Larry’s Diary Week Forty Six

Monday

Good morning readers, a strange day today, a little warmer outside but not very sunny. Breakfast with the gang who arrived back at No10, via the back door, yesterday evening. Before going to bed, Bozzie put out a couple of tweets about the mob at the gates. Once again I couldn’t sleep on the windowsill yesterday afternoon because of the racket outside. Want I want to know is why the Police didn’t drag that moron off the Cenotaph when be tried to set fire to the Union Flag.

I saw an interesting bit on the withdrawn Lancet article on hydroxychloroquine. The article pointed out that even if the data hadn’t been faked, the trial was faulty. In countries where hydroxychloroquine has proved to be a successful treatment it has been given either as a preventative or in the first few days of symptoms appearing, such as a trial in Marseille University Hospital, where the fatalities were reduced to 0.9%. Not only that it has been given in combination with a specific antibiotic called “azithromycin” and with zinc. None of the Lancet cases in the trials reported utilised Zinc and many used different antibiotics and all were given to patients that were already in the later stages of the Virus. Hydroxychloroquine is known to enable Zinc to enter human cells and this is a key point to the treatment. The article went on to ponder why prestigious organs like the Lancet were in such a rush to slag off hydroxychloroquine combination treatment. It concluded that the answer was money. Big Pharmaceutical companies stood to make little money out of hydroxychloroquine as opposed to novel treatments or vaccines.

The BLM lot were out all over the place yesterday in most cities they were peaceful but as I mentioned before they were awful in London, but the mob in Bristol pulled down a statue and threw it into the docks. The Black Labour Mayor of Bristol said he was delighted that the statue had been taken down because it was of a slave trader and that he had always wanted it down. When asked why he had not suggested this earlier he said he had been too busy. Strangely he has been the Mayor of Bristol since 2016 and says has been too busy!

In Ashbourne, Derbyshire the local council has received a petition asking for the removal of a pub sign as racist. The sign is outside the Green Man and Blacks Head and features a Green Man and a Black head on top of a wooden beam across the road supported on two posts. The council has agreed to remove the Black Head but it is Grade II listed and they need permission from Heritage England to do so. In the meantime they have received a rival petition to retain it!

Pretty Petal made a statement in the Commons this afternoon on the weekends riots and then answered questions. One black Labour MP told her that she would never understand what it was like to be black and have to put up with racist remarks. Pretty paused for a moment and giving her a withering look told the Labour MP how she had to regularly put up with being called a Pakl in the school playground.

The last cruise ship with passengers still at sea docked today in Bremerhaven. The 1200 passenger ship set off on a 140 day world cruise back on 21st December last year. The MV Artania docked in Perth in March and the Australians carried out Coronavirus tests on the passengers and crew. 38 people proved positive and were Hospitalised while the rest on board were quarantined. At the end of the quarantine most passengers and some crew were flown home but 8 passengers chose to cruise home. The ship took so long to get back because it travelled around a lot of islands dropped off crew members. When it arrived in Bremerhaven there were only 8 passengers and 75 crew left on board. Of the 38 Hospitalised in Perth 2 passengers and 1 crew man died, the rest recovered and were flown to Germany.

The number of Corvid-19 deaths fell to 55 today, the lowest before Lockdown started in March. The number of positive tests was also down falling to 1205. On top of these numbers the number of deaths in Scottishland, Northern Ireland and London were all zero. Matt Handoncock made the point that these were weekend numbers and numbers were always lower than weekdays because the lazy buggers in the NHS didn’t bother to register all the deaths at weekends. Still the numbers keep going down weekend on weekend.

My best chuckle of the day was when I read that a Romanian ship carrying sheep to Jordan sunk a Russian warship in the Bosporus Straits today. The Cargo ship punched a big hole in the Russian ship Limen and it sunk. 17 Russian Sailors were rescued. The sheep carrier suffered only light damage. Now we know that if we ever go to war with Russia they can’t fight sheep.

Tuesday

Bozzie was hopping mad this morning at Breakfast. Doing his usual bit of reading the papers and listening to the radio he was also jumping around TV channels and came across Pier Moron having a go at him for having messy hair, likening him to Worzel Gummidge. Bozzie was swearing and shouting about the idiot not realising that Hairdressers were shut and he hadn’t had had his done for weeks. Bozzie moaned about Moron being more interested in his hair than in what he was saying and called him a very rude four letter word which go a rebuke from the Little Otter.

