Larry’s Diary Week Forty Five

Monday

Morning everyone and welcome to the first day of Summer. Now Summer is here the forecast is that it’s going to get a touch cooler! I was just coming in from my first patrol of the day when I bumped into Bozzie coming back from his fitness routine. I must say he was a bit red in the face and a bit breathless but he is definitely not as bad as when he first came out of Hospital. I went to see if my breakfast was out and had finished it by the time he had finished his shower and came in for his breakfast. I hung around, not because I wanted to beg any of his Muesli but I wanted to see the newspapers.

The latest Labour MP to be caught breaking the lockdown was still coping it. Rosie Duffield the MP who the University Students elected in Canterbury is now sharing her Westminster flat were her married boyfriend Mr Rough. As he as officially now parted from his wife it seems it is OK for the taxpayer to pay his rent. I couldn’t find any mention of the internet story that Ian Blackford the SNP London leader was the next one on the naughty step. The story goes that he had been staying in his taxpayer funded London flat, but decided to drive back to Skye because he was missing his lover. On arriving she is said to have promptly passed the virus on to him. I wonder if it didn’t happen or if the press are sitting on the story. The truth will out.

A story that was in the papers was that the poison dwarf, Bercow, has had his nomination for a peerage blocked by the committee that scrutinises nominations. For the first time in 200 years the Government refused to nominate him because of his remoaner stance in the last parliament. Instead he was nominated by Steptoe in his resignation list. But part of the rules for being nominated are that the nominee must be free from any possible scandal. The poison dwarf is being investigated for mistreatment of his underlings while speaker so he was out at the moment. It’s reported that two other of Steptoe’s nominations are also being blocked. Karie Murphy and Tom ‘fatty’ Watson have both fallen foul of the same rule. Murphy is caught up in the antisemitism investigation and Watson was promoting the Westminster Peado ring scam.

A new regulation was laid this morning which basically makes it illegal to socialise in your house with someone who is not from your household. In other words you can’t have a friend round for sex unless it is in the Garden!

The proposed new law in China that could make protests in Hong Honk illegal has caused a rush of people applying for A British National (Overseas) Passport. The application papers are down loaded from the internet but need to be sent to London. Hence long queues outside DHL offices in Hong Kong today. Isn’t it strange that it’s own people don’t trust sending their documents via China Post! Still in Hong Kong the local Police has written to the organisers of the annual Candle Light Procession that has for the past 30 years been a commemoration of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. The excuse for the ban is as you might have guessed, social distancing.

I have decided that the last place on earth to travel to would be the Democratic Republic of Congo. If Coronavirus wasn’t bad enough I see they have just had another outbreak of Ebola. They have had a few outbreaks over the past couple of years and it is now several weeks since the last outbreak was stopped by vaccinating everyone in a ring around the outbreak. The WHO was poised to announce that Congo was Ebola free when six new cases popped up in another region. It’s seems to be like playing whack a mole!

The more I read about Humans the less I understand them. Cats are simple we only want to be fed and a place to sleep. Dogs are a bit more complex and additionally expect a pack leader who takes them for walk. But Humans! I have just been looking at picture of them queuing up for four hours in the sun to get into a shop selling Flat Pack Furniture from Sweden. I will never understand humans.

Tuesday

It’s hot again today, but it looks like the last warm one for a while. I can’t say I’m sorry I do find long hot spells a bit taxing

I read that the fourth round of Free Trade Agreement talks with the E.U. starts today. Michael Barnier has gone on the record as saying to EU leaders that he expect the U.K. to crack and give in to the E.U. demands. Is he for real, has he not been listening to a word David Frost has been saying or is he still playing games. Bozzie’s spokeman said this was E.U. wishful thinking but I think the E.U. are desperate for our money and to want to tie us in for two more years payments.

The Government announced this morning that they are going to halt the weekend Coronavirus Press Conference. They say that this is because the TV audience is small. I’m not sure this is the real reason. I think they have a problem getting anyone decent to do it, Bozzie wants his weekends off and so do the main Ministers. If some Nonentity is scheduled it’s hardly surprising, in any case there is hardly ever anything important announced at weekends. I see Bozzie has committed to doing at least one press conference a week.

Parliament is back today from their Late Spring break. The Mogg was up with his proposal to reintroduce physical voting into the Commons. The temporary remote voting rules have been allowed to lapse so the return to physical voting was automatic but old method of voting meant that MPs crowded into a lobby and this had to stop because there was no way they could socially distance. The new procedure is to queue up outside the chamber in a snaking queue, just like outside Tesco, and to walk up to the dispatch boxes and announce their names and say Aye or Noe. The queues were so long they went outside and round the grounds. It was surprising how many MP’s found this too hard and mess it up.

