At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Who wants to eat foreign muck anyway?
Give me a Yorkshire pudding any day.
Are we talking about hors d'oeuvre or whores under a duvet here?
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Leon is on to something concerning the decline of French restaurants in London though. The original Boulestan closed around that time, and a few years after it was clear that French wasn't the way to go, and now I can't think of a decent French restaurant in London. (Maybe that romantic place in Covent Garden who's name I forget)
Boulestin has been replaced by St Jacques, which is much superior. Cheaper and better food.
Gotta dash but re @contrarianI'm sure 87% of people criticising him and his perfectly consistent views which haven't changed much over the course of the pandemic are just doing so because they are scared that he is speaking much truth. Which to a very large extent he is.
But no people mock him for not wanting to put something into his body that the government says he should. Ponder that. Not wanting to inject something that was developed less than a year ago. That that is worthy of mockery no matter the good or bad reasons for doing so is extraordinary.
I don't agree with everything he says but I agree with a helluva lot of it. I have posted much about the freedom vs safety element and the imo egregious transgressions of the govt against our liberties but people on here (and in the UK it seems) are happy to swallow them all because they think they are being kept safe.
This may be so - but at what cost?
Utter nonsense on stilts. Phil Thompson, Anabobazina and MaxPB are arguing vociferously against further lockdown and they've all been vaccinated. Everyone I know pretty much except a few youngster shave had the vaccine and you know what, they're all fine. All of them. I know a couple of handfuls of people who've had Covid and some of them have become long coviders. It's just crackers to not bother with the vaccine.
They are arguing against further lockdown now. When it's too late. When we have already given the government permission, applauded them even, as they took liberty after liberty.
Just that previously people were thinking of the safety not the liberty element. Now they have deigned to think of liberty it's too late.
That’s as absurd as someone arguing that a cancer-sufferer who has gone through chemotherapy was obviously not considering the effects of being poisoned by the chemo and therefore are hypocrites if they want to avoid being poisoned after the cancer has cleared up.
For the avoidance of doubt: in this analogy, lockdowns are analogous to chemotherapy - an extreme solution to an extreme problem, used to avoid near-term death but harmful and strongly undesired normally. And in that case, arguing that you accepted this during the circumstance when the harm it avoided outweighed the harm it caused means that you are hypocrites for accepting it then and not now... doesn’t really impress.
No lockdown is an extreme solution to a non-extreme problem.
99.50% of infected people survive covid.
Firstly: Wrong, there are entire countries where more than 0.5% of their whole populations have died of covid (and these are countries with younger populations than us).
Secondly: We’ve been going on all the damn time about hospitalisations being the key issue. And we came incredibly close to overwhelming the NHS in winter with about 40,000 hospitalised at one time. Given that 450,000+ have been hospitalised with it to date, it’s a brave stance that just letting all that happen quickly (plus the more than double again from those yet unaffected) would have gone off without any issues.
No there aren't entire countries with more than 0.5% of the population.
The highest in the world by far is Peru with 0.503% of the population and that's worst in the world with a complete collapse in their healthcare system. Belgium have 0.433% and a few nations around a third of a percentage point.
Had the NHS been overwhelmed then people would have locked down voluntarily, but then been able to unlock voluntarily much sooner without this crap of months of pointless lockdowns far too late.
Speaking of restaurants, here in Seattle there is a BIG problem for hospitality industry in hiring enough cooks, waiters, etc. to handle increasing demand. Not just higher-end places, but also for the taco place next to my humble abode.
And this is with a higher city minimum wage than the State of WA generally.
Part of the issue here, especially (but not just) for lower-cost options, is that there is also a huge demand for construction workers.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Leon is on to something concerning the decline of French restaurants in London though. The original Boulestan closed around that time, and a few years after it was clear that French wasn't the way to go, and now I can't think of a decent French restaurant in London. (Maybe that romantic place in Covent Garden who's name I forget)
Boulestin has been replaced by St Jacques, which is much superior. Cheaper and better food.
I'm about to do a foodie road trip around East Anglia. I know some of the places I am going, and they were brilliant pre-plague - The Mistley Thorn, Pinneys of Orford, the Company Shed. It will be interesting to see if they have maintained standards
Speaking of restaurants, here in Seattle there is a BIG problem for hospitality industry in hiring enough cooks, waiters, etc. to handle increasing demand. Not just higher-end places, but also for the taco place next to my humble abode.
And this is with a higher city minimum wage than the State of WA generally.
Part of the issue here, especially (but not just) for lower-cost options, is that there is also a huge demand for construction workers.
It's a curious echo of the Black Death! Which - famously - led to a massive hike in rural workers' wages, what with half the rural workers being dead
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Goering was Hitler’s designated successor, and even if he had been bypassed Himmler, as the second most powerful man in the government, would have been a more likely replacement than Goebbels (amused by the autocorrect, btw).
It is worth pointing out that even when Hitler did, in his final days, strip Himmler and Goering of their titles, although he made Goebbels the head of government it was Doenitz who was made Head of State and Bormann Party Leader. It looks as though Hitler didn’t think of Goebbels as a leader in his own right.
Thanks for that. Lots of good history on the succession there. And the ability to spell Gerbils without relying on spell check.
The other answers were good to, about Foxley plans, the argument about if it’s worth it. About the buzz and non buzz bombs. How no Adolf would or wouldn’t have impacted D Day.
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Who wants to eat foreign muck anyway?
Give me a Yorkshire pudding any day.
Are we talking about hors d'oeuvre or whores under a duvet here?
You can tell a good restaurant because they offer amuse-bouche rather than hors d'oeuvre.
It really pains me to say this but I love French food and if Brexit has fecked up French restaurants in this country then I'm going to go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
You knew what you were voting for...
It's not Brexit, per se, it's the unhappy and unforeseen combo of Brexit AND Covid. A lot of these staff left due to the plague, but now, because of Brexit, it will be very difficult to come back
HMG should maybe offer a 2 year visa for people aged 18-25 in this industry
Gotta dash but re @contrarianI'm sure 87% of people criticising him and his perfectly consistent views which haven't changed much over the course of the pandemic are just doing so because they are scared that he is speaking much truth. Which to a very large extent he is.
But no people mock him for not wanting to put something into his body that the government says he should. Ponder that. Not wanting to inject something that was developed less than a year ago. That that is worthy of mockery no matter the good or bad reasons for doing so is extraordinary.
I don't agree with everything he says but I agree with a helluva lot of it. I have posted much about the freedom vs safety element and the imo egregious transgressions of the govt against our liberties but people on here (and in the UK it seems) are happy to swallow them all because they think they are being kept safe.
This may be so - but at what cost?
Utter nonsense on stilts. Phil Thompson, Anabobazina and MaxPB are arguing vociferously against further lockdown and they've all been vaccinated. Everyone I know pretty much except a few youngster shave had the vaccine and you know what, they're all fine. All of them. I know a couple of handfuls of people who've had Covid and some of them have become long coviders. It's just crackers to not bother with the vaccine.
They are arguing against further lockdown now. When it's too late. When we have already given the government permission, applauded them even, as they took liberty after liberty.
Just that previously people were thinking of the safety not the liberty element. Now they have deigned to think of liberty it's too late.
That’s as absurd as someone arguing that a cancer-sufferer who has gone through chemotherapy was obviously not considering the effects of being poisoned by the chemo and therefore are hypocrites if they want to avoid being poisoned after the cancer has cleared up.
For the avoidance of doubt: in this analogy, lockdowns are analogous to chemotherapy - an extreme solution to an extreme problem, used to avoid near-term death but harmful and strongly undesired normally. And in that case, arguing that you accepted this during the circumstance when the harm it avoided outweighed the harm it caused means that you are hypocrites for accepting it then and not now... doesn’t really impress.
No lockdown is an extreme solution to a non-extreme problem.
99.50% of infected people survive covid.
Firstly: Wrong, there are entire countries where more than 0.5% of their whole populations have died of covid (and these are countries with younger populations than us).
