While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Yes, the cross of St George was a glorious symbol of inclusion in the Crusades, famously it denoted a “safe space” where people of all faiths and genders could discuss microagressions in the Levant
I take it Starmer's direct appeal to the patriotic English right may not be hitting its mark with you?
I was wondering what the best of Britain is. Cool the way Starmer has debunked symbols and sentiment by using tons of symbols and sentiment.
This was ny favourite
Yes, the cross of St George was a glorious symbol of inclusion in the Crusades, famously it denoted a “safe space” where people of all faiths and genders could discuss microagressions in the Levant
I wonder if his "Free Lions" is as affected as George Osborne's glottal stops?
Here is a classic example of the huge advantage towards women in our justice system. This sort of thing never gets mentioned by those that bang on about patriarchy.
I have also learnt this week that, together with 17 relatives, I own a manuscript by the father of French Romanticism, deemed to be a cultural artefact of national importance to the French state.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
If the "head of legal" was not "implicated in" decisions to prosecute, who has the overall responsibility for them ? ...Continuing with the minutes from the board meeting, Susan Crichton is shown a note that asks if she was implicated in the prosecutions - to which she tells the inquiry she was not.
She says it was her understanding the board wanted to know if it was her who was bringing the prosecutions against the sub-postmasters...
I have also learnt this week that, together with 17 relatives, I own a manuscript by the father of French Romanticism, deemed to be a cultural artefact of national importance to the French state.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
Here is a classic example of the huge advantage towards women in our justice system. This sort of thing never gets mentioned by those that bang on about patriarchy.
I have also learnt this week that, together with 17 relatives, I own a manuscript by the father of French Romanticism, deemed to be a cultural artefact of national importance to the French state.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
I have also learnt this week that, together with 17 relatives, I own a manuscript by the father of French Romanticism, deemed to be a cultural artefact of national importance to the French state.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
I have also learnt this week that, together with 17 relatives, I own a manuscript by the father of French Romanticism, deemed to be a cultural artefact of national importance to the French state.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
Yes, the cross of St George was a glorious symbol of inclusion in the Crusades, famously it denoted a “safe space” where people of all faiths and genders could discuss microagressions in the Levant
I take it Starmer's direct appeal to the patriotic English right may not be hitting its mark with you?
On which subject, I got my local election flyer from the local Labour Party last week - it's the most visually appealing bit of material that Labour have ever put out. The red of Labour segues into a stylised union jack in the corner; the colour scheme is red and white, rather than the horrible red and yellow they used to insist on; the candidate is a normal-looking friendly-faced young man in a suit rather than a terrifying-looking probably-Corbynite loon. They are REALLY trying to court the uncommitted at the expense of alienating the weird vexilophobes on their own side and I'm quite impressed.
I'm under no illusion that Labour are suddenly the patriotic party. But at least they're willing to look like they no longer appear to actively hate Britain.
Though the high score for social media influencers made me laugh/cry
I'm only a senior lecturer, not a professor - do I count in the 3%?
(Although technically our Uni allows us to use the terms assistant professor and associate professor as other institutions (notably overseas) don't use Lecturer/SL/Reader/Prof for the academic scales.)
Who among us has not paid porn actresses hundreds of thousands to keep quiet about our affairs during our wives' pregnancies ?
"He’s not just our former president," Trump's lawyer Todd Blanche says in his opening. "He’s a man. He’s a husband, he’s a father, and he’s a person, just like you and just like me.".. https://twitter.com/benkochman/status/1782428812849901753
Here is a classic example of the huge advantage towards women in our justice system. This sort of thing never gets mentioned by those that bang on about patriarchy.
Imagine the punishment for a man glassing a woman repeatedly in the face, scarring her permanently.
It's not really clear what was disobliging about what the fella said to her either. You'd have thought at the very least there would be some sort of damages being paid (I have no understanding whatsoever of this sort of case.)
She looks vaguely familiar. I've a feeling I may know her.
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
Though the high score for social media influencers made me laugh/cry
Those findings are completely in line (social media influencers aside) with what Liz Truss is expounding, which is that elected politicians bear all the responsibility but unelected bureaucrats hold all the real power. Power with no democratic (or other) accountability is what she is complaining about.
I have also learnt this week that, together with 17 relatives, I own a manuscript by the father of French Romanticism, deemed to be a cultural artefact of national importance to the French state.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
Yes, it appears to be missing all the windmills on the West Pennine Moors north of Bury/Bolton (of which there are many) and those next to the Mersey estuary near Frodsham, to name the two which spring most readily to mind near me.
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
It seems that Wales has declined to built wind farms in places with poor connectivity, knowing that to do so would lead to constraining frequently and therefore represent poor value for bill payers. Scotland has observed no such strictures, and seems to have seen the wind farm rush as a nice little racket, which it is.
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
This is a useful summary table (Wiki). In 2020 Scotland had about 75% of UK onshore capacity, and 10% of offshore. By 2025 it will have about 15% of offshore, having trebled offshore capacity since 2020. No 2025 numbers for onshore.
The numbers look about right, but I am not sure what the greyed out figures - perhaps projections not available at the time of complication.
Nor am I sure of the impact of Sunak & Friends' butt-sitting or existing-in-chaos habits.
Yes, the cross of St George was a glorious symbol of inclusion in the Crusades, famously it denoted a “safe space” where people of all faiths and genders could discuss microagressions in the Levant
I take it Starmer's direct appeal to the patriotic English right may not be hitting its mark with you?
On which subject, I got my local election flyer from the local Labour Party last week - it's the most visually appealing bit of material that Labour have ever put out. The red of Labour segues into a stylised union jack in the corner; the colour scheme is red and white, rather than the horrible red and yellow they used to insist on; the candidate is a normal-looking friendly-faced young man in a suit rather than a terrifying-looking probably-Corbynite loon. They are REALLY trying to court the uncommitted at the expense of alienating the weird vexilophobes on their own side and I'm quite impressed.
I'm under no illusion that Labour are suddenly the patriotic party. But at least they're willing to look like they no longer appear to actively hate Britain.
So now they're PR savvy conmen instead of earnest wrong thinkers.. is that progress?
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
It seems that Wales has declined to built wind farms in places with poor connectivity, knowing that to do so would lead to constraining frequently and therefore represent poor value for bill payers. Scotland has observed no such strictures, and seems to have seen the wind farm rush as a nice little racket, which it is.
You keep on tilting at those windmills, but you are even more wrong than the map was incomplete, as it turns out.
If the "head of legal" was not "implicated in" decisions to prosecute, who has the overall responsibility for them ? ...Continuing with the minutes from the board meeting, Susan Crichton is shown a note that asks if she was implicated in the prosecutions - to which she tells the inquiry she was not.
She says it was her understanding the board wanted to know if it was her who was bringing the prosecutions against the sub-postmasters...
Or was it no one ?
I think the issue here is three-fold.
(1) It looks as if the Board was trying to make Crichton the scapegoat for the prosecutions. Remember: Paula Vennells presented the paper to the Board not Susan Crichton, which is interesting and suggests to me that she was both trying to control the narrative, throw Susan Crichton under the bus & prevent her from properly briefing the Board on the implications.
(2) The Board should have already known that Susan had only been the Head of Legal since 2010 and that prosecutions had been happening for 10 years before that. So this question - if accurately recorded - shows how unaware the Board was of what was going on.
(3) it is not at all clear how far Legal was responsible for the Security Team and the investigators. That was part of the problem - lots of fiefdoms doing their own thing, No joined up thinking and no proper assessment of the law or risks.
While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Plenty of muggers* in India/Pakistan, too, and Nile crocs in the, erm, Nile, as well as Palestine and Mespot, in historical times.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
I have also learnt this week that, together with 17 relatives, I own a manuscript by the father of French Romanticism, deemed to be a cultural artefact of national importance to the French state.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
That Chateaubriand must be quite rare.
Chapeau is the word!
I know next to nothing of Chateaubriand but according to historian Peter Gay:
Chateaubriand saw himself as the greatest lover, the greatest writer, and the greatest philosopher of his age.
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
It seems that Wales has declined to built wind farms in places with poor connectivity, knowing that to do so would lead to constraining frequently and therefore represent poor value for bill payers. Scotland has observed no such strictures, and seems to have seen the wind farm rush as a nice little racket, which it is.
You keep on tilting at those windmills, but you are even more wrong than the map was incomplete, as it turns out.
The revised UK map posted downthread shows exactly the same thing - that Wales' remote 'middle bit' is sparse in wind farms. I am very conscious of and 100% correct about what the policy has been in Scotland. I am not aware of Welsh policy on this, hence my comment was a surmise, prefaced by 'It seems'.
Yes, the cross of St George was a glorious symbol of inclusion in the Crusades, famously it denoted a “safe space” where people of all faiths and genders could discuss microagressions in the Levant
I take it Starmer's direct appeal to the patriotic English right may not be hitting its mark with you?
On which subject, I got my local election flyer from the local Labour Party last week - it's the most visually appealing bit of material that Labour have ever put out. The red of Labour segues into a stylised union jack in the corner; the colour scheme is red and white, rather than the horrible red and yellow they used to insist on; the candidate is a normal-looking friendly-faced young man in a suit rather than a terrifying-looking probably-Corbynite loon. They are REALLY trying to court the uncommitted at the expense of alienating the weird vexilophobes on their own side and I'm quite impressed.
I'm under no illusion that Labour are suddenly the patriotic party. But at least they're willing to look like they no longer appear to actively hate Britain.
So now they're PR savvy conmen instead of earnest wrong thinkers.. is that progress?
