Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
Also, there is a chance we could see 5-7 days in a row of 30C heat, which is essentially unprecedented in the UK. August could end up nearly as hot as July, and as dry if not drier
Continuous heat might be even more challenging than those two days of 38-40C in July
Meanwhile in France:
"France on Sunday braced for a fourth heatwave this summer as its worst drought on record left parched villages without safe drinking water."
Mr. Leon, lengthening nights will be of some use, though. More time for things to cool in between hotter days. And hopefully people will remember some of the useful tips from the last heatwave to mitigate matters.
The forecast maximum for the end of week is 34c but @Leon seems to be overheating already.
Boris Johnson has obviously realised he will now live his life in the past tense - he will be defined not by what he is or is doing but what he was and did. That's not easy for ambitious people to succeed and like any other addict, they got a taste of power and they want some more.
The forecast maximum for the end of week is 34c but @Leon seems to be overheating already.
Boris Johnson has obviously realised he will now live his life in the past tense - he will be defined not by what he is or is doing but what he was and did. That's not easy for ambitious people to succeed and like any other addict, they got a taste of power and they want some more.
This is not hyperbole. One model - Navgem - is showing 38/39C for SE England next weekend. Personally, I think this is unlikely, and it just one model. It's harder to break records in August as the days are shorter
On the other hand, this incredible summer has built up a reservoir of heat all across W Europe, and the seas are much warmer than normal. And we have had zero rain to cool things down. So maybe
I just found this picture of fields in Sussex. Look at it. If I did not know I would guess that is inland Sicily
Re: Farage at CPAC in Florida, does anyone doubt that Boris Johnson is going to be their foreign star turn next year?
Johnson is a socially liberal lower case g green so, while he is a venal fantasist, he is not really CPAC's type of venal fantasist in the way frogface is.
Don't think his line in "comic" facetiousness would go down that well there either.
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
While that looks delicious that's under 600 calories. 3 square meals like that a day would leave the average male 800 calories short, more than 1 extra meal.
One of the main attractions of shit Iceland/Lidl food is not the convenience but that they are calorie dense.
1 quid gets you a 900+ calorie pizza from Iceland.
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
In the end it is just a question of self discipline and knowledge. Our neighbours earn less than the minimum wage, they both work but are below even the threshold where they pay tax. They cook meals like this and seem to do absolutely fine. They drive a car they inherited from their grandparents and have just been on a camping holiday. They are extremely resourceful, ie picking up eggs from farms. They bought a flat in their twenties in the south east. They can still afford to take their child out horse riding, at £20 a time.
In the end, you can't save people from their own incompetence and stupidity. It is largely futile trying to get people in the same situation, who are currently buying chicken nuggets and are stuck in various debt traps; to start cooking Tarka Dahl. You can make them aware that there is another way, but ultimately they have to come to the realisation themselves, and make the necessary changes.
This year is finally going to answer a question that has always intrigued me. Will I ever get bored of warmth, blue skies and fine dry weather?
In late March I went to Urfa, in far east Turkey, where it was warm sunny and dry. Cloudless. From there I went to the Deep South, then back to Turkey, then Greece, then Georgia, then Armenia, then back to Georgia, then Turkey again, then Montenegro, and then finally the UK
In every place the weather was warm fine and dry, Or properly hot. The hottest place, amazingly, has been the UK - that 40C in July
So far, I am not remotely bored of "good" weather. I love it. But can that last?
I see that Sunak has said it's wrong for Truss to cut his National Insurance tax hike, so people who work many of whom are seeing wages go up less than inflation can keep more of their own money, as he thinks we should do more to support Triple Locked pensioners instead.
Sunak represents everything that is wrong with the modern Conservative Party. If he wins, the Party deserves to lose.
Add that to his green belt nimbyism when what we really need is houses, houses, houses.
We do not need houses, houses, houses in the already overheated South-East, nor do we need more high-rise flats in London as Rishi proposes. We need to spread prosperity throughout the country, to make levelling up more than a slogan, and to build new homes and even new towns with new employers in the less affluent parts of the country.
You do need houses, houses, houses all over the country including the South East. The South East like the entire country has seen its population dramatically rise in a generation thanks to longer life expectancies and net immigration. That should not be be a bad thing but housing hasn't kept up so many people can't get a home of their own.
Unless you want to start major net emigration we need more housing for the people already living here to get a home of their own. North, South, East and West.
If you want to have any immigration at all, which is a very good thing in my eyes to have I don't know about you, then we need even more housing just to stand still let alone sort out the backlog of missing homes.
Net migration is a red herring, whether up or down. Internal migration should be encouraged: that's the point. It is also what happened during the industrial revolution, and after the war with new towns being built. There's nothing new here. Move people, and jobs, and economic activity and prosperity around the country.
Internal migration is a herring. Homes, homes, homes are needed because the population of the country has risen by about 10 million people in a generation and is still rising fast and the housing supply hasn't kept up. You can't solve that with a few soothing words about spreading prosperity, we need a massive and sustained increase in housing supply to address the shortage and to then stand still with rising population levels.
We also need tighter immigration controls to reduce demand. The biggest shortage of affordable housing is in London by far that is where most new property needs to be built, through high rise in particular. In the North East or most of the West Midlands there is plenty of affordable housing already
Tighter immigration controls won't reduce demand, just slow the increase in demand. Demand will still be there, and rising, unless we have net emigration surpassing the rate of native population growth to reduce demand.
Houses are needed either way. There is not plenty of affordable housing anywhere, there are housing shortages across the entire country which is why new homes are being built in the North and Midlands as they're needed just as they are in the South too.
Native population growth is already below replacement level, the UK birth rate is only 1.65 per woman. It is rising immigration that is pushing up demand.
There is not the same need for affordable housing in the North and Midlands, Wales, NI and Scotland, average house prices there are less than half the price of those in the South. There is also in turn not the same need for new affordable housing in the South as in London, house prices in London are a 1/3 higher than those in the South on average
Categorically wrong, native population is growing.
10.79 births/1000 population and 9.07 births/1000 population = growing population even without immigration.
House prices to earnings ratios are too high in the entire country.
Once you take account of native population deaths our population is declining without immigration.
Once you exclude the distortion of London from house price to earnings ratios North of Watford there is not really a problem
Not true.
10.79 births > 9.07 deaths.
If births > deaths then population grows.
For population to fall then deaths must be greater than births.
House price ratios in the North now are higher than they were anywhere in the entire country, including London, a generation ago.
Deaths outnumbered births last year actually in the UK.
Property prices in London were cheap a generation ago before it became a global city so that means little
Those figures are out of date and from two years ago, at the height of the pandemic. Births exceed deaths now and normally.
Property prices were normal a generation ago, that is what we should be getting back to now, by building enough houses. Your utter obsession with London doesn't answer the fact that prices are too high in the entire country and a crash relative to earnings is needed.
Do you have the raw numbers for of births and deaths in the UK in 2021? I've searched and I can't find them.
(And UK TFR from 2019 was 1.65, so absent immigration, the medium term outlook is for falling population.)
Sinn Féin 36% (nc) Fine Gael 22% (nc) Fianna Fáil 17% (+2) Greens 4% (nc) People Before Profit/Solidarity 4% (+1) Social Democrats 4% (+1) Labour 3% (-1) Aontú 3% (nc) others/independents 9% (-1)
What's interesting about that is that FF + FG are down 4 points one the 2020 GE, and SF are up 11.5 points, so SF are consolidating support that's otherwise gone to minor parties and independents.
When FG received 36% of the vote in 2016 they won 76 seats, only 8 short of a majority.
I wonder if this hot weather is going to worsen the situation with house prices on the south coast of England. They rose significantly during the covid lockdowns when people realised they could WFH part of the week. Now, the beaches are heaving and there is a cool breeze. It is ideal summer weather. No need to go abroad.
I wonder if this hot weather is going to worsen the situation with house prices on the south coast of England. They rose significantly during the covid lockdowns when people realised they could WFH part of the week. Now, the beaches are heaving and there is a cool breeze. It is ideal summer weather. No need to go abroad.
It depends how often these new summers happen, of course
If two out of three summers were like this, then that would pretty much kill off the British-in-the-Med tourist industry, especially as the Med could get unpleasantly hot
That seems unlikely. So far. But this is weird heat now
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
Is Home Economics still binned in schools? I remember it being basically useless when I had to do it - but feels like the kind of thing that *should* be really useful to give kids some baseline knowledge.
As it is, I remember being taught how to 'make a pizza' - which was to take the top half of a roll, spread tomato puree on it and a slice of cheddar then put it under the grill.
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Make Edinburgh the summer capital and we can all relocate once a year like the Queen does, holidays in the Cornish Riviera notwithstanding.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
I wonder if this hot weather is going to worsen the situation with house prices on the south coast of England. They rose significantly during the covid lockdowns when people realised they could WFH part of the week. Now, the beaches are heaving and there is a cool breeze. It is ideal summer weather. No need to go abroad.
It depends how often these new summers happen, of course
If two out of three summers were like this, then that would pretty much kill off the British-in-the-Med tourist industry, especially as the Med could get unpleasantly hot
That seems unlikely. So far. But this is weird heat now
Brother-in-law has just been on the phone from Manchester complaining about the rain! It's lovely here in North Essex; beautiful blue skies, little fluffy clouds and a gentle breeze.
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Make Edinburgh the summer capital and we can all relocate once a year like the Queen does, holidays in the Cornish Riviera notwithstanding.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
If you think there's space for any more people from England in Edinburgh in August, you've obviously not been.
Sinn Féin 36% (nc) Fine Gael 22% (nc) Fianna Fáil 17% (+2) Greens 4% (nc) People Before Profit/Solidarity 4% (+1) Social Democrats 4% (+1) Labour 3% (-1) Aontú 3% (nc) others/independents 9% (-1)
What's interesting about that is that FF + FG are down 4 points one the 2020 GE, and SF are up 11.5 points, so SF are consolidating support that's otherwise gone to minor parties and independents.
When FG received 36% of the vote in 2016 they won 76 seats, only 8 short of a majority.
Sinn Fein being ganged up on last time must have had an impact. I hate the idea of them taking power anywhere, but it was clearly the democratic thing. And they will do next time.
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Make Edinburgh the summer capital and we can all relocate once a year like the Queen does, holidays in the Cornish Riviera notwithstanding.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
If you think there's space for any more people from England in Edinburgh in August, you've obviously not been.
Perth is the obvious choice (and could do with it).
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Make Edinburgh the summer capital and we can all relocate once a year like the Queen does, holidays in the Cornish Riviera notwithstanding.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
If you think there's space for any more people from England in Edinburgh in August, you've obviously not been.
I go every year. Plenty of room on that hill and the small park nearby for blocks of flats.
