Larry’s Diary, Week Two Hundred And Eighty-Four

Monday

Good morning my happy readers, it’s sunny in the morning but I hear it is going to be showery later. I didn’t remember it was a bank holiday until I saw how empty the office was, so I’m starting my day off in a good mood.

I had to chuckle when I saw the Ginger Growler on multiple TV channels yesterday morning, lying with every word out of her mouth. The various channels had all picked up that last week she had, as they say in politics, ‘been on manoeuvres’ and was pushing herself forward as the unions’ favourite for PM. But when asked directly if she wanted to be PM, she said it was the last thing on her mind, and she didn’t want to be party leader or PM. Of course she does, she would take the post like a shot if it became available, then she could increase taxes on ‘the rich’ and bring back the Tramp.

The Navy has been talking about its Future Air Dominance System (FADS). It seems to be based around the proposed Type 83 Destroyer, a ship that is years away from being ordered, let alone in service. Apparently, the Navy is narrowing down the design and it looks rather bigger than the Type 26 Frigate. But the main difference is the number of Mk 41 Vertical Launch Cells. The thinking at the minute is 128 cells capable of housing one or two long-range missiles or up to four short-range missiles. But it will also be able to launch the missiles of nearby modern RN ships like the Type 26 or Type 31 Frigates. An interesting idea is to have what I hear is being called a ‘Missile Barge’—a ship that is literally just a carrier of Vertical Launch Cells controlled from the Type 83, supposedly a cheap way to get multiple missiles into a fight.

Next weekend is the last of the Play-Off Finals at Wembley, the one for the National League play-offs. The final is between two ex-EFL teams that are well supported and itching to join the League winners, Barnet, back in the Second Division. But for some unknown reason, Transport for London have chosen this weekend to close Wembley Park Tube station for engineering work. This is the station the vast majority of people heading to the stadium by public transport use. As these works had been planned in advance, it was decided to limit attendance at Wembley to 17,500 for each team, expecting this to satisfy likely demand. But those tickets have been rapidly snapped up, with people being advised to use either Wembley Central or Wembley Stadium stations, which are usually madly busy as they are much smaller. So, both teams are now getting another 5,000 tickets each, but only for sale to people who book coach travel at the same time. Wouldn’t it have been simpler to put off the maintenance work?

Andrew Rosindell, the MP for Romford, is campaigning for the London Borough of Havering, which is on the eastern outskirts of London and includes Romford, to use the current Ginger Growler council reorganisation to quit being a London Borough and rejoin the county of Essex. I don’t know if this is possible under the reorganisation, but it would be one in the eye for Sad Dick if it were to happen.

A year ago, BT announced plans to convert 2,000 phone boxes into what it called ‘Street Hub 2’ units. About 1,000 have already been converted to offer features such as ‘up to 1Gbps capable public Wi-Fi internet connectivity (within a 150-metre radius), free UK calling, USB device charging, small cells to boost localised 4G or 5G mobile signals, and local information/adverts via a large HD touchscreen display’. But BT have hit a problem—an increasing number of planning applications to make the changes are being rejected by councils. Swindon and Salisbury in Wiltshire, Dursley and Stroud in Gloucestershire, and Bristol have all refused applications, and now I hear Bristol has just turned down an application to convert 27 phone boxes. Apparently, Bristol says the new hubs will be a pavement obstruction. Aren’t the phone boxes doing that already?

Good news today for the British aerospace industry. Vietnamese airline VietJet has signed an order for 20 more A330-900s. They already operate 7 x A330 and have an existing order for 20. The plane’s wings are built at Broughton and the Rolls-Royce Trent 7000 engines in Derby. VietJet is also a big operator of the A320 family, with 115 in use and 96 on order.

Tuesday

Good morning everyone, at least it is dry at the moment following several downpours yesterday, but the forecast is rain later. The news this morning is led by the car driving into the crowd at the Liverpool Football Club victory parade. The most notable thing is how quick the Murkyside Police were in announcing that the car driver was white and it ‘definitely wasn’t’ a terrorist attack. If he had been black we wouldn’t have been told anything. But I seem to remember that the Southport murders were nothing to do with terrorism until they admitted what they found in his bedroom.

