Red or Blue Organs

It turns out that your attitude to organ donation might be hiding in the ballot box. According to researchers from the University of Queensland, those of a left‑leaning persuasion are far more willing to sign up as organ donors, happily imagining their kidneys going off to lead a new life somewhere in Milton Keynes. Meanwhile, conservatives tend to hang on to their bits like they’re family heirlooms – as if Granny’s corneas might one day be worth a fortune on Antiques Roadshow.

The same Queensland team dug into why this might be. Conservatives, they say, place a “higher value on bodily integrity” – which is academic shorthand for “don’t touch my spleen.” Add in a splash of magical thinking – the “tempting fate” theory – and you have a group that seems to believe signing the donor register is basically sending the Grim Reaper an engraved invitation.

Across Europe, things get more nuanced. A University of Bath analysis of Eurobarometer data found that just having any political affiliation – red, blue or the colour of a decomposing cabbage – makes you more likely to tick the donor box than those who couldn’t give a toss about politics. Apparently, simply taking a view on bin collections or tax policy makes you more charitable about where your pancreas ends up.

But here’s the interesting twist: while the right may be reluctant to donate their organs, there’s no evidence they’re equally reluctant to receive them. No peer‑reviewed study has caught a self‑declared conservative nobly refusing a new liver for reasons of ideological purity. Research into religious and cultural reluctance shows the pattern clearly – plenty won’t donate, but if a transplant is needed, the answer is usually “yes please” rather than “keep your filthy socialist kidneys away from me.”

Of course, fairness demands a little counterbalance. If conservatives cling to their livers, the left can be accused of clinging just as fiercely to the 45p tax rate – and, according to recruitment stats, to the comfort of not enlisting in the armed forces. The right might not want to give you their liver, but the left probably won’t storm the beach to save it.

Then there’s the real irony: the opt-out system. In countries where you’re automatically assumed to donate unless you say otherwise, altruism shoots up – largely because no one gets round to the paperwork. Left-leaning folk still lead the way, waving their donor cards like Glastonbury tickets, while those on the right clutch their livers, muttering about “property rights.”

So next time someone bangs on about “owning their body” while voting against universal healthcare, remember this: they may cling to their organs like priceless antiques – but if the worst happens, they’ll take yours in a heartbeat. And the left? They’ll happily give you their spleen… provided you don’t ask them for a tax cut or a rifle.

Open All Hours

I dress, almost exclusively, in charity shop clothing. I say “almost exclusively” because I am, on very rare occasions, prone to treating myself to a rather nice, new shirt for those times I never actually go out. These rare new purchases hang in the wardrobe like exhibits in a museum of unfulfilled social plans.

You may wonder what the above image of Ronnie Barker and David Jason references, but that will become clear.

My mornings start clean. Serviceable charity shop polo shirt, trousers or shorts, depending on the weather, and every intention of remaining presentable until bedtime. Hay, ever the voice of reason, will warn me to change into my second-best charity shop clothing if I’m about to do anything that might involve grease. “Second-best” meaning the stuff already boasting the faint whiff of petrol and that subtle patina of mystery stains.

The problem is, I sometimes “just pop” into the garage to do a clean job on the GT6 – something that doesn’t, at first glance, require a change of attire. That’s where the rot sets in. I think, “Well, if I’m careful, I can do so-and-so job,” which invariably turns out to be a so-and-so job involving enough grease to lubricate the QE2. Even if it’s just on my hands, those hands inevitably find their way to my clothing, like an absent-minded MP fiddling with the expenses forms.

I have, in theory, a solution: two grocers’ coats, the kind worn by Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours, that can be quickly thrown on to protect my clothes. I also own a full set of overalls – brand new, never used, hanging there like some mythical suit of armour for a battle I’ve never fought. The trouble is, I rarely use either. It’s always “just a minute” and “it’s a clean job” right up until it isn’t.

The net result is a constant migration of the morning’s clean clothing to the work clothes drawer – a drawer now twice the size of the clean clothing one, which needs constant restocking from the local charity shops. It’s become a sort of textile black hole, sucking in pristine garments and spitting them out with mysterious black streaks and the faint aroma of EP90.

