EU trade talks latest

"Give up your rights under international law" 
"No" 
"You're being unreasonable"

"Subject your trade to our political court"
"No"
"You're being very unreasonable"

"Allow us to dictate your national standards"
"No"
"There you go again - just unreasonable. Clearly you don't want a trade deal."

Jim

I imagine it is kindness on the part of the government that allows 'Chief Nurse' Ruth May to encourage stories that she was dropped from the daily Covid briefings because she disagreed with the fact that Dominic Cummings did nothing wrong.

The alternative may be less palatable. It took only one appearance and one answer from Ms May for me to conclude that she simply wasn't up to it. At the podium she was an embarrassment. You can understand the Number 10 press office thinking - "let's have a nurse on, a nice reassuring homely nursey, spirit of the NHS, representative of the people .."

I'm not knocking nurses, but nurses are nurses, professors of epidemiology are professors of epidemiology and politicians driven and devious enough to have risen to ministerial level are, erm, politicians. And it really was better for Ms May that she was withdrawn when she was. She was never there in the first place for her scientific or public administration expertise, but as a misplaced bit of PR. Absent lions, Hilaire Belloc's Jim may have done no wrong.

Police are not immune to Instagram culture

Back in Suffolk in the 90s I used to rough shoot with a bloke who'd bagged several empty Halls to market and sell; this was before City, pop-star and footie player money moved out into the country, and though just about every village had its Hall house, an astonishing number were empty and unwanted. Anyway, point is this gave him many hundreds of acres of rough shooting whilst he was agent. One morning after shooting the grounds of Mockbeggars Hall we stopped at the village shop for a couple of ham rolls. The cottage next door to the shop had been bought by a county copper, who had an irrational dislike of anyone parking outside his house. Not a great deal of foresight in that mind. Sure enough, while we were in the shop he was out there examining the Landy for Road Traffic Act breaches. In the (locked) back were our guns. He was pumped like a toad when we came out

"Do you know how many times I've had to face someone holding a shotgun?" he demanded

"Never" replied my mate,  a Countryside Alliance gun-rights star, with a hard light in his eye. He did actually know every single shotgun crime incident in the county for the past twenty years and was just waiting for the parking space bully to challenge him. The toad crumbled, mumbled a few words of advice about gun security and retreated into his cave.

Today of course, a selfie with the Landy in the background would be on Instagram within minutes. If there's one myth plod loves to perpetuate about the Job it's their contact with weapons. That and dead bodies. "Do you know how many bodies I've had to ...." must be the most popular opening police line in constraining human joy - and in most cases the answer will be, as it was with our plod, "None".

So when two junior officers were tasked with guarding a murder crime scene recently, neither could resist taking selfies with the dead and posting them to Whatsapp. How many more officers have done the same, and keep the pics on their phones, so if anyone challenges them with a "none" they can provide evidence that they have, in fact, seen a human dead body? Police are no more immune to the Instagram culture than any others of their age, background and education.

There is a serious question. Should we continue to allow police officers to go on duty with their mobiles? Or members of the armed forces, or the emergency services? Or should we just accept that these distasteful records are a part of modern human culture?

Could the Wuhan virus save the car industry?

Investors may not have to write off the car makers and lease networks quite yet. As the dark lid of lockdown lifts, for many people their car is becoming a mobile extension to their virus-safe home. Bugger Greta, we're driving.

No problem for those of us with no carbon conscience, but a poser for the metropolitan virtue signallers. Those smug and pious Gretists who boasted that Eurostar and TGV was the only acceptable way to get to their Provence gîte are now faced with a dilemna. Load up the disco in the dark of night and go before the neighbours are awake and face the embarrassment three week later, or set off in a visible Uber and jump into a hired disco down the road?

No one trusts flying any more, despite the assurances about the number of air changes and the efficiency of the cabin air filtration system. Too many have come away from a short hop flight with a cold or flu, and the folk appreciation of the risk is widespread.

Comfort for the virtue-signallers is already here. The 'graph has a piece explaining that those driving to the Alps (presumably written in January and held over, as it's about skiing) can still claim to be green if you game the maths a bit -

According to research by Best Foot Forward, a car with four people in it going to Méribel in France’s giant Trois Vallées would generate two-thirds of the emissions than if you had flown to Geneva.

I can suggest a further pabulum for the virtuous - "Jeremy's IBS puts him in the at-risk category, so using any form of public transport is just too risky .." or "we would go by easyjet but Mère Prépuce is 87, and she insists on cleaning the place each day and we can't risk her health". You can think of a thousand others, I expect.