Yesterday there were three football victory parades, one in Liverpool for the League Champions, one in South London for the FA Cup winners and one in North London for Arsenal Women, who won the Women’s Champions League. The crowds cheered the players and the trophies, but in North London they also cheered a Chocolate Labrador called Win. Win is a much-loved pet of both the Arsenal men and women and officially lives at the Arsenal training ground, but she is often taken home for the night by one of the players or the manager. Win is a trained therapy dog, is renowned for her laid-back personality and took appearing in front of thousands of supporters in her normal relaxed manner. I wonder how long it will be before other clubs get a team dog.

Air India have come up with a new inflight treat for passengers in Business and First Class. During the quiet time when these passengers are often busy watching movies, they are being served freshly made popcorn in containers reminiscent of those used by cinemas, but smaller. I understand the corn is popped in the galley microwave that is normally used to heat up snacks for those two levels of passenger. I wonder if they do different flavours of popcorn. One of the people who used to work in the office used to bring in microwave packs; my favourite was toffee.

An interesting bit of video has been doing the rounds on the internet. It shows Emanuel Macaroon arriving on his plane for an official visit to Vietnam. As he stands at the top of the steps in the aircraft’s lobby, a fist comes out of the first-class section and pushes him in the face. Seconds later, Mrs Macaroon appears, and they walk down the steps together. Macaroon denies he was having a row with his wife. Instead, he says they were messing around and she gave him a friendly shove. I’ll let you make up your own mind when you see the clip, but I know what I saw.

I hear that the Wales family have welcomed new arrivals into the family. Their four-year-old Cocker Spaniel, Orla, has given birth to a litter of four puppies. Little has been revealed about the puppies—no names, no sexes, and the father has not been revealed. All we are told is that mother and puppies are healthy. As an aside, I understand that the Wales children are in love with the puppies but are unlikely to be allowed to keep them all. So, if you fancy a royal puppy, you might be able to buy one, but I suspect it would be very expensive.

The economists have done their calculations and have revealed that if Robber Reeves is to be able to afford the promised reversal of tax changes, she will need to find £30 billion. The calculation is based on a full restoration of the Winter Fuel Allowance, the cutting of the two-child limit on child allowances, and keeping disability allowances and not cutting them as announced. So where will she find £37 million? It’s not exactly down-the-back-of-the-sofa money. She has two options: borrow it, or increase taxes, both things she has promised not to do. I bet it lands up on taxes.

Tommy Robinson was released from prison this morning after a rather complicated sentence. He got a 14-month “punitive” element and four-month “coercive” element, which meant that he was serving 18 months in total and under normal circumstances would be released after serving 50% (9 months) in July. He is reported to have ‘purged his contempt’, which removed the coercive element, and so he was released after serving 50% of the punitive sentence.

Wednesday

Hi folks, it’s dry this morning after a very wet late morning, afternoon and evening yesterday. Talking about wet, I see Thames Water got two fines from Ofwat this morning. The first was £18.2 million for breaking the rules on dividends and the second was £104.7 million for dumping sewage and not doing anything about it. So, Thames have to find £122.9 million in total. The problem with this is that the company pays the fine, not the directors; they will continue with their fat pay packets while the company cuts back on building new infrastructure or puts up their charges to pay the fine.

I was hardly surprised when I heard that Qatar Airways had cancelled its order for 25 x Boeing 737 Max 10s (and 25 options). These were ordered when Qatar were arguing with Airbus over the finish of its A350-900s. They stopped accepting newly made A350s and eventually Airbus retaliated by cancelling an order for long-range A320s. Qatar then tried to put pressure on Airbus by ordering what was second best for their network, B737 Max 10s, as they had a lower capacity and shorter range. Of course, Airbus and Qatar eventually came to an agreement about their A350s and the order for A320s was reinstated. So, Qatar no longer had any use for this fall-back order and so it has been scrapped. It’s only surprising that it took so long to happen.