In the kingdom of the non-PR savvy Tory conman, the PR-savvy Labour conman is king.
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
It seems that Wales has declined to built wind farms in places with poor connectivity, knowing that to do so would lead to constraining frequently and therefore represent poor value for bill payers. Scotland has observed no such strictures, and seems to have seen the wind farm rush as a nice little racket, which it is.
Hmm, that does not take into account the major impending changes to the grid system. I forget the names of the two big north-south projects.
Yes, the cross of St George was a glorious symbol of inclusion in the Crusades, famously it denoted a “safe space” where people of all faiths and genders could discuss microagressions in the Levant
I take it Starmer's direct appeal to the patriotic English right may not be hitting its mark with you?
On which subject, I got my local election flyer from the local Labour Party last week - it's the most visually appealing bit of material that Labour have ever put out. The red of Labour segues into a stylised union jack in the corner; the colour scheme is red and white, rather than the horrible red and yellow they used to insist on; the candidate is a normal-looking friendly-faced young man in a suit rather than a terrifying-looking probably-Corbynite loon. They are REALLY trying to court the uncommitted at the expense of alienating the weird vexilophobes on their own side and I'm quite impressed.
I'm under no illusion that Labour are suddenly the patriotic party. But at least they're willing to look like they no longer appear to actively hate Britain.
So now they're PR savvy conmen instead of earnest wrong thinkers.. is that progress?
I think it is. At least it suggests they are aware of a world outside their bubble which thinks somewhat differently to them.
The opinions of a middle-class, middle-aged, historically aware but vaguely gammony man on St. George:
It's hard to get too excited about him either way as an individual. Clearly he was introduced in the plantaganet era by foreign kings with different values. It would have been nice to have retained one of our pre-Norman actually English saints as our patron saint - Cuthbert, say, or Alban. But largely they all had daft names. So maybe not. In any case, the concept of a patron saint is a bit foreign now: we don't really have much more in common with the values of Cuthbert or Alban than we do with George. It's hard to get too enthusiastic about the concept of early English Christians: mostly they tend to come across as on the side of Christianity, rather than of the English. It's hard, for the vaguely partisan 21st century Englishman, to side with dark ages English Christians over dark ages English pagans; and harder still to be unequivocally sure that the right side won at the synod of Whitby. Essentially it would be hard to find an English saint who we could be unequivocally supportive of.
Still, everyone apparently has to have a patron saint, and St. George is probably no worse than anyone else. He has a nice flag. And more to the point, he's who we've got; he's been our patron saint for generations, and that is more important (for the English or anyone else) than whatever qualities he himself might have possessed. Frankly the qualities of the saint himself are incidental: it's a national day, which again, everyone apparently has to have, and one in mid-Spring seems the right sort of time to have one.
We don't make a massive fuss, but we don't let the day go past entirely uncommented on as we might with, say, Rogation Sunday. Seems about right.
I once heard an American describe Bonfire Night as the British national day. I initially thought this a cultural misreading: they have fireworks on 4th July, which is their national day; our fireworks are on 5th November, so that must be our national day. A big oversimplification. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it to be true. Bonfire night is when we are at our most unselfconsciously British. It's one of the very few solely British traditions, and one which we do without really thinking about. We rehash the historical story, but we don't really think about the significance of it: we just set fire to things and blow things up. You could, if you want, see it as the first win for parliamentary democracy over absolutism, but most people don't really think about things that deeply, and it's not really in the British tradition to do so. You don't HAVE to do anything; your presence isn't required anywhere. No-one needs to fall out about its significance. It's just something that happens. That to me makes it a true national day.
Speak for yourself , I am certainly not British on 5th November or any other date.
You just don't identify as British, malcolm. It would take another referendum, or your renouncing your citizenship, to change the uncomfortable fact.
Neither of those things would change that fact. Scotland voting for independence wouldn't change its geography, and Malcolm becoming stateless would not change his origin.
Of course they would. Scottish independence would make malcolm solely Scottish, without the taint of Britain.
I might as well say that you are European.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but just in case, I am European.
The answer is going to depend on what you mean. Our objective and legal citizenship (for most of us) is that of the UK of GB and NI. Our subjective one is whatsoever you will. Hope that ends the discussion......
Of course it doesn't. Citizenship has nothing to do with it. People from Britain are British - it's simply a function of geography. Just like the most ardent remainer and the fiercest leaver are still European, because geographically we're in Europe. We haven't gone anywhere. If and when Scotland ever becomes independent it will be as British the day after it as it was the day before.
I don't think that's right. 'British' has a legal status as in, for example, 'British citizen'.
Something like 'European' mostly doesn't, (though of course 'EU citizen' does - and when the UK left the EU most British citizens lost that EU citizen status.
It doesn't matter what political dimensions or identities overlay it, it is still a simple geographical fact that Scotland is part of Britain, and will remain so until it finds a way to tow itself to Sweden.
Well you were arguing, sorry if I misunderstood, that people in Scotland/Scotland itself would be NO LESS BRITISH if Scotland becomes independent. This is clearly bollocks Britain is not just the name of island, 'British' refers to a nationality and not just a geographical feature. So Scotland wouldn't 'as British the day after as it was the day before'
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
This is a useful summary table (Wiki). In 2020 Scotland had about 75% of UK onshore capacity, and 10% of offshore. By 2025 it will have about 15% of offshore, having trebled offshore capacity since 2020. No 2025 numbers for onshore.
The numbers look about right, but I am not sure what the greyed out figures - perhaps projections not available at the time of complication.
Nor am I sure of the impact of Sunak & Friends' butt-sitting or existing-in-chaos habits.
IIRC, last time this went round PB, it turned out there was a strong correlation between areas that regularly got useful winds (continuous rather than gusting, frequent etc) and wind farms.
Funny that.
Most interest is in offshore now - no size limits (bigger is better, so far, in wind turbines), lots of space, no NIMBYs, no geography to complicate the flows…
Yes, the cross of St George was a glorious symbol of inclusion in the Crusades, famously it denoted a “safe space” where people of all faiths and genders could discuss microagressions in the Levant
I take it Starmer's direct appeal to the patriotic English right may not be hitting its mark with you?
On which subject, I got my local election flyer from the local Labour Party last week - it's the most visually appealing bit of material that Labour have ever put out. The red of Labour segues into a stylised union jack in the corner; the colour scheme is red and white, rather than the horrible red and yellow they used to insist on; the candidate is a normal-looking friendly-faced young man in a suit rather than a terrifying-looking probably-Corbynite loon. They are REALLY trying to court the uncommitted at the expense of alienating the weird vexilophobes on their own side and I'm quite impressed.
I'm under no illusion that Labour are suddenly the patriotic party. But at least they're willing to look like they no longer appear to actively hate Britain.
So now they're PR savvy conmen instead of earnest wrong thinkers.. is that progress?
In the kingdom of the non-PR savvy Tory conman, the PR-savvy Labour conman is king.
Who among us has not paid porn actresses hundreds of thousands to keep quiet about our affairs during our wives' pregnancies ?
"He’s not just our former president," Trump's lawyer Todd Blanche says in his opening. "He’s a man. He’s a husband, he’s a father, and he’s a person, just like you and just like me.".. https://twitter.com/benkochman/status/1782428812849901753
Trump is never typical.
He was having a long-term affair with another woman during his wife's pregnancy, and betrayed *both* of them for his $130k (IIRC. Plus - evaded? - tax, plus payment-transfer-fee?) quickie with Stormy Daniels.
Even his ... "waah waah waah ... I'll miss my son's graduation because they are making me attend my own criminal trial" is framed by 1 - A long list of children's graduations that he has not attended, and 2 - the Judge has not made a ruling.
I have also learnt this week that, together with 17 relatives, I own a manuscript by the father of French Romanticism, deemed to be a cultural artefact of national importance to the French state.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
That Chateaubriand must be quite rare.
Chapeau is the word!
I know next to nothing of Chateaubriand but according to historian Peter Gay:
Chateaubriand saw himself as the greatest lover, the greatest writer, and the greatest philosopher of his age.
Sounds like an early SeanT alias to me.
Except SeanT isn't named after a delicious cut of steak. We'll have the SeanT with truffle butter and some creamed spinach on the side please. Medium rare. Doesn't cut it.
If I could be named after a steak, assuming ChateauB is taken, I think it would be T-Bone. "The" T-Bone.
While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Plenty of muggers* in India/Pakistan, too, and Nile crocs in the, erm, Nile, as well as Palestine and Mespot, in historical times.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
Chinese Dragons do look very similar to Western depictions too.
Yes, the cross of St George was a glorious symbol of inclusion in the Crusades, famously it denoted a “safe space” where people of all faiths and genders could discuss microagressions in the Levant
I take it Starmer's direct appeal to the patriotic English right may not be hitting its mark with you?
On which subject, I got my local election flyer from the local Labour Party last week - it's the most visually appealing bit of material that Labour have ever put out. The red of Labour segues into a stylised union jack in the corner; the colour scheme is red and white, rather than the horrible red and yellow they used to insist on; the candidate is a normal-looking friendly-faced young man in a suit rather than a terrifying-looking probably-Corbynite loon. They are REALLY trying to court the uncommitted at the expense of alienating the weird vexilophobes on their own side and I'm quite impressed.
I'm under no illusion that Labour are suddenly the patriotic party. But at least they're willing to look like they no longer appear to actively hate Britain.
So now they're PR savvy conmen instead of earnest wrong thinkers.. is that progress?
In the kingdom of the non-PR savvy Tory conman, the PR-savvy Labour conman is king.
