Sharring for Eels

A couple of weeks ago I watched The Hairy Bikers fishing for eels, which sparked a memory from when I was a kid.

When I was a boy, I stood on the banks of a sluggish, reedy drain somewhere out in the sticks of Lancashire, watching my Uncle Bob push a pole with a strange, wavy metal plate on the end into the canal bed. It wasn’t a spear. It didn’t hook or pierce. It was a shar – a word you won’t find in many books now, unless they’re about lost things. Bob showed me how it worked: the wavy cuts in the plate trapped the eels as he pushed it into the mud. No bait, no blood – just patience and knowledge. The sort you can’t Google.

And that’s the thing. Bob didn’t have a degree in ecology or a clipboard from the Environment Agency. He had boots, a rolled-up sleeve, and a feel for the land. That pole and plate were part of a quiet tradition that’s now all but sunk. 

We like to pretend we care about heritage in this country. There’s always money for bunting and plaques and commemorative benches – but when it comes to the actual, lived traditions of ordinary people, the kind passed down from muddy hand to muddy hand, the silence is deafening. Eel-sharring wasn’t glamorous. It didn’t involve influencers or lanyards. It just worked.

The shar, like so many tools of the real countryside, wasn’t preserved because it wasn’t profitable. You can’t commodify a boy watching his uncle teach him how to read a canal. You can’t mass-produce stillness, or the moment a glinting eel breaks the surface with a furious twist. And you certainly can’t make a TED Talk out of someone quietly knowing exactly where the eels are, and how to catch them without fanfare or fuss.

Uncle Bob’s shar wasn’t just a tool – it was a link in a chain of knowledge that went back centuries, possibly millennia. And now it’s rusting in sheds, or hanging on museum walls with a little card beneath it that reads: “Obsolete eel-catching implement, 19th–20th century.” Obsolete? Only because the people who used them weren’t invited to the meetings where "heritage" got redefined to mean castles, croquet and cream teas.

We let it go. Not just the eels, but the shars, the marshes, the mud, and the memory. We allowed a living tradition to be turned into folklore – because no one thought men like Uncle Bob were part of history. But they were. And if we had any sense, we’d stop romanticising rural England and start remembering the parts of it that actually mattered.

Because once it’s gone, all you’re left with is a story. And the older I get, the more I realise that the story matters too – even if I was only ever the assistant.

The Guardians Who Bruise

They turned up waving flags, howling about protecting “our women” from some imagined horde – and two in five of those later dragged before the courts for their part in the so‑called “refugee riots” had themselves been reported for domestic abuse. Not whispered rumours, but police reports: assaults, stalking, coercive control, even grievous bodily harm. 

In some towns the proportion was closer to seven in ten. And here’s the rub – many of those shouting loudest about keeping Britain “safe” for women couldn’t keep their own hands off them.

It would almost be funny if it weren’t so bleak. The same men who spray‑painted slogans about “protecting our daughters” are the ones who sent their partners to A&E, who ignored restraining orders, who made homes into war zones. 

Yet they drape themselves in the Union Flag, claiming to be guardians of some mythic national virtue. When the smoke clears, it turns out the danger to women wasn’t coming from a dinghy in the Channel – it was already in the house, sitting on the sofa, scrolling through Facebook rants about “illegals.”

There’s an irony so heavy it could crack the pavement. Politicians who pander to these mobs won’t say it, but the numbers don’t lie. The violence these men feared was the violence they brought with them.

Fire Doesn't Lie

You only need to touch a flame once. It doesn't argue. It doesn't dither. It doesn’t offer a softly-spoken warning followed by a leaflet and a workshop on "personal responsibility". It just burns. And that lesson is permanent. The fire isn’t out to make a point – it is the point. No excuses, no appeals, no "but I didn’t know." Physics doesn’t do nuance.

Now compare that to the old back-of-the-hand school of parenting – or the slipper, the cane, the scowl of a headmaster with Napoleon syndrome. Here we’re told, is how civilisation is preserved: through the sudden application of pain by someone older, stronger, and – in theory – wiser.

But the problem isn’t just the bruising. It’s the logic. Because punishment only works if it’s certain. And unlike the flame, corporal punishment is anything but. Sometimes you're caught. Sometimes you're not. Sometimes Mum’s had a bad day, sometimes she hasn’t. Sometimes the teacher's watching, sometimes he’s too busy shouting at Year 9.

So the child learns – not morality, not empathy, not reason – but gambling. They learn to calculate: can I get away with it? Will anyone see? What’s the penalty if I do? They don’t learn don’t do it – they learn don’t get caught. It’s not moral education – it’s early-stage fraud training.

And here's where it gets darker – because it’s not just corporal punishment that does this. Every imposed punishment suffers the same defect. The detention, the driving fine, the prison sentence, even divine retribution from some sky-based accountant – all of it hinges on the risk of detection, not the wrongness of the act.

What you end up with is not a society of decent people – but a society of risk managers. People who behave only when watched. People who equate justice with enforcement and morality with monitoring. It doesn’t build a conscience – it builds a surveillance strategy.

The person who refrains from theft because of a CCTV camera is not good – they’re cautious. Take away the camera, and see what’s left. A man who only tells the truth under oath is not honest – he’s legally literate.

Punishment, in this light, isn’t education – it’s behaviour modification under threat. The stick without the carrot. And the child – or adult – doesn't grow a moral compass. They grow antennae, twitching for signs that the coast is clear.

Natural consequences don’t play this game. You speed round a bend on a wet road, you crash. You gorge on sweets, you vomit. You light a cigarette in a hay barn, it goes up. There’s no authority figure lurking – just reality, indifferent and instructional. That teaches.

Corporal punishment doesn’t. Nor, frankly, does most punitive justice. They both say: "Obey, or else." The fire says: "Ignore me, and you’ll suffer – not because I want to punish you, but because that’s how things are."

That’s why natural consequences breed wisdom – and imposed punishments breed resentment. You can argue with a parent, or a judge, or a God. You can blame them. You can even fight back. But you can’t negotiate with gravity, or flames, or nettles. They’re immune to your excuses.

And that’s the heart of it. The fire never lies. But those who punish often do – they lie about fairness, about consistency, about justice. And worst of all, they pretend they’re teaching when all they’re doing is threatening.

Ah, but someone will say – “It worked for me.” Yes, for some people, the cane “worked”. But let’s be clear what that means. For some, it worked because they already believed the rules. The punishment just confirmed what they already felt – that they’d done wrong. It was punctuation, not education.

For others, it worked because they were naturally cautious. Fear, for them, is enough. But then, they were never the ones who needed the cane in the first place.

For a few, it became a kind of badge of belonging – a twisted rite of passage into the tribe of the compliant. I took my beating like a man. Well done. So did your dog.

And for some, it offered closure – a crude, bodily form of atonement. A ledger balanced through bruises. But the pain alone didn’t teach. The pain just marked the page. What taught – if anything did – was already present: guilt, temperament, structure, culture. The cane was just theatre.

And for many, the play ended badly. It bred not discipline but duplicity. Not reflection but rebellion. Not morality, but muscle memory – with a side-order of seething resentment that would later be passed down like a family heirloom. One hand to the next.

So no – the cane didn’t teach you right from wrong. You either already knew, or you learnt it despite the beating, not because of it.

In the end, only one teacher never lies, never blinks, never changes the rules. The fire. It doesn’t moralise. It doesn’t judge. It just tells you what happens when you’re careless – and that lesson, unlike punishment, doesn’t depend on who’s watching.

Because real learning doesn’t need fear. It needs reality. And fire, unlike authority, never forgets to show up.

Kit

So we won.

England supporters, bless them, still looked like a jumble sale – but at least this time they were winning while doing it. The Women’s Euros final ended with England beating Spain, yet the crowd in the stands still looked like someone had tipped over the lost property bin at Wembley. Red here, white there, and – bafflingly – the occasional Union Flag cape, as if we’d annexed Wales and Scotland for the day and they just hadn’t been told yet.