And for carmakers who have almost run out of gadgets, gizmos and apps to attract buyers, here's one. A HEPA++ cabin air filtration system, with the effectiveness of an FFP2 facemask, i.e. filtering out a minimum of 94% of particles down to 0.3 microns. Your car then becomes an item of essential medical equipment .. "We would have bought an EV, but only the Vulva Sauvete P3 has the air filter we need for Tarquin .." 

The cost of public vanity

I've seen a lot of really rubbish architecture in my time, but the biggest waste of space must be the South Bank centre in London. Millions of tourists coming into London over Hungerford bridge must wonder why we chose to build a vast 1970s concrete car park so close to the centre of London, and most Londoners seem to regard it as a free public toilet with carpets and burgers. A very few will realise that there are two resident orchestras buried within a concert hall with the most appalling acoustics in Europe, and squatting on the top like a Halfords roof box is one of the most unsatisfactory art galleries I have ever seen, which surely must have been planned by one who hated visual art with a vengeance.

The whole nasty, tacky, amateurish bodginess of the South Bank was epitomised for me by the Nelson Mandela bust. A big bronze head about six times scale squatted on a pedestal on the outside walkway visible from the train track. Like much of the haranguing by the liberal elite it was meant as a punishment and a rebuke as much as a tribute to the great man. So they put the poor chap not nobly gazing over the Thames but around the side, looking at the scruffy, blackened and spray painted railway arches so as to inflict him on millions of tired commuters, whom they presumably held responsible for the entire apartheid regime in South Africa. Well, one day a frustrated commuter took a hammer to the thing. It was so monolithic, even a 20oz hammer would have left no more a few slight dings, but to everyone's astonishment it knocked a huge chunk through Nelson's breastbone. Turned out it wasn't made of bronze at all but fibreglass.

Well, this was back in the day when the Standard was a newspaper and had journalists and stories and everything. The patrons said they thought they'd paid for bronze, so extortionately expensive was the thing. No, no, said the artist, I never said bronze. I said bronze finish, see? And if that bloke hadn't put a hammer through it, you'd never have noticed. As it turned out, the fake bronze bust was a perfect embellishment to the fake concert centre and the fake art gallery to which it was attached. It was all just a huge con on the public purse.

Anyway, all that was to point you in the direction of a Speccie piece by Norman Lebrecht, who loathes the place as much as I do. His solution is much kinder by far than mine. I would turn the entire place over to an upscale toilet and street food centre, which sometimes seem to be the only two visitor attractions that London gets right.

What happened to the Mandela bust? Oh it was repaired. A few times. Then someone realised that fibreglass is flammable, and burned the thing to pieces. Eventually, we paid up for a copy in real bronze set out of hammer-reach, thus perpetuating the practice of not only paying over the odds but twice for something of questionable merit.

The attractive Shell building obscured by a luvvie monolith

Number 10 gets one back at Sturgeon

Nicola Sturgeon has been an online participant in the government's behind the scenes health briefings since the crisis gelled. As public health is a devolved issue, it is down to the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales to make their own announcements about changes in government policy. Sturgeon however has consistently infuriated Downing Street by stealing the PM's thunder - making her announcement in Scotland before the issue has been promulgated in London.

Yesterday, I think, Boris got his own back. The co-ordinated steering group had agreed early yesterday that  BBQs were on - limited public gatherings were to be permitted. Then the details got a bit hazy. Nicola rushed onto the airwaves to announce the policy she imagined Boris would announce later in the day, as she has done consistently. As Edinburgh Today reports, she set out Scotland's lockdown rules; "The First Minister also stressed that households must remain outside at all times and refrain from entering anyone's house" it reports. She also insisted that BBQ guests must bring their own food, though it can be grilled on a shared barbecue.

When Boris announced the English BBQ rules they were subtly different. While Scots in need of the toilet must stay in the open and use the garden, it's fine for the English to nip indoors for a sit-down. "Chief medical officer Chris Whitty confirmed that people can go to the toilet in other people's houses if they come to visit" reports the Mail. Additionally, English guests don't have to bring their own food, a move that will disappoint many parsimonious English hosts.

So as we move into the weekend, spare a thought for those elderly aunts in Scots gardens squatting behind the rhododendron with their bloomers around their ankles, clutching a pair of raw lamb cutlets, a loo roll and a bottle of Heavy, whilst their English counterparts take their comfort indoors. Hey ho.

Practising for a Scots BBQ

On the bright side ...

Climate activists will no doubt be contemplating a new series of disruptive protests at the news. The sunshine and good weather, it seems,  is down to dramatically lower levels of atmospheric pollution across the world. It surely cannot be long before the increased levels of UV trigger a new fear campaign. "Unless we stop this lack of pollution that protects us from harmful UV rays, the whole country will start tanning and producing more vitamin D!"