Vote LibDem, get Sunak!
Unlike Green (BJO fans please explain) that doesn't hold true. Vote Lib Dem in target constituency, get Tory MP out.
Here is a classic example of the huge advantage towards women in our justice system. This sort of thing never gets mentioned by those that bang on about patriarchy.
If the "head of legal" was not "implicated in" decisions to prosecute, who has the overall responsibility for them ? ...Continuing with the minutes from the board meeting, Susan Crichton is shown a note that asks if she was implicated in the prosecutions - to which she tells the inquiry she was not.
She says it was her understanding the board wanted to know if it was her who was bringing the prosecutions against the sub-postmasters...
Or was it no one ?
I think the issue here is three-fold.
(1) It looks as if the Board was trying to make Crichton the scapegoat for the prosecutions. Remember: Paula Vennells presented the paper to the Board not Susan Crichton, which is interesting and suggests to me that she was both trying to control the narrative, throw Susan Crichton under the bus & prevent her from properly briefing the Board on the implications.
(2) The Board should have already known that Susan had only been the Head of Legal since 2010 and that prosecutions had been happening for 10 years before that. So this question - if accurately recorded - shows how unaware the Board was of what was going on.
(3) it is not at all clear how far Legal was responsible for the Security Team and the investigators. That was part of the problem - lots of fiefdoms doing their own thing, No joined up thinking and no proper assessment of the law or risks.
Thanks, Cyclefree.
The first two are pretty clear, but facts behind the third point are for now quite opaque to me. A curious incuriosity on the part of Susan Crichton regarding both rationale and responsibility for the prosecutions - and the extent to which they might have been fatally flawed - is though pretty hard to ignore.
I have also learnt this week that, together with 17 relatives, I own a manuscript by the father of French Romanticism, deemed to be a cultural artefact of national importance to the French state.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
That Chateaubriand must be quite rare.
Chapeau is the word!
I know next to nothing of Chateaubriand but according to historian Peter Gay:
Chateaubriand saw himself as the greatest lover, the greatest writer, and the greatest philosopher of his age.
Sounds like an early SeanT alias to me.
Except SeanT isn't named after a delicious cut of steak. We'll have the SeanT with truffle butter and some creamed spinach on the side please. Medium rare. Doesn't cut it.
If I could be named after a steak, assuming ChateauB is taken, I think it would be T-Bone. "The" T-Bone.
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
This is a useful summary table (Wiki). In 2020 Scotland had about 75% of UK onshore capacity, and 10% of offshore. By 2025 it will have about 15% of offshore, having trebled offshore capacity since 2020. No 2025 numbers for onshore.
The numbers look about right, but I am not sure what the greyed out figures - perhaps projections not available at the time of complication.
Nor am I sure of the impact of Sunak & Friends' butt-sitting or existing-in-chaos habits.
IIRC, last time this went round PB, it turned out there was a strong correlation between areas that regularly got useful winds (continuous rather than gusting, frequent etc) and wind farms.
Funny that.
Most interest is in offshore now - no size limits (bigger is better, so far, in wind turbines), lots of space, no NIMBYs, no geography to complicate the flows…
OK. I think all the greyed out numbers are just "no data at this time".
Here are reported numbers for Wales from last month (again, they look OK as a report) - 1200GW onshore, 730W offshore, which is significant growth over recent years :
While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Plenty of muggers* in India/Pakistan, too, and Nile crocs in the, erm, Nile, as well as Palestine and Mespot, in historical times.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
Chinese Dragons do look very similar to Western depictions too.
A bit longer and wormier maybe? Though actually more like the old mediaeval depictions which were also rather wormier.
I'd guess that 20th and 21st C depictions of dragons are heavily influenced by dinosaur aesthetics. The scaly skin, lines of teeth, fatter torsoes etc.
Here is a classic example of the huge advantage towards women in our justice system. This sort of thing never gets mentioned by those that bang on about patriarchy.
Imagine the punishment for a man glassing a woman repeatedly in the face, scarring her permanently.
I don't know that I'd draw any wider conclusions, but the sentence does seem absurdly lenient. It wasn't even a case of someone lashing out, but rather, someone going after a victim who had tried to defuse the situation, by walking away.
The opinions of a middle-class, middle-aged, historically aware but vaguely gammony man on St. George:
It's hard to get too excited about him either way as an individual. Clearly he was introduced in the plantaganet era by foreign kings with different values. It would have been nice to have retained one of our pre-Norman actually English saints as our patron saint - Cuthbert, say, or Alban. But largely they all had daft names. So maybe not. In any case, the concept of a patron saint is a bit foreign now: we don't really have much more in common with the values of Cuthbert or Alban than we do with George. It's hard to get too enthusiastic about the concept of early English Christians: mostly they tend to come across as on the side of Christianity, rather than of the English. It's hard, for the vaguely partisan 21st century Englishman, to side with dark ages English Christians over dark ages English pagans; and harder still to be unequivocally sure that the right side won at the synod of Whitby. Essentially it would be hard to find an English saint who we could be unequivocally supportive of.
Still, everyone apparently has to have a patron saint, and St. George is probably no worse than anyone else. He has a nice flag. And more to the point, he's who we've got; he's been our patron saint for generations, and that is more important (for the English or anyone else) than whatever qualities he himself might have possessed. Frankly the qualities of the saint himself are incidental: it's a national day, which again, everyone apparently has to have, and one in mid-Spring seems the right sort of time to have one.
We don't make a massive fuss, but we don't let the day go past entirely uncommented on as we might with, say, Rogation Sunday. Seems about right.
I once heard an American describe Bonfire Night as the British national day. I initially thought this a cultural misreading: they have fireworks on 4th July, which is their national day; our fireworks are on 5th November, so that must be our national day. A big oversimplification. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it to be true. Bonfire night is when we are at our most unselfconsciously British. It's one of the very few solely British traditions, and one which we do without really thinking about. We rehash the historical story, but we don't really think about the significance of it: we just set fire to things and blow things up. You could, if you want, see it as the first win for parliamentary democracy over absolutism, but most people don't really think about things that deeply, and it's not really in the British tradition to do so. You don't HAVE to do anything; your presence isn't required anywhere. No-one needs to fall out about its significance. It's just something that happens. That to me makes it a true national day.
Speak for yourself , I am certainly not British on 5th November or any other date.
You just don't identify as British, malcolm. It would take another referendum, or your renouncing your citizenship, to change the uncomfortable fact.
Neither of those things would change that fact. Scotland voting for independence wouldn't change its geography, and Malcolm becoming stateless would not change his origin.
Of course they would. Scottish independence would make malcolm solely Scottish, without the taint of Britain.
I might as well say that you are European.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but just in case, I am European.
The answer is going to depend on what you mean. Our objective and legal citizenship (for most of us) is that of the UK of GB and NI. Our subjective one is whatsoever you will. Hope that ends the discussion......
Of course it doesn't. Citizenship has nothing to do with it. People from Britain are British - it's simply a function of geography. Just like the most ardent remainer and the fiercest leaver are still European, because geographically we're in Europe. We haven't gone anywhere. If and when Scotland ever becomes independent it will be as British the day after it as it was the day before.
I don't think that's right. 'British' has a legal status as in, for example, 'British citizen'.
Something like 'European' mostly doesn't, (though of course 'EU citizen' does - and when the UK left the EU most British citizens lost that EU citizen status.
It doesn't matter what political dimensions or identities overlay it, it is still a simple geographical fact that Scotland is part of Britain, and will remain so until it finds a way to tow itself to Sweden.
Well you were arguing, sorry if I misunderstood, that people in Scotland/Scotland itself would be NO LESS BRITISH if Scotland becomes independent. This is clearly bollocks Britain is not just the name of island, 'British' refers to a nationality and not just a geographical feature. So Scotland wouldn't 'as British the day after as it was the day before'
Of course it would. We have not become any less European because we left the EU. The citizens of Switzerland and Western Russia are no less European because they've never been in the EU. Scotland would forever be part of Britain, every bit as much as what remained of 'Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. It doesn't matter how you slice or dice it; it wouldn't have gone anywhere, so it wouldn't have changed.
Indeed. I remember the news of that, and the outcome, very well from my student days (and I wasn't one of the Socialist Worker types either, quite the reverse).
I was thinking about that the other day when some PBers were claiming that lively (so to speak) demos were a strictly modern concept, with the perhaps unintended but equally wrong corollary that the Met didn't gratuitously kill people in the good old days either.
While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Plenty of muggers* in India/Pakistan, too, and Nile crocs in the, erm, Nile, as well as Palestine and Mespot, in historical times.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
Chinese Dragons do look very similar to Western depictions too.
A bit longer and wormier maybe? Though actually more like the old mediaeval depictions which were also rather wormier.
I'd guess that 20th and 21st C depictions of dragons are heavily influenced by dinosaur aesthetics. The scaly skin, lines of teeth, fatter torsoes etc.
Glaurung is definitely a wormy dragon, Smaug more like a dinosaur.
I have also learnt this week that, together with 17 relatives, I own a manuscript by the father of French Romanticism, deemed to be a cultural artefact of national importance to the French state.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
That Chateaubriand must be quite rare.
Chapeau is the word!
I know next to nothing of Chateaubriand but according to historian Peter Gay:
Chateaubriand saw himself as the greatest lover, the greatest writer, and the greatest philosopher of his age.
Sounds like an early SeanT alias to me.
Except SeanT isn't named after a delicious cut of steak. We'll have the SeanT with truffle butter and some creamed spinach on the side please. Medium rare. Doesn't cut it.
