Best Of

O/T today is a good example of the inherent physical differences between men and women when it comes to sport (no, not the Swiss women’s national football team being beaten by Lucerne’s under 15 boys 7-1).

Faith Kipyegon will today attempt to become the first woman to run a mile under 4 minutes. To do this she will be aided by specialist kit including an aerodynamic skin suit, specialist energy returning lightweight spikes and specialist pace runners arranged to disrupt the airflow for her. She will attempt this on a modern track which returns energy after a lifetime of the best scientific conditioning of fitness and nutrition.

71 years ago Roger Banister did it with none of the above assistance after starting the day at work as a medical student then catching the train up to Oxford mid morning and running at 6pm.

Banister did have the aid of a rousing Vangelis musical accompaniment.

Totally off-topic, we are now 'out of the ground' with our self-build:



(Digger for scale)

Quite absorbed with the build now, hence not on PB so much.

Fascinating. Post more about this!

I am genuinely and sincerely interested. I am thinking of changing my entire life within the next 4-5 years. Trying to work out where and when

I am happy in London as is, but I can now see myself moving....

This is in Dorset with your wife, yes? Are you literally building your own design? Tell us more! If you can be bothered..

That's very kind of you.

I'm doing a regular short blog here if you're interested: https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/blogs/blog/87-contemporary-build-in-north-dorset/

TLDR: Mrs P. and I sold our house, bought a plot, and we're building a modern sustainable, single-storey, timber-frame house. I'm managing sub-contractors to build it. We've used an architect to turn our tight brief into a deliverable design. Early days but so far, so good.

It's a beautifully boring evening, the midsummer sun folds its cards, over the Primrose Hill frontier lands

I eat tuna steak with anchonvy, caper, lemon, sourdough breadcrumb; and I sip Albarino de Fefinanes; and the moments pass

VIBE

Yeah, I can see why they binned the first draft of Summertime by Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.

It's incredible. Found the recipe online

"Crusted Tuna Steak with Anchovy, Capers, Tomatoes & Herby Crumbs

(Serves 1 or 2 if you simply double amounts)

Ingredients:

1 thick tuna steak (180–200g, about 2–3cm thick)

1 anchovy fillet (oil-packed)

1 tbsp capers, rinsed and roughly chopped

75g cherry tomatoes, halved

1 small garlic clove, finely chopped

Zest of ½ lemon

3 tbsp fresh breadcrumbs

1 tbsp chopped parsley (or a mix of parsley & basil)

1½ tbsp olive oil (plus a little more for drizzling)

Salt & black pepper

Optional: pinch of chilli flakes or crushed fennel seeds

Method:

Preheat the oven to 200°C (390°F). Line a small baking dish or tray with foil or parchment.

Make the herby crumb crust:

In a small bowl, mash the anchovy into a paste.

Add garlic, lemon zest, chopped capers, breadcrumbs (or biscuit crumbs), herbs, a drizzle of olive oil, salt, pepper, and optional chilli/fennel.

Mix until it’s clumpy and damp but crumbly

Make the tomato bed:

Toss the halved cherry tomatoes in a little olive oil and salt.

Spread them on the tray in a rough little pillow where your tuna will sit.

Prepare the tuna:

Pat it dry, season lightly with salt and pepper, and place it on top of the tomatoes.

Press the breadcrumb mixture firmly onto the top of the tuna in a thick, luscious layer.

Roast in the oven for 8–10 minutes, depending on thickness and how pink you like it. Aim for just-blushed in the centre - not cooked to death. The crumb should be golden and just toasty at the edges

Rest for 1 minute, then spoon a few tomatoes and their juices over the top, scatter with a little more herb

Serve with cold Albarino de Fefinanes"

Sounds like one of those posh £10 meal deals at any supermarket.

£15 in Waitrose, just saying. And in fact those 'posh meal deals' tend to be riddled with ultra-processed foods, whereas Leon's recipe is made from ingredients everyone can recognise.

