Larry’s Diary, Week Two Hundred And Fifty-Nine

Monday

Good morning and welcome to another week of my diary. Today is the 11th, the real Armistice Day, and Palestinians are threatening to disrupt services around the country. Legohead is off to Paris to suck up to the frogs and lay a wreath on the French memorial to the unknown soldier. Is he scared to do it in Britain?

Why was Reform not allowed to have Nigel, their party leader, lay a wreath at the Cenotaph yesterday? Well, it seems that under some old rule they don’t have enough MPs in parliament. Apparently you need to have a minimum of 6 MPs, and they only have 4 (5 if you included the Irish tie in). But under a rule, which doesn’t seem to have been written down anywhere, and was never reported in Hansard, the SNP and Plaid Cymru (only 4 MPs) take it alternately to lay a wreath. This year it was the turn of the SNP, and I see their leader in Westminster, Stephen Flynn, refused to sing the National Anthem.

I see that in the United States the Inspector General has just put out a report highly critical of Boeing spare parts sales of its C17 military aircraft. It seems that Boeing has been highly inflating the cost of spare parts under its maintenance contract. Some of the costs are mad, for example a small metal pin that should have cost five cents was charged at $5. But one of the worst examples was a soap dispenser for the toilet which was identical to a $17 civilian one that they charged over $8,500 for. Boeing said the one they sold met the military specifications. That’s some specification.

I see that it took until Sunday morning for Arizona to count enough votes to finally reach the point that if every uncounted vote was for the Camel, she wouldn’t have enough votes to beat Trump. It was then that the state declared for the Donald meaning that the final numbers were 312 electoral college votes for him against 226 for her. For the first time in several elections it looks like the Republicans have won the popular vote and by a big margin.

We are about to go into the third week of the country sitting under a winter high which brings grey windless days. The result of which is not just a calm Channel and thousands of illegal immigrants crossing in small boats, it also means a lack of generations of renewable electricity. The average renewable has dropped to about 8% of demand last Tuesday when the previous Tuesday Red Ed Millipede was boasting about 66% coming from renewables. This shows exactly what I have been banging on about for ages, renewables are unreliable and last week we must rely on gas-powered back-up every single day to keep the lights on.

Mattel, the toy makers, have a bit of a red face this morning. It seems they have put out a new range of dolls which are based on characters in the new Wicked film, which is based on the stage show, which is based on the Wizard of Oz. The dolls’ packaging has a link to a website printed on it that leads to a porn site. Fortunately, the packaging is different between the USA and Britain so we aren’t getting the link here.

I read a headline today that said “Corbyn Bankrupt” and my little cat heart was filled with joy. But on reading the article under the headline I was a bit disappointed as it was not the ex-Liebore extreme left leader. Instead, it was all about a construction company of the same name that is in financial trouble having lost £5.1 million on a turnover of £46.1 million last year. Would you believe that 28 construction companies went into administration in October? It sounds like not to be the business to be in.

Tuesday

Good morning everyone, at last the weather has changed and it’s a cloudless sky this morning. I must admit I feel happier this morning with the sun shining. Did you see Legohead on the TV in Paris yesterday? It showed me just how small he is, a similar height to the midget Macaroni. Then they were riding around standing side by side in the back of an open truck waving. That reminded me of Hitler and Mussolini. But when they did it, the streets were thronged with Germans, yesterday there was hardly anyone on the streets of Paris.

Why is Legohead bothering going to the COP 29 in Azerbaijan? None of the leaders of the biggest users of fossil fuel will be there. The leaders of the US, China, India, Indonesia, France, the EU and many others, are giving it a miss because they know that it is an utter waste of time and money. But what amused me is that the Taliban are there. I wonder if Legohead will meet with them? My theory is that with Azerbaijan being a big oil-producing nation he is trying to sign up for us to get some of their exports. Anyway, while he is away Number 10 is a much happier place!