If I could be named after a steak, assuming ChateauB is taken, I think it would be T-Bone. "The" T-Bone.
You can be T-Bone, chuck, if I can be Tomahawk.
Sir Loin still available. Feather-Blade. "The" Rib Eye. Flatiron. Tournedos. Some decent comic hero names there.
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
It seems that Wales has declined to built wind farms in places with poor connectivity, knowing that to do so would lead to constraining frequently and therefore represent poor value for bill payers. Scotland has observed no such strictures, and seems to have seen the wind farm rush as a nice little racket, which it is.
You keep on tilting at those windmills, but you are even more wrong than the map was incomplete, as it turns out.
I can just imagine the Authority Quote on a Reform-UK leaflet in Scarborough, the more literary parts of Thanet where they still have Grammar Schools, or Walmington-on-Sea.
"Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Plenty of muggers* in India/Pakistan, too, and Nile crocs in the, erm, Nile, as well as Palestine and Mespot, in historical times.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
Chinese Dragons do look very similar to Western depictions too.
A bit longer and wormier maybe? Though actually more like the old mediaeval depictions which were also rather wormier.
I'd guess that 20th and 21st C depictions of dragons are heavily influenced by dinosaur aesthetics. The scaly skin, lines of teeth, fatter torsoes etc.
Yes, quite possibly. I always feel a bit sorry for the dragon in old pictures of St George. It looks like he's killing an oversized lizard. Dragons have got a lot bigger in recent pop culture, making slaying them seem a bit more heroic.
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
It seems that Wales has declined to built wind farms in places with poor connectivity, knowing that to do so would lead to constraining frequently and therefore represent poor value for bill payers. Scotland has observed no such strictures, and seems to have seen the wind farm rush as a nice little racket, which it is.
You keep on tilting at those windmills, but you are even more wrong than the map was incomplete, as it turns out.
I can just imagine the Authority Quote on a Reform-UK leaflet in Scarborough, the more literary parts of Thanet, or Walmington-on-Sea.
And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
I predict that this will not happen in Ashfield.
On the subject of hard to read books (Ulysses discussion passim) I have tried and failed to get through Don Quixote twice. It does rather go on.
My list of attempted and dropped books includes Don Q (twice), Ulysses, A la recherche DTP (not so hard to read but just very very long), The Jungle Book (language is unbearably archaic), Life and fate (unfairly, may try again), Lord of the Rings (couldn't get into it).
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
The opinions of a middle-class, middle-aged, historically aware but vaguely gammony man on St. George:
It's hard to get too excited about him either way as an individual. Clearly he was introduced in the plantaganet era by foreign kings with different values. It would have been nice to have retained one of our pre-Norman actually English saints as our patron saint - Cuthbert, say, or Alban. But largely they all had daft names. So maybe not. In any case, the concept of a patron saint is a bit foreign now: we don't really have much more in common with the values of Cuthbert or Alban than we do with George. It's hard to get too enthusiastic about the concept of early English Christians: mostly they tend to come across as on the side of Christianity, rather than of the English. It's hard, for the vaguely partisan 21st century Englishman, to side with dark ages English Christians over dark ages English pagans; and harder still to be unequivocally sure that the right side won at the synod of Whitby. Essentially it would be hard to find an English saint who we could be unequivocally supportive of.
Still, everyone apparently has to have a patron saint, and St. George is probably no worse than anyone else. He has a nice flag. And more to the point, he's who we've got; he's been our patron saint for generations, and that is more important (for the English or anyone else) than whatever qualities he himself might have possessed. Frankly the qualities of the saint himself are incidental: it's a national day, which again, everyone apparently has to have, and one in mid-Spring seems the right sort of time to have one.
We don't make a massive fuss, but we don't let the day go past entirely uncommented on as we might with, say, Rogation Sunday. Seems about right.
I once heard an American describe Bonfire Night as the British national day. I initially thought this a cultural misreading: they have fireworks on 4th July, which is their national day; our fireworks are on 5th November, so that must be our national day. A big oversimplification. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it to be true. Bonfire night is when we are at our most unselfconsciously British. It's one of the very few solely British traditions, and one which we do without really thinking about. We rehash the historical story, but we don't really think about the significance of it: we just set fire to things and blow things up. You could, if you want, see it as the first win for parliamentary democracy over absolutism, but most people don't really think about things that deeply, and it's not really in the British tradition to do so. You don't HAVE to do anything; your presence isn't required anywhere. No-one needs to fall out about its significance. It's just something that happens. That to me makes it a true national day.
Speak for yourself , I am certainly not British on 5th November or any other date.
You just don't identify as British, malcolm. It would take another referendum, or your renouncing your citizenship, to change the uncomfortable fact.
Neither of those things would change that fact. Scotland voting for independence wouldn't change its geography, and Malcolm becoming stateless would not change his origin.
Of course they would. Scottish independence would make malcolm solely Scottish, without the taint of Britain.
I might as well say that you are European.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but just in case, I am European.
The answer is going to depend on what you mean. Our objective and legal citizenship (for most of us) is that of the UK of GB and NI. Our subjective one is whatsoever you will. Hope that ends the discussion......
Of course it doesn't. Citizenship has nothing to do with it. People from Britain are British - it's simply a function of geography. Just like the most ardent remainer and the fiercest leaver are still European, because geographically we're in Europe. We haven't gone anywhere. If and when Scotland ever becomes independent it will be as British the day after it as it was the day before.
I don't think that's right. 'British' has a legal status as in, for example, 'British citizen'.
Something like 'European' mostly doesn't, (though of course 'EU citizen' does - and when the UK left the EU most British citizens lost that EU citizen status.
It doesn't matter what political dimensions or identities overlay it, it is still a simple geographical fact that Scotland is part of Britain, and will remain so until it finds a way to tow itself to Sweden.
Well you were arguing, sorry if I misunderstood, that people in Scotland/Scotland itself would be NO LESS BRITISH if Scotland becomes independent. This is clearly bollocks Britain is not just the name of island, 'British' refers to a nationality and not just a geographical feature. So Scotland wouldn't 'as British the day after as it was the day before'
Of course it would. We have not become any less European because we left the EU. The citizens of Switzerland and Western Russia are no less European because they've never been in the EU. Scotland would forever be part of Britain, every bit as much as what remained of 'Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. It doesn't matter how you slice or dice it; it wouldn't have gone anywhere, so it wouldn't have changed.
So in your idiolect when you use the words 'Britain' and 'British' you are always referring to a geographical feature. You might be interested to know that for most (almost all) speakers of English those words are very often referring to a country or nationality. Hope this helps.
I have also learnt this week that, together with 17 relatives, I own a manuscript by the father of French Romanticism, deemed to be a cultural artefact of national importance to the French state.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
That Chateaubriand must be quite rare.
Chapeau is the word!
I know next to nothing of Chateaubriand but according to historian Peter Gay:
Chateaubriand saw himself as the greatest lover, the greatest writer, and the greatest philosopher of his age.
Sounds like an early SeanT alias to me.
Except SeanT isn't named after a delicious cut of steak. We'll have the SeanT with truffle butter and some creamed spinach on the side please. Medium rare. Doesn't cut it.
If I could be named after a steak, assuming ChateauB is taken, I think it would be T-Bone. "The" T-Bone.
You can be T-Bone, chuck, if I can be Tomahawk.
My family's story (not @SeanT's many vulgar identities) is actually quite interesting - especially for anyone interested in French history.
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
It seems that Wales has declined to built wind farms in places with poor connectivity, knowing that to do so would lead to constraining frequently and therefore represent poor value for bill payers. Scotland has observed no such strictures, and seems to have seen the wind farm rush as a nice little racket, which it is.
You keep on tilting at those windmills, but you are even more wrong than the map was incomplete, as it turns out.
I can just imagine the Authority Quote on a Reform-UK leaflet in Scarborough, the more literary parts of Thanet, or Walmington-on-Sea.
And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
I predict that this will not happen in Ashfield.
On the subject of hard to read books (Ulysses discussion passim) I have tried and failed to get through Don Quixote twice. It does rather go on.
My list of attempted and dropped books includes Don Q (twice), Ulysses, A la recherche DTP (not so hard to read but just very very long), The Jungle Book (language is unbearably archaic), Life and fate (unfairly, may try again), Lord of the Rings (couldn't get into it).
LOTR is the only one of that lot I've read and I went through that like a dose of salts. Helped by enoying the film depiction. Don't think I'd be bothered to read it again.
While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Plenty of muggers* in India/Pakistan, too, and Nile crocs in the, erm, Nile, as well as Palestine and Mespot, in historical times.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
Also Komodo dragons, which would have been creatures only of legend to most (and were unknown in the west until 1910), given their extremely limited geographic spread.
The opinions of a middle-class, middle-aged, historically aware but vaguely gammony man on St. George:
It's hard to get too excited about him either way as an individual. Clearly he was introduced in the plantaganet era by foreign kings with different values. It would have been nice to have retained one of our pre-Norman actually English saints as our patron saint - Cuthbert, say, or Alban. But largely they all had daft names. So maybe not. In any case, the concept of a patron saint is a bit foreign now: we don't really have much more in common with the values of Cuthbert or Alban than we do with George. It's hard to get too enthusiastic about the concept of early English Christians: mostly they tend to come across as on the side of Christianity, rather than of the English. It's hard, for the vaguely partisan 21st century Englishman, to side with dark ages English Christians over dark ages English pagans; and harder still to be unequivocally sure that the right side won at the synod of Whitby. Essentially it would be hard to find an English saint who we could be unequivocally supportive of.
