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

Monday

Good morning from a dry but grotty Westminster. It looks like it’s going to rain at any moment, but the forecast is for a dry day. Today’s big question is, did the Camel actually have a summer job in McDonald’s before she went to college? I find it rather strange that the company has sworn employees to silence on the subject.

Today I read that the Wes Streeting has had a brain wave and wants to give millions of older people a digital smart watch so that they can all measure their own blood pressure and heart rate. Well, I have a few problems with that. Firstly, are they planning to give them to all 10 million pensioners? That’s an awful lot of watches and so are the huge costs for a decent one. The cheapest watch that I could find that measures blood pressure was £30 a pop. Well, I suppose that if you want to order ten million you will get a decent discount, but then you must set up a system to distribute them so let’s say you can do that within the £30 per person. But then how many people will wear them? I can imagine an 80-year-old in a care home giving theirs to a carer. Will the system be set up to give people a smart watch on their 65 birthdays?

I note that several people have been complaining that Greggs have instigated a new policy when selling sausages rolls. If you go into a branch and ask for a ‘sausage roll’ they will now ask “Is that a ‘pork’ sausage roll?” Well, I’m pretty sure that if the person asking was a vegetarian or vegan they would have specified a ‘vegetarian sausage roll’. So why are Greggs pandering to vegans and vegetarians, they are a small minority.

I read that Ukraine has developed a new cheap drone to defend themselves from the Shahed 136 drone used by Russia. The Shahed 136 is manufactured by Iran and has been supplied in thousands to Russia who are reported to have already used over 6,500 in their war with Ukraine. The new Ukrainian drone called Sting fly’s faster than the Shahed and at 10,000 ft from where it can dive down onto the Russian drone. The report I read said the Sting drone is controlled by a person on the ground using VR glasses and is eight times cheaper than the Shahed drone. I will be watching to see if this is all true.

The media tells me there is a war going on between BA and easyJet at London’s Gatwick airport where both are struggling to recruit pilots. With the recovery of air travel still moving up following the pandemic, the airport’s two biggest operators are both trying to launch new routes and for that they need more pilots. Reports are that passenger numbers are now back to pre-pandemic levels and I read that Europe is said to be short of 19,000 pilots. A little while ago easyJet said they were recruiting 1,000 new pilots. At the moment a pilot employed by easyJet earns between £137,000 and £157,000 and at BA they earn £107,000 to £122,000 for flying the same sort of A320 family jets. An easyJet pilot can also earn over double the amount a BA pilot can earn in overtime. It looks like BA are going to have to up their game.

So it looks like in Moldova one million odd voters have voted very narrowly in a referendum to amend their constitution to make it an aim to join the EU. A before-the-referendum poll said ‘Yes’ would win 60/40 but the declared result was 50.7% Yes and 49.3% No. The police say they have identified a lot of political interference including 130,000 people paid to vote No. Whoever paid those voters needs to ask for their money back.

I hear that Heinz have launched a special version of baked beans for Christmas, not that I shall be trying them. They have brought out a special festive pigs in blankets with ‘seasonal’ flavouring. Well, I quite like sausages and bacon, but I’m not so keen on the idea of ‘seasonal’ flavouring, especially when I haven’t the slightest idea what it actually is. I associate seasonal flavours as things like stuffing, egg nog, trifle, and Christmas pudding. Stuffing and beans might be OK, but beans and Christmas pudding? I have one other objection; the pigs in blankets seem to have lost their blankets.

Tuesday

Hi folks, well it’s dry at the moment, lots of swearing coming from the Number 10 flat, it seems the internet is down, and Legohead clearly isn’t happy and nor is his family. I hear that the government is planning to release another 3,000 prisoners early to make space for more criminals. Well, I’m not very happy with that, as I am told 70% of the last lot let out early are now back behind bars. It’s really not a very clever policy.

Since 2017 TfL have been thinking about a new Overground line linking Hounslow with Neasden via Old Oak Common. Now this would be a very cheap line to build as it mostly already exists as a freight line and various bits of passenger lines. The last proposed cost I saw was under £300 million which is really very cheap for a full-size railway. The only slightly controversial thing is whether it should continue past Neasden and link into the Thameslink line to Luton from King Cross. The new Thameslink station at Brent Cross that opened a while back was built with sufficient platform capacity to take trains on this proposed West London orbital line and terminate them at Hendon. Of course, the problem is money, but TfL has wasted far more than this on ULEZ.