Secondly: We’ve been going on all the damn time about hospitalisations being the key issue. And we came incredibly close to overwhelming the NHS in winter with about 40,000 hospitalised at one time. Given that 450,000+ have been hospitalised with it to date, it’s a brave stance that just letting all that happen quickly (plus the more than double again from those yet unaffected) would have gone off without any issues.
No there aren't entire countries with more than 0.5% of the population.
The highest in the world by far is Peru with 0.503% of the population and that's worst in the world with a complete collapse in their healthcare system. Belgium have 0.433% and a few nations around a third of a percentage point.
Had the NHS been overwhelmed then people would have locked down voluntarily, but then been able to unlock voluntarily much sooner without this crap of months of pointless lockdowns far too late.
On the other hand, while the specific falls (the claim that there are multiple countries that have lost 0.5% of their population) that does rather bear out the general point that the case fatality rate is a lot higher than 0.5%.
Which is not surprising, given who wrote it and how dishonest he is, but is still depressing.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Who wants to eat foreign muck anyway?
Give me a Yorkshire pudding any day.
Are we talking about hors d'oeuvre or whores under a duvet here?
You can tell a good restaurant because they offer amuse-bouche rather than hors d'oeuvre.
It really pains me to say this but I love French food and if Brexit has fecked up French restaurants in this country then I'm going to go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
It's not Brexit. It's Brexit AND Covid. They all went home coz Covid, Brexit means they can't get back
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
You knew what you were voting for...
It's not Brexit, per se, it's the unhappy and unforeseen combo of Brexit AND Covid. A lot of these staff left due to the plague, but now, because of Brexit, it will be very difficult to come back
HMG should maybe offer a 2 year visa for people aged 18-25 in this industry
They won't though, will they?
Probably not, but they should. And this should apply worldwide
"Donald Moss will discuss whiteness as a condition one first acquires and then one has--a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. He describes the condition as being foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world: Parasitic whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse; these deformed appetites particularly target non-white people; and, once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate"
Not sure what that has got to do with black lives matter mate
Black Lives Matter, or is it Black Lives mAttEr, I dunno, is a Marxist organisation which aims to defund the police, deconstruct the family and destroy any self-respect white people have by instilling an intrinsic guilt about racism, which can never be erased. If you deny your racism you are a racist, if you admit you are racist, get down on your knees
Fuck it. It is loathsome. White people conquered the world, and invented modernity. I will never be ashamed of this, as a white person, because I didn't do it; in the end I will take pride in it, as a race, if necessary
Because that is the end of this hideous divisiveness: White Pride. Maybe that is what they want
Well, I was with you until the end of the first paragraph.
I think some of the fanatics behind this want racial strife in the same way the old lot wanted class strife, because they thought it'd bring about The Revolution.
That (white pride) is the elephant trap that they want you to fall in to, thus proving them right all along.
What is quite interesting is that it hasn't happened. There is no outburst of white pride. People agree with black lives matter because for the most part, they want to move on from racism. However, they have no real understanding of the post marxist agenda of the actual organisation, which is exploiting peoples sympathy towards getting rid of racism. Thats the problem. How to break the link.
It is of course a common tactic of extremist organisations to attach themselves to, and try to parasite on, popular movements ("entryism"). The Socialist Workers Party did so in the Miner's Strike for instance, and Class War did with the poll tax riots. You got neo-Nazi groups trying to infilrate UKIP and the Conservative Party too.
That is their only tactic without significant popular support in this country, as we have an excellent voting system that ruthlessly punishes cranks and nutters, so they will never hold the balance of power in coalition governments, which is their other route to influence.
Yep. The problem is a bit deeper than that though. The 'Black Lives Matter' organisation are a small part of the problem. The bigger problem is the ideas connected to identity politics, which emphasise racial differences, and link these to outcomes and experiences. They have infiltrated all political parties, and have become deeply entrenched in our legal system. They have largely conquered universities. They are largely running unopposed through schools and businesses. This way of thinking inherently makes racial equality impossible. It purports to promote equality, but then turns everything in to a conflict about race, to which there seems to be no real answer or point other than to promote an endless power struggle between different racial groups.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Not a quick fix for the haute cuisine end of the market, where skilled labour will, presumably, be finite and take a long time to replace. Result: shortened opening hours and higher prices.
Not so sure about the broader restaurant sector. Reports of some businesses struggling to recruit, but the establishments around here all seem to be back to operating at their pre-Plague hours and prices, and with no noticeable diminution in quality. The hotel is doing a marginally shorter menu (though its range of drinks has actually increased,) but that's about it.
People with money to burn may find they need to burn even more to pay for experiences at their favourite Michelin starred establishments, but I doubt that the rest of us will be reduced to reheated microwave meals any time soon.
I have a lot of friends in the restaurant business. They are all desperate for staff. They have loads of bookings, not enough chefs de partie
This is mainly London, however. Where the number of EU workers was striking. Maybe it is better elsewhere
It could be that fine dining is a casualty of Brexit. But it was one of the main soundbites from Farage era UKIP that FOM meant the wealthy got cheaper au pairs, waiting staff etc and the poor got their wages undercut and job security ruined.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Who wants to eat foreign muck anyway?
Give me a Yorkshire pudding any day.
Are we talking about hors d'oeuvre or whores under a duvet here?
You can tell a good restaurant because they offer amuse-bouche rather than hors d'oeuvre.
It really pains me to say this but I love French food and if Brexit has fecked up French restaurants in this country then I'm going to go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
It's not Brexit. It's Brexit AND Covid. They all went home coz Covid, Brexit means they can't get back
Brexit made a bad situation worse.
No Brexit, they come back easily.
Brexiteers deserve to be force fed pies from Wigan made by ASBO teenagers doing community service.
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
Just a thought @LEON I was shielded by my Mother under a steel table with my Father and Sister in Manchester when a V2 engine cut out immediately above us and fell nearby killing 6 of our neighbours
A sobering thought that only by the Grace of God I survived that attack
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Leon is on to something concerning the decline of French restaurants in London though. The original Boulestan closed around that time, and a few years after it was clear that French wasn't the way to go, and now I can't think of a decent French restaurant in London. (Maybe that romantic place in Covent Garden who's name I forget)
Boulestin has been replaced by St Jacques, which is much superior. Cheaper and better food.
I'm about to do a foodie road trip around East Anglia. I know some of the places I am going, and they were brilliant pre-plague - The Mistley Thorn, Pinneys of Orford, the Company Shed. It will be interesting to see if they have maintained standards
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
But the air supremacy would have also allowed the allies to isolate the Panzer divisions as they moved towards Normandy by bombing the routes to Normandy.
"Donald Moss will discuss whiteness as a condition one first acquires and then one has--a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. He describes the condition as being foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world: Parasitic whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse; these deformed appetites particularly target non-white people; and, once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate"
Not sure what that has got to do with black lives matter mate
Black Lives Matter, or is it Black Lives mAttEr, I dunno, is a Marxist organisation which aims to defund the police, deconstruct the family and destroy any self-respect white people have by instilling an intrinsic guilt about racism, which can never be erased. If you deny your racism you are a racist, if you admit you are racist, get down on your knees
Fuck it. It is loathsome. White people conquered the world, and invented modernity. I will never be ashamed of this, as a white person, because I didn't do it; in the end I will take pride in it, as a race, if necessary
Because that is the end of this hideous divisiveness: White Pride. Maybe that is what they want
Well, I was with you until the end of the first paragraph.
I think some of the fanatics behind this want racial strife in the same way the old lot wanted class strife, because they thought it'd bring about The Revolution.
That (white pride) is the elephant trap that they want you to fall in to, thus proving them right all along.
What is quite interesting is that it hasn't happened. There is no outburst of white pride. People agree with black lives matter because for the most part, they want to move on from racism. However, they have no real understanding of the post marxist agenda of the actual organisation, which is exploiting peoples sympathy towards getting rid of racism. Thats the problem. How to break the link.