Still, everyone apparently has to have a patron saint, and St. George is probably no worse than anyone else. He has a nice flag. And more to the point, he's who we've got; he's been our patron saint for generations, and that is more important (for the English or anyone else) than whatever qualities he himself might have possessed. Frankly the qualities of the saint himself are incidental: it's a national day, which again, everyone apparently has to have, and one in mid-Spring seems the right sort of time to have one.
We don't make a massive fuss, but we don't let the day go past entirely uncommented on as we might with, say, Rogation Sunday. Seems about right.
I once heard an American describe Bonfire Night as the British national day. I initially thought this a cultural misreading: they have fireworks on 4th July, which is their national day; our fireworks are on 5th November, so that must be our national day. A big oversimplification. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it to be true. Bonfire night is when we are at our most unselfconsciously British. It's one of the very few solely British traditions, and one which we do without really thinking about. We rehash the historical story, but we don't really think about the significance of it: we just set fire to things and blow things up. You could, if you want, see it as the first win for parliamentary democracy over absolutism, but most people don't really think about things that deeply, and it's not really in the British tradition to do so. You don't HAVE to do anything; your presence isn't required anywhere. No-one needs to fall out about its significance. It's just something that happens. That to me makes it a true national day.
Speak for yourself , I am certainly not British on 5th November or any other date.
You just don't identify as British, malcolm. It would take another referendum, or your renouncing your citizenship, to change the uncomfortable fact.
Neither of those things would change that fact. Scotland voting for independence wouldn't change its geography, and Malcolm becoming stateless would not change his origin.
Of course they would. Scottish independence would make malcolm solely Scottish, without the taint of Britain.
I might as well say that you are European.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but just in case, I am European.
The answer is going to depend on what you mean. Our objective and legal citizenship (for most of us) is that of the UK of GB and NI. Our subjective one is whatsoever you will. Hope that ends the discussion......
Of course it doesn't. Citizenship has nothing to do with it. People from Britain are British - it's simply a function of geography. Just like the most ardent remainer and the fiercest leaver are still European, because geographically we're in Europe. We haven't gone anywhere. If and when Scotland ever becomes independent it will be as British the day after it as it was the day before.
I don't think that's right. 'British' has a legal status as in, for example, 'British citizen'.
Something like 'European' mostly doesn't, (though of course 'EU citizen' does - and when the UK left the EU most British citizens lost that EU citizen status.
It doesn't matter what political dimensions or identities overlay it, it is still a simple geographical fact that Scotland is part of Britain, and will remain so until it finds a way to tow itself to Sweden.
Well you were arguing, sorry if I misunderstood, that people in Scotland/Scotland itself would be NO LESS BRITISH if Scotland becomes independent. This is clearly bollocks Britain is not just the name of island, 'British' refers to a nationality and not just a geographical feature. So Scotland wouldn't 'as British the day after as it was the day before'
Of course it would. We have not become any less European because we left the EU. The citizens of Switzerland and Western Russia are no less European because they've never been in the EU. Scotland would forever be part of Britain, every bit as much as what remained of 'Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. It doesn't matter how you slice or dice it; it wouldn't have gone anywhere, so it wouldn't have changed.
So in your idiolect when you use the words 'Britain' and 'British' you are always referring to a geographical feature. You might be interested to know that for most (almost all) speakers of English those words are very often referring to a country or nationality. Hope this helps.
In my experience, most refer to it all as "England".
While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Plenty of muggers* in India/Pakistan, too, and Nile crocs in the, erm, Nile, as well as Palestine and Mespot, in historical times.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
Chinese Dragons do look very similar to Western depictions too.
Not sure, a quick google for images took me to wikipedia where the opening paragraph is a good illustration of what I'd say the differences are:
"...dragons in Western cultures since the High Middle Ages have often been depicted as winged, horned, and capable of breathing fire. Dragons in eastern cultures are usually depicted as wingless, four-legged, serpentine creatures..."
i.e. western dragons have wings, Chinese don't and the Chinese ones have longer bodies, more snake-like.
Indeed. I remember the news of that, and the outcome, very well from my student days (and I wasn't one of the Socialist Worker types either, quite the reverse).
I was thinking about that the other day when some PBers were claiming that lively (so to speak) demos were a strictly modern concept, with the perhaps unintended but equally wrong corollary that the Met didn't gratuitously kill people in the good old days either.
Not a socialist worker, so more of a toff layabout?
I'm reimagining you as a member of the Bullingdon Club
You should get down on your knees on November 5th, and thank the English for saving and preserving democracy, and then having the generosity to share it with the ungrateful Scots
Um... "interesting" reading of history, the leader of the plot, Robert Catesby was from Warwickshire and Guido Fawkes, of course, was a Yorkshireman. The Gunpowder plot was of course attempting to murder the King in Parliament and overthrow of the established Protestant political order
Sounds good. .
and its replacement with a Catholic dictatorship.
Well, you can't have everything. Don't cavil. .
The conspirators: Fawkes and Catesby together with 11 others, Thomas Wintour, Jack Wright, Thomas Percy Robert Keyes, Robert Wintour, John Grant, Kit Wright, Thomas Bates, Ambrose Rookwood, Francis Tresham and Sir Everard Digby were all, of course, English.
The King in question, His Grace and Majestie King James VI and I, was, of course, Scottish. We celebrate the FAILURE of the plot, and the punishment of Catesby et al... so, as always here we see the PB reactionary -as usual- trying to fake history to serve his own radical political agenda...namely annoying Scots.
Honestly, Hanging, Drawing and Quartering is too good for him...
The only further thing to add is that the Spectator is well known to be a tool of those who want Roman rule.
The opinions of a middle-class, middle-aged, historically aware but vaguely gammony man on St. George:
It's hard to get too excited about him either way as an individual. Clearly he was introduced in the plantaganet era by foreign kings with different values. It would have been nice to have retained one of our pre-Norman actually English saints as our patron saint - Cuthbert, say, or Alban. But largely they all had daft names. So maybe not. In any case, the concept of a patron saint is a bit foreign now: we don't really have much more in common with the values of Cuthbert or Alban than we do with George. It's hard to get too enthusiastic about the concept of early English Christians: mostly they tend to come across as on the side of Christianity, rather than of the English. It's hard, for the vaguely partisan 21st century Englishman, to side with dark ages English Christians over dark ages English pagans; and harder still to be unequivocally sure that the right side won at the synod of Whitby. Essentially it would be hard to find an English saint who we could be unequivocally supportive of.
Still, everyone apparently has to have a patron saint, and St. George is probably no worse than anyone else. He has a nice flag. And more to the point, he's who we've got; he's been our patron saint for generations, and that is more important (for the English or anyone else) than whatever qualities he himself might have possessed. Frankly the qualities of the saint himself are incidental: it's a national day, which again, everyone apparently has to have, and one in mid-Spring seems the right sort of time to have one.
We don't make a massive fuss, but we don't let the day go past entirely uncommented on as we might with, say, Rogation Sunday. Seems about right.
I once heard an American describe Bonfire Night as the British national day. I initially thought this a cultural misreading: they have fireworks on 4th July, which is their national day; our fireworks are on 5th November, so that must be our national day. A big oversimplification. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it to be true. Bonfire night is when we are at our most unselfconsciously British. It's one of the very few solely British traditions, and one which we do without really thinking about. We rehash the historical story, but we don't really think about the significance of it: we just set fire to things and blow things up. You could, if you want, see it as the first win for parliamentary democracy over absolutism, but most people don't really think about things that deeply, and it's not really in the British tradition to do so. You don't HAVE to do anything; your presence isn't required anywhere. No-one needs to fall out about its significance. It's just something that happens. That to me makes it a true national day.
Speak for yourself , I am certainly not British on 5th November or any other date.
You just don't identify as British, malcolm. It would take another referendum, or your renouncing your citizenship, to change the uncomfortable fact.
Neither of those things would change that fact. Scotland voting for independence wouldn't change its geography, and Malcolm becoming stateless would not change his origin.
Of course they would. Scottish independence would make malcolm solely Scottish, without the taint of Britain.
I might as well say that you are European.
I assume you're being sarcastic, but just in case, I am European.
The answer is going to depend on what you mean. Our objective and legal citizenship (for most of us) is that of the UK of GB and NI. Our subjective one is whatsoever you will. Hope that ends the discussion......
Of course it doesn't. Citizenship has nothing to do with it. People from Britain are British - it's simply a function of geography. Just like the most ardent remainer and the fiercest leaver are still European, because geographically we're in Europe. We haven't gone anywhere. If and when Scotland ever becomes independent it will be as British the day after it as it was the day before.
I don't think that's right. 'British' has a legal status as in, for example, 'British citizen'.
Something like 'European' mostly doesn't, (though of course 'EU citizen' does - and when the UK left the EU most British citizens lost that EU citizen status.
It doesn't matter what political dimensions or identities overlay it, it is still a simple geographical fact that Scotland is part of Britain, and will remain so until it finds a way to tow itself to Sweden.
Well you were arguing, sorry if I misunderstood, that people in Scotland/Scotland itself would be NO LESS BRITISH if Scotland becomes independent. This is clearly bollocks Britain is not just the name of island, 'British' refers to a nationality and not just a geographical feature. So Scotland wouldn't 'as British the day after as it was the day before'
Of course it would. We have not become any less European because we left the EU. The citizens of Switzerland and Western Russia are no less European because they've never been in the EU. Scotland would forever be part of Britain, every bit as much as what remained of 'Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. It doesn't matter how you slice or dice it; it wouldn't have gone anywhere, so it wouldn't have changed.