Olympic Boulevard, in Colchester, is protected by a ‘bus gate’ banning all traffic from entering the road except buses and authorised vehicles, like residents. The restrictions have been in place for the last nine years and there has never been a prosecution in all that time. The most amazing thing is no bus route runs though Olympic Boulevard, and it has never been on a bus route! Discussions are currently going on about removing the ‘bus gate’ but the suggestion is to put up ‘No Entry’ signs at both ends of the road. An alternative being discussed is to put a 20 mph limit on the road and to make it “no parking” for its complete length. I can’t see the local residents liking the options, they are better off with the ‘bus gate’ however stupid it is.

In Canterbury, the Two Doves pub was bought by a developer back in 2019 and he has so far had three planning permission applications, to convert the pub into firstly flats and more recently a shop and flat, rejected. The old pub was about for 150 years before it was closed and is on the end of a row of terraced houses and in a conservation area. A local pub landlady has been trying to buy the pub for the last four years as she believes the pub could still be viable despite the owner ripping out the bar and all the fittings. I say good luck to her, I think I would like to be a pub cat when I get slung out of here.

I hear that in the US, pressure is being put on Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire and allow Sniffer Joe to appoint another Democratic supporting successor. It is well documented that she suffers from type 1 diabetes and has health problems. The judge was a Democratic nomination to the lifetime post under Clinton. A new Democrat nomination wouldn’t affect the current balance of power on the Supreme Court bench, but the thinking is if she must quit or dies after the Donald’s inauguration he will nominate another young Republican, cementing their power. Mind you if she did resign right now, which she says she has no intention to do, there is a major doubt if there is enough time to get a Biden nomination in place before the inauguration.

The NASA probe Viking 1 left the plant Earth 47 years ago and is out in interstellar space some 24,000,000,000 miles away. Some 43 years ago NASA shut down one of its twin radio transmitters to save on battery power. Recently the transmitter they had been using went silent causing a bit of a panic back in America. The thinking is that something went wrong with the spacecraft and its automatic protection circuits shut the transmitter down. So, they sent a signal to wake up the shutdown transmitter and much to their surprise it worked, and they are back in contact. Interestingly it took 23 hrs for the command to reach Viking and another 23 hours before the message came back to Pasadena to say it had obeyed the order. I find it amazing that we can send a message all that way, but the WIFI signal doesn’t reach every room in Number 10.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Wokeby, says he is not going to resign over the John Smyth sex abuse scandal. In the latest report it has been shown that he knew about Smyth’s sexual and physical abuse of young men and boys decades before his actions came to light. Wokeby says he has consulted his advisers, and they have advised him not to resign. Could that be because they are as woke as he is, he did of course appoint them. I don’t think that Wokeby can last the week out, maybe not even the day.

Wednesday

Hi folks, it’s not a sunny start to the day but it is still brighter, but cold. Well, my prediction about Wokeby was right, he resigned in the early afternoon a few hours after I had finished my diary entry for the day. It has been shown Wokeby knew what was happening in 2013, but almost certainly knew earlier, and chose to do nothing to stop this monster and moved him to Southern Africa where he is suspected of killing a young boy in Zimbabwe and skipping to South Africa where he died. I had to laugh at his resignation having to be approved by woke King Big Ears, he could hardly say no. But this morning the woke lefties, like Alister Campbell, are insisting ‘he is a good man’.

Why am I not surprised to see that the unemployment numbers had jumped in the last three months, effectively since Liebore came to power. The rate has gone up from 4% to 4.3% and that is before the impact of the Budget. At the same time, I see wages have gone up by 4.8% which is higher than inflation which was down to 1.7% in the last report in the 12 months to September. I think we should all be bracing ourselves for the next set of numbers after the budget.

Great British Nuclear has announced that they enter into negotiations with the four companies that have reached the tendering stage of bidding for the UK’s Small Modular Reactors. We are now down to GE Hitachi, Holtec, Rolls-Royce SMR and Westinghouse. If I was in charge, some of the major questions I would be asking are the reactors designed and made in Britain and is there an opportunity to export the reactors overseas? The size and type of reactors being offered by each company are very different, so I don’t know how GBN are going to be able to compare the offerings fairly. We should be told the winner by the spring.