It is of course a common tactic of extremist organisations to attach themselves to, and try to parasite on, popular movements ("entryism"). The Socialist Workers Party did so in the Miner's Strike for instance, and Class War did with the poll tax riots. You got neo-Nazi groups trying to infilrate UKIP and the Conservative Party too.
That is their only tactic without significant popular support in this country, as we have an excellent voting system that ruthlessly punishes cranks and nutters, so they will never hold the balance of power in coalition governments, which is their other route to influence.
Yep. The problem is a bit deeper than that though. The 'Black Lives Matter' organisation are a small part of the problem. The bigger problem is the ideas connected to identity politics, which emphasise racial differences, and link these to outcomes and experiences. They have infiltrated all political parties, and have become deeply entrenched in our legal system. They have largely conquered universities. They are largely running unopposed through schools and businesses. This way of thinking inherently makes racial equality impossible. It purports to promote equality, but then turns everything in to a conflict about race, to which there seems to be no real answer or point other than to promote an endless power struggle between different racial groups.
Yes, it is deliberately and deeply divisive, and surely designed to stoke racial war. They came close to achieving that in the USA, and I expect they might come closer still, unless the Marxists are stopped
This means denouncing this anti-white racist bullshit as soon as it appears, not dismissing it as some lunatic fringe. It really is not fringe. As you say, it has completely conquered academe, and it advances on all fronts from there
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Who wants to eat foreign muck anyway?
Give me a Yorkshire pudding any day.
Are we talking about hors d'oeuvre or whores under a duvet here?
You can tell a good restaurant because they offer amuse-bouche rather than hors d'oeuvre.
It really pains me to say this but I love French food and if Brexit has fecked up French restaurants in this country then I'm going to go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
It's not Brexit. It's Brexit AND Covid. They all went home coz Covid, Brexit means they can't get back
Brexit made a bad situation worse.
No Brexit, they come back easily.
Brexiteers deserve to force fed pies from Wigan made by ASBO teenagers doing community service.
I fear that is the likely outcome for everyone. So you northerners won't notice any difference at all
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
Just a thought @LEON I was shielded by my Mother under a steel table with my Father and Sister in Manchester when a V2 engine cut out immediately above us and fell nearby killing 6 of our neighbours
A sobering thought that only by the Grace of God I survived that attack
Crikey. Amazing story
You are a living bit of history Big G! There can't be many people alive with personal experience of a V2 rocket attack
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Leon is on to something concerning the decline of French restaurants in London though. The original Boulestan closed around that time, and a few years after it was clear that French wasn't the way to go, and now I can't think of a decent French restaurant in London. (Maybe that romantic place in Covent Garden who's name I forget)
The decline of French restaurants in London. FFS. Middle class problems.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Who wants to eat foreign muck anyway?
Give me a Yorkshire pudding any day.
Are we talking about hors d'oeuvre or whores under a duvet here?
You can tell a good restaurant because they offer amuse-bouche rather than hors d'oeuvre.
It really pains me to say this but I love French food and if Brexit has fecked up French restaurants in this country then I'm going to go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
It's not Brexit. It's Brexit AND Covid. They all went home coz Covid, Brexit means they can't get back
I've just got back from to 27 in Kingsbridge. Got a Michelin plate recently - the Michelin stars can't be far behind. Delightful food. But the chef has made few friends in the industry locally by offering a £1,000 for those staff who stay until the end of September. The result is a kitchen that is firing on all cylinders - and a service as good as you would want.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Who wants to eat foreign muck anyway?
Give me a Yorkshire pudding any day.
Are we talking about hors d'oeuvre or whores under a duvet here?
You can tell a good restaurant because they offer amuse-bouche rather than hors d'oeuvre.
It really pains me to say this but I love French food and if Brexit has fecked up French restaurants in this country then I'm going to go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
It's not Brexit. It's Brexit AND Covid. They all went home coz Covid, Brexit means they can't get back
Brexit made a bad situation worse.
No Brexit, they come back easily.
Brexiteers deserve to be force fed pies from Wigan made by ASBO teenagers doing community service.
I misread that at first, and was startled to find that community service in Wigan included random acts of cannibalism.
"Donald Moss will discuss whiteness as a condition one first acquires and then one has--a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. He describes the condition as being foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world: Parasitic whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse; these deformed appetites particularly target non-white people; and, once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate"
Not sure what that has got to do with black lives matter mate
Black Lives Matter, or is it Black Lives mAttEr, I dunno, is a Marxist organisation which aims to defund the police, deconstruct the family and destroy any self-respect white people have by instilling an intrinsic guilt about racism, which can never be erased. If you deny your racism you are a racist, if you admit you are racist, get down on your knees
Fuck it. It is loathsome. White people conquered the world, and invented modernity. I will never be ashamed of this, as a white person, because I didn't do it; in the end I will take pride in it, as a race, if necessary
Because that is the end of this hideous divisiveness: White Pride. Maybe that is what they want
Well, I was with you until the end of the first paragraph.
I think some of the fanatics behind this want racial strife in the same way the old lot wanted class strife, because they thought it'd bring about The Revolution.
That (white pride) is the elephant trap that they want you to fall in to, thus proving them right all along.
What is quite interesting is that it hasn't happened. There is no outburst of white pride. People agree with black lives matter because for the most part, they want to move on from racism. However, they have no real understanding of the post marxist agenda of the actual organisation, which is exploiting peoples sympathy towards getting rid of racism. Thats the problem. How to break the link.
It is of course a common tactic of extremist organisations to attach themselves to, and try to parasite on, popular movements ("entryism"). The Socialist Workers Party did so in the Miner's Strike for instance, and Class War did with the poll tax riots. You got neo-Nazi groups trying to infilrate UKIP and the Conservative Party too.
That is their only tactic without significant popular support in this country, as we have an excellent voting system that ruthlessly punishes cranks and nutters, so they will never hold the balance of power in coalition governments, which is their other route to influence.
Yep. The problem is a bit deeper than that though. The 'Black Lives Matter' organisation are a small part of the problem. The bigger problem is the ideas connected to identity politics, which emphasise racial differences, and link these to outcomes and experiences. They have infiltrated all political parties, and have become deeply entrenched in our legal system. They have largely conquered universities. They are largely running unopposed through schools and businesses. This way of thinking inherently makes racial equality impossible. It purports to promote equality, but then turns everything in to a conflict about race, to which there seems to be no real answer or point other than to promote an endless power struggle between different racial groups.
It needs to be hammered intellectually (easy if opposition is not shouted down) especially in academia. Aggressive woke academics need their pathetic charlatan drivel exposed, dismantled and ridiculed.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Who wants to eat foreign muck anyway?
Give me a Yorkshire pudding any day.
Are we talking about hors d'oeuvre or whores under a duvet here?
You can tell a good restaurant because they offer amuse-bouche rather than hors d'oeuvre.
It really pains me to say this but I love French food and if Brexit has fecked up French restaurants in this country then I'm going to go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
It's not Brexit. It's Brexit AND Covid. They all went home coz Covid, Brexit means they can't get back
Brexit made a bad situation worse.
No Brexit, they come back easily.
Brexiteers deserve to force fed pies from Wigan made by ASBO teenagers doing community service.
I fear that is the likely outcome for everyone. So you northerners won't notice any difference at all
Nah.
We laugh at Southerners for buying overpriced houses so we can spend money on the good things in life.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Who wants to eat foreign muck anyway?
Give me a Yorkshire pudding any day.
Are we talking about hors d'oeuvre or whores under a duvet here?
You can tell a good restaurant because they offer amuse-bouche rather than hors d'oeuvre.
It really pains me to say this but I love French food and if Brexit has fecked up French restaurants in this country then I'm going to go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
It's not Brexit. It's Brexit AND Covid. They all went home coz Covid, Brexit means they can't get back
Brexit made a bad situation worse.
No Brexit, they come back easily.
Brexiteers deserve to be force fed pies from Wigan made by ASBO teenagers doing community service.