The first Type 31 Frigate, HMS Venturer, was rolled out of its assembly shed yesterday at Babcock’s Rosyth Shipyard. It is structurally complete and freshly painted and sitting on hard standing. In the next 10 days, it will be rolled onto a semi-submersible barge that will be lowered into the water. The ship will then be moved across the basin to Dry Dock No. 3 where its mast, weapons and sensors will be added. Babcock say that the ship has been fitted out internally to an advanced stage and its roll-out has been delayed, allowing work to be completed under cover. The handover of the ship is expected to be in about a year. In the meantime, Babcock says that with space now available, assembly work is due to begin on the third ship in the series this morning, utilising parts that have already been fabricated.

Toyota has made an interesting announcement. They are to build the Corolla GR Sports Hatchback at its Burniston plant not for sale in the UK or Europe but for export to the United States. The new production line supplements the one in Japan and is expected to cost £41 million. Toyota believes that it is cheaper for them to make use of existing space at the Burniston plant and the lower US tariffs on British-built cars than building a factory in the US or paying higher tariffs on cars built in other countries.

A bit of a different cat story this week. I hear that cats are quickly catching up with dogs as Britain’s favourite pet. Dogs were always favoured by the nobility for their hunting and guarding abilities. But cats are now nearly as popular. We are a much lower maintenance pet, we are cheaper to buy and cheaper to keep, we don’t need to be taken for walks, and we are self-cleaning! You only have to look at the number of cat and kitten videos on the internet to see how we are taking over from dogs.

If you are heading to the USA in the next couple of weeks, I hope you are not taking an internal flight on United Airlines out of San Francisco. If you are, you might just find yourself going hungry. Two weeks ago, United changed their in-flight catering contractor at SFO from Gate Gourmet to LSG Sky Chefs and it has been a rough two weeks. Apparently, many flights have taken off without food, drink or both, and snacks like bags of pretzels are being delivered to the planes in black sacks. Sky Chefs are believed to have not been able to recruit enough staff quickly enough to handle this huge contract. The experts are saying that it is likely to be at least another two weeks before the problems are sorted out.

The English football transfer window opens on Sunday the 1st of June (after you should be reading this diary) and closes just over a week later on the 8th of June to accommodate the Club World Cup matches. It will then reopen after the matches on the 16th of June and close on the 1st of September at 19:00. This means that the media is now full of stories of who is going where, which club wants to buy whom for mad amounts of money, who has run their contract down and is available on a free transfer (but enormous wages), and those whose club no longer want or need them and have been released on free transfers. I have been having fun making a list of the players my scribe’s team are being tipped to buy, and it is massive!

Thursday

Good morning everyone, it’s a bit damp yet again this morning. From what I hear, it is going to get sunny and warm over the next few days as better weather moves up from Spain. A Minister, Steve Reed, has been doing the rounds this morning saying we are going to run out of drinking water within ten years, if we don’t build new reservoirs, due to all the extra people we have in the country. Of course, it’s all the fault of the evil Tories who didn’t build them. But this ignores the fact that we were in the EU and the EU banned the building of new reservoirs on ‘environmental’ grounds.

Apparently, different Government Ministries are at war over money allocation. The one I had to laugh at is the Home Office, which was famously branded as not fit for purpose by a previous Liebore Home Secretary. In recent months, there have been numerous pressures over things that fall under Home Office control, like Legohead promising 13,000 more police, releasing criminals early and tackling knife crime. All of these will cost the Home Office extra money. The cost of 13,000 extra police is not inconsiderable, nor is the cost of releasing criminals early. I understand the need for more space in prisons, but those released early need more electronic tags and probation officers, and these all cost money. The Home Office has made a case for additional funding for these expenses, but the Treasury wants cuts.