Seriously, what has surprised many is the speed with which the earth has bounced back from a pause in human activity. The force of life in nature is tremendously strong and an entire city will return to jungle if we abandon it, if we stop the daily fight to keep nature at bay, halt the weeding, the mowing, the cultivating, the taming of all that incessant growth.

It's mating time for both house spiders and salamanders here. The first are no problem - but little webs I've not previously noticed are suddenly holding a pair of spiders. Leave them be until they've done their spider stuff. The salamanders though are as daft as bricks. They've been crawling slowly up the old stream bed each year for a thousand years or more to mate, and the fact that a cart track has become a little road with two or three vehicles an hour at peak times doesn't phase them. But it does me. So as I spot them, I become a salamander lollipop man, sometime picking them up and carrying them across if they're moving too slowly. They seem to give me a look of withering contempt - "We'll still be doing this long after you've gone, human".

It's the trees I feel sorry for. We've just reduced their lush diet of CO2. It won't be long before the Gretas start blaming us for that too - the year of Covid will be recorded for posterity by a thin, emaciated growth ring. All our fault. And the bloody things are probably getting sunburnt, to boot.

Borders borders borders

As Europe stumbles in a spread field into phase II of the Wuhan virus response, crossing borders becomes the issue of debate. Although Brits have been warned that they won't be let out for Summer, much of tourist Europe isn't so sanguine. Austria has been trying to re-open the border with Germany, to allow in the floods of German tourists, but so far Germany has refused - and with a second wave of infections coming to Germany, is unlikely to do so.

There's no move from Austria to re-open the border with Italy - they're quite happy with having it closed - but the two nations announced yesterday that cowherds tending herds on the alm, the high alpine summer pastures that frequently straddle the borders, could cross at will. These almhutte high in the mountains are often popular with girl students spending a Summer away together, a group of five or six doing the daily milking and making cheese from May until September. Often connected only by steep cattle tracks, with no vehicular access, where everything has to be carried up and down, it's regarded as quality time away. When it's time to bring the cows back down to the valleys in Autumn, they the girls will go back to university. Or not. There are reputed to be almhutte that actually sit on the border, with the bedroom in Italy and the kitchen in Austria, rather like the Irish border.

The UK has announced that no quarantine will be needed for those crossing from France, only to earn a rebuke from the technocrats from their bunker beneath the Berlaymont. It turns out we can do it under their EU laws, but only if we say 'no quarantine for residents of France' rather than 'no quarantine for anyone entering from France'. Go figure. I suppose we must therefore bang-up Polish truck drivers for a fortnight if we pay any attention to the dreary officials in Brussels. Which I hope we won't.

Whilst the Germans won't be able to come to Austria, the Austrians won't be able to visit their own  favourite destinations in Spain. I'm not sure where the Spanish won't be able to go - except Portugal, of course, which will also be missing the English. Meanwhile Croatia is planning an air-corridor to fly in their preferred Summer guests, the Czechs. Greece, like Austria a heavy-smoking nation with a low rate of infection, is ambivalent about losing her crucial Summer trade. Perhaps she should open only to Europe's smokers - each visitor having to drag deeply on a Capstan full strength at the airport on arrival to validate their status.

Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have already opened their mutual borders, but with about a third of the population still working in the UK as bar-staff (now furloughed) there will be barely enough natives left to fill the foreign tourist restaurant tables. "What's the local speciality?" "Liver dumplings." "Oh that's strange. That's our speciality back home as well".

But remarkably, Europeans are reverting to a national border mindset more swiftly than I would ever have imagined possible after the Shengen experience. And that may be the biggest worry for Brussels.

Transition extension - translation

As Irish Deputy Teasack Coveney's statement was issued to the press, we provide a translation from the gaelic.

COVENEY
Covid-19 has made what is already a very, very difficult timeline to get agreement virtually impossible. Given the added complications of Covid-19 it surely makes sense to seek a bit more time to navigate our way through these very difficult waters in the months ahead so that we can get a good outcome for the UK and EU. I think anybody looking at this from the outside could only conclude it makes sense to look for more time but the British Government has decided that's not what they want and they have made that very clear both publicly and privately. I wouldn't be raising expectations around the British Government agreeing to seeking more time. If we're going to have any chance of persuading them to take more time then we need to be careful about how we do that because demanding it from them ... almost as a concession to the EU, is certainly not the way to do it.

TRANSLATION
We're buggered. Our demands for their fishing waters, subservience of British law to the ECJ and a ball and chain on their trade options are just unrealistic - they won't accept them. Even our effort to weaponise the Northern Irish border by demanding an office for the EU Gauleiter in Belfast has been rejected. We're not going to get an EU-weighted deal.