The brewer Asahi has announced that it has reduced the AVB of its Grolsch Premium Pilsner to 3.4% from 4.0% in the U.K. to make it cheaper, as a big chunk of its price is duty. What is intriguing is that in the rest of Europe it is 5%. When it first became available in this country it was 5% but it has regularly been watered down to keep its price down. I wonder if we will be seeing another increase in Alcohol Duty in the Budget, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if it and petrol were on Robber Reeves’s agenda.

Totteringham Hotspurs may have a smart stadium, but they also have a reputation of being a bit tight where money is concerned. Kyle Walker, the Manchester City defender, recently said that unusually Totteringham even supply shower gel in the away team dress room, something that normally is only supplied to the home team. But, he says, if a player pops the remainder of the bottle into their bag Totteringham send the visiting club a bill! I also hear that several years ago, when Totteringham bought Luka Modric from Dinamo Zagreb, the executive director of Dinamo asked for half a dozen club shirts as a souvenir. He later discovered that Totteringham had deducted the cost of shirts from the value of the transfer fee.

There’s a whole load of old Royal Navy nuclear-powered submarines waiting to be dismantled at Babcock’s Rosyth dockyard. The lead boat HMS Swiftsure is well underway to being recycled with much of its ordinary and slightly radioactive internal steel having been already removed. Both France and the USA have already dismantled nuclear submarines by cutting a hole in the hull and lifting out the reactor in one piece and burying it as a whole. But the U.K. is working differently and have de-fueled the 27 laid up boat’s reactors, and low-level nuclear waste has been removed from four of the seven boats currently at Rosyth. The work on Swiftsure is due to be completed by spring 2026 and as lead boat it is hoped that the proposed dismantling techniques will help the remaining 26 to be turned into tin cans and razor blades increasingly quickly.

The One Web family of 588 low Earth orbit satellites was supposed to have been complete back in April 2023, but in effect a further 46 satellites were also launched as a flying reserve. Then a month later another 13 reserves were launched. The company has subsequently been purchased by Eutelsat and at the weekend it emerged that a further 20 satellites had been launched via SpaceX. Although Eutelsat/OneWeb have said nothing, it is believed they are also spares. Eutelsat are said to have plans to create a 2,000 satellite mesh in medium Earth orbit but are currently too short of money to proceed with the project.

When Liebore won the general election back in July one of the first things they did was cancel the road and rail building program for any and every project not yet begun. One of the roads to suffer was the A27 in West Sussex. Two projects were hit, the conversion of a single-lane section around Arundel into a dual-carriageway bypass and improvements to the single-lane section around the back of Worthing. This second part is badly congested every rush hour and has long needed a bypass, but it would have to be well north of the town and probably go under the South Downs in a tunnel. The last government wouldn’t spend that much money so opted for a series of upgrades to junctions on this section which is what Liebore cancelled. Now I hear that West Sussex County Council has written to the government saying they now have two of the most congested sections of road in the country and what do they propose doing about it. I suspect the answer will be Sweet Fanny Adams.

Wednesday

Good morning my happy readers to a dry morning in Westminster. It’s a celebratory day in No. 10 as Legohead is off to the heads of commonwealth meeting in Samoa for six whole days. Mind you that includes 27 hours each way on the plane. That means there will be a fried chicken night (or two) while he is missing. A consequence of him not being here on a Wednesday is that the Ginger Growler will be on the front bench for PMQs. I am looking forward to that.

I was interested to read that the police firearms officer, Martin Blake, who shot and killed Chris Kaba was found not guilty of murder in just three hours by a jury. Such a quick result in a murder trial is most unusual, so the jury must have been pretty sure that the officer was not guilty. The thing I was surprised about was that Kaba’s family took out an injunction banning the media revealing anything about Kaba’s background and then told a press conference that he was a lovely young man who had turned over a new leaf in the previous year. However, the Old Bailey trial judge then said that details of Kaba’s criminal history could be reported. It turns out he had previously been convicted of having both a gun and a knife, was a member of a notorious gang, was being looked for for the shooting of a man in an East End nightclub, was suspected of being involved in a shooting the previous day and was driving an unregistered £80,000 luxury car that was used in a previous day’s shooting in South London. Is that what is considered ‘turning his life around’?

