Yesterday, as my Oxford contemporaries discovered whether they were moving up or down the slippery pole at Westminster, my five year old son Joshua and I celebrated getting a sex pest suspended from his work, by going blackberry picking. It is horses for courses I guess. But boy was it fun as we discovered two new spots where nobody seems to have been and which were dripping with blackberries. Joshua’s motive is that if we picked enough I could make more cordial which then becomes ice cream. His birthday party looms and he is keen that his friends have his favourite ice cream. Meanwhile…
It is 8 days to Sharestock when 70-80 folks will spend the day in a tent on a raised garden on the banks of the River Dee, eight m,iles from Chester but in Wales! There will be free drinks all day and up to four meals of locally produced food. There is salmonand pike fishing, prize croquet but this day is for those who want to make more money from shares. It will be fun and entertaining with no speaker, least of all me, pulling their punches.
I am not denying that the fuel crisis will hit a lot of folks hard this winter. If our entire political and media class had not driven this nation down the path prescribed by the uneducated doom goblin Greta Thunberg and had we not prolonged the bloodshed in Ukraine we would not be in this mess. But that is for another day. The GroupThink will – on both counts – be shown to be in the wrong just as they were on masks and lockdown. But will thousands die in unheated homes as we are told by the media and the Labour Party each day? I remember my childhood in the 1970s.
My mind flashes back to that day in 1978, or perhaps it was 1977, when I was climbing out of the old outdoors pool at Warwick school, a place where penguins would have complained about the cold.
I am working like a demon picking blackberries with Joshua in order to produce as much blackberry cordial as possible. On Saturday we spent an hour picking at our two favourite sites and the amount we produced generated 600 ml of cordial which is enough to make three litres of ice cream. But with both Sharestock and Joshua’s birthday party looming I need about 6 litres, plus some for normal family use. And fear not there will be other ice creams at both events (lavender and rhubarb & ginger). So it is all hands to the coalface.
Bruno seems to think it is becoming reliant on Russian Gas in the 2010s. Can any reader think of any action of the last 100 years which might, perhaps, have been an even bigger mistake?
A tweet from the wonderful BurnsideNotTosh. Yes this is 2022
One of three brothers who all became vicars ( until one was defrocked and sent to prison) , Douglas Winnifrith was my great great uncle and in this podcast I bring you his account – written up in a 1915 book – of Christmas Day 1914 on the Western Front.
Apart from a brief couple of weeks when we were ordered to celebrate Black Lives Matter last year, Pride Month which started in June 2013 has been celebrated every month since. This week it is Pride Week in Ottawa, capital of the woke Socialist hell hole that is Canada. I am delighted to read in the must subscribe newsletter, the Ottawan – prop my pal D Atwater Esq – that “the Ottawa Tool Library presents the Free Pride Week Sewing Circle, for 2SLGBTQIA+ makers of all levels of sewing experience. Tickets are free.” Radical! Stonewall Riot v2. But what on earth is 2SLGBTQIA+ – I bet even President Castro-Trudeau cannot tell us what that stands for. But as a Welsh taxpayer there is something else bringing me even more joy.
It s just 16 days to Sharestock and I bought the big tent for it yesterday!. It will not just be about shares to short. Peter Hambro will talk about gold and how to play it. Chris Bailey will talk about making money from long only value investing in a bear market and 3 CEOs will face a 15 minute grilling from me, including Optibiotix boss Steve O’Hara and Cathal Friel of Open Orphan. But the short sellers presenting are legends.
The apples should be falling later but this hot summer means that in the old orchard by the river they are starting to drop already. So they should be almost ripe. If I wait longer more will fall down the sloping banks into the river or just sit on the ground waiting for worms and other bugs. And so Joshua and I gathered a large plastic ball full and did our first press of ther year, aided by our new toy, an apple scratter.
Some of the responses to the tweet below sent out by Lincolnshire Police showing its officers dancing away at the LGBT Pride parade in Lincoln suggest that only hate filled Daily Mail readers could possibly object.
I have a lot of time for the good Reverend the, now retired, vicar who started off with Jimmy Somerville in the Communards. He handled the death of his husband stoically and he serves up really quite interesting material, an increasing rarity on the BBC. On twitter he brought my attention to an interesting Northamptonshire artisan cheese. But yesterday on his show the subject turned to women’s soccer and he insisted that audiences at Euro 2022 were “huge” and that was a game changer. The problem, as I pointed out to him on a tweet he ignored, is that what he said is just not true.
If it was just down to Ukraine or printing vast amounts of new money all of Western Europe would be in the same mess. But it is not as the graphic below demonstrates. UK electricity is vastly more expensive than anywhere else in Europe? Why?
Yes it is just 21 days to the most unusual event in the share calendar – ShareStock. On September 10, sixty to eighty folks will be sitting in tents on an elevated lawn by the banks of the River Dee listening to legends from the investment world give talks and them chatting to them informally, one to one, in the drinks tent.