An interesting bit of news coming out of Wetherspoons, where they have announced that they are to stop selling San Miguel lager. It will be replaced by the Italian lager Poretti which will allow Spoons to sell lager for £4 a pint in most of its pubs or £3.20 under its cheapest ‘Monday Club’ price. I guess some people will moan, but others will be quite happy that Spoons are keeping the cost of a pint of lager down.

I read that for the first time in ages we have three of our attack submarines at sea together. HMS Astute left Faslane yesterday, joining HMS Anson and HMS Triumph which were already at sea. However, another of our Astute class boats, HMS Audacious, remains in Devonport still awaiting a dry dock, 19 months after arriving there. HMS Ambush has not been to sea for more than two years and HMS Artful has not sailed for 18 months. Whether they have not been to sea for maintenance reasons or lack of crew is unclear, but I suppose we should be thankful that we have managed to scrape together three boats, one of which, HMS Triumph, is due for decommissioning next year.

I just read a little story from the days when Jeff Bezos was the big boss at Amazon. He recalled that all the company data he was getting said that calls to customer services were being answered within one minute. However, he said he was getting a number of complaints that customers were subject to long waits for customer service calls to be answered. Several executives in the meeting insisted the data was right and calls were answered within one minute. Bezos said he took out his mobile phone and called customer service and had to wait 10 minutes for an answer. Point proved.

I hear that in Glasgow Celtic have a problem that many other Scottishland football teams would love to have, they sell out for virtually every match. Celtic park has a capacity of about 60,000 seats and 52,000 of those are occupied by season ticket holders. This leaves around 8,000 tickets to go to the supporters of visiting teams and some non-season ticket-holding supporters. But it is the renewal rate of season tickets that is amazing, it is between 98 and 99% annually which other clubs around the world would love to have. Many point out that more than 2% can be expected to die or become too old to attend matches, but there must be something special about Celtic supporters because that doesn’t happen in Glasgow. Apparently, they closed the season ticket waiting list to new applicants three years ago and it has hardly got any shorter. Strangely average life expectancy in Glasgow is below the national average (except for Celtic Supporters).

Thursday

Hello my friends and gosh was it chilly when I stepped out this morning. At least it’s not wet, and the sun is out. I have been having a lovely week laughing at the lefties moaning about the election result in the USA. I can see why people in the US might be deeply upset but I was amazed to see the Guardian running courses to help their staff get over the Donald being elected. Now I hear the money-losing lefty paper is closing its X (Twitter) account because the Donald is giving Elon Musk a job. But it gets even silly when the Clifton Suspension Bridge is closing its account in protest.

The factory in Hull has landed an order for the blades for 64 wind turbines being built by Scottish Power 20 miles off the coast of Suffolk. The order is for blades to be installed at the East Anglia Two wind farm. I assume that each of the 64 turbines will have three blades, which seems to be the norm, so that is 192 blades. I read that the contract is worth £1 billion which means that each 377 feet long bill will cost over £5.2 million.

The French are not very happy because Cadbury’s Chocolate Fingers have disappeared from the market and have launched a petition to get them reinstated. The owners of Cadbury’s, Mondelēz International, have not said why, and the French importer says it is not their fault. But the problem seems to be that despite Cadbury’s being the original maker, several cheaper knock-off brands have appeared on the French market and have caused a fall in sales. Hence the withdrawal from the French market.

I read that a 98-year-old woman who was a founder of the La Leche League, an organisation promoting breastfeeding, has resigned because they have started admitting trans men. Apparently, there is now a drug available that helps men lactate. However, I hear that the fluid produced is not milk, has no nutritional value and may contain harmful hormones. Surely this should be considered child abuse and banned, not encouraged by a woke organisation.

Tests are underway in 38 countries to put QR codes on supermarket goods, with the idea that they could replace barcodes. The idea is that the customers could use their mobile phone to read the QR code to reveal all sorts of enhanced information about what is being purchased and would also trigger the check-out scanner just as the barcode does at the moment. Now I see problems here, not everyone has a mobile phone, so they will be discriminated against. It will be the young people sent out shopping for mum and the oldies who are not technically savvy who will suffer.