I misread that at first, and was startled to find that community service in Wigan included random acts of cannibalism.
It wouldn't surprise me, Wigan is full of weirdos. It is where they based the film The Hills Have Eyes on.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Leon is on to something concerning the decline of French restaurants in London though. The original Boulestan closed around that time, and a few years after it was clear that French wasn't the way to go, and now I can't think of a decent French restaurant in London. (Maybe that romantic place in Covent Garden who's name I forget)
The decline of French restaurants in London. FFS. Middle class problems.
Are we only allowed to talk about cockles and vinegar? The decline in Lancashire clog-making? Scrofula in the household? What?
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Leon is on to something concerning the decline of French restaurants in London though. The original Boulestan closed around that time, and a few years after it was clear that French wasn't the way to go, and now I can't think of a decent French restaurant in London. (Maybe that romantic place in Covent Garden who's name I forget)
The decline of French restaurants in London. FFS. Middle class problems.
London was, for a while, the World's Capital.
It may return to that state. And the baton may be passed elsewhere. (And being the World's Capital is not entirely a bed of roses, resulting in skyrocketing rents and house prices.)
Nevertheless, being the World's Capital was also a little bit amazing. Losing those French restaurants is not really an issue for the middle classes as the oligarch (and Goldman partner) class.
As I said this morning. All legal requirements such as social distancing and masks axed and replaced with guidance and recommendations based on one's vaccine status. It will appeal to Boris's instincts and the guidance just becomes irrelevant over the next 50-60 days as the vaccine scheme covers the last 8-9m people.
Yes. You might be right about that.
Interestingly the legislation actually expires on 30 June. So they would need to seek new legislation.
And this paragraph suggests they have got the memo about weddings - I suspect they don’t want wall to wall coverage of tearful brides on the broadcast news…
One cabinet minister said officials were “trying to find a solution that pleases the PM’s instincts” to reopen society, noting that allowing a tweak to regulations to allow larger weddings to go ahead would be “easy”, though nightclubs were not expected to open “for a while”.
What would Labour do if there was a renewal of the emergency legislation, with a hundred Tory MPs prepared to vote against it, and a handful prepared to resign from government to do so?
The big one is the distancing requirement / capacity limit in pubs and theatres, if that can go, then life is good.
The WFH guidance can remain, and companies like TfL might insist on masks on tube trains, but no compelling legislation.
Nightclubs are then the only issue left, maybe fudge that by requiring inspections regarding ventilation from local authorities before they reopen? Expect a run on portable HVAC equipment!
The key obstacle to nightclubs reopening are mask mandates. You can make people going to the theatre sit in stupid masks (although many will baulk at the idea, and I'm certainly not going anywhere near a venue purporting to offer entertainment if I'm made to sit there wearing a gag all night,) but they're patently unworkable in a club.
Therefore, if the public health catastrophists are really insistent on keeping masks, then it is impossible for nightclubs to come back. Otherwise, it would be simply ridiculous to keep insisting on them in shops, at theatres, in sports stadiums or pretty much anywhere else, save possibly for public transport and healthcare settings. And if the mask wearing fetish is penned into trains, buses and the occasional visit to the GP then it'll become marginal, and quickly obvious that it's of very limited benefit once the hospitals stubbornly refuse to fill back up with new victims, and we should be able to kill the damned things off.
If they want to keep enforcing masks through until Autumn, and thence throughout the Winter and into 2022, then they need to keep the nightclubs shut indefinitely.
Let venues decide for themselves what their behavioural rules will be, and let the punters decide if they wish to go there or not.
No use to the catastrophists. If the rules are all made voluntary then almost nobody (aside perhaps from a small number of little tea shoppes and social clubs catering to the extremely old and very frightened) will stick to them - and that's masks killed off immediately.
Hence no part of that fraction of scientific and political opinion that wants the masks to stay can possible advocate the reopening of nightclubs.
I think you’d be surprised. Most venues won’t just open up as they were before, there will be hand sanitisers around, staff in masks and gloves (they won’t want them off sick), maybe more tables and less standing for a while, maybe masks on dance floors. But all at the discretion of the venue, not from government.
I would be genuinely astonished. Who in the name of God would want to go clubbing with a bloody gag on? The mind boggles. And if you're not going to gag the punters when they're on the dancefloor then, even if you think that the masks are of any great facility at this stage in the game, there's certainly precious little point in using them anywhere else.
The idea of masks in a "proper" nightclub is ludicrous. They might be OK for glorified & pretentious late night wine bars, but I've never been to one of those. A negative recent lft or proof of double vaccination could probably work.
"Donald Moss will discuss whiteness as a condition one first acquires and then one has--a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. He describes the condition as being foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world: Parasitic whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse; these deformed appetites particularly target non-white people; and, once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate"
Not sure what that has got to do with black lives matter mate
Black Lives Matter, or is it Black Lives mAttEr, I dunno, is a Marxist organisation which aims to defund the police, deconstruct the family and destroy any self-respect white people have by instilling an intrinsic guilt about racism, which can never be erased. If you deny your racism you are a racist, if you admit you are racist, get down on your knees
Fuck it. It is loathsome. White people conquered the world, and invented modernity. I will never be ashamed of this, as a white person, because I didn't do it; in the end I will take pride in it, as a race, if necessary
Because that is the end of this hideous divisiveness: White Pride. Maybe that is what they want
Well, I was with you until the end of the first paragraph.
I think some of the fanatics behind this want racial strife in the same way the old lot wanted class strife, because they thought it'd bring about The Revolution.
That (white pride) is the elephant trap that they want you to fall in to, thus proving them right all along.
What is quite interesting is that it hasn't happened. There is no outburst of white pride. People agree with black lives matter because for the most part, they want to move on from racism. However, they have no real understanding of the post marxist agenda of the actual organisation, which is exploiting peoples sympathy towards getting rid of racism. Thats the problem. How to break the link.
It is of course a common tactic of extremist organisations to attach themselves to, and try to parasite on, popular movements ("entryism"). The Socialist Workers Party did so in the Miner's Strike for instance, and Class War did with the poll tax riots. You got neo-Nazi groups trying to infilrate UKIP and the Conservative Party too.
That is their only tactic without significant popular support in this country, as we have an excellent voting system that ruthlessly punishes cranks and nutters, so they will never hold the balance of power in coalition governments, which is their other route to influence.
Yep. The problem is a bit deeper than that though. The 'Black Lives Matter' organisation are a small part of the problem. The bigger problem is the ideas connected to identity politics, which emphasise racial differences, and link these to outcomes and experiences. They have infiltrated all political parties, and have become deeply entrenched in our legal system. They have largely conquered universities. They are largely running unopposed through schools and businesses. This way of thinking inherently makes racial equality impossible. It purports to promote equality, but then turns everything in to a conflict about race, to which there seems to be no real answer or point other than to promote an endless power struggle between different racial groups.
Yes, it is deliberately and deeply divisive, and surely designed to stoke racial war. They came close to achieving that in the USA, and I expect they might come closer still, unless the Marxists are stopped
This means denouncing this anti-white racist bullshit as soon as it appears, not dismissing it as some lunatic fringe. It really is not fringe. As you say, it has completely conquered academe, and it advances on all fronts from there
Yes, that is the problem. It isn't fringe. It is mainstream. It is now the status quo. Because of technological accelleration, it has happened so fast that people don't realise what has happened.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Leon is on to something concerning the decline of French restaurants in London though. The original Boulestan closed around that time, and a few years after it was clear that French wasn't the way to go, and now I can't think of a decent French restaurant in London. (Maybe that romantic place in Covent Garden who's name I forget)
The decline of French restaurants in London. FFS. Middle class problems.
Wash your mouth out.
Some of the biggest deals I've worked on have usually began and or concluded in a decent French restaurant in London.
They were great for the economy, it helped raise money in taxes which paid for the benefits of the plebs.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Not a quick fix for the haute cuisine end of the market, where skilled labour will, presumably, be finite and take a long time to replace. Result: shortened opening hours and higher prices.
