Best Of

Last post on my cycle ride:

I'm back, no thanks to the French Rail strike that led to my sleeper train being cancelled.

425 km ridden down the Canal du Midi and Canal du Robine. Some of it, in particular the Canal du Robine, is tricky on a touring bike even with slightly wider tyres.

Due to the train strike I had the pleasure of having to cycle across Paris on my return at midnight. Lovely!

Toulouse was good, Carcassonne was a bit disappointing (expectations too high). Beziers was good and Sete is stunning. La Somail and Capestang are recommended. Narbonne is ok. Port-LaNouvelle should be avoided. Lovely beach, but industrial to start with then a Margate like front. Actually I would give the Canal du Robine a miss altogether and spend more time around Canal du Midi.

We have noticed over the years the increase in electric bikes, but we estimated it is now over 90% on these trips.

The french respect for bike riders was appreciated.

PS Portugal in 2 weeks, where I might for the first time ride an electric bike.

Why Farage will have nothing to do with Tommy Robinson; he can come across as a voice of reason

Nigel Farage says the death of Charlie Kirk is "a wake up call" for people in public life, "that we have to behave with responsibility."

"It's not just the left that say constant abusive things. There are figures on the right that do the same."


https://x.com/talktv/status/1966084678252654642?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q

Labour MP’s constituency office ‘set on fire’

Message spray painted on Sharon Hodgson’s office says ‘328 days of blood on your hands’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/11/labour-mp-sharon-hodgson-office-set-on-fire-328-days/

A number of MPs have had their offices attacked in recent months. I hope if they are caught they get the extra special harsh treatment, like the authorities stamp down hard on rioting, any attack on a politician / their offices etc, should carry similar extra penalties. It is incredibly important that they are protected even if I don't agree with them e.g. Jezza getting assaulted.

As I said, the left are on a roll of violence at the moment.

There’s a horribly plausible theory on X that says a foreign actor likely killed Kirk

Logic:

1 cui bono? No one in America, not really. This pushes the country closer to civil strife

2 the job looks extremely professional. State level lethality. A clever sniper who got clean away

Putin has made it clear he’s happy to kill people abroad and he’d love to see the USA sink into internecine violence. I expect Xi would be positive, too

Murdering Charlie Kirk could be the perfect trigger event to allow Trump to send armed militia into cities he dislikes and round up "radical liberals". Trump needs to impose martial law to scrap the mid terms. He benefits from this absolutely.

You cannot discount this being a false flag. Especially when MAGA immediately screams that the perp is liberal and demands vengeance. Everyone stopped talking about Epstein as well. Perfect.

The perp was first claimed to be trans...

Transnistrian? So it’s the Russians then.

Why Farage will have nothing to do with Tommy Robinson; he can come across as a voice of reason

Nigel Farage says the death of Charlie Kirk is "a wake up call" for people in public life, "that we have to behave with responsibility."

"It's not just the left that say constant abusive things. There are figures on the right that do the same."


https://x.com/talktv/status/1966084678252654642?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q

Labour MP’s constituency office ‘set on fire’

Message spray painted on Sharon Hodgson’s office says ‘328 days of blood on your hands’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/11/labour-mp-sharon-hodgson-office-set-on-fire-328-days/

A number of MPs have had their offices attacked in recent months. I hope if they are caught they get the extra special harsh treatment, like the authorities stamp down hard on rioting, any attack on a politician / their offices etc, should carry similar extra penalties. It is incredibly important that they are protected even if I don't agree with them e.g. Jezza getting assaulted.

As I said, the left are on a roll of violence at the moment.

There’s a horribly plausible theory on X that says a foreign actor likely killed Kirk

Logic:

1 cui bono? No one in America, not really. This pushes the country closer to civil strife

2 the job looks extremely professional. State level lethality. A clever sniper who got clean away

Putin has made it clear he’s happy to kill people abroad and he’d love to see the USA sink into internecine violence. I expect Xi would be positive, too

Right now it’s clear that whoever pulled the trigger knew what they were doing. They took a single shot with a rifle and quickly cleared off afterwards, before anyone knew what had happened. There’s a lot of Americans with those skills, unless and until they find him it’s unlikely we’ll know the motive.

Remember that he isn’t a politician, there weren’t Secret Service everywhere and only half a dozen local police in attendance, mostly for crowd control. This was a guy famous for setting up a stand in the middle of a university and asking strangers to step up to the mic and debate him, which is exactly what he was doing yesterday. He was a relatively moderate conservative youth movement leader, who had been doing the same thing for the past decade, willing to discuss and debate with anyone on any subject.

Yes, it does push the country closer to civil strife, there’s plenty of people online who think his death is a positive, which is obviously a very unhealthy attitude.

That’s one thing I respected about Charlie — and it’s worth emphasizing because the assassin attacked him as he spoke on campus — he wasn’t afraid of a debate. He was willing to talk to anyone. And when he was shot in the middle of a debate, the assassin didn’t just take aim at a precious human being, created in the image of God, he took aim at the American experiment itself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assassination-debate.html

Starmer takes too long to make a decision once again.

