The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
Anyone here with an orangery instead of conservatory?
We're going to have a plant room in our new house... but no windows.
Funding the build by getting into high end cannabis production? Oh, not that kind of plant!
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
Anyone here with an orangery instead of conservatory?
"Sells better apparently." ??
I'm sorry Hugo, we are simply not putting in an offer on that place. It had a larder instead of a pantry!
House buying is weird. I cannot quite put myself in the mindset of rich people looking to purchase some place with 6 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms for example.
I mean, even assuming some of those are actually just toilets and everyone has an en suite, the ratio is still off right?
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
Anyone here with an orangery instead of conservatory?
"Sells better apparently." ??
I'm sorry Hugo, we are simply not putting in an offer on that place. It had a larder instead of a pantry!
Police confirming a white man has been arrested. Hmmm, do they always give the race of the arrested perpetrator?
They do, if White. If not, they urge the public not to speculate on the identity of the attacker.
In both instances, it's for reasons of "community relations".
In both instances, they probably have a point, no?
No, if the perpetrator is White, say it, if he is black, say, it if he Hispanic/Muslim/a Martian, say it. Honesty is the only method that doesn't rile people one way or the other
People who say things are two tier aren’t going to be feeling like they were wrong are they? I don’t use the term, but specifying ‘white British’ so early will only rile them
The accusation in Southport was one of "we weren't given enough information".
Now you have been given definitive details by the police you are moaning that you didn't want those details if the suspect is white
Fine if the policy has changed but I doubt it has.
After the Southport riots ( Farage Riots according to James O'Brexit) it would seem expedient to report ethnicity if that helped to avoid race riots.
Let’s wait until the next time it’s not a white male and see, shall we. I know where my money lies.
Do you not understand? If the police can cut Tommy Robinson fanbois off at the pass they might not set fire to Holiday Inns. I don't see a conspiracy, I see practicality.
Do you not understand? By not giving a ‘colour’ or nationality the police instantly drive a narrative. And here, when it’s a pissed off white chap, it’s out of the coppers mouth quicker than he can say ‘sorry serge, he fell down the stairs’.
Of course they are driving a narrative to prevent an unpleasant secondary story. Had the police been able to say earlier that Rudicabana was a Cardiff born UK national racists couldn't apply the asylum seeker label to the suspect thus avoiding Holiday Inns being set on fire.
This a seems pretty simple.
So why didn’t they?
Was the information available? I assume Rudicabana wasn't especially cooperative having just brutally murdered three innocent little girls. "I'm not an asylum seeker, I'm from Cardiff".
He was pretty clearly a person of colour.
Christ on a bike. What advantage was there in saying Rudicabana was not white?
Dickhead racists would put two and two together and reach the answer of asylum seekers. By saying this suspect is white the racists small brains might assume, well that's ok he's not an asylum seeker so we don't have to set a hotel on fire
If you don’t announce details, is that said racist dickheads get to fill in their own bullshit.
The art of news management, in a democracy, is getting in first with something approximating to truth. With lots of detail.
Hence the old style of reporting - “Two men appended in burglary! At 11:32pm on Wednesday 14th May, two men were apprehended at 11 Shithole Street, by PC Savage, of the Ellsworth Police Station. Two brothers, John and Dave Stabbington, of no fixed address, were bought before magistrates at the town court on the 16th, and remanded in custody until trial.”
F*** me, that's uncanny. I live at no 11 Shithole Street. It's a small world.
You do realise that you have just doxxed yourself and your brother?
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
Earlier, rcs1000 argued that different nations have different advantages. I would extend that point by saying that often the loose federal system of the US gives us both advantages and disadvantages. For example, the small state of Kentucky has prospered by being a good place to manufacture vehicles. For example: https://pressroom.toyota.com/facility/toyota-motor-manufacturing-kentucky/
Similarly, Texas and Florida have greatly improved their public schools, while other states have lagged.
And it allows political leaders to show what they can do, before they go national. Though success doesn't always get the attention it deserves, as the example of Republican Phil Scott shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Scott "Philip Brian Scott (born August 4, 1958) is an American politician, businessman, and stock car racer who has been the 82nd governor of Vermont since 2017. . . . Scott was first elected governor of Vermont in the 2016 general election,[1] and was reelected in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Scott's 2024 margin of victory is the largest in any Vermont gubernatorial election since 1946."
But that same federal system often makes it harder to control crime.
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Police confirming a white man has been arrested. Hmmm, do they always give the race of the arrested perpetrator?
They do, if White. If not, they urge the public not to speculate on the identity of the attacker.
In both instances, it's for reasons of "community relations".
In both instances, they probably have a point, no?
No, if the perpetrator is White, say it, if he is black, say, it if he Hispanic/Muslim/a Martian, say it. Honesty is the only method that doesn't rile people one way or the other
People who say things are two tier aren’t going to be feeling like they were wrong are they? I don’t use the term, but specifying ‘white British’ so early will only rile them
The accusation in Southport was one of "we weren't given enough information".
Now you have been given definitive details by the police you are moaning that you didn't want those details if the suspect is white
Fine if the policy has changed but I doubt it has.
After the Southport riots ( Farage Riots according to James O'Brexit) it would seem expedient to report ethnicity if that helped to avoid race riots.
Let’s wait until the next time it’s not a white male and see, shall we. I know where my money lies.
Do you not understand? If the police can cut Tommy Robinson fanbois off at the pass they might not set fire to Holiday Inns. I don't see a conspiracy, I see practicality.
Do you not understand? By not giving a ‘colour’ or nationality the police instantly drive a narrative. And here, when it’s a pissed off white chap, it’s out of the coppers mouth quicker than he can say ‘sorry serge, he fell down the stairs’.
Of course they are driving a narrative to prevent an unpleasant secondary story. Had the police been able to say earlier that Rudicabana was a Cardiff born UK national racists couldn't apply the asylum seeker label to the suspect thus avoiding Holiday Inns being set on fire.
This a seems pretty simple.
So why didn’t they?
Was the information available? I assume Rudicabana wasn't especially cooperative having just brutally murdered three innocent little girls. "I'm not an asylum seeker, I'm from Cardiff".
He was pretty clearly a person of colour.
Christ on a bike. What advantage was there in saying Rudicabana was not white?
Dickhead racists would put two and two together and reach the answer of asylum seekers. By saying this suspect is white the racists small brains might assume, well that's ok he's not an asylum seeker so we don't have to set a hotel on fire
Because it was important to know he was not an asylum seeker. The cops should immedoately have given his full history:
Born Rwandan, black, came over as a child with parents, not an asylum seeker, not brought up Muslim, yes a link to Prevent but tenuous
That would have instantly defused so many of the most lurid conspiracies, and I do not believe we would have seen riots. Anger, major suspicion, but not riots
I hope this new policy of Total Instant Revelation is a genuine new policy, because it is the correct policy. Lying and gaslighting made it all worse
However I do not believe our police and government are that sensible
Wasn't there a problem in his case that he wasn't very communicative, so it would have been difficult to say much other than he was black? My own first guess was that it was someone with mental health issues, which turned out to be correct.
So we’ve done larders quite well, any comments on time keeping in say 1430? Did people just wake up really early in midsummer?
In 1430 people had two sleeps - they'd rise at midnight or just after and commit to tasks about the house and often meet /socialise in this waking time then back to sleep. They'd be up earlier in summer to make use of the light and get heavy work done before the heat of the day (siesta type rest or doing lighter labour was common in hottest times of the day) They had a hell of a lot more time off than modern workers too
Is that actually true though (the two sleeps thing)? I’d read that there is very little evidence for this. I know that the religious calendar before the reformation had a lot of inbuilt ‘bank holidays’ (all the various saints days etc).
Yes, I believe "two sleeps" has been debunked
That said, I do it occasionally. Esp if I wake up at 5am with a raging hangover. Then I drink a litre of water, take a xanax, a valium, some ibuprofen, aspirin and paracetamol (my wife and I did this so much in our hedonistic marriage we called it the "the proty" - ie the "protocol")
An hour later you fall fast asleep and wake up at 11am feeling absolutely fine, Fit as a fiddle. It is superb. An actual hangover cure
Not sure why you'd need valium on top of xanax there other than perhaps the extended half life?
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
Anyone here with an orangery instead of conservatory?
"Sells better apparently." ??
I'm sorry Hugo, we are simply not putting in an offer on that place. It had a larder instead of a pantry!
House buying is weird. I cannot quite put myself in the mindset of rich people looking to purchase some place with 6 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms for example.