Next Bozzie had on Nick Motorcar who was talking about the suggestion that some schools might not even open in September. Motorcar was saying that what was the problem, it it was space why not buy some Portacabins. Bozzie said that he wished that was the only problem and that Motorcar should come and talk to the Bloody unions.

Sad Dick has announced a commission to look to see which London Statues and Monuments might be removed to appease Black Lives Matters. He also confirmed that the statue of Churchill will not be one that is removed. But what statues could be removed, Admiral Nelson was an anti-abolishonist and Cleopatra was a slave owner, so that goodbye to Nelsons Column and Cleopatra Needle. I guess William Wilberforce’s Memorial in Westminster Abbey will be OK, but the statue of Gandhi in Parliament Square could be in trouble given Gandhi’s views on Indians being superior to Africans.

The Greenock Job Centre has had a number of it’s workers suspended by the Department of Work and Pensions. There have been reports that staff held 2 parties in the building during lockdown. The DWP say they are taking the allegations very seriously and their major worry is the safety of their employees.

Sky News had to apologise this morning for a cock-up on last nights 8 o’clock news. As the presenter read out a story about the German Police’s new suspect in the Madeline McCann case they showed film of Prince Andrew implying he was involved. At the time Sky News just ignored the mistake and carried on as if nothing had happened. However this morning they had either had a rethink or the Palace had complained as they broadcast an apology.

Yesterday I reported on the Black Head at Ashbourne Derbyshire that the council wanted to remove. Well this morning a council cherrypicked arrived to remove it only to find that it was gone. It seems that a load of locals had turned out late last night and removed it for safe keeping. It has been smuggled into a “safe place” where it will be given a fresh coat of paint and hidden until all the fuss has been forgotten. The woman who launched the campaign to have the head removed says all the locals are racists!

Another milestone was met today in the bringing of the Aircraft Carrier Queen Elizabeth into full service. The F35 jets of 617 Squadron landed on the carrier for the first time off the south coast of England. 617 was the famous Dambusters Squadron that flew Lancaster Bombers in WW2 and was recently reformed with the new F35s. The Aircraft are to test their ability to fly aircover for the carrier group.

Good news for all you McDonalds fans who don’t drive so can’t use a drive-thru or live near one of the 46 restaurants offering delivery, next week McDonalds will be opening 500 more restaurants for McDelivery. But I expect one man in Scarborough won’t be bothering. He was first in the queue when the drive-thru reopened but they refused to serve him. He was in his disability buggy and they claimed it wasn’t a car. He pointed out that it was as it was a road going version with all the necessary equipment such as lights and horn. It was even taxed and insured, but a security man threw him out. Back home he checked up on McDonalds website and according to that it was accepted as a car. So he went back to McDonalds only for the security man to not even let him join the queue despite pointing out that the website said it was OK. McDonalds have subsequently apologised and said that the man left before they could check his claim!

I had just curled up in my basket and was dropping off to sleep when I heard Bozzie telling an underling that he was to tweet that Zoo’s and Safari Parks can open next week. I hadn’t released they were not opening. If you can open all sorts of outdoor places like garden centres, markets and amusement parks I thought it was obvious that Zoo’s and Safari Parks opening was a no brainier. I wonder if someone had forgotten them!

Wednesday

Morning all, it’s a bit grey and a little drizzly in Downing Street today. I shall not be getting my fur wet if I can help it. Bozzie was busy being briefed by a SPAD at Breakfast ready for PMQs at lunchtime. The SPAD was throwing possible Stoma questions at him to see if he had read his briefs. To me he seemed to do OK but we shall see later if they have anticipated the right questions.

