Do you plank them?

Hmmm.

If India/Pakistan kicks off, it’s going to make the riots a few years ago look like a playfight.

Depressing, isn’t it?

Is that not normal now? But landfill isn’t stinky, generally. Mine’s 90% plastic film.

On the other hand, for some reason, my garden/food bin hasn’t been emptied for the last three fortnights, even though I keep reporting it, and it is absolutely bloody vile.

(Just waiting for the locals to be out of the way before I escalate it.)

Yes, absolutely!

Another interesting bit from the interview: they did lots of surveys about why people don’t cook (barriers like: think it costs more, too tired after work, don’t want to risk the kids refusing strange food, already got processed food in the fridge, etc, etc) but a very high proportion wrote in “too lazy” but then went on start cooking after the course + food bags. When she dug into it more, it turned out “too lazy” was code for “I have more than five of the barriers you have identified”.

Just listened to an interview with the founder of this organisation: https://bagsoftaste.org/

Apparently if you do cooking classes for people (who don’t cook), only 8% of the recipes ever get made again, but if you do cooking classes and then sell people a bag of portioned out ingredients (£3 for four portions) then 89% of them use the ingredients, so now she has a system where they deliver the ingredients and there’s a WhatsApp group with a mentor who gives advice to the members.

Clever idea.

Interview: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002b70s

Participants receive a bag of food to their door with all the ingredients for seven meals, three recipes and all the materials required for to take part in the two week course which is delivered remotely to their phone. Since launching in 2014 Bags of Taste has taught over 14,000 people and delivered 100,000 meals.

A view of two halves:

The wind is coming from the lowlands, and the moisture is condensing out as it shoots up the slope to the highlands.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/keir-starmer-is-a-shallow-hollow-man/

And, fine, it’s politics. You take a position for a while, it doesn’t work out, you ditch it and move on, all the while briefing that you’ve been consistent from the start. I get all that. What I don’t get is the prologue. There was a time when Starmer came to believe that men who called themselves women were women. How did he arrive at this conviction? Who did he read? What evidence convinced him? It must have been very persuasive to get a KC to adopt a highly contested interpretation of the law, doubly so when he was leader of a political party and eager to win the next general election.

And now he no longer believes that men can become women. It appears that the Supreme Court judgment changed his mind, but that only returns us to the above questions. How did he get the law so wrong? Has he reflected on how these errors came about? Have they prompted any doubts about his wider judgment?

https://archive.ph/6fcRQ

It’s a bloody athletic lamb if it got over both the drystone wall and the fence on top of it!

I was really hoping the deer wouldn’t find my garden, so hopefully a Welshman!

Either of you got any idea what might have had this leek? It’s in a bed with broad bean seedlings and next to one full of lovely tender kale and broccoli flowers, none of which have been touched!

Any guesses what would do this to a leek?

I’d been leaving it to flower :(

I was proper jealous when you posted that it was too wet to do your path!

I’m jealous. I might have had as much as 4mm today, the same a week ago, and that’s it for the month so far.

This was an infuriating listen:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0029zc1

(Also available as a real podcast.)

VioGen is an algorithm used by the police – it’s a risk assessment tool. Based on a woman’s answers to a series of questions, it calculates the likelihood she will be attacked again so police resources can be allocated to protect those most in danger. The level of risk could be negligible, low, medium, high or extreme. Lina was recorded as being at ‘medium’ risk of a further attack by the man who was her ex-partner. Three weeks later, she was dead. VioGen’s critics are concerned about the number of women registered on the system who are then murdered by men who are former or current partners. Its champions claim that without VioGen there would be far more violence against women.

He is, I get faintly embarrassed every time I see him overseas representing the country.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14628803/Final-proof-party-touch-Labour.html

I was once a member of the Labour Party – but not any more. I left in 2021, the day that David Lammy dismissed women’s rights campaigners like me as ‘dinosaurs... hoarding their rights’. For good measure, he claimed that men can grow a cervix.

I could see then that, on the issue of trans rights, my party had lost the plot. It had veered so wildly from what I felt was right – and frankly what the vast majority of the public feels is right – that I could no longer support it.

The Supreme Court ruling should have been a wake-up call for Labour but the party has shown itself to be hopelessly out of touch once again.

The silence from the PM on such a socially transformative ruling is tin-eared enough. But now the likes of Home Office Minister Dame Angela Eagle are plotting to thwart the judgment in a cowardly WhatsApp group of Labour MPs.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/17/what-happened-to-all-those-female-penises-keir/

The trans takeover of Labour speaks to how susceptible the technocrats are to mania. These supposedly smart people have trained themselves out of common sense. They belong to an overeducated caste that defers blindly to expertise. That is naturally suspicious of what ordinary people believe to be true. That thinks the counterintuitive idea, the one that is hard to understand and even harder to explain, must be superior. They will happily believe that 2 + 2 = 5, men can become women, and insanely expensive windmills will bring down energy costs, if someone with letters after their name says so.

It also speaks to how visionless our rulers have become. Bizarre ideas have so deranged governments across the West precisely because they stand for so little. They have no ideology, no vision for society, and so they latch on to transgenderism or critical race theory or climate alarmism to lend some meaning, some semblance of purpose, to what is otherwise power for its own sake.

Number four of six.