to visit her friend. I stayed behind to have a good sulk and plotting my next temper tantrum when boom. The house exploded.
I wasn’t even killed by the blast. I was found in the garden, strangled. So, someone went to all the trouble of rigging explosives to presumably to make it look like an accident only to then manually have to throttle me.
To this day, historians can’t agree who did it. Was it Mary? (tragic queen, beheaded, romantic but unlikely), Elizabeth I of England (Virgin Queen, patron of the arts, destroyer of Spanish fleets but doubtful) Mary's future husband, Bothwell? (dashing villain, accused of everything so probably) or was it simply the universe’s way of saying, i had worn out my welcome?
I did leave behind a son who united two crowns which further serves as a cautionary tale about marrying your own cousin and never trusting a Scot with a match near your bedroom.