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

Monday

Good morning all my lovely readers, there’s a bit of a change in weather this morning here in London. It is not so hot, although pleasantly warm, and there is more cloud around. I see the fatty Transport Secretary was doing the rounds of the TV studios yesterday morning, telling how the Government is giving £25 million to councils to enable them to make grants available to install ‘pavement gullies’ for electric car chargers. Apparently, these are for houses with no off-street parking so you can run the cable from your house to your EV. It’s all a wonderful idea, but you must be able to park directly in front of your house. Good luck with that.

The bad news this morning is there is a growing shortage in Britain of Brie, Camembert, goat and other cheese made from unpasteurised milk in France and Italy. The problem is an outbreak of Lumpy Skin Disease in mainland Europe. Apparently, the disease is a virus and only cattle can catch it, but there is no cure. The worry is introducing the disease into the country, not to the population who eat the cheese, but to cows who don’t. However, pasteurising the milk makes it perfectly safe.

Researchers at the University of Florida have been experimenting with using robot bunny rabbits to catch the state’s infestation of Burmese pythons. Apparently, the pythons are particularly fond of feeding on indigenous rabbits and the first idea was to put out traps baited with real rabbits. But this was not clever, as these traps only attracted a snake a week and bunny lovers objected to having the cuddly little animals caged for weeks, not to mention delivery of food and water to hundreds of caged bunnies. So, the answer being tried is toy bunnies fitted with motors and heaters to mimic the movement and temperature of live rabbits.

I have just read an article on car controls and how manufacturers have removed lots of the switches, dials and controls from modern cars. Never having learned to drive a car, some of the things don’t mean a lot to me, but I do remember when cars all had round steering wheels, and there was a cigar lighter. But I think a floor-mounted headlight dip switch was before I ever got in a car. These days, headlights dip automatically in many cars.

I see that Britain and France are going to put the Storm Shadow / Scalp guided missile back into production after being out of production for 15 years. The two countries are believed to have thousands of missiles in store when the war in Ukraine started, and a huge number of them were shipped to Ukraine. The idea of the missile going into production is to rebuild our stocks. But Britain and France have also announced that they are going to develop a new missile to replace the Storm Shadow.

So, Ed Millipede is to reintroduce grants for some electric cars on Wednesday, paying up to £3,750 for cars which are particularly sustainable, but with only 48 hours to go, no one knows, especially the dealers and manufacturers, if their cars meet the criteria. Apparently, there are to be two tiers: the highest one will offer a £3,750 grant and tier two, £1,750. How can people buy a new EV if they have no idea of the cost? As it stands, this half-baked scheme is going to stop people buying EVs and not encourage them. One group of EVs that will not be eligible for a grant is Chinese cars.

It looks like Trump has finally realised that he is being played by PooTin. When they chat on the phone, PooTin apparently tells Trump what he wants to hear, then does the complete opposite. Trump is now threatening more sanctions on Russia and countries who trade with them (China and India?) unless they come to the negotiating table. I wonder if it is going to happen, when Russia, who says it will only settle for all the land it occupies, plus some it wants but has failed to gain, and the dismantling of the Ukrainian government, refuses to compromise.

Tuesday

Good morning everyone, well the heatwave is over and it’s back to dull and overcast and windy. I don’t like the wind; it messes up my coat. I hear Thames Water is in more trouble this morning with its annual results out. Last year it made about £157 million in profit; this year they have lost £1.68 billion and reported a big jump in ‘pollution incidents’. I hope there were no bonuses paid.

The first opinion poll that includes the Corbyn/Sultana party came out overnight and it is terrible news for Legohead. It has Reform leading on 34%, next come the Tories on 17%, then it’s Liebore and Corbyn/Sultana both on 15%. The Limp Dumps are on 9% and the Greens on 5%. I bet Farage is rolling about laughing—this new party looks to have handed Number 10 to him by splitting the Liebore vote. No wonder Legohead was more grumpy than usual this morning.