The kit doesn’t help. Red, white and blue. Which, let’s be honest, isn’t England’s colour at all – it’s Great Britain’s. So while the players were hammering in goals, they were also looking like they’d stepped off a commemorative Jubilee plate, while somewhere in Edinburgh and Cardiff, entire pubs groaned every time we scored.

Then there's the Three Lions. On the England home kit, the famous Three Lions aren’t the traditional gold-on-red seen in heraldry – they’re royal blue, set on a crisp white shield trimmed with red roses and edged in blue. It’s a modern reworking of the badge that sits neatly on the white shirt, which itself features subtle red and blue detailing. The result is a cleaner, sportier look – though one that drifts further from the historic lions of Richard the Lionheart and closer to a contemporary, made-for-TV emblem.

Compare this to the Dutch – because they know how to do this properly. Their flag is red, white and blue, yet their fans don’t turn up looking like a patriotic patchwork quilt. They wear orange. All of them. One colour, one identity, one giant, blinding traffic cone of national pride.

England? We still can’t decide. Some wear red, some wear white, some look like they’re on their way to a royal wedding by mistake. Even after lifting the trophy, our supporters looked like they were celebrating three different events entirely and had somehow ended up in the same stadium by accident.

If England wants to look as organised as they now play, we need to do what the Dutch did centuries ago – pick one colour and stick to it. Otherwise, every England victory will continue to look like it was brought to you by a crowd dressed for the wrong party.

Yet, oddly enough, the House of Orange started out as French.

The name comes from the Principality of Orange, a tiny patch of land in Provence, in the south of France. Back in medieval times, it wasn’t about the fruit – the town of Orange existed long before oranges were even widely known in Europe. It was originally a feudal lordship, then a principality, and it passed through various noble hands until the title “Prince of Orange” eventually ended up with the House of Nassau in the Netherlands in the 16th century.

That’s how Dutch royalty ended up calling themselves the House of Orange, despite the fact the place was French, the name wasn’t about the colour, and the fruit came into the story much later. Over time, “Orange” became the national colour of the Netherlands – even though it technically comes from a French toponym, not a crate of fruit.

So the Dutch sea of orange at football matches is, in a roundabout way, a tribute to a medieval French principality. Very Dutch – adopting something foreign and making it more iconic than the original.

You're All Individuals

I was watching The Ezra Collective at Glastonbury the other day – or rather, watching them watching us, egging on the crowd, striding out into it trumpet-first like jazz-funk missionaries. There was this electric moment when half the audience was clapping in time, swaying like a tide of limbs. You could feel the buzz ripple through the screen. Even I, sitting in a chair that’s seen off three cats and a decade of rear ends, felt it in my bones.

And it got me thinking – synchrony does something strange to us.

Get enough people doing the same thing at the same time – clapping, dancing, chanting, marching – and we go all gooey inside. We love it. We need it, even. It’s why flash mobs are a thing. Why people cry at choirs. Why Riverdance could sell out every venue from here to the Urals by simply stamping in formation. It speaks to something tribal in us, something ancient and comforting. The individual melts away and we become part of the we – however temporary, however bonkers.

But like most things that light up our brain's pleasure centres, there’s a darker side.

Because the moment you surrender to that synchrony – the moment the ‘I’ dissolves into the ‘we’ – you're also switching off the bit of your brain that asks awkward questions. Like: “What are we clapping for, exactly?” Or: “Why am I in a matching shirt waving a flag and singing about blood and soil?” You stop thinking and start feeling. And feelings, as history has shown us time and again, can be a gateway drug to all sorts of regrettable behaviour.

It’s the Life of Brian moment, isn’t it? Brian stands there, desperately trying to convince the crowd to stop following him:

“You’re all individuals!” And they chant back in unison: “Yes! We’re all individuals!” Then, a lone voice pipes up: “I’m not!”

Mass participation, for all its power to lift and unite, also has the terrifying capacity to erase. It can erase doubt. Erase dissent. Erase nuance. You’ll cheer the leader, burn the books, and stomp in time with your neighbours if the atmosphere’s right and the bass is heavy enough.

It’s not the rhythm that’s the problem – it’s who sets the beat.

So yes – go to the gig. Dance in the mud. Join the clap-along. But do keep one eye open. Keep the other on your critical faculties. And for heaven’s sake, if anyone starts handing out uniforms, chanting in Latin or saying he's the only one who can stop the Boats, maybe head for the exits.

After all, it’s one thing to be moved by the music – quite another to be marched.

Feudalism 2.0: Now with Added Wi-Fi

They told us we were entering a new era – a sleek, interconnected digital world where everything from groceries to government would be just a swipe away. And we did swipe, didn't we? Like peasants marvelling at the castle gates flung open, we rushed in, waving our data like currency. Only we weren’t the lords of this brave new world – we were the serfs. Again.

Corporate feudalism isn't looming. It's here. We live it every time we accept a T&Cs scroll disguised as freedom. In the old days, barons extracted rent for your pigsty and a portion of your grain. Today, Bezos and Musk and Zuckerberg do it through subscriptions, surveillance, and “engagement”. The medium has changed – the mechanism hasn’t.

A handful of tech oligarchs own the servers, the algorithms, the infrastructure, the pipelines of information. You might think you own your house, but you rent your cloud storage. You think you're a sovereign consumer, but you're a data point in an AI model, shaped to boost shareholder value. We haven’t escaped the manor – we’ve just given it a UX makeover.

And the state? In the old feudal model, the monarch could at least theoretically put the boot in if the barons overreached. These days, the state genuflects. Politicians court Amazon to build warehouses that employ people on zero-hours contracts monitored by wristbands that vibrate if you idle for too long. It's not a job – it's digital indenture.

Look at the NHS – lured into data deals with Palantir, a company whose entire raison d’être is government surveillance. Or education, now gleefully outsourced to platforms that monetise your child’s attention span. Or transport, where Uber undercuts unionised labour while lobbying governments to deregulate further. We've handed our commons – our data, our infrastructure, our institutions – to private fiefdoms who wrap it all in the language of innovation while looting the public realm.

And the media? A PR wing for the new aristocracy. While tabloids shout about benefit fraud or migrant boats, the real theft – of democracy, privacy, sovereignty – carries on in boardrooms. The BBC used to hold power to account. Now it debates whether billionaires really do need to pay tax.

This isn’t capitalism anymore – it’s enclosure with better branding. We’re not citizens; we’re tenants in a gig economy, beholden to terms of service that can change on a whim. Try appealing your Amazon suspension. Try getting a human being on Meta’s helpdesk. Good luck. Serfs had more legal recourse.

And just like medieval serfdom, it’s dressed up as destiny. "That's just how the world works now," they say. "You’ve got to move with the times." As if handing control of essential infrastructure to a few unelected tech barons is "progress". As if disempowerment is the price of convenience. As if the right to repair your own tractor or use your own seed wasn’t something your grandparents fought for.

The irony is that we were sold this world on the promise of decentralisation. The internet would liberate us. Instead, it shackled us to fewer, more powerful actors than ever before. Google is the internet. Apple controls the walled garden. BlackRock controls the capital that funds it all. You can choose your brand – but not your master.

Feudalism used to be about land. Now it's about platforms. The peasants are still productive – only now they produce content, code, consumption patterns. And just like before, the value they generate flows upwards. Trickle-down, they said. Trickled us into servitude more like.

So what’s the answer? Unionise. Regulate. Tax. Break up monopolies. Nationalise where needed. Put the digital commons back under democratic control. Because if we don’t, the next generation won’t remember what freedom looked like. They’ll think terms and conditions were carved in stone.