Not so sure about the broader restaurant sector. Reports of some businesses struggling to recruit, but the establishments around here all seem to be back to operating at their pre-Plague hours and prices, and with no noticeable diminution in quality. The hotel is doing a marginally shorter menu (though its range of drinks has actually increased,) but that's about it.
People with money to burn may find they need to burn even more to pay for experiences at their favourite Michelin starred establishments, but I doubt that the rest of us will be reduced to reheated microwave meals any time soon.
I have a lot of friends in the restaurant business. They are all desperate for staff. They have loads of bookings, not enough chefs de partie
This is mainly London, however. Where the number of EU workers was striking. Maybe it is better elsewhere
It could be that fine dining is a casualty of Brexit. But it was one of the main soundbites from Farage era UKIP that FOM meant the wealthy got cheaper au pairs, waiting staff etc and the poor got their wages undercut and job security ruined.
Except that au pairing and hospitality are things that tend to be done by the young ('cos the hours are antisocial and you need the physical energy), and for many of them, the chance to do it abroad is part of the point. Go somewhere exciting for a couple of years, improve your language skills, either go home more rounded or settle in your new home with your new someone.
And the version of Brexit we have ended up with has cut that off. It wasn't inevitable in 2016, but it's where we've ended up.
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
Just a thought @LEON I was shielded by my Mother under a steel table with my Father and Sister in Manchester when a V2 engine cut out immediately above us and fell nearby killing 6 of our neighbours
A sobering thought that only by the Grace of God I survived that attack
Crikey. Amazing story
You are a living bit of history Big G! There can't be many people alive with personal experience of a V2 rocket attack
PB is great for this kind of thing
Great anecdote that connects us to the past. Is there a typo? It would have been a V1 as they cut out and dropped (jet) V2 was rocket and you didn't hear them coming.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
If he raises the wages, he will get the staff. If wages in the sector rise, more people will work there. The boss class importing cheap foreign labour to suppress working class wages is exactly why we voted out. Fuck him. He can afford it.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Leon is on to something concerning the decline of French restaurants in London though. The original Boulestan closed around that time, and a few years after it was clear that French wasn't the way to go, and now I can't think of a decent French restaurant in London. (Maybe that romantic place in Covent Garden who's name I forget)
It's going to be Black Pudding Parlours and Temperance Bars.
Learn to love sarsparilla and dandelion and burdock.
As I said this morning. All legal requirements such as social distancing and masks axed and replaced with guidance and recommendations based on one's vaccine status. It will appeal to Boris's instincts and the guidance just becomes irrelevant over the next 50-60 days as the vaccine scheme covers the last 8-9m people.
Yes. You might be right about that.
Interestingly the legislation actually expires on 30 June. So they would need to seek new legislation.
And this paragraph suggests they have got the memo about weddings - I suspect they don’t want wall to wall coverage of tearful brides on the broadcast news…
One cabinet minister said officials were “trying to find a solution that pleases the PM’s instincts” to reopen society, noting that allowing a tweak to regulations to allow larger weddings to go ahead would be “easy”, though nightclubs were not expected to open “for a while”.
What would Labour do if there was a renewal of the emergency legislation, with a hundred Tory MPs prepared to vote against it, and a handful prepared to resign from government to do so?
The big one is the distancing requirement / capacity limit in pubs and theatres, if that can go, then life is good.
The WFH guidance can remain, and companies like TfL might insist on masks on tube trains, but no compelling legislation.
Nightclubs are then the only issue left, maybe fudge that by requiring inspections regarding ventilation from local authorities before they reopen? Expect a run on portable HVAC equipment!
The key obstacle to nightclubs reopening are mask mandates. You can make people going to the theatre sit in stupid masks (although many will baulk at the idea, and I'm certainly not going anywhere near a venue purporting to offer entertainment if I'm made to sit there wearing a gag all night,) but they're patently unworkable in a club.
Therefore, if the public health catastrophists are really insistent on keeping masks, then it is impossible for nightclubs to come back. Otherwise, it would be simply ridiculous to keep insisting on them in shops, at theatres, in sports stadiums or pretty much anywhere else, save possibly for public transport and healthcare settings. And if the mask wearing fetish is penned into trains, buses and the occasional visit to the GP then it'll become marginal, and quickly obvious that it's of very limited benefit once the hospitals stubbornly refuse to fill back up with new victims, and we should be able to kill the damned things off.
If they want to keep enforcing masks through until Autumn, and thence throughout the Winter and into 2022, then they need to keep the nightclubs shut indefinitely.
Let venues decide for themselves what their behavioural rules will be, and let the punters decide if they wish to go there or not.
No use to the catastrophists. If the rules are all made voluntary then almost nobody (aside perhaps from a small number of little tea shoppes and social clubs catering to the extremely old and very frightened) will stick to them - and that's masks killed off immediately.
Hence no part of that fraction of scientific and political opinion that wants the masks to stay can possible advocate the reopening of nightclubs.
I think you’d be surprised. Most venues won’t just open up as they were before, there will be hand sanitisers around, staff in masks and gloves (they won’t want them off sick), maybe more tables and less standing for a while, maybe masks on dance floors. But all at the discretion of the venue, not from government.
I would be genuinely astonished. Who in the name of God would want to go clubbing with a bloody gag on? The mind boggles. And if you're not going to gag the punters when they're on the dancefloor then, even if you think that the masks are of any great facility at this stage in the game, there's certainly precious little point in using them anywhere else.
The idea of masks in a "proper" nightclub is ludicrous. They might be OK for glorified & pretentious late night wine bars, but I've never been to one of those. A negative recent lft or proof of double vaccination could probably work.
Or just get on with life and anyone who wants to hide in their home can do so. 🤷♂️
Why are these scientists producing models suggesting 3rd waves “worst than January” etc so determined to ignore the evidence of places like Bolton? How can anyone take real world data from places like Bolton and come up with the sort of scenarios they are putting forward as potentially “plausible”???
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
Just a thought @LEON I was shielded by my Mother under a steel table with my Father and Sister in Manchester when a V2 engine cut out immediately above us and fell nearby killing 6 of our neighbours
A sobering thought that only by the Grace of God I survived that attack
Crikey. Amazing story
You are a living bit of history Big G! There can't be many people alive with personal experience of a V2 rocket attack
PB is great for this kind of thing
I am reminded of a piece by Paul Merton.
"During the war, we used to huddle together in terror as the V1s went over. My mother though was very practical. "The only ones you need to worry about are the ones with your name on them." Which didn't huge comfort to our next door neighbours, Mister and Missus Doodlebug...."
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Leon is on to something concerning the decline of French restaurants in London though. The original Boulestan closed around that time, and a few years after it was clear that French wasn't the way to go, and now I can't think of a decent French restaurant in London. (Maybe that romantic place in Covent Garden who's name I forget)
The decline of French restaurants in London. FFS. Middle class problems.
London was, for a while, the World's Capital.
It may return to that state. And the baton may be passed elsewhere. (And being the World's Capital is not entirely a bed of roses, resulting in skyrocketing rents and house prices.)
Nevertheless, being the World's Capital was also a little bit amazing. Losing those French restaurants is not really an issue for the middle classes as the oligarch (and Goldman partner) class.
It was an amazing period in London history. About 1995-2015, an ascent to supremacy once again, overtaking Paris, then New York
Will it ever return? Brexit makes it harder (I voted knowing that, and accepting it), but not impossible. New York faces significant problems. Paris is doomed by Frenchness. Hong Kong is ruined. China is China, so, nope. Tokyo is a bit too Tokyo and parochial
London has a chance to retake the spot. It will be hard, but huge cities are resilient - particularly London
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Not a quick fix for the haute cuisine end of the market, where skilled labour will, presumably, be finite and take a long time to replace. Result: shortened opening hours and higher prices.
