Yes Prime Minister

Second world war veterans just about outnumbered former prime ministers at the national service of remembrance at the Cenotaph this morning with 12 World War II Veterans, three more than the 9 people who once called themselves Prime Minister.
It shows the political turmoil Great Britain has been through over the last few decades that we have quite so many former Prime Ministers standing at the Cenotaph with their heads down looking suitably solemn.
The list in order was John Mayor, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Teresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer and led by the current Prime Minister Andy Burnham who is the 7th to hold the title since 2015.
Always a sad day because we remember those who have been killed in wars they were sent to by those same leaders who stood there looking sad and it always amazes me that none of the veterans have run over and lumped them for what they did, especially Tony Blair who lied and schemed his way to war in Iraq but for some reason the veterans never do, the public on the other hand are not so kind and continue to berate and spew hatred upon him every time he shows his head, and that is how it should be.

Guns and Bibles

Donald Trump told Americans to imagine his name was on the Ballot during the mid-terms which is exactly what they did as they handed out a proper shallacking to the most corrupt sex offender who has ever sat his wobbly fat backside in the reinforced Oval Office Chair.
What that means in America is he is now restrained from being the semi-fascist racist tosspot he has been over the last two years but internationally, apart from the sounds of cheering from every national Capital except Moscow, we will have to wait and see but nice to see that the Iranians plan (if it was a thing) to drag the war out to the midterms and hand Trump a massive loss as his citizens are reminded of his folly every time they fill up their cars at the petrol station, worked.
Obviously there are some who are not happy that the Democrat Party now hold all the aces and one guy whose title and name i missed summed up the number of whack-a-doodle's who refused to see an almost certain pedophile and conman who was ruining their country, and concentrated on the other guys instead.
Obviously irate at the Republican Candidate for Texas losing his seat, he said that Texans should start buying up all the guns and Bibles they can as the Democrats will be coming for them for which my first question is how many Bibles does a person need?
Surely one is enough because they all say the same thing, you can buy 10 and read them straight after each other and your understanding of all things Biblical will be the same after the 10th as it was after the first.
As for the Guns, it's America with all its bat shit crazy gun laws, of course they don't need any encouragement to buy guns, they can buy them in Supermarkets while they are picking up their breakfast cereal, there was a story a few years ago of gun permits being granted to people who are legally or completely blind and whose vision is so impaired that they can't legally drive or read the application forms.
True story, they literally couldn't see what they were shooting at because as one official explained: 'We can’t deny them a permit based on that one thing'.   
Hopefully the Democrat Party will use their power to investigate the man now known as a lame duck President (or a Duck à l'orange as some wags have beaten me to saying) and look into the many mentions in the Trumpstein files where he is all but exposed as a Pedophile, so we we moan about much which is wrong in this country but we should be thankful that the Guns 'N' God crowd are over there making awful laws and not here and for all the faults of every leader we have had since i was born, none were as bad as Trump and his lickspittle enablers.

Might Need Our Big Coats

What with El Niño and stupid people still pumping pollution into the atmosphere the weather is set to take centre stage again and the long term Winter Season weather forecast for the UK from the MET Office is a wet and stormy start to Winter and turning very cold after the New Year but then along comes a disturbance in the Polar region and suddenly everyone is talking about us waking up to temperatures that would make an Eskimo shiver.
High above the Arctic, the coldest winds known as the Polar Vortex circle the North Pole but the El Niño has disrupted this and shifted it, dragging the cold wind out of position and although this happens every year at some point, it is usually mid-Winter and has never happened this early in the Season and Meteorologists are left scratching their heads at what this means for us Brits eyeing our big coats and woolly gloves.
When the Vortex moves around it messes around with the Jet Stream and bring the UK cold winds from the East and we are back into 'Beast From The East' territory which we had a few years ago and with that can come lots and lots of Snow.
The Met Office spokesman said: 'This is a very unusual event' and 'The current record El Niño taking us into uncharted territory in terms of disruption to worldwide weather patterns' and if the experts don't know, i think we can ignore all those scary newspaper headlines stating we will soon be building Igloos in our gardens.
The MET Office are staying with their initial forecast of a stormy November and December and a cold January and February although they wouldn't be drawn on just how cold and if I will be building Snowmen on the Beach for Christmas but as there is a lag of 4-6 weeks between the Vortex shifting and it affecting the weather at ground level, we should know by the start of December if the thermals should be coming out.