I mean, even assuming some of those are actually just toilets and everyone has an en suite, the ratio is still off right?
Forget houses, I cannot stand toilets that have say 10 sinks but two hand dryers. Why have so many sinks?
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Posh people have pantries. Plebs have larders.
Larder just sounds like a posher word to me. Softer, richer.
So we’ve done larders quite well, any comments on time keeping in say 1430? Did people just wake up really early in midsummer?
In 1430 people had two sleeps - they'd rise at midnight or just after and commit to tasks about the house and often meet /socialise in this waking time then back to sleep. They'd be up earlier in summer to make use of the light and get heavy work done before the heat of the day (siesta type rest or doing lighter labour was common in hottest times of the day) They had a hell of a lot more time off than modern workers too
Is that actually true though (the two sleeps thing)? I’d read that there is very little evidence for this. I know that the religious calendar before the reformation had a lot of inbuilt ‘bank holidays’ (all the various saints days etc).
Yes, I believe "two sleeps" has been debunked
That said, I do it occasionally. Esp if I wake up at 5am with a raging hangover. Then I drink a litre of water, take a xanax, a valium, some ibuprofen, aspirin and paracetamol (my wife and I did this so much in our hedonistic marriage we called it the "the proty" - ie the "protocol")
An hour later you fall fast asleep and wake up at 11am feeling absolutely fine, Fit as a fiddle. It is superb. An actual hangover cure
I think it's efficacy has been debunked but there's certainly literature referencing rising from your first sleep and second sleep etc - I think it's how common it was in practice that's debated?
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Posh people have pantries. Plebs have larders.
Larder just sounds like a posher word to me. Softer, richer.
Nah, larders are smaller, hence you can get one in a single tall kitchen unit.
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
Anyone here with an orangery instead of conservatory?
"Sells better apparently." ??
I'm sorry Hugo, we are simply not putting in an offer on that place. It had a larder instead of a pantry!
House buying is weird. I cannot quite put myself in the mindset of rich people looking to purchase some place with 6 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms for example.
I mean, even assuming some of those are actually just toilets and everyone has an en suite, the ratio is still off right?
Americans call such downstairs toilets "half-baths". So you get "the house has three and a half bathrooms" and so on.
So the Economist is reporting that Russia can manufacture more ballistic missiles than the West can manufacture interceptor missiles to shoot them down, and this three years and some into the war. What happened to the West's industrial might overwhelming Russia with munitions? And this is Russia, a complete basket case economically. Imagine how bad the situation would be if faced with a conflict against China?
None of the petty political arguments we are currently having over anything matter if we cannot retain our independence by being able to manufacture enough war material to defend ourselves.
So we’ve done larders quite well, any comments on time keeping in say 1430? Did people just wake up really early in midsummer?
In 1430 people had two sleeps - they'd rise at midnight or just after and commit to tasks about the house and often meet /socialise in this waking time then back to sleep. They'd be up earlier in summer to make use of the light and get heavy work done before the heat of the day (siesta type rest or doing lighter labour was common in hottest times of the day) They had a hell of a lot more time off than modern workers too
Is that actually true though (the two sleeps thing)? I’d read that there is very little evidence for this. I know that the religious calendar before the reformation had a lot of inbuilt ‘bank holidays’ (all the various saints days etc).
Yes, I believe "two sleeps" has been debunked
That said, I do it occasionally. Esp if I wake up at 5am with a raging hangover. Then I drink a litre of water, take a xanax, a valium, some ibuprofen, aspirin and paracetamol (my wife and I did this so much in our hedonistic marriage we called it the "the proty" - ie the "protocol")
An hour later you fall fast asleep and wake up at 11am feeling absolutely fine, Fit as a fiddle. It is superb. An actual hangover cure
Not sure why you'd need valium on top of xanax there other than perhaps the extended half life?
Xanax gives you a little euphoric buzz when you wake up, Valium guarantees the sleep
I do not recommend the "proty" - the Protocol - to people unused to tranquilisers and anxiolytics
So we’ve done larders quite well, any comments on time keeping in say 1430? Did people just wake up really early in midsummer?
In 1430 people had two sleeps - they'd rise at midnight or just after and commit to tasks about the house and often meet /socialise in this waking time then back to sleep. They'd be up earlier in summer to make use of the light and get heavy work done before the heat of the day (siesta type rest or doing lighter labour was common in hottest times of the day) They had a hell of a lot more time off than modern workers too
Is that actually true though (the two sleeps thing)? I’d read that there is very little evidence for this. I know that the religious calendar before the reformation had a lot of inbuilt ‘bank holidays’ (all the various saints days etc).
Yes, I believe "two sleeps" has been debunked
That said, I do it occasionally. Esp if I wake up at 5am with a raging hangover. Then I drink a litre of water, take a xanax, a valium, some ibuprofen, aspirin and paracetamol (my wife and I did this so much in our hedonistic marriage we called it the "the proty" - ie the "protocol")
An hour later you fall fast asleep and wake up at 11am feeling absolutely fine, Fit as a fiddle. It is superb. An actual hangover cure
I very rarely go "out out" now, but if I do my hangover prevention measure is 2 paracetamol , washed down with a Vitamin C tablet dissolved in a glass of water.
Good news (I think): "TORONTO — The last time Canada’s monarch opened a session of Parliament was in 1977, when Queen Elizabeth II visited the country as part of her Silver Jubilee tour. On Tuesday, King Charles III will become only the second monarch in Canada’s history to participate in the historic ritual." source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/05/25/canada-king-charles-parliament-trump/
My guess is the Liverpool horror is some kind of road rage turned into a man fearing for his life and then murderously hurtling through crowds instead of getting lynched (which nearly happened, anyway)
I've had two big nights in the last four days. On one, I had a terrible full day hangover. The other, I ran 5k in the morning. Roughly equal volumes of alcohol with identical paracetamol/water/food treatment. Weird.
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
Anyone here with an orangery instead of conservatory?
Yep and they are different. I wouldn't deign to have a conservatory. Common as muck. We have a rather smart orangery. Two solid brick walls and two half brick walls and glass and with a lead and glass roof, a stove and chimney and electric opening roof panels.
My guess is the Liverpool horror is some kind of road rage turned into a man fearing for his life and then murderously hurtling through crowds instead of getting lynched (which nearly happened, anyway)
Police confirming a white man has been arrested. Hmmm, do they always give the race of the arrested perpetrator?
They do, if White. If not, they urge the public not to speculate on the identity of the attacker.
In both instances, it's for reasons of "community relations".
In both instances, they probably have a point, no?
No, if the perpetrator is White, say it, if he is black, say, it if he Hispanic/Muslim/a Martian, say it. Honesty is the only method that doesn't rile people one way or the other
People who say things are two tier aren’t going to be feeling like they were wrong are they? I don’t use the term, but specifying ‘white British’ so early will only rile them
The accusation in Southport was one of "we weren't given enough information".
Now you have been given definitive details by the police you are moaning that you didn't want those details if the suspect is white
Fine if the policy has changed but I doubt it has.
After the Southport riots ( Farage Riots according to James O'Brexit) it would seem expedient to report ethnicity if that helped to avoid race riots.
Let’s wait until the next time it’s not a white male and see, shall we. I know where my money lies.
Do you not understand? If the police can cut Tommy Robinson fanbois off at the pass they might not set fire to Holiday Inns. I don't see a conspiracy, I see practicality.
Do you not understand? By not giving a ‘colour’ or nationality the police instantly drive a narrative. And here, when it’s a pissed off white chap, it’s out of the coppers mouth quicker than he can say ‘sorry serge, he fell down the stairs’.
Of course they are driving a narrative to prevent an unpleasant secondary story. Had the police been able to say earlier that Rudicabana was a Cardiff born UK national racists couldn't apply the asylum seeker label to the suspect thus avoiding Holiday Inns being set on fire.
This a seems pretty simple.
So why didn’t they?
Was the information available? I assume Rudicabana wasn't especially cooperative having just brutally murdered three innocent little girls. "I'm not an asylum seeker, I'm from Cardiff".
He was pretty clearly a person of colour.
Christ on a bike. What advantage was there in saying Rudicabana was not white?
Dickhead racists would put two and two together and reach the answer of asylum seekers. By saying this suspect is white the racists small brains might assume, well that's ok he's not an asylum seeker so we don't have to set a hotel on fire
If you don’t announce details, is that said racist dickheads get to fill in their own bullshit.
The art of news management, in a democracy, is getting in first with something approximating to truth. With lots of detail.
