Larry’s Diary Week, One Hundred And Forty Eight

Monday

Good morning folks. Bozzie was running around like a mad man this morning trying to drum up support for the leadership vote of confidence. The Chairman of The 1922 Committee rang him last night and told him that he had enough letters to call for a vote and he instantly became super grumpy. Anyway this morning he was a bit happier as his inner circle had taken a straw poll that showed him winning.

This morning researchers have revealed that a 15mg dose of tirzepatide injected once a week for 72 weeks has on average led to a 23.6 Kg weight loss. Tirzepatide is actually a diabetic drug but a trial has been run on a group of people who were nearly all diagnosed as obese. The group of just over 2,500 people it was tested on were mainly white women. The group was divided into four. One quarter took 5mg weekly while the other quarters took 10mg, 15mg and a placebo. The whole group was encouraged to eat low-calorie meals and exercise. All 4 groups on average lost weight, the placebo 2.4kg, the 5mg lost 16.1Kg, the 10mg lost 22.2Kg, but the most was lost by the 15mg group who on average lost 23.6Kg or around 20% of their body weight.

The old Strictly Come Dancing judge Len Goodman upset some BBC viewers yesterday. He said his granny would have described Coronation Chicken as “Foreign Muck”. He said consequently that until Saturday he had never tried it, but his wife had made it and he liked it. So the BBC got complaints and made an apology. Some people are very easily offended.

I have been reading that there have been a lot of complaints from people over the current state of air travel particularly with BA, EasyJet and RyanAir. It seems that one company, Jet2, has been getting good reviews with hardly any cancellations. But I read today of a problem at Gatwick where the people who help disabled people on and off planes have been leaving people waiting ages for assistance. One person was dumped at the gate 90 minutes before take-off time but no one returned to help them board the plane so they had to shuffle on their bum or miss the flight. Another woman was left on a plane, on her own, for 1 hour 50 minutes after the passengers and crew deplaned. Still, she probably got to the baggage hall before her luggage!

70 British firms are starting a test this morning to see if it is practical to work a 4-day week. I expected to read that the people were expected to complete the same number of weekly hours but spread over 4 days instead of 5. But no, the idea is working hours will be reduced to 80% of the current level and the wages will not be reduced in line. The aim is that people will be more productive and do the same amount of work in the reduced hours. I wonder how they found 70 mug companies to try this out?!

So the scientists have told us not to throw away goldfish if you no longer want it as a pet. Don’t drop it in a pond, lake, river or stream because they are actually a non-native species and will grow once out of a restrictive bowl or tank and can become quite large. They will consume all sorts of vegetation which native fish will not and when they become large they commonly attack and consume fish, frogs and tadpoles. Next time you see your cat with its paw in the fish tank please remember it is only trying to preserve British waterways.

Ryanair have announced that they are going to give South Africans a short test on South African general knowledge which they must pass before being allowed on their flights to the U.K. and Ireland. Apparently, the test is to try to weed out forged passport holders. This is not a British test but is of Ryanair’s own invention. The problem is that the test is in Afrikaans which is only one of eleven official languages in South Africa namely, Zulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, Sepedi, Setswana, English, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Siswati, Tshivenda and Ndebele. Under apartheid many black school children were forced to learn Afrikaans as a second language when English would have been of much more use, consequently, many South Africans consider the test racist.

Tuesday

The mood over breakfast was nearly as dark as the sky over Westminster. Bozzie was not a happy bunny and it’s all about last night’s vote. He is convinced that some cabinet members voted against him. As it was a secret ballot he can’t find out, but that does not stop him speculating and plotting his revenge.

I read that Johnny Depp and his buddy Jeff Beck have just run up a £50,000 bill in a Birmingham Indian restaurant. The pair took over the Varanasi restaurant on Sunday evening and invited along 20 of their friends. What I can’t work out is how 22 people could have consumed £2,500 worth of food and drink in a single sitting. Mind you, I don’t know what the restaurant would usually take on a Sunday evening, so I suppose some of that money would have been compensation for loss of income as the place can seat 350 people.