Enjoy It While You Still Can Youngsters

When i began work, any talk of paying into a pension was dismissed scoffingly and it wasn't until my late 30's and i was enrolled automatically into one with a change of employer that it even crossed my mind.
Now i am in my 50's and have a few small employee pension pots scattered around but as I am looking at a possible retirement in the next decade or so, i look at my Occupational Pension and State Pension together and think that really isn't going to stretch very far so fall back on winning the Lottery.
We have quite a few younger employees at work and i am hearing more and more how they have stopped paying into their retirement fund as they just can't afford it.
I get why, a pension wasn't a financial priority for me either at their age and details from the Department of Work and Pensions revealed that those aged between 22 and 29 opting out of their workplace pension scheme rose from 98,000 to 158,000 with rising day-to-day living costs the main reason.   
To be honest the extra money i earned through not paying a pension in my 20's and 30's went on going out, cigarettes and travelling while todays youth need the extra to just keep their heads above water and that's the difference, i will be financially hit due to spending too much money on necking Bacardi Breezers and puffing on Benson and Hedges in European Capitals while today it is just to live.
I am not one to wag a finger and tell the youngsters they should be saving for a Pension,  that would make a massive hypocrite because I never, but i will wag a finger and say don't forget you are young so if you have extra cash, bloody enjoy it while your body can still handle drinking your own weight in lager and eating chips on the beach at 2am because there will come a time when you will be going to bed at 10pm and trying to remember what day the bins go out today and the memory of paying your electric bill on time every month will not keep you as warm as that memory of that youthful Summer night in Paris when the Wine flowed a little too freely and you walked back to your hotel room with only one shoe and a telephone number scrawled on the back of your hand.

Special Guest Blogger: Kushim

I am Kushim, the World’s first Accountant but I never wanted to be a legend. I just wanted to be a guy who knew exactly where the barley went.
If you’re reading this, it means humanity’s obsession with recording things has officially reached a fever pitch. You’re scanning marks on a screen and found me, the first named person in recorded History.
Do you know how embarrassing that is? I’m essentially the patron saint of middle management. When you think of the dawn of civilization, you probably picture some priest-king building a Ziggurat to the gods. You don’t picture a guy in a dusty room in Uruk, poking a reed into a wet brick of clay because he’s worried about a missing sack of grain.
People romanticise the Uruk period. They talk about the invention of the wheel, the birth of the city-state, the sophistication of irrigation. Let me tell you what it was really like, it was damp, hot and it smelled intensely of fermented grain and sheep manure.
My day-to-day life wasn't spent pondering the secrets of the universe. It was spent documenting inventory.
I was the human equivalent of a modern day spreadsheet. If you’ve ever sat at a desk, staring at a flickering monitor, wondering if your existence is defined by the number of invoices you process in a day, take comfort in this: I was doing that 5,000 years ago. I was the OG of the signed invoice. I didn’t have a boss, I had a temple hierarchy that would probably have me executed if I miscounted a bushel of wheat.
I didn’t set out to be famous. I didn’t set out to change the world. I just wanted my barley ledger to balance so I could go home, eat some flatbread, and sleep on a pile of furs without someone waking me up to ask where the inventory went but my name got baked into literal clay.
You guys have gone from clay tablets to smartphones. You have automated my misery. You have global supply chains, international trade agreements, and cloud-based accounting software and yet, you’re still doing exactly what I was doing, tracking stuff.
My legacy then isn't an epic poem or a majestic statue,  it’s the receipt but we need to know who has what, how much of it they have, and most importantly who owes who and if you feel like your job is just an endless parade of paperwork, stop. Take a breath. Look up at the sky and remember that 5,000 years ago, I was doing the same thing you’re doing, and I ended up in the history books.
Now, get back to work. Those invoices aren't going to sign themselves.