I wonder if this hot weather is going to worsen the situation with house prices on the south coast of England. They rose significantly during the covid lockdowns when people realised they could WFH part of the week. Now, the beaches are heaving and there is a cool breeze. It is ideal summer weather. No need to go abroad.
It depends how often these new summers happen, of course
If two out of three summers were like this, then that would pretty much kill off the British-in-the-Med tourist industry, especially as the Med could get unpleasantly hot
That seems unlikely. So far. But this is weird heat now
Brother-in-law has just been on the phone from Manchester complaining about the rain! It's lovely here in North Essex; beautiful blue skies, little fluffy clouds and a gentle breeze.
Also, there is a chance we could see 5-7 days in a row of 30C heat, which is essentially unprecedented in the UK. August could end up nearly as hot as July, and as dry if not drier
Continuous heat might be even more challenging than those two days of 38-40C in July
Meanwhile in France:
"France on Sunday braced for a fourth heatwave this summer as its worst drought on record left parched villages without safe drinking water."
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
Is Home Economics still binned in schools? I remember it being basically useless when I had to do it - but feels like the kind of thing that *should* be really useful to give kids some baseline knowledge.
As it is, I remember being taught how to 'make a pizza' - which was to take the top half of a roll, spread tomato puree on it and a slice of cheddar then put it under the grill.
Plus the “classic” of cheese and potato pie. Which is mash with cheese in it, chucked in the oven with grated cheese on top.
Also, there is a chance we could see 5-7 days in a row of 30C heat, which is essentially unprecedented in the UK. August could end up nearly as hot as July, and as dry if not drier
Continuous heat might be even more challenging than those two days of 38-40C in July
Meanwhile in France:
"France on Sunday braced for a fourth heatwave this summer as its worst drought on record left parched villages without safe drinking water."
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
Is Home Economics still binned in schools? I remember it being basically useless when I had to do it - but feels like the kind of thing that *should* be really useful to give kids some baseline knowledge.
As it is, I remember being taught how to 'make a pizza' - which was to take the top half of a roll, spread tomato puree on it and a slice of cheddar then put it under the grill.
Some of is definitely laziness.
I have lots of eggs in the fridge but so often I look in there and go 'meh, nothing to eat'.
I wonder if this hot weather is going to worsen the situation with house prices on the south coast of England. They rose significantly during the covid lockdowns when people realised they could WFH part of the week. Now, the beaches are heaving and there is a cool breeze. It is ideal summer weather. No need to go abroad.
It depends how often these new summers happen, of course
If two out of three summers were like this, then that would pretty much kill off the British-in-the-Med tourist industry, especially as the Med could get unpleasantly hot
That seems unlikely. So far. But this is weird heat now
It’s a real life taster of why a two degree increase globally (where I think we’ll end up post Glasgow and with unforeseen tech help) will be fine for the U.K. with a bit more aircon and more reservoirs. The wine will get even better and we gain tomatoes and olives.
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
In the end it is just a question of self discipline and knowledge. Our neighbours earn less than the minimum wage, they both work but are below even the threshold where they pay tax. They cook meals like this and seem to do absolutely fine. They drive a car they inherited from their grandparents and have just been on a camping holiday. They are extremely resourceful, ie picking up eggs from farms. They bought a flat in their twenties in the south east. They can still afford to take their child out horse riding, at £20 a time.
In the end, you can't save people from their own incompetence and stupidity. It is largely futile trying to get people in the same situation, who are currently buying chicken nuggets and are stuck in various debt traps; to start cooking Tarka Dahl. You can make them aware that there is another way, but ultimately they have to come to the realisation themselves, and make the necessary changes.
Probably because it relies upon motivation and discipline, a bit like exercise I guess.
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Make Edinburgh the summer capital and we can all relocate once a year like the Queen does, holidays in the Cornish Riviera notwithstanding.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
Quite a lot of English luvvies already decamp to Edinburgh (Covid unpleasantness aside) in August. Difficult to say how they’d break now after 8 years of shitshow.
Also, there is a chance we could see 5-7 days in a row of 30C heat, which is essentially unprecedented in the UK. August could end up nearly as hot as July, and as dry if not drier
Continuous heat might be even more challenging than those two days of 38-40C in July
Meanwhile in France:
"France on Sunday braced for a fourth heatwave this summer as its worst drought on record left parched villages without safe drinking water."
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Make Edinburgh the summer capital and we can all relocate once a year like the Queen does, holidays in the Cornish Riviera notwithstanding.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
In return, we will move down to London for some summer weather, take over Westminster, and vote through Scottish independence.
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
Is Home Economics still binned in schools? I remember it being basically useless when I had to do it - but feels like the kind of thing that *should* be really useful to give kids some baseline knowledge.
As it is, I remember being taught how to 'make a pizza' - which was to take the top half of a roll, spread tomato puree on it and a slice of cheddar then put it under the grill.
Some of is definitely laziness.
I have lots of eggs in the fridge but so often I look in there and go 'meh, nothing to eat'.
The only way I can successfully stick to my brutal diet (9 pounds down now!) is by having absolutely NOTHING to eat in my flat, apart from spices, oils, vinegars, powders, pickles, etc
At about 10pm when my willpower crumbles, you can find me nibbling raw Kampot peppercorns, or having a tragic spoonful of sauerkraut. It works
Also, there is a chance we could see 5-7 days in a row of 30C heat, which is essentially unprecedented in the UK. August could end up nearly as hot as July, and as dry if not drier
Continuous heat might be even more challenging than those two days of 38-40C in July
Meanwhile in France:
"France on Sunday braced for a fourth heatwave this summer as its worst drought on record left parched villages without safe drinking water."
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
While that looks delicious that's under 600 calories. 3 square meals like that a day would leave the average male 800 calories short, more than 1 extra meal.
One of the main attractions of shit Iceland/Lidl food is not the convenience but that they are calorie dense.
1 quid gets you a 900+ calorie pizza from Iceland.
Chapatti or bread with it?
Either way, it's better than fricking Huel which too many of my friends immiserate themselves on.
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Make Edinburgh the summer capital and we can all relocate once a year like the Queen does, holidays in the Cornish Riviera notwithstanding.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
Quite a lot of English luvvies already decamp to Edinburgh (Covid unpleasantness aside) in August. Difficult to say how they’d break now after 8 years of shitshow.
Oh come on. Each year I reckon only 50-60% of the shows I see at the Fringe are shit.
I wonder if this hot weather is going to worsen the situation with house prices on the south coast of England. They rose significantly during the covid lockdowns when people realised they could WFH part of the week. Now, the beaches are heaving and there is a cool breeze. It is ideal summer weather. No need to go abroad.
It depends how often these new summers happen, of course
If two out of three summers were like this, then that would pretty much kill off the British-in-the-Med tourist industry, especially as the Med could get unpleasantly hot
That seems unlikely. So far. But this is weird heat now
It’s a real life taster of why a two degree increase globally (where I think we’ll end up post Glasgow and with unforeseen tech help) will be fine for the U.K. with a bit more aircon and more reservoirs. The wine will get even better and we gain tomatoes and olives.
And indigenous French as well as transients piling into dinghies to come over here
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Make Edinburgh the summer capital and we can all relocate once a year like the Queen does, holidays in the Cornish Riviera notwithstanding.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
In return, we will move down to London for some summer weather, take over Westminster, and vote through Scottish independence.
Troubling. Like house swapping for countries. We’d get back to find the nukes gone and red wine stains on the sofa.
Also, there is a chance we could see 5-7 days in a row of 30C heat, which is essentially unprecedented in the UK. August could end up nearly as hot as July, and as dry if not drier
Continuous heat might be even more challenging than those two days of 38-40C in July
Meanwhile in France:
"France on Sunday braced for a fourth heatwave this summer as its worst drought on record left parched villages without safe drinking water."
I wonder if this hot weather is going to worsen the situation with house prices on the south coast of England. They rose significantly during the covid lockdowns when people realised they could WFH part of the week. Now, the beaches are heaving and there is a cool breeze. It is ideal summer weather. No need to go abroad.
It depends how often these new summers happen, of course
If two out of three summers were like this, then that would pretty much kill off the British-in-the-Med tourist industry, especially as the Med could get unpleasantly hot
That seems unlikely. So far. But this is weird heat now
It’s a real life taster of why a two degree increase globally (where I think we’ll end up post Glasgow and with unforeseen tech help) will be fine for the U.K. with a bit more aircon and more reservoirs. The wine will get even better and we gain tomatoes and olives.
And indigenous French as well as transients piling into dinghies to come over here
So it's really bad news then? @TSE will actually explode.
I wonder if this hot weather is going to worsen the situation with house prices on the south coast of England. They rose significantly during the covid lockdowns when people realised they could WFH part of the week. Now, the beaches are heaving and there is a cool breeze. It is ideal summer weather. No need to go abroad.
It depends how often these new summers happen, of course
If two out of three summers were like this, then that would pretty much kill off the British-in-the-Med tourist industry, especially as the Med could get unpleasantly hot
That seems unlikely. So far. But this is weird heat now
It’s a real life taster of why a two degree increase globally (where I think we’ll end up post Glasgow and with unforeseen tech help) will be fine for the U.K. with a bit more aircon and more reservoirs. The wine will get even better and we gain tomatoes and olives.
And indigenous French as well as transients piling into dinghies to come over here
Also, there is a chance we could see 5-7 days in a row of 30C heat, which is essentially unprecedented in the UK. August could end up nearly as hot as July, and as dry if not drier
Continuous heat might be even more challenging than those two days of 38-40C in July
Meanwhile in France:
"France on Sunday braced for a fourth heatwave this summer as its worst drought on record left parched villages without safe drinking water."
Boris will stay as Prince across the Water. If his successor slips up then he will pounce. He still was the preferred choice over both Truss and Sunak in polls of 2019 Tory voters and Tory members
Neither you nor Johnson get it.
He has been defenestrated as an out of touch chancer, patron to, and of scoundrels and is now considered a national security threat.
So you're saying he's a dead-cert for the House of Lords then?
Sinn Féin 36% (nc) Fine Gael 22% (nc) Fianna Fáil 17% (+2) Greens 4% (nc) People Before Profit/Solidarity 4% (+1) Social Democrats 4% (+1) Labour 3% (-1) Aontú 3% (nc) others/independents 9% (-1)
What's interesting about that is that FF + FG are down 4 points one the 2020 GE, and SF are up 11.5 points, so SF are consolidating support that's otherwise gone to minor parties and independents.
When FG received 36% of the vote in 2016 they won 76 seats, only 8 short of a majority.
With a potential SF government I worry more for the European Union than the UK. They're going to be a nightmare in the European Council while the UK gov can mostly ignore them.
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Newent wine, I trust?