Anyone looking from the outside can see we're on the back foot and Germany will force through a trade deal anyway because her industrial sector demands it. And we need the City of London's services now more than ever - whatever Covid recesssion financial deal the ECB and Brussels stitch up, we will depend on London to be able to carry it out.

Begging the British government to give us a one or two year extension really isn't a good look. And they wouldn't even think about it - right now they can hide whatever minor economic ding will be caused by a third-country trade deal in December by the Covid fall-out, which will be ten times worse.

The Teasack needs to get ready to bite the pillow and ask the UK for a bail-out at the end of the year.

Licence plate lockdown

Unlike UK licence plates, which belong to a particular car, Austrian plates are issued to an insured driver by the insurance companies on behalf of the government. They are yours, and can be used on up to three cars - you only pay an insurance premium for the most expensive. They clip and unclip from their mountings quite easily. But because they belong to the insured person, it is possible for each registration number to carry a residence-specific code portion, along with the wappen or arms of your Bundesland . If you move to a different Bezirk (think of it as about equivalent to a district council) you need to get a new licence plate.

A plate belonging to someone from Klagenfurt, in the state of Kärnten

If such a scheme were run in the UK, the first two letters of the licence plate would indicate your place of residence. For London, it would be a London shield symbol plus a borough code - say LA for Lambeth, WE for Westminster, BR for Bromley and so on. Any 'county lines' drug dealers here have a very hard time - but that's not all.

Country areas are naturally suspicious of outsiders even in good times, and the Wuhan virus has magnified mistrust of any vehicle with a 'foreign' licence plate - and by foreign, I mean a vehicle from a neighbouring district, never mind out-of-state vehicles or the Satanic chariots carrying the evil W for Vienna. Believe me, after a while non-local vehicles stick out like a sore thumb in the supermarket car park - and you can be sure if a car with plates bearing the shield of Tyrol and LA code that includes Ishgl, the seat of Austria's après-ski contagion, were spotted there the store doors would have been locked shut. 

I'm fascinated to learn how the locals will cope with the end-of-lockdown dilemna. They will be riven between mistrust of the outsider and the welcoming of the critical summer tourist Euros. It will be fun to watch. 

And second-homers in the UK can be very grateful for the anonymity of UK licence plates.

The joys of snuff

With that title, I expect for some time we'll get disappointed google searchers hitting this page; internet users are a weird lot. An old post about taxpayer-funded elective cosmetic surgery entitled "Poor women with large tattooed breasts" consistently scored the highest hits ranking of any page on the blog. So to clarify for any puzzled visitors, this post is about powdered cured tobacco.

I took a complete break from smoking about seven or eight years ago and have never craved one since. Physically. Not smoking takes no effort at all, but Oh how I regret having foregone the pleasure of smoking; I loved smoking. Really enjoyed it. If I live to 75, I'm going to start again. Before the smoking ban here this year, I loved to spend an hour or two in the local Gasthaus just for the smell of the dense clouds of cigarette smoke around the bar, a delicious fragrancing of my clothes that I would sniff nostalgically for the rest of the day. Well, Nicotine has been a good friend to me since I was 15, with me at all the big moments in life. So when I took a break from fags, I switched to snuff. Made in an old English snuff mill, a Northern one, that cures and grinds Virginia tobacco.

It's not some eccentricity for public showing-away but a connection with a lifelong physiological partnership. The Nicotine is just a fraction of that from smoking, the dopamine effect imperceptible but the connection remains. With the benefit that one can take snuff when seated on an aircraft, at a restaurant table, in a bar. It confuses the bansturbators - nobody has told them to ban snuff. And sales are so inconsequential that HM Treasury can hardly be bothered to tax it - a 25g tin costs about £2.80 and lasts about a month.

There's only one drawback. As a seasoned snuffer, my sneeze reaction is pretty well under control; one intakes snuff like sniffing a flower, not snorting coke. One of my few pleasures in life is agreeing to let coke-heads take a pinch; inevitably they suck it straight into the upper septum where it takes about a second before leaving them in tear-streaming agony, puce-faced and contorted with pain. But sometimes - when out walking, when in the supermarket - the residual snuff induces a sneeze. No problem, as I always have a snuff-kerchief to hand.

But boy. The looks of fear and horror from anyone within ten metres. A couple of times I've done that little pantomimey thing of shaking the head and waving the hand 'no', though I don't think they were convinced. 

Snuff mills with parts dating to the 18th century still grind exceeding fine in English factories

Actors

Actors age like fine wine and most are better with age. I've drunk and laughed with many, including an ex, and I like them as a breed - but they're definitely more fun when they've reached a stage at which they can laugh at their own profession. I've got a deep fund of actor jokes they've shared with me over the years, but a few are favourites. The late Billy Jay, an old time Rep actor, reminded me of the precarious life of an actor when we caught sight through the window of the French of someone carrying a box of Romeo y Julietas. Old-school actors, he explained, used to carry their make-up in cigar boxes. On spotting his thespian friend on the other side of Shaftesbury Avenue carrying such a cigar box one blade waved across the traffic and with stage-face asked optimistically 'Working?' the response was a shake of the head. "Moving" came the reply.