Over the weekend the NCL cruise ship Norwegian Star sailed from the New York Cruise Terminal in Manhattan on a trip to Canada. But it was soon back at the pier, having suffered a complete electrical failure—meaning no propulsion, no air conditioning, no hot food and only emergency battery power. The ship was towed back and manoeuvred to the pier by two tugs and repairs were undertaken. I hear the ship was cleared to sail the following day. If I was on board, I would be a little concerned that it would happen again, but this time while at sea and not in the river close to the pier.

In the UK, when we talk about takeaway fried chicken it is invariably KFC (I still think of it as Kentucky Fried Chicken), but that’s not the case in the States where they have fallen down the pecking order. In the US they have major competition from Popeyes, Chick-fil-A and Raising Cane’s, and the last I heard they had dropped to number 3 in the rankings. But they are mounting a major campaign to get customers back and, for a limited period, are giving free chicken buckets worth up to $15 to all customers. I bet they don’t do it here.

Unite the Union are not happy yet again. The union that is supposedly the nation’s biggest is about to launch industrial action against Lockwood Haulage, who has taken over the contract to supply forklift truck drivers to the Ardagh Glass bottle factory in Knottingley from GXO. Ardagh Glass make bottles for several prestigious companies including Diageo, InBev, Coca-Cola, Heineken and Highland Spring. The row centres around union recognition and has little to do with Ardagh Glass. GXO had a collective bargaining agreement with Unite, but Lockwood doesn’t, and Unite is trying to force Lockwood into an agreement. Unite has put out a statement saying that Lockwood are indulging in union busting, which is their right to do.

I see a survey in southeast London has asked residents what the area was lacking and could benefit from. Some of the responses were not really a surprise: more parks, a new Thames crossing, direct trains to Gatwick Airport, improved high streets, more police on the street, youth clubs and wheelchair access. But my favourite answer was more cats.

A man has just spent 14 days recording every underground train leaving Mill Hill East on the Northern Line branch and it makes for pretty poor reading. Trains are scheduled to run every 8 minutes in the rush hour and 15 minutes during the day. But in that 14-day period it was just not happening. In that period, some 41 of the 525 departures were cancelled, many without any warning, and 33 were during the morning rush hour. This included one gap in the service of 41 minutes. Users of the Mill Hill branch have long complained that the service is terrible; now someone has made the effort to document just how bad. I wonder if TfL will do anything to improve the service.

Wednesday

Hi folks, it has gone back to being a lovely sunny morning in London when I trotted down the garden. When I got back, today’s feeder had the radio on and heard more problems for Legohead to worry about. The first thing was inflation has jumped once again and is now up to 3.7%. It seemed to have been going down when the Tories lost power, but since the Liebore lot came to power it only seems to have gone up. But perhaps the worst story is the number of Afghans that came here secretly under a super-injunction. The injunction was supposed to protect the people who worked for the British Armed Forces in Afghanistan, and their details were on a spreadsheet that was leaked by someone in the MoD. What a mess.

Today I hear rumours that the Indian airline IndiGo is about to convert 40 of its options for Airbus A350s into firm orders. The airline initially ordered 30 x A350-900s and placed 70 options. Back at the beginning of June, it converted 30 options, bringing its firm orders to 60. Now I hear it has been reviewing its business and its longer-haul services are growing so fast that the predictions are it will need even more long-range aircraft, so it is to exercise the remaining 40 options, taking the firm order to 100 planes. Good news for the factory that manufactures the wings at Broughton near Chester, and Rolls-Royce, who make the engines.

So, the two idiots who cut down the Sycamore Gap tree have been sentenced to 4 years and 3 months in jail each. I’m not sure that is the right sentence for cutting down a tree. OK, they did something stupid, but I see no consistency in prison sentences. I would have sent them to prison, but 12 months would have been enough—when you see the paedo BBC newsreader got away with a suspended sentence and kept his massive BBC pension.

Another stupid statement from Mad Red Ed Millipede in which he says ‘climate change denial’ should be made illegal. How could that be implemented? There would be more people being sent to prison than were free! Personally, I think it should be the other way around and that ‘climate change belief’ should be made illegal.