Klopp

There’s an advert doing the rounds – something utterly forgettable, probably flogging car insurance or lager with an identity crisis – featuring Jürgen Klopp and two other blokes with perfectly ordinary teeth. You know, the sort of teeth that suggest a diet of Yorkshire puddings, not activated charcoal smoothies. And there, slap bang in the middle, is Klopp, grinning like a Bond villain halfway through a whitening strip bender.

Now, I like Jürgen Klopp. Who doesn’t? Charismatic, passionate, prone to fits of touchline lunacy – everything you want in a football manager. But his teeth? His teeth deserve a credit in the advert all to themselves. “Starring: Jürgen Klopp and The Illuminated Manuscript Formerly Known as His Mouth.”

They're so white, I’m fairly sure they’ve been classified as a navigational aid by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. In the advert, the contrast is so stark you’d think he was digitally inserted from a Colgate campaign in Qatar. The poor sods next to him look like Dickensian chimney sweeps by comparison. One imagines them quietly resenting his molars’ ability to trigger lens flare.

And this, I think, is the perfect metaphor for late-stage capitalism. We no longer accept success quietly. We have to radiate it. Subtlety is for losers. Your average Premier League manager used to look like a hungover geography teacher in a Matalan coat. Now they turn up with personal stylists and teeth so white they can broadcast DAB radio. Klopp’s are simply the logical conclusion – pearlescent monuments to performance dentistry.

It’s not just Klopp, of course. We live in a time when being normal is treated like a medical condition. Everyone's either a lifestyle brand or a cautionary tale. The middle-aged bloke with the average smile? Invisible. The bloke who looks like he’s had his gob airbrushed by Pixar? Centre stage, mate.

Soon, there’ll be boosterism for bicuspids. “Do your incisors project confidence?” “Are your molars monetisable?” It’s only a matter of time before Sky Sports hires a dental analyst. “Gary, you can see here Klopp’s second premolar is really pressing high up the pitch...”

The worst bit? The teeth now speak louder than the man. You don’t notice what Klopp says anymore – only how many lumens his canines are putting out. It’s visual tyranny. A smile that blinds before it charms.

Still, perhaps there’s hope. Maybe, just maybe, one of those unassuming, natural-toothed co-stars in the ad will spark a revolution. A quiet uprising of the coffee-stained and the mildly crooked. A molar mutiny.

Until then, I’m wearing sunglasses during the ad breaks. Safety first.

A Modest Proposal for State Pension Reform: Let the Kids Pay

Here’s a thought that’ll have the Guardian in fits and the Express spluttering into its powdered eggs: what if we stopped handing out state pensions to people who’ve got perfectly capable adult children?

I mean, isn’t it time we asked why the taxpayer should keep bankrolling pensioners with three children in executive homes who think a birthday card once a year and the odd Zoom call is a substitute for, say, support?

Because let’s not pretend the system is working. The UK state pension is a magnificent fiction – £110 billion a year, built on the premise that we can keep paying more people for longer with fewer workers to fund it. It’s not a savings account. There’s no pot. You’re not “entitled” to your pension in any material sense – you’re entitled to hope that when you reach your golden years, there are enough mugs still working to keep the lights on at DWP HQ.

Meanwhile, we’ve allowed a silent social shift. Once upon a time, your children were your pension – emotionally, financially, sometimes even physically, when they pushed your bath chair down to the Co-op. Now? They’re more likely to be living in a different county, hoarding Air Miles and wondering how long they can keep your care costs off their balance sheet.

So here’s my modest proposal: if you’ve got adult children earning six figures, living mortgage-free in a house you co-signed, maybe you don’t need the state to step in. Maybe we should be limiting state pensions to those who don’t have adult children in a position to support them. Or, more gently, maybe your kids should get a hefty tax break for doing what used to be considered common decency – supporting their parents.

Radical? Not really. Singapore has a law compelling children to support their elderly parents. In parts of southern Europe, multi-generational homes are still normal. And even in Britain, before we sold the post-war dream to the lowest bidder, families looked after each other. Now we have a system that encourages atomisation, state dependency, and the delusion that society owes you everything because you once worked in accounts and didn’t murder anyone.

Imagine the outcry, though. “But what if their kids are horrible?” they’ll cry. Yes – and what if they’re in jail, or in Australia, or just plain useless? Fine. That’s where the state backstop kicks in. But if your children are sitting on stock options and sending the grandkids to private school, perhaps it’s not too much to expect them to chip in for your heating bills.

We could make it voluntary, of course – incentivised through tax relief, NI rebates, council tax discounts, or even inheritance tax exemptions. Support your parents now, benefit later. After all, we already hand out child benefit to anyone with a working womb. Why not parental benefit in reverse?

And here’s the irony: if we don’t do something like this, we’re left with the usual menu of idiocy. Raise the pension age until it matches life expectancy in Glasgow. Scrap the triple lock and face electoral annihilation. Or start taxing the dead before they’re even cold to fund a system no one trusts.

So yes – let’s consider the unthinkable. Let’s ask whether adult children should bear more of the cost of retirement. Not to punish anyone, but to rebuild the intergenerational contract we’ve spent the last fifty years dismantling in favour of car leases and cheap flights.

Because if we don’t want to be taxed to death funding a system that’s collapsing under its own contradictions, we may have to rediscover a lost art: families supporting each other.

Or to put it another way – if your kids are living the good life thanks to your sacrifices, maybe it's time they paid you back with more than a bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream at Christmas.

Nice Idea, but the Work!

Replicating the front end of an E-Type on a GT6? Well, of course it looks nice. It should – the GT6 was called the “Mini E-Type” from the outset. Long nose, curvaceous hips, fastback roof… it was Jaguar’s sexier cousin on a more realistic budget, provided you didn’t mind leaf springs and panel gaps you could post a letter through.

So when ChatGPT chirpily offered up a digital rendering of a GT6 with a graceful oval grille and just the right whiff of Jaguar about the nose (see above), I was – to use the technical term – seduced. The image looked lovely, and you have to admit it. Sleek. Clean. Balanced. And from there, like any deluded classic car owner, I found myself slipping down the rabbit hole of “How hard can it be?”

Quite hard, it turns out. The rendering forgot something important – reality. Specifically, the hinge pods. Those great steel clams that protrude proudly beneath each headlamp like a Victorian underbite. Essential to the GT6’s iconic clamshell bonnet, and utterly incompatible with any notion of E-Type purity.

Still, I pressed on. Surely if I just cut the right shape into the valance, I could retain the hinge pods and get the look. And yes – in steel, it's entirely possible. You can mark, cut, and roll a neat oval into the valance without disturbing the bonnet. The hinge pods stay, the bonnet remains untouched, and the result is surprisingly elegant. But this is fabrication work, not wishful thinking. It’s slow. It’s fiddly. It involves grinders, welders, and more measuring than you’d think necessary for something that “just looks right”.

Meanwhile, the temptation of fibreglass beckoned early on. Lightweight! Easy to shape! Malleable! The internet positively glistens with websites flogging fibreglass bonnets promising sleek profiles and less nose weight.

Except… I’m running a turbocharged Mazda 1.8 under there. A setup not known for its mild, tepid disposition. That thing throws out enough heat to make toast two feet away. Fibreglass, faced with that, responds like a cheap sunlounger left on a barbecue: warps, smokes, then wilts into a sticky, cracked mess. It’s not so much a bonnet as a slow-burning fire risk.

Let’s not forget the structural realities. The GT6 bonnet doesn’t just sit there looking pretty – it is the front end. It takes hinge loads, headlamp mounts, closing forces, and all the flexing of spirited British motoring. A steel bonnet shrugs it off. A fibreglass one squeals and begs for mercy before the second roundabout.

So, could I recreate that lovely oval-mouthed front? Yes. Would it look great? Possibly. Would it retain the character of the GT6 while nodding to its more glamorous cousin? Arguably.