London's theatres are going dark. We are losing a large part of the magic that lives amongst us, for the live stage is a potent conjuration, an experience that leaves even the jaded and unimpressed changed, and mostly improved. Not just the actors on stage, but the whole backstage armies so skilled in lights, paint, ropes and canvas and mixing boards who form little animated clumps in pubs from the Welsh Harp to the Coach and beyond and whose presence amongst us adds immeasurably to the joy and quality of West End life.

I've just read Philip Ziegler's 'London at War 1939 - 1945' in which the capability of theatreland to survive and even flourish during the blitz and the following attritional bombing campaigns is well-described. This time that won't even be a possibility - this nasty little virus will succeed where Herr Goering failed (and we without a Murial let alone a 'Miss Hitler' to curse).

So here's a plea. In all the measures to mitigate the effects of this thing, let's not forget the theatres, and the people that make them work, and not just the West End but every Rep in the land that brings the magic of the stage to our lives. It will cost a lot less than maintaining the billionaire Richard Branson in his offshore lifestyle, and bring a lot more benefit to many more lives.

How the Continent has improved since 1973

It leaves me with a warm feeling that we have left the Continent a far better place than it was when we joined the EEC back in 1973. Let me count the ways -

When I was a lad, all foreign animals were infested with Rabies and one was warned not to try to touch or stroke them or die a terrible death. We were also warned that because of very low continental standards of animal hygiene, they were likely also to be infested with fleas and parasites. Foreign animals were not allowed into Britain unless they had spent six months in quarantine - racehorses excluded, of course.

I'm glad to say that in the intervening years the continentals have taken our lead and have massively improved their standards of animal welfare. It is now OK to stroke French cats, though they are still likely to be infested with fleas and worms.

It was on my first school exchange, to St Étienne, that I first encountered the French squat toilet, and my first evacuation was something of an adventure (it was not a subject about which I could have in decency asked my host family, even if my French had been up to it). After a day or two of careful experimentation, I adapted like a native and the sound of the Dambusters theme tune being hummed loudly from the bathroom would greet Mme Dupont every morning.

I'm almost sad to see that the French have now almost universally adopted proper civilised toilets, though they still maintain some of their old ways by neglecting to clean them. The Teutons, too, have taken to British toilets; the German obsession with bowel movements had gifted them with bathroom porcelain fitted with an integral inspection shelf, which allowed them to study their stools closely before consigning them to the sewer. Now their waste disappears around the bend like that of civilised nations, condition decently unseen.

"Never" we were warned "drink the tap water". Only English piped water was drinkable; continental water was polluted filth that harboured typhoid, cholera and raw sewage. When washing one's face, the mouth and eyes must be kept tightly closed lest infection be induced. We learned that we should use something called Badoit or Vichy to brush our teeth, somewhat to the puzzlement of the apothecaries in St Étienne whom I first approached for these mysterious substances, before finding them alongside the Orangina in the local shop.

Now I'm glad to say under British influence many continental countries have improved the quality of their tap water to the extent that it may now be drunk, carefully and with a little care. Though those non-potable water signs are still surprisingly common.

Just imagine. If we'd had another 50 years we may even have been able to show them how to cook and make decent beer and cheese, as well as improve their still appallingly low standards of nationally-made clothing and footwear. Ah well.

Still, it's good to see that some things they had in 1973 are still there, and still popular

Preventing online harms to politicians

Government proposals to prevent online harms to politicians and those in public life 

I may yesterday have given the impression that I in some way objected to our wise Leader's introduction of internet censorship for the UK. Nothing could be further from the truth. I recognise that the wise and reasonable proposals made by the fragrant Lady Morgan and the saintly Ms Patel will propel the UK into a place unknown by other democratic nations.

In particular, I applaud the wisdom of including perfectly legal and lawful content in the material to be censored. The White Paper is intended to protect vulnerable groups such as children and those active in public life, in circumstances in particular in which politicians and civil servants may be offended or disturbed by comments on their actions made by citizens. Politicians must be free to do as they wish without negative and sometimes hurtful comment from citizens. So even though such comments are quite legal, they must be banned from the internet for the public good.

Quite rightly neither the government, the courts, the regulator Ofcom or companies that provide platforms in return for advertising revenue wish to be bothered with vexatious complaints about censorship and injustice from individual citizens. The government will therefore make it practically impossible to appeal the arbitrary banning of content and voices, in the best interests of the State.

