Funerary Fridge Wars

Given we watch PBS America documentaries a lot, we're inundated by adverts for low-cost funerals, where someone collects the body and returns the ashes by hand, leaving the rest of the family free to have a party on the basis of the savings made. Hay and I wondered if Prince Philip ever considered this no-nonsense type of funeral - he always struck us, after all, as a no-nonsense kind of person and didn't want much fuss over his funeral. The saving would have been huge in his case and would have funded a massive party for the Royals.

Talking of Prince Philip's funeral, did you notice that no-one was wearing spectacles? Not many of the Royal Family do wear specs, but you do see the Queen wearing them a lot. However, imagine the embarrassment of having fogged up specs due to having to wear masks and blundering into everyone else or sitting in the wrong place. Mind you, without your specs, you're just as likely to sit in the wrong place - and she was sitting on her own without her specs on...

Now tell me this, if you know. Hay has a habit that annoys the hell out of me, although I'm not sure why it annoys me.

When I buy, for example, some blueberries, I'll place the container in the fridge and leave it there till I've used them all up, at which time the container - which is invariably the plastic, supermarket tray, goes into the recycling.

Hay, on the other hand, will swap the container for a slightly smaller one, from our stock of plastic Tupperware containers, whenever the volume of blueberries decreases, generating a heap of extra washing up.

My theory is that the larger the container, the less the fridge has to work to keep chilled - a full fridge uses less energy than an empty fridge. Hay, I think, just wants to keep as much room available in the fridge.

Is this a female thing?

Knight Attire

While idly trawling FlipBoard, the news aggregator site I use, I came across an item about great medieval knights and spotted this image of a knightly tournament in France.

It shows Jacques de Lalaing fighting the Lord of Espiry at the Passage of Arms of the Fountain of Tears. Now these knights were meant to be tough old buggers, but I never realised they fought while wearing pink tutus. Mind you, he was French.

Now, Jacques de Lalaing was either putting two fingers up at his opponent, or he's the reason the English won at Agincourt, Crecy and Poitiers against the effete French. 

He went down in history as being one of the first knights to be killed by gunfire.

Upload / Download

Isn't it a shame that you live for decades, picking up knowledge, learning from mistakes and gaining wisdom, only for it to disappear the second you kick the bucket. You're unable to pass all this experience on to your progeny, except perhaps a few snippets.

I wonder whether, before I shuffle off my mortal coil, science will progress to the point where all the memories  and experience locked chemically into one's brain can be downloaded to some technological device and then uploaded to whomsoever.

I don't mean the conscious you - that would be nightmarish and akin to immortality - but merely the accumulated data.

There again, one's experiences determine who you are and, it could be argued, that someone else's uploaded knowledge would reshape the conscious you. Uploading Honest John Major's knowledge to Boris Johnson, for example, might result in a slightly more honest Boris. No - I agree, far too fanciful.

Legalised Plunder

Here I am, banging on about the slave trade again, but does anyone else find it ironic that when the slave trade was banned and compensation had been paid in 1837, the trafficking of opium to China took on a sudden exponential trend? 

It's even more ironic when it is constantly trumpeted that Britain was the first country to ban the slave trade, as if it was some act of altruism, rather than a contract involving massive amounts of compensation from the public purse for loss of earnings; compensation that was immediately invested into an equally nefarious business that brought misery to millions of Chinese.

The East India Company had kept shipments of opium to China quite low, so as to increase profit margin, while farming out the actual smuggling to smaller operators so as to keep their hands unsullied. However, once the British government took over the East India Company (and India) and realised the huge profits to be made, shipments rocketed, resulting in prices falling dramatically, necessitating further increases in shipments and a vested interest in spreading the habit of chasing the dragon as widely as possible among the Chinese. In the mid 1800s, Britain was, in effect, the world's largest drug trafficker, but greed eventually killed the golden goose when the trade was no longer profitable. 