So in your idiolect when you use the words 'Britain' and 'British' you are always referring to a geographical feature. You might be interested to know that for most (almost all) speakers of English those words are very often referring to a country or nationality. Hope this helps.
It can be both, surely? Just as I have no problems referring to myself as European, as well as British, and English - that's not a nationality thing. And if England were independent, that would make me no more English and no less British than I am today, surely? There are many things which are characteristically British besides our shared citizenship of the UK.
While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Plenty of muggers* in India/Pakistan, too, and Nile crocs in the, erm, Nile, as well as Palestine and Mespot, in historical times.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
Chinese Dragons do look very similar to Western depictions too.
Not sure, a quick google for images took me to wikipedia where the opening paragraph is a good illustration of what I'd say the differences are:
"...dragons in Western cultures since the High Middle Ages have often been depicted as winged, horned, and capable of breathing fire. Dragons in eastern cultures are usually depicted as wingless, four-legged, serpentine creatures..."
i.e. western dragons have wings, Chinese don't and the Chinese ones have longer bodies, more snake-like.
Indeed, but they are able to fly, despite rarely being depicted with wings.
Chinese dragons have many animal-like forms such as turtles and fish, but are most commonly depicted as snake-like with four legs. Academicians have identified four reliable theories on the origin of the Chinese dragon: snakes, Chinese alligators, thunder worship and nature worship.[2] They traditionally symbolize potent and auspicious powers, particularly control over water.[3]
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
It seems that Wales has declined to built wind farms in places with poor connectivity, knowing that to do so would lead to constraining frequently and therefore represent poor value for bill payers. Scotland has observed no such strictures, and seems to have seen the wind farm rush as a nice little racket, which it is.
You keep on tilting at those windmills, but you are even more wrong than the map was incomplete, as it turns out.
I can just imagine the Authority Quote on a Reform-UK leaflet in Scarborough, the more literary parts of Thanet, or Walmington-on-Sea.
And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
I predict that this will not happen in Ashfield.
On the subject of hard to read books (Ulysses discussion passim) I have tried and failed to get through Don Quixote twice. It does rather go on.
My list of attempted and dropped books includes Don Q (twice), Ulysses, A la recherche DTP (not so hard to read but just very very long), The Jungle Book (language is unbearably archaic), Life and fate (unfairly, may try again), Lord of the Rings (couldn't get into it).
Gormenghast. Sort of petered out with A la recherche but the phrase ‘tits like hunting horns’ stuck with me. I’ve tried to confirm that I actually read it with no success so perhaps I imagined it. It doesn’t sound that Proustian tbf.
Circa 1983 I had gone to Twickenham with half a dozen friends. We were staying on a friend's floor in Gloucester Road. We had had a few beers and we're singing outside a pub called the Hereford House. We really weren't doing any harm, but we were a little noisy. The landlord explained if we didn't stop singing he would call the old bill. We finished our pints and headed for the tube station. We were almost there when we heard sirens and a full riot equipped Transit race past us towards the pub. It stopped at the pub and about a dozen baton charging coppers piled out and into the pub. We realised it was for us, so we ran like the wind over the barriers and down to the platform. Until the tube train pulled out of the station we were in full panic mode.
We hadn't done anything to warrant such a fuss, but from the little we saw of them they were clearly out to give whoever they confronted a right royal hiding.
Say what you like about today's Met, they have moved on since those days.
While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Plenty of muggers* in India/Pakistan, too, and Nile crocs in the, erm, Nile, as well as Palestine and Mespot, in historical times.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
Chinese Dragons do look very similar to Western depictions too.
Not sure, a quick google for images took me to wikipedia where the opening paragraph is a good illustration of what I'd say the differences are:
"...dragons in Western cultures since the High Middle Ages have often been depicted as winged, horned, and capable of breathing fire. Dragons in eastern cultures are usually depicted as wingless, four-legged, serpentine creatures..."
i.e. western dragons have wings, Chinese don't and the Chinese ones have longer bodies, more snake-like.
Indeed, but they are able to fly, despite rarely being depicted with wings.
It's the sticks that enable that - and enthusiastic operators, I think
If the "head of legal" was not "implicated in" decisions to prosecute, who has the overall responsibility for them ? ...Continuing with the minutes from the board meeting, Susan Crichton is shown a note that asks if she was implicated in the prosecutions - to which she tells the inquiry she was not.
She says it was her understanding the board wanted to know if it was her who was bringing the prosecutions against the sub-postmasters...
Or was it no one ?
I think the issue here is three-fold.
(1) It looks as if the Board was trying to make Crichton the scapegoat for the prosecutions. Remember: Paula Vennells presented the paper to the Board not Susan Crichton, which is interesting and suggests to me that she was both trying to control the narrative, throw Susan Crichton under the bus & prevent her from properly briefing the Board on the implications.
(2) The Board should have already known that Susan had only been the Head of Legal since 2010 and that prosecutions had been happening for 10 years before that. So this question - if accurately recorded - shows how unaware the Board was of what was going on.
(3) it is not at all clear how far Legal was responsible for the Security Team and the investigators. That was part of the problem - lots of fiefdoms doing their own thing, No joined up thinking and no proper assessment of the law or risks.
Thanks, Cyclefree.
The first two are pretty clear, but facts behind the third point are for now quite opaque to me. A curious incuriosity on the part of Susan Crichton regarding both rationale and responsibility for the prosecutions - and the extent to which they might have been fatally flawed - is though pretty hard to ignore.
Even if she was manipulated by the Board.
Agree. My impression of her is that while she was well-meaning, she was weak, passive and very uncurious.
Also clear from later evidence that the Board was not interested in getting high quality legal advice & that SC was not strong enough a character to impose herself or manoeuvre her way around the politics & a business that did not wish to be challenged at all.
The lack of curiosity has been a feature of others of course, other lawyers and Chairs and MDs/CEO's. There was little or no interest in the subpostmasters and very little interest in the PO's prosecutorial role, what that entailed and the risks for the business it posed. This was an absolute dereliction of duty by all concerned, especially the lawyers.
They keep saying that they weren't criminal lawyers but this simply won't do. First all lawyers have to learn criminal law so you know the basics. Second, if you work for a body which prosecutes you make it your business to learn about it, especially if it looks as if there might be problems. You get on top of it. You ask questions. You don't wait patiently outside the boardroom waiting to be let in. You bloody well make sure you speak to the Board bluntly and in clear terms and you tell them clearly of the risks.
Instead, she was using language in her reports dictated to her by the CEO's husband. FFS!
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
It seems that Wales has declined to built wind farms in places with poor connectivity, knowing that to do so would lead to constraining frequently and therefore represent poor value for bill payers. Scotland has observed no such strictures, and seems to have seen the wind farm rush as a nice little racket, which it is.
You keep on tilting at those windmills, but you are even more wrong than the map was incomplete, as it turns out.
I can just imagine the Authority Quote on a Reform-UK leaflet in Scarborough, the more literary parts of Thanet, or Walmington-on-Sea.
And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
I predict that this will not happen in Ashfield.
On the subject of hard to read books (Ulysses discussion passim) I have tried and failed to get through Don Quixote twice. It does rather go on.
My list of attempted and dropped books includes Don Q (twice), Ulysses, A la recherche DTP (not so hard to read but just very very long), The Jungle Book (language is unbearably archaic), Life and fate (unfairly, may try again), Lord of the Rings (couldn't get into it).
I did find the first half of both of the first two books in the Lord of the Rings a bit of a slog. I was relieved that Tom Bombadil was cut from the films.
I've noticed in some recent books I've read that the author has somewhat artificially withheld information from the reader. On the one hand this is a rather clumsy way of controlling the narrative and manipulating the reader, but it can also have the benefit of cutting a lot of stodgy exposition from the beginning of a story and putting the reader more immediately into the middle instead.
While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Plenty of muggers* in India/Pakistan, too, and Nile crocs in the, erm, Nile, as well as Palestine and Mespot, in historical times.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
Chinese Dragons do look very similar to Western depictions too.
A bit longer and wormier maybe? Though actually more like the old mediaeval depictions which were also rather wormier.
I'd guess that 20th and 21st C depictions of dragons are heavily influenced by dinosaur aesthetics. The scaly skin, lines of teeth, fatter torsoes etc.
‘Worm’ is of course the word used in the North East for ‘dragon’. There’s a folk song about it; the Lambton Worm.
Here is a classic example of the huge advantage towards women in our justice system. This sort of thing never gets mentioned by those that bang on about patriarchy.
Imagine the punishment for a man glassing a woman repeatedly in the face, scarring her permanently.
I don’t think I’d let her anywhere near a child of mine, TBH, after that. You are overstating it a bit, though.
What am I overstating?
On a simple cost benefit analysis, surely it is appropriate to punish men more? They are dramatically more likely to commit violent crimes, and therefore punishments are clearly insufficient to deter.
I suspect that map only has wind farms above a certain size. Presumably there's less open space for fitting in larger wind farms in England, though I don't know what Wales' excuse is. Though perhaps some of the older, smaller wind farms I am thinking of have been decommissioned.
It seems that Wales has declined to built wind farms in places with poor connectivity, knowing that to do so would lead to constraining frequently and therefore represent poor value for bill payers. Scotland has observed no such strictures, and seems to have seen the wind farm rush as a nice little racket, which it is.
You keep on tilting at those windmills, but you are even more wrong than the map was incomplete, as it turns out.
I can just imagine the Authority Quote on a Reform-UK leaflet in Scarborough, the more literary parts of Thanet, or Walmington-on-Sea.