McDonalds opened 168 drive-thru restaurants today to massive queues. Motorists queues built up and got so long that the Edinburgh store closed down again because the cars were causing an obstruction. In Bolton the queue reached 1.5 hours and in Bangor it reached 2 hours. I would have to be very hungry to queue up for that long for my dinner!

A report into Coronavirus deaths out today says that the highest risk of all of dying from the virus is age. 50% of deaths are in those over 80 years old. The next highest risk factor was being Male and the third highest is being BAME. But guess what the BBC News led on. I’m sure you’ve guessed right it was the risk to BAME. So a 90 year old Male is in trouble if they catch the Virus whether White or Black. If you are aged over 80 you are 70 times more likely to die if you get Coronavirus than it you are aged 40. Black people, as well as those of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, other Asian, or Caribbean backgrounds had between a 10 and 50 per cent higher risk of death. The problem is they still don’t know why this is or have any idea what to do.

More Sporting news today, England are going to play 3 Test Matches against the West Indies starting at Southampton in July. The teams will be able to isolate easily there as there is a Hotel attached to the ground. In August there are to be 2 F1 Grans Prix at Silverstone on consecutive weekends and finally the Premiere League Football teams have been told they may play friendly games before the season restarts on June 17th. However, the matches must be within 90 minutes of their home ground, the players must travel in their own cars and they must arrive in their kit. I hope it’s not wet and muddy or the journey home is going to be very uncomfortable and just think what a mess that would make of the players flashy cars cream leather interiors!

Wednesday

A bit cooler this morning, much more to my liking. I shall be able to get back to the windowsill this afternoon. I need to catch up on my lost sleep, as baby Wilf has a healthy set of lungs, so a little snooze will do me good.

This morning I see we have upset the Chinese Government. Yesterday Dominic Rabbit said that China was destroying the “Jewel in its Crown”, Hong Kong. He also suggested that Britain could take in hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents who have British National (Overseas) Passports. The Chinese Government didn’t like this and said it was none of our business and we should keep out. Unfortunately when we handed Hong Kong back to China they signed an agreement that gave us a continuing interest in Hong Kong which they have decided to ignore.

With the announced 14 day quarantine for anyone coming into the country starting on Monday people have started worrying that they won’t be able to have a summer holiday in the sun. A few days ago there was talk of “Airbridges”. Direct flights linking Britain with holiday resorts would allow visitors to move in both directions between countries signing agreements, but this was dismissed. Today it is back. Portugal has always benefited from large numbers of British tourists for many years and this morning they announced that they were in talks to establish an “Airbridge”, leaving the question “Who else is talking to us”?

The Nightingale Hospital in Harrogate Yorkshire hasn’t had to take a single Coronavirus patient. But rather than waste the facility, the local NHS Trust has decided to repurpose it as a Radiology Centre. This is an area of investigation and treatment that has been missing out under Covid-19. It is planned to install a CT Scanner and the facility will start taking patients from tomorrow. However, it will not be used treat anyone who is shielding or isolating and all patients will be screened before their appointments, which will be available 7 days a week.

A week or so ago the Lancet published a paper that said that using hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of Coronavirus was dangerous as it rained the risk of Heart problems. Subsequently PHE and WHO both stopped their trials on Hospital patients. However, in the intervening time people have been questioning the paper. Firstly it was claimed to have the electronic test results for thousand of subjects. But there was the problem, for example it claimed to have more details of subjects in Australia than there had been cases and similar in Africa where electronic record just weren’t available. The company who supplied the data aren’t answering questions. The Lancet has now put out a warning about the original article. Perhaps hydroxychloroquine works after all.

In the United States, the Minnesota District Attorney has upgraded the charges against the Officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck to second degree murder and charged the other 3 officers with aiding and abetting. There was another “Black Lives Matters” march in London today. Initially it was all very peaceful but later on the March tried to head for here only to find the Police had closed off a number of streets. It was then that things including road signs and traffic cones were thrown at the Police and several protesters were arrested.

The Business Secretary, Alok Sharma, became ill while speaking in the Commons this afternoon. He became quite ill and was sweating and wiping his face. He has been given a Coronavirus test and gone home to self isolate pending the result.

Right that’s it for tonight and I’m off to see what’s for dinner.

Thursday

Another early morning. This is getting to be a little to regular, I think I shall have to start retiring to my basket a little earlier to keep up my hours of beauty sleep. As usual Bozzie was listening to the radio and skim reading the papers while eating Breakfast. I was getting stuck in to my Felix when suddenly I heard him laughing aloud. It seem that Nick Motorcar was having a row with a listener who had phoned in and the man was talking such rubbish the he banned him from the program. A pity I didn’t hear what the listener said, I was concentrating on eating, but it was something about the Police and Armed Forces personnel all being racist.