Sorry Is The Hardest Word

With King Charles touring the Caribbean, the question of an apology and reparations for the Slavery Trade is being asked again and there is a great cartoon by Ben Jennings in the Guardian which seems to sum up the awful thoughts of some of the establishment with a man arrogantly explaining that Britain has already paid reparations for slavery, to all those poor slave owning families who lost out when it was abolished.
When the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force, the Slave Compensation Act 1837 followed and the British government paid £20 million to slave owners in compensation which is equivalent to £17bn in today's money paid out to 46,000 slave owners to compensate them for the loss of their 'property'.
The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership estimates that up to 20% of Britain's wealthy can be identified as having had links to slavery and despite the abolition, many owners continued to exploit the slaves on  multi-year 'apprenticeships' of unpaid labour.
Data from the University College London Legacies of British Slavery Project shows that roughly half of the £20 million payout remained in Great Britain, enriching prominent politicians, aristocrats, and merchants including several of the most notable families and political figures who received payouts.
Sir John Gladstone, father of four-time British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, received the single largest individual payout, £106,769 (equivalent to roughly £12 million today) as compensation for the 2,508 enslaved people he owned across his Caribbean plantations
The Jolliffe Family, related to David Cameron’s wife Samantha, received £4,000 (£533,200.00 in 2026) in compensation and MP James Blair who is the great-great-grandfather of Eric Blair (George Orwell) received £83,530 (£11.1m) for the thousand enslaved people he owned.
The then largest empire in the world cannot pretend that by ending Slavery they are in anyway absolved, between 1519 and 1833, Britain transported 40.5% of enslaved humans, almost 5 million humans herding onto ships and transporting them to awful conditions to work for free on sugar, cotton, and tobacco fields while bolstering Britain's economy.
It's true that Brit's today aren’t directly responsible for the actions of their ancestors, but we are responsible for somehow making sure that their abhorrent actions are at least acknowledged and widely known and castigated because as Author James Baldwin wrote: 'Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced'.

Special Guest Blogger: Mayan God Ah Puch

The clattering of my bell-adorned collar, the distinct, pungent aroma of five-hundred-year-old expired cheese meets compost heap, i get it, you know i'm coming and you start rethinking your life choices, look for the nearest exit or even call for the priest but nothing is going to stop the inevitable when the God of Death is on your case.
Being me is a thankless job, there’s no Employee of the Month board in Xibalba, it's just  me, some rather judgmental owls, a few hairless dogs who think they own the place and a steady stream of souls who, for some strange reason, are never happy to see me.
I guess it's the whole burning of the soul thing but listen, it’s a process! If you want to get to the good stuff,the part where you actually get to go somewhere interesting, you have to be sexfoliated by being incinerated from the inside out.
Most gods are out there doing important things like ensuring the rain falls but I’m the one who shows up at the end of the party, shuts off the music, and demands that everyone stops drinking and dancing but i’m basically doing you a favor and all I get is a reputation for being the universe’s most antisocial roommate.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably still breathing and good for you, cherish it while you still live because eventually, you’re going to find yourself standing in front of me and wondering if the rumors about the fire are true and I’ll be there, bells jingling and ready to give you the most thorough cleansing of your existence so, please, for the love of the gods, try not to complain when I grab the matches as it really does make the whole process go much, much faster.