Hence the old style of reporting - “Two men appended in burglary! At 11:32pm on Wednesday 14th May, two men were apprehended at 11 Shithole Street, by PC Savage, of the Ellsworth Police Station. Two brothers, John and Dave Stabbington, of no fixed address, were bought before magistrates at the town court on the 16th, and remanded in custody until trial.”
F*** me, that's uncanny. I live at no 11 Shithole Street. It's a small world.
You do realise that you have just doxxed yourself and your brother?
He’s the burglary victim though, Shirley? The Stabingtons don’t live there. He does.
This a perfect example of how miss reading press reports leads to mistakes. And riots.
My guess is the Liverpool horror is some kind of road rage turned into a man fearing for his life and then murderously hurtling through crowds instead of getting lynched (which nearly happened, anyway)
Deeply sad
There was an eyewitness interviewed on GB News who said it was a recipe for disaster because the road hadn't been closed. It sounds like the driver took a wrong turn and it all escalated from there with him ending up surrounded by a hostile crowd and then either panicking or seeing red.
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
Anyone here with an orangery instead of conservatory?
Yep and they are different. I wouldn't deign to have a conservatory. Common as muck. We have a rather smart orangery. Two solid brick walls and two half brick walls and glass and with a lead and glass roof, a stove and chimney and electric opening roof panels.
Pfft Conservatory, never.
What if your personal conservatoire regularly plays in the orangery? Is that posh?
So the Economist is reporting that Russia can manufacture more ballistic missiles than the West can manufacture interceptor missiles to shoot them down, and this three years and some into the war. What happened to the West's industrial might overwhelming Russia with munitions? And this is Russia, a complete basket case economically. Imagine how bad the situation would be if faced with a conflict against China?
None of the petty political arguments we are currently having over anything matter if we cannot retain our independence by being able to manufacture enough war material to defend ourselves.
We are so fucked.
The money is being spent on welfare.
The people want winter fuel allowance not interceptor missiles and the politicians are happy to pander to them.
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
Anyone here with an orangery instead of conservatory?
Yep and they are different. I wouldn't deign to have a conservatory. Common as muck. We have a rather smart orangery. Two solid brick walls and two half brick walls and glass and with a lead and glass roof, a stove and chimney and electric opening roof panels.
Pfft Conservatory, never.
The cherry blossom tree out the back of mine is dead. Drug dealer who let his big burly dogs scrape all the bark off the trunk has finally killed it.
Thankfully he left our theoretical orangery alone. We all never lowered ourselves to a theoretical conservatory.
Good news (I think): "TORONTO — The last time Canada’s monarch opened a session of Parliament was in 1977, when Queen Elizabeth II visited the country as part of her Silver Jubilee tour. On Tuesday, King Charles III will become only the second monarch in Canada’s history to participate in the historic ritual." source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/05/25/canada-king-charles-parliament-trump/
Does this involve Penny standing about with a big sword? If not - I fear I shall have to remove Canada from my Christmas round-robin letter this year.
So the Economist is reporting that Russia can manufacture more ballistic missiles than the West can manufacture interceptor missiles to shoot them down, and this three years and some into the war. What happened to the West's industrial might overwhelming Russia with munitions? And this is Russia, a complete basket case economically. Imagine how bad the situation would be if faced with a conflict against China?
None of the petty political arguments we are currently having over anything matter if we cannot retain our independence by being able to manufacture enough war material to defend ourselves.
We are so fucked.
The money is being spent on welfare.
The people want winter fuel allowance not interceptor missiles and the politicians are happy to pander to them.
We need political leaders who will inspire people to do what needs to be done, rather than what is easy or attractive.
Most people are willing to be led by politicians who exhibit some leadership.
Too many politicians use focus groups to find out what people want to hear, rather than what way of crafting their message is most convincing. We have politicians who are following the people instead of leading them. It will end up with the Chinese telling us what we're allowed to do.
So the Economist is reporting that Russia can manufacture more ballistic missiles than the West can manufacture interceptor missiles to shoot them down, and this three years and some into the war. What happened to the West's industrial might overwhelming Russia with munitions? And this is Russia, a complete basket case economically. Imagine how bad the situation would be if faced with a conflict against China?
None of the petty political arguments we are currently having over anything matter if we cannot retain our independence by being able to manufacture enough war material to defend ourselves.
We are so fucked.
The money is being spent on welfare.
The people want winter fuel allowance not interceptor missiles and the politicians are happy to pander to them.
We need political leaders who will inspire people to do what needs to be done, rather than what is easy or attractive.
Most people are willing to be led by politicians who exhibit some leadership.
Too many politicians use focus groups to find out what people want to hear, rather than what way of crafting their message is most convincing. We have politicians who are following the people instead of leading them. It will end up with the Chinese telling us what we're allowed to do.
We now have politicians who boast that they didn't enter politics to make difficult decisions.
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
As someone who's family is from NE Scotland - it is very hard to find a decent buttery anywhere else. Especially a toasted one smothered in... butter.
So the Economist is reporting that Russia can manufacture more ballistic missiles than the West can manufacture interceptor missiles to shoot them down, and this three years and some into the war. What happened to the West's industrial might overwhelming Russia with munitions? And this is Russia, a complete basket case economically. Imagine how bad the situation would be if faced with a conflict against China?
None of the petty political arguments we are currently having over anything matter if we cannot retain our independence by being able to manufacture enough war material to defend ourselves.
We are so fucked.
The money is being spent on welfare.
The people want winter fuel allowance not interceptor missiles and the politicians are happy to pander to them.
We need political leaders who will inspire people to do what needs to be done, rather than what is easy or attractive.
Most people are willing to be led by politicians who exhibit some leadership.
Too many politicians use focus groups to find out what people want to hear, rather than what way of crafting their message is most convincing. We have politicians who are following the people instead of leading them. It will end up with the Chinese telling us what we're allowed to do.
It's because military spending is used as industrial welfare.
A few years back, a group of US Navy Officers specified the follow on missile design to Trident II to be pretty "Same again, but with some tweaks".
They were being briefed against, in the press as Traitors To The Republic. Because specifying the missile that way meant no vast, juicy development contracts. And without a radical change in size and shape of the missile, the submarines could just be an evolution of the Ohio class.
See also, the new upstart contractors who are delivering solid fuelled rocket motors for US military missiles at a few percent of the "proper cost". Congress is a fighting a rear-guard action, but the problem is that, in addition to costing a fraction of LockMart and Boing! prices, they seem to be more reliable and have a bit more performance. So far they have just been making motors for tactical missiles, but that dam will break soon.
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
Accessible sources about lives other than top nobility/royals like the Paston letters, the Luttrell Psalter and Chaucer's prologue are fairly few in number but wonderful.
Helen Castor's book on the Paston family and letters (15th century) is a gem.
I’ve been aware of the Paston letters for a while but not yet got a copy. I assume it’s worth adding to the list?
The letters are perhaps a bit dry to those without a command of Middle English grammar. I would however recommend the biography by Frances and Joseph Gies.
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
Anyone here with an orangery instead of conservatory?
"Sells better apparently." ??
I'm sorry Hugo, we are simply not putting in an offer on that place. It had a larder instead of a pantry!
House buying is weird. I cannot quite put myself in the mindset of rich people looking to purchase some place with 6 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms for example.
I mean, even assuming some of those are actually just toilets and everyone has an en suite, the ratio is still off right?
Forget houses, I cannot stand toilets that have say 10 sinks but two hand dryers. Why have so many sinks?
There is an entertaining story of the ratio of wash bowls to rinsing bowls in field kitchens of the US Army in Korea. One of the classic of Operational Research.
What's going on in Liverpool? I haven't looked at the news since this morning.
Someone drove a car into the crowds on Water St. about 6pm. Adults and children injured, but thankfully no fatalities at present. Avoid news channels, who are showing videos with very little obscured.
What's going on in Liverpool? I haven't looked at the news since this morning.
Someone drove a car into the crowds on Water St. about 6pm. Adults and children injured, but thankfully no fatalities at present. Avoid news channels, who are showing videos with very little obscured.
Thanks, I'll probably just listen to the radio news.
What's going on in Liverpool? I haven't looked at the news since this morning.
Someone drove a car into the crowds on Water St. about 6pm. Adults and children injured, but thankfully no fatalities at present. Avoid news channels, who are showing videos with very little obscured.
Thanks, I'll probably just listen to the radio news.
Merseyside Polis appear to know nothing, but good to know 'a robust traffic management plan' was in place and it wasn't their fault. guv.
No actual details other than what they had already briefed to the media.
Are we watching the same broadcast? Because there is a lot more detail here than earlier.