One day I’ll learn. But then again, probably not.

Popping Knees and Being Trapped

Right, picture the scene. My GT6 is currently sporting those welded door aperture braces – a little invention to stop the body from folding like a wet cardboard box while the tub’s off. They’re perfectly functional if your only aim is to maintain structural rigidity, but less so if you also want to actually get inside the car.

Anyway, I’d had yet another trial fitting of the MX-5 engine with the gearbox attached, and the verdict was in – the original GT6 gearbox support had to go in order to lower the gearbox slightly. No big deal, I thought. Just whip it off. It’s held in place by two Allen bolts. Easy. Except, of course, the nuts for these bolts are hidden away under the chassis rails, like they’ve been placed there by some sadistic Triumph engineer whose personal mission in life was to make sure owners of a certain age develop a colourful vocabulary.

The nuts can’t be reached from outside the car without circus training, so the only option was to climb inside and remove them through the transmission tunnel hole. This meant vaulting over one of my own braces – which, let’s be honest, is about as dignified as watching a walrus attempt the high jump. My left knee has been on strike ever since I spent a few hours welding on my knees last week, so the idea of bending it into the footwell was… optimistic. Still, in I went, landing squarely on the really bad knee (as opposed to the just bad knee), which made a loud “pop” like an impatient champagne cork. Miraculously, whatever was misaligned in there popped back into place. NHS orthopaedics, eat your heart out – I appear to have invented the DIY knee reset.

Spurred on by this unexpected medical triumph, I managed to get a half-inch ring spanner onto the nut and remove the bolt on one side. The victory was short-lived, however, because I now faced a new problem: I was trapped. There’s a certain indignity in realising that you’ve become the human equivalent of one of those stranded sheep you see in the news, stuck halfway through a fence. It took me a full thirty minutes to work out a method of escape that didn’t involve either screaming in agony or calling the fire brigade.

The good news is I got out. The bad news is I now have to do the other side. At least I have a 25-year-old son who’s willing to help me occasionally – and who may even inherit the GT6 when I finally peg it. Though with my luck, he’ll sell it to buy a Tesla.

And while we’re on the subject of design quirks, I think I’ve mentioned before that the original GT6 transmission tunnel was made of cardboard – yes, cardboard. It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether Triumph’s design department had a sideline in packaging. Sadly, a tuned, turbo MX-5 engine is going to produce rather more heat than a Corn Flakes box can handle, so a sturdier option is needed. You can get GRP or plastic GT6 tunnels, but they a) melt faster than a choc ice on a car dashboard, and b) don’t fit the MX-5 gearbox anyway. My cunning plan? Hack a perfectly serviceable transmission tunnel out of a scrap MX-5 and graft it onto the GT6’s scuttle and floorpans like some sort of Frankenstein’s automotive upholstery experiment.

Of course, the MX-5 gearbox is longer than the GT6’s, which means it collides head-on with the original handbrake. The solution? Delete the manual handbrake entirely and replace it with a modern electric actuator – one button, no faffing. The gear selector may also need a bit of cosmetic surgery to angle it forward, so it’s not sticking up beside my elbow like an uninvited dinner guest. After all, I’m going for “restomod chic”, not “DIY ergonomic disaster”.

VAT on Public School Fees

“50 private schools shut due to Labour’s VAT raid!” – shrieks the Daily Mail, clutching its pearls with such vigour you’d think Keir Starmer had personally bulldozed Eton and replaced it with a polytechnic.

It’s a juicy headline, designed to trigger a thousand coffee-fuelled rants in kitchen diners across Middle England – but as with most things Mail-related, it collapses under the weight of actual numbers.

Let’s start with that dramatic “50 closures” claim. Sounds catastrophic, doesn’t it? Like some sort of educational Rapture, where children are torn from lacrosse pitches and flung into overcrowded state schools with no Latin and suspiciously few rowing opportunities.

But here’s what the Mail doesn’t mention – because, frankly, it would ruin the fun.