When a 90-year-old woman in Enfield had to go into a care home because of dementia her family were reluctant to sell her bungalow to pay the fees. However, they eventually had to and they called in a valuer to estimate the worth of the contents. They were amazed to find that an oil painting that had been hanging on a wall for over 30 years, since the woman was gifted it by her father, turned out to be a masterpiece. The “Depiction of the Madonna and Child” by Filippino Lippi, a student of Boticelli, was painted in the fifteenth century and has just been sold at auction for £255,000. That should cover a couple of weeks in the care home at the extortionate rate they charge these days.

I have been wondering what we are doing to replace the British Army weapons we have been sending to Ukraine. We have sent thousands of NLAWs and Javelin missiles. Then we sent armoured vehicles and Starstreak missiles now it is 3 x MLRS. But we are only a small country and when we send 3 MLRS it is nearly 10% of our inventory. Are we replacing what we are sending? Or are we weakening our forces so much that we couldn’t respond effectively if attacked? I hear we have sent about a quarter of all NLAWs ever made to Ukraine, but I am waiting to hear if the factory in Belfast is working 24 hours a day to replace them. I know the armoured vehicles are old stuff we have ordered AJAX to replace, but that programme is a disaster, running 5 years late and still to deliver a single operational one.

Last Saturday P&O Ventura was at Southampton’s Mayflower Cruise terminal when a nasty incident occurred. A luggage cage full of suitcases went over the edge of the dock into the water. I have seen pictures of suitcases floating on the water. The ship had to launch one of its tenders to collect the soggy baggage. It seems a baggage hoist snapped and up to 20 bags went into the Solent. It is believed that all were recovered but were soaked. I hope the owners were offered adequate compensation as they were on a 14-night cruise to the Canaries and, with the first few days at sea, they would have to purchase clothes in the ship’s shops which are not cheap.

Another cheap supermarket is coming to the U.K. next month. Mototos is a Swedish brand that has already got stores in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Germany and does home deliveries via a website. This particular chain claim to be up to 60% cheaper than others. Mototos say that they keep prices down by bulk buying known brands and not unknown brands like Aldi and Lidl. Now I remember a Russian chain called Svetofor, who also said they were the cheapest, were going to open 300 Mere stores in the U.K. So far they have opened the grand total of one in Preston in August 2021.

I read of a man sitting on his EasyJet Flight at Dalyan airport in Turkey at 01:25, with his seat belt on and the flight attendants doing their last checks, when he got an email from EasyJet apologising for the cancellation of his 01:30 flight and telling how to get a refund or a transfer to another flight. Strangely no one had told the crew, who carried on closing the doors and checking everyone had their seat belts on. He checked with others around him and while members of his family got the same message no one else had! As the plane pushed back they got a second message that said, “Please ignore the last message it was sent in error.” I suspect he breathed a huge sigh of relief as the plane took off.

Wednesday

Well, it was cloudy when I woke up, but the sun is out now, but I saw the forecast for today on the TV and it said it is going to rain at snooze time! Typical. I hear that bloke Marr on the radio saying how disappointed he was that Bozzie was still in office. Which made me think about how he is still that Communist who used to sell the Socialist Worker.

A derelict cement works site in the South Downs, near Shoreham, looks like it may be made use of at long last. The works is the largest brownfield site in England and has been rotting since it closed down in 1991. Three schemes are before an enquiry into whether the 109-acre site can be developed as it sits in a national park. I understand their optional plans are for a ‘mixed use’ scheme with employment and 400 new homes: two similar schemes with fewer houses – either 240 or 84 homes – or a ‘leisure-led’ scheme with 200 new homes. It seems mad to me that there should be any questions about knocking down an eyesore on a brownfield site and replacing it with much-needed housing, but I bet the Greens will be against it.

A peregrine falcon chick has fallen out of its nest high on the tower of Salisbury Cathedral. The chick appears to have slipped out as it is still a few days from flying, but it was developed enough to survive the 68-metre fall and glided into a garden 100 metres from the tower, landing unhurt. The surprised householder called the cathedral and a verger, whose job includes keeping an eye on the falcons, collected the disgruntled bird. It was returned to its nest and its brother and two sisters. Three days later it and its siblings took to the air and can now be seen soaring over Salisbury.