Couple of friends who were invited to attend our Diamond wedding celebration last month, but were unable to, turned up yesterday with a gift of a bottle of Nyetimber for us!
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
Is Home Economics still binned in schools? I remember it being basically useless when I had to do it - but feels like the kind of thing that *should* be really useful to give kids some baseline knowledge.
As it is, I remember being taught how to 'make a pizza' - which was to take the top half of a roll, spread tomato puree on it and a slice of cheddar then put it under the grill.
Some of is definitely laziness.
I have lots of eggs in the fridge but so often I look in there and go 'meh, nothing to eat'.
Are we in danger of starting a 'should you keep eggs in the fridge?' discussion?
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
Is Home Economics still binned in schools? I remember it being basically useless when I had to do it - but feels like the kind of thing that *should* be really useful to give kids some baseline knowledge.
As it is, I remember being taught how to 'make a pizza' - which was to take the top half of a roll, spread tomato puree on it and a slice of cheddar then put it under the grill.
Some of is definitely laziness.
I have lots of eggs in the fridge but so often I look in there and go 'meh, nothing to eat'.
The only way I can successfully stick to my brutal diet (9 pounds down now!) is by having absolutely NOTHING to eat in my flat, apart from spices, oils, vinegars, powders, pickles, etc
At about 10pm when my willpower crumbles, you can find me nibbling raw Kampot peppercorns, or having a tragic spoonful of sauerkraut. It works
That's starvation and whilst I'm sure it sheds the pounds I'm not sure any doctor would recommend it.
Casino's quip about early summer 1940 does raise an intriguing question. Had pb existed then under the Asquthian benevolence of Sir Michael Fortesque Cavendish-Smithson Bt, how many of our number would have counselled for an 'honourable' peace with Germany, rather than persist with an unwinnable war under the erratic, unscrupulous adventurer Churchill, who only months previously had lost Norway?
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
Is Home Economics still binned in schools? I remember it being basically useless when I had to do it - but feels like the kind of thing that *should* be really useful to give kids some baseline knowledge.
As it is, I remember being taught how to 'make a pizza' - which was to take the top half of a roll, spread tomato puree on it and a slice of cheddar then put it under the grill.
Some of is definitely laziness.
I have lots of eggs in the fridge but so often I look in there and go 'meh, nothing to eat'.
The only way I can successfully stick to my brutal diet (9 pounds down now!) is by having absolutely NOTHING to eat in my flat, apart from spices, oils, vinegars, powders, pickles, etc
At about 10pm when my willpower crumbles, you can find me nibbling raw Kampot peppercorns, or having a tragic spoonful of sauerkraut. It works
That's starvation and whilst I'm sure it sheds the pounds I'm not sure any doctor would recommend it.
I've said this before, and so I'll say it again. I've done this several times and I am quite used to it. You can train yourself to withstand hunger. I also like the discipline and control. And the weight falls away
The human body is designed for periods of famine. That's why we have fat reserves in the first place
I see that Sunak has said it's wrong for Truss to cut his National Insurance tax hike, so people who work many of whom are seeing wages go up less than inflation can keep more of their own money, as he thinks we should do more to support Triple Locked pensioners instead.
Sunak represents everything that is wrong with the modern Conservative Party. If he wins, the Party deserves to lose.
Add that to his green belt nimbyism when what we really need is houses, houses, houses.
We do not need houses, houses, houses in the already overheated South-East, nor do we need more high-rise flats in London as Rishi proposes. We need to spread prosperity throughout the country, to make levelling up more than a slogan, and to build new homes and even new towns with new employers in the less affluent parts of the country.
You do need houses, houses, houses all over the country including the South East. The South East like the entire country has seen its population dramatically rise in a generation thanks to longer life expectancies and net immigration. That should not be be a bad thing but housing hasn't kept up so many people can't get a home of their own.
Unless you want to start major net emigration we need more housing for the people already living here to get a home of their own. North, South, East and West.
If you want to have any immigration at all, which is a very good thing in my eyes to have I don't know about you, then we need even more housing just to stand still let alone sort out the backlog of missing homes.
Net migration is a red herring, whether up or down. Internal migration should be encouraged: that's the point. It is also what happened during the industrial revolution, and after the war with new towns being built. There's nothing new here. Move people, and jobs, and economic activity and prosperity around the country.
Internal migration is a herring. Homes, homes, homes are needed because the population of the country has risen by about 10 million people in a generation and is still rising fast and the housing supply hasn't kept up. You can't solve that with a few soothing words about spreading prosperity, we need a massive and sustained increase in housing supply to address the shortage and to then stand still with rising population levels.
We also need tighter immigration controls to reduce demand. The biggest shortage of affordable housing is in London by far that is where most new property needs to be built, through high rise in particular. In the North East or most of the West Midlands there is plenty of affordable housing already
Tighter immigration controls won't reduce demand, just slow the increase in demand. Demand will still be there, and rising, unless we have net emigration surpassing the rate of native population growth to reduce demand.
Houses are needed either way. There is not plenty of affordable housing anywhere, there are housing shortages across the entire country which is why new homes are being built in the North and Midlands as they're needed just as they are in the South too.
Native population growth is already below replacement level, the UK birth rate is only 1.65 per woman. It is rising immigration that is pushing up demand.
There is not the same need for affordable housing in the North and Midlands, Wales, NI and Scotland, average house prices there are less than half the price of those in the South. There is also in turn not the same need for new affordable housing in the South as in London, house prices in London are a 1/3 higher than those in the South on average
Categorically wrong, native population is growing.
10.79 births/1000 population and 9.07 births/1000 population = growing population even without immigration.
House prices to earnings ratios are too high in the entire country.
Once you take account of native population deaths our population is declining without immigration.
Once you exclude the distortion of London from house price to earnings ratios North of Watford there is not really a problem
Not true.
10.79 births > 9.07 deaths.
If births > deaths then population grows.
For population to fall then deaths must be greater than births.
House price ratios in the North now are higher than they were anywhere in the entire country, including London, a generation ago.
Deaths outnumbered births last year actually in the UK.
Property prices in London were cheap a generation ago before it became a global city so that means little
Those figures are out of date and from two years ago, at the height of the pandemic. Births exceed deaths now and normally.
Property prices were normal a generation ago, that is what we should be getting back to now, by building enough houses. Your utter obsession with London doesn't answer the fact that prices are too high in the entire country and a crash relative to earnings is needed.
No they aren't, they are the latest figures available. If we had a high birthday the death rate would still be less than it is despite Covid and Covid is not going away, especially for the unvaccinated and over 80s.
Property prices were cheap a generation ago because we were a strike ridden, nationalised industry dominated economy and Canary Wharf had yet to have been built and London was not a global city. That is not going to change however many houses we build unless fewer foreigners want to come to London ir we further tighten immigration controls.
Outside of London and certainly north of Watford there is no housing problem of any significance, most locals can easily afford to but in Stoke, Bishop Auckland etc hence in part why they now have Tory MPs.
A crash just leaves to negative equity which as the 1992 to 1997 Tory government discovered is equally disastrous
We were a strike ridden, nationalised industry dominated economy at the turn of the century 2000?
You seem to be looking two generations back.
At the turn of the century we had privatised industries, much of Canary Wharf had been built, the house price to earnings ratio in almost the entire country was about 3x income multiples.
Then Blair and Brown f***ed things up and we've had population surge by 10 million since then but housing supply hasn't kept up. It has nothing to do with nationalisation versus not nationalisation, its pure supply and demand.
Negative equity is far less of a problem than people not being able to afford a home in the first place. Negative equity is a barrier on mobility but that's it and if you can keep your mortgage repayments going for a few years its a transient problem after which inflation and keeping up with repayments will erode the negative equity and get you back into positive equity.
Having no equity as house prices are 4-8 or higher times incomes and rent is proportionately higher too due to a lack of a supply is a far worse problem than negative equity which is blown up out of all proportion by people who wish to justify their higher equity prices while pretending to be caring.
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Make Edinburgh the summer capital and we can all relocate once a year like the Queen does, holidays in the Cornish Riviera notwithstanding.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
Quite a lot of English luvvies already decamp to Edinburgh (Covid unpleasantness aside) in August. Difficult to say how they’d break now after 8 years of shitshow.
Did you see that Edinburgh Council is now requiring airbnb holders to apply for planning permission (a few exceptions aside)? Be interesting to see how it pans out. (The SG already stopped people being evicted at short notice, more generally, cue luvvies whining a fe years back that they coiuldn't so easily get nice flats for the AF. But this is a further step forward in trying to deal with the problems.)
Sinn Féin 36% (nc) Fine Gael 22% (nc) Fianna Fáil 17% (+2) Greens 4% (nc) People Before Profit/Solidarity 4% (+1) Social Democrats 4% (+1) Labour 3% (-1) Aontú 3% (nc) others/independents 9% (-1)
What's interesting about that is that FF + FG are down 4 points one the 2020 GE, and SF are up 11.5 points, so SF are consolidating support that's otherwise gone to minor parties and independents.
When FG received 36% of the vote in 2016 they won 76 seats, only 8 short of a majority.
With a potential SF government I worry more for the European Union than the UK. They're going to be a nightmare in the European Council while the UK gov can mostly ignore them.
You mean, a nightmare like the British Tory and UKIP MEPs?
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
Is Home Economics still binned in schools? I remember it being basically useless when I had to do it - but feels like the kind of thing that *should* be really useful to give kids some baseline knowledge.
As it is, I remember being taught how to 'make a pizza' - which was to take the top half of a roll, spread tomato puree on it and a slice of cheddar then put it under the grill.
Some of is definitely laziness.
I have lots of eggs in the fridge but so often I look in there and go 'meh, nothing to eat'.
Are we in danger of starting a 'should you keep eggs in the fridge?' discussion?
You went there. No is of course the correct answer.
Just got back from a weekend in the smoke. Went to see Spurs v Saints yesterday and have never been so hot at football. We were sat in the sun for the full match and there was one gentle breeze about each half hour. I can’t imagine what it must be like to play in that heat.
It took me over five hours to get home from my mate’s in Walthamstow today as there were bad tube delays and I just missed my train. I had to wait nearly two and a half hours for the next at Paddington. On the train I got a call from my mate who was supposed to come and pick me up from the station saying he had to go and pick his daughter up instead. I’d arranged for him to pick me up as there are no Sunday buses.
So I headed back with six miles in front of me, including a great big fucking hill, and my thumb out. About a mile and a half in (before the hill), and after about twenty cars accelerating past me, a heavily tattooed van driver pulled in. I had to sit with his mongrel dog (I did ask what breed) resting his front legs on my lap, but had a nice chat with my very friendly rescuer.
I got home fifty four hours after I last watered my sky garden. I feared the worst, and thought it confirmed when I saw every single leaf drooping, some little green tomatoes on the floor, and some on the plant shrivelled a bit like big green sultanas. But after a couple of thorough waterings over about half an hour, they’re definitely reviving.