Not from Merseyside Police, the ambulance and fire service, plus Liam Robinson gave all the information and reassurance. Thankfully, no fatalities.
The ACC said 'we've arrested someone, but cheer up we had good traffic management in place'. Useless.
If the police feel they have to say they had a 'robust traffic management plan' my immediate thought is that they did not in fact have a 'robust traffic management plan' and someone ended up (possibly accidentally) where they shouldn't have been.
What's going on in Liverpool? I haven't looked at the news since this morning.
Someone drove a car into the crowds on Water St. about 6pm. Adults and children injured, but thankfully no fatalities at present. Avoid news channels, who are showing videos with very little obscured.
Thanks, I'll probably just listen to the radio news.
What's going on in Liverpool? I haven't looked at the news since this morning.
Someone drove a car into the crowds on Water St. about 6pm. Adults and children injured, but thankfully no fatalities at present. Avoid news channels, who are showing videos with very little obscured.
Thanks, I'll probably just listen to the radio news.
You're all not going to believe me but I promise you this is true...... Chatting whilst out today to a vague/not well known acquaintance at an event and politics came up via some lame joke I told about the current state of the Tories. I've no idea this guys allegiances but he jumped in, unbidden, with 'Boris back. That's what I want to see' I'm half expecting to find out someone here paid him to say it to me!
Can't say I'm surprised. The idea of Boris is still attractive, and everyone likes it at first. The catch is the Max Hastings (?) point- sooner or later he betrays everyone and everyone eventually regrets dealing with him. Unfortunately, for all the gifts the good fairy gave him, the bad fairy made him a selfish lying shit; he can't help himself.
It's not difficult to see that some people haven't reached that betrayal point yet. It's an individual thing. But I suspect we're well past the tipping point.
When Boris was PM I had a heated discussion about him with some of his admirers. I was outnumbered and in the end cooler heads present suggested we put it aside and talk about something else. But those admirers have now moved on to Reform and are contemptuous of Boris. Yes, there are probably still some in the Boris zone, but it's emptying and I doubt those who leave will ever return.
There'll always be a market for Boris's kind of feel-good, Panglossian spin on modern Britain, and what better figurehead for it than Mr Eponymous Wave himself?
His former admirers may have deserted him, but he can find new supporters among the metropolitan Labour voters who are so disenchanted with Starmer's Reform act.
The voters don’t want a feel good guy any more. They want something more like General Pinochet
The voters think they want someone who will tell them the truth. Unfortunately, they’re not prepared to pay for the truth.
I want a hard right government that tasers shoplifters and litterers and phone thieves, that sends the Boriswave home tomorrow, which reduces net migration to zero, abolishes the right to asylum and sends the boat people to Rockall
I hear you - there’s a growing and sizeable voter pool demanding at least that.
It raises some interesting challenges: 1. A lack of police. For all that “it’s obvious” that we have plenty of police but they’re all wasting their time doing woke shit, in reality we don’t have enough police. So we’re at basics - how do we get more police and quickly? 2. One option is recruit a load of specials. Fast track training could be done in 6 months or so if really compressed. Will need managing but would add more bodies out there where needed. 3. The next challenge is what do we do when we run out of cells? And capacity in the courts system? And capacity in the jails? Because in many places that is already reality.
That’s just law and order going after scrotes. Your war against the forrin is fine providing that you have a plan to replace them with Brits? Which you don’t. I know that “make the scroungers work for their benefits” gets trotted out, but said “scroungers” have issues preventing them from taking those jobs including capability, skills, childcare and transport. A blanket “just make it work” doesn’t address any of the detail barriers which are massive.
If we had a government of any persuasion put forward a plan, that would help. Otherwise it’s just vapourware, a pretty crayon picture offered to the uninformed as “common sense”.
On 1, 2 and 3, you can't get more police quickly.
When Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne gutted the police service, the 15% they removed included much of the core, many with who had decades of experience. You do not rebuild anything overnight. It will take as long to restore the police force as it will take to restore the prison service - at least a decade.
I have not seen evidence that "they are all wasting their time doing woke shit". The Telegraph and friends have recently been raking over an incident going back to 2023. If that's most of what they have got, then that won't solve police numbers problems.
What's going on in Liverpool? I haven't looked at the news since this morning.
Someone drove a car into the crowds on Water St. about 6pm. Adults and children injured, but thankfully no fatalities at present. Avoid news channels, who are showing videos with very little obscured.
Thanks, I'll probably just listen to the radio news.
You're all not going to believe me but I promise you this is true...... Chatting whilst out today to a vague/not well known acquaintance at an event and politics came up via some lame joke I told about the current state of the Tories. I've no idea this guys allegiances but he jumped in, unbidden, with 'Boris back. That's what I want to see' I'm half expecting to find out someone here paid him to say it to me!
Can't say I'm surprised. The idea of Boris is still attractive, and everyone likes it at first. The catch is the Max Hastings (?) point- sooner or later he betrays everyone and everyone eventually regrets dealing with him. Unfortunately, for all the gifts the good fairy gave him, the bad fairy made him a selfish lying shit; he can't help himself.
It's not difficult to see that some people haven't reached that betrayal point yet. It's an individual thing. But I suspect we're well past the tipping point.
When Boris was PM I had a heated discussion about him with some of his admirers. I was outnumbered and in the end cooler heads present suggested we put it aside and talk about something else. But those admirers have now moved on to Reform and are contemptuous of Boris. Yes, there are probably still some in the Boris zone, but it's emptying and I doubt those who leave will ever return.
There'll always be a market for Boris's kind of feel-good, Panglossian spin on modern Britain, and what better figurehead for it than Mr Eponymous Wave himself?
His former admirers may have deserted him, but he can find new supporters among the metropolitan Labour voters who are so disenchanted with Starmer's Reform act.
The voters don’t want a feel good guy any more. They want something more like General Pinochet
The voters think they want someone who will tell them the truth. Unfortunately, they’re not prepared to pay for the truth.
I want a hard right government that tasers shoplifters and litterers and phone thieves, that sends the Boriswave home tomorrow, which reduces net migration to zero, abolishes the right to asylum and sends the boat people to Rockall
I hear you - there’s a growing and sizeable voter pool demanding at least that.
It raises some interesting challenges: 1. A lack of police. For all that “it’s obvious” that we have plenty of police but they’re all wasting their time doing woke shit, in reality we don’t have enough police. So we’re at basics - how do we get more police and quickly? 2. One option is recruit a load of specials. Fast track training could be done in 6 months or so if really compressed. Will need managing but would add more bodies out there where needed. 3. The next challenge is what do we do when we run out of cells? And capacity in the courts system? And capacity in the jails? Because in many places that is already reality.
That’s just law and order going after scrotes. Your war against the forrin is fine providing that you have a plan to replace them with Brits? Which you don’t. I know that “make the scroungers work for their benefits” gets trotted out, but said “scroungers” have issues preventing them from taking those jobs including capability, skills, childcare and transport. A blanket “just make it work” doesn’t address any of the detail barriers which are massive.
If we had a government of any persuasion put forward a plan, that would help. Otherwise it’s just vapourware, a pretty crayon picture offered to the uninformed as “common sense”.
I've told you one of my solutions
Modernised corporal punishment, for things like shoplifting, mugging, phone thieves. Taser them every day fior a week. Far far cheaper and wiser than jail - and arguably more humane - and they won't be doing the crime again in a hurry
That only bypasses the jail bit. The lack of police the lack of cells the lack of court time is still a major problem.
I assume that you envisage Home Secretary Yaxley-Lennon would want a justice process? Or is the idea to nick em, taser them on the street and then publicly flog them? Trial by mob is what the hard right want - and we saw them last year trying to round up anyone they could for their crime of being Muslim. On the streets of Acklam, about a mile from where I used to live in Thornaby
That type of thing from, Leon will fix nothing; it's just a Rhodes Boyson style fantasy - dreaming of a mini-me Mussolini.
Merseyside Polis appear to know nothing, but good to know 'a robust traffic management plan' was in place and it wasn't their fault. guv.
No actual details other than what they had already briefed to the media.
Are we watching the same broadcast? Because there is a lot more detail here than earlier.
Not from Merseyside Police, the ambulance and fire service, plus Liam Robinson gave all the information and reassurance. Thankfully, no fatalities.
The ACC said 'we've arrested someone, but cheer up we had good traffic management in place'. Useless.
If the police feel they have to say they had a 'robust traffic management plan' my immediate thought is that they did not in fact have a 'robust traffic management plan' and someone ended up (possibly accidentally) where they shouldn't have been.