You have probably read that people have been crowdfunding the Ukraine armed forces and have even raised enough to purchase a Turkish TB-2 Drone. Now I read that the Russians have been doing the same thing and I have seen pictures on the internet of what a Russian Su-34 squadron has received. Perhaps the most useful thing is a pair of Chinese-made forklift trucks, which they use to lift bombs up to the underwing fitting. But the other things pictured make it look like someone raided the nearest B&Q, including power tools, spanners, extension cables, and even an axe and weed hackers. Is the Russian Airforce that badly supplied?

I hear that a new law is to be introduced in the next few days to force all new build houses and buildings to have an electric car charging point. If the Government is serious about this electric crap they will need to ensure that those home chargers are capable of charging a car quickly, which will mean upgrading the power supply to the new estate. Which in turn means that they need to upgrade the grid and power generation. New commercial buildings and those undergoing refurbishment will have to install EV chargers if they have more than 10 parking spaces.

Inmarsat have switched on the UK “space-based augmentation system” (UKSBAS) which augments the GPS signal. When we left the EU they cut our access to the secure encrypted signal from the wider European Galileo system which had the European augmentation system called EGNOS. Why do we need to augment GPS? Well, it is because it is not accurate enough for some uses such as the military, shipping aircraft and driverless cars. What UKSBAS does is add an additional signal on top of GPS to make it more secure and accurate. GPS is good enough for your car’s SatNav or for your phone with its accuracy of metres but this improves it to centimetres.

A bit more fear being pumped out by the media this morning. Apparently, climate change is going to cause a shortage of tomato sauce in the coming years. However, the production of Tomatoes has been increasing for seventy years! What is strange is that we grow most of our tomatoes in greenhouses to make sure the temperature is warm enough for them. Imports come from the likes of the Canaries or Southern Spain where the weather is much warmer. If the weather really is going to get much warmer here perhaps we can do away with heated greenhouses and have cheaper tomatoes and tomato sauce.

This morning the Government has overturned Surrey County Council’s refusal of an exploratory license for U.K. Oil and Gas (UKOG) to carry out more tests for natural gas at Dunsfold. Four preliminary test wells were drilled and natural gas was found to flow. UKOG has now had 3 years to drill and line 9-inch wells over three-quarters of a mile deep to prove the concept. Surrey CC refused the permission on the grounds that the site was in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. However, the Government pointed out that the only visible construction on the site would be a drilling rig and that would be for a maximum of 60 days, all other plant items would be no higher than 10 feet. This shouldn’t be controversial, we need natural gas and this is not Fracking. I wonder if the site being in Jeremy Hunt’s constituency had any influence on the decision?

Thursday

Well, it’s lovely and sunny first thing but I hear it might cloud up later. Bozzie was extremely happy that Stoma buggered up PMQs yesterday. He told the Little Otter that Stoma had an open goal but put the ball wide of the post. She didn’t seem to understand what he was talking about and went off to feed the baby!

I hear that the fossils of Europe’s biggest carnivore have been found on the Isle of Wight. The Dinosaur was 15 metres long and 5 metres tall and is said to be a fish eater. Apparently, the shape of the head, like a Crocodile, gives the clue to what it ate. The fossils were found by a man walking on the beach after the sea had eroded a cliff creating a fall.

The Norfolk Police stopped a steam traction engine on the A47 near Trowse yesterday, as it was only doing 5mph and even though it was on a dual carriageway, it was holding up traffic. The engine was towing a vintage wooden caravan, a Land Rover Discovery and a loaded twin axle trailer. The police pulled the train into a lay-by and let the traffic ease, however, the driver was doing nothing illegal and the police had to let him continue on his journey. They did, however, suggest that the Disco should be cut out of the train and act as an escort vehicle.

I have written about it before but I return to the disaster that is the US airborne refuelling tanker, the KC46. Today I read that the project is a mere $5.4 billion over budget and so far only about 50 of the 179 aircraft on order have been delivered. It is not yet ‘War Ready’ and apparently several years from being so. Despite Boeing having spent $406 million it still has not fixed the problem with the remote TV viewing system that is used to control the refuelling boom. They have managed to fix the buffeting problem caused when a wide-body aircraft refuels but that cost another $835 million. Then there have been other problems like chronic leaks in the onboard fuel handling system when trimming the load, problems with the APU air duct coming loose and new fixings having to be designed and retrofitted. Then the drain pipes from the APU were found to be coming off in flight and had to be re-welded. What has happened to American industry what with this and the Ajax fighting vehicle their reputation is going down the pan?