I wonder if this hot weather is going to worsen the situation with house prices on the south coast of England. They rose significantly during the covid lockdowns when people realised they could WFH part of the week. Now, the beaches are heaving and there is a cool breeze. It is ideal summer weather. No need to go abroad.
It depends how often these new summers happen, of course
If two out of three summers were like this, then that would pretty much kill off the British-in-the-Med tourist industry, especially as the Med could get unpleasantly hot
That seems unlikely. So far. But this is weird heat now
Brother-in-law has just been on the phone from Manchester complaining about the rain! It's lovely here in North Essex; beautiful blue skies, little fluffy clouds and a gentle breeze.
Brace!
Is that weather station at the 'focus' of that mobile phone shaped and car melting skyscraper? Met Office forecasts are a good 5degC lower for later in the week.
I see that Sunak has said it's wrong for Truss to cut his National Insurance tax hike, so people who work many of whom are seeing wages go up less than inflation can keep more of their own money, as he thinks we should do more to support Triple Locked pensioners instead.
Sunak represents everything that is wrong with the modern Conservative Party. If he wins, the Party deserves to lose.
Add that to his green belt nimbyism when what we really need is houses, houses, houses.
We do not need houses, houses, houses in the already overheated South-East, nor do we need more high-rise flats in London as Rishi proposes. We need to spread prosperity throughout the country, to make levelling up more than a slogan, and to build new homes and even new towns with new employers in the less affluent parts of the country.
You do need houses, houses, houses all over the country including the South East. The South East like the entire country has seen its population dramatically rise in a generation thanks to longer life expectancies and net immigration. That should not be be a bad thing but housing hasn't kept up so many people can't get a home of their own.
Unless you want to start major net emigration we need more housing for the people already living here to get a home of their own. North, South, East and West.
If you want to have any immigration at all, which is a very good thing in my eyes to have I don't know about you, then we need even more housing just to stand still let alone sort out the backlog of missing homes.
Net migration is a red herring, whether up or down. Internal migration should be encouraged: that's the point. It is also what happened during the industrial revolution, and after the war with new towns being built. There's nothing new here. Move people, and jobs, and economic activity and prosperity around the country.
Internal migration is a herring. Homes, homes, homes are needed because the population of the country has risen by about 10 million people in a generation and is still rising fast and the housing supply hasn't kept up. You can't solve that with a few soothing words about spreading prosperity, we need a massive and sustained increase in housing supply to address the shortage and to then stand still with rising population levels.
We also need tighter immigration controls to reduce demand. The biggest shortage of affordable housing is in London by far that is where most new property needs to be built, through high rise in particular. In the North East or most of the West Midlands there is plenty of affordable housing already
Tighter immigration controls won't reduce demand, just slow the increase in demand. Demand will still be there, and rising, unless we have net emigration surpassing the rate of native population growth to reduce demand.
Houses are needed either way. There is not plenty of affordable housing anywhere, there are housing shortages across the entire country which is why new homes are being built in the North and Midlands as they're needed just as they are in the South too.
Native population growth is already below replacement level, the UK birth rate is only 1.65 per woman. It is rising immigration that is pushing up demand.
There is not the same need for affordable housing in the North and Midlands, Wales, NI and Scotland, average house prices there are less than half the price of those in the South. There is also in turn not the same need for new affordable housing in the South as in London, house prices in London are a 1/3 higher than those in the South on average
Categorically wrong, native population is growing.
10.79 births/1000 population and 9.07 births/1000 population = growing population even without immigration.
House prices to earnings ratios are too high in the entire country.
Once you take account of native population deaths our population is declining without immigration.
Once you exclude the distortion of London from house price to earnings ratios North of Watford there is not really a problem
Not true.
10.79 births > 9.07 deaths.
If births > deaths then population grows.
For population to fall then deaths must be greater than births.
House price ratios in the North now are higher than they were anywhere in the entire country, including London, a generation ago.
Deaths outnumbered births last year actually in the UK.
Property prices in London were cheap a generation ago before it became a global city so that means little
Those figures are out of date and from two years ago, at the height of the pandemic. Births exceed deaths now and normally.
Property prices were normal a generation ago, that is what we should be getting back to now, by building enough houses. Your utter obsession with London doesn't answer the fact that prices are too high in the entire country and a crash relative to earnings is needed.
Do you have the raw numbers for of births and deaths in the UK in 2021? I've searched and I can't find them.
(And UK TFR from 2019 was 1.65, so absent immigration, the medium term outlook is for falling population.)
So births exceed deaths by almost 40,000 in 2021 even with the pandemic going on and the pandemic deaths recorded especially in January 2021.
Longer term we may have falling population without immigration due to TFR but people have been saying that for many decades and only in 2 years in about half a century have we had births be less than deaths - and one of those was only narrowly and thanks to the pandemic.
Casino's quip about early summer 1940 does raise an intriguing question. Had pb existed then under the Asquthian benevolence of Sir Michael Fortesque Cavendish-Smithson Bt, how many of our number would have counselled for an 'honourable' peace with Germany, rather than persist with an unwinnable war under the erratic, unscrupulous adventurer Churchill, who only months previously had lost Norway?
I think it was Chamberlain who lost Norway ...? Or at least carried the can IRL. But who cares, it's alternative history anyway!
While my predictions, as the Stodge Saturday Patent has demonstrated, aren't worth any attention, I'll offer a thought based on recent experience.
In 50-75 years time, London will empty at the beginning of June as those who can seek solace from the 45c temperatures and humidity associated with the late 21st century British summer between the spring and autumn monsoon seasons.
The newly-refurbished London Euston station will host the regular 30-minute Maglev summer service to the Lake District having passengers disembarking at Oxenholme in little more than a hour. From there, families will decamp to their summer chalets near the lakes (or as near as is affordable). The ability to work independently from location, first established during the 2020 pandemic, will allow tens of thousands of Londoners to continue working far from the overheating capital.
For those without the means to escape the heat, the annual ordeal that is summer in London is the very definition of purgatory. On the hottest days, with temperatures nearing 50c, many head to vast "cool centres" where they can enjoy air conditioned relief before heading home in the later evening.
While the Lakes are one popular "retreat from the heat", the Pennines and Cheviots have also seen summer housing and the major development of the north Scottish coast around Torrisdale and the islands of Harris and Lewis have seen an explosion of summer homes for those from southern and eastern Britain desperate to seek cooler summer weather.
Casino's quip about early summer 1940 does raise an intriguing question. Had pb existed then under the Asquthian benevolence of Sir Michael Fortesque Cavendish-Smithson Bt, how many of our number would have counselled for an 'honourable' peace with Germany, rather than persist with an unwinnable war under the erratic, unscrupulous adventurer Churchill, who only months previously had lost Norway?
As you say, intriguing thought. I may be being unkind to him, but I suspect my friend from Epping would have been in the honourable peace camp, that being the policy of a significant part of the Conservative party!
To be fair, I might well have been following the far left line, which would've meant I'd had to had to do a severe reverse ferret a few months later!
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Make Edinburgh the summer capital and we can all relocate once a year like the Queen does, holidays in the Cornish Riviera notwithstanding.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
Quite a lot of English luvvies already decamp to Edinburgh (Covid unpleasantness aside) in August. Difficult to say how they’d break now after 8 years of shitshow.
Did you see that Edinburgh Council is now requiring airbnb holders to apply for planning permission (a few exceptions aside)? Be interesting to see how it pans out. (The SG already stopped people being evicted at short notice, more generally, cue luvvies whining a fe years back that they coiuldn't so easily get nice flats for the AF. But this is a further step forward in trying to deal with the problems.)
I saw a couple of tweets to that effect, good for them. Any indication how the variegated council voted for/against the issue?
Fasting also gives you intense mental highs. The body is excused its normal task of metabolising food, so it sends all its ample spare energy to the brain. Probably because it wants the brain to work out why there is no bloody food
While my predictions, as the Stodge Saturday Patent has demonstrated, aren't worth any attention, I'll offer a thought based on recent experience.
In 50-75 years time, London will empty at the beginning of June as those who can seek solace from the 45c temperatures and humidity associated with the late 21st century British summer between the spring and autumn monsoon seasons.
The newly-refurbished London Euston station will host the regular 30-minute Maglev summer service to the Lake District having passengers disembarking at Oxenholme in little more than a hour. From there, families will decamp to their summer chalets near the lakes (or as near as is affordable). The ability to work independently from location, first established during the 2020 pandemic, will allow tens of thousands of Londoners to continue working far from the overheating capital.
For those without the means to escape the heat, the annual ordeal that is summer in London is the very definition of purgatory. On the hottest days, with temperatures nearing 50c, many head to vast "cool centres" where they can enjoy air conditioned relief before heading home in the later evening.
While the Lakes are one popular "retreat from the heat", the Pennines and Cheviots have also seen summer housing and the major development of the north Scottish coast around Torrisdale and the islands of Harris and Lewis have seen an explosion of summer homes for those from southern and eastern Britain desperate to seek cooler summer weather.
That actually sounds like a reasonable prediction, as I stare out at the parched sere grass of the Regent's Park, which has not seen decent rain since early July
We were a strike ridden, nationalised industry dominated economy at the turn of the century 2000?
You seem to be looking two generations back.
At the turn of the century we had privatised industries, much of Canary Wharf had been built, the house price to earnings ratio in almost the entire country was about 3x income multiples.
Then Blair and Brown f***ed things up and we've had population surge by 10 million since then but housing supply hasn't kept up. It has nothing to do with nationalisation versus not nationalisation, its pure supply and demand.
Negative equity is far less of a problem than people not being able to afford a home in the first place. Negative equity is a barrier on mobility but that's it and if you can keep your mortgage repayments going for a few years its a transient problem after which inflation and keeping up with repayments will erode the negative equity and get you back into positive equity.
Having no equity as house prices are 4-8 or higher times incomes and rent is proportionately higher too due to a lack of a supply is a far worse problem than negative equity which is blown up out of all proportion by people who wish to justify their higher equity prices while pretending to be caring.
The problem, as you well know, is it's in everyone's interests (well, everyone who matters) to keep the supply of land under tight control and house prices high.
For many people, the house is the only asset they have - selling it and downsizing will provide for their pension by liberating capital on which they ca either live or invest. A significant reduction in the value of such assets will leave hundreds of thousands without the means to afford to retire.
Looking at one end of the market "the young can't afford to buy property" forgets the other. If I have a house worth £800k in and around London and I want to downsize and retire elsewhere, I can find a nice little house for £300k (for example) and I have £500k in equity. The problem is not who will buy my house valued at £800k in London but if I buy a £300k property elsewhere I am preventing a local family getting on the ladder.
