The Greek Easter is next week when we will be in Wales. Welsh Easter is today when we are in Greece. So it was a mixed celebration.
Back in August of last year the sight of a parched Lake Vyrnwy in the hills about an hour from where I live was a posterboy for those predicting more and more droughts thanks to man made global warming. As someone who remembers my local reservoir drying up in 1976 but refilling very quickly the next year I thought that this was media bull at the time and with data from United Utilities and a site visit I have demonstrated a number of times that I was right and the MSM was talking GroupThink cock. But the mainstream media has not apologised, indeed over at the Guardian they have doubled down.
It is the first survey since 2017 by the local GP practice, the one just over the river among the infidels in England. Suffice to say I was damning in my assessment but the last question caused particular comment “With which gender do you most identify?” My choice was: Female, Male, Non Binary, Other or Prefer Not to Say.
In four days time, the advance party, myself and Joshua will be in Greece ensuring that a third proper loo is fitted at the hovel and that the last bad bit of road on snake hill is mended. We will take out a few more books although the library there is extensive and have to buy some loungers for the pool before the arrival of the Mrs and Jaya. The house is then, near as damn it, complete. There may be a picture or two to take out and hang and a few more books and DVDs but it is a place I could now live in all year round. I wish. There is good news and bad news from Kambos.
You need to take out a second mortgage to afford a train fare these days. There are constant strikes by greedy and overpaid workers disrupting passenger travel. So what is the priority of the industry? Of course paint a train in rainbow colours and staff it with members of the LGBTQA+ community. How very 2023 in the decadent West. Virtue signalling, as you can see below, is so much more important than offering a cost effective reliable service. I wonder how many Diversity Officers at South West Trains it took to come up with this wheeze?
Instead of heading straight to the petrol station on the Wrexham Ring Road and back, I took a diversion from just inside the village boundary, a walk across the fields to Frog Lane, something advertised as ½ mile. My plan was to do the walk and back on both legs of my walk to the petrol station so adding 2 miles to last week’s nine miles. Plans, plans, plans.
I see my hero Peter Tatchell is tweeting a headline from the Pink News on how Britons “unanimously reject calls for bans on drag shows. Tatchell thinks that those who oppose drag shows are “far right” and a tiny minority. I sense some fake news and a fake poll here. And I am right.
In these Russiaphobic times many will see this article as proof that I am a Putin apologist. I am not. The invasion of Ukraine was wrong, and I am sure that, while both sides have committed war crimes in this war, Ukraine as well as Russia, it is the latter whose sins are greater. But that is not a reason for Britain to supply depleted Uranium tank shells to Ukraine. Iraq and the Yugoslav wars show just how horrible these weapons are.
I am ordering a stack of Discovery apple trees to create a colonade along the path by the river. I am not sure how they will do in what is a flood meadow but I shall stake them firmly and see. The stakes I put up by the river with some oak saplings last year have survived even if the oaks have not. And the trees I have ordered are already 5 foot high so I hope they will flourish. My orders were divided as my normal supplier had only nine trees left and so I had to use Beechwood Nurseries for the rest. Buyer beware: Beechwood are shysters!
The river Dee is still outside of its banks and I am still rather worried about the killer cows and thus on Saturday morning, for my second Rogue Bloggers for Woodlarks training walk, I opted for the most boring of walks: my house to the service station on the Wrexham ring road and back.
There is a photo out today of Ms Braverman laughing on a trip to Ruanda. With hindsight that might have been unwise as she claims to be tightening the UK’s immigration system. I shall believe that when I actually see it. However, there can be no excuses for the tweet below from the leading anti Brexit campaigner Steve Bray photoshopping the laughing minister in front of the entrance to Auschwitz. He also removes from the origonal picture two laughing Rwandans either side of Ms Braverman.
The Donald reckons he will be arrested over alledged payments to porn star Stormy Daniels on 21 March 2023. I discuss that case, the sad weaponisation opf the law in American politics and what it all means for the 2024 elections in this podcast.
My father and mother were in Oxford in the 1960s at a time when Sergeant Morse arrived in the City and when Oxfam was set up and they were – like Morse – almost, lifelong supporters. They paid over a monthly direct debit even when they could not afford it and would order Christmas presents from the third world via the Oxfam catalogue. But in his final years I finally persuaded Dad that sending his cash to an organisation which covered up for paedophiles in the field was not a good idea. We discussed the bloated salaries of the administrative staff in Oxford and how Oxfam was now opining on areas well outside its original remit of fighting famine. He could not argue and one glorious day I answered a begging call for a Tom Winnifrith from the aggressive sales team at Oxfam, and, with the consent of my father, ( also called Tom) told them to bugger off and to stop the direct debit.
As an assistant to the leader of the Lib Dems in the house of Lords we might not be too surprised that poor Caroline has caught a case of #BrexitDerangementSyndrome. One imagines there is a lot of it going around in the offices or Lord Newby. Whoever he is. But we should not mock Caroline but should pray for her as her level of sickness is off the scale.
Next year we must do something special as the Greek Hovel will be 100 years old. Maybe I shall build a stone wall as an add on up by the house. I shall consider my options. This year, between the start of April and the end of October, the place will be busy.