Over the past five years, private school closures in England have averaged around 77 per year. That’s not a fluke – it’s the natural churn of a sector that includes a lot of tiny prep schools and specialist outfits running on tight margins. Some close. Some open. Some go under because they were teaching Mandarin to three pupils and a Labrador.

And how many closed so far in 2024? 46. That’s right – not 77, not 100, but 46. Which is actually below the long-term average.

Now, how many new private schools opened in the same period? 77. That’s not my projection – that’s from the Department for Education. So despite the Mail’s wailing, the number of independent schools in England actually rose from 2,421 to 2,456 between January 2024 and January 2025.

Yes – you read that correctly. More opened than closed. Net gain: +35.

In other words, if 50 schools closed, then at least 85 opened. But the Mail doesn’t report that, because it turns the whole “Labour’s Class War” narrative into a bit of a damp cravat.

Instead, it frames this as a direct, singular consequence of the new VAT policy – conveniently ignoring that most of these closures were down to long-standing financial fragility, shrinking demographics, or simple retirement of founders. If Labour’s VAT policy did anything, it was to give some of these already-wobbling schools a polite nudge.

And what about the supposed “exodus” of pupils? The Mail breathlessly suggests that thousands of parents are yanking their offspring from independent schools in protest, shoving them into the nearest comp and demanding to speak to the head about the lack of croquet.

The actual drop in private school enrolment? 1.9%. That’s around 11,000 pupils out of 582,000. In statistical terms, that’s a modest dip – easily attributed to demographics and fewer new joiners, not some VAT-fuelled stampede for the state sector.

But then, facts aren’t really the point, are they?

The Mail doesn’t do nuance. It doesn’t do context. What it does do – with relentless enthusiasm – is turn policy tweaks into culture war grenades. It turns perfectly normal market churn into apocalyptic proof that Labour wants to nationalise the school tuck shop and force all children to sing the Red Flag instead of hymns.

So let’s recap:

• Around 50 closures? True – but fewer than average.
• 77 openings? Also true – just not reported.
• Net increase in independent schools? Uncomfortable, so swept under the editorial rug.
• Enrolment drop? A minor 1.9%, painted as a crisis.

The real story isn’t that VAT is destroying private schools. The real story is that the private sector is proving far more resilient than the Mail would have you believe. It’s adapting, not collapsing.

But don’t expect the Mail to report that. They’re too busy loading the outrage cannon and aiming it squarely at the middle class, hoping to spark a tuition-fee uprising led by outraged parents in gilets.

Because when it comes to Daily Mail economics, reality is optional – but panic pays the bills.

Let's Leave the ECHR

There’s a certain type of British slogan that sounds bold, decisive, and patriotic – until you think about it for longer than three seconds. You know the sort:

“Let’s take back control!”
“Let’s trade with the rest of the world!”

And now the latest steaming turd from the same rhetorical stable: “Let’s leave the ECHR!”

All three have the same DNA – vague enough to be catchy, confident enough to sound like a plan, and utterly detached from how the world actually works.

“Take back control!” we were told. Which we promptly did – by throwing ourselves out of the largest free market in history, erecting trade barriers with our neighbours, and turning passport queues into endurance events. We took back control and then had no bloody idea what to do with it.

Next up: “Let’s trade with the rest of the world!” As if we hadn’t been doing that already, and as if swapping frictionless lorry-loads of goods to Calais for a one-off crate of jam to New Zealand was a masterstroke of economic wizardry. All it’s really done is downgrade us from “leading global power” to “Tesco Value Singapore”.

And now – because no Brexit disaster is complete without a new scapegoat – we’re being told to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, a post-war British invention designed to stop governments from acting like, well, fascists. Apparently, human rights are now the problem. Not incompetent ministers, not a backlog the size of Birmingham, not Home Office cock-ups or the fact we can’t negotiate a readmission deal to save our lives – but rights. Imagine that.

The claim is that the ECHR stops us from deporting people. It doesn’t. It just stops us from deporting them into torture, death, or vanishing into a black site. In other words, it asks that we behave like human beings – a standard we used to be proud of. Now it’s painted as some foreign yoke imposed by sinister European judges (never mind that it’s based in Strasbourg and not Brussels, and we helped write the thing).