Do you want to put up rows of small flats/houses on the outskirts of Cornish or Lake District villages and even if you do, you can't guarantee (because there is a free market at work which presumably you support) southern retirees won't snap them up. Even embargoing second home doesn't help because people want to retire to the likes of St Ives and Perranporth and that demand blocks out the locals.
The housing question is complex - simply saying "we need to build more houses" neglects the nuances in the issue.
While my predictions, as the Stodge Saturday Patent has demonstrated, aren't worth any attention, I'll offer a thought based on recent experience.
In 50-75 years time, London will empty at the beginning of June as those who can seek solace from the 45c temperatures and humidity associated with the late 21st century British summer between the spring and autumn monsoon seasons.
The newly-refurbished London Euston station will host the regular 30-minute Maglev summer service to the Lake District having passengers disembarking at Oxenholme in little more than a hour. From there, families will decamp to their summer chalets near the lakes (or as near as is affordable). The ability to work independently from location, first established during the 2020 pandemic, will allow tens of thousands of Londoners to continue working far from the overheating capital.
For those without the means to escape the heat, the annual ordeal that is summer in London is the very definition of purgatory. On the hottest days, with temperatures nearing 50c, many head to vast "cool centres" where they can enjoy air conditioned relief before heading home in the later evening.
While the Lakes are one popular "retreat from the heat", the Pennines and Cheviots have also seen summer housing and the major development of the north Scottish coast around Torrisdale and the islands of Harris and Lewis have seen an explosion of summer homes for those from southern and eastern Britain desperate to seek cooler summer weather.
I think you understate the case. The way we're going it will be a runaway climate change. Although some, especially reputable researchers, know what we need to do to counter this, most of us are too gormless to act accordingly. For instance, getting an electric car does not justify an otherwise wanton life style.
Re: Farage at CPAC in Florida, does anyone doubt that Boris Johnson is going to be their foreign star turn next year?
I doubt it, if you listened to Farage's speech he said Boris was trailing and Scott Morrison lost as they weren't conservative and anti woke enough.
While he also hailed Trump and the Trumpite candidates who won their primaries last week
Farage is in many ways THE perfect fit to lead 2022's Conservative Party. People like Truss and Braverman are pale imitations really.
Notably Farage said he backed Badenoch as the best of the Tory leadership contenders, like the majority of the Tory membership
Indeed. Hard nationalistic small state libertarian antiwoke leavery with strong borders and a very picky immigration system is the name of the game. Truss is trying but I'm not sure she's the real deal.
We're all gonna have to move to fucking Scotland. Ugh
Well at least that screws the SNP
Yeah. Fuck em. Let's all go to Scotland to get some cool rain AND all vote NO, then we can move back to warm, beautiful sunny Merry England
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Make Edinburgh the summer capital and we can all relocate once a year like the Queen does, holidays in the Cornish Riviera notwithstanding.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
Quite a lot of English luvvies already decamp to Edinburgh (Covid unpleasantness aside) in August. Difficult to say how they’d break now after 8 years of shitshow.
Did you see that Edinburgh Council is now requiring airbnb holders to apply for planning permission (a few exceptions aside)? Be interesting to see how it pans out. (The SG already stopped people being evicted at short notice, more generally, cue luvvies whining a fe years back that they coiuldn't so easily get nice flats for the AF. But this is a further step forward in trying to deal with the problems.)
I saw a couple of tweets to that effect, good for them. Any indication how the variegated council voted for/against the issue?
Nope, sorry, haven 't looked into it (not my cooncil). But basically they are using the powers provided to LAs by the Scottish Pmt by recent legislation - or possibly a SG ordinance/regulation: haven't checked. Same sort of thing as in Wales. But a quick check reveals Tory MSP MIles Briggs whining about the new regs not allowing for local choice, which I don't understand unless he means the choice of landlords to do what they want. Yet it seems CEC planning cttee was unanimous re the move, which implies the 2 Tory members (out of 11 in all) perhaps supported it (would need to check details re the actual vote, mind, but anyway they didn't vote against it, which perhaps suggests the strength of feeling).
While my predictions, as the Stodge Saturday Patent has demonstrated, aren't worth any attention, I'll offer a thought based on recent experience.
In 50-75 years time, London will empty at the beginning of June as those who can seek solace from the 45c temperatures and humidity associated with the late 21st century British summer between the spring and autumn monsoon seasons.
The newly-refurbished London Euston station will host the regular 30-minute Maglev summer service to the Lake District having passengers disembarking at Oxenholme in little more than a hour. From there, families will decamp to their summer chalets near the lakes (or as near as is affordable). The ability to work independently from location, first established during the 2020 pandemic, will allow tens of thousands of Londoners to continue working far from the overheating capital.
For those without the means to escape the heat, the annual ordeal that is summer in London is the very definition of purgatory. On the hottest days, with temperatures nearing 50c, many head to vast "cool centres" where they can enjoy air conditioned relief before heading home in the later evening.
While the Lakes are one popular "retreat from the heat", the Pennines and Cheviots have also seen summer housing and the major development of the north Scottish coast around Torrisdale and the islands of Harris and Lewis have seen an explosion of summer homes for those from southern and eastern Britain desperate to seek cooler summer weather.
I think you understate the case. The way we're going it will be a runaway climate change. Although some, especially reputable researchers, know what we need to do to counter this, most of us are too gormless to act accordingly. For instance, getting an electric car does not justify an otherwise wanton life style.
That's my fear. That we are now in an accelerating loop of increasing warmth and volatility, which will feed off itself like a chain reaction. And perhaps it is already too late to stop this
Casino's quip about early summer 1940 does raise an intriguing question. Had pb existed then under the Asquthian benevolence of Sir Michael Fortesque Cavendish-Smithson Bt, how many of our number would have counselled for an 'honourable' peace with Germany, rather than persist with an unwinnable war under the erratic, unscrupulous adventurer Churchill, who only months previously had lost Norway?
Almost all of use would rather have been counselling the need to form a united government led by a senior and respected non-party figure, probably Sir John Anderson but possibly Archibald Sinclair, so that the war could be prosecuted without the partisan suspicion and confusion that would inevitably arise if a tribal figure like Churchill, Attlee, Bevin, Eden, Halifax or Simon were chosen.
And we would also explain why the chippy cretins of the Conservative party would make that impossible, and how they would even pass over a solid and reliable figure like Halifax in favour of an unstable buccaneer like Churchill who had been wrong on everything his whole career long.
And we'd be right. It's just that Churchill, almost entirely fortuitously, turned out to be right about Hitler.
While my predictions, as the Stodge Saturday Patent has demonstrated, aren't worth any attention, I'll offer a thought based on recent experience.
In 50-75 years time, London will empty at the beginning of June as those who can seek solace from the 45c temperatures and humidity associated with the late 21st century British summer between the spring and autumn monsoon seasons.
The newly-refurbished London Euston station will host the regular 30-minute Maglev summer service to the Lake District having passengers disembarking at Oxenholme in little more than a hour. From there, families will decamp to their summer chalets near the lakes (or as near as is affordable). The ability to work independently from location, first established during the 2020 pandemic, will allow tens of thousands of Londoners to continue working far from the overheating capital.
For those without the means to escape the heat, the annual ordeal that is summer in London is the very definition of purgatory. On the hottest days, with temperatures nearing 50c, many head to vast "cool centres" where they can enjoy air conditioned relief before heading home in the later evening.
While the Lakes are one popular "retreat from the heat", the Pennines and Cheviots have also seen summer housing and the major development of the north Scottish coast around Torrisdale and the islands of Harris and Lewis have seen an explosion of summer homes for those from southern and eastern Britain desperate to seek cooler summer weather.
I think you understate the case. The way we're going it will be a runaway climate change. Although some, especially reputable researchers, know what we need to do to counter this, most of us are too gormless to act accordingly. For instance, getting an electric car does not justify an otherwise wanton life style.
That's my fear. That we are now in an accelerating loop of increasing warmth and volatility, which will feed off itself like a chain reaction. And perhaps it is already too late to stop this
yep. But we do actually have the wherewithal to fix it. We are not a global tribe.
While my predictions, as the Stodge Saturday Patent has demonstrated, aren't worth any attention, I'll offer a thought based on recent experience.
In 50-75 years time, London will empty at the beginning of June as those who can seek solace from the 45c temperatures and humidity associated with the late 21st century British summer between the spring and autumn monsoon seasons.
The newly-refurbished London Euston station will host the regular 30-minute Maglev summer service to the Lake District having passengers disembarking at Oxenholme in little more than a hour. From there, families will decamp to their summer chalets near the lakes (or as near as is affordable). The ability to work independently from location, first established during the 2020 pandemic, will allow tens of thousands of Londoners to continue working far from the overheating capital.
For those without the means to escape the heat, the annual ordeal that is summer in London is the very definition of purgatory. On the hottest days, with temperatures nearing 50c, many head to vast "cool centres" where they can enjoy air conditioned relief before heading home in the later evening.
While the Lakes are one popular "retreat from the heat", the Pennines and Cheviots have also seen summer housing and the major development of the north Scottish coast around Torrisdale and the islands of Harris and Lewis have seen an explosion of summer homes for those from southern and eastern Britain desperate to seek cooler summer weather.
There's a rather good UK sci-fi film from the early 60s called 'The Day The Earth Caught Fire' set in London which features the temperature going through the roof (I won't spoil the reasons). Very well done and an excellent turn from Leo McKern.
Edit: I meant to specify that it features people trying to make a mass exodus to cooler parts of the country, water rationing, etc - which is why it came to mind.
As you say, intriguing thought. I may be being unkind to him, but I suspect my friend from Epping would have been in the honourable peace camp, that being the policy of a significant part of the Conservative party!
To be fair, I might well have been following the far left line, which would've meant I'd had to had to do a severe reverse ferret a few months later!
I'm less certain - @HYUFD would have lived in Churchill's constituency - he was MP for Epping from 1924 to 1945.
Boundary changes moved Churchill to the new Woodford seat in 1945 and Epping was won by Labour. The Conservatives re-captured it in 1950 but lost it again in 1964 when Stan Newens became MP. Newens lost in 1970 in a straight fight with a new Conservative candidate - one Norman Tebbit.
The Epping constituency was then abolished in 1974.
Casino's quip about early summer 1940 does raise an intriguing question. Had pb existed then under the Asquthian benevolence of Sir Michael Fortesque Cavendish-Smithson Bt, how many of our number would have counselled for an 'honourable' peace with Germany, rather than persist with an unwinnable war under the erratic, unscrupulous adventurer Churchill, who only months previously had lost Norway?
I think it was Chamberlain who lost Norway ...? Or at least carried the can IRL. But who cares, it's alternative history anyway!