I hear that the one Concorde remaining in British Airways’ possession has been moved out of its Heathrow hangar and towed across the runway to a new spot where it is to feature in a fun day for BA engineers and their families. G-BOAD was undergoing a complete internal refit when the Paris air crash occurred; the work stopped and was never completed. For some time, this bird was on display at what is known at Heathrow as ‘Point Rocket’, the middle of the roundabout at the mouth of the general road tunnel into Heathrow Central. I am delighted to report that the plane has recently been repainted and looks immaculate. I hope the engineers and their families enjoy seeing a Concorde in the flesh; my scribe certainly liked his Concorde experience in Bridgetown Airport.

Sad Dick has come up with a new proposal; he now wants to decriminalise the use of cannabis. The reason he gives is that drug use is driving a wedge between the police and the population of London because so many are being stopped on suspicion of possession. He says that decriminalising cannabis would still leave selling, growing or smuggling illegal, but using it would be OK. I’m not sure how those people using cannabis legally would be able to have got it legally.

Sainsbury’s has finally followed Tesco in announcing the closure of several in-store services. Its remaining patisserie, hot food and pizza counters will be closed within weeks. I’m not sure if the deli counters are also going, as they have done in Tesco. So, in future, Sainsbury’s customers will have to serve themselves from displays in the aisles just like Tesco customers. The line being spun is this is better for the customer — no it’s not, it means fewer employees behind the counters and more profit.

Yet another company has announced plans to run trains from Britain to the Continent, but this time it is a little different. The ride-hailing company Uber says that they want to run trains to Paris, but instead of starting at St Pancras like all the others, they propose starting at Stratford and calling at a reopened Ebbsfleet. It’s a bit different and could just work. But it would be a bit different saying “I’m getting an Uber to Paris.”

Tesco has started installing CCTV cameras over its self-service tills to catch people who do not swipe their shopping properly. The system will record every transaction and replay it to the checkout’s screen if it detects a problem, along with a message suggesting you need to rescan the item. It’s a bit like football’s VAR, except this will only disallow things — “Your tin of tomato soup is not allowed.”

Friday

Hi everyone, I thought it was supposed to be warm this morning — well, it isn’t. I heard a lot of muttering coming from Legohead’s bedroom during the night. It sounded like he kept muttering “Nigel Farage, Nigel Farage”.

The junior doctors, who are members of the left-wing union BMA, are once again voting on strike action over a pay increase. They have been offered 4%, which is over inflation. But it is not enough for them; encouraged by the newly installed Liebore Government caving in to them last year, they are demanding a 29% increase. Intriguingly, the opinion polls show that, unlike last year, the public are heavily against the doctors. Oh yes, I also see the nurses are not happy, as they have accepted the 4% and don’t like the prospect of militant doctors getting an increase far in excess of them.

Over the long weekend, Nigel Farage made a major speech setting out Reform economic policy when in power. It included some spending increases, like restoring the Winter Fuel Allowance, and some savings like dropping DEI and Net Zero. Well, Legohead has said this Reform policy is unfunded and going to crash the economy, as we would be spending more than we would be taking in taxes. But this ignores what his Chancellor is doing today. At the moment, we are borrowing £20 billion a month to meet spending commitments, and the latest reports say that rather than the imaginary £20 billion black hole when Liebore came to power, we now have an actual £35 billion — and growing — black hole.

I hear that following the death of a Liebore councillor there is to be a by-election on Adur District Council. For many years, Adur was under Tory control, but at the last election, in 2023, the council moved to No Overall Control, with a coalition of Limp Dumps, Liebore and Greens taking over. But the Tories are still the largest party, and there is a large number of independents. The last by-election went to Reform, and there has been a defection to Reform. I hear that Reform are also favourites to take the by-election in mid-June. It’s not going to take this council to a Reform, Tory, Independent coalition.

The police officers who were found not guilty in court of assault over a rather over-enthusiastic encounter with an upset 92-year-old, one-legged, wheelchair-bound retirement home dweller, holding a butter knife, are not yet in the clear. The couple who not only hit him with a baton, but pepper-sprayed him and Tasered him, are now on a disciplinary charge. Having seen the video of the incident on the internet, I wonder why they just didn’t throw a towel over the old man’s hand. Incidentally, we will never know what the old man was upset about, as he died two weeks after the incident.