Yesterday in parliament some MPs called for that old Cockney favourite pie, mash and liquor to receive ‘protected status’, like the Cornish pasty and Cumberland sausage. I’m not really sure how pie and mash on its own could be ‘protected’, it is really the liquor that is the unique thing, it is a vivid green sauce, which to me looks odd. However, I understand that the colour comes from parsley, so I guess it tastes better than it looks.

Yesterday there was a big fire in a 15-storey block of flats in Plaistow, London. I hear that the fire started in one flat and that over 70 firemen were needed to put out the fire in the tenth floor flat. But what caused the fire? I understand that it was a runaway lithium battery which seem to cause numerous fires these days in electric vehicles and in mobile phones. But it is the ones used in conversion kits on push bikes and scooters that seem to be the worst offenders. If I lived in a 10th-floor flat there is no way I would bring an electric scooter up in a lift and plug it in to recharge in the hall.

When the new Paddington Bear film was being planned the film-makers asked the Home Office if they could supply a replica passport for Paddington as in the film he was supposed to be travelling to Peru to visit his Aunty Lucy. What surprised the film-makers was that the Home Office issued a specimen document to the fictional Peruvian-born Bear in the name of Paddington Brown (he was adopted by the Brown family) with the observation saying ‘bear’, and it even had Paddington’s photo. All I know about the film is that when Paddington arrives at the home for retired bears, where Aunt Lucy lives, he discovers from the guitar-playing nun who runs the home that Aunt Lucy has gone missing in the jungle.

With the news emerging that 1,500 North Korean special forces have been flown to Russia to support them in the war against Russia, I hear that as a result North Korea’s main foe, South Korea, are thinking about supplying weapons to Ukraine. South Korea makes many powerful weapons for its own forces and in recent times have sold things like tanks and 155mm Howitzers around the world. It has also emerged that at least 18 of the North Koreans have already gone AWOL.

I hear that Northern Rail, England’s second largest train operator, has a pigeon problem. It seems that more and more of their stations have been inundated by flocks of the flying rats. So much so that they have appealed to passengers to stop feeding them both directly and indirectly by dropping half-eaten sandwiches and the like. Apparently Northern have tried all sorts of things, netting, anti-bird spikes, playing the noises of various birds of prey, painting areas with ‘fire gel’ that makes the area have an ultra-violet appearance, even artificial owls. But nothing has worked, hence the attempt to starve them out.

Thursday

Hello friends, it’s another dry and bright sunny morning and very pleasant in the sun. I chuckled this morning when I read that a woman had kicked off in Spoons when asked to leave because she had a dog with her. Like almost everyone in Britain, perhaps with the exception of some Muslim taxi drivers, Spoons only accept assistance dogs. But this woman claimed her dog was an ‘emotional support dog’. Unfortunately, this is not a trained assistance dog like a guide dog or a hearing dog, so Spoons were fully within the law. I am available to go to the pub as an emotional support cat provided you pay me in Felix Chicken.

The Ministry of Defence has issued a Prior Information Notice (PIN) for a new loitering munition. They want something that can fly 60km and linger over the target for up to 40 minutes. It must be man-portable and able to work by day or night in any weather. It must be able to send back clear video and linger over the target while flying at a minimum of 100 km/hr. I wonder how many people will be bidding for this project?

RMT leader Mick Lynch and ASLEF leader Mick Whelan have written to Sad Dick to tell him to transfer the ownership of the Elizabeth line, and the London Overground into public ownership. According to Lynch and Whelan rail services are better in public ownership, they are cheaper and better at running on time. But surely this is a spurious argument for these two companies. Are these two trade union dinosaurs being sensible, as far as I know they are both run by Transport for London, so are in effect already in public ownership.

We are going to sign a new defence agreement with the Germans. I suppose that is better than signing one with the EU. Under it they will fly some of the maritime patrols out of RAF Lossiemouth and the German company Rheinmetall will open a factory to manufacture barrels for heavy guns. The announcement says Rheinmetall will use steel produced by state-owned Sheffield Forgemasters, but I didn’t think they made steel, only forged it into shapes. Maybe that is what is meant, Forgemaster’s will produce the basic shape and Rheinmetall will precision machine it. Anyhow the factory is said to need four hundred employees, so it is good news for somewhere with that many jobs coming.

