Larry’s Diary, Week Two Hundred and Seventy Eight

Monday

Good morning, and it looks like today could be the last day of decent weather, with rain forecast for tomorrow morning. I was not surprised to see that Parliament was busy on Saturday, but I’m sorry for the MPs who only saw the Bill they were voting on 45 minutes before the session started. It was all but nationalisation of British Steel without actually doing so. However, I was astonished that Liebore MPs denied that the green agenda had anything to do with the problems steel was having. Apparently, the cost of energy and not having a domestic supply of coke were not a problem – it was all the evil Tories’ fault for allowing Indian Tata to sell the Scunthorpe works to China for £1.

A report by MPs out today says there is no two-tier policing in this country. The report is clearly talking rubbish. It is quite clear that the policing of many groups is done differently, and the difference is the ideology of the protesters. If the protesters are peaceful but considered to be ‘right wing’, then the police go in with batons and shields. But if it’s Just Stop Oil gluing themselves to the road, they get offered a cup of tea.

I love the story I heard this morning that Border Force officers with sniffer dogs, whose job it is to find smuggled drugs, are being sent on a course to learn how to massage their dogs to reduce their stress. The sniffer dogs I have seen don’t seem to be very stressed to me; they seem to love their jobs, and all the reward they want is a few minutes with a tennis ball. I wonder if we will soon be seeing a special breed of dog – the Border Force Collie.

More problems for Legohead – his close friend and Liebore MP for Hampstead and Highgate, Tulip Siddiq, is now the subject of a Bangladeshi arrest warrant for corruption. Of course, Siddiq’s British lawyers say the ex-government minister for fighting corruption is innocent and has done nothing wrong. I understand that we have an extradition agreement with Bangladesh, but it is a 2B extradition country – meaning clear evidence must be presented before ministers and judges decide. I wonder what our ministers consider to be ‘clear evidence’.

I hear that the Ministry of Defence is considering buying some more Airbus A400M transport aircraft. It is hardly a surprise that the RAF is short of transport aircraft. They used to have 72 Hercules aircraft to do the same job that they are today supposed to be doing with a fleet of 22 A400Ms. OK, I know the A400M is half as big again as the Hercules, but it has had several problems which have cut its reliability. At one time, only 11 planes were available on any given day, although I understand this has improved. With only 22 aircraft, we are rather putting all our eggs in one basket. I have not heard how many new planes they are thinking of ordering; they are keeping that one quiet. But I’ll let you know when I hear what is happening.

I see that 656 illegal immigrants arrived across the Channel in small boats on Saturday, taking the number up to a record high for the first four months of the year. The 11 boats that arrived on Saturday took the number of immigrants, including Saturday’s, up to 8,064 – beating the record 7,657 who crossed the Channel in the first four months of last year, with weeks to go. I suppose it could have been worse. The French say they stopped 50 people crossing on Saturday, the majority of whom were in one boat that was in trouble and escorted back to France. The remainder were taken off two more boats that were in trouble but continued to England. So, the Frogs could have actually stopped a lot more.

On the 31st of July this year, Arsenal will play Tottenham in a pre-season friendly match. But unlike previous pre-season friendly matches, this will not take place in the UK; instead, it will be played in Hong Kong’s 50,000-seater Kai Tak Stadium. So why do Premier League teams play this kind of match? The answer is easy – it’s all about the money. Not only can the teams try out youngsters away from the pressure of their North London fans, but they are guaranteed a huge payday in a packed stadium with a massive local TV audience. Without British TV showing the game, the two clubs are likely to pocket £2 million each. Arsenal have done very nicely, thank you, from playing in this year’s Champions League and look likely to qualify for next year’s competition, meaning more money. While Tottenham have had a poor league season and are near the bottom of the table, they won’t qualify for any of the European money-spinning competitions next season. £2 million for Arsenal is a nice bonus, but it will fill a big hole for Tottenham, who have reported making a loss for the last four years.

Tuesday

Good morning, everyone. The weather has finally changed here in London. Lots of rain overnight and it’s grey and drizzly but not too cold. Legohead has gone off on a family holiday to a secret destination but has refused to hand over power to his Deputy PM, the Ginger Growler. I can’t say I am surprised; would you want to leave her in charge of your business? I haven’t heard where Legohead has gone, but I bet he turns up at Real Madrid’s Bernabéu Stadium tomorrow night to watch the Champions League match with Arsenal. I would love to think that he and Lady Sponger are staying in a 3-star hotel in Benidorm, but I expect it is much more likely the family is in the 5-star Hotel Don Pepe Gran Meliá in Marbella.