I'm not sure that's strictly true, or more accurately yes it is true these days but it shouldn't be. Bear in mind this scandal is less than a week old. In pre-world-wide-web (say 1995) or pre-smartphone (say 2015) days he could have taken longer and we would have been less concerned. But now it is the time of instant reaction which, I feel, places too much burden on the PM. There's going to have to be a "hand of the King" role sooner or later so the PM isn't distracted by stuff like this.

In this particular instance I think the bigger point is the judgement in making the Mandelson appointment in the first place.

I think this was one of those situations of institutional blindness - Mandelson has attained a semi-mythical status among the UK political class and political journalists as a master of his art (despite managing to have a rather poor track record of being able to hold a government job down). I am sure that on paper Starmer wanted to bask in the reflected glow, and get the same boost as Brown received when he brought Mandelson back to government.

But Mandelson has always been a figure with skeletons. And we live in an era where public figures are increasingly unable to hide from their actions and associations, given the spread of news and information. As such a figure and knowing he had even so much of a tangential friendship with Epstein - and let us not forget that it was friendship with Epstein that brought down Prince Andrew only a few short years ago - it seems incredibly curious on reflection that anyone deemed him a good fit for a high profile role.

From the NTA’s.

This is the great British Public for you.



Freddie Flintoff - Nearly Died
Rob Burrow - Died
Strictly Amy - Living with cancer
Molly Mae - Split up with her boyfriend

Which one wins the NTA… absolute bollocks #ntaawards


https://x.com/jord9393/status/1965884420617023623?s=61

An award show that is voted for by ITV viewers giving a number of awards to ITV programs and presenters - it's not a surprise.

Also Molly Mae's show was a lighter touch with a large audience than the other programs.

I’m having a day of ignorance the last 24 hours. I didn’t know who Charlie Kirk was save a vague sense he was someone American, I’d no idea what the NTA was until this post, and I’ve never heard of Mollie Mae.

Phew that is a relief. I'm not feeling so stupid now. All over my head. I didn't even have a vague sense re Charlie Kirk.

I hadn't heard of him either.

Yeah me neither. Seems like a thoroughly nasty piece of work but it should go without saying that his murder is a terrible thing.
After Sandy Hook though I decided not to allow myself to get too upset about US gun violence. It's like a drug addict who keeps relapsing and OD'ing. People who apparently have no desire to help themselves don't really deserve our sympathy.

Not a thoroughly nasty piece of work at all. A committed Christian (which I find bonkers but it takes all sorts) and articulated the views that are anti-fashionable and, no doubt (@Foxy?) biblically-based. I have heard him articulate support for Israel in terms of Jesus being Jewish and walking on water wherever it was but which is now modern-day Israel.

I have a lot of sympathy for saying committed religionists are weird, albeit, ironically, essentially human (and therefore scared which makes them turn to an unseen greater power), but not "thoroughly nasty".

Whether committed religionists are nice or nasty, and in what mixture, is a question of fact in every case. There are many traps for the unwary 'committed' believer - like the sort who end up backing 'Jesus, babies, guns, whites, English speaking, autocrats, kleptocrats'.

There is however a good deal to be said for 'uncommitted religionists'. The sort, of which there were quite a lot, who thought that the best way of loving and honouring God (whichever god she was) was to live a life according to principle and moral fundamentals, and to assume all power is service and that if god made and cared for all things then in our own tiny sphere of life we we could best honour and worship god by caring for others and doing no evil, and not leaving out the unlovable and the unloved to the best of our finite abilities.

This is by the way, a perfectly possible and sensible reading of what Jesus - and I suspect quite few other religious leaders - were on about. Significantly more likely than that Jesus was really on about the merits of gun ownership and white supremacy.

Yeah but you don't really need Jesus and the whole on the third day he was risen bit to live a "good" life.

Of course, that goes without saying. I didn't compose the last 2000 years of human and religious history. We are where we are.

A fully formed religion needs a bit more to get going than 'be nice'. In particular early Christianity resolved a couple of tricky issues such as the Jewish and pagan rather gloomy expectations of the afterlife, replacing them with hope; it promoted strongly the significance of very poor and oppressed humanity - ie most of it, in the great scheme of things, something Romans were not great at. Also the religion set up the idea, still immensely strong, of a jurisdiction on the basis of humble servanthood rather than Caesar like power.

Despite the epic fails of the last 2000 years, I still like all those things, and FWIW I think each of them ultimately derive from the thoughts of Jesus himself, who was a very remarkable person.

Were they now. Catherine Nixey et al are not so sure.

Catherine Nixey views the Roman Empire as "liberal, humane, tolerant."

It's a view, I suppose.

It's a splendid view, old fashioned and redolent of Gibbon, and reeking of Oxford as the home of lost causes, and entirely false.

Gibbon is a brilliant writer, often hilariously funny, but his view, that the best time to have been alive was the Second Century, would have been absurd in the late thirteenth century, let alone the late eighteenth century. He saw elite pagans as being like him, religious sceptics. They were anything but. The vast majority were entirely sincere, in their religious beliefs.