Or someone ignored all the road closed signs and notices through letterboxes. This typically happens when someone pulls out of a drive during a marathon, though usually they are quickly advised by runners/volunteers to stop - and do so.
Merseyside Polis appear to know nothing, but good to know 'a robust traffic management plan' was in place and it wasn't their fault. guv.
No actual details other than what they had already briefed to the media.
Are we watching the same broadcast? Because there is a lot more detail here than earlier.
Not from Merseyside Police, the ambulance and fire service, plus Liam Robinson gave all the information and reassurance. Thankfully, no fatalities.
The ACC said 'we've arrested someone, but cheer up we had good traffic management in place'. Useless.
If the police feel they have to say they had a 'robust traffic management plan' my immediate thought is that they did not in fact have a 'robust traffic management plan' and someone ended up (possibly accidentally) where they shouldn't have been.
Or someone ignored all the road closed signs and notices through letterboxes. This typically happens when someone pulls out of a drive during a marathon, though usually they are quickly advised by runners/volunteers to stop - and do so.
True, I've actually witnessed this during a cycle race (Tour de Yorkshire, rolling roadblock style, rather than closed roads).
We were spectating in a village during one of the women's races and a large bunch of cyclists came through followed by the usual stream of team cars.
An impatient local goes to pull out of their driveway and is waved to stop by spectators (including us).
They continue to pull out and drive off, fortunately in the same direction as the race.
60 seconds later, another bunch comes past.
Maybe they didn't know to wait for the broom wagon because they'd never seen a cycle race, but you'd have thought they might have considered whether they were doing the right thing when everyone waves at them to stop.
Race marshals and police can't cover every eventuality.
But...there aren't many driveways around Water Street, it is the city centre (business district), and parades tend to go at rather less than the speed limit.
My guess is the Liverpool horror is some kind of road rage turned into a man fearing for his life and then murderously hurtling through crowds instead of getting lynched (which nearly happened, anyway)
Deeply sad
There was an eyewitness interviewed on GB News who said it was a recipe for disaster because the road hadn't been closed. It sounds like the driver took a wrong turn and it all escalated from there with him ending up surrounded by a hostile crowd and then either panicking or seeing red.
My guess is the Liverpool horror is some kind of road rage turned into a man fearing for his life and then murderously hurtling through crowds instead of getting lynched (which nearly happened, anyway)
Deeply sad
There was an eyewitness interviewed on GB News who said it was a recipe for disaster because the road hadn't been closed. It sounds like the driver took a wrong turn and it all escalated from there with him ending up surrounded by a hostile crowd and then either panicking or seeing red.
Merseyside Polis appear to know nothing, but good to know 'a robust traffic management plan' was in place and it wasn't their fault. guv.
No actual details other than what they had already briefed to the media.
Are we watching the same broadcast? Because there is a lot more detail here than earlier.
Not from Merseyside Police, the ambulance and fire service, plus Liam Robinson gave all the information and reassurance. Thankfully, no fatalities.
The ACC said 'we've arrested someone, but cheer up we had good traffic management in place'. Useless.
If the police feel they have to say they had a 'robust traffic management plan' my immediate thought is that they did not in fact have a 'robust traffic management plan' and someone ended up (possibly accidentally) where they shouldn't have been.
Or someone ignored all the road closed signs and notices through letterboxes. This typically happens when someone pulls out of a drive during a marathon, though usually they are quickly advised by runners/volunteers to stop - and do so.
That's actually a classic example of autoselfish behaviour. The lady became fixated on her target, and in her need to get out simply did not compute the risk of injury she was posing to other people.
Remember, the police will only declare a terrorism incident when they are sure it fits the definition and Merseyside police won't right now even if they have any suspicion. Too many connotations and, most likely, too uncertain right now.
Only when they are sure they can pin ideological, religious or political motive would they do it. That may take a few days or more to grasp if they have any suspicions. The problem arises if lets say they did find such motive then dont bother telling the public in due course.
As it is, we don't know and they probably are not 100% sure right now until they look about a bit. If there isnt, they should confirm that pretty quickly and get it over with.
As it is, there is every chance the person involved is known to the police in some form. Its very possible to have some kind of history to be doing that kind of thing, even if the story comes out that the prepetrator was coked or methed up the eyeballs as a contributory cause or something like that.
Just on the thread, Tim Montgomerie is reportedly of the view that Boris is actively looking a route back, if that counts for anything.
My guess is the Liverpool horror is some kind of road rage turned into a man fearing for his life and then murderously hurtling through crowds instead of getting lynched (which nearly happened, anyway)
Deeply sad
There was an eyewitness interviewed on GB News who said it was a recipe for disaster because the road hadn't been closed. It sounds like the driver took a wrong turn and it all escalated from there with him ending up surrounded by a hostile crowd and then either panicking or seeing red.
You watch GBNews? Well I never!
So do I, as it happens - usually in the car in small doses to see what the .. er .. knuckle-draggers are up to.
When I was heading back late on Saturday from Oldham they were pushing the faked up Lucy Connolly "convicted and imprisoned for a single tweet" fairy story.
It's like the Daily Mail with a political campaign attached, whereas the Mail itself just wants to identify items for its readers to be able to get angry and point the fingers at "somebody who is not me"about.
My guess is the Liverpool horror is some kind of road rage turned into a man fearing for his life and then murderously hurtling through crowds instead of getting lynched (which nearly happened, anyway)
Deeply sad
There was an eyewitness interviewed on GB News who said it was a recipe for disaster because the road hadn't been closed. It sounds like the driver took a wrong turn and it all escalated from there with him ending up surrounded by a hostile crowd and then either panicking or seeing red.
You watch GBNews? Well I never!
So do I, as it happens - usually in the car in small doses to see what the .. er .. knuckle-draggers are up to.
When I was heading back late on Saturday from Oldham they were pushing the faked up Lucy Connolly "convicted and imprisoned for a single tweet" fairy story.
It's like the Daily Mail with a political campaign attached, whereas the Mail itself just wants to identify items for its readers to be able to get angry and point the fingers at "somebody who is not me"about.
It's the only news channel which has a fairly cheerful and relaxed attitude to life. Both BBC and Sky are like puritanical schoolteachers, lecturing people on how they ought to be living. My view.
You're all not going to believe me but I promise you this is true...... Chatting whilst out today to a vague/not well known acquaintance at an event and politics came up via some lame joke I told about the current state of the Tories. I've no idea this guys allegiances but he jumped in, unbidden, with 'Boris back. That's what I want to see' I'm half expecting to find out someone here paid him to say it to me!
Can't say I'm surprised. The idea of Boris is still attractive, and everyone likes it at first. The catch is the Max Hastings (?) point- sooner or later he betrays everyone and everyone eventually regrets dealing with him. Unfortunately, for all the gifts the good fairy gave him, the bad fairy made him a selfish lying shit; he can't help himself.
It's not difficult to see that some people haven't reached that betrayal point yet. It's an individual thing. But I suspect we're well past the tipping point.
When Boris was PM I had a heated discussion about him with some of his admirers. I was outnumbered and in the end cooler heads present suggested we put it aside and talk about something else. But those admirers have now moved on to Reform and are contemptuous of Boris. Yes, there are probably still some in the Boris zone, but it's emptying and I doubt those who leave will ever return.
There'll always be a market for Boris's kind of feel-good, Panglossian spin on modern Britain, and what better figurehead for it than Mr Eponymous Wave himself?
His former admirers may have deserted him, but he can find new supporters among the metropolitan Labour voters who are so disenchanted with Starmer's Reform act.
The voters don’t want a feel good guy any more. They want something more like General Pinochet
The voters think they want someone who will tell them the truth. Unfortunately, they’re not prepared to pay for the truth.
I want a hard right government that tasers shoplifters and litterers and phone thieves, that sends the Boriswave home tomorrow, which reduces net migration to zero, abolishes the right to asylum and sends the boat people to Rockall
Well I want a hard left government that puts entitled self-indulgent reactionaries to work in call centres.
My guess is the Liverpool horror is some kind of road rage turned into a man fearing for his life and then murderously hurtling through crowds instead of getting lynched (which nearly happened, anyway)
Deeply sad
There was an eyewitness interviewed on GB News who said it was a recipe for disaster because the road hadn't been closed. It sounds like the driver took a wrong turn and it all escalated from there with him ending up surrounded by a hostile crowd and then either panicking or seeing red.
You watch GBNews? Well I never!
So do I, as it happens - usually in the car in small doses to see what the .. er .. knuckle-draggers are up to.