The two Opium Wars the Brits engaged in with China (fondly remembered by the Chinese to this day - not) were fought in order to force China to legalise the trade through gunboat diplomacy, which the Chinese Emperor had banned since the early 1700s. The ban was, after all, a barrier to free trade. The wars seriously weakened the political system in China which, indirectly and arguably, culminated in the emergence of the People's Republic of China.

The French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, once said; "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it." Nothing could be truer.

Another irony is that the type of people who were profiting from the Chinese opium trade were cut from the same cloth as those who today are busy declaring a War on Drugs. Perhaps there's a lesson here for the War on Drugs - make something legal and it becomes unprofitable. 

Uniformly Consistent

Members of the Royal Family will not be wearing uniform for Prince Philip's funeral on Saturday. Commentators maintain it's to spare embarrassment to Prince Harry, who has no leave to wear uniform since being stripped of his honorary military ranks. 

Being so stripped, he is a veteran, and veterans are not allowed by law to wear their uniforms after leaving the services, as Harry has done. All they can wear are their service medals. The rest of them have honorary ranks which were given by the Queen, and are therefore still considered to be on active service.

I don't believe for one minute that Harry would be embarrassed - quite the reverse, it's the rest of them who would be embarrassed at dressing up like extras in a North Korean version of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, when it's Harry who we most associate with honourable active service in wartime. 

Of course, Prince Andrew saw active service in the Falklands, but he's somewhat blotted his copybook of late, and he's still a bloody Rear Admiral, despite never progressing beyond the real rank of Commander RN and himself being retired, and therefore not entitled to wear uniform, unless of an honorary rank bestowed by the Queen.

Autistic Cats

We have some new neighbours and they also have a cat. It's already investigating our garden and it won't be much longer before it's joining our cat, our adopted stray - Railway - and our other neighbour's two cats that have made our house their home. It's the underfloor heating that attracts them.

However, the new cat has a problem - its tail is permanently curled under its body. It must have had an accident to its tail at some stage - but that means that, as far as other cats in the neighbourhood are concerned, it's wandering around with the equivalent of two fingers permanently stuck up at the them. 

Railway and Kitty are still not getting on too well, but Railway only gets as far as our porch, where he occasionally sprays.

Come summer, I think Railway might be tempted to come into the house through the open French doors, but I honestly hope he doesn't. He must be riddled with fleas and spraying in the house won't be appreciated.

The only cat Kitty doesn't mind too much is the neighbour's ginger tom, but he's probably the most unthreatening cat in the world and, since his road accident, wanders around as if he's in a permanent daze, showing not the slightest hint of aggression to anything or anyone. I think all the other cats realise he's not quite the full shilling.

Failures of State

I'm about 2/3rds through reading Failures of State, an analysis by two Sunday Times investigative journalists into the multiple cock-ups perpetrated by our current government in its handling of the Covid crisis, and came across this damning paragraph, which I have to say is, sadly, one among many.

"On the day that Northwick Park was at critical level, Public Health England made a confusing announcement that sent out the wrong messages. The threat of Covid-19 was being downgraded so it would no longer be classed as a High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID). This seemed inexplicable, as the virus was fast becoming the deadliest pandemic the world had seen for more than a hundred years. The downgrading, the government said, was a technical matter of terminology. The virus may have killed a lot of people, but it was a low percentage of the total numbers infected, according to the official line. Yet an investigation by the BBC programme Panorama discovered the move was at least partly a way to get around the shortage of protective equipment in the NHS. The problem was that the Health and Safety Executive had earlier ruled that the very top level of PPE should be worn when dealing with a disease ranked as an HCID. The change in classification therefore meant health workers could be kitted out with less protective equipment - making the most of the threadbare stocks available. The government had requested that the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens remove Covid-19 from the HCID list. Sources on that committee said it had taken the decision pragmatically based on the PPE stockpile shortages at the time. On the same day, NHS staff were told it was fine to wear less protective aprons and basic surgical masks."

Regardless of what you think of the Sunday Times' politics, it has an admirable record on investigative journalism, with numerous journalists receiving multiple awards.