I read that a drought in Iraq has revealed an ancient city. It seems that a shortage of water in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has meant that to save crops authorities have released water from the Mosul Dam and this has uncovered what is believed to have been a major city in the Mittani Empire built 3,400 years ago. This gave archaeologists only a few days to map and photograph the city before the dam started to refill and the city again was drowned. The archaeologists knew the city was there but had never before been able to fully search or map it.

It seems that last year the cost of shutting down wind turbines when we couldn’t use their intermittent power, jumped by 70% to £507 million. The problem is that unlike a gas turbine or a coal-fired power station it is impossible to switch them on and off as demand increases or decreases. Wind turbines, of course, depend on the wind and if it is blowing, say at night, when demand is low, the only option is to turn the wind turbines off. But the owners love this as under their contract we compensate them. It’s a pity it doesn’t work the other way and they pay us when the wind doesn’t blow and they don’t generate.

On Tuesday 14th June, Heathrow Terminal Four will have reopened (or when you read this has opened) and 30 odd airlines will transfer their flights there over the coming weeks. This means that Transport for London is going to have to resume stopping at the Terminal Four station. At the moment the four Elizabeth Line trains an hour from Paddington have a stopping pattern of all four serving Terminal 2&3, two run on to Terminal 5 and the other 2 terminate at Terminal 2&3. From the 14th, the two trains that currently terminate at Terminal 2&3 will continue on and terminate at Terminal 5. These trains currently run from Paddington mainline station, but in the autumn they will continue through central London to serve the likes of Liverpool Street and Canary Wharf. The Piccadilly Line will resume serving Terminal 5 on the same day.

Friday

Gosh, it’s a lovely sunny, warm morning. It’s definitely a Larry type of day. I see Lord Frost has warned Bozzie that the grass-root Tories want to see tax cuts, VAT dropped on fuel bills, fracking, get rid of loads of leftover EU regulations, sort out the Northern Ireland crap and get a decent Deputy PM. I can’t see anything wrong with that, but it will obviously upset the Left and the Greens.

I hear that a huge survey of the Palace of Westminster is to be undertaken. The idea is to ascertain exactly how much work still needs to be done to the 350-year-old building. There are to be 35 boreholes to be drilled up to 70 metres deep and 120 rooms reviewed. What amuses me is that bits and pieces of work are already being undertaken. Isn’t it a bit odd that work is being done without knowing what effect it could have on the room next door? Also without a comprehensive survey, how have we ever been able to produce an accurate cost estimate?

I see that Lockheed Martin is having a bit of a hard time restarting its F-16 production line. They are restarting the line as they have got a $1.7 billion order for 8 aircraft from Bulgaria, but have been struggling to recruit and train enough workers. The idea is that they should be able to produce 3 aircraft a month, starting in 2025, should demand require it. Apparently, there is interest in buying new planes from Bahrain, Taiwan, Slovakia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who are all said to be eager to purchase the jet.

I read that on Tuesday many Welsh ‘A’ level students were left struggling over their English Language exam when the main Welsh exam board missed out four pages from the exam paper. The candidates were supposed to write an essay using extracts from 3 Shakespeare plays, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello and The Tempest, but the exerts were missing! Strangely, instead of abandoning the exam, the students were told “to do their best”. The Welsh exam board said that the papers would be marked considering that many students didn’t receive the whole paper and it would all be looked into after results day. It’s a bit late then.

The couple who won £184 million on the Euromillions a month ago have made their first major purchase, a new car. What have they bought, a Porsche, a Ferrari, a Rolls Royce, a Bentley? No, they have purchased a second-hand Volvo V60 in grey for £38,000. I wonder how many minutes interest that represented? They are talking about taking their two primary school-age children on holiday to Hawaii, “Because that is something they had always talked about.” Asked if they had thought about moving house, they said they had been looking at houses on a website, but when they got up to houses costing £7 million they had thought they were being silly. I wish I could be that silly, I would buy the Felix factory.