When I was heading back late on Saturday from Oldham they were pushing the faked up Lucy Connolly "convicted and imprisoned for a single tweet" fairy story.
It's like the Daily Mail with a political campaign attached, whereas the Mail itself just wants to identify items for its readers to be able to get angry and point the fingers at "somebody who is not me"about.
It's the only news channel which has a fairly cheerful and relaxed attitude to life. Both BBC and Sky are like puritanical schoolteachers, lecturing people on how they ought to be living. My view.
The casualties were worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Simply horrific.
Why isn't this more widely known?
I'm not quite sure that's accurate. There were more casualties at Waterloo than were suffered by the British Army on the first day of the Somme (around 60,000 against 57,000)
Yes, that's what I meant. And all achieved within less than three square miles with sword, sabre, bayonet, ball and shot; 18th and 19th Century weapons. And arguably worse than a machine gun bullet since such carnage would have been at close quarters, personal, brutal, and highly violent.
Simply horrific.
Horrific indeed. Your initial post got me trawling wiki to improve my understanding a bit and I came across this:
Carabinier-à-Cheval cuirass holed by a cannonball at Waterloo, belonging to Antoine Fauveau
You're not surviving that.
How anyone made it through ancient battles (or just life in general) is beyond me.
We moan, and of course we are not going to compare ourselves to this part of the past, but we don't know how good we have it.
From a recommendaiton on here I read 'By sword and fire: cruelty and atrocity in medieval warfare', which was a bit of an eye opener.
I've not read some of the author's other works, such as 'Blood cries afar' and 'Kill them all', about the Albigensian Crusade.
As much as I have read widely about wars and conflict, I find myself more drawn to the minutiae of everyday life. Simple things that we take for granted, such as fridges and freezers. How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food? Back in medieval Warminster did everyone have really, really long days in midsummer? Did people keep,gardens with flowers back then? Or was it only ever useful plants?
Modern historians are probably be more interested in that stuff than traditional high politics and war, but of course it's harder to gather evidence on mundane life so on to the archaelogists I guess.
"How did people in Warminster in 1925 keep food?"
The larder.
How long can you keep a cooked chicken in a larder? These are the thoughts which keep me awake at night (or rather these are the thoughts I think about when I can’t sleep).
A surprisingly long time. Larders were low-tech fridges; on the north side of your house, well ventilated, with stone which retained the cold. Not great inthe height of summer but quite efficient nine months of the year.
Also, a lot of potting and smoking of meat went on.
My gran still had an operating larder when I was a child in 1970s.
I currently have a larder (though I call it a pantry, apparently incorrectly on a technical basis, according to one of the first comments I ever made on PB).
So, do tell, what's the difference between a larder and a pantry?
Isn't a larder for meat and a pantry for bread? That I think was at least the technical definition.
And of course, a buttery is for - wine.
When we sold our house last year the agents insisted in calling our walk-in larder a pantry. Sells better apparently.
Mind you, the corridor between the kitchen and the lounge was a 'walk-through library' apparently. Who knew?
Anyone here with an orangery instead of conservatory?
"Sells better apparently." ??
I'm sorry Hugo, we are simply not putting in an offer on that place. It had a larder instead of a pantry!
House buying is weird. I cannot quite put myself in the mindset of rich people looking to purchase some place with 6 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms for example.
I mean, even assuming some of those are actually just toilets and everyone has an en suite, the ratio is still off right?
Forget houses, I cannot stand toilets that have say 10 sinks but two hand dryers. Why have so many sinks?
Someone has actually answered this question. The stuff you find on t'internet.
My guess is the Liverpool horror is some kind of road rage turned into a man fearing for his life and then murderously hurtling through crowds instead of getting lynched (which nearly happened, anyway)
Deeply sad
There was an eyewitness interviewed on GB News who said it was a recipe for disaster because the road hadn't been closed. It sounds like the driver took a wrong turn and it all escalated from there with him ending up surrounded by a hostile crowd and then either panicking or seeing red.
You watch GBNews? Well I never!
So do I, as it happens - usually in the car in small doses to see what the .. er .. knuckle-draggers are up to.
When I was heading back late on Saturday from Oldham they were pushing the faked up Lucy Connolly "convicted and imprisoned for a single tweet" fairy story.
It's like the Daily Mail with a political campaign attached, whereas the Mail itself just wants to identify items for its readers to be able to get angry and point the fingers at "somebody who is not me"about.
It's the only news channel which has a fairly cheerful and relaxed attitude to life. Both BBC and Sky are like puritanical schoolteachers, lecturing people on how they ought to be living. My view.
Sky News being a bit naughty this morning. They’ve shown one video of what happened before, but they’ve not shown the immediate seconds before the driver drove into the crowd. Either show it all, or show nothing.
Sky News being a bit naughty this morning. They’ve shown one video of what happened before, but they’ve not shown the immediate seconds before the driver drove into the crowd. Either show it all, or show nothing.
It is hardly unprecedented for mainstream news channels not to show people being killed or grievously injured.
My guess is the Liverpool horror is some kind of road rage turned into a man fearing for his life and then murderously hurtling through crowds instead of getting lynched (which nearly happened, anyway)
Deeply sad
There was an eyewitness interviewed on GB News who said it was a recipe for disaster because the road hadn't been closed. It sounds like the driver took a wrong turn and it all escalated from there with him ending up surrounded by a hostile crowd and then either panicking or seeing red.
You watch GBNews? Well I never!
So do I, as it happens - usually in the car in small doses to see what the .. er .. knuckle-draggers are up to.
When I was heading back late on Saturday from Oldham they were pushing the faked up Lucy Connolly "convicted and imprisoned for a single tweet" fairy story.
It's like the Daily Mail with a political campaign attached, whereas the Mail itself just wants to identify items for its readers to be able to get angry and point the fingers at "somebody who is not me"about.
It's the only news channel which has a fairly cheerful and relaxed attitude to life. Both BBC and Sky are like puritanical schoolteachers, lecturing people on how they ought to be living. My view.
The Telegraph's chart showing the scale of debt in the G7 has five countries with more debt than His Majesty's United Kingdom and only Germany with less (admittedly a lot less).
I'm not really sure what the point of the article is, other than to fill space.
Analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility suggests that based on policy settings as of March 2024, public spending in the UK over the next 50 years would rise from 45pc to 60pc of GDP, but that tax revenues would remain static at 40pc.
As a result, public debt would rise rapidly from the late 2030s onwards to 274pc of GDP by 2075.
This is exactly what I have been saying since well before the election, really from the point Truss tried to write a blank cheque for our energy costs and then Hunt merely wrote a humongous one.
Right now government finances should be at least neutral, arguably in surplus. No war, no recession, no pandemic, no particular stress. We are borrowing £12bn a month. Reeves went on about an £18bn black hole, raised the taxes to fill it and then blew them all and more on public sector pay. The reality is that there is a £150bn black hole and nobody will even talk about it, let alone address it.
We need to massively increase taxes, massively decrease public spending, massively reduce the public sector headcount, cut the unsustainable generosity of public sector pensions and keep this up for a generation or more. Pretending that growth is the answer is simply delusional because public sector spending grows at least as fast as the economy.
Sky News being a bit naughty this morning. They’ve shown one video of what happened before, but they’ve not shown the immediate seconds before the driver drove into the crowd. Either show it all, or show nothing.
It is hardly unprecedented for mainstream news channels not to show people being killed or grievously injured.
You misunderstand. They are showing that bit (or at least, the bit just before). What they’re not showing is before that the car was surrounded by a baying mob. They have shown the guy kicking the cars rear windscreen wiper off to suggest that an altercation has occurred. They just haven’t shown what it escalated to.
The Telegraph's chart showing the scale of debt in the G7 has five countries with more debt than His Majesty's United Kingdom and only Germany with less (admittedly a lot less).
I'm not really sure what the point of the article is, other than to fill space.
Analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility suggests that based on policy settings as of March 2024, public spending in the UK over the next 50 years would rise from 45pc to 60pc of GDP, but that tax revenues would remain static at 40pc.
As a result, public debt would rise rapidly from the late 2030s onwards to 274pc of GDP by 2075.
Fifty years is a long time in politics.
"The Telegraph is an increasingly terrible newspaper-shaped object, part n in a series on N."
(See also the bluesky thread viewcode linked to. If you have the resources to dress propaganda up as news, then propaganda beats reality. And that's a blooming hard problem to fix.)
The maths is somewhat beyond me but read superficially that is fascinating and troubling. Thanks for the link.