But the work involved? Fabricating, reinforcing, measuring, welding, fettling, shaping, sealing, and painting?

Let’s be honest – it’s miles beyond my pay grade.

Nigel & El Salvador

Nigel Farage’s latest wheeze is to send dangerous British prisoners to El Salvador - because nothing screams “credible prime minister-in-waiting” like outsourcing criminal justice to a Central American strongman regime. It’s not a policy. It’s a headline. A stunt. A deliberately ludicrous idea dressed up as “common sense,” launched not to be implemented, but to feed the outrage machine. That’s the point. It always is.

Farage has no intention of governing. He wants attention, influence, and donations - but not responsibility. Power is meetings and consequences, civil servants and compromise. It’s boring. Worse, it’s measurable. You can fail. So instead, he plays the eternal outsider: the pub-bore prophet howling at the gates. And it works - because his followers aren’t there for policy. They’re there for the hormonal high.

Farage doesn’t lead a movement. He manages an endocrine system. His rallies are biological flashpoints: adrenaline to make you afraid, noradrenaline to keep you angry, dopamine to reward you for being angry, testosterone to make you feel powerful, and oxytocin to bind you to the man with the pint and the permanent sneer. It’s not politics. It’s chemical theatre - marketed to a base carefully cultivated not to think too hard.

He needs followers who don’t read past the headline. Who confuse feeling informed with having seen a meme. Who don’t want policy - they want enemies. People for whom a 30-second TikTok of Farage shouting at an interviewer carries more weight than any white paper. I came across one of them the other day, in full outrage mode over a newspaper story warning of a £2,500 fine for flying the Union Jack. He was convinced the government was coming for bunting and garden poles. But the article - had he bothered to read it - was about long-standing planning rules on flying flags from public buildings, not someone’s front porch. Twenty years old. Dressed up as something new and clearly click-bait. And he fell for it. Loudly.

This is Farage’s ideal supporter: ill-informed, emotionally primed, and ready to rage at shadows. The moment they start reading in depth, the spell breaks. So he makes sure they don’t.

He triggers panic, then offers himself as release. The migrants are coming. The elites are laughing. The BBC is lying. Britain is broken. But don’t worry - Nigel sees it too. Pint in hand, tie askew, he’s here to say what “we’re all thinking.” You’re not mad - you’re right. And you’re not alone. That’s not a political platform. That’s a serotonin trap.

This isn’t a party aiming to govern. Reform UK is not a serious political project. It’s a grievance franchise with a lion logo and a terminal allergy to policy detail. It exists to scare the Tories, not replace them. Farage walks a tightrope: just enough support to hijack the agenda, never enough to be handed the wheel. If it ever looks like he might win something, he sabotages it - say, by suggesting we deport prisoners to El Salvador and watching the press implode.

Because Farage is not a revolutionary. He’s a coward with a brand. He rules by flattening his own party. No rising stars, no competing visions - just Nigel, endlessly reheated. Richard Tice exists not to lead, but to ensure no one else does. Reform UK is Farage. Inextricably. Without him, it’s a domain name with a Facebook page full of lion memes and spelling errors.

But here lies the real danger - not Farage, but his Röhm moment. In 1934, Hitler purged Ernst Röhm because Röhm had become too powerful to control. Flip that: Farage lives in fear of being Röhm-ed himself. That someone inside the party - someone younger, sharper, more interested in winning than whining - might realise he is the problem. That Reform UK could go further, faster, if Nigel just got out of the way.

So long as Farage holds the reins - or holds the puppet who does - the danger is illusory. The clown bars the gates. But if he’s shoved aside by someone hungrier, someone not afraid of spreadsheets and grown-up power, the structure he’s built could finally start doing real damage. And that, not Farage, is what the main parties should be worried about.

Until then, let him rage. Let him bellow. But don’t mistake him for a leader. He is the angriest man in the pub, shouting at the telly, who - when finally offered the keys - smirks and says, “Nah, mate, I’m good,” and drops them down a drain just to make sure.

And pray no one else picks them up.

Palestine Action

So Palestine Action has been proscribed. Declared a terrorist group. Just like ISIS, al-Qaeda and… people who chuck a bit of red paint at an arms factory in Oldham. Apparently, spray-painting Elbit Systems and gluing yourself to a fence is now up there with hijacking planes and beheading aid workers. Who knew?

The spelling mistake in the image above? The image was actually taken from the website of Mims Davies, a Conservative MP. I don't think she notices the spelling mistake, despite having been a journalist.

Now, I’m not waving a Palestine Action banner, chanting slogans, or building a catapult out of tofu. But I did think – foolishly, it turns out – that we still lived in a country where you could support an idea without MI5 peering at your bookshelf. Not the methods, mind – just the aims. Like opposing the sale of British weapons to regimes that break international law. How terribly subversive.

But no. Say something like “perhaps we shouldn’t be supplying an apartheid state,” and you risk being labelled a sympathiser of terrorists-with-marker-pens. Because nuance, in modern Britain, is about as welcome as a Palestinian flag at a Tory fundraiser.

Let’s be clear: Palestine Action claim to be non-violent. Disruptive, yes. Unapologetically annoying? Certainly. But no one’s been blown up. No hostages taken. The most serious injury appears to be the trauma suffered by defence contractors discovering that red paint clashes with the office décor.

And yet here we are – you can’t join, donate to, or even appear to support them without risking arrest. We’ve reached the point where expressing sympathy for their stated aims – like ending arms deals with repressive regimes – is enough to get your name flagged next to “actual terrorist” and “person who once retweeted Mick Lynch.”

Meanwhile, if you fancy backing a violent regime, there’s an easier route. Wear a suit, donate to the Labour Party, and call it “defence procurement.”

If you're a citizen with a conscience who wants to protest British complicity in overseas atrocities, you're now expected to go through official channels – like penning a strongly worded email to your MP, which they’ll ignore just before tweeting a grinning selfie from a BAE Systems showroom.

So let’s be clear: I don’t support Palestine Action. But I do believe we shouldn’t be selling missiles to governments that treat international law like tissue paper. If that position is now controversial, then it’s not me who’s radical – it’s the government.

Next, they’ll be banning Amnesty International for “mood disruption” and proscribing Quakers as “repeat offenders of silence.” And if criminal damage is now the red line – drawn in vegan paint – then let’s make room on the terror watchlist. Just Stop Oil? Soup on sunflowers. XR? Blocking roads and gluing themselves to anything vaguely horizontal. Hunt saboteurs? Wrecking quad bikes and blowing whistles at men in red trousers. Shall we chuck them all on the list too?

Or maybe – just maybe – we admit what this is actually about. It’s not the mess. It’s the message. Palestine Action targeted the defence industry, and that’s sacred turf. You can hurl orange powder at Lord Nelson, but don’t you dare scuff a lobbyist’s laminate.

Because this proscription isn’t about law – it’s about control. It’s not “don’t do this.” It’s “don’t believe this.” That’s the line where democracy gives way to something with sharper suits and fewer questions.

You can ban the banners, shut down the meetings, criminalise the slogans – but you can’t extinguish belief. Conviction doesn’t evaporate under pressure; it deepens. The government can proscribe an organisation, but it can’t erase the moral clarity that drives people to oppose injustice. In straying into the territory of thought crime – where opinions and sympathies are policed – it confesses not authority, but insecurity. Thought can’t be switched off. Conscience doesn’t answer to statute. In criminalising belief, they betray the fragility of their rule.

Still, if this is the new legal standard, then we’d best be consistent. Let’s arrest the suffragettes posthumously, proscribe Greenpeace, and raid the Quakers. Equal treatment, after all. Unless, of course, you're smashing things in support of state power. In which case – crack on. Paint’s in aisle three.

This isn’t about justice anymore. It’s about silencing dissent. And if you think that’s fine because it’s “only Palestine Action,” then you’ve missed the point entirely. Because once the principle’s gone, your cause will be next.