I wandered of to the offices and caught a bit of Pier Moron on GMB. As usual he was being obnoxious in an interview with Rudy Giuliani, the ex mayor of New York. They got into a row about the GKP and Giuliani brought up a number of the mistakes Moron had made, saying how he had “stuffed up” his career on US TV and been sacked. Moron then went into one, accusing Giulianl of using “profanities”. He obviously misheard the “stuffed up” as something else, but was wrong.

I read lots of people’s opinions in the paper about how Coronavirus is going to give us a chance of a “Green” future. Old Jug ears was at it this morning, but what they all skip over is the cost. Talking about high cost and Green I read a review in, I think, The Express of the new Vauxhall Corsa Electric Car. The man reviewing it was driving round a roundabout when all the warning lights came on and the car stopped, dead, in the middle of the road. The reviewer said that the electronic handbrake came on automatically so he couldn’t even push the car to the side of the road. He sat for a few minutes that remembered that his car was highly computerised like his Windows PC. So he rebooted it a couple of times and it suddenly came back to life. It sounds like Bozzie’s Sky Q Box. Anywhere my point was for this clunky electronics you pay £33,500, the equivalent Petrol model is around half that price!

I read that a man has been charged with assaulting an Australian female reporter at the “peaceful” protest in London yesterday. Soofuu Yakr, 26, of no fixed abode, hit the woman, is reported to have been shouting “Allah Akbar” and when he was arrested he was found to have an offensive weapon in his pocket, a screw driver, and some Cannabis. Clearly a nice young man and probably a prospective professional footballer or pop star.

The Government announced this afternoon that passengers on buses and trains in England are going to have to wear face coverings from 15 June. The conditions for travel will be changed to make coverings mandatory and people who refuse can be refused travel. But if people take masks off once on the buses of trains they could be fined.

I see that the two biggest loans given to companies under the Coronavirus Loans Schemes went to two foreign owned companies. The German chemical giant BASF, borrowed £1 Billion and Spanish owned British Airways have borrowed £300 Million. Honda, Nissan and Toyota have collectively borrowed another £1 Billion and airlines EasyJet, Wizz Air and Ryanair have also borrowed £100’s of millions. M&S have borrowed £260 million and Tottenham Hotspur and borrowed £175 million. Even the National Trust has borrowed £50 million. I’m hardly surprised that big companies have taken advantage of free money.

I see that while we have all been worrying about Coronavirus, PHE have been drawing up a plan to tackle Tiger Mosquitoes. They are nasty little beasts that have arrived in Europe from their natural home in the tropics. They don’t normally carry malaria however, there have been cases of zika virus, dengue fever and chikungunya in Europe attributed to the insect. They have been in France for a while, with the first case of Zika occurred recently in France. Now the Tiger Mosquito has been seen in Kent in the last couple of summers but it seems to be only visiting and hasn’t taken up residence. PHE have established a surveillance program at ports. I don’t know what that means, are they checking their passports?

One little bit of good news before I go to bed. Alok Sharma has tested negative for Coronavirus. Night, night folks.

Friday

As usual I have been reading Bozzie’s Newspapers and they don’t make for happy reading this morning. They are full of the story of the German Police, a child rapist and the Maddie McCann abduction. This particular story has been going on all my life and I would be delighted if this is the beginning of end of it. But the story that made me laugh is the speculation in one of the papers that Bald men suffer worse from Coronavirus. The Little Otter has been telling Bozzie for weeks that he is going bald and only has his hair all over the place to hid it. When she read the story this morning she said to Bozzie that if you look at the leaders nearly all the ones who have had it badly are bald, balding or thinning, Bozzie, Dom, Handoncock and Chris Whitty. The one’s with a full head of Hair have been OK, Rishi Nik-Nak, Pretty Petal, The Rabbit, The Gove and The Mogg to name but a few. Maybe their onto something. As a cat I am pretty hairy so I should be OK!

Looters who stole the latest iPhones from the Apple store they attacked in New York have found that when they try to use the stolen phones a message to them pops up on the the screen. It has long been rumoured that Apple puts special software on the phones sold through its shops that renders them useless if stolen. Now it seems that the rumours are true. Basically the message says that the phone is locked, cannot be used, it’s location is known and has been given to the authorities so return it to the Apple Store.