I DO understand the maths, and the data in the study doesn't really justify the clickbaity headline or the sweeping statements in the introduction and conclusion. It isn't entirely invalid, but, as it admits itself, they rely on a very small sample size, in many cases their standard errors are larger than their means, which is always a big red flag, and they don't bother to explain many anomalies.
For a non-technical example, look at the graph of suicides by gender in Section 5.3. It shows female suicides increasing sharply as internet penetration increases, BUT only up to 2014, after which they stabilise and fall slightly. Why, given that high-speed internet penetration only STARTED to grow rapidly around then, according to their own graphs in Section 2?
Also, what explains the big decline in teen suicides in the period between 1996 and 2008? Was the rollout in dialup great for mental health?
An equally if not more plausible explanation surely links teen suicide rates to the Spanish economy, which boomed between 1996 and 2008, then crashed, then recovered a bit from the mid-2010s, and this may have hit girls worse than boys, which could explain the post-2014 differential. Either that, or high-speed internet suddenly became therapeutic for girls post-2014, contrary to their thesis?
None of this invalidates their useful research, it just indicates that other, probably more important, factors are at work, and shows the dangers of drawing sweeping conclusions from single studies and small sample sizes.
The Telegraph's chart showing the scale of debt in the G7 has five countries with more debt than His Majesty's United Kingdom and only Germany with less (admittedly a lot less).
I'm not really sure what the point of the article is, other than to fill space.
Analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility suggests that based on policy settings as of March 2024, public spending in the UK over the next 50 years would rise from 45pc to 60pc of GDP, but that tax revenues would remain static at 40pc.
As a result, public debt would rise rapidly from the late 2030s onwards to 274pc of GDP by 2075.
Fifty years is a long time in politics.
Which gives us plenty of time to do something about it, sadly it looks like short termism always wins.
This is exactly what I have been saying since well before the election, really from the point Truss tried to write a blank cheque for our energy costs and then Hunt merely wrote a humongous one.
Right now government finances should be at least neutral, arguably in surplus. No war, no recession, no pandemic, no particular stress. We are borrowing £12bn a month. Reeves went on about an £18bn black hole, raised the taxes to fill it and then blew them all and more on public sector pay. The reality is that there is a £150bn black hole and nobody will even talk about it, let alone address it.
We need to massively increase taxes, massively decrease public spending, massively reduce the public sector headcount, cut the unsustainable generosity of public sector pensions and keep this up for a generation or more. Pretending that growth is the answer is simply delusional because public sector spending grows at least as fast as the economy.
Look at the large rise in out of work benefits since Covid, from a previously high level, how is this sustainable ?
This is exactly what I have been saying since well before the election, really from the point Truss tried to write a blank cheque for our energy costs and then Hunt merely wrote a humongous one.
Right now government finances should be at least neutral, arguably in surplus. No war, no recession, no pandemic, no particular stress. We are borrowing £12bn a month. Reeves went on about an £18bn black hole, raised the taxes to fill it and then blew them all and more on public sector pay. The reality is that there is a £150bn black hole and nobody will even talk about it, let alone address it.
We need to massively increase taxes, massively decrease public spending, massively reduce the public sector headcount, cut the unsustainable generosity of public sector pensions and keep this up for a generation or more. Pretending that growth is the answer is simply delusional because public sector spending grows at least as fast as the economy.
That's not going to happen while we see the backlash from the cut to WFP and the ending of the landowners IHT exemption. This government inherited both a terrible financial situation and threadbare public services.
That said, the misery is overdone. I have been to both Cheshire and York for family events these last weekends, and both were heaving with folk out spending money.
The Telegraph's chart showing the scale of debt in the G7 has five countries with more debt than His Majesty's United Kingdom and only Germany with less (admittedly a lot less).
I'm not really sure what the point of the article is, other than to fill space.
Analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility suggests that based on policy settings as of March 2024, public spending in the UK over the next 50 years would rise from 45pc to 60pc of GDP, but that tax revenues would remain static at 40pc.
As a result, public debt would rise rapidly from the late 2030s onwards to 274pc of GDP by 2075.
Fifty years is a long time in politics.
"The Telegraph is an increasingly terrible newspaper-shaped object, part n in a series on N."
(See also the bluesky thread viewcode linked to. If you have the resources to dress propaganda up as news, then propaganda beats reality. And that's a blooming hard problem to fix.)
Funnily enough my wife was lamenting that some offer or other meant she was reading a lot more from the Telegraph and she thought that this was contributing to her low mood. Its contribution is indeed depressing. I have tried to explain that the Telegraph thinks that it is its duty to decry a Labour government, even if the vast majority of the problems were inherited from the Tories. The thread @viewcode linked to does indeed show how this works.
But Jeremy Warner is a serious person and he is right about the desperate state of our finances.
Sky News being a bit naughty this morning. They’ve shown one video of what happened before, but they’ve not shown the immediate seconds before the driver drove into the crowd. Either show it all, or show nothing.
It is hardly unprecedented for mainstream news channels not to show people being killed or grievously injured.
You misunderstand. They are showing that bit (or at least, the bit just before). What they’re not showing is before that the car was surrounded by a baying mob. They have shown the guy kicking the cars rear windscreen wiper off to suggest that an altercation has occurred. They just haven’t shown what it escalated to.
Are you hinting/hoping that it was awful Liverpool fans causing it by attacking the man’s car by any chance?
By the sound of things, from an immediate eyewitness who is a bbc journalist, the car drove into someone, ambulance tried to get to them then car reversed into ambulance and after that they sped through crowd.
No idea if it was panic, trying to escape a mob, justice, whatever but I guess, (like people who want bad attacks to be by Muslims/ not by Muslims/ by far right people, anyone who suits a prejudice)some people want it to be activated by a group they don’t like.
The Telegraph's chart showing the scale of debt in the G7 has five countries with more debt than His Majesty's United Kingdom and only Germany with less (admittedly a lot less).
I'm not really sure what the point of the article is, other than to fill space.
Analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility suggests that based on policy settings as of March 2024, public spending in the UK over the next 50 years would rise from 45pc to 60pc of GDP, but that tax revenues would remain static at 40pc.
As a result, public debt would rise rapidly from the late 2030s onwards to 274pc of GDP by 2075.
Fifty years is a long time in politics.
"The Telegraph is an increasingly terrible newspaper-shaped object, part n in a series on N."
(See also the bluesky thread viewcode linked to. If you have the resources to dress propaganda up as news, then propaganda beats reality. And that's a blooming hard problem to fix.)
Funnily enough my wife was lamenting that some offer or other meant she was reading a lot more from the Telegraph and she thought that this was contributing to her low mood. Its contribution is indeed depressing. I have tried to explain that the Telegraph thinks that it is its duty to decry a Labour government, even if the vast majority of the problems were inherited from the Tories. The thread @viewcode linked to does indeed show how this works.
But Jeremy Warner is a serious person and he is right about the desperate state of our finances.
Yes he is and it is sad to see otherwise smart people dismissing what he says simply because it’s the Telegraph.
My guess is the Liverpool horror is some kind of road rage turned into a man fearing for his life and then murderously hurtling through crowds instead of getting lynched (which nearly happened, anyway)
Deeply sad
There was an eyewitness interviewed on GB News who said it was a recipe for disaster because the road hadn't been closed. It sounds like the driver took a wrong turn and it all escalated from there with him ending up surrounded by a hostile crowd and then either panicking or seeing red.
You watch GBNews? Well I never!
So do I, as it happens - usually in the car in small doses to see what the .. er .. knuckle-draggers are up to.
When I was heading back late on Saturday from Oldham they were pushing the faked up Lucy Connolly "convicted and imprisoned for a single tweet" fairy story.
It's like the Daily Mail with a political campaign attached, whereas the Mail itself just wants to identify items for its readers to be able to get angry and point the fingers at "somebody who is not me"about.
It's the only news channel which has a fairly cheerful and relaxed attitude to life. Both BBC and Sky are like puritanical schoolteachers, lecturing people on how they ought to be living. My view.
This is exactly what I have been saying since well before the election, really from the point Truss tried to write a blank cheque for our energy costs and then Hunt merely wrote a humongous one.
Right now government finances should be at least neutral, arguably in surplus. No war, no recession, no pandemic, no particular stress. We are borrowing £12bn a month. Reeves went on about an £18bn black hole, raised the taxes to fill it and then blew them all and more on public sector pay. The reality is that there is a £150bn black hole and nobody will even talk about it, let alone address it.