Not so sure about the broader restaurant sector. Reports of some businesses struggling to recruit, but the establishments around here all seem to be back to operating at their pre-Plague hours and prices, and with no noticeable diminution in quality. The hotel is doing a marginally shorter menu (though its range of drinks has actually increased,) but that's about it.
People with money to burn may find they need to burn even more to pay for experiences at their favourite Michelin starred establishments, but I doubt that the rest of us will be reduced to reheated microwave meals any time soon.
I have a lot of friends in the restaurant business. They are all desperate for staff. They have loads of bookings, not enough chefs de partie
This is mainly London, however. Where the number of EU workers was striking. Maybe it is better elsewhere
It could be that fine dining is a casualty of Brexit. But it was one of the main soundbites from Farage era UKIP that FOM meant the wealthy got cheaper au pairs, waiting staff etc and the poor got their wages undercut and job security ruined.
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Who wants to eat foreign muck anyway?
Give me a Yorkshire pudding any day.
Are we talking about hors d'oeuvre or whores under a duvet here?
You can tell a good restaurant because they offer amuse-bouche rather than hors d'oeuvre.
It really pains me to say this but I love French food and if Brexit has fecked up French restaurants in this country then I'm going to go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
It's not Brexit. It's Brexit AND Covid. They all went home coz Covid, Brexit means they can't get back
I've just got back from to 27 in Kingsbridge. Got a Michelin plate recently - the Michelin stars can't be far behind. Delightful food. But the chef has made few friends in the industry locally by offering a £1,000 for those staff who stay until the end of September. The result is a kitchen that is firing on all cylinders - and a service as good as you would want.
And thus, it turns out that mass importation of foreign labour really did suppress the wages of low income earners after all. Who'd'a-thunk-it?
Although that said, the recruitment woes of the hospitality sector aren't confined to the inability to draft more recruits from the continent. Apparently, the pay in many restaurants was so pitiful that many of the chefs and waiters who went off to work doing delivery driving or stacking shelves in supermarkets don't want to come back, either. Similar money for less work, less stress and better hours.
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
Just a thought @LEON I was shielded by my Mother under a steel table with my Father and Sister in Manchester when a V2 engine cut out immediately above us and fell nearby killing 6 of our neighbours
A sobering thought that only by the Grace of God I survived that attack
I think that would more likely have been a V1 attack
My mother used to recount similar stories about that awful silence when the engine cut out on a V1.
She was in an Anderson shelter during a bomb raid and the bombs landed so close the frame warped and she could not get out without help - she said that was the worst experience of her life
At lunch with my Flint Sex Toy Agent today, she said she'd had a series of mediocre restaurant meals since the end of lockdown
My lunch was pleasant, today, hers WAS a bit rubbish
It's suddenly occurred to me: is this because of Brexit/Covid? Apparently 180,000 EU hospitality workers have left the country in the last year, and likely will not return. All restaurants, bars and hotels are desperate for staff, and often unable to find them
"Michel Roux Jr, chef patron of Le Gavroche, said it will only operate a evening service from June 14th due to the "incredibly frustrating and painful" labour shortage"
A lot of these will be waiters, maids, sommeliers, but a lot will be chefs, sous chefs, and the like. Not easily or quickly replaced. This will mean British restaurants will plunge in quality, as untrained and novice chefs try to learn to cook (or turn to ready meals)
This is the reason French restaurant food deteriorated so badly from about 1990 onwards. They didn't forget to cook, they couldn't afford enough staff because of strict French labour laws, so all the little bistros reverted to the microwave. Endless frozen confits de canard shipped down from a warehouse near Paris
I fear the UK restaurant scene faces the same fate
Pay more. Train more.
Leon is on to something concerning the decline of French restaurants in London though. The original Boulestan closed around that time, and a few years after it was clear that French wasn't the way to go, and now I can't think of a decent French restaurant in London. (Maybe that romantic place in Covent Garden who's name I forget)
The decline of French restaurants in London. FFS. Middle class problems.
London was, for a while, the World's Capital.
It may return to that state. And the baton may be passed elsewhere. (And being the World's Capital is not entirely a bed of roses, resulting in skyrocketing rents and house prices.)
Nevertheless, being the World's Capital was also a little bit amazing. Losing those French restaurants is not really an issue for the middle classes as the oligarch (and Goldman partner) class.
It was an amazing period in London history. About 1995-2015, an ascent to supremacy once again, overtaking Paris, then New York
Will it ever return? Brexit makes it harder (I voted knowing that, and accepting it), but not impossible. New York faces significant problems. Paris is doomed by Frenchness. Hong Kong is ruined. China is China, so, nope. Tokyo is a bit too Tokyo and parochial
London has a chance to retake the spot. It will be hard, but huge cities are resilient - particularly London
London was a world city not a European one.
If it ceases to be so, it will be because of Covid, WFH etc and not because of Brexit.
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
Just a thought @LEON I was shielded by my Mother under a steel table with my Father and Sister in Manchester when a V2 engine cut out immediately above us and fell nearby killing 6 of our neighbours
A sobering thought that only by the Grace of God I survived that attack
Crikey. Amazing story
You are a living bit of history Big G! There can't be many people alive with personal experience of a V2 rocket attack
PB is great for this kind of thing
Great anecdote that connects us to the past. Is there a typo? It would have been a V1 as they cut out and dropped (jet) V2 was rocket and you didn't hear them coming.
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
But the air supremacy would have also allowed the allies to isolate the Panzer divisions as they moved towards Normandy by bombing the routes to Normandy.
RAF, USAAF and French Resistance all played a key role in messing up German troop movements before and especially after D-Day. As in the case of the Das Reich panzer division (source Wiki)
"The allied invasion of Normandy took place on 6 June 1944. On 7 June Das Reich was ordered to move to Normandy to reinforce the German units contesting the allied invasion. It would be a journey of approximately 700 kilometres (430 mi) and an unopposed movement of men and equipment by railroad would have taken three or four days. However, the option to move by rail had been preempted by the French Resistance. The rail cars to be used for transporting the tanks and equipment were unguarded.
In the days before 6 June French operatives of the Special Operations Executive's Pimento network, headed by Anthony Brooks, sabotaged the rail cars by draining the axle oil and replacing it with an abrasive powder that caused the axles of the cars to seize up. The powder had been parachuted in by SOE. The perpetrators of the sabotage were a 16 year old girl named Tetty, her boyfriend, her 14-year old sister, and several of their friends.
As a consequence of the sabotage of the rail cars, Das Reich left Montauban on 8 June with 1,400 vehicles and proceeded northward by road. Travel by road caused the steel tracks of the tanks and assault guns to wear out; vehicles broke down frequently; and fuel was in short supply. Pinprick attacks by groups of resistors, called Maquis, killed 15 Germans on the first two days of the movement. More than 100 French were killed, many of them unarmed civilians. Das Reich had been given the additional task of suppressing the Maquis during its journey, ordered "to break the spirit of the population by making examples." This the Division attempted to do with massacres of hundreds of civilians on 9 and 10 June in Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane. Attacks by resistance forces mostly ended on 12 June as Das Reich moved into less favorable territory for ambushes.
Air attacks hindered the progress of Das Reich in the last phases of its northward journey. On 11 June British bombers attacked and destroyed several railcars full of much-needed gasoline at Châtellerault. The air strike was directed by the Special Air Service (SAS) group called Operation Bulbasket. After the advance elements of Das Reich crossed the Loire River on 13 June, the division was under constant air attacks during the day. As a result, Das Reich arrived only piecemeal to the Normandy battlefield between 15 and 30 June, its arrival delayed at least several days by the resistance attacks and air strikes. Rather than going on the offensive to try to push the Allies back into the sea, Das Reich initially found itself mostly plugging gaps in the German defenses. The division was not reunited until 10 July.