And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, "Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
I predict that this will not happen in Ashfield.
On the subject of hard to read books (Ulysses discussion passim) I have tried and failed to get through Don Quixote twice. It does rather go on.
My list of attempted and dropped books includes Don Q (twice), Ulysses, A la recherche DTP (not so hard to read but just very very long), The Jungle Book (language is unbearably archaic), Life and fate (unfairly, may try again), Lord of the Rings (couldn't get into it).
I'm currently reading Paradise Lost. It is manageable in short bursts.
BREAKING: A dinghy with migrants has left the coast of France and is heading in the direction of the UK.
It comes after Rishi Sunak's Rwanda bill was finally passed through the Lords yesterday.
WRT betting on the general election and its timing, the ground may now have shifted slightly.
The government is already taking the line, this very morning, that the deterrent effect kicks in when flights start.
Two points on that. Flights may not start anyway - we are now nearer to day one of complex litigation, which will go to the SC, which may well only start once a named individual is served with an order for deportation under the act.
Second, if there are flights, they won't (IMHO) be a deterrent.
Which means it is, despite the talk, vital that the GE is held before the alleged deterrent can kick in, and after it is clear that 'leftie lawyers' are slowing it down placing Labour in the maximally awkward place.
On balance this supports an earlier rather than a later date for the GE.
Of course the prospect of being flown to Kigali won't be a deterrent to people who are willing to risk their lives trying to cross the Channel.
If the "head of legal" was not "implicated in" decisions to prosecute, who has the overall responsibility for them ? ...Continuing with the minutes from the board meeting, Susan Crichton is shown a note that asks if she was implicated in the prosecutions - to which she tells the inquiry she was not.
She says it was her understanding the board wanted to know if it was her who was bringing the prosecutions against the sub-postmasters...
Or was it no one ?
I think the issue here is three-fold.
(1) It looks as if the Board was trying to make Crichton the scapegoat for the prosecutions. Remember: Paula Vennells presented the paper to the Board not Susan Crichton, which is interesting and suggests to me that she was both trying to control the narrative, throw Susan Crichton under the bus & prevent her from properly briefing the Board on the implications.
(2) The Board should have already known that Susan had only been the Head of Legal since 2010 and that prosecutions had been happening for 10 years before that. So this question - if accurately recorded - shows how unaware the Board was of what was going on.
(3) it is not at all clear how far Legal was responsible for the Security Team and the investigators. That was part of the problem - lots of fiefdoms doing their own thing, No joined up thinking and no proper assessment of the law or risks.
Thanks, Cyclefree.
The first two are pretty clear, but facts behind the third point are for now quite opaque to me. A curious incuriosity on the part of Susan Crichton regarding both rationale and responsibility for the prosecutions - and the extent to which they might have been fatally flawed - is though pretty hard to ignore.
Even if she was manipulated by the Board.
Agree. My impression of her is that while she was well-meaning, she was weak, passive and very uncurious.
Also clear from later evidence that the Board was not interested in getting high quality legal advice & that SC was not strong enough a character to impose herself or manoeuvre her way around the politics & a business that did not wish to be challenged at all.
The lack of curiosity has been a feature of others of course, other lawyers and Chairs and MDs/CEO's. There was little or no interest in the subpostmasters and very little interest in the PO's prosecutorial role, what that entailed and the risks for the business it posed. This was an absolute dereliction of duty by all concerned, especially the lawyers.
They keep saying that they weren't criminal lawyers but this simply won't do. First all lawyers have to learn criminal law so you know the basics. Second, if you work for a body which prosecutes you make it your business to learn about it, especially if it looks as if there might be problems. You get on top of it. You ask questions. You don't wait patiently outside the boardroom waiting to be let in. You bloody well make sure you speak to the Board bluntly and in clear terms and you tell them clearly of the risks.
Instead, she was using language in her reports dictated to her by the CEO's husband. FFS!
She seems to have been pedestrian at work and now carries the countenance of someone crushed by events she wasn’t able to control.
If the "head of legal" was not "implicated in" decisions to prosecute, who has the overall responsibility for them ? ...Continuing with the minutes from the board meeting, Susan Crichton is shown a note that asks if she was implicated in the prosecutions - to which she tells the inquiry she was not.
She says it was her understanding the board wanted to know if it was her who was bringing the prosecutions against the sub-postmasters...
Or was it no one ?
I think the issue here is three-fold.
(1) It looks as if the Board was trying to make Crichton the scapegoat for the prosecutions. Remember: Paula Vennells presented the paper to the Board not Susan Crichton, which is interesting and suggests to me that she was both trying to control the narrative, throw Susan Crichton under the bus & prevent her from properly briefing the Board on the implications.
(2) The Board should have already known that Susan had only been the Head of Legal since 2010 and that prosecutions had been happening for 10 years before that. So this question - if accurately recorded - shows how unaware the Board was of what was going on.
(3) it is not at all clear how far Legal was responsible for the Security Team and the investigators. That was part of the problem - lots of fiefdoms doing their own thing, No joined up thinking and no proper assessment of the law or risks.
Thanks, Cyclefree.
The first two are pretty clear, but facts behind the third point are for now quite opaque to me. A curious incuriosity on the part of Susan Crichton regarding both rationale and responsibility for the prosecutions - and the extent to which they might have been fatally flawed - is though pretty hard to ignore.
Even if she was manipulated by the Board.
Agree. My impression of her is that while she was well-meaning, she was weak, passive and very uncurious.
Also clear from later evidence that the Board was not interested in getting high quality legal advice & that SC was not strong enough a character to impose herself or manoeuvre her way around the politics & a business that did not wish to be challenged at all.
The lack of curiosity has been a feature of others of course, other lawyers and Chairs and MDs/CEO's. There was little or no interest in the subpostmasters and very little interest in the PO's prosecutorial role, what that entailed and the risks for the business it posed. This was an absolute dereliction of duty by all concerned, especially the lawyers.
They keep saying that they weren't criminal lawyers but this simply won't do. First all lawyers have to learn criminal law so you know the basics. Second, if you work for a body which prosecutes you make it your business to learn about it, especially if it looks as if there might be problems. You get on top of it. You ask questions. You don't wait patiently outside the boardroom waiting to be let in. You bloody well make sure you speak to the Board bluntly and in clear terms and you tell them clearly of the risks.
Instead, she was using language in her reports dictated to her by the CEO's husband. FFS!
Alan Bates said “we’re just skint little people!” I don’t think he realised how right he was, and how much contempt Management had for his colleagues.
While I'm not into 'days' (though Saint George is at least the national saint), it'd be nice to go a year without the repetitive chorus of "He wasn't born here, you know".
Yes, I know. People bang on about it every year.
The passing of the Rwanda bill on St George's day makes the fact even more apt today.
Saint George killed a dragon?
It’s up there with a virgin birth.
Let’s be honest he was high on magic mushrooms and in all likelihood killed a dragonfly.
Dragon mythology is global and rather hard to explain.
I like to think that it's a deep-rooted instinct inherited from proto-mammal ancestors who lived in the shadows of dinosaurs 66m years ago. That's bollocks of course but I still like to think it.
Isn’t it just an uninformed explanation for dinosaur fossils?
Not sure I believe that one. How often did our ancient ancestors come across well preserved, relatively complete dinosaur fossils?
I don't think dinosaur fossils entirely explain dragon myths, but our ancient ancestors came across enough fossils that we know they had ideas about them. E.g., see "The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times" by Adrienne Mayor (2011).
Salt water crocs could be one explanation in the Far East.
Plenty of muggers* in India/Pakistan, too, and Nile crocs in the, erm, Nile, as well as Palestine and Mespot, in historical times.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
Also Komodo dragons, which would have been creatures only of legend to most (and were unknown in the west until 1910), given their extremely limited geographic spread.
Clean forgotten about those! But yes indeed. And moreover varanids (monitor lizards) are generally fairly common - long, snaky, scaly, sort of spit fire with their flickering bifurcate tongue. Everywhere from Sierra Leone to beyond Wallace's Line. I don't think that there were any giants outside Australia and of course Komodo in historical times, but it's certainly a potential model.
Some great electioneering by Sunak cutting off Stoltenberg after a question by Pippa Crerar. He more than implies the World is unsafe with Corbyn loving Starmer.
I just chatted with a lovely young South Korean chap - there are loads of South Koreans doing the Camino; Lee, the lady on the airport bus, told me there would be, but I wasn't expecting quite so many
And I was expecting groups; most of them are solo ladies or couples. Of all ages, and all super friendly
Anyway, this young chap, when I told him I'm from England, excitedly told me that he has a "Lion Air fright" booked from Santiago to Stansted so that he can go to see his favourite football team and player (Spurs and Son obvs)
Indeed. I remember the news of that, and the outcome, very well from my student days (and I wasn't one of the Socialist Worker types either, quite the reverse).
I was thinking about that the other day when some PBers were claiming that lively (so to speak) demos were a strictly modern concept, with the perhaps unintended but equally wrong corollary that the Met didn't gratuitously kill people in the good old days either.
Not a socialist worker, so more of a toff layabout?
I'm reimagining you as a member of the Bullingdon Club
No, just not interested in politics - working too hard. Though plenty of my contemporaries went on such marches, peace camps, Greenham Common, etc.
Edit: which makes suggestions that the past was a political demo-free time even more peculiar.
Comments
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13335555/Drunk-businesswoman-glassed-pub-drinker-age-manchester.html
Imagine the punishment for a man glassing a woman repeatedly in the face, scarring her permanently.