Cruise ships that put into US ports are liable to a health inspection by the US CDC, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. The ships are inspected against a fixed number of 100 items so strict that it is almost impossible to score 100. The new Cunard ship, Queen Anne, was inspected last week and scored 97, which is pretty good. It had previously been inspected and had received a score of 95, so things are getting better. The inspections are tough; for example, on the Queen Anne, one of the problems was that the paperwork for the lining of a water tank wasn’t available – the shipbuilders hadn’t supplied it to Cunard. Mind you, if a ship scores 85 or less, then immediate action to put things right is expected. Over 85 points, and things are expected to be put right by the next inspection.

I must admit I got caught by clickbait this morning. The headline said, “Tesla Cybertruck to go on sale in the U.K.” So, knowing that it does not currently meet our motor vehicle build standards, I wondered what had been done to make it comply and clicked on the Sun article, only to find a puff piece on the EV. So, I know what grade of steel it is made from, that its tyre can be used on the Moon, and it can accelerate faster than a Porsche 911. But what changes had been made to make it street legal in the U.K.? Well, right at the end of the article it said it would go on sale in the U.K. as soon as it met European standards. So basically, no time soon, if ever.

How good is your memory? Do you remember when we had an outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease on British farms? If there was a single infected animal on a farm, every animal was culled and huge funeral pyres burned to destroy the infected animals. Well, I hear there is a Foot and Mouth outbreak in Central Europe. It was first found in early March on a Hungarian cattle farm. Within two weeks, it had spread to three neighbouring farms and three more across the border in Slovakia, resulting in thousands of cattle being culled. The disease is highly contagious and affects animals with a cloven hoof like cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and deer, and results in fevers and blisters in the mouth and hooves. It is not known to infect humans, or, my worry, cats. But the virus can be transmitted by contact, or on clothes, vehicle tyres and even the wind. Consequently, Austria and the Czech Republic have closed border crossings to Hungary and Slovakia, and we have banned people bringing meat and cheese in from the EU. It is a very nasty virus which we have been lucky to avoid for many years.

Residents in the New Forest District Council area are about to become the latest area in the country to move from rubbish collections being made in black bin bags to wheelie bins. Residents are getting black-lidded bins for normal rubbish, green-lidded bins for recycling, and two food caddies – one for indoors and one for outside. Obviously, this is not unusual, but inside five of the food caddies the council has placed golden ticket prizes for the lucky recipients. The idea is to get people to look at the instructions that come in the caddies and to read them. I wonder if the lucky winners will include the driver of the truck delivering the bins.

In Lancing, West Sussex, the Parish Council has just written to holders of annual season tickets at its Beach Green car park to tell them the cost is going up. It seems that when they came to negotiate a new contract to operate the car park, they realised that under the old contract, 20 people – mainly owners of beach huts – had annual season tickets that allowed them to park for £60 a year, and the cost hadn’t gone up for 3 years. As the daily charge is currently £4, this is a substantial discount. The council told the season ticket holders that a previous clerk to the council had made a mistake, and the price should have been £350 a year, but as a gesture of goodwill, they will only charge the 20 season ticket holders £250 this year and £350 from next year. I suppose that when you think that they will be only paying the equivalent of 68p a day instead of £4, it is a bargain, but it is a big jump from £60 a year.

As of the 1st of August, Ofgem, the gas and electricity regulator, is insisting that gas and electricity suppliers offer customers a 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year service to talk to if their service goes down. Some companies already have such a service to report to, but not all. Ofgem now requires this to be a universal offering, meaning that if your meter packs in on, say, Christmas Day in the middle of cooking dinner, you can report it and expect it to be fixed. Reasonably, Ofgem say they don’t mind if the companies come together to operate a common centre, but they all must offer the service. The operators say that a service like this increases cost and will ultimately be recovered through increased bills. I can’t see it costing a lot and it could be cheaper for those who already operate a service to share the cost with those who don’t.

Wednesday

Hi folks, and it’s a strange morning – going from clear blue sky to overcast and raining in seconds before going back to full sun. I suppose this is April showers. So, the Supreme Court has ruled that trans women are not real women and that, for purposes of the Equality Act, a person with a Gender Recognition Certificate is not a real woman. A bit of common sense at last.