"Donald Moss will discuss whiteness as a condition one first acquires and then one has--a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. He describes the condition as being foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world: Parasitic whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse; these deformed appetites particularly target non-white people; and, once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate"
Not sure what that has got to do with black lives matter mate
Black Lives Matter, or is it Black Lives mAttEr, I dunno, is a Marxist organisation which aims to defund the police, deconstruct the family and destroy any self-respect white people have by instilling an intrinsic guilt about racism, which can never be erased. If you deny your racism you are a racist, if you admit you are racist, get down on your knees
Fuck it. It is loathsome. White people conquered the world, and invented modernity. I will never be ashamed of this, as a white person, because I didn't do it; in the end I will take pride in it, as a race, if necessary
Because that is the end of this hideous divisiveness: White Pride. Maybe that is what they want
Well, I was with you until the end of the first paragraph.
I think some of the fanatics behind this want racial strife in the same way the old lot wanted class strife, because they thought it'd bring about The Revolution.
That (white pride) is the elephant trap that they want you to fall in to, thus proving them right all along.
What is quite interesting is that it hasn't happened. There is no outburst of white pride. People agree with black lives matter because for the most part, they want to move on from racism. However, they have no real understanding of the post marxist agenda of the actual organisation, which is exploiting peoples sympathy towards getting rid of racism. Thats the problem. How to break the link.
It is of course a common tactic of extremist organisations to attach themselves to, and try to parasite on, popular movements ("entryism"). The Socialist Workers Party did so in the Miner's Strike for instance, and Class War did with the poll tax riots. You got neo-Nazi groups trying to infilrate UKIP and the Conservative Party too.
That is their only tactic without significant popular support in this country, as we have an excellent voting system that ruthlessly punishes cranks and nutters, so they will never hold the balance of power in coalition governments, which is their other route to influence.
Yep. The problem is a bit deeper than that though. The 'Black Lives Matter' organisation are a small part of the problem. The bigger problem is the ideas connected to identity politics, which emphasise racial differences, and link these to outcomes and experiences. They have infiltrated all political parties, and have become deeply entrenched in our legal system. They have largely conquered universities. They are largely running unopposed through schools and businesses. This way of thinking inherently makes racial equality impossible. It purports to promote equality, but then turns everything in to a conflict about race, to which there seems to be no real answer or point other than to promote an endless power struggle between different racial groups.
It needs to be hammered intellectually (easy if opposition is not shouted down) especially in academia. Aggressive woke academics need their pathetic charlatan drivel exposed, dismantled and ridiculed.
This won't happen any time soon due to the fact that the woke have taken over most social science departments at universities, and because they have found ways to protect these theories from intellectual criticism.
Its hard to see what the answer is but unless some radical action is taken universties will become pointless because they are just being used as a way of legitimising propoganda and ideological drivel. I've already given up on going in to the academy because it will be starting from a bad place and carrying out a rear guard action from there.
If anyone is interested in this, the book Cynical Theories by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose is a must read and explains the situation brilliantly (albeit incredibly depressing )
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
Just a thought @LEON I was shielded by my Mother under a steel table with my Father and Sister in Manchester when a V2 engine cut out immediately above us and fell nearby killing 6 of our neighbours
A sobering thought that only by the Grace of God I survived that attack
A lucky escape! Though it would have been a V1 (the V2 didn't have the range and being supersonic had arrived and exploded before the sound of its motor was heard). I had thought the V1 didn't have the range (it didn't) - but some were launched from bombers:
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
Just a thought @LEON I was shielded by my Mother under a steel table with my Father and Sister in Manchester when a V2 engine cut out immediately above us and fell nearby killing 6 of our neighbours
A sobering thought that only by the Grace of God I survived that attack
Crikey. Amazing story
You are a living bit of history Big G! There can't be many people alive with personal experience of a V2 rocket attack
PB is great for this kind of thing
Great anecdote that connects us to the past. Is there a typo? It would have been a V1 as they cut out and dropped (jet) V2 was rocket and you didn't hear them coming.
Yes it was a V1
Still quite remarkable - and even further back in time Thankyou
Speaking of restaurants, here in Seattle there is a BIG problem for hospitality industry in hiring enough cooks, waiters, etc. to handle increasing demand. Not just higher-end places, but also for the taco place next to my humble abode.
And this is with a higher city minimum wage than the State of WA generally.
Part of the issue here, especially (but not just) for lower-cost options, is that there is also a huge demand for construction workers.
Pay more. If your specialty was in an in demand sector with limited available employees. You would demand more money wouldn’t you? Then why shouldn’t wait staff etc?
The way the elitist bastards despise working class people and do not believe they have the same rights, ambitions and needs makes me sick.
Refusing a vaccine is not ‘risk averse.’ Quite the contrary.
But stand your position on its head. Why should the rest of us suffer because some people refuse to take a vaccine for a highly infectious lethal disease?
You and I don't know why people have refused vaccinations. It's easy to make assumptions but I suspect there are myriad reasons and there will be those who want to be vaccinated but for all manner of reasons can't or won't yet recognise the health risk to themselves.
It's easy to call those who aren't vaccinated "stupid" (and some may well be) but it's a generalisation which I think is unhelpful and doesn't fit the facts.
The fact so many are vaccinated and the fact we see how effective the vaccines are makes your notion absurd and indeed I'm NOT arguing for an extension of restrictions in any way, shape or form and I'm not sure how you have inferred that from my previous.
We can and should end restrictions but @MaxPB 's initial suggestion was to regulate access to society based on vaccination status and it is with that I am uncomfortable.
Point of order, I suggested no society based on vaccine status just guidelines and recommendations for people who are awaiting their first/second doses. They are, of course, free to ignore those guidelines.
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
For the Normandy invasion, a lot of the tanks were in the wrong place and, thanks to the French Resistance blowing up bridges and railways, took weeks instead of days to reach the fighting.
As an aside, the Jeremy Clarkson documentary on VC winners includes an extended description of fighting German tanks with anti-tank guns. I imagine it is available in the usual places.
Looking at the rapid rise in cases... I'm wondering if govt might have to reintroduce some restrictions for a period. We just need to buy a bit more time until the vaccinations have kicked in.
For what purpose? To stop case numbers rising? We could stop case numbers rising by reducing testing with the same effect. What matters is hospitals and, as Chris Hobson pointed out, the profile and nature of people attending hospitals.
To reduce hospitalizations. I think they will grow over the next few weeks. If they don't - then I guess we are fine.
Growing is fine, so long as the number of people in hospital grows at only a modest rate.
10% week over week is an irrelevancy: it means it takes three months to quadruple the number of people in hospital and by that point everyone is double jabbed anyway.
Even 20% is quite manageable.
But you don't want to be at 30 or 40% a week.
Well said - and the virus is rapidly running out of people to infect. We're already at 80% of adults with antibodies and millions more vaccinated per week. The virus is going to burn out and hit a herd immunity wall very rapidly.
That's how it feels to me too, although this virus does keep surprising us. This is surely like that final jump scare scene in all good horror movies when the evil thing you thought was dead comes back for one final lunge before getting the wooden stake in the heart.
A curve like India has seen, on a per capita basis but with the benefits of vaccination, would see us with a month or two of exponential growth, flattening then sharp decline and possibly a max daily count of 30-40k but limited rises in deaths and the NHS never close to overwhelmed.
The Indian variant reminds of the V2 campaign near the end of World War 2.
Just as we thought we had Hitler beaten, he launched this super-weapon.
If he'd had this technology 2-3 years earlier, he might easily have won the war, especially if you add nukes. However it came too late, the Allies were overrunning occupied Europe and Hitler ran out of time, slaves. space, materials
The allies are the vaccines, overwhelming the virus, even as it shows this sting in the tail. We hope
2-3 years maybe. But on the whole - not really.
V2 was an astonishingly inefficient way of killing people.
The programme was a load on the German economy roughly equivalent to the Manhattan project on the allied ones. IMO an excellent example of the successful allied policy of not assassinating Hitler because Germany would be more damaged were he to stay alive.
Firstly as a weapon of terrorising, it was pretty effective?
Secondly, what an amazing counterfactual, allied assassination of Hitler late 43 into 44? What would have happened?