Even the idea that leaving it would fix anything is laughable. We’d still be bound by the Refugee Convention, the Convention Against Torture, and every basic principle of international law we haven’t yet torched. And we’d still need other countries to agree to take people back – which they won’t do if we’ve just torn up every treaty like a petulant child with a sticker book.

But that’s not the point, is it? The point is sounding tough. Like “take back control” and “global trade”, it’s a slogan for people who want a fight, not a solution. Something to scream on a panel show, tweet with a little Union Flag, or mutter darkly in the pub after four pints and a whiff of GB News.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world – the actual, functioning world – looks at us in baffled silence. The country that once helped write the rules is now threatening to burn them, and for what? Deportations we already do? Trade deals we already had? Control we never used properly?

So here it is: another empty slogan for the bonfire. “Let’s leave the ECHR” – the natural heir to “Let’s take back control”, the spiritual cousin of “Let’s trade with the rest of the world”, and just as damaging, deluded, and doomed.

You’d almost admire the consistency if it weren’t so catastrophically stupid – especially when no one mentions that deporting people still requires a country on the other end to actually accept them, which they tend not to do when you’ve just torn up your human rights treaties and shouted “foreign meddling” across the Channel like a drunk at a ferry port.

Jumping the Sinking Ship

So, Rupert Matthews has jumped ship. After 40 years in the Tory party – that’s four decades of nodding sagely while the country slid into potholes, debt and cultural flatulence – he's scuttled over to Reform UK, the political equivalent of a lock-in at the Angry Gammon Arms. According to Farage, Matthews’ defection is a "major coup." I suppose if you define “major” as “mildly embarrassing but still breathing,” he might have a point.

Who is Rupert Matthews? Well, aside from being Leicestershire’s Police and Crime Commissioner – a title which now appears to require nothing more than a hi-vis gilet and a press release – he's best known for churning out over 170 books about ghosts, UFOs, and other things that only appear in the minds of the easily impressed. He’s basically Britain's answer to Dan Brown, if Dan Brown had flunked geography and thought the Treaty of Lisbon was a coded plot to turn Birmingham into Bavaria.

But don’t scoff – this is a man who believes he’s been chosen to tackle “wokeness” in the criminal justice system. That’s right. Apparently the rot set in when constables were encouraged to use people’s preferred pronouns, instead of just tasering them and asking questions later. Matthews wants us to model our prisons on American supermaxes – presumably because nothing says “efficient justice” like a society that jails more people per capita than China and still can’t stop school shootings.

And then there’s his big idea: deport all foreign criminals immediately upon conviction. No appeal, no delay – just herd them onto the first Ryanair to Nowherestan and hope the paperwork catches up. It’s not clear whether this includes second-generation Brits who had the temerity to be born brown, but let’s not get bogged down in detail. This is Reform UK, where nuance goes to die.

You might wonder why he’s defecting now, having stood for the Tories in the last PCC election and won. Couldn’t possibly be that Reform just swept the local elections in Leicestershire, could it? Perish the thought. No, I’m sure it’s ideological. A sudden, blinding revelation – like Saint Paul on the road to Market Harborough – that the real enemies of Britain are drag queens, solar panels, and the metric system.

Rupert, whose previous highlight in Brussels was once warning that the EU might "invade" Britain via administrative treaty, has now taken on a new foe: feelings. He wants Britain to toughen up, crack down, man up – though one suspects his own idea of a strongman is a retired Territorial with a Labrador and a copy of The Daily Express wedged under one arm.

Reform’s delighted, of course. Farage stood beaming next to him like a man who’s just bought a second-hand car that still has the ashtray intact. This is the new political elite, apparently – ghost-hunting author turned crime czar, whose grasp of policy lies somewhere between an Enid Blyton plot and a Donald Trump rally.

So here we are. Rupert Matthews – the ghostwriter who’s now ghosted the Tories – has flounced over to Reform to crack down on the woke, deport the bad guys, and generally perform 1980s cosplay with fewer facts and more volume. Somewhere, a copy of The Road to Serfdom is weeping quietly into its tweed binding.