We also welcome moves to end internet anonymity in the UK. It is clearly simply wrong that so many individuals making comments on news sites, Twitter, blogs and other internet forums do so under assumed identities. During the recent General Election campaign, for instance, the government estimate that some 64% of anonymous political statements were posted by those from the civil and public services, who only form 39% of the workforce. As those employees are contractually forbidden from making public political statements, ending internet anonymity will either silence them or allow them to be easily dismissed from their posts. National productivity will also be increased as they will get on with making beds, policing bus lanes, changing colostomy bags and so on rather than fiddling with their phones.

I also applaud measures to be taken against disinformation and the saying of untrue things on the internet, and clearly the BBC must have a major role as the arbiter of what is truthful and can be stated and written by citizens in this regard. 

Personally, I think the proposed legislation doesn't go far enough. There is no mention for example of regulating or banning cartoons that portray politicians in negative and sometimes hurtful ways. These must also be included in the scope of legislation or Twitter will become a mass of poorly-drawn caricatures posted by named persons in such a way that will evade censorship.

I confirm I am willing of my own free will to submit this posting to the Google Blogger UK content checking authority, appointed by Ofcom in accordance with the Online Harms Act 2020, for verification and permission to publish

Last post for Christmas

Change came to the valley this year. Since the days of King Francis' kataster, or land register, made at around the time of the battle of Waterloo, we have got by with a house number and the name of one of three cadastral communities that comprise the postcode. My house was number 40, the next three houses, on the other side of the old mineshaft, were numbers 162, 163 and 164 (they were built in the 1920s) , and the next house, on the old unmetalled track, was number 3, the house of the Deplorables. Every house built since 1815 was given the next available sequential number, irrespective of location. And our cadastral village is three miles long and a mile wide.

The system never caused the slightest problem locally, as everyone knows where everyone else lives anyway, and the postman's job is a lifetime sinecure, held for three generations by the same family. It was the internet that killed it. Rumour has it that an Amazon delivery driver from Graz, a decent man called Kemal who just wanted to finish his round and return home to the warmth of his family, was found sobbing in his vehicle at 11pm, having spent seven hours trying to locate number 67. Ah, they nodded when he had shown them his clipboard. The Huber house. It's down an unmarked forest track.

So we now have some sixty street names each with a geographically sequential run of numbers, and this being Austria the change went smoothly if somewhat unorthodoxly. It's still not quite fair, many feel, on the city boys who drive the internet vans; they have a fear of the high valleys, and not just in a Deliverance banjo-twanging way. The little GPS satellite high in the sky guiding them to their destination is often unreliable in the forest. And we actually do have well-established populations of bears, wolves and lynx - a cause of pride to us, but a source of fear to a city boy navigating an unsurfaced mountain road at 6kph with the Spruce boughs brushing the sides of their van.

The official figures have just been published like a sort of tierwelt league table; bears have taken 35 sheep this year, wolves only 4. The Land employs an expert called Roman, the Wolfsbeauftragter, with a helpline number, whom one calls to take DNA samples from any scraps of your sheep that remain uneaten. The State hunters' association must by law pay compensation for livestock killed by bears, lynx or wolves, even though the species are protected and cannot be shot by the hunters. It's a very Austrian thing. Before DNA testing many farmers were reputed to messily kill their own sick and worthless sheep and blame it on the local bear in order to pocket the generous (80€ per ewe) compensation. Our local bear has already destroyed several hives and taken a sheep from a small herd of Suffolk blackfaces (they really are - what are the chances of that?) at the bottom of the valley, so our sheepholding neighbours here are paying students home for the holidays to guard their stock.

Back to house numbers. I had, I thought, let everyone back in the UK know that my address had changed, but of course several Christmas cards have arrived with the old address. No problem. The postman will operate both systems until he retires, and he's still a comparatively young man. Frau Fuchs regrets slightly that number 3, our oldest house, now has a more anonymous number, but it's of little consequence to its occupants, our own Deplorables.

The house itself is an old farmhouse built of massive larch timbers and dating back to the 1600s. In the UK it would be as desirable as a Georgian parsonage, but here, where the old is scorned, and old houses are unwanted (hence me buying my own gorgeous 17th century mine-owners house for a song) it has been converted into three apartments, that are let cheaply to three single men, all white-beards, whom I have come to call the Deplorables.