I look forward to the French state treating me with the appropriate level of reverence. Apparently a documentary is being made about this so I may be asked to appear.
( ** must remember Chateaubriand is a writer not just a steak **)
I can count at least 120 surrounding our local NNR and none of them appear on that map.
Also, some of the Scottish ones should never have been built (peat substrate, visual intrusion, etc etc etc).
Offshore or bust.
https://x.com/LukeTryl/status/1782697711092797626
Though the high score for social media influencers made me laugh/cry
(See pancakes)
The UK Government holds negative net approval ratings on EVERY policy issue prompted.
UK Government Policy Approval Ratings (21 April):
Coronavirus -1%
Defence -9%
Foreign policy -12%
Education -16%
Crime -19%
Economy -24% 👈
Housing -26%
Immigration -36% 👈
NHS -39% 👈
They are REALLY trying to court the uncommitted at the expense of alienating the weird vexilophobes on their own side and I'm quite impressed.
I'm under no illusion that Labour are suddenly the patriotic party. But at least they're willing to look like they no longer appear to actively hate Britain.
(Although technically our Uni allows us to use the terms assistant professor and associate professor as other institutions (notably overseas) don't use Lecturer/SL/Reader/Prof for the academic scales.)
"He’s not just our former president," Trump's lawyer Todd Blanche says in his opening. "He’s a man. He’s a husband, he’s a father, and he’s a person, just like you and just like me."..
https://twitter.com/benkochman/status/1782428812849901753
She looks vaguely familiar. I've a feeling I may know her.
This is a map with live data of wind farm energy output. Looks like the same wind farms.
https://renewables-map.robinhawkes.com/#4.5/55.48/0.07
From this report.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5e7b4e6d86650c743d2f6cdc/Wind_powered_electricity_in_the_UK.pdf
In 2020 Scotland had about 75% of UK onshore capacity, and 10% of offshore.
By 2025 it will have about 15% of offshore, having trebled offshore capacity since 2020.
No 2025 numbers for onshore.
The numbers look about right, but I am not sure what the greyed out figures - perhaps projections not available at the time of complication.
Nor am I sure of the impact of Sunak & Friends' butt-sitting or existing-in-chaos habits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom
(1) It looks as if the Board was trying to make Crichton the scapegoat for the prosecutions. Remember: Paula Vennells presented the paper to the Board not Susan Crichton, which is interesting and suggests to me that she was both trying to control the narrative, throw Susan Crichton under the bus & prevent her from properly briefing the Board on the implications.
(2) The Board should have already known that Susan had only been the Head of Legal since 2010 and that prosecutions had been happening for 10 years before that. So this question - if accurately recorded - shows how unaware the Board was of what was going on.
(3) it is not at all clear how far Legal was responsible for the Security Team and the investigators. That was part of the problem - lots of fiefdoms doing their own thing, No joined up thinking and no proper assessment of the law or risks.
Bondegezou's point does also of course work with non-reptiley things like Cenozoic elephant/mammoth/rhinoceros bones, for instance. Don't need the (strictly speaking anhistorical) concept of "dinosaur" to find bones of giants such as those fossils.
*Crocodylus palustris, not the kind one gets in London etc. (outside the Zoological Society's Gardens).
Chateaubriand saw himself as the greatest lover, the greatest writer, and the greatest philosopher of his age.
Sounds like an early SeanT alias to me.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/23/voyager-1-transmitting-data-again-after-nasa-remotely-fixes-46-year-old-probe
Funny that.
Most interest is in offshore now - no size limits (bigger is better, so far, in wind turbines), lots of space, no NIMBYs, no geography to complicate the flows…
He was having a long-term affair with another woman during his wife's pregnancy, and betrayed *both* of them for his $130k (IIRC. Plus - evaded? - tax, plus payment-transfer-fee?) quickie with Stormy Daniels.
Even his ... "waah waah waah ... I'll miss my son's graduation because they are making me attend my own criminal trial" is framed by 1 - A long list of children's graduations that he has not attended, and 2 - the Judge has not made a ruling.
If I could be named after a steak, assuming ChateauB is taken, I think it would be T-Bone. "The" T-Bone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Blair_Peach
The first two are pretty clear, but facts behind the third point are for now quite opaque to me.
A curious incuriosity on the part of Susan Crichton regarding both rationale and responsibility for the prosecutions - and the extent to which they might have been fatally flawed - is though pretty hard to ignore.
Even if she was manipulated by the Board.
Here are reported numbers for Wales from last month (again, they look OK as a report) - 1200GW onshore, 730W offshore, which is significant growth over recent years :
Wales has 1.2 GW of onshore wind today and much more under development. With 730 MW of offshore wind, and a plan to develop 4.5 GW of floating wind in the Celtic Sea by 2035 the Welsh Government wants renewables to provide 100% of Wales’ electricity by 2035.
https://windeurope.org/newsroom/news/how-wales-can-maximise-its-wind-resources-and-bring-value-to-communities-and-the-economy/
I'd guess that 20th and 21st C depictions of dragons are heavily influenced by dinosaur aesthetics. The scaly skin, lines of teeth, fatter torsoes etc.
I was thinking about that the other day when some PBers were claiming that lively (so to speak) demos were a strictly modern concept, with the perhaps unintended but equally wrong corollary that the Met didn't gratuitously kill people in the good old days either.
"Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless."
I predict that this will not happen in Ashfield.
My list of attempted and dropped books includes Don Q (twice), Ulysses, A la recherche DTP (not so hard to read but just very very long), The Jungle Book (language is unbearably archaic), Life and fate (unfairly, may try again), Lord of the Rings (couldn't get into it).
https://www.cyclefree.co.uk/the-manuscript-the-notary-and-the-forgetful-publisher/
A komodo skull:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon#/media/File:KomodoDragon_Skull.jpg
"...dragons in Western cultures since the High Middle Ages have often been depicted as winged, horned, and capable of breathing fire. Dragons in eastern cultures are usually depicted as wingless, four-legged, serpentine creatures..."
i.e. western dragons have wings, Chinese don't and the Chinese ones have longer bodies, more snake-like.
https://x.com/metpoliceuk/status/1782759376240955533?s=46&t=fJymV-V84rexmlQMLXHHJQ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_dragon
Lots more stuff here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_dragon#Depictions
I'm reimagining you as a member of the Bullingdon Club
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68881429
High petrol prices are normally bad for government polling.
. Well, you can't have everything. Don't cavil.
. The only further thing to add is that the Spectator is well known to be a tool of those who want Roman rule.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_dragon
Sort of petered out with A la recherche but the phrase ‘tits like hunting horns’ stuck with me. I’ve tried to confirm that I actually read it with no success so perhaps I imagined it. It doesn’t sound that Proustian tbf.
Circa 1983 I had gone to Twickenham with half a dozen friends. We were staying on a friend's floor in Gloucester Road. We had had a few beers and we're singing outside a pub called the Hereford House. We really weren't doing any harm, but we were a little noisy. The landlord explained if we didn't stop singing he would call the old bill. We finished our pints and headed for the tube station. We were almost there when we heard sirens and a full riot equipped Transit race past us towards the pub. It stopped at the pub and about a dozen baton charging coppers piled out and into the pub. We realised it was for us, so we ran like the wind over the barriers and down to the platform. Until the tube train pulled out of the station we were in full panic mode.
We hadn't done anything to warrant such a fuss, but from the little we saw of them they were clearly out to give whoever they confronted a right royal hiding.
Say what you like about today's Met, they have moved on since those days.
"The bì'àn 狴犴, (Hybrid of tiger and dragon) a creature that likes litigation, are placed over prison gates (in order to keep guard)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_sons_of_the_dragon#/media/File:Neixiang_Yamen_08.jpg
Also clear from later evidence that the Board was not interested in getting high quality legal advice & that SC was not strong enough a character to impose herself or manoeuvre her way around the politics & a business that did not wish to be challenged at all.
The lack of curiosity has been a feature of others of course, other lawyers and Chairs and MDs/CEO's. There was little or no interest in the subpostmasters and very little interest in the PO's prosecutorial role, what that entailed and the risks for the business it posed. This was an absolute dereliction of duty by all concerned, especially the lawyers.
They keep saying that they weren't criminal lawyers but this simply won't do. First all lawyers have to learn criminal law so you know the basics. Second, if you work for a body which prosecutes you make it your business to learn about it, especially if it looks as if there might be problems. You get on top of it. You ask questions. You don't wait patiently outside the boardroom waiting to be let in. You bloody well make sure you speak to the Board bluntly and in clear terms and you tell them clearly of the risks.
Instead, she was using language in her reports dictated to her by the CEO's husband. FFS!
(By high fuel prices making crossings uneconomic)
I've noticed in some recent books I've read that the author has somewhat artificially withheld information from the reader. On the one hand this is a rather clumsy way of controlling the narrative and manipulating the reader, but it can also have the benefit of cutting a lot of stodgy exposition from the beginning of a story and putting the reader more immediately into the middle instead.
There’s a folk song about it; the Lambton Worm.
Sunak's inanity knows no bounds.
Edit: and claw-y, too, of course.
Rishi is having a fantastic week.
And I was expecting groups; most of them are solo ladies or couples. Of all ages, and all super friendly
Anyway, this young chap, when I told him I'm from England, excitedly told me that he has a "Lion Air fright" booked from Santiago to Stansted so that he can go to see his favourite football team and player (Spurs and Son obvs)
He will "fry home flom Heathlow"
Edit: which makes suggestions that the past was a political demo-free time even more peculiar.