And who’ll be left to protest then? Certainly not me – I’ll be too busy filing my pre-arrest clarification with the Home Secretary. Just in case she starts thinking satire is a gateway drug to sedition.

While this blog post does not support Palestine Action, incite violence, or promote illegal activity, it could still fall foul of the UK’s newly stretched definition of “inviting support” under the Terrorism Act. The law is now so broad – and so politically wielded – that merely questioning a proscription, mocking its absurdity, or expressing agreement with a banned group’s stated aims might be enough to attract police attention. That’s the chilling reality: not that what’s written is unlawful, but that it could be treated as if it were, depending on who’s reading and why. 

When satire, criticism and moral conviction become grounds for suspicion, we’re no longer protecting democracy – we’re throttling it.

Concept

I just love this concept:

Nothing more needs to be said.....

Dome

It began, as so many modern-day architectural musings do, in a Welsh campsite toilet queue.

There I was at Hilton Court, expecting no more than compost loos and the odd fairy-lit yurt, when I stumbled across a vast glittering dome tucked among the shrubbery. At first glance, it looked like the Eden Project had spawned a satellite pod and deposited it in Pembrokeshire. Inside, a botanical fever dream – palms, banana trees, looping vines, hanging wicker baubles, and enough humidity to ruin a cravat.

It was, as it turns out, just a greenhouse.

But not just a greenhouse. No, this was a geodesic dome – that utopian bubble beloved of American futurist Buckminster Fuller. He of the 1960s “let’s dome over Manhattan and regulate the weather” fame. He saw domes not as fancy sheds, but as the future of civilisational efficiency. Less weight, less waste, more structure – what’s not to like?

Turns out: the maintenance.

But more on that in a moment. Because my brain – which should’ve been focused on where I’d left the barbecue tongs – instead leapt across the North Sea to Copenhagen, where the Danes decided to take Bucky seriously.

There, in one of the city’s largest plazas, sits the Dome of Visions – a full-scale geodesic greenhouse encasing not tomatoes or palm trees, but a house. A deliberately minimalist one, made for a family of four, built from low-impact materials, with no glue or chemicals, and plonked right in the middle of this transparent shell.

The idea? That the dome becomes your external wall – a kind of weatherproof forcefield – allowing the actual house inside to be featherlight. Like living inside a Russian doll, if the outer doll was a giant Perspex hedgehog.

And in principle, it’s marvellous. A climate-controlled bubble of serenity in which you can grow lettuce, save the planet, and read Kierkegaard in your underpants all year round. The Danes pitched it as a challenge to traditional building norms – a “third space” that is both inside and outside. Very hygge, very edgy, very clever.

But – and it’s a big but – how the hell do you clean it?

Because what looks minimalist and inspiring in the architectural press becomes, quite quickly, a logistical nightmare once nature kicks in. Rain splashes, birds poop, insects commit aerial suicide. Algae creeps in. And before you know it, your gleaming dome of the future looks like the inside of a frog’s armpit.

Enter the Eden Project, Cornwall’s contribution to sci-fi horticulture, and the only dome project I’ve seen that actually plans for this. Their answer? ETFE. A magical transparent membrane that self-cleans in the rain, like the lotus leaf of architectural materials. You only need to send the abseilers in every couple of years for the stubborn bits. It’s maintenance by design – literally letting the weather do the work.

Compare that to Hilton Court’s noble effort, or the Dome of Visions, and you realise: unless your dome is made of miracle plastic, you’re going to need scaffolding, a team of mountaineers, and possibly a priest.

I’m not knocking it. I love the ambition. The idea of shielding your life from the elements in a great glass cocoon, like a tomato under cloche, is deeply appealing. Especially when the weather outside is horizontal.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Most of these domes – beautiful, bold, clever as they are – will, without vigilant attention, end up resembling a frogspawn terrarium from the outside. The dream will persist, but you won’t be able to see it through the grime.

Still, the next time someone suggests insulating your home with three feet of sheep’s wool and a vapour barrier thick enough to stop gamma rays, just point them at the Danes and say, “Or, we could live in a greenhouse.”

Just make sure you’ve got a cherry picker on standby.

Self-Sufficiency

For a country blessed with rolling fields, a mild climate, and a long agricultural tradition, it’s astonishing how spectacularly we’ve bungled food self-sufficiency. Today, only around 60% of our food is grown here. The rest trundles in on refrigerated lorries or floats in by container, racking up emissions while we pretend we’ve “taken back control.”

And what do we do with our farmland? Use over 70% of it to feed animals, not people. Grazing, silage, oilseed rape for cattle – a logistical farce where we grow plants to feed animals to feed us, with about 10% efficiency if we're lucky. It’s the dietary equivalent of using a wood-burning stove to boil a kettle. You couldn’t invent a more wasteful system.

Beef and lamb are the chief culprits – calorifically expensive, environmentally catastrophic, and culturally protected by a fog of nostalgia. Meanwhile, fruit and vegetable growing is in decline, pickers are in short supply, and we import lentils from halfway across the world while our own fields are chewing cud.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if we halved our meat and dairy intake, we could feed ourselves far more effectively. That’s not utopian – it’s the conclusion of detailed modelling by Oxford University and the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission. A 70% cut, and we could achieve near-total food self-sufficiency – not just turnips and tatties, but actual diversity, nutrition, and climate resilience. Rewild some uplands while we’re at it, and the future starts to look not just possible, but preferable.

Of course, the moment you say “eat less meat,” someone will bark “What, you want us to be like Ethiopia?” as if it’s Greggs or famine, nothing in between. Yes, Ethiopia eats very little meat – so do Bangladesh and Nepal – but they’re not models of healthy nutrition, they’re examples of poverty. The point isn’t to eat no meat – it’s to eat enough, and not too much, and make the rest of the diet matter.

Because if you look at the global data, what emerges isn’t a straight line but a curve. Eat too little meat and you risk malnutrition. Eat a moderate amount – like the Japanese – and you hit the sweet spot: long life, low disease, strong public health. But overshoot it – as the UK and US have – and the curve bends sharply downward.

This is where we need to be cautious. It’s tempting to look at that curve and declare: “more meat equals worse health.” But that’s a classic correlation–causation trap. It’s not the meat alone doing the damage – it’s what comes with it. In Britain, meat isn’t grilled and served with steamed vegetables. It’s slapped in a bun, deep-fried, or processed to death, then washed down with a litre of sugar and eaten behind the wheel.

Over 50% of UK calories now come from ultra-processed food – industrial bread, ready meals, reconstituted meat, sugar disguised as yoghurt. In Japan, meat is served with rice, miso, vegetables, and fish. In Britain, it’s served with marketing and a coronary.

Go further down that path and you land in America – world leaders in both meat and UPF consumption – where life expectancy is actually falling. It’s not just a diet – it’s a slow-motion public health collapse with a glossy wrapper.

So yes, reducing meat matters. But what replaces it matters more. You don’t swap a sausage roll for a vegan sausage roll and call it progress. You swap it for beans, lentils, grains, veg – real food, grown in real soil. If we did that, we’d free up land, cut imports, restore ecosystems, and likely live longer into the bargain.

If we could reduce our consumption of beef and lamb to 2 days a week with one of fish, we could be self-sustainable in food, as well as releasing enough land to be self-sufficient in renewable energy. If we ate chicken instead of red meat, the meat eating days could increase to 4 or 5, as chicken is less land-intensive. 

But try telling that to the “common sense” crowd who think hummus is Marxist and a carrot is a left-wing plot. If it’s not wrapped in plastic and deep-fried, they suspect subversion.

So next time someone waves the Union Flag and bangs on about “taking back control,” ask them how many calories we could grow here if the borders shut. The answer? Not enough to butter a crumpet – unless we stop feeding cows instead of people, lay off the ultra-processed gloop, and relearn how to eat like a functioning society.