The National Trust has been found guilty of breaking conservation rules in the management of Long Mynd, near Church Stretton. The trust had been using a new sort of machine to collect seeds from wildflowers and heather without damaging them. The idea was then to dry the seeds and then to sow them in other areas to encourage heathland. However, Long Mynd is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and subject to special conservation rules and the National Trust didn’t have permission to harvest seeds. But worse still the new machine ripped up heather and made deep ruts in the ground.

I am hearing another story of wokeism coming from Abingdon, in Oxfordshire where a pub is being forced to change its name because some people think it is ‘offensive’. The joke is that The Midget is named after the car the MG Midget that was built nearby for many years. But apparently some people have complained that midget is a non-woke way of referring to people suffering from dwarfism. To stop any trouble, the pub’s owners, Greene King, have decided to rename the pub as ‘The Roaring Raindrop’. I wonder if that will upset climate change activists.

Friday

Back to a grey morning when I went out, no rain but it’s cold. Two bits of goodish news out this morning. Firstly, GDP was up for the previous quarter, the first under Liebore, by a massive 0.1%. Then Legohead announced that he is ‘smashing the gangs’ because one Turkish man has been arrested and charged with supplying equipment used by a gang in Belgium. This one man seems to be a very small cog in a very big wheel, and I doubt what Legohead called a ‘smaggling gun’ will miss him. I wonder if he is having remedial reading lessons, first ‘sausage’ and now his.

Did you know that McDonald’s just celebrated its 50th Anniversary in the U.K. That is long before I was a kitten, but I have been reading about it. When they first opened, a cheeseburger cost just 21p and a Big Mac was 45p. The Egg McMuffin arrived in 1982 and in 1984 Chicken McNuggets replaced Onion Nuggets. The Happy Meal arrived in 1986, and the first drive-thru opened in 1990. The one that surprised me was the 1994 trial of the McPizza. Individual 8” pizzas which for some unknown reason were only available after 4 pm. Today there are 1,435 outlets in the U.K., and I have never been in any of them.

I read that when Sad Dick was installing the cameras for the London ULEZ scheme he made the cameras capable of enforcing a pay-per-mile scheme at a cost of £150 million. Leaked documents show he was planning to start charging drivers in London £2 a mile, starting in October next year. However, he quickly back-tracked, on what was apparently codenamed Project Gladys, following the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election in July 2023. Much against the national opinion polls at the time, the Tories beat the incumbent Labour Party to win the seat and it seems to have put the wind up Sad Dick.

The new Saudi airline, Riyadh Air, has announced an order for 60 Airbus A321 family aircraft. I am just a little surprised as they have already ordered the Boeing 767 for its longer haul routes and consequently the 737 Max was seen as the favourite to win the order. The airline is now teasing that it will begin looking for what it calls a fleet of extra wide-body aircraft for very long-range services. This will clearly be a fight between the well-established Airbus A350-1000 and the yet to be certified Boeing 777X. Interestingly, the A350 is marketed as the ‘extra wide body’ jet, so has Riyadh Air just given us a big hint on its thinking.

An incident on the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Symphony of the Seas has been brought to my attention. It seems that passengers were packed in the theatre when a smoke machine being used to give ‘atmosphere’ to a show triggered the ship’s sprinkler fire suppression system. For 20 minutes the downpour continued in all the indoors areas of the ship. Soaked passengers tried to find spots the sprinklers didn’t reach, but their were few of them as the sprinklers are designed to reach everywhere. Even the lifts stopped working. I hear people were walking on squelching carpet for days afterwards.

Next August the Manston International Airshow is scheduled to return to the airport in Kent. This will be the first major event at the Kent airport since it closed in 2014 when its last scheduled flight to Amsterdam took place, and the last 144 people employed there were made redundant. No details of the airshow have been released yet, other than it will take place across two dates on Saturday, August 16 and Sunday, August 17 and the Belgium-based Bronco Demo Team featuring the North American OV-10 Bronco will take part.

According to the Turkish newspaper, Türkiye Today, the German Government has finally approved the sale of 40 Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets to Turkey. Last week I told you that there could be as many as 150 new Typhoon sales on the horizon. Well, it looks like the first part of my prediction is coming good.