Churchill had been the sponsor and architect of the Norway Campaign which effectively brought down the government, even though it actually won the confidence vote. Churchill took over as Prime Minister of a coalition government; Chamberlain remained leader of the Conservative Party.
The other candidate for Prime Minister had been Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, who favoured a negotiated peace. This was no mere pipedream as Hitler had reached out via Mussolini to offer terms.
The new Prime Minister and coalition government were unpopular on Conservative benches. Obviously, this was to change with time and events.
Sinn Féin 36% (nc) Fine Gael 22% (nc) Fianna Fáil 17% (+2) Greens 4% (nc) People Before Profit/Solidarity 4% (+1) Social Democrats 4% (+1) Labour 3% (-1) Aontú 3% (nc) others/independents 9% (-1)
What's interesting about that is that FF + FG are down 4 points one the 2020 GE, and SF are up 11.5 points, so SF are consolidating support that's otherwise gone to minor parties and independents.
When FG received 36% of the vote in 2016 they won 76 seats, only 8 short of a majority.
With a potential SF government I worry more for the European Union than the UK. They're going to be a nightmare in the European Council while the UK gov can mostly ignore them.
What are they going to do in the European Council? Their entire agenda is about spending more money at home. It is no different to Five Star or Syriza or a bunch of other parties that have been and gone when they couldn't ramp the economy hard enough.
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
Is Home Economics still binned in schools? I remember it being basically useless when I had to do it - but feels like the kind of thing that *should* be really useful to give kids some baseline knowledge.
As it is, I remember being taught how to 'make a pizza' - which was to take the top half of a roll, spread tomato puree on it and a slice of cheddar then put it under the grill.
Some of is definitely laziness.
I have lots of eggs in the fridge but so often I look in there and go 'meh, nothing to eat'.
The only way I can successfully stick to my brutal diet (9 pounds down now!) is by having absolutely NOTHING to eat in my flat, apart from spices, oils, vinegars, powders, pickles, etc
At about 10pm when my willpower crumbles, you can find me nibbling raw Kampot peppercorns, or having a tragic spoonful of sauerkraut. It works
That's starvation and whilst I'm sure it sheds the pounds I'm not sure any doctor would recommend it.
I think selective fasting has become popular among trendy metropolitan types. Hence Leon's interest.
There's a rather good UK sci-fi film from the early 60s called 'The Day The Earth Caught Fire' set in London which features the temperature going through the roof (I won't spoil the reasons). Very well done and an excellent turn from Leo McKern.
Yes, the Daily Express print room features in it back when the Express was a decent paper.
Some of the science is a bit dubious and I'm NOT suggesting anything like that.
I'm merely arguing that in the absence of widespread air conditioning, those who can may well move north to a more comfortable existence in northern England and indeed Scotland and if I wanted a long-term investment, I'd buy up land and property on the northern Scottish coast and in the islands.
It's not easy to get to Scrabster or that coastline now as @Sunil_Prasannan will confirm but that could well change if there was a real expansion of tourism.
I'm with Horse on this. It was a great product when there was only one of it. Like membership of Blockbuster video, only with a much, much wider choice. But now there are half a dozen players - you simply can't have a subscription to all of them. It's daft, and prohibitively expensive. There can't be more than one Netflix, and the chances that Netflix are the best at being Netflix seem no better than about one in six.
No chance for Netflix with Disney+ having more than half of all content produced, without overheads of licensing to external companies
Alternatively many people will happily pay for both Netflix and Disney+ as we already do ourselves. Netflix + Disney+ combined costs much less than Sky and about the same as the BBC too and provides much more that we use than either Sky or BBC do.
In America that's even more true. The cost of "cable" TV in the USA has long been far more than even multiple subscriptions now cost.
Netflix is losing customers at a ridiculous pace.
They will not be around in 10 years, not enough content.
But you can’t just extrapolate a trend to infinity, yes they have shed customers, but the basic model isn’t broken.
Their model is broken.
They cannot support their lack of content because they're losing customers. They need original content to undo the content they're losing year on year to other services. They cannot keep up.
Not a chance they will be around in 10 years, probably get bought I would think.
But that's no longer true because for the last 5 years Netflix borrowed billions of dollars to build out a first party library to which they own the perpetual rights. All of the third party content that is going to leave has already gone and if anything we're going to see that reverse over the next few years because services like Paramount+ and Peacock are going to fail which means Paramount and NBC will have to start putting content on Netflix again and just taking the annual lump sum from Netflix if they agree and the price is right.
We've already seen the start of the consolidation, HBO Max has been canned. It's now being "merged" into Discovery+ but all of the original streaming only content is being killed and essentially it will just be HBO programming and boxsets under a HBO tab within Discovery+, that is not going to compete with Netflix or Disney+ (the two likely survivors of the streaming wars).
The other big deal for Netflix is that in 5 years they will have 10 years worth of original content in the library, while I don't think it has as much value as most people, it will be a bigger pull factor. The biggest missing piece of the puzzle, IMO, is not having a theatrical window. That's where Disney+ has a huge leg up on Netflix. Their movies still go out and recoup production costs in cinemas and then 84 days later they put it on their streaming service which is pure profit for bringing in new subscribers.
I agree with 99% of this. My only issue is that I think that HBO has a decent shot of making it. Don't forget that they have an existing "pay" channel, so why would they want to have streaming only content?
Just as interesting is what - if anything - Amazon and Apple do. They both have almost infinite money, but their streaming businesses have to be seriously money losing propositions - particularly Apple TV+.
Not sure how much profit there is in it (little, I suspect) but supermarkets should do bags of ingredients for £4 or less with recipes that take 20 mins or less, and sell 'a week' of family dinners for £20. This sort of thing - which is filling and perfectly nourishing:
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
In the end it is just a question of self discipline and knowledge. Our neighbours earn less than the minimum wage, they both work but are below even the threshold where they pay tax. They cook meals like this and seem to do absolutely fine. They drive a car they inherited from their grandparents and have just been on a camping holiday. They are extremely resourceful, ie picking up eggs from farms. They bought a flat in their twenties in the south east. They can still afford to take their child out horse riding, at £20 a time.
In the end, you can't save people from their own incompetence and stupidity. It is largely futile trying to get people in the same situation, who are currently buying chicken nuggets and are stuck in various debt traps; to start cooking Tarka Dahl. You can make them aware that there is another way, but ultimately they have to come to the realisation themselves, and make the necessary changes.
Probably because it relies upon motivation and discipline, a bit like exercise I guess.
Those are hard values to "learn".
More about habits than values imo. We all have habits so what you need to do is make as many of them as possible of the good variety.
Eg me. Last year I identified 2 positive habits I wanted to inculcate - flossing my teeth and building up my muscle tone with boxing.
Both of these are the sort of activities you naturally want to put off - being not exactly pleasant or easy to do - but I persisted and in time they took hold and became routine.
So, now, most days, I box and I floss. Have been for a few months and - yep - noticeably better teeth and more muscle on the arms and torso. Recommend to all.
While my predictions, as the Stodge Saturday Patent has demonstrated, aren't worth any attention, I'll offer a thought based on recent experience.
In 50-75 years time, London will empty at the beginning of June as those who can seek solace from the 45c temperatures and humidity associated with the late 21st century British summer between the spring and autumn monsoon seasons.
The newly-refurbished London Euston station will host the regular 30-minute Maglev summer service to the Lake District having passengers disembarking at Oxenholme in little more than a hour. From there, families will decamp to their summer chalets near the lakes (or as near as is affordable). The ability to work independently from location, first established during the 2020 pandemic, will allow tens of thousands of Londoners to continue working far from the overheating capital.
For those without the means to escape the heat, the annual ordeal that is summer in London is the very definition of purgatory. On the hottest days, with temperatures nearing 50c, many head to vast "cool centres" where they can enjoy air conditioned relief before heading home in the later evening.
While the Lakes are one popular "retreat from the heat", the Pennines and Cheviots have also seen summer housing and the major development of the north Scottish coast around Torrisdale and the islands of Harris and Lewis have seen an explosion of summer homes for those from southern and eastern Britain desperate to seek cooler summer weather.
I think you understate the case. The way we're going it will be a runaway climate change. Although some, especially reputable researchers, know what we need to do to counter this, most of us are too gormless to act accordingly. For instance, getting an electric car does not justify an otherwise wanton life style.
That's my fear. That we are now in an accelerating loop of increasing warmth and volatility, which will feed off itself like a chain reaction. And perhaps it is already too late to stop this
The science, as we know it at present, seems to suggest that we can still limit the rise to 1.5 degrees and avoid runaway climate change, but it's getting more difficult all the time. Biden's bill looks as though it's passing, which is good news for the climate although could have been better. Let's hope that the Congress elections in November and the Presidential in 2024 are good for the Democrats. Here the Tory contenders for PM seem worse than Boris, who at least paid lip service to the subject.
Churchill had been the sponsor and architect of the Norway Campaign which effectively brought down the government, even though it actually won the confidence vote. Churchill took over as Prime Minister of a coalition government; Chamberlain remained leader of the Conservative Party.
The other candidate for Prime Minister had been Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, who favoured a negotiated peace. This was no mere pipedream as Hitler had reached out via Mussolini to offer terms.
The new Prime Minister and coalition government were unpopular on Conservative benches. Obviously, this was to change with time and events.
Chamberlain was ill and would have resigned sooner or later. The revisionist character assassination of Halifax comes with little or no evidence. I suspect he'd have been as resistant to German peace feelers as was Churchill. There was no way any British Government was going to accept German hegemony over the Continent as a done deal.
The window of opportunity for the Germans to make a successful landing was probably mid-July - growing RAF strength, the rapid re-building of mobile reserves lost at Dunkirk, the re-grouping of naval forces and German unwillingness to risk an amphibious landing meant Britain was safe thereafter.
The famous Sandhurst exercise modelling a German invasion in mid September shows such an attempt would likely have ended in disastrous failure. That in itself might have foreshortened the war with Hitler being ousted by the Army but we've no way of knowing that.
As the old saying goes - the Americans provided the money, the Russians provided the blood and the British provided the time - all helped by Hitler's stupidity which ended with him going to war with the two growing industrial powers of the day, fighting a multi-front war and ending with Germany being physically conquered and divided.
While my predictions, as the Stodge Saturday Patent has demonstrated, aren't worth any attention, I'll offer a thought based on recent experience.
In 50-75 years time, London will empty at the beginning of June as those who can seek solace from the 45c temperatures and humidity associated with the late 21st century British summer between the spring and autumn monsoon seasons.
The newly-refurbished London Euston station will host the regular 30-minute Maglev summer service to the Lake District having passengers disembarking at Oxenholme in little more than a hour. From there, families will decamp to their summer chalets near the lakes (or as near as is affordable). The ability to work independently from location, first established during the 2020 pandemic, will allow tens of thousands of Londoners to continue working far from the overheating capital.