It has been reported that the police officer, Sgt. Martin Blake, who was found ‘not guilty’ of murdering gangster Chris Kaba has had a £10,000 bounty put on his head by the 67 gang Kaba was a member of. This is totally the result of the trial judge deciding that the name of the officer could be released to the public after pressure from the prosecution and Kaba’s family. This is the same judge who also denied a defence request to release the criminal history of Kaba. This history would have explained why Kaba was so anxious to escape arrest and was driving at police officers and their cars.

I hear that the Don is more than a little upset with Legohead over sending 100 Liebore Party members to the main swing state to campaign for the Camel. The Don says that this is election interference by a foreign power and is threatening to go to court. This doesn’t bode well for a future relationship between a Trump Presidency and the Legohead Government. What I particularly like is that the Don keeps talking about the ‘far Left’ Liebore Party.

Friday

It seems to have been wet overnight as the paths are a bit damp. I stepped onto the grass as I thought it might be better, but it was extremely soggy, so I got off quickly. This morning I heard on the radio that 15,071 have now come across the channel in small boats, illegally, since July 6th, the day after the Liebore were voted in. This is only just short of the 16,031 that arrived in the whole previous year. I thought they were going to smash the gangs.

More news is leaking out about the Chris Kaba case. It seems that along with coming to their decision in only three hours, the Jury in the trail found the time to write a unanimous letter which they requested the judge read out in open court. Of course he didn’t, but the letter was shared with both the prosecution and defence and has subsequently leaked. Unsurprisingly the letter lambasted the decision to prosecute the case at all levels including the CPS and the IOPC. The letter said the prosecution was clearly wrong, should never have been brought in the first place and a waste of time and money. I suppose it was hardly surprising the judge didn’t read it out.

The International Monetary Fund, the organisation that seems to regularly get its predictions wrong, has changed its growth projections for this year. It has been saying that U.K. growth for this year would be 0.7%. But having seen the numbers for most months so far this year are higher than predicted with only a couple of months to go in 2024 they have changed the projection to 1.1% this year but are sticking to their 1.5% for next year. I will be interested if they stick with those numbers after the budget.

So, the government are going to ban disposable vapes from June next year, on health grounds. It seems odd to me that they are still going to allow refillable vapes. All that will happen is people will switch to the refillable version. I have a better idea, Robber Reeves is short of money for her black hole, so just smack a huge tax on vapes full stop. It will stop the kids who buy the cheap disposable vapes and raise some cash to help fill her black hole.

Here’s a nice bit of trivia I learnt today. The jam in Jammie Dodgers although looking like and tasting like raspberry jam is not raspberry jam. It is actually apple jam! I didn’t even know that you could make jam from apples! But that is exactly what it is dyed red and flavoured with raspberry extract. I suspect the reason for this is that it is cheaper than making the jam from 100% raspberries. The one good thing is that both the colouring and the flavouring are natural products, so I will carry on eating Jammie Dodgers if anyone cares to give me one, but I prefer crumbled-up Hobnobs.

At the recent Convenience Store Expo in Las Vegas, Coca-Cola announced an ‘exciting new permanent’ flavour, to replace ‘spiced’ flavour which was the last ‘new permanent flavour’ that was so popular it lasted nearly four months. This new flavour is orange cream Coke and is due to go on sale early next year. But is Coca-Cola Orange Cream really new? Coke used to offer an orange flavour called Dreamworld that was another one that was withdrawn. I suppose this is another case of if at first you don’t succeed try, try, try, again.

I have been reading about just how much money the teams in this year’s rehashed Champions League are making. The 36 clubs who made it to the final league stage this season are sharing equally €670 million. That means each team will pocket €18.62 million without kicking a ball. Then there is a prize of €2.1 million for each of the eight league matches they win and €700,000 for each match they draw. This doesn’t count the money that a club makes from selling tickets and refreshments at each of its four home games. I understand that, for example, Arsenal take around £3 million for each home game. At the end of the eight matches the teams are arranged in one giant 36-team league with the teams getting another position payment known as a ‘share’. The team in position 36 will get one share, worth €275,000, the 35th-placed team will get two shares and so on all the way up to the top team who get 36 shares or €9.9 million. So the higher you finish the more you earn in prize money. But it doesn’t finish there. The teams finishing positions one to eight get a €2 million bonus and the teams in positions nine to sixteen get a €1 million bonuses. The clubs then enter a play-off stage where clubs that finish in position nine to twenty-four go into a hat to find an opponent. The eight winners get another €1 million and go into a draw with the teams that finished in the top eight. This means that teams going into the last 16 will earn €11 million, the last eight, €12.5 million, the last four, €15 million, and the final €18 million, with the winner getting an additional €6.5 million. The winner will then earn €4 million for playing in the UEFA Super Cup and €1 million for playing the winner of the Europa League. No wonder everyone wants to qualify for the Champions League, it looks like a license to print money.