In London’s Rathbone Square, there is a stacking car park. Back in December 2022, the system broke down, trapping a number of vehicles. Apparently, it took quite a long time to fix the mechanism because a replacement part had to be sourced from abroad. Reports say the car park was fixed and fully restored on 25th March this year. But the owners of vehicles in the car park say their vehicles, which have been trapped since December 2022, are still not being released to them. It seems the problem now is an insurance dispute over who is responsible for compensation for the problems. Is it the car parking system makers, maintainers, operators or owners? In addition, the owners of the trapped vehicles can’t claim from their own insurance until the vehicle is released and the period they have been deprived of the vehicle can be determined. What an utter farce.

For all you drinkers, I hear a couple of interesting things about UK wine. Apparently, as areas get warmer, new places are becoming good to wine. The weather on the South Downs is now the equivalent of the French Champagne district 20 years ago. Essex is slowly becoming a wine-growing area and is said to be producing some excellent wines. Essex wine makes me think of a lot of jokes, but I will restrain from telling them for fear of upsetting my Essex readers. Finally, I hear that the next area that is expected to make it as a wine-growing area is Hull. A bottle of Château Humber Estuary doesn’t exactly excite.

Yesterday, the Chinese government ordered Chinese airlines to stop accepting Boeing aircraft or American-made equipment or parts as part of the tariff wars. I’m not sure how many planes Chinese airlines still have on order from Boeing – as far as I remember, they haven’t placed a big order for Boeing planes in years. I understand Boeing has shifted 40 of the rejected planes to India, but I bet Airbus is laughing all the way to the bank.

Britain’s new airline, Air Global, has finally put its first tickets on sale. The airline currently has one Airbus A380 and wants to run a daily return service from London’s Gatwick Airport to New York. But the first two flights to be operated are charter flights. The first is from Glasgow to New York, where the plane will wait for 4 days before taking the passengers back to Glasgow. Two days later, it will repeat the exercise with a similar service from Manchester. I hear the plane’s 500+ seats are organised in 3 classes – Economy, Business and 12 First Class seats. The word is that, with the seats only just going on sale, 2 × £8,500 First Class return seats from Glasgow have been sold already.

JD Vance is reported to have said that the US and UK are very close to agreeing a trade deal. He claims that this would be more than a basic trade deal, as it would include things like services. At the moment, we have a trade deficit with the US, where last year we exported £68 billion worth of goods to the US and imported £80 billion worth, so the US is happy to do a deal. One interesting thing is that Vance talked about all the countries that want to do trade deals with the US, but that Britain was at the head of the queue.

I fail to understand what the union in the bin men’s strike in Birmingham is playing at. The reason for their strike is that the council breached the equal pay rule and either have to increase the money of thousands of dinner ladies or reduce the pay of 8 bin men out of several hundred. They obviously chose the second option. The council is broke, so can’t pay the dinner ladies more after having paid out millions to rectify the underpayments to the dinner ladies. The bin men’s union, Unite, is threatening to call bin men across the country out on strike. But the stupid thing is, if they pay the 8 bin men more, they will be breaking the equal pay rules again.

Thursday

Hi everyone, and it’s back to a clear blue sky this morning, a lovely day out there. Yet another record day for immigrants arriving in small boats yesterday – only 705 came in yesterday and it’s not even summer yet. That took the number up to 8,888 this year alone, up by 48% on the same period last year. We are being swamped by all these goat herds and hawkers arriving in the country. If they manage to get refugee status, I wonder what sort of job they can do here.

I can’t believe that anyone with even a tiny brain could come up with the scheme on illegal immigrants that we are about to test. The idea is we will return failed asylum seekers to France and, on a one-for-one basis, accept people with a ‘right to live in the UK’. So, we return 700 failed asylum seekers to France and get 700 back who claim the right to live here. What good does this do? We still have the same bloated number of immigrants in the country. But we have sent 700 back to France to have another go at a small boat crossing.

A man conned £710,000 out of Leeds City Government by claiming to be the Greggs property manager during Covid. He took advantage of Leeds’ lax administration by applying for rates relief from the Small Business Grant Fund, a scheme set up by the Government to help small businesses stay afloat during the pandemic. Aftab Baig, from Glasgow, was part of a fraud which saw bogus claims made against all 32 Leeds branches of Greggs bakery and has been jailed for four years. It seems that all but £90,000 has been recovered.