For those without the means to escape the heat, the annual ordeal that is summer in London is the very definition of purgatory. On the hottest days, with temperatures nearing 50c, many head to vast "cool centres" where they can enjoy air conditioned relief before heading home in the later evening.
While the Lakes are one popular "retreat from the heat", the Pennines and Cheviots have also seen summer housing and the major development of the north Scottish coast around Torrisdale and the islands of Harris and Lewis have seen an explosion of summer homes for those from southern and eastern Britain desperate to seek cooler summer weather.
I think you understate the case. The way we're going it will be a runaway climate change. Although some, especially reputable researchers, know what we need to do to counter this, most of us are too gormless to act accordingly. For instance, getting an electric car does not justify an otherwise wanton life style.
That's my fear. That we are now in an accelerating loop of increasing warmth and volatility, which will feed off itself like a chain reaction. And perhaps it is already too late to stop this
yep. But we do actually have the wherewithal to fix it. We are not a global tribe.
We have the technology but not the political will.
We were a strike ridden, nationalised industry dominated economy at the turn of the century 2000?
You seem to be looking two generations back.
At the turn of the century we had privatised industries, much of Canary Wharf had been built, the house price to earnings ratio in almost the entire country was about 3x income multiples.
Then Blair and Brown f***ed things up and we've had population surge by 10 million since then but housing supply hasn't kept up. It has nothing to do with nationalisation versus not nationalisation, its pure supply and demand.
Negative equity is far less of a problem than people not being able to afford a home in the first place. Negative equity is a barrier on mobility but that's it and if you can keep your mortgage repayments going for a few years its a transient problem after which inflation and keeping up with repayments will erode the negative equity and get you back into positive equity.
Having no equity as house prices are 4-8 or higher times incomes and rent is proportionately higher too due to a lack of a supply is a far worse problem than negative equity which is blown up out of all proportion by people who wish to justify their higher equity prices while pretending to be caring.
The problem, as you well know, is it's in everyone's interests (well, everyone who matters) to keep the supply of land under tight control and house prices high.
For many people, the house is the only asset they have - selling it and downsizing will provide for their pension by liberating capital on which they ca either live or invest. A significant reduction in the value of such assets will leave hundreds of thousands without the means to afford to retire.
Looking at one end of the market "the young can't afford to buy property" forgets the other. If I have a house worth £800k in and around London and I want to downsize and retire elsewhere, I can find a nice little house for £300k (for example) and I have £500k in equity. The problem is not who will buy my house valued at £800k in London but if I buy a £300k property elsewhere I am preventing a local family getting on the ladder.
Do you want to put up rows of small flats/houses on the outskirts of Cornish or Lake District villages and even if you do, you can't guarantee (because there is a free market at work which presumably you support) southern retirees won't snap them up. Even embargoing second home doesn't help because people want to retire to the likes of St Ives and Perranporth and that demand blocks out the locals.
The housing question is complex - simply saying "we need to build more houses" neglects the nuances in the issue.
Retiring to a picturesque rural area when in your 60s might seem like a good idea.
A few years later, when perhaps in need of regular medical treatment, that same isolated rural area might not seem so ideal.
Or perhaps that realisation comes one snowy winter.
While my predictions, as the Stodge Saturday Patent has demonstrated, aren't worth any attention, I'll offer a thought based on recent experience.
In 50-75 years time, London will empty at the beginning of June as those who can seek solace from the 45c temperatures and humidity associated with the late 21st century British summer between the spring and autumn monsoon seasons.
The newly-refurbished London Euston station will host the regular 30-minute Maglev summer service to the Lake District having passengers disembarking at Oxenholme in little more than a hour. From there, families will decamp to their summer chalets near the lakes (or as near as is affordable). The ability to work independently from location, first established during the 2020 pandemic, will allow tens of thousands of Londoners to continue working far from the overheating capital.
For those without the means to escape the heat, the annual ordeal that is summer in London is the very definition of purgatory. On the hottest days, with temperatures nearing 50c, many head to vast "cool centres" where they can enjoy air conditioned relief before heading home in the later evening.
While the Lakes are one popular "retreat from the heat", the Pennines and Cheviots have also seen summer housing and the major development of the north Scottish coast around Torrisdale and the islands of Harris and Lewis have seen an explosion of summer homes for those from southern and eastern Britain desperate to seek cooler summer weather.
I think you understate the case. The way we're going it will be a runaway climate change. Although some, especially reputable researchers, know what we need to do to counter this, most of us are too gormless to act accordingly. For instance, getting an electric car does not justify an otherwise wanton life style.
That's my fear. That we are now in an accelerating loop of increasing warmth and volatility, which will feed off itself like a chain reaction. And perhaps it is already too late to stop this
The science, as we know it at present, seems to suggest that we can still limit the rise to 1.5 degrees and avoid runaway climate change, but it's getting more difficult all the time. Biden's bill looks as though it's passing, which is good news for the climate although could have been better. Let's hope that the Congress elections in November and the Presidential in 2024 are good for the Democrats. Here the Tory contenders for PM seem worse than Boris, who at least paid lip service to the subject.
!.5 degrees is also now almost impossible. Even 2 degrees is extremely difficult and would require immediate and large scale action of the kind that appears to be politically unfeasible.
Casino's quip about early summer 1940 does raise an intriguing question. Had pb existed then under the Asquthian benevolence of Sir Michael Fortesque Cavendish-Smithson Bt, how many of our number would have counselled for an 'honourable' peace with Germany, rather than persist with an unwinnable war under the erratic, unscrupulous adventurer Churchill, who only months previously had lost Norway?
I think it was Chamberlain who lost Norway ...? Or at least carried the can IRL. But who cares, it's alternative history anyway!
Churchill had been the sponsor and architect of the Norway Campaign which effectively brought down the government, even though it actually won the confidence vote. Churchill took over as Prime Minister of a coalition government; Chamberlain remained leader of the Conservative Party.
The other candidate for Prime Minister had been Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, who favoured a negotiated peace. This was no mere pipedream as Hitler had reached out via Mussolini to offer terms.
The new Prime Minister and coalition government were unpopular on Conservative benches. Obviously, this was to change with time and events.
Thanks - I was indeed wondering about that, given Churchill's role as First Lord of the Admiralty.
We were a strike ridden, nationalised industry dominated economy at the turn of the century 2000?
You seem to be looking two generations back.
At the turn of the century we had privatised industries, much of Canary Wharf had been built, the house price to earnings ratio in almost the entire country was about 3x income multiples.
Then Blair and Brown f***ed things up and we've had population surge by 10 million since then but housing supply hasn't kept up. It has nothing to do with nationalisation versus not nationalisation, its pure supply and demand.
Negative equity is far less of a problem than people not being able to afford a home in the first place. Negative equity is a barrier on mobility but that's it and if you can keep your mortgage repayments going for a few years its a transient problem after which inflation and keeping up with repayments will erode the negative equity and get you back into positive equity.
Having no equity as house prices are 4-8 or higher times incomes and rent is proportionately higher too due to a lack of a supply is a far worse problem than negative equity which is blown up out of all proportion by people who wish to justify their higher equity prices while pretending to be caring.
The problem, as you well know, is it's in everyone's interests (well, everyone who matters) to keep the supply of land under tight control and house prices high.
For many people, the house is the only asset they have - selling it and downsizing will provide for their pension by liberating capital on which they ca either live or invest. A significant reduction in the value of such assets will leave hundreds of thousands without the means to afford to retire.
Looking at one end of the market "the young can't afford to buy property" forgets the other. If I have a house worth £800k in and around London and I want to downsize and retire elsewhere, I can find a nice little house for £300k (for example) and I have £500k in equity. The problem is not who will buy my house valued at £800k in London but if I buy a £300k property elsewhere I am preventing a local family getting on the ladder.
Do you want to put up rows of small flats/houses on the outskirts of Cornish or Lake District villages and even if you do, you can't guarantee (because there is a free market at work which presumably you support) southern retirees won't snap them up. Even embargoing second home doesn't help because people want to retire to the likes of St Ives and Perranporth and that demand blocks out the locals.
The housing question is complex - simply saying "we need to build more houses" neglects the nuances in the issue.
Retiring to a picturesque rural area when in your 60s might seem like a good idea.
A few years later, when perhaps in need of regular medical treatment, that same isolated rural area might not seem so ideal.
Or perhaps that realisation comes one snowy winter.
Most people don't downsize all at once. One step down to live in the picturesque village for a few years, and then a further step down to a retirement home with the aforesaid urban conveniences laid on.
Although you'd be surprised how many are still in 'isolated rural areas.'
While my predictions, as the Stodge Saturday Patent has demonstrated, aren't worth any attention, I'll offer a thought based on recent experience.
In 50-75 years time, London will empty at the beginning of June as those who can seek solace from the 45c temperatures and humidity associated with the late 21st century British summer between the spring and autumn monsoon seasons.
The newly-refurbished London Euston station will host the regular 30-minute Maglev summer service to the Lake District having passengers disembarking at Oxenholme in little more than a hour. From there, families will decamp to their summer chalets near the lakes (or as near as is affordable). The ability to work independently from location, first established during the 2020 pandemic, will allow tens of thousands of Londoners to continue working far from the overheating capital.
For those without the means to escape the heat, the annual ordeal that is summer in London is the very definition of purgatory. On the hottest days, with temperatures nearing 50c, many head to vast "cool centres" where they can enjoy air conditioned relief before heading home in the later evening.
While the Lakes are one popular "retreat from the heat", the Pennines and Cheviots have also seen summer housing and the major development of the north Scottish coast around Torrisdale and the islands of Harris and Lewis have seen an explosion of summer homes for those from southern and eastern Britain desperate to seek cooler summer weather.
I think you understate the case. The way we're going it will be a runaway climate change. Although some, especially reputable researchers, know what we need to do to counter this, most of us are too gormless to act accordingly. For instance, getting an electric car does not justify an otherwise wanton life style.
Telling people what sort of lifestyles they ought to be living isn't acceptable.
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We could potentially see another 38-39C day - next weekend. Incredible
Of course that would have smashed the all-time UK record, if we hadn't recorded 40.3C two weeks ago
Been toying with tiny football bets. Mildly amused that that came off and my 'safety first' bet on Liverpool did not.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/tarka_dahl_with_rice_01844
One reason people overspend on food: it's hard & time-consuming to cook. And then you have washing up.
So people go for chicken nuggets and chips (stick in the oven for 25 mins) from Iceland for £2.99, or ready meals that are microwaveable.
Continuous heat might be even more challenging than those two days of 38-40C in July
Meanwhile in France:
"France on Sunday braced for a fourth heatwave this summer as its worst drought on record left parched villages without safe drinking water."
https://twitter.com/KKotakorpi/status/1556302422741499904?s=20&t=Pdgwce4A4hGauJQv901RZQ
The forecast maximum for the end of week is 34c but @Leon seems to be overheating already.