Until then, we’re not self-sufficient – we’re self-defeating.

Much Ado About Melanin

So Diane Abbott pens a letter pointing out – quite calmly, and with more care than most of Westminster manages on a good day – that racism based on skin colour tends to be visible, immediate, and inescapable. She then notes that some other forms of prejudice, while no less vile, don’t always jump out at you in the street. That’s it. That’s the scandal. You’d think she’d marched into Golders Green with a placard and a loudhailer, the way they’re carrying on.

But here we are – the commentariat having a fit, Labour HQ scuttling under a desk, and the BBC tone-policing like a sixth-form debating coach who’s just discovered one of the students has read Fanon without permission.

Let’s be clear: this wasn’t a gaffe. It wasn’t a rant. It wasn’t “clumsy,” unless we now expect every utterance on race to come footnoted, triple-disclaimed, and blessed by a diversity subcommittee before it's safe for public consumption. It was, if anything, unusually precise. She said: racism often operates differently when it’s based on skin colour because skin colour is visible. Not that other forms of racism don’t exist. Not that they don’t matter. Just that they function differently. A perfectly legitimate point – and one echoed in academia, human rights law, and lived experience.

But no. That’s not allowed. You can practically hear the panic in Labour HQ: “Oh no! Someone’s said something nuanced. Quick – disown her before the Daily Mail puts it in 72-point red!” And so, once again, Abbott is chucked under the bus marked “permanent suspension pending further grovelling” while the party of working-class solidarity courts Mail readers with all the sincerity of a vegan at a hog roast.

It’s all getting a bit BBC, isn’t it? That familiar, twitchy reflex to turn everything into a false equivalence, a both-sides wobble. Never mind what’s true – the real crime is sounding like you’ve got an opinion not run past three PR consultants. We've replaced moral clarity with HR-speak, and now even seasoned MPs are expected to talk like laminated safety posters.

Meanwhile, the Right – who wouldn’t know a hate crime if it booted them in the ballot box – are suddenly born-again anti-racists, gleefully accusing Abbott of denying the Holocaust, the Porajmos, and the Plantation all in one breath. Let’s be honest – this is less about antisemitism or anti-Traveller hatred, and more about finding new ways to punish a Black woman who’s never played by the rules and refuses to be cowed by focus group fear.

And the great irony? Abbott’s point was about visibility – and now she’s been made invisible. Silenced, sidelined, and smeared, just for daring to suggest that how we experience prejudice depends on how we’re seen. Which, given the reaction, seems to have proven her point rather neatly.

So yes – much ado about bugger all. But it serves a purpose. It keeps Labour bland, the BBC fretful, and the public scared of saying anything real. Heaven forbid we allow a bit of honesty to slip through the cracks.

After all, it’s not about what you mean. It’s about what someone might choose to hear – and whether Keir Starmer thinks it’ll cost him half a seat in the West Midlands.

Leaning

There’s a quiet drama playing out in churchyards across the country – a slow-motion exodus so subtle you’d miss it unless you looked twice. Gravestones. Leaning. Always backwards. Always away from the grave. It’s as if, having stood loyally guard for a couple of centuries, they’ve finally had enough and are shuffling off backwards, muttering "Not my circus, not my skeleton."

You’ll find them in every village – great slabs of gritstone, sandstone, or whatever some Georgian mason thought looked suitably eternal, now leaning at such precarious angles they look like they’ve just remembered they left the oven on in 1794.

And the direction of the lean is never random. Few gravestones have ever flopped forward in an enthusiastic embrace of the corpse beneath. No, they lean away – discreetly horrified, like they’ve overheard something unspeakable going on down below. One can’t help but imagine the grave whispering "I'm still here…" and the stone edging back, hissing, "Yes, and that’s your problem, not mine."

The real reason, of course, is less spiritual and more structural – which is deeply disappointing. Turns out, when you dig a big hole in the ground, fill it with wood and person, then mound a bit of earth over the top, the soil doesn’t settle like concrete. No. It sinks, it shifts, it wobbles. It becomes, in geotechnical terms, 'a bit squishy'. And while you and I might take the hint and build a decent foundation, the Victorians – great at solemn inscriptions, less great at civil engineering – just shoved the headstone into the soil behind the grave like a pub signpost and called it a day.

Then you add in centuries of frost heave, where water in the soil freezes and expands like it's trying to pop the world’s largest champagne cork. Plus tree roots, badgers, vicars driving over the lawn in Nissan Qashqais, and the odd bout of ecclesiastical indifference. The result? Every headstone begins a slow, dignified retreat from the scene of the crime, like a valet backing out of a room where something unseemly has just happened in the coffin.

If gravestones were sentient, they’d be the most British of objects – unfailingly polite, stoically enduring centuries of weather and lichen, but ever so gently distancing themselves from awkwardness. A sort of geological "well… I mustn’t keep you."

It’s comforting, in a bleak sort of way. Because while modern life speeds up, melts down, and downloads itself into oblivion, these old stones are still out there – leaning back in slow horror, like all of us watching the news. And perhaps one day, long after the WiFi’s gone, we’ll join them – not in the grave, but just outside it, craning over the edge, muttering "on second thoughts…"

Through a Glass, Skewedly

There comes a time in any project – usually somewhere between the second mug of tea going cold and the first moment of self-doubt – when you stop and ask yourself: am I actually making this better, or simply reenacting an episode of Scrapheap Challenge while wearing distorted spectacles and shouting at inanimate objects? For me, that time was yesterday.

The task: fabricate a pair of 2mm steel reinforcement plates to the GT6 chassis rails to take the Mazda MX-5 engine mounts. Easy enough on paper. Measure twice, scribe once, bend to 90°, test fit, crack open a beer and admire your handiwork. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, let’s start with the metal bender. A tool, in theory, designed to bend metal. In practice, it looked at my 2mm plate and, after a brief whimper and some superficial creaking, gave up entirely – like a hungover teenager asked to mow a lawn. The handle flexed, the vice groaned, and what I got was not so much a bend as a gentle shudder of suggestion. Nothing crisp, nothing sharp – just a half-arsed arc that could have come from leaving the plate in the sun for a fortnight. I could have persevered with heat from a gar torch, but couldn't be arsed.

So I reverted to the Old Ways: vice, hammer, swearing. The bend came eventually, but of course, being 2mm mild steel, it came with baggage – a nice fat radius and enough spring-back to make a coiled mattress jealous. And that’s when my varifocals decided to join in the sabotage.

You see, varifocals aren’t so much corrective eyewear as they are a visual prank. The top of the lens is for distance. The bottom is for close work. And the bit in between? That’s for confusion, mistrust, and the creeping belief that all your chassis rails are somehow widening as they descend. I’d checked my work with a set square – perfect. But when viewed through the lower half of my glasses, the panel looked like it flared at the bottom, like a 1950s skirt caught in a breeze. I re-checked. Still square. But my eyes insisted it was all wrong.

And so began the self-doubt spiral. Was my measurement off? Did I bend it too far? Had I cut the piece slightly skewed? No, no, and no – it was simply optical gaslighting, courtesy of Glasses Direct lenses and ageing eyeballs.

But that wasn’t the only hiccup. The bend radius meant the flange sat 1 to 2mm proud of the lower chassis rail – enough to bugger the welding, throw off the alignment, and make me question whether I'd be better off taking up needlepoint. 

And here, at last, came the revelation: I should have allowed for an overhang. Just a few extra centimetres of steel beyond the lower end, to account for radius, spring-back, and general mischief. That way, once clamped in position, I could trim it back with the slitting disc for a perfect fit.

And that’s exactly what I did.