Now that the EU has passed a law that all phones sold in the EU must have a USB ‘C’ charger plus by autumn 2024, Apple will have to redesign the iPhone it sells in Europe. Apparently, Apple could also change to USB plugs in the U.K., whether they will make the change in the rest of the world is not yet known. The EU also want the rule to apply to what it calls “small devices” which is expected to include tablets, such as the iPad, but no one knows if it includes laptops which often have a totally different type of plug socket. The EU say the idea is that it will save people having to buy two different types of charger but this is really a stupid argument as millions of people with Apple Lightning Connectors will have to buy a new charger for a new device rather than reusing their old one.

I hear that in America yesterday two workers at the American Mars factory fell in a vat of liquid chocolate. Apparently, they couldn’t get out and the fire brigade had to be called to extract them. I wonder if they really wanted to get out or if they were content to stay there and eat chocolate!?

Saturday

Oh, what a lovely morning, the family has gone to the country, the sun is shining and there is a gentle breeze, and it was Felix Chicken with the Dreamies Girl for breakfast. Can life get any better?

I see that Egypt is splurging on a mass of new military equipment and upgrades to existing equipment. According to the Spanish portal InfoDefensa, the list of what they want to purchase is 24 Eurofighter fighter jets, 20 M-346 training aircraft, four multi-role Fremm Frigates, 20 patrol boats, and a surveillance satellite. Then they want to upgrade their Abrams M1A1 tanks to M1A2 and have already signed a deal to purchase 200 South Korean K9 155mm tracked Howitzers. I wonder who they are thinking of attacking or who they think is going to attack them?

The bosses of Silverstone motor racing track are planning to sue Aggregate Industries for nearly £8 million over a botched track resurfacing job they did in 2018 just before the British F1 Grand Prix which cost £2 million. The track had previously been resurfaced in parts, leading to changes of surface conditions during a lap. The idea was to produce a smooth consistent surface, but that just didn’t happen. The resulting surface was incredibly bumpy and leached a white liquid under some circumstances. A couple of weeks after the F1 GP the MotoGP took place and it was wet. During practice, water pooled on the new surface causing 5 crashes. The MotoGP was cancelled and 56,000 tickets were refunded. The track was then resurfaced by Tarmac at a cost of £3.5 million and consequently, Silverstone lost the rights to host the British MotoGP. Silverstone is suing for the cost of the lost MotoGP, the cost of resurfacing the track again and additional lost profits worth £624,552, bringing the total to £7,933,124 before legal fees.

I told you yesterday about the EU enforcing USB ‘C’ charging sockets on all mobile phones sold in the EU. Today I hear that the U.K. is not going to follow the EU and enforce this rule. Phone makers in the U.K. will be able to make up their own minds and put whatever socket they choose on their phones. I now understand that the EU will apply this rule to smartphones, tablets, e-readers, earbuds, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, handheld videogame consoles and portable speakers, while laptops will have to be adapted within 40 months of the rules coming into force.

I hear that using a mobile phone for calling home, to connect with the internet or send or receive emails can be quite expensive on a cruise ship where everything has to go via satellite. On sea days, on a full ship, the internet can be like wading in treacle. Now I hear that the cruise companies are talking to the likes of OneWeb and Starlink about suppling on-ship services as they have networks of low orbit satellites covering the world. If they come to an agreement I can see people not being able any longer to escape work video meetings while in the middle of the North Atlantic.

Yesterday the United States announced they were dropping the requirement for visitors to have a negative Covid test before entering the country. The rule change takes place at midnight on Sunday. I wonder if this will now be adopted on cruise ships as they tend to follow the rule laid down by the American Centre for Disease Control and this is what is changing? If this is the case, there will be a lot of happy cruise passengers around the world.

I have just heard about Tiggy the cat who has been banned by Twitter for being underage. You are supposed to be over 13 to have a Twitter account and the Twitter computers picked up on her sixth birthday celebration pictures. Her account was shut and they want proof she is over 13 to reopen it. Acceptable proof is a birth certificate, passport or a driving license. I wonder if they have ever tried getting one of those for a cat? Anyway, Tiggy is about 40 in human years so should be old enough to have an account. Twitter haven’t caught her younger sibling Rainbow yet, she is only four!

Right friends, that’s me done for another week and I am off for my regular Saturday afternoon sleep without being distracted by all the comings and goings of a weekday. I’ll be back on diary duty on Monday.
 

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