Boris Johnson has obviously realised he will now live his life in the past tense - he will be defined not by what he is or is doing but what he was and did. That's not easy for ambitious people to succeed and like any other addict, they got a taste of power and they want some more.
On the other hand, this incredible summer has built up a reservoir of heat all across W Europe, and the seas are much warmer than normal. And we have had zero rain to cool things down. So maybe
I just found this picture of fields in Sussex. Look at it. If I did not know I would guess that is inland Sicily
One of the main attractions of shit Iceland/Lidl food is not the convenience but that they are calorie dense.
1 quid gets you a 900+ calorie pizza from Iceland.
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/4/hungarys-viktor-orban-calls-us-conservatives-unite/
*drinks more excellent English white wine*
Our neighbours earn less than the minimum wage, they both work but are below even the threshold where they pay tax.
They cook meals like this and seem to do absolutely fine. They drive a car they inherited from their grandparents and have just been on a camping holiday.
They are extremely resourceful, ie picking up eggs from farms.
They bought a flat in their twenties in the south east.
They can still afford to take their child out horse riding, at £20 a time.
In the end, you can't save people from their own incompetence and stupidity.
It is largely futile trying to get people in the same situation, who are currently buying chicken nuggets and are stuck in various debt traps; to start cooking Tarka Dahl.
You can make them aware that there is another way, but ultimately they have to come to the realisation themselves, and make the necessary changes.
In late March I went to Urfa, in far east Turkey, where it was warm sunny and dry. Cloudless. From there I went to the Deep South, then back to Turkey, then Greece, then Georgia, then Armenia, then back to Georgia, then Turkey again, then Montenegro, and then finally the UK
In every place the weather was warm fine and dry, Or properly hot. The hottest place, amazingly, has been the UK - that 40C in July
So far, I am not remotely bored of "good" weather. I love it. But can that last?
(And UK TFR from 2019 was 1.65, so absent immigration, the medium term outlook is for falling population.)
When FG received 36% of the vote in 2016 they won 76 seats, only 8 short of a majority.
If two out of three summers were like this, then that would pretty much kill off the British-in-the-Med tourist industry, especially as the Med could get unpleasantly hot
That seems unlikely. So far. But this is weird heat now
As it is, I remember being taught how to 'make a pizza' - which was to take the top half of a roll, spread tomato puree on it and a slice of cheddar then put it under the grill.
All we then have to do is schedule all independence votes for August, and give a vote to all residents even if they are normally resident elsewhere. We can make the announcement of the “No” vote part of the military tattoo.
I have lots of eggs in the fridge but so often I look in there and go 'meh, nothing to eat'.
Those are hard values to "learn".
At about 10pm when my willpower crumbles, you can find me nibbling raw Kampot peppercorns, or having a tragic spoonful of sauerkraut. It works
Either way, it's better than fricking Huel which too many of my friends immiserate themselves on.
The human body is designed for periods of famine. That's why we have fat reserves in the first place
You seem to be looking two generations back.
At the turn of the century we had privatised industries, much of Canary Wharf had been built, the house price to earnings ratio in almost the entire country was about 3x income multiples.
Then Blair and Brown f***ed things up and we've had population surge by 10 million since then but housing supply hasn't kept up. It has nothing to do with nationalisation versus not nationalisation, its pure supply and demand.
Negative equity is far less of a problem than people not being able to afford a home in the first place. Negative equity is a barrier on mobility but that's it and if you can keep your mortgage repayments going for a few years its a transient problem after which inflation and keeping up with repayments will erode the negative equity and get you back into positive equity.
Having no equity as house prices are 4-8 or higher times incomes and rent is proportionately higher too due to a lack of a supply is a far worse problem than negative equity which is blown up out of all proportion by people who wish to justify their higher equity prices while pretending to be caring.
No is of course the correct answer.
It took me over five hours to get home from my mate’s in Walthamstow today as there were bad tube delays and I just missed my train. I had to wait nearly two and a half hours for the next at Paddington. On the train I got a call from my mate who was supposed to come and pick me up from the station saying he had to go and pick his daughter up instead. I’d arranged for him to pick me up as there are no Sunday buses.
So I headed back with six miles in front of me, including a great big fucking hill, and my thumb out. About a mile and a half in (before the hill), and after about twenty cars accelerating past me, a heavily tattooed van driver pulled in. I had to sit with his mongrel dog (I did ask what breed) resting his front legs on my lap, but had a nice chat with my very friendly rescuer.
I got home fifty four hours after I last watered my sky garden. I feared the worst, and thought it confirmed when I saw every single leaf drooping, some little green tomatoes on the floor, and some on the plant shrivelled a bit like big green sultanas. But after a couple of thorough waterings over about half an hour, they’re definitely reviving.
And they’re starting to go red
2021 England and Wales: 625,008 live births
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/monthlyfiguresondeathsregisteredbyareaofusualresidence/2021
2021 England and Wales: 585,348 registered deaths
So births exceed deaths by almost 40,000 in 2021 even with the pandemic going on and the pandemic deaths recorded especially in January 2021.
Longer term we may have falling population without immigration due to TFR but people have been saying that for many decades and only in 2 years in about half a century have we had births be less than deaths - and one of those was only narrowly and thanks to the pandemic.
While my predictions, as the Stodge Saturday Patent has demonstrated, aren't worth any attention, I'll offer a thought based on recent experience.
In 50-75 years time, London will empty at the beginning of June as those who can seek solace from the 45c temperatures and humidity associated with the late 21st century British summer between the spring and autumn monsoon seasons.
The newly-refurbished London Euston station will host the regular 30-minute Maglev summer service to the Lake District having passengers disembarking at Oxenholme in little more than a hour. From there, families will decamp to their summer chalets near the lakes (or as near as is affordable). The ability to work independently from location, first established during the 2020 pandemic, will allow tens of thousands of Londoners to continue working far from the overheating capital.
For those without the means to escape the heat, the annual ordeal that is summer in London is the very definition of purgatory. On the hottest days, with temperatures nearing 50c, many head to vast "cool centres" where they can enjoy air conditioned relief before heading home in the later evening.
While the Lakes are one popular "retreat from the heat", the Pennines and Cheviots have also seen summer housing and the major development of the north Scottish coast around Torrisdale and the islands of Harris and Lewis have seen an explosion of summer homes for those from southern and eastern Britain desperate to seek cooler summer weather.
To be fair, I might well have been following the far left line, which would've meant I'd had to had to do a severe reverse ferret a few months later!
And: Wow
For many people, the house is the only asset they have - selling it and downsizing will provide for their pension by liberating capital on which they ca either live or invest. A significant reduction in the value of such assets will leave hundreds of thousands without the means to afford to retire.
Looking at one end of the market "the young can't afford to buy property" forgets the other. If I have a house worth £800k in and around London and I want to downsize and retire elsewhere, I can find a nice little house for £300k (for example) and I have £500k in equity. The problem is not who will buy my house valued at £800k in London but if I buy a £300k property elsewhere I am preventing a local family getting on the ladder.
Do you want to put up rows of small flats/houses on the outskirts of Cornish or Lake District villages and even if you do, you can't guarantee (because there is a free market at work which presumably you support) southern retirees won't snap them up. Even embargoing second home doesn't help because people want to retire to the likes of St Ives and Perranporth and that demand blocks out the locals.
The housing question is complex - simply saying "we need to build more houses" neglects the nuances in the issue.
For instance, getting an electric car does not justify an otherwise wanton life style.
And we would also explain why the chippy cretins of the Conservative party would make that impossible, and how they would even pass over a solid and reliable figure like Halifax in favour of an unstable buccaneer like Churchill who had been wrong on everything his whole career long.
And we'd be right. It's just that Churchill, almost entirely fortuitously, turned out to be right about Hitler.
There's a rather good UK sci-fi film from the early 60s called 'The Day The Earth Caught Fire' set in London which features the temperature going through the roof (I won't spoil the reasons). Very well done and an excellent turn from Leo McKern.
Edit: I meant to specify that it features people trying to make a mass exodus to cooler parts of the country, water rationing, etc - which is why it came to mind.
Boundary changes moved Churchill to the new Woodford seat in 1945 and Epping was won by Labour. The Conservatives re-captured it in 1950 but lost it again in 1964 when Stan Newens became MP. Newens lost in 1970 in a straight fight with a new Conservative candidate - one Norman Tebbit.
The Epping constituency was then abolished in 1974.
The other candidate for Prime Minister had been Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, who favoured a negotiated peace. This was no mere pipedream as Hitler had reached out via Mussolini to offer terms.
The new Prime Minister and coalition government were unpopular on Conservative benches. Obviously, this was to change with time and events.
Some of the science is a bit dubious and I'm NOT suggesting anything like that.
I'm merely arguing that in the absence of widespread air conditioning, those who can may well move north to a more comfortable existence in northern England and indeed Scotland and if I wanted a long-term investment, I'd buy up land and property on the northern Scottish coast and in the islands.
It's not easy to get to Scrabster or that coastline now as @Sunil_Prasannan will confirm but that could well change if there was a real expansion of tourism.
Just as interesting is what - if anything - Amazon and Apple do. They both have almost infinite money, but their streaming businesses have to be seriously money losing propositions - particularly Apple TV+.
Eg me. Last year I identified 2 positive habits I wanted to inculcate - flossing my teeth and building up my muscle tone with boxing.
Both of these are the sort of activities you naturally want to put off - being not exactly pleasant or easy to do - but I persisted and in time they took hold and became routine.
So, now, most days, I box and I floss. Have been for a few months and - yep - noticeably better teeth and more muscle on the arms and torso. Recommend to all.
Here the Tory contenders for PM seem worse than Boris, who at least paid lip service to the subject.
The window of opportunity for the Germans to make a successful landing was probably mid-July - growing RAF strength, the rapid re-building of mobile reserves lost at Dunkirk, the re-grouping of naval forces and German unwillingness to risk an amphibious landing meant Britain was safe thereafter.
The famous Sandhurst exercise modelling a German invasion in mid September shows such an attempt would likely have ended in disastrous failure. That in itself might have foreshortened the war with Hitler being ousted by the Army but we've no way of knowing that.
As the old saying goes - the Americans provided the money, the Russians provided the blood and the British provided the time - all helped by Hitler's stupidity which ended with him going to war with the two growing industrial powers of the day, fighting a multi-front war and ending with Germany being physically conquered and divided.
A few years later, when perhaps in need of regular medical treatment, that same isolated rural area might not seem so ideal.
Or perhaps that realisation comes one snowy winter.
Although you'd be surprised how many are still in 'isolated rural areas.'