I was intrigued to learn that the Chinese passenger jet, the COMAC C919, is considered by Airbus as a copy of their A320. But they are not particularly worried because it seems to be a copy of their obsolete version of the plane—the A320ceo—which has been replaced by the A320neo and other versions. Chinese airlines purchased numerous A320ceos from Airbus, so it is quite possible that one was ripped down and copied. But the engines used are the CFM Leap 1C, which are bought from the West.

Today is National Snake Day. Why we hold a day for such a nasty creature is beyond me. A day for cuddly, nice pussy cats I can understand, but not one for horrible snakes—many of whom would eat me as soon as look at me. But I digress. I was going to tell you that the RSPCA is warning people walking in the countryside to be vigilant because of the large number of snakes that have escaped this year and are believed to be slithering around out there. With the warm weather, many will be quite active this summer, rather than looking for somewhere to keep warm in winter. I hear the number of escapes reported to the RSPCA is up 18% on last year.

I hear that MSC-owned Explora Journeys’ third ship, inventively named Explora 3, has been floated out of the Fincantieri shipyard in Genoa on Monday. Explora Journeys have contracted with Fincantieri for six ships costing over £3 billion. Many cruise lines are investing in ‘explorer’ ships as they see people willing to pay more money to travel on smaller, luxurious ships that can visit smaller ports—where bigger ships can only visit if they anchor off and tender passengers ashore. I understand that Explora 3, once complete, is scheduled to visit smaller Mediterranean ports and to sail from Southampton next summer to the smaller Norwegian fjords, inaccessible to the larger ships.

Thursday

Hello folks, grey but warm this morning, and I smell rain on the wind. This story of the super-injunction stopping any discussion on the scheme to bring Afghans who worked for the British Forces out there isn’t going away; in fact, if anything, it is getting worse as more details leak out. A Royal Marine sent out a spreadsheet with 18,500 names of people who worked for us to someone he shouldn’t have, and this led to a grand panic at the upper levels of Government. So, the plan was hatched to bring them all here surreptitiously at a cost of £7 billion that has been hidden from us. Now I hear lawyers have jumped on the bandwagon and are suing the Government for £1 billion, because ‘they didn’t act quickly enough.’

I have been reading about Hinkley Point C, and they are boasting about how much quicker they are building Unit 2 than Unit 1, and with a smaller workforce. They are saying that many of the Unit 2 tasks are being completed in 40% less time. I’m not sure this is anything to boast about. Sizewell, which was given the green light in 2016, was to cost £18 billion and be completed by 2027, meaning the first unit should be up and running by now. Unit 1 is now expected to be ready in 2031, and the whole project costing £47.9 billion. A 40% time saving on Unit 2 over Unit 1 is totally meaningless.

It has emerged that more than 1 million people receiving Universal Credit are not British citizens. These appear to be a mixture of people who came to the country from the EU when we were members and others who have ‘exceptional circumstances’. In general, these are people who were smuggled into the country as sex slaves and the like. In general, only people who have contributed to the state are entitled to receive any funds.

I read that cycling to work in the City of London has increased considerably. In the last two years, the number commuting by bike has increased by 50%, probably because of the increased cost of commuting on public transport. But it has also led to a huge increase in the number of cyclists being fined for breaking road rules. For example, 284 cyclists have received fixed penalty notices for failing to stop at traffic lights since January, compared to just 25 motorists. The City of London Police have also been trying to cut down on the number of phones being snatched by cyclists and say that the numbers are down 30% this year.

This afternoon, Legohead has removed the whip from four persistent Liebore rebels: Rachael Maskell, Neil Duncan-Jordan, Brian Leishman and Chris Hinchliff. The MPs will now sit as independents. The four all voted against the Government in the vote on the Welfare Reform Bill. Three others, Rosena Allin-Khan, Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Mohammed Yasin, have been stripped of their trade envoy roles for the same offence. I hear this could just be the start, with other rebels likely to be suspended in the future. Legohead has such a big majority that to throw out a few rebels doesn’t make a lot of difference, but might just stop other MPs rebelling.