The result? Well, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves – but suffice to say, it fits. It sits tight, flush, and purposeful. No gaps, no flare, no perceptible lean. The overhang was trimmed back neatly. The bends, while not press-shop sharp, have a decent line and a firm grip on the rail. The notches are clean, the angles are true, and the whole thing – despite being born of brute force and optical betrayal – looks rather good.

One for the other side, just to bring both sides to the same level. It didn't need to be as big, as it wasn't covering a rebate in the chassis rail.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say it looks factory-adjacent. Both are adapted so as to not obstruct the wishbone nut.

Ready to weld into position.

And while I was riding this unexpected wave of competence, I thought I’d get ahead of the game and plan for removing the tub at some point in the future. I needed to brace the door apertures and add a cross brace across the cabin to stop the thing folding like a cheap deckchair once it’s unbolted. So I had a look on eBay (or E-Thief, as it’s better known), where some chancer wanted £100 for five bits of 1-inch box section that probably fell off the back of his uncle’s garage.

Instead, I did something radical. I walked half a mile down the road to the local fabrication shop, where a proper bloke with a tape measure, a bandsaw, and no pretensions cut me exactly what I needed – to length, no fuss – for £25.

No extortion, no delay, no drama.

Trump Calling!

So Donald Trump phones the BBC.

Not summoned. Not questioned. He just rings up. Like your uncle after three pints, wanting to reminisce about when he almost single-handedly ended a war. And what does the BBC do? Do they press him? Do they expose the nonsense? Do they go in armed with facts, figures, and follow-ups? No. They lean in like it’s an old pal on the line.

The result was less of an interview, more of a voicemail with a byline. Gary O’Donoghue, who is normally a forensic operator with a superb ear for verbal sleight-of-hand, found himself trapped in a format designed to fail. Trump was driving. O’Donoghue was in the boot. This wasn’t a grilling. It was a soft launch.

Trump spouted the usual cocktail of vanity, vagueness, and veiled threats. He said he was “not done” with Putin, like some jilted Tinder date. Claimed he’d nearly done a peace deal four times, as though Ukraine was a business merger that fell through because the coffee was cold. Then – and here’s the really clever bit – he warned Putin that unless there’s a ceasefire in 50 days, there might be tariffs.

Fifty days. A 7-week bombing holiday for the Kremlin. A time-limited offer to flatten what’s left of Kyiv before Donny gets the sanctions crayons out. It’s not policy. It’s theatre. The kind where the audience dies and the actor wants an award.

And what of his weapons pledge? He’s not giving Ukraine anything. He’s outsourcing it through Europe, which is like saying you’re buying someone a pint and then sending them to the pub with their own wallet. But the BBC didn’t press him on that either. Because by the time the subject came up, Trump was already off talking about King Charles and how Canada ought to be flattered he even knows it exists.

Here’s the real issue. Trump’s mastery isn’t in policy or planning – it’s in flooding the zone. He spews so many contradictions in so short a time that unless you’re prepared to interrupt and pounce, it all just floats past in a puff of presidential noise. That’s why you don’t let him ring you. You sit him down and pin him to a chair with facts.

But the BBC didn’t want a showdown. They wanted a scoop. A Trump-shaped trophy on the mantelpiece of impartiality, to wave about next time someone accuses them of being too “woke”. And in doing so, they handed him a free propaganda slot.

No questions about why he gutted NATO credibility in his first term. No challenge to his record on sanctions, which is about as strong as wet cardboard. No mention of his soft spot for strongmen or his transactional view of global alliances. Instead, we got nodding noises. The kind people make when they’ve just been told something absurd but they’re too polite to say so.

Let’s not blame O’Donoghue. He’s done the hard jobs. This wasn’t his call – quite literally. This was editorial cowardice. The kind that dresses up access as journalism, and headlines as scrutiny. And while they fiddled with the tone, Ukraine burned.

We’ll be told this was a “rare insight”. It was nothing of the sort. It was Trump doing what Trump does best – monologue, muddy, move on. And the BBC just held the phone.

Flick

It’s one of those things you don’t notice until you travel: our national obsession with flicking things off. At the socket, I mean.

British plug sockets – nearly all of them – come with little red switches. We flip them on. We flip them off. It’s as reflexive as tutting in a queue or saying “sorry” when someone walks into you. But to outsiders, it’s utterly baffling.

Because here’s the thing – almost nowhere else does this.

Pop over to France, Germany or the Netherlands and their sockets just sit there. No switches. No reassuring clunk. Power is always live. You unplug the hairdryer with an air of mild peril. The Continentals live dangerously – or, more accurately, trust their circuits.

The Americans? Even wilder. They’ll wire an entire room so the wall switch controls a socket, usually one with a lamp plugged in. And then forget to tell you. You stand there flicking the kettle and wondering if democracy really was worth it.

But here in Blighty, we’ve got ring mains, 13-amp fused plugs, and a collective neurosis about electricity dating back to when the toaster first killed the budgie. So we invented the switched socket – and made it a fixture of domestic life. Not a legal requirement, mind you, but so strongly recommended that builders now install them by the dozen without thinking.

Australia and New Zealand followed suit. Singapore, too. Places the Empire left behind with a plug and a prayer.

There’s logic, of course. The switch lets you kill power without unplugging – good for safety, handy for lazy types, and potentially lifesaving if you’ve got one of those 1980s electric fires that hisses like a Bond villain.

But more than that, it’s a habit. A ritual. The British approach to risk management: don’t just pull the plug – make damned sure the little light is off first.

It’s also deeply classless. From council flats to Georgian townhouses, that same click. One nation, under 240 volts, divided by taste but united by paranoia.

So the next time you flick a socket off before unplugging the iron, remember: you’re not being fussy. You’re being British.

And somewhere in Stuttgart, someone’s just pulled a live plug out of the wall without a second thought – and lived to tell the tale.

Savages.

Medieval History

I’m currently wading through The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History – Volume II has been reached, about 3/4 of the way through – which, like calling the Hundred Years’ War “a bit of a tiff,” is pure academic trolling. The main takeaway? Medieval Europe was one long punch-up in a muddy field, occasionally interrupted by plagues, popes, and the odd overcooked boar.

It's extremely hard to keep up with the constant, shifting tides of ownership. By the end of one page, a territory that was owned by one individual at the start of the page, has passed between 3 others - nothing stayed stable for longer than 5 minutes, which makes Vol II a rather turgid read. Every land-grabbing lunatic with a sword and a dubious family tree fancied himself a king. But let’s not romanticise it – these weren’t noble stewards of civilisation. They were homicidal kleptomaniacs in chainmail. What we now call "nobles" were just thugs with monograms. Born today, they’d be flogging crypto and appearing on GB News to denounce the Archbishop of Canterbury as “woke”.

And the names! Louis the Sluggard, Baldwin the Bulbous, John the Blind, Philip the Slightly Moist. All stomping about, lopping limbs off rivals, while peasants prayed the next overlord would be marginally less stabby than the last. It was less the “Age of Chivalry” and more a never-ending episode of Game of Thrones, just with worse personal hygiene and even less character development. It's hard to keep up with the shifting lands being handed to shifting Barons. The main reason was there was not uch concept as primogeniture and every landowner had to split his land between his mutually antagonistic sons.

All of them were related in some way or other and it was like the Mafia wars.

Eventually – miraculously – something shifted. People began noticing they had more in common with the bloke in the next village, who spoke the same dialect and hated the same taxes, than with some silk-wearing duke from Anjou who claimed their souls and livestock by divine right. Identity began to coalesce around language and culture, not just bloodlines and bonkers heraldry. Enter the nation-state: turbulent, bloody, often ridiculous – but a step up from being ruled by Henry the Quarrelsome, whose foreign policy involved biting people.

But of course, history always leaves behind a few awkward outliers.