They live together quite amicably, and once or twice a week one of them takes it in turn to take the local drunk-taxi, the Gomobil, down to the Spar to restock with beer. The rear of the van is loaded with crates of empties (one gets money back on crates and bottles - shops have automatic machines into the base of which one pushes a crate of empties which disgorges a little credit ticket to be redeemed at the till) and it waits outside the shop while the elderly delegate wobbles a trolley stacked with full crates out of the door. The rough track to the church runs through the farm, as of yore, and the old boys keep some chickens and goats in shanty sheds on one side with the house on the other. They have an elderly and somewhat toothless dog who barks but is afraid to approach closer than about six feet. I suppose he frightens some people - delivery drivers, probably. I like them. They are always beaming, always ready to exchange words or a cheery wave, and they annoy the more puritanical local OCD obsessives who disparage the drinking, the untidiness of the little stables and the animal turds, a rebelliousness which I perhaps admire most of all. They have perhaps achieved that wisdom of years which focuses on what is really important in life.

It wasn't until yesterday, sitting in quiet companionship over a beer down at the pub, chuckling at comments thrown out with the expert comic timing that develops amongst drinking buddies, that it occurred to me. In a real-world mirror of the crib outside the church, we had the elements of the nativity amongst us; in the sky above, the twinkling GPS satellite guiding the way, on the hills shepherds were watching the sheep, and the three wise men, between beers, felt the warm breath of the goats in their byre. All we lack is a pregnant virgin. But this is Austria, and I have come to be surprised by nothing, and we have two days to go.

With all my sincere best wishes to every one of you, I'm signing off now for a few days. Have a wonderful Christmas, all!

Radders  

Reasons why Labour lost - by Labour

It is quite clear that Labour's resounding defeat, according to the Party, had nothing to do with Jeremy Corbyn, the Party's extremism, anti-semitism, sheer nastiness, risk to the nation or betrayal of the referendum result and the Party's voters outside the metropolitan heartlands. Here is why, according to Labour, they lost -

• It was the Jews / Israel. Lady Tonge said "The pro-Israel lobby won our General Election by lying about Jeremy Corbyn"
• Voters are too stupid to understand the Party- Emily Thornberry, Lady Nugee 
• Not everyone on the left-dominated Twitter agrees with me, therefore Twitter lost the election - Lily Allen
• It was the voters fault. They're simply not worthy of the Party - Jeremy Corbyn
• It was the billionaire owned media (of which only the Telegraph backed Brexit for the last 3 years)
• Not enough luvvies came out in support of the party. 
• Because we didn't lower the voting age to 11 and allow the EU to vote

The petulance level in London has risen to 9 on the Coogan scale and police and emergency services are braced to deal with copious tears and widespread whining when the Withdrawal Bill gets re-tabled.

Of course we'll also know very very soon whether the Lords needs swamping with 500 new Brexit peers just prior to its radical reform .. it's up to you, your Lordships.

Déjà écrit

Evelyn Waugh - Decline and Fall

"I was on night duty last night between the hours of 8pm and 4am" testified the warder in a sing-song voice, "when my attention was attracted by sounds of agitation coming from the prisoner's cell. Upon going to the observation hole I observed the prisoner pacing up and down his cell in a state of high excitement In one hand he held his Bible, and in the other a piece of wood which he had broken from his stool His eyes were staring; he was breathing heavily, and at times muttering verses of the Bible. I remonstrated with the prisoner when he addressed me in terms prejudicial to good discipline"
 
"What are the words complained of?" asked the Chief Warder

"He called me a Moabite, an abomination of Moab, a wash-pot, an unclean thing, an uncircumcised Moabite, an idolater, and a whore of Babylon, sir "

"I see What do you advise, officer ?"

"A clear case of insubordination, sir," said the Chief Warder "Try him on No 1 diet for a bit"

But when he asked the Chief Warder’s opinion, Sir Wilfred was not really seeking advice He liked to emphasise in his own mind, and perhaps that of the prisoners, the difference between the official view and his own.
 
"What would you say was the most significant part of the evidence ?" he asked

The Chief Warder considered. "I think whore of Babylon, on the whole, sir"
 
Sir Wilfred smiled as a conjurer may who has forced the right card.
 
"Now I," he said, "am of different opinion It may surprise you, but I should say that the significant thing about this case was the fact that the prisoner held a piece of the stool"

"Destruction of prison property," said the Chief Warder. "Yes, that’s pretty bad "

"Now what was your profession before conviction?" asked the Governor, turning to the prisoner

"Carpenter, sir"

"I knew it ," said the Governor triumphantly "We have another case of the frustrated creative urge. Now listen, my man. It is very wrong of you to insult the officer, who is clearly none of the things you mentioned. He symbolizes the just disapproval of society and is, like all the prison staff, a member of the Church of England . But I understand your difficulty You have been used to creative craftsmanship, have you not, and you find prison life deprives you of the means of self-expression, and your energies find vent in these foolish outbursts. I will see to it that a bench and a set of carpenter’s tools are provided for you The first thing you shall do is to mend the piece of furniture you so wantonly destroyed After that we will find other work for you in your old trade You may go".