I’d say you couldn’t make it up. But Rupert probably already has – in book 147: Ghosts of Common Sense: The Day Britain Forgot How to Think.

Aunty

I used to be firmly in favour of the BBC licence fee. Call it civic pride or just an appreciation for a decent wildlife documentary without an ad for toothpaste shoehorned in every six minutes. But lately, I’ve found myself twitching. Not because I’ve fallen for the swivel-eyed “defund the BBC” crowd – most of whom think “bias” means anything to the left of Genghis Khan – but because I’ve noticed something worse: the Beeb hasn’t been captured by the people. It’s been captured by politicians.

The whole point of the licence fee, once upon a time, was to keep the BBC independent. A bit of insulation from corporate shareholders, tabloid pressure, and ministerial sulks. That was the theory, anyway. In practice, it’s turned into a political leash. Every time the BBC steps even one toe out of line, ministers start rattling the tin. “Time to freeze the licence fee.” “Why not scrap it altogether?” “Subscription model, anyone?” – all floated with the same menacing smirk.

And the BBC folds like a deckchair.

Take Richard Sharp – former Tory donor, Boris Johnson ally, and conveniently appointed BBC chairman. He helped arrange an £800,000 loan for the PM, then somehow found himself in the top job at Auntie. When the conflict of interest was exposed, the BBC wriggled and squirmed, but it was all too revealing. This wasn’t a broadcaster holding the powerful to account. This was one cosying up, desperate not to bite the hand that feeds.

Then came the Gary Lineker debacle – punished for tweeting a personal opinion about the government’s asylum policy. Not during a broadcast. Not while presenting Match of the Day. Just an entirely separate comment on his own time, for which he was publicly slapped down. What clearer signal could there be? The message was obvious: if you work for the BBC, you’re expected to self-censor – not just on air, but in life.

And lurking behind this culture of nervous compliance is Robbie Gibb – the so‑called “anti‑woke” crusader parachuted onto the BBC Board, with one foot in Tufton Street’s shadowy network of “think‑tanks” and the other still damp from his time wading through Downing Street’s comms swamp. Gibb’s presence isn’t about oversight – it’s about overreach. It’s about making sure the BBC never strays too far from the approved hymn sheet, that “balance” means giving the culture warriors their pound of flesh, and that anyone with the faintest whiff of independence is quietly frozen out.

And so the output suffers. “Balance” becomes both-sides nonsense. Climate change deniers given equal time with climatologists. Brexit presented as “controversial” rather than catastrophic. Every topic hedged, every sentence caveated. The goal isn’t to inform – it’s to avoid offence. Usually to government ministers, tabloid editors, or the handful of perpetually-outraged voices who think the licence fee should be paid in grovelling apologies.

This isn’t editorial independence. It’s institutional cowardice.

So maybe it’s time to cut the cord – not to kill the BBC, but to set it free. Independent funding. Independent governance. Ring-fenced, transparent, and beyond the reach of whichever halfwit happens to be culture secretary this week – and yes, beyond the reach of people like Gibb and his ideological gatekeeping too.

Yes, that carries risk. The output might become bolder, edgier – even upsetting. Good. That’s the point. A truly independent BBC wouldn’t ask “Is this fair to the government?” – it would ask “Is this true?”

Right now, Auntie isn’t a national treasure. She’s a battered hostage blinking under duress. And if we want to save her soul, we’ll have to prise her out of the grip of party politics.

Before the only thing left of public service broadcasting is a smug panel show hosted by Jacob Rees-Mogg, with Robbie Gibb grinning offstage like a man who’s just strangled the last bit of integrity out of the room.

The BBQ

It all started, as these things often do, with the casual announcement: “We’ll have a BBQ for the Bank Holiday. A few friends from the motor trade, a few colleagues. Nothing fancy.”

Of course, “nothing fancy” in my world rarely stays that way. I could have wandered down to B&Q and come back with a flimsy tin box with three spindly legs, guaranteed to collapse under the weight of a half‑cooked burger. But no – that would offend every fibre of my engineering brain. If I was going to do this, I’d do it properly.