The BBC Flagship news program Newsnight is in trouble again. They produced an on screen Graphic on Wednesday’s program showing that the days Covid-19 death toll of 357 was more than the total number of 314 for the E.U. 27. This was quickly called out as Fake news. The BBC had taken the numbers from the website “Worldometer” and didn’t explain that different countries count the numbers in different ways. Ours was for deaths in all settings. Some of the 27 exclude care homes, other exclude death in private property while many don’t count them as Coronavirus deaths unless the person dying had tested positive, some of ours had died days ago and had only just been registered, all of which we include. If we had counted the numbers the same way as Spain does we would on only 22 deaths!

Still on the subject of Fake news, this mornings Guardian headlines a story that the Track and Trace scheme will not be working until September. Where did this story come from when the Track and Trace scheme has be up and running for a week now. Well the Guardian listened in to a private webinar given by Serco to NHS managers on which it was said that it may take until September to get the App, which Serco are in charge of, to be a the World Beater. A minister said today that App would be available before the end of this month. So the Guardian has put two and two together and made twenty. For some unknown reason David Lumpy was on QT last night claiming that Track and Trace needed 50,000 tracers to work. Hasn’t he been listening to or watching the News, many of the 25,000 who have been recruited are currently being paid to do nothing. Despite the number of daily CV tests being done hitting over 220,000 the number of positive tests is stuck around 1800. This makes nearly 14 tracers per positive test so why would we need another 25,000 tracers?

Another Labour MP, Barry Uphill Gardiner, has shown himself up to be a totally brainless hypocrite this week. A week ago he was never off the TV and Radio castigating Dom over breaking lockdown by going to Durham to isolate. A trip were he didn’t break lockdown and the Durham Police accepted that when he made his infamous trip to Barnard Castle if they had stopped him they would only have sent him home. So this week Uphill was out on the Black Lives Matters March arm in arm with other marchers. Uphill says it was OK because he had a negative test two days ago. Why doesn’t he realise that a test only says you haven’t got it when tested. It doesn’t stop you from catching it from the person he is arm in arm with. It’s no wonder that he wasn’t to be seen in the Commons yesterday. I hope he had gone into self isolation for 14 days.

Saturday

This time last week I was moaning about the heat, well this morning it is distinctly chilly despite some early sunshine. I hear it’s going to be wet this afternoon, so no windowsill snoozing for me. At least I had a good nights sleep as the family has gone to Chequers and left me alone. Well not quite alone as my friendly Dreamies girl was on Breakfast duty. She remembered to put the radio on but it’s that idiot Tennis player on a Saturday and Sunday. Why does he only ever have lefties, Remoaners and GKP haters on as guests? This morning he outdid himself with the Mayor of Manchester and the head of the Met, Cressida Dyke.

Today is the anniversary of D-Day, a day that is usually celebrated in Europe but this year the celebrations have been distinctly muted. In this country limit of only 6 people gathering has rather put a stop to any celebrations. Most years many veterans travel over to the beaches of Normandy, but the Coronavirus travel restrictions have put a halt to that. I see the Documentary channels have lots of programs about D-Day today so people will still be able to get involved from home.

You probably remember that while people in England can travel as far as they like for leisure, provided they can get back home in the day as you are not allowed to stay in someone else’s overnight, people in Scottishland can only travel 5 miles from home. The Caledonian MacBrayne ferry company has been having problems stopping people trying to travel to the islands which are obviously more than five miles. Recently they discovered a party of Golfers hiding in the back of a van. Only essential travel to the islands is allowed and of course delivery vans are permitted. Which raises an interesting question, how did Ian Blackford manage to get back to Skye to his girlfriend?

There was a huge fuss at the end of the road this evening, when “peaceful” Black Lives Matter protestors kicked off. I went upstairs to look out of the window so I could see what was going on. The BLM lot started throwing stuff at the Police, who brought up the mounted Police to clear the area. The “peaceful” protesters then started throwing bottles,  poles, flares, even bicycles at the horses. One copper was knocked off her horse and lay on the ground being tended, while their horse ran wild, and the mob kept on throwing things. I understand that before trying to invade Downing Street the mob had defaced statues of Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. Why is it not on the BBC website? Will there be arrests?

I hear the Tesla are looking for a 4,000,000 Sq. Ft. industrial site in the U.K. for a new Research, Development and Manufacturing facility for EVs. At the moment a 650 acre site near Bridgewater in Somerset is being considered. It is rumoured that Elon Musk’s private jet flew into Luton Airport this week, although no one actually says they saw Musk. It would be a bit of a success for the Government if a new Tesla plant was to be built in Britain.

Sleep calls and it’s my day off tomorrow so I’ll be writing again on Monday.
 

© WorthingGooner 2020
 

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