"Get to the cause of the trouble," Sir Wilfred added when the prisoner was led away, "your Standing Orders may repress the symptoms, they do not probe to the underlying cause ".
===================

Of course the inevitable happened, and the prisoner used his carpenter's tools to saw-off the head of the prison chaplain, Mr Prendegast.

No doubt in the wake of yesterday's tragic events, someone will dare to question the wisdom of not only releasing early from prison an Islamist terrorist, but of inviting him to participate in a criminology conference organised by the University of Cambridge at the exact site of the start of London's previous Islamist terrorist atrocity.

Remember, she's a woman.

Even the midst of this most critical of election campaigns there is room for the little wry surprises that evoke a smile. I've just seen a pic for the first time that immediately caused to spring into my mind the title of the post. Let me explain.

One of the key professional skills I mastered was that of leading a team. In delivering complex construction schemes it is a pre-requisite. If you asked me to teach it I couldn't - humour, self-confidence, supportiveness and all those sort of things came into it. And one has to do it time after time after time, and each time anew, with a fresh team. Sometimes a consultancy firm sent along an engineer / QS / designer / CDM supervisor with whom one had worked on a previous job, which was always a joy. And women were quite equal to men in every role. Except one that had me foxed. She was unhappy. The little signs were not hard to miss. But she was good, a valued team member, highly professional and I promise I acted utterly scrupulously in treating her not one mite different to any other member of the team. One Friday during a wind-down drink-up with another female colleague I mentioned the odd dynamic. "Ah" she said enigmatically when she had quite absorbed the situation "You need to remember she's a woman". I'm still not quite sure what she meant.

Many of you will recall this wonderful photo of McDoom -

Of course he looks like an utter plonker. It's a lesson to politicians, like Mr Ed's bacon sandwich, that the camera lens is the media's greatest satirist, and if you're visiting a combat zone or riding in an armoured vehicle appearance is everything. Only Mrs T got it absolutely right, with an Isadora Duncan style chiffon scarf in the turret of a Challenger tank. 

Now this is the first time I've seen the pic below of Theresa May. The jacket is very clever - it avoids wearing an actual combat jacket but affords an equivalent camouflage. But look carefully. She's not that fat; I swear she's wearing ballistic armour under it. I take my hat off. I never thought there would be one single aspect of May's premiership that would win my grudging admiration, but here it is. I should perhaps have remembered that she's a woman.

A step closer to robot coal mines in Yorkshire?

The scientists and energy experts amongst you can feel free to chuckle at what is probably my naivety, but I keep returning to a notion that surfaces in my mind from time to time. Again this morning, a  greenie on the Today programme has been explaining how we can phase out domestic gas boilers and cookers. Well, we could look at conversion to eco-friendly gas fuels such as Hydrogen, she said.

Add to this the wall that electric vehicle roll-out will hit when there is simply not enough electricity being generated to replace petrol and diesel fuels; I have long suspected that Hydrogen fuelled vehicles are the VHS of sustainable transport, and battery cars are the Betamax technology.

But where do we get all that Hydrogen from?

Well, it's what we always used to burn in our homes before North Sea gas came along. Older readers will recall the mass-conversion of domestic cookers to methane when that fuel came on line - surely it's also possible to convert them back, if we reverted to a mix of Hydrogen, Methane and CO in our gas networks?

Coal gas, or Town gas as it was called, as almost every town in the country had its own gas plant, is obtained by heating coal in the absence of air. And we've got billions and billions of tons of coal under our feet. And now of course the dirty and dangerous work of getting it out of the ground, even from under water, can be done by robotic mining machines, piloted by technicians sitting at their terminals on the surface.

It may still be a pipe dream, but I feel that we are creeping closer and closer.

Robot miners are already in use ... in China

The EU army's theatre of operations ...

It's a slow day so let's have a bit of fun. Let's presume there is a future shake-out of military alliances, with the EU choosing to go its own way, after having admitted Ukraine. Let's presume also that the neutral countries stay neutral, and that the UK, Norway and Iceland remain in NATO. Turkey? Well, not in NATO, clearly. And unlikely to have been admitted to EU membership. Which would lead Turkey to look to Russia for an alliance.

Now the military types amongst you will appreciate the position better than I, but if I were the EU, I think I'd want very much to have Turkey on my side rather than Russia's. With a population of 82m, 12m of which are men of prime military age and not soft and woke like EU youth, what's the bet that the EU will go-a-courting again? If they have to defend three fronts, will that cost them more or less than the 2% they're supposed to spend on NATO?

NATO blue, Russia red

NATO blue, EU green, Russia red