I read the headline this morning that Type 23 frigate HMS Monmouth had been ‘handed over to Turkey’. It turns out that this is a rather misleading headline. From it, you would think that we had given the Turkish Navy the ship. But when you read a bit more, this is not the case at all. What has actually happened is that HMS Monmouth has been retired from service and anything useful – say, bits that can be used for spares for the remaining Type 23s – and the remaining hulks have been sold to a Turkish scrapper.

I have always thought that we would be better off as a country if we were to invest in hydrogen-powered vehicles rather than electric vehicles. But the lack of hydrogen filling stations makes it impossible. Up in Aberdeen, the City Council, back in EU days, took an £8.3 million grant from the EU to buy 25 hydrogen-powered double-deck buses. They all started replacing other council vehicles with dual-fuelled vehicles running on hydrogen and diesel. Back in June last year, the council closed their main hydrogen refuelling station for ‘life extension’ work. Consequently, the 25 double-deckers were taken off the road and have been so since then. The other vehicles are OK because they have switched over to diesel. That’s £8.3 million well spent.

It seems that Wetherspoon’s boss, Tim Martin, has a gripe over the baked beans served with Spoons’ Full English. He says the beans are often not hot enough. Apparently, if beans are dumped on the plate, besides losing heat rapidly to the plate, many people don’t like bean juice running all over the place. So, Spoons allows individual branches to serve beans in a ramekin, as apparently it keeps them warmer. But again, some people don’t like this, as it invariably means that you get a smaller portion of beans. Personally, I don’t care – I’m not a baked bean lover. I would prefer more meat, like another sausage or a couple of bits of black pudding.

I have a warning for people who use the Gatwick Express – the daily 18:03 from London Victoria to Bognor Regis, despite being operated by a red Gatwick Express train, does not stop at Gatwick. The Gatwick Express service has still not recovered from the Covid drop in passengers, and there are several trains painted in Gatwick Express colours that are not in current use on the service. Surprisingly, passengers have realised that the fare on Southern or Thameslink is less and only a couple of minutes slower. The owners of the franchise, Govia Thameslink, have opted to use a Gatwick Express train on another one of its franchises, Southern, to relieve a busy time on the Victoria to Bognor route. So, if you want to go to Gatwick, don’t get on the 18:03 to Bognor – it goes through Gatwick at 80 mph.

Friday

Good morning, happy readers. Sunny at the moment, but the forecast is rain later, so I need to get my jobs done early if I want any time on the windowsill. Still no news on where Legohead has gone for his holidays. I watched the football the other night on an office TV, but I didn’t spot him. Mind you, that doesn’t mean to say he wasn’t there.

I have just seen pictures of one of the new Piccadilly line trains running through Ruislip Manor Station late at night on test. Apparently, this was the first train, built in Vienna, and it has a couple of interesting design features. The seven-carriage trains will alternate between a long carriage on bogies and a short carriage that has no wheels but is suspended between two wheeled drive carriages. The whole train is articulated, and there are only double doors, no single doors at the end of carriages. Not having bogies and motors under the suspended carriages makes room for air conditioning units under the train, and the ducting runs under the seats. I wonder where the cold air comes out – will you get a cold bum or cold feet?

Apparently, our army have been testing a new anti-drone weapon on a range in Wales. The lorry-mounted weapon is understood to have taken down a swarm of drones using radio waves. The Radiofrequency Directed Energy Weapon (RF DEW) is said to have so far cost £40 million to develop, which is peanuts by weapons development costs. In addition, it is said that each shot by the new weapon costs only 10p! The word is the energy beam fired disrupts the electronics within the drone. I wonder if we will be sending the prototype over to Ukraine to test them.

Scientists think they have detected gases on planet K2-18b which they say, on Earth, are only produced by plankton. So this planet could be supporting life of some sort. But it is doubtful we will ever know for sure, as the planet is a mere 124 light years away and, at the moment, we have no way of travelling at a speed that would ever get us there. The reports say this planet is four times bigger than the Earth and has oceans. It orbits a red sun that is colder than our sun, but I am told it generates enough heat to sustain life on K2-18b. But you have to realise what we are seeing is what happened 125 light years ago – for all we know, that red sun could have died by now.

Last week, a Russian helicopter was brought down some 400 km from the Ukrainian border. Yesterday, Russia said it had been brought down by a Ukrainian RZ-500 helicopter drone. I rather suspect that Ukraine would have been boasting if it had managed this feat, but according to what I have heard, the RZ-500 has a range of 300 km, so that drone bringing it down seems unlikely. So why did the Russians blame Ukraine? Well, it seems the US spy satellites show the Russians brought down their own helicopter.