And there was another factor – motor trade people are notoriously unreliable. If you invite them for a BBQ, you could end up with 30 attendees or 3. You plan for 3, you’ll get 30. You plan for 30, you’ll get 3 and a dog. So the BBQ had to be big enough to cope with the maximum, just in case the entire trade turned up with a plus‑one and an appetite.

That’s how I ended up staring at an empty 208‑litre Castrol drum – gifted by the Ford dealership up the road, where I know the General Manager. A proper drum, the sort that once held enough oil to service half of Bristol. It practically whispered, “I could be a BBQ.”

It wasn’t my first brush with the concept either. Back in my seafaring days, the engineers would hack an oil drum in half, scrounge some angle iron and engine‑room plating, and before you knew it, there’d be a BBQ big enough to feed the entire crew. Never harmed anyone, despite all the scare stories you now hear about oil drums and toxicity.

The very first job was obvious: burn it out. Before there was a stand, before there was any talk of a griddle, there was a ceremonial inferno. A towering pile of logs and scrap went into that drum to strip oil residue, fry off any lining, and blister the paint like an overdone crème brûlée. The neighbours muttered darkly, DEFRA probably circled me on a list, but by the end, the inside was clean and ready for business.

The “fire floor” was another bit of scavenging genius. I’d found some corrugated cladding at work – thick, galvanised stuff. Perfect for holding logs off the base, but it had to go through the baptism of fire first: the same burn that cleaned the drum stripped off its paint, and then I took a grinder with a wire brush to remove the last of the galvanising until it was honest bare steel.

A neighbour donated some old oven shelves, which I welded together into a single griddle, but it was more suited to casserole dishes than lumps of meat. Instead, I blagged some rusty chicken grating from the fabricator up the road, which was perfect for a main cooking area and a shelf for keeping food warm.

A piece of old, mild steel created a burger frying area on the left. A quick blast with the sandblaster will remove the surface rust.

Then came the legs. Oh, the legs. There were sketches. There were calculations. There were even a few muttered lectures – from myself to myself – about the geometry of X‑frames. Should the cross point sit at the drum’s bottom, below it, or somewhere near a ley line aligned with the Equinox?

Dozens of measurements later – each one claimed to be “final” – I did what any sensible fabricator would have done in the first place. I guessed.

And the guess worked.

I welded up two sturdy X‑frames from 20 mm box section – leftovers from bracing the GT6 tub. Added a cross brace, and suddenly the frame looked less like a BBQ stand and more like something Robot Wars rejected for being too overbuilt. Collapsible? No. Stable? Absolutely – you could park a forklift on it.

The clever bit, if I say so myself, was the mounting. No ugly bolts or spindly brackets – just neat little welded stubs that let the drum drop on like it was made for it. The griddle? A free offcut from the local fabricator. The VHT black paint was left over from the Mazda MX‑5 engine rebuild.

And the tabletop? Well, I didn’t like the idea of this rather handsome oil‑drum stand sitting in the garden rotting between BBQs – so I dug out a sheet of 12mm plywood that had been sulking in my garage for over a year. A quick cut, a bit of varnish, and the BBQ stand suddenly became an occasional table for occasional use – proof that even industrial scrap can scrub up nicely for polite company.

In fact, the only things I actually bought were the hinges. Everything else was begged, borrowed, scavenged or unearthed from the archaeological layers of my workshop.

By the time I stood back and looked at it, what I had wasn’t just a BBQ – it was a monument. A Castrol drum reborn, sitting proudly on GT6 box‑section legs, ready to feed a crowd – or just three – without ever looking like it was bought in the seasonal aisle.

So when my friends from the motor trade turn up for the August Bank Holiday, they won’t find a wobbly grill from a garden centre. They’ll find the BBQ to end all BBQs – forged from leftovers, built for anything, and moonlighting as a table when it’s not cooking.

And when someone inevitably asks, “Why didn’t you just buy one?”, I’ll hand over a perfectly charred burger, rest my pint on the table top, and say: “Because this one won’t blow over in the wind, Mike. And because I could.”

Bet it's bucketing down at the Bank Holiday.

New Lamps for Old

There I was, minding my own business in a pub while away in the motorhome, when a lamp caught my eye. Not just any lamp – no, this one was fashioned from the stock of a shotgun, and I was instantly smitten.