We need to massively increase taxes, massively decrease public spending, massively reduce the public sector headcount, cut the unsustainable generosity of public sector pensions and keep this up for a generation or more. Pretending that growth is the answer is simply delusional because public sector spending grows at least as fast as the economy.
That's not going to happen while we see the backlash from the cut to WFP and the ending of the landowners IHT exemption. This government inherited both a terrible financial situation and threadbare public services.
That said, the misery is overdone. I have been to both Cheshire and York for family events these last weekends, and both were heaving with folk out spending money.
In contrast i am in Aberdeen. Union Street was once up there with Princes Street in Edinburgh and Buchanan Street in Glasgow as a shopping and entertainment hub. Now it’s a combination of the boarded up and charity shops as well as filthy. It’s really sad to see it.
Comments
I mean, even assuming some of those are actually just toilets and everyone has an en suite, the ratio is still off right?
But we did sell quickly and for a good price :-)
It's what we plebs call the drawing room.
Similarly, Texas and Florida have greatly improved their public schools, while other states have lagged.
And it allows political leaders to show what they can do, before they go national. Though success doesn't always get the attention it deserves, as the example of Republican Phil Scott shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Scott
"Philip Brian Scott (born August 4, 1958) is an American politician, businessman, and stock car racer who has been the 82nd governor of Vermont since 2017.
. . . Scott was first elected governor of Vermont in the 2016 general election,[1] and was reelected in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Scott's 2024 margin of victory is the largest in any Vermont gubernatorial election since 1946."
But that same federal system often makes it harder to control crime.
None of the petty political arguments we are currently having over anything matter if we cannot retain our independence by being able to manufacture enough war material to defend ourselves.
We are so fucked.
I do not recommend the "proty" - the Protocol - to people unused to tranquilisers and anxiolytics
source$: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/05/25/canada-king-charles-parliament-trump/
Deeply sad
Pfft Conservatory, never.
This a perfect example of how miss reading press reports leads to mistakes. And riots.
The people want winter fuel allowance not interceptor missiles and the politicians are happy to pander to them.
Thankfully he left our theoretical orangery alone. We all never lowered ourselves to a theoretical conservatory.
No actual details other than what they had already briefed to the media.
27 people in total taken to hospital
Most people are willing to be led by politicians who exhibit some leadership.
Too many politicians use focus groups to find out what people want to hear, rather than what way of crafting their message is most convincing. We have politicians who are following the people instead of leading them. It will end up with the Chinese telling us what we're allowed to do.
The ACC said 'we've arrested someone, but cheer up we had good traffic management in place'. Useless.
A few years back, a group of US Navy Officers specified the follow on missile design to Trident II to be pretty "Same again, but with some tweaks".
They were being briefed against, in the press as Traitors To The Republic. Because specifying the missile that way meant no vast, juicy development contracts. And without a radical change in size and shape of the missile, the submarines could just be an evolution of the Ohio class.
See also, the new upstart contractors who are delivering solid fuelled rocket motors for US military missiles at a few percent of the "proper cost". Congress is a fighting a rear-guard action, but the problem is that, in addition to costing a fraction of LockMart and Boing! prices, they seem to be more reliable and have a bit more performance. So far they have just been making motors for tactical missiles, but that dam will break soon.
In a word: Phwooooooar
When Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne gutted the police service, the 15% they removed included much of the core, many with who had decades of experience. You do not rebuild anything overnight. It will take as long to restore the police force as it will take to restore the prison service - at least a decade.
I have not seen evidence that "they are all wasting their time doing woke shit". The Telegraph and friends have recently been raking over an incident going back to 2023. If that's most of what they have got, then that won't solve police numbers problems.
My beef is that when such are installed, they are installed crassly and without thought - using up much of what little money we have available.
This is a good example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-44228164
Germany stops allowing family reunification for asylum seekers before their cases are granted. Mad they ever did...
We were spectating in a village during one of the women's races and a large bunch of cyclists came through followed by the usual stream of team cars.
An impatient local goes to pull out of their driveway and is waved to stop by spectators (including us).
They continue to pull out and drive off, fortunately in the same direction as the race.
60 seconds later, another bunch comes past.
Maybe they didn't know to wait for the broom wagon because they'd never seen a cycle race, but you'd have thought they might have considered whether they were doing the right thing when everyone waves at them to stop.
Race marshals and police can't cover every eventuality.
But...there aren't many driveways around Water Street, it is the city centre (business district), and parades tend to go at rather less than the speed limit.
Only when they are sure they can pin ideological, religious or political motive would they do it. That may take a few days or more to grasp if they have any suspicions. The problem arises if lets say they did find such motive then dont bother telling the public in due course.
As it is, we don't know and they probably are not 100% sure right now until they look about a bit. If there isnt, they should confirm that pretty quickly and get it over with.
As it is, there is every chance the person involved is known to the police in some form. Its very possible to have some kind of history to be doing that kind of thing, even if the story comes out that the prepetrator was coked or methed up the eyeballs as a contributory cause or something like that.
Just on the thread, Tim Montgomerie is reportedly of the view that Boris is actively looking a route back, if that counts for anything.
When I was heading back late on Saturday from Oldham they were pushing the faked up Lucy Connolly "convicted and imprisoned for a single tweet" fairy story.
It's like the Daily Mail with a political campaign attached, whereas the Mail itself just wants to identify items for its readers to be able to get angry and point the fingers at "somebody who is not me"about.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629625000499
https://bsky.app/profile/volts.wtf/post/3lpu6ksru3k2h
Senior figures say former PM is unpopular with floating voters and political landscape has changed
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/05/26/tory-mps-tell-boris-johnson-we-do-not-want-you-back/ (£££)
https://www.qbicwashrooms.co.uk/blog/how-many-hand-dryers-do-i-need-for-my-washroom.html
Labour is going to Truss the economy. The moment there is the slightest pressure they fold.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/25/bond-markets-open-revolt-global-fiscal-reckoning/
I'm not really sure what the point of the article is, other than to fill space.
Analysis by the Office for Budget Responsibility suggests that based on policy settings as of March 2024, public spending in the UK over the next 50 years would rise from 45pc to 60pc of GDP, but that tax revenues would remain static at 40pc.
As a result, public debt would rise rapidly from the late 2030s onwards to 274pc of GDP by 2075.
Fifty years is a long time in politics.
Right now government finances should be at least neutral, arguably in surplus. No war, no recession, no pandemic, no particular stress. We are borrowing £12bn a month. Reeves went on about an £18bn black hole, raised the taxes to fill it and then blew them all and more on public sector pay. The reality is that there is a £150bn black hole and nobody will even talk about it, let alone address it.
We need to massively increase taxes, massively decrease public spending, massively reduce the public sector headcount, cut the unsustainable generosity of public sector pensions and keep this up for a generation or more. Pretending that growth is the answer is simply delusional because public sector spending grows at least as fast as the economy.
(See also the bluesky thread viewcode linked to. If you have the resources to dress propaganda up as news, then propaganda beats reality. And that's a blooming hard problem to fix.)
For a non-technical example, look at the graph of suicides by gender in Section 5.3. It shows female suicides increasing sharply as internet penetration increases, BUT only up to 2014, after which they stabilise and fall slightly. Why, given that high-speed internet penetration only STARTED to grow rapidly around then, according to their own graphs in Section 2?
Also, what explains the big decline in teen suicides in the period between 1996 and 2008? Was the rollout in dialup great for mental health?
An equally if not more plausible explanation surely links teen suicide rates to the Spanish economy, which boomed between 1996 and 2008, then crashed, then recovered a bit from the mid-2010s, and this may have hit girls worse than boys, which could explain the post-2014 differential. Either that, or high-speed internet suddenly became therapeutic for girls post-2014, contrary to their thesis?
None of this invalidates their useful research, it just indicates that other, probably more important, factors are at work, and shows the dangers of drawing sweeping conclusions from single studies and small sample sizes.
https://x.com/danbdennis/status/1925670863673696271?s=61
We have time to do something about it. Sadly we don’t have the political will.
That said, the misery is overdone. I have been to both Cheshire and York for family events these last weekends, and both were heaving with folk out spending money.
But Jeremy Warner is a serious person and he is right about the desperate state of our finances.
By the sound of things, from an immediate eyewitness who is a bbc journalist, the car drove into someone, ambulance tried to get to them then car reversed into ambulance and after that they sped through crowd.
No idea if it was panic, trying to escape a mob, justice, whatever but I guess, (like people who want bad attacks to be by Muslims/ not by Muslims/ by far right people, anyone who suits a prejudice)some people want it to be activated by a group they don’t like.
Is this chat moribund ?
😂