Never Too Early For Xmas Decs

Generally in our house, the Christmas decorations go up mid November but that is only because of my Husband, if i had my way i would leave them up until June and put them back up again in July although i do tend to 'accidentally' leave some out, there has been a Christmas Gonk on the side since last year which has escaped and will soon be joined by all his little cute Festive friends.
According to a BBC poll, the date most Brits drag out their tree and hang the Mistletoe is the start of December  (29%), then mid December (15%) and then 12% join me in going for mid November although a hardy 4% will be brushing away the Halloween devils and vampires and replacing it with Santa's and Snowmen today.   
Obviously there is no right or wrong day to usher in Christmas, unless you are a strict religious type who wait until Christmas Eve because before it is actually Advent and the Baby Jesus wouldn't like it...or something.
After Halloween the shops go all out and there has been Mince Pies on their shelves even before the Bonfire Night smoke has cleared but if you want to go early in your house, you have Science on your side because according to psychologists, putting them up early makes you happier as the festive lights and decor triggers a spike in feel-good hormones like dopamine and serotonin.
If you are going for a real Christmas Tree and you want to have it in rude health still on the big day then Christmas Tree retailers are suggesting the 1st December at the earliest as the Trees last around 4-6 weeks although you will be finding pine needles in your carpet until September.   
So in the Lucy household I will be sneaking out Festive things until November 14/15 and then go all out and keep being 'too busy' to take them down again until the nagging gets too much around Mid January but to be fair how could anyone deny themselves a two-month Christmas so eat that Santa shaped chocolate, buy that gingerbread spiced latte, wear that gaudy Christmas jumper and put up your Christmas tree and sing along to the Pogues wishing you a Happy Christmas you scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot.

Why Would Anyone Want A Data Centre?

Britain has always had a good NIMBY-ism going on whether it is Prisons, Power Plants, Nuclear Waste Sites or Refugee Camps, everyone agrees that they are needed but Not In My Back Yard and a huge back and forth then takes place but it seems that nobody wants a Data Centre anywhere near them which is a problem for the Government who are keen to build them as part of their  Data Centre policy.
The Americans are far ahead of us in this respect and their appears to be a huge backlash over there and even more-so for candidates campaigning right now with the Mid Terms elections coming up next week.
What the residents near these Data Centres say is that they are huge, noisy things which suck up their electricity which increases their bills and use up their water with very little benefit coming back to the Community which hosts them.
The argument is that they bring jobs to the area and benefit it financially but that's not the experience of people who already have them such as  the OpenAI’s Stargate Project in Michigan where it requires very few people, just 20 staff members who were hired as Security Guards, because it did not need staff as was just a warehouse of servers.
So apart from the long-term costs on power, water, and denying land which could be otherwise used for something useful such as housing as well as delivering minimal jobs or direct community benefit, not much going in their favour except finding more Cat Videos and Alexa harvesting your information.
Do the locals get any reduction in cost of their Internet or better Wifi or anything? Not at all so I really can't see why any community would welcome them, which any political representative will find hard to sell to their voters.  

Get Ready?

Ever since the UK Government issued a warning to stockpile emergency supplies for 72 hours, many people are asking is there something they are not telling us about to happen?
Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, said the advice: 'Was not triggered by any particular piece of intelligence, but was aimed at 'improving national resilience more generally' which seems sensible but it has spooked people that the UK was one of many nations who issued the warning around the same time.
Governments in 32 nations including Britain, Canada, Australia, the US, Japan and most of Europe urged the stockpiling which included drinking water, sleeping bags, non-perishable food, a torch, spare batteries, matches or a lighter, a first-aid kit, cash, a power bank and a wind-up radio to allow households to have enough supplies to manage independently for a short period.
I would add toilet paper because we all remember what happened when COVID hit and with the shelves empty people were eyeing up any paper they had laying around.
Britain's 2025 National Security Strategy identified Russian aggression, hostile cyber activity and sabotage and Climate Change as major security concerns and in the United States, it is reported that the Pentagon is developing a plan known as FORTRESS, designed to enable major military bases to operate for 90 days without outside assistance.
In countries close to Russia such as Finland, Sweden, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, they have expanded their civil-defence efforts including renovating shelters, developing evacuation plans, increasing grain reserves, and training civilians.
While some nations are advising 3 days worth of essentials, the Nordic nations and Germany are urging 10 days worth and whether it is an escalation in the Iran War, Nuclear Russia being stupid, weather extremes related to El Niño or Ai about to go mental, we can only hope that it is an amazing coincidence that the leaders of so many nations issued the warning together.