The BBC has been boasting that we have gone for two months without burning coal for electricity generation. What they don’t tell you is how much this is costing us balancing the network and this is on top of the £10 Billion the renewable generators got in subsidies last year. At the moment electrical demand is low because of Coronavirus and often wind turbines are paid not to generate. For example they were paid £50 million over the last Bank Holiday weekend. But balancing the network is the big problem. It has long been so, having to have plant on spinning reserve for when the peak demand kicks in. But wind and solar power don’t work like that and are either generating or not and can’t be brought on line rapidly like thermal or pump storage. Therefore demand these days has to be met mainly from gas fired plant or diesel generators as coal is not to be tolerated. In 2002 system balancing cost £367 million. Last year it cost £1.5 billion and was expected to be similar this year. Unfortunately because wind and solar have been coping so poorly with the current love demand this year has already jumped to £2 billion based on a full return to work in August or £3 Billion if the shutdown continues into the Autumn. Get ready for your electricity bill to leap up.

I read that two more drugs are to be trialled in the Covid-19 fight. Both are anti-inflammatories, one new and one that has been in use for some time. The first is Namilumab which is in the late stages of being tested for rheumatoid arthritis treatment. The second is drug is Infliximab, an anti-tumour necrosis factor (TNF) therapy that is widely used for the treatment of ankylosing spondylitis. The problem with both these drugs is that they are expensive, unlike that other treatment that the GKP has been championing.

Jessie Tieti Mawutu is not very happy and has started a petition to get the Independent Office for Police Complaint to investigate her case as the Police have said they can’t. She was knocked over by the runaway Police Horse and suffered grazes at the BLM protest in Whitehall on Saturday. The Police told her that the incident could not be take as it occurred during a violent protest. I say tough, if she didn’t want to get hurt she should have gone home when the protest turned nasty.

It appears that the Boris Bikes in London are doing very well with over a million hires a month. In fact the scheme is to be expanded with another 1700 bikes and several new hire points around central London. Who realised how popular they were and that they weren’t just there for throwing at Police Horses.

Kier Stoma decided to have a go at Bozzie today over Primary Schools not fully reopening until September. I would have thought he would have picked a subject to go with that would have left himself a bit less open to counter attack. Only a week ago Stoma was having a go at Bozzie for “rushing children back to school” when it wasn’t safe. Now he is moaning that children are not going back. It seems to me that he is just acting as a mouthpiece for some of the Teaching Unions who just want to stay at home and get paid.

As hinted at in PMQs, Bozzie had a new relaxing of lockdown announcement at the evening Press Conference. This time it was what was termed a “support bubble” for people living on their own or single parents with children under 18. These people will be able to associate with another household, but once a household has been chosen it has to be stuck with. So basically a Granny living on her own could visit and stay over in the home of a child but only one if she has more than one child. A couple living apart could get together provided that one was living alone.

The people who moaned about Dom’s trip to Durham really scrapped the barrel when they reported his family to the council for not getting planning permission for the house he stayed in. The council announced that although there might have been some minor breaches of planning law they were historic and no action could be taken as the offences were time limited. The two main complaints were that the main house had been divided into two residences and the building Dom had stayed in didn’t have planning permission. Both these complaints were dismissed the main house hadn’t been divided and the outhouse didn’t need permission to be converted.

I read today that pigs really can fly. You may remember that a few weeks ago I told you about a British company that was making money by taking advantage of China’s problems with African Swine fever wiping out half their herd. Well the Chinese love pork so much that they have been buying in such volumes that the world has virtually run out of spare capacity. So they have now started on a new strategy, buying live pigs from Europe and flying them to China to rebuild their herds. A Russian Cargo Airline has begun fly Boeing 747F Aircraft loads of pigs to China and has already shipped many thousands of best breeding stock.

Thursday

It’s still a bit grey this morning, but it’s a little bit warmer and not raining. Perhaps the sun will come out later and I will get my windowsill snooze this afternoon.

The pressure is building up on Bozzie this morning to reduce the 2.0 metre social distancing rule to 1.0 metre. SAGE original recommended the 2.0 metre distance when the WHO distance was 1.0 metre. Various countries around the world have adopted distances between 2 and 1 metre and it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the infection rate. But now that more people are going back to work and kids back to school the longer distance is proving to be a problem. Pubs and Restaurants reckon that the longer distance means that they would be limited to about 30% normal capacity while the smaller distance would up the capacity to 80% making the difference between a loss and a profit. A similar problem exists with school class sizes. Now lots of Tory MP’s, papers and radio presenters are pushing for the distance to be reduced for economic reasons.