The owners of Nutella and Ferrero Rocher, Ferrero, have purchased WK Kellogg’s, the cereal makers. It looks like they are paying about $23 a share, which is quite a premium on the $17.50 when the deal was announced. Ferrero make a number of other products mainly sold on the American market including Butterfinger, Famous Amos (which I have never heard of), and Tic Tacs (that I have). I wonder if we will see any difference to the products sold in the UK—maybe we will get Nutella-flavoured Corn Flakes.

I understand the first power cable from the East Anglia 3 offshore wind farm has made it onto shore at Bawdsey. Onshore cables will now be run to the converter station at Bramford, near Ipswich. These cables will mostly be run through pipe tubes that were previously installed to take the power from East Anglia 1. I suppose the environmentalists will be happy that there are no new overhead cables, but that’s a load more intermittent power we have contracted to buy at more than the current going rate. No wonder this country is going.

Friday

Hi everyone, still warm on my trot down the garden before I got back for my delicious Felix breakfast. Yet more bad news for the disaster that is Legohead this morning. The unemployment numbers are up, the number of people in work is down, and the rate of wage increases is down. I know the Tories were bad, but at least under them these numbers were moving in the right direction. Gosh, this seems to be getting worse every day. I wonder where it is all going to end.

Researchers at the University of Newcastle have come up with a way of using the DNA of three people when creating an embryo. The idea is that if one parent has faulty DNA and is likely to pass it on to a baby, the mixing of three DNA sources instead of the normal two eliminates the risk of passing on the hereditary mitochondrial disease. In tests where the mother was the disease carrier, it was 100% successful in producing a healthy baby. So, using this technique, it is expected that many hereditary diseases can be eliminated.

Diane Abbotpotamus doesn’t learn from her experiences, either that or she is exceedingly stupid. She wrote a letter to The Observer which said that Jews didn’t suffer from racism. The Liebore Party forced her to apologise, and she was suspended from the party for a year, only being let back in just before the last election because otherwise she would have stood as an independent and Liebore would have lost the seat. She was sent on an anti-Semitism course and warned about her future conduct. Now she has said in an interview that she didn’t regret a thing and claimed that Black people and Jews don’t suffer the same sort of racism. She is now back under investigation. I wonder if she will be the next Liebore MP to lose the whip.

In renewable energy news, I hear that both electricity generated from wind farms and solar panels are more expensive than that generated by gas turbines. But it is the news that the Committee for Climate Change now say that it will be 2038 before so-called renewable energy is cheaper than that supplied by gas turbines. That is probably an optimistic date, as the CCC never seem to get anything right. However, imagine we were burning our own cheap fracked gas in those turbines—renewables would never be cheaper.

The Government has decided to let 16- and 17-year-olds vote in the next General Election. I presume this is because they think that they will vote Liebore or one of the parties they might need to join with to form a government. But I think they may get a surprise, as surveys show many of these kids are either not interested in politics or support Reform.
But it is the idea of giving the vote to someone who can’t buy a pint or a glass of wine at the pub, can’t buy a packet of cigarettes or a vape, can’t get married without parental consent, can join the Army but can’t fight, can’t sign a contract, can’t buy a lottery ticket, can’t manage their own finances, can’t buy a house, can’t get a tattoo, can’t be sued, can’t place a bet, can’t buy fireworks, can’t sit on a jury, and a whole lot more, that worries me. This isn’t going to end well.

Yet another announcement from Legohead, who says he has come to an agreement with the Germans that will ‘smash the gangs’. So, what has he agreed? The Krauts have said they will look at changing their laws that currently make it legal for ‘people smugglers’ to store their ribs and outboard motors in German warehouses. I can’t see how this will ‘smash the gangs’, who will simply move their storage elsewhere—assuming that the Germans get the legislation through.

It has been reported that someone in Arizona has, for the first time in 14 years, died from the plague. I learn there are three types of plague, which is a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. The bacterium is normally carried by fleas that live on the likes of rats, prairie dogs and marmots, and the disease is spread when the flea bites a human. The basic plague is bubonic, and it can be a killer if not treated. Then there is septicaemic plague, which occurs if bubonic plague is left untreated and passes into the bloodstream. The third type, which the man in Arizona died from, was pneumonic plague, which occurs when bubonic plague sometimes infects the lungs. Left untreated, 40% to 60% of bubonic plague sufferers will die, while 100% of pneumonic plague sufferers will. Fortunately, bubonic plague can be easily treated with a 14-day course of antibiotics if treated quickly, but there have still been 14 deaths in the US in the last 25 years.