Take Switzerland – a country so mountainous and inconvenient to invade that most powers simply gave up and went around it. Too rugged to conquer, too remote to centralise, too well-armed to ignore. Its cantons squabbled like a dysfunctional village fête committee, each with their own language, customs, and opinion on the correct way to melt cheese. But instead of collapsing into civil war or getting annexed by Habsburgs with ideas above their station, they just… carried on. Multilingual by geography, not ideology. A loose alliance of stubborn valleys who learned to get along because no one else wanted the job. A country accidentally preserved by its own inaccessibility.

Then there’s Britain – the sulky teenager of Europe, sat just offshore, arms crossed, muttering about sovereignty. Its island status spared it the worst of continental trampling (bar the odd Norman, Roman, or low-cost Ryanair invasion). Over time, this physical detachment fostered a mental one. While Europe tangled itself in imperial ribbons, Britain forged a fudge of nations: England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland… and Cornwall, quietly rehearsing secession in the corner over scones. Like Switzerland, it remained multilingual – not from tolerance, but from centuries of conquest, accommodation, and benign neglect.

It worked – or did – because the parts tolerated each other, vaguely united by free movement, shared institutions, and Antiques Roadshow. Strip that away, and you’re left with a group of flatmates who’ve realised they hate each other but are stuck on the same tenancy agreement.

So yes – most of Europe eventually staggered towards borders and identities that made some sort of sense. The great patchwork empires – Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans, Tsarist Russia – crumbled under the weight of bayonets, bureaucracy and bad blood. But Switzerland? The exception. Britain? The experiment.

Just don’t call either of them normal. They’ve read the rulebook – they’ve just scrawled their own addendum in Welsh, Romansh, and Glaswegian, and left a note in the margin saying no thanks, we’re full.

I'm Here to Help

I was wandering through Tesco the other day – as one does when in search of distraction, biscuits or both – when I noticed a curious phenomenon. Amid the whooshing trolleys, passive-aggressive tutting, and bafflingly complex meal deals, there stood a figure holding aloft a laminated placard that read, “I’m here to help.”

Now, I’ve seen a few cults begin like this. All we’re missing is a robe and a chanting circle in the baked goods aisle. But instead of sidling over and asking where they keep the tahini, I found myself tempted to ask them something altogether more existential.

“Are we but fleeting specks in an uncaring cosmos, Kevin?” 

“Can free will truly exist in a world governed by Tesco Clubcard pricing?” 

“Where is the self, Kevin? Is it behind the deli counter?”

Of course, Kevin – if that is his real name – would blink at me blankly, half-expecting I’d simply mislaid the aubergines, or was the sort of man who thinks 'Søren Kierkegaard' is a new Scandi bakery line. But surely, if one is here to help, one must be prepared for all eventualities – not just to point to the bog roll.

Because here’s the rub: nobody ever specifies what they’re here to help with. It’s like calling your political party “Reform” – it sounds nice and active, but covers a multitude of sins. “I’m here to help” might mean reuniting you with your trolley, or it might mean spiritually guiding you through a midlife crisis by the tinned tuna. Who can say?

And perhaps that’s the problem. The modern supermarket is now so vast, so labyrinthine, so bloody full of novelty hummus, that its very scale demands a new breed of shepherds. Gone is the wise village grocer who knew your name, your ailments, and your weekly order of sliced corned beef. Now we’ve got Stacey from seasonal produce clutching a stick like Moses in a hi-vis tabard, ready to lead you through the parting aisles of multipack crisps.

So next time I spot one of these supermarket Samaritans, I might just test the limits of their helpfulness. “Excuse me – do you believe consciousness is a by-product of neural complexity, or evidence of a universal substrate of awareness?” And when Kevin mutters, “Erm… aisle five, maybe?” – I shall nod sagely, whisper “Of course,” and vanish into the frozen veg, leaving him to question his life choices.

If nothing else, it’ll break up the monotony.

And isn’t that, in its own way, a kind of help?

The Rubber Fought Back

It began, innocently enough, with a spot of metalwork on the scuttle. The BP4W coil packs, proud and unrepentant, had made it clear they weren’t going to fit without some persuasion. So out came the angle grinder, and off came a neatly cropped section of Triumph steel – a precise little rebate, 6 cm in from the edge, just deep enough to make room for the towers of spark-slinging japery.

But I wasn’t about to leave a hole in the structural brow of the GT6. This is not a hot rod. It’s a restomod – which, as everyone knows, is the difference between "bodged" and "engineered." So I fabricated a neat L-shaped reinforcement that I bent with my metal stretcher, spanning the width of the recess like a steely eyebrow. Stiff as a Presbyterian deacon and a damn sight more useful. It will be spot welded into position with an extra brace across the front section.

Unfortunately I split the mild steel at the corners of the filler piece by being a tad too enthusiastic with the metal stretcher, but that was be MiG welded, or I can easily make another.

Job done, I thought. But the extra engine mount brackets I'd bought on e-Bay were still laughing at me from the bench – offset, awkward, and entombed in rubber that had clearly signed a non-disclosure agreement with Satan.

So I turned my attention to the Mazda mounts.

The plan was simple: drill holes in the rubber, weaken it, and then slice the rest away. The reality was more Jackson Pollock than engineering. The drill bit jammed. The grinder screamed. And before long, I had glistening flecks of molten rubber speckled across both arms and the front of my polo shirt – which, fortunately, was from a charity shop and cheap as chips. No great loss, though I did get a look from Hay later that suggested otherwise.

Realising I was entering into a battle of attrition, I changed tactics.

I grabbed a scrap of metal from the GT6’s old rear valance – a poetic repurposing, if ever there was one – and set the mount on top. No petrol, no drama. Just a gas torch and half an hour of quiet smouldering on the gravel outside the garage, the air slowly filling with the scent of regret and progress. The rubber didn’t melt so much as crumble, falling away in charred flakes until the steel bracket stood proud and free, like Excalibur pulled from a tyre fire.

I came inside for a cup of tea. That’s when Hay noticed the shirt.

“What on earth have you been doing?” I said nothing. she just shook her head with the weary grace of someone used to finding scorched valve springs on the kitchen windowsill. But the bracket was clean. The scuttle was reinforced. And I was one step closer to making a BP4W look like it belonged in a Triumph GT6 – which it absolutely doesn’t, but we’re past that point now.

All in all, a productive Thursday. One shirt demoted. One set of repurposed bracket reborn. And a car that, one finely fettled inch at a time, is becoming something delightfully irrational.

Over the weekend I gave some thought to how I'm going to mount the C brackets on the chassis, focusing on the passenger side of the chassis, which has a rebate cut into it to accommodate something from the GT6 engine. I decided to fabricate a box section from 2mm steel to cover the whole section, which will have to be repeated on the driver side to ensure both sides are level.

To get the right position for the C brackets I again test fitted the engine into the old chassis, using some wood to cover the passenger side rebate and ensure the engine seated evenly, rather than canted to one side.

That was about as vertical as achievable, even if a bit high, but I was more interested in the longitudinal position to get the chassis mounts in the right position.

The shot below shows the salvaged C brackets laid on top of the replacement chassis' rails and the rebate on the lower rail. 

Having some crap aluminium handy, I made a rough mockup.

The salvaged C brackets will be notched at the right angle to fit over the box section and be welded to it at 35 degrees from the vertical, which matches the angle of the engine side mounts. The depth of the notches will determine the height at which the engine sits.

I'll have to put a hole in the centre of the inner section of the box so the wishbone nut can still be accessed. I'll also have some more room when I receive the lightened, aluminium crank pulley from the USA and have it lathed to remove the outer groove, which is no longer necessary since I removed the power assisted steering and A/C.

Some additional cropping near the driver side turret and old GT6 engine mount will give me some lateral room around the alternator.

I don't want to do any cropping on the old chassis, as I will probably sell it once I get the tub off, but I can use it to gauge what needs to be shaved off the new chassis, providing I do my measurements accurately, which I don't....

Now to find some 2mm mild steel plate to replace the aluminium template.....