I was very disappointed to read this morning that the Annual London Black Cab excursion to Worthing, for Military Veterans, has been cancelled for the first time since it started just after WW2, because of Coronavirus. The taxi drivers give up the day’s work every June to fill up a fleet of Cabs with veterans for a day by the sea. The routine is to drive in convoy down the A24, where the passengers are given a Fish and Chip lunch and and afternoon Ice Cream before returning to London. I wonder if one year I could hitch a ride and meet WG.

All I seem to hear about these days is more and more job losses. This morning it’s Centrica who are cutting 5,000 positions. Centrica are the parent company of British Gas so if you have to wait a long time to get a man to fix central heating boiler you know why they are short of staff.

Barnier has been muttering about the need for the U.K. to compromise in order to reach a Trade Agreement with the E.U. Unfortunately he has been given a mandate by the E.U. 27 with no wiggle room and the U.K. has no intention of giving up on any major points. There is no way Bozzie is going to give in to acceptance of the ECJ, the “level playing field” or especially Fishing rights. Barnier has realised to get a Fishing agreement he will have to compromise, but the Ministers from the 8 biggest fishing countries are saying NO. Unless they change their stance it’s going to be WTO rules.

Bristol Council has recovered the statue of Edward Colston from the harbour. They will now take it to a museum for safe keeping until it is safe to return it. The BLM lot seem to have drawn up a long list of targets including Queen Victoria, Charles 2, James 3, Robert Peel, Earl Grey and Lord Kitchener. If they get their own way we will have no British history left. We will have to put up statues of Zulu chiefs on the empty plinths.

The Press Briefing tonight concentrated on the Test and Track system that Labour have been continually saying in Parliament isn’t working. Well that is clearly rubbish. In the first week they have spoken to over 8000 people with positive Covid-19 tests. This has given them over 30,000 contacts of whom they got 27,000 (or 85%) agreeing to self isolate for fortnight. I reckon that’s pretty good for the first week. Mind with the number of positive test falling daily it will be interesting to see how those numbers move.

Tonight I hear that there is a major problem for Marmite lovers. They have stopped production of the large 450g jars and are currently only producing the 250g jars. The problem is Coronavirus. The shutdown of pubs has meant that beer is not being produced and with no beer there is a shortage brewers yeast which is a major ingredient of Marmite. I guess you will have to switch to Bovril which is a Beef extract.

Right I off to see if Bozzie is watching Question Time.

Friday

Not very nice again this morning. Recently the weather has gone from being too hot to miserable very quickly. Looks like it’s going to rain later so I’m not going out. Bozzie was eating his Breakfast Porridge when the boy from the No 10 Post Room timidly knocked on the door. It was a hand delivered letter. The Little Otter took it from the boy and handing it to Bozzie said it was another letter from Stoma. She asked Bozzie why Stoma couldn’t ring up like everyone else. Bozzie said Stoma was a lawyer and was user to charging £500 to write a letter. The Little Otter wondered wondered how much he was charging the Labour Party every time he wrote.

Bozzie did, however, talk on the phone with The Gove. Although I could only hear Bozzie’s half of the conversation he was obviously confirming that in The Gove’s zoom conference with the E.U. this morning he was ready to tell them that we would not be extending the Transition Period. Bozzie reminded him that he had to do it today as we only had until the end of this month to confirm things as the this was the last meeting until September. I heard later that the E.U. were not happy as Barnier and all the Remoaners had kept telling them that we would back down. The penny must finally have dropped for the E.U. as they now want to speed up discussions when up to now they have been trying to slow things down.

There was an ONS report out this morning on Coronavirus statistics. It seemed to me to be stating the obvious, saying things that we already knew. It said the death rate from Coronavirus had halved from March to April. Well you can see that on the chart that is shown on the Government Press Conference every evening! They said that between 1st March and 31st May Covid-19 deaths were 81.9 per 100,000. Why have I been reading we have been having a rate up in the 200 or 300’s.

This Black Lives Matter stuff is getting silly. Poor old Churchill has been boxed up as has the Cenotaph to protect them from a threatened march tomorrow (I hear BLM have called it off but we will see). There was a small protest in Hyde Park this afternoon but on the TV it looked like there were more plod than protesters! I hear that the statue of Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn has been vandalised by BLM. Who was he racist against – the English?