If the generals had taken over they may have sued for peace?
If the cabinet remained in charge, Gerbils? And business as usual?
Well, it was Hitler who swallowed the line that D-Day is a feint, and stopped Rommel coming north to where he might have seen off the invasion.
Nah, the Allies had a massive air supremacy on D-Day.
The Allies had something like 9,000 planes whilst the Germans had just over 300.
Those divisions that weren't released would have been smashed from the skies had they been released.
Those fighters weren't that useful against tanks. They'd have had some effect, sure, but the reality is that German armour was only destroyed en mass by allied armour.
Just a thought @LEON I was shielded by my Mother under a steel table with my Father and Sister in Manchester when a V2 engine cut out immediately above us and fell nearby killing 6 of our neighbours
A sobering thought that only by the Grace of God I survived that attack
Indeed !
That was the Christmas Eve in 1944 raid?
They would be V1s, and were actually air-launched over the North Sea from bomber aircraft.
Comments
The highest in the world by far is Peru with 0.503% of the population and that's worst in the world with a complete collapse in their healthcare system. Belgium have 0.433% and a few nations around a third of a percentage point.
Had the NHS been overwhelmed then people would have locked down voluntarily, but then been able to unlock voluntarily much sooner without this crap of months of pointless lockdowns far too late.
And this is with a higher city minimum wage than the State of WA generally.
Part of the issue here, especially (but not just) for lower-cost options, is that there is also a huge demand for construction workers.
The other answers were good to, about Foxley plans, the argument about if it’s worth it. About the buzz and non buzz bombs. How no Adolf would or wouldn’t have impacted D Day.
PB hive mind at its best.
It really pains me to say this but I love French food and if Brexit has fecked up French restaurants in this country then I'm going to go all Michael Douglas in Falling Down.
I wish him every success
Which is not surprising, given who wrote it and how dishonest he is, but is still depressing.
No Brexit, they come back easily.
Brexiteers deserve to be force fed pies from Wigan made by ASBO teenagers doing community service.
A sobering thought that only by the Grace of God I survived that attack
This means denouncing this anti-white racist bullshit as soon as it appears, not dismissing it as some lunatic fringe. It really is not fringe. As you say, it has completely conquered academe, and it advances on all fronts from there
You are a living bit of history Big G! There can't be many people alive with personal experience of a V2 rocket attack
PB is great for this kind of thing
That's beautiful symmetry.
We laugh at Southerners for buying overpriced houses so we can spend money on the good things in life.
It may return to that state. And the baton may be passed elsewhere. (And being the World's Capital is not entirely a bed of roses, resulting in skyrocketing rents and house prices.)
Nevertheless, being the World's Capital was also a little bit amazing. Losing those French restaurants is not really an issue for the middle classes as the oligarch (and Goldman partner) class.
Some of the biggest deals I've worked on have usually began and or concluded in a decent French restaurant in London.
They were great for the economy, it helped raise money in taxes which paid for the benefits of the plebs.
And the version of Brexit we have ended up with has cut that off. It wasn't inevitable in 2016, but it's where we've ended up.
Fuck him. He can afford it.
Learn to love sarsparilla and dandelion and burdock.
Why does nobody challenge them on this?
"During the war, we used to huddle together in terror as the V1s went over. My mother though was very practical. "The only ones you need to worry about are the ones with your name on them." Which didn't huge comfort to our next door neighbours, Mister and Missus Doodlebug...."
Will it ever return? Brexit makes it harder (I voted knowing that, and accepting it), but not impossible. New York faces significant problems. Paris is doomed by Frenchness. Hong Kong is ruined. China is China, so, nope. Tokyo is a bit too Tokyo and parochial
London has a chance to retake the spot. It will be hard, but huge cities are resilient - particularly London
Although that said, the recruitment woes of the hospitality sector aren't confined to the inability to draft more recruits from the continent. Apparently, the pay in many restaurants was so pitiful that many of the chefs and waiters who went off to work doing delivery driving or stacking shelves in supermarkets don't want to come back, either. Similar money for less work, less stress and better hours.
Not that surprising when you think about it.
I tried to make Hyena soup.
Made myself a laughing stock.
NEW THREAD
https://aircrashsites.co.uk/air-raids-bomb-sites/luftwaffe-v1-attack-on-manchester-christmas-eve-1944/
You would not have heard a V2 coming and I dont think they had the range tbh
https://londonist.com/2009/01/london_v2_rocket_sitesmapped
My mother used to recount similar stories about that awful silence when the engine cut out on a V1.
She was in an Anderson shelter during a bomb raid and the bombs landed so close the frame warped and she could not get out without help - she said that was the worst experience of her life
If it ceases to be so, it will be because of Covid, WFH etc and not because of Brexit.
"The allied invasion of Normandy took place on 6 June 1944. On 7 June Das Reich was ordered to move to Normandy to reinforce the German units contesting the allied invasion. It would be a journey of approximately 700 kilometres (430 mi) and an unopposed movement of men and equipment by railroad would have taken three or four days. However, the option to move by rail had been preempted by the French Resistance. The rail cars to be used for transporting the tanks and equipment were unguarded.
In the days before 6 June French operatives of the Special Operations Executive's Pimento network, headed by Anthony Brooks, sabotaged the rail cars by draining the axle oil and replacing it with an abrasive powder that caused the axles of the cars to seize up. The powder had been parachuted in by SOE. The perpetrators of the sabotage were a 16 year old girl named Tetty, her boyfriend, her 14-year old sister, and several of their friends.
As a consequence of the sabotage of the rail cars, Das Reich left Montauban on 8 June with 1,400 vehicles and proceeded northward by road. Travel by road caused the steel tracks of the tanks and assault guns to wear out; vehicles broke down frequently; and fuel was in short supply. Pinprick attacks by groups of resistors, called Maquis, killed 15 Germans on the first two days of the movement. More than 100 French were killed, many of them unarmed civilians. Das Reich had been given the additional task of suppressing the Maquis during its journey, ordered "to break the spirit of the population by making examples." This the Division attempted to do with massacres of hundreds of civilians on 9 and 10 June in Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glane. Attacks by resistance forces mostly ended on 12 June as Das Reich moved into less favorable territory for ambushes.
Air attacks hindered the progress of Das Reich in the last phases of its northward journey. On 11 June British bombers attacked and destroyed several railcars full of much-needed gasoline at Châtellerault. The air strike was directed by the Special Air Service (SAS) group called Operation Bulbasket. After the advance elements of Das Reich crossed the Loire River on 13 June, the division was under constant air attacks during the day. As a result, Das Reich arrived only piecemeal to the Normandy battlefield between 15 and 30 June, its arrival delayed at least several days by the resistance attacks and air strikes. Rather than going on the offensive to try to push the Allies back into the sea, Das Reich initially found itself mostly plugging gaps in the German defenses. The division was not reunited until 10 July.
Its hard to see what the answer is but unless some radical action is taken universties will become pointless because they are just being used as a way of legitimising propoganda and ideological drivel. I've already given up on going in to the academy because it will be starting from a bad place and carrying out a rear guard action from there.
If anyone is interested in this, the book Cynical Theories by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose is a must read and explains the situation brilliantly (albeit incredibly depressing )
https://aircrashsites.co.uk/air-raids-bomb-sites/luftwaffe-v1-attack-on-manchester-christmas-eve-1944/
The way the elitist bastards despise working class people and do not believe they have the same rights, ambitions and needs makes me sick.
Eat the rich!
As an aside, the Jeremy Clarkson documentary on VC winners includes an extended description of fighting German tanks with anti-tank guns. I imagine it is available in the usual places.
That was the Christmas Eve in 1944 raid?
They would be V1s, and were actually air-launched over the North Sea from bomber aircraft.
There's a detailed and fascinating article here:
https://aircrashsites.co.uk/air-raids-bomb-sites/luftwaffe-v1-attack-on-manchester-christmas-eve-1944/
The distribution says something. They were all aimed at Manchester.