Interesting news about your electric car spying on you. We all know about your iPhone, iPad and Alexa listening to you and popping up with adverts associated with your conversations and search habits. Well, the military has warned servicemen not to have conversations in their electric car (especially if it is Chinese) as they can gather information and send it back to their makers. But the RAF has gone a bit further, telling people not to park electric vehicles on RAF stations, as cars could be listening in to secret communications on the stations.

A man has received a lifetime ban from Everton’s new Bramley Moore Dock stadium before it opens for its first season. The man videoed himself stealing food from an outlet at a test event and was daft enough to post the video on the internet. Apparently, at the ground’s first test event, an under-18 match against Wigan, the man ordered and accepted food worth £12.50, and when the vendor turned to make the man a coffee, he walked off without paying. However, he was identified from the video and has had his club membership withdrawn, and he has been banned for life. I wonder if it was worth it for £12.50.

Saturday

Good morning everyone, it was grey and windy outside when I popped down the garden, but at least it’s not raining yet – though it looks like it’s going to soon. I had to chuckle when my feeder put the radio on this morning; the man said it’s National Cat Lady Day. We’ve never had a cat lady at Number 10, most of the women have been quite the opposite. But I must admit I got on best with ‘Call Me Dave’ and Boris.

As far as I know, the only major cruise line that stops at Haiti is Royal Caribbean. Many stop in the Dominican Republic, which is the other half of the island of Hispaniola. Royal Caribbean have a ‘private’ port called Labadee, about as far away from the riots in the capital city as you can get, but they are cancelling all calls there as the State Department has changed its travel advice to Haiti to ‘Do Not Travel’. Strangely, Labadee is perfectly safe, surrounded by security fences with armed guards, and loved by cruisers – but with the new ruling, they just can’t stop there.

I learnt something today. Having lived in London all my 18+ years, I have never travelled on the Tube, so I have no reason to have seen this in person. But it seems that the poles that people hang on to in Tube trains are colour-coded to match the colour of the line on the Tube map. So, the poles on the Northern Line are black, the Piccadilly Line’s poles are blue, the District Line is green, the Central Line red, and so on. Now I also understand that the base colour of the seat moquette also matches the line colour. Bet you didn’t know that.

For those of you who are lucky enough to have a cat choose to live in your home, here’s how often a vet says you should bathe them. Basically, he says never – you only need to give them a bath if they were to roll in something extremely nasty. Normally, a cat is perfectly capable of keeping themselves clean by using their tongue to groom themselves. You may need to brush a long-haired cat occasionally to help it keep its coat at its best, and some cats – not me – like to be brushed and purr madly when brushed.

I hear that PooTin has declared a unilateral Easter truce in Ukraine. The truce is from six o’clock tonight local time until midnight on Saturday. I am a suspicious old cat and don’t think PooTin would be doing this unless he had something to gain. Is he going to use it to bring up reinforcements, or to move into new positions? What is he going to do if Ukraine doesn’t also observe a truce? He is supposed to be in the middle of a truce where both sides aren’t meant to be attacking ‘energy’ targets, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Canadians are voting with their feet. It seems that the tariff wars with the USA have caused droves of Canadians to choose not to take their usual summer holidays in the US. Instead, many are choosing to visit Europe, with France, Germany, Italy and the UK being the most popular destinations. Consequently, the Canadian airlines, Air West, Porter and Air Canada, are adding extra services to Europe this summer.

A new type of diabetes has been recognised by doctors. The new version is “Type 5 diabetes” or Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young (MODY). The report I read said that Type 5 was rare, then said there are about 25 million sufferers around the world, so it’s not that rare. Unlike Type 1 and Type 2, it is not caused by obesity or lifestyle but is genetic and is inherited from a parent, but triggered by malnutrition when young. It is very unusual for this type of diabetes to occur in Europe or America and is usually found in Africa and Asia. I wonder why it is called Type 5 diabetes – are there already Type 3 and Type 4 diabetes?

Well, that’s me done again for another week, and unlike this morning’s weather forecast, it is beautifully sunny and warm, so I am off to the windowsill for my afternoon snooze. The forecast now says tomorrow is going to be warm and sunny in London, so I shall be having a nice lazy day. Chat to you all next week.
 

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