Then there's the fiasco of the Nightingale Hospitals, which couldn't be used because there simply weren't enough staff to man them, which was in part also due to the woeful state of our PPE stocks, which meant doctors and nurses were dropping like flies.

Then there was the triage system the government introduced, meaning the elderly with pre-existing conditions, the very people they'd promised to protect, were denied intensive care treatment and left to die due to the shortage of ventilators, all so the government could say the NHS hadn't been overwhelmed. As they hadn't been tested for Covid, they didn't appear in the Covid death stats, even if showing the signs of Covid infection.

Doctors and nurses were warned by Health Trust managers about whistleblowing and threatened with all manner of retribution if they complained about lack of PPE, or indeed anything.

The litany of incompetence and skullduggery is breathtaking - and this was during the 1st wave of infection. It's no wonder Johnson isn't too keen on a public inquiry.

I heartily recommend the book unless, of course, you're one of the many for whom Boris and his bunch of incompetent slackers are nothing less than gods and incapable of doing wrong and the fact the government managed to get its vaccines before the EU (despite the EU signing its contract with AZ 24 hours before the UK - 27th vs 28th August 2020) somehow atones for the death of 127,000 of the citizens it was responsible for defending. Modelling has shown that had we locked down 2 weeks earlier, as advised by the science at the time, the death toll would have been halved and the most dominant strain across the USA and Europe would not be the UK variant.

Shame, in this country of ours, has gone the same way as honour - it has disappeared.

Some will say that we should withhold judgement till a public inquiry, but does anyone actually believe there will be an independent inquiry? There may be a whitewash, but Boris, with his majority, will resist a real inquiry. It would be too embarrassing, especially this close to an election.

Talking of public inquiries, the government has announced it will initiate an enquiry into the conduct of David Cameron and his lobbying activities on behalf of a company that the German anti-corruption service was trying to close down a while ago; a company with dubious links to Liberty Steel. The irony is that David Cameron himself promised in 2010 to implement policies to prevent him doing exactly what he has spent the last 12 months actually doing. Dennis Skinner was famously chucked out of the House of Commons for referring to Cameron as Dodgy Dave.

The double irony is that Boris Johnson has a habit of ignoring the recommendations and results of inquiries anyway. Indeed, his own independent advisor on the Ministerial Code resigned over this very issue of ignoring recommendations - and he has still not been replaced. Given such a replacement may have a lot more to say before this government itself is replaced, I doubt a replacement independent advisor will be appointed this side of an election. 

As for the Cameron inquiry, while the result won't implicate Boris, it could result in a call for tighter restrictions on him when he leaves politics, so I wouldn't imagine he'd be in no hurry to implement any recommendations arising from it. Nigel Boardman, the lawyer appointed to lead the inquiry, is compromised from the start; he is a non-executive director of BEIS which supervised the British Business Banks which is the very entity which lent money to Greensill.

While I'm at it, Boris Johnson said, when Foreign Secretary, that it was 'unconscionable and inconceivable' for any Conservative Prime Minister to do do exactly what he has a done as PM in respect of Northern Ireland and for which the EU is currently being blamed by the Tories.

What is it about the British public that allows this kind of malfeasance to proliferate and defend the indefensible?

Cyclehome II

While investigating potential bases for a cyclehome, I came across these:

That last one would be excellent as the basis for a van, requiring bugger all pedalling and be considerably faster.

Cyclehome

I'm really tempted to build something like this, but fear that without electric assist it would be impossible to cycle up even a small incline.

Orange and Green

I was listening to someone yesterday talking about the situation in Northern Ireland and he said something that is so blindingly true, but had never struck me before.

What he said was that, in Northern Ireland, the political discourse is not between left and right, or red and blue, as it is elsewhere in the UK, and indeed most of the world, but solely between Orange and Green - Unionism and Republicanism. That's its tragedy. Everyday politics of big government vs small government or low tax vs public spending, simply doesn't enter into the equation. It's all about identity and nuance is the price paid.