Saturdays

Good Morning everyone, it’s dry and cold today but at least it’s not raining. Do you remember the air traffic control meltdown last summer when the whole system crashed due to a software glitch. Someone filed a flight plan that used a correct waypoint code but somehow the system had two waypoints with the same code and didn’t know what to do so just stopped working. This meant that the whole system had to be restarted, and it has emerged that was a problem because it could only be restarted on site and the duty engineer was ‘working from home.’ Consequently, hundreds of thousands of people had flight problems because one person was WFH.

Here’s a story which shows just how much the ridiculous green energy policy is causing prices to go up. In the last two years the price paid by Network Rail for its electricity has gone up from £379M in 2021/2022 to £885M in 2023/2024 and of course it will be up again this year. Network Rail are a massive user of electricity, not just for electric trains but think about all the electricity that is consumed in operating stations, signalling systems, ticketing systems, maintenance depots, even level crossings. We all know what this means, that you will face ticket prices going up to cover the increase. The train user always pays while the government crows about the ‘clean’ electric railways.

Back on 10 September this year a Vauxhall Grandland came off the A617 Kirklington Road in Nottinghamshire and crashed upside down into a ditch. Fortunately, nobody suffered any serious injuries, but two months later the car is still there. Some wit has just put it on Google maps as a ‘historic landmark’. It has a 4.9 star rating but clearly the reviewers are entering into the joke saying things like ‘the best blue car crash I have ever seen’, ‘a modern day Taj Mahal’ and ‘the subtle draping of the ‘police aware’ tape is a stark contrast with the vehicle position, which illustrates the ‘driver unaware’ of the ditch.’ The police say it is down to the driver’s insurance company to remove it.

The German publication Bild tells me that the Ukrainian forces have recently returned their Russian-supplied 2S7 “Pion” artillery systems to active service. They had to take the 99 systems they have out of service because they ran out of the Russian-supplied 203mm ammunition and unsurprisingly couldn’t get any more. The cannon is mounted on a special tracked vehicle and requires a crew of 14 and can fire 220 kg shells 30 miles. The mobile artillery pieces are now receiving fresh ammunition from the US who have reactivated a production line that had made the same calibre shells for now redundant US mobile artillery.

The news coming out of Babcock International, one of the nation’s leading defence contractors seems to get better and better. Their results for the first half of the year were out earlier this week and were well up with an increase in turnover, profit and dividend. They also reported they that have already booked over 80% of next year’s work well in advance. Only days after that announcement, the news came out that they had been selected as ‘preferred bidders’ for the contract to provide primary flying training for the French airforce, navy and army. I understand the contract is worth €800 million over 15 years. This is inspite of Brexit.

Are you a customer of OVO Energy? If so you might find yourself paying an extra £1.50 a month if you don’t opt out of a paper bill. The new charge is due to start in December for most customers who still receive paper bills. There are a few exceptions like those on the Priority Services Register and those who need adaptive services like a bill in Braille. Bills will be sent out electronically in PDF format, so people can still print them off if they need to provide proof of address. OVO say they are sending out a letter to all paper bill customers before this begins with a QR code to get to the form people will need to register on the Priority Services Register. But this ignores anyone who does not have a mobile phone, a PC or has no idea what a QR code is.

When the new winter train timetable starts next month, Cross Country are going to introduce a through train from Cardiff to Edinburgh. Apparently, it is the first direct train service ever between the two cities. The journey is scheduled to take nearly five hours and call at 22 stations on the trip. Judging from the fact that there is only one train a weekday in each direction and no weekend service I guess is supposed to be a service for business travellers. As there is currently a regular service between Cardiff and Birmingham and Birmingham and Edinburgh how difficult is it to turn them into through trains?

I’m done for another week and although it’s dry out there it’s not very nice. It’s a bit chilly out there so I’m going to snooze in one of the rooms that Legohead hardly uses, like the Thatcher Room. It’s not the same in there since he moved her portrait, but I like it. The forecast for tomorrow is sunny, dry, and chilly. I might be able to snooze on the windowsill then if I can get in the sun. Chat to you next week.
 

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