Yesterday it was announced at the White House that Elon Musk is leaving the DOGE and going back to running his various businesses full-time. Of course, much of the media, including our wonderful BBC, speculated that Musk and Trump had fallen out. From what I hear, this is far from the case. In fact, Musk was only ever a temporary employee. He was always supposed to leave before the end of May, as staying any longer would mean numerous congressional hearings and having to hand over direct control (but not ownership) of the likes of Tesla and SpaceX to others.

I have been hearing a lot recently about Russia’s shadow fleet of sanction-busting oil tankers, and it has now emerged that many of them are registered in the Cook Islands. The Cook Islands are in the South Pacific, close to New Zealand, who they are in association with. The Cook Islands decided that they wanted to grab a chunk of the world’s ship register as a source of income, and over the past year have doubled the number of ships on their registry. But like many small nations, the actual registry is outsourced to a limited company — in this case, based in Rotorua in New Zealand’s North Island. This has now caught the attention of the New Zealand authorities, and I will be keeping an eye on what happens next.

Saturday

Good morning, my happy readers — a strange morning weather-wise. The air is warmer but is a bit misty first thing. The forecast says the sun is going to come out and it is going to be rather nice. I do love a nice sunny Saturday afternoon.

Apparently, puffins are on the protected list as their numbers are falling. But this is not the case on Skomar Island off the Pembrokeshire coast. They have just done a survey there and come up with a record 43,205. I really don’t understand how they have come up with an odd number when it is breeding time and they are all supposed to be paired up. Perhaps some of them were having a threesome.

The Airbus A220 assembly line in Montreal, Canada, has suffered a bit of a problem, forcing a shutdown for a while. A mother raccoon was found in the factory climbing up the nose wheel on a nearly complete aircraft. This led to a major search and five baby raccoons were found. The report I read didn’t say what had happened to the family. I hope they were released into the wild.

Why do so many airlines still fly the giant double-deck A380 aeroplane from Heathrow when it has fallen out of popularity with many airlines and, because of its operating costs, many are parked up? The answer is very simple: it is due to the lack of take-off and landing slots at the two-runway airport. A good example is Etihad Airways; they have four daily take-off and landing slot pairs for the flight connecting to their Abu Dhabi International Airport hub. They currently operate two A380s and two Boeing 787-10s, but from early June one of the 787-10 slots will become a third A380 slot, as it can carry an additional 150 passengers and there is the passenger demand. Etihad is typical of many airlines; they would love to add an additional flight, but there are no slots available.

The news has come out that foreigners are claiming £1 billion a month in benefits — an amount that has doubled in under three years. These foreign people are entitled to claim the money when they have been here for five years or have been granted asylum. This is a ridiculous amount of money when you realise we are handing out in two months more than scrapping the Winter Fuel Allowance was designed to save.

Do you remember the Harris hawk that was terrorising the village of Flamsted a few weeks ago, attacking tall people and leaving many with a bloody head before it was captured? I can now give you a little update: the bird is living with a falconer and is now a calm, well-behaved bird. The falconer has not yet let the bird fly free but believes it would now happily return to him when he does.

Chelsea player Raheem Sterling has been on loan at Arsenal for the whole of last season and is returning to his parent club this summer. It has not been the most successful of loan spells for Sterling — he has only started seven games and scored a single goal in all competitions. But it might not likely be the last time a Sterling plays Arsenal, as I hear that Raheem’s eldest son, Thiago, has signed up by Arsenal’s Academy at under-9 level. Arsenal’s Hale End Academy has one of the best reputations for bringing on young footballers and has brought on many players who have made it into the Arsenal first team and others who have been sold and are playing for teams all over the world. Has Sterling realised that a talented son has a better chance of becoming a professional footballer at Arsenal than at Chelsea?

That’s me done, and I’m delighted to say the weather forecast has proved to be right and it’s a nice, sunny, warm afternoon, so I am off to my favourite windowsill to enjoy my afternoon snooze. Chat to you all next week.
 

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