Saturday

Morning everyone it is a bit damp with a steady drizzle, you know the sort that blows in your face and quickly soaks you to the skin. So the Israelis hit back at Iran overnight hitting air defence targets and a factory that makes drones. I suppose that the Israelis were a bit clever hitting them on the Jewish Sabbath when Iran would least expect it. Now the ball is in the Iranian court, will they want to escalate the conflict?

I rather fear for the country at the moment. Legohead and the Tottenham Turnip are in Samoa; Robber Reeves and Red Ed Millipede are in Washington; that leaves the country in the hands of the Ginger Growler and the gay boy whose boyfriend has just been given a top job in the Liebore Party. God help us if a political crisis crops up in the next couple of days as we are in the hands of an idiot and an Iron Hoof.

I see that Nigel Farage has come up with an interesting new strategy for next May’s local elections. Reform have written to over 1,200 Tory councillors suggesting that if they want to retain their seats they should switch their allegiance to Reform. He says that many local councillors have beliefs that are far more akin to Reform policies than to those of the Conservative Parliamentary Party. That may well be true, but I can’t see many people switching party.

Boeing have suffered yet another setback in their dispute with the striking International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). The 30,000 strikers are said by the union to have voted by 64% not to accept the latest Boeing offer. Boeing started off offering the strikers 20% which was turned down flat with the union holding out for 40%. The next offer from Boeing was for 30% which they said was their ‘full and final’ offer. The union didn’t even bother putting this offer to its members. The offer that has just been turned down was for 35%. The strike is said to be costing Boeing $100 million a day, and in the last quarter their commercial aircraft division lost $4 billion, and the defence division lost $2.4 billion. Boeing has a massive order book of around 6,200 planes so I doubt they will be going broke anytime soon, but it has been noticeable that airlines have started voting with their feet and last month Airbus received the three large orders placed, taking its order backlog to 8,750 at the end of September.

Interesting reports are coming out of the Middle East where I learn that Iraq has come to an agreement with France to purchase 12 Rafale fighters. But the odd thing about this deal is that Iraq is to pay in crude oil delivered to France. The Rafale is a big jump in ability over the old F-16s that Iraq currently uses, not just in its ability to fly higher, faster and further but the big advantage is it can carry modern weapons like glide bombs, missiles and stand-off weapons.

I hear that Legohead has been desperately trying to find a country to host the 2030 Commonwealth Games while at the Commonwealth meeting in Samoa. The 2022 games were originally supposed to be held in Malaysia, but they pulled out due to the cost so Birmingham who were originally supposed to host the 2026 games stepped in and Brisbane were awarded the 2026 games in their place. When the Aussies realised it was going to cost more than they could afford they pulled out. A desperate Commonwealth Games Committee eventually got Glasgow to step into the breach with a program of events cut back to only 12 core events and the committee putting up most of the money. Now it seems that there’s no one to take on a new-style cut back games for 2030 even with loads of money from the committee. Will the games be abandoned or will the U.K. step in again with a cut-back program in London, Manchester, Cardiff or Newcastle?

If you live in London or its surrounding area I understand you are being asked to look out for Lily and Margo, who are rare blue and yellow macaws who have flown away from London Zoo. The pair were taking a regular exercise flight outside their enclosure and just didn’t come back. The species was thought to be extinct, but some were found in the Bolivian savannah in 1992. The zoo says that the pair are likely to stick together and roost high up in the trees only coming down to look for food. I suspect they might be easy to recognise among all the London pigeons and starlings, not many of them are bright blue and yellow. I’ll have a look in the back garden.

That’s another week done and it is mild but horribly wet out there in the street. Consequently, I’m not off for my afternoon windowsill snooze, perhaps I’ll use Legohead’s chair as he’s still missing. The forecast for tomorrow is warm and sunny, so I’ll be getting some sun in while I still can. Chat to you next week.
 

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