That wee Froggy Bloke Macaroon is coming to see Prince Charles in London on Thursday. As a visitor from abroad he should be doing 14 days in quarantine but he is being made an exception and won’t have to. He is going the meet Jug Ears on the 80th anniversary of General De Gaulle’s appeal to the French people to resist the German occupation. He will present London with the highest French decoration – the Legion d’Honneur. I suppose that means that snivelling git Sad Dick will be there. The Queen and Phil the Greek won’t be there, they are leaving it to Jug Ears who speaks Frog. I hope they all wear PPE.

I see that a further Police investigation is to take place into 250 more deaths at Gosport War Memorial Hospital bringing the total deaths being investigated to over 700. It is all about a Doctor who gave old patients high doses of very strong pain killers. She has already been struck of for putting patients lives in danger but is yet to face any court charges. This woman makes Shipman look like an amateur.

Nearly four weeks ago Wee Krankie promised to give Coronavirus tests to all care home residents and staff every week. To date she has managed to get about a third of the staff tested once. This is the woman who keeps telling Bozzie what to do. She’s useless.

Saturday

It’s slowly getting a bit warmer and sunnier in London, but there could be storms later. I will probably be back on the windowsill but I’ll be looking out for rain. In the mean time it’s breakfast with the mod for a change this morning. That’s good because when Bozzie finishes his skim read he drops the papers on the floor, they think I’m just sitting on the papers but really I’m reading them.

It’s the Queens official birthday and she is going to have an adapted Trooping the Colour ceremony at Windsor castle this morning. The Military Band will be much smaller than usual and the number of troops marching will also be much reduced and social distancing will be maintained. The lumbering great horses won’t be there either. The Queens Birthday honours announcement has been postponed because of Coronavirus. I wonder if that means the investigation into the Poison Dwarf will be over by the time the announcement is made and he he might still get his peerage.

There have been two rival protests in London this afternoon. The BLM lot met in Hyde Park. Officially this protest was called off but from what I saw quite a lot turned up and a lot of Black Power salutes were made. While in Trafalgar Square the rival meeting took place. This lot said they were there to protect the statues from the BLM lot. The Police turned out to keep them apart and they were all told to go home for tea at 17:00. It sounded like the Teddy Bears picnic to me!

181 Coronavirus deaths in the U.K. today. The number seems to be edging down very slowly. While it is still going up rapidly in some other places. Brazil overtook us for numbers today. Russia had a huge leap today doubling their number, but they put it down to a new counting method. Others said they had been under reporting for political reasons and have finally had to adjust things.

While still on the subject of Coronavirus I read that AstraZenaca have signed another agreement to supply the Vaccine being developed by Oxford University. They already have a contracts to supply hundreds of millions of doses to the U.K. and USA, but they have now signed new contracts to supply another 400 million doses for Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands. I heard someone from Oxford talking on the radio who said that the vaccine was on schedule to get approval some time in August and AstraZenaca were going to start vaccine production very soon to stockpile it so that it could start being used in September if it got August clearance. He went on to say that the intention was to have produced enough vaccine quickly enough for everyone in the U.K. to be vaccinated by Christmas. They now have agreements in place with companies all over the world to produce 3 Billion doses. I wonder if it works on Cats.

Could Bozzie be getting ready to drop the Social Distancing from 2 metres to 1 metre. SAGE have put out a report that basically says that one metre would be adequate if businesses made a few adjustments. For example it suggested that workers should sit side by side and not facing each other and they should take regular breaks. I hear that the experts say that you need to get 15 to 18 virus particles to catch it. At 2 metres the chance is if you were next to someone for 15 minutes you might get 2 particles, but if it was only 1 metre distance you would get 4 particles. This is why people say you have double the chance of catching Coronavirus at a metre but the chance is painfully small.

You may remember that the University Boat Race had to be cancelled this year when we went into lockdown. Well today two teams of eight competed in a virtual race, driving the boats over a computerised course by using rowing machines. In case you are interested it was a close thing but Cambridge won.

Right that’s it for the week, I’m off to eat my dinner. See you Monday.
 

© WorthingGooner 2020
 

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