Yes, that's absolutely it, These days you simply cannot trust the junk in ready meals - or, sadly, in many restaurants. In recent years I've noticed that the best food comes from quite poor countries. eg Cambodia, and Moldova were both brilliant; France and many other rich countries have sorely disappointed

I think I've worked out why. Places like Cambodia and Moldova ARE poor so they literally dig the food out of the ground - or quickly butcher the meat - and serve it fast. No weird processing is involved, they simply don't do that. At the same time they are just rich enough they can grow and serve good basic ingredients. The food is often naturally organic. This makes for fantastic meals with honest and clever recipes: healthy and yum

The idea is to replicate that at home, if you can. And you can

First mangetout from the allotment tonight. The glut starts…

Some interesting charts in the YouGov poll,

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/06/25/working-class-voters-abandon-labour-for-reform-poll/

Wow. Cost of living and NHS nearly twice as important to Labour --> Reform switchers as immigration.

Has anyone told them about Nigel's plans for a contributory insurance based NHS? Moving on...

We will have no real idea what Reform's manifesto will say about the NHS until about 2029. My guess is that on the major planks of the social welfare state (ie every one of the expensive bits of discretionary state expenditure) it will play it straight down the centre and promise no significant front line cuts, and no change to how things are funded.

Why not a contributory insurance based NHS? We might not have millions on an operating waiting list..and be just like every other modern European nation..🧐

If we were starting from scratch we might not invent the NHS exactly as it is, but it doesn't follow from this that it ought to be radically changed. Re-engineering something as complex and central to our society as healthcare is a massive undertaking fraught with risk and unintended consequences. It would take time (longer than electoral time), serious money, and great skill, integrity, diligence. Not the way to go imo. Better to keep the core model and seek continual incremental improvement in outcomes and value-for-money.

No Big Bang project has ever worked.

The founding of the NHS was, in many ways, incremental on what went before.

When the Great NHS IT Contract comedy was at its height, I was an attending a project management methodology course.

The chap giving the course, a well respected Canadian expert, asked me at lunch if I knew why the projects were being done like this. Since nothing this scale had ever worked using waterfall methods.

The biggest problem is the refusal, on many areas, to contemplate incremental change. And try experimental change in limited areas.

See the repeated rejection of trials of decreasing class sizes in state schools.

Afternoon all

Sometimes you get your beliefs and views challenged head on and last evening, at a local meeting, I had the rare opportunity to meet and have a prolonged 1-to-1 conversation with a property developer or rather a senior planner at one of the big developers.

They are looking to redevelop a brownfield site near us (the site has a gasholder, electricity pylons and high pressure gas pipes running across it and is designated Metropolitan Open Land (MoL) in the Newham Local Plan).

The two big problems from the developer side were first the cost of decontamination. Removing a foot of topsoil across a 22 acre site isn't cheap or easy - deconstructing and cleaning a gasholder isn't easy or cheap with decades of accumulated and highly toxic sludge at the bottom.

On top of that, the second problem was the cost of construction - the cost of labour and materials had spiked in the past 3-5 years but that was exacerbated by Section 106 payments, community infrastructure levy payments and the carbon off-set tax. In other words, London was, in his view, the most expensive place in the world to build.

All that was further compounded by the fact flats and houses weren't being sold at the prices developers needed to make even a small profit so the argument very often came down to economics rather than NIMBY-ism. Could the site be developed - was it viable as a development opportunity?

The paradox, he said, was that the places where people most needed houses and the places most people wanted to live were the ones where the costs of construction were at their highest - specifically, Inner London brownfield sites. Newham isn't replete with Green Belt - the MoL was meant to be a form of urban green belt to provide some green space and prevent complete urban sprawl.

He also told me (and I don't know if it's true) in Q1 in London, 4,000 new dwellings were started and 3,000 completed but the requirement is 88,000 new dwellings per year which in his view was wholly unachievable.

I left the meeting frustrated and depressed - the housing problem has been widely portrayed as a struggle between developers and locals but it's nothing like that - it's a series of economic paradoxes which make sensible development economically unviable and force developers into over-dense applications simply in order to make the sums add up.

It may be there are special issues with brownfield and contaminated sites and the costs of their remediation which need to be mitigated "somehow" (and I've no idea how) but the fact the scarcity of alternatives mean such sites now have to be considered speaks volumes as to the size of the problems and the paucity of other solutions.