Saturday

Good morning, my happy readers, and gosh is it wet this morning. It seems to have been raining for a long time, and very heavily. I had second thoughts about my trip down the garden this morning. As it was either going out in the rain or the dreaded litter tray, I waited for it to ease off and ran like hell. When I got back, one of the nicer feeders was in the kitchen and they dried me off with a nice fluffy towel. It was almost worth getting wet for.

I read that in America there is a new type of ice cream van. Instead of playing Greensleeves or Match of the Day, when it arrives in your street the van has gone hi-tech and sends out a flood of text messages to people in the street who have registered with the company. I suppose it saves a lot of pester power, and mums will no longer be able to claim the van only plays a tune when it has sold out of ice cream.

A recent report suggests that the way forward for UK energy production is to build wind turbines out in the North Sea, up to 120 GW by 2030, and use them to produce hydrogen, on site, by electrolysis. The gas would then be piped to shore for use in our gas network. Apparently, to bring that amount of electricity ashore would cost €44 billion in cables and transmission equipment, while a gas pipeline would only cost €1.2 billion. But would Ed Millipede approve?

Again in America, I see that at long last Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is beginning to win the battle to remove oil-based dye from foodstuffs. One of the first to remove the likes of Red 3 and Yellow 5 will be the 40 major ice cream manufacturers who are responsible for 90% of all ice cream sold in the US. They will remove the dyes by the end of 2027—so are in no rush. I also hear that Kraft Heinz are to voluntarily remove all chemical dyes from its foods by the end of 2027. I wonder what colour American tomato sauce will become. Perhaps they will use the British recipe that hasn’t had chemical dyes for many years.

Here is a rather silly thing. The officially most crowded train service in the U.K. isn’t actually as crowded as you might think from the statistics. The most overcrowded train in the U.K. is officially the Thameslink 07:30 Bedford to London Bridge that officially operates most days at 184% of capacity. But it rarely carries any more passengers than the 07:38 Bedford to London Bridge, which operates at an official 68% of capacity. The problem is how Network Rail calculates the capacity of the identical 12-carriage, 1,620-passenger trains. It is a bit odd, but when the Class 700 trains were designed, they were intended to move lots of standing passengers on the run between London Bridge and King’s Cross, where the maximum time between stations is only a few minutes. Consequently, when doing the crowding calculations, the standing spaces are included if the maximum time between stations is 20 minutes or less. The 07:38 is a slow, all-stations train and is never timetabled to be more than 20 minutes between stops. But the 07:30 is a fast train that misses out stations, and one time between stations is 21 minutes, so they leave out the standing spaces and do the calculation only on seats. So, despite them both normally carrying the same number of passengers into London each morning, one is officially overcrowded, and the other isn’t.

I read of a Welshman who was watching TV when he realised he had a spot on his neck and popped it. Two days later it had developed into an abscess, it felt hot, and he felt ill. His partner drove him to hospital, where he was admitted with sepsis. Two operations and intravenous antibiotics later, he has recovered. Perhaps he should have washed his hands before popping his spot.

The BBC at last had a bit of good news to celebrate after a torrid week. Their broadcast of the England Women’s Euros Quarter-Final match with Sweden drew 7.4 million viewers to BBC One. With another 3 million watching on iPlayer and 8.3 million views on the BBC’s live text page, they are extremely happy. Their only problem is that ITV have the England semi-final broadcast rights, so they are hoping England can win and they will get another bumper audience for the final.

Well, that’s me done for the week, and it’s no windowsill for Larry today—it’s too wet. So, I think that it’s going to be the armchair in the entrance lobby, so I can see what is going on and who is coming and going. I hear it might stop raining by late afternoon, so I might get out before the feeder is back with my tea. Chat to you all next week.
 

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