There’s something about seeing an everyday object turned on its head that makes you think, “I could do that.” Admittedly, my inspiration bar was set some years ago by a table lamp I once saw in Amsterdam made from a gold-plated AK47 – which, to be fair, would have been a tad much for the Cotswolds. But a tasteful lamp fashioned from a gunstock? That, I thought, has “Philip’s workshop” written all over it.

Of course, when you get an idea like this, there’s the small matter of sourcing the raw materials. Enter Facebook Marketplace – that marvellous bazaar of everything from broken Dyson hoovers to horses you wouldn’t trust to carry a sack of carrots, let alone a human. There, on the Isle of Wight, I found not one but two air rifles. Perfect. Except the seller “couldn’t post them for obvious reasons,” which is fair enough – you can’t exactly stroll into the Post Office with a rifle-shaped package and a cheery “second-class, please.”

But since I only wanted the wooden stocks, the chap kindly agreed to saw them off and stick them in a box. That’s commitment to customer service, that is. Two amputated air rifles later, I was £20 lighter plus postage – a bargain in my book, though I now imagine somewhere on the Isle of Wight there’s a man scratching his head over two newly limbless rifles.

Now, here’s the rub. The stocks have made it to my workshop, and there they’ll no doubt languish for a year or more, propped in a corner next to the Triumph GT6 bits, odd lengths of steel, and half-finished “projects” that will all absolutely be tackled “one day.” Because making a lamp isn’t as simple as sticking a lightbulb on top and calling it a day.

No, the tricky bit will be drilling a straight hole from the bottom to the top of the stock. This is the sort of task that sounds easy until you try it and end up with an exit hole halfway through the cheekpiece, turning your elegant lamp into something out of a postmodern art exhibit titled Misery in Wood. I may have to take the drastic step of cutting the stock into sections, drilling each piece, and reassembling it like some sort of mahogany Frankenstein’s monster.

Will I ever get round to it? Probably. Eventually. Maybe after the GT6 stops being a pile of parts. Or when the weather turns. Or when I finally find the right drill bit. Until then, those stocks will sit quietly, judging me from the corner of the workshop – mute reminders of yet another brilliant idea that’s just one straight hole away from glory.

Recognising Palestine

Israel and a chorus of lawyers are waving the Montevideo Convention like it’s holy scripture, insisting Palestine can’t be recognised because it doesn’t tick all four boxes. Permanent population? Tick. Defined territory? Tick – albeit with Israel doing its best to redraw it with a bulldozer. Government? Tick‑ish – but if the world waited for every state to have a spotless, unified government, Somalia would still be a blank space on the map. The final hurdle – the ability to conduct international relations – is the one they pounce on.

But here’s the awkward question that knocks the legs off their lectern: what if the reason Palestine struggles to exercise that capacity is because Israel keeps its foot on Palestine’s neck? That turns the Montevideo argument into farce. It says, “You can’t be a state until you can behave like one,” while ensuring you can’t behave like one. That’s not law – that’s a rigged game.

And let’s pause on this word Convention. A convention isn’t a thunderbolt from the heavens or some stone tablet handed down by the Almighty. It’s a treaty – an agreement between states to play by a shared set of rules, usually drafted to bring a semblance of order to the international free‑for‑all. Montevideo wasn’t meant to be weaponised against peoples struggling for self‑determination; it was meant to help clarify when statehood exists, not block it.

Because if Israel’s interpretation held sway, any occupying power could smother a nation into permanent limbo simply by refusing to let go. That precedent is grotesque. Picture Britain in the 1950s telling Kenya it wasn’t “ready” to be a state – and then using that as the excuse to keep its flag flying forever.

The reality is plain: Palestine has people, land, and functioning government structures, however imperfect. It’s already engaging with most of the world. The only reason it doesn’t fully meet every Montevideo test is because Israel is making sure of that.

So yes, lawyers can wave the text like a fig leaf. But the spirit of Montevideo? That says statehood isn’t meant to be something an occupier can crush just by keeping its boot pressed down long enough.