The BBC decided to send one of its reporters, Branwen Jeffreys, to some grim Northern town where folks were poor so that they could take the piss out of the “levelling up” programme which is one of Boris Johnson’s little joke policies.  Firstly the state broadcaster showed the traditional scenes one associates with grim post industrial Northern towns such as this one, Ashington in Northumbria. And then complained that the Government was not spending enough on infrastructure to change that.

My son is a 5 year old kid just like all the other kids in his form at Primary school.  He plays, he learns, he obeys the teacher. He gets on well with his peers and with older kids in a school where there are, I think, three children of colour. Joshua is the only one in his form. Boy must he have stood out today.

As I have discussed openly, I have in the past considered suicide. Thankfully those dark days are long gone but 125 folks a week do kill themselves in the UK each week. If my mother’s own suicide taught me anything it is a tragedy for the person who ends their life but, perhaps, an even greater one for those left behind. I know that both my father and my mother’s brother, Christopher Booker, were haunted to the end by the idea they could have stopped it.  The pain and guilt they felt were all too obvious. 

Plan B for England should covid case numbers increase involves bringing back face masks, vaccine passports and an encouragement to work from home. And this, we are assured by the experts, will help to stop the spread of covid, protect the NHS, make us all safer, yak, yak, yak.  But the problem is that there is already hard data from the British Isles to show this is utter rubbish.

When Angela Rayner termed the Tories “scum” she was attacked for her language and then the papers snapped her having a crafty cigarette outside the Labour party conference. That was the picture then used because, in 2021, all smokers are deemed stupid, ignorant and just rather dirty. Truly: smoking is the new evil.

One of the totemic symbols of global warming is the polar bear. Al Gore predicted they’d all be gone by now as he picked up his Nobel prize. In fact numbers are at record levels. Another is the Maldives. The islands were meant to be under water by 2010. In fact sea levels are unchanged and not one island is underwater. And then there are the coral reefs. I shall hand you over to Prince William…

Today we learn the sad news that Dennis Hutchings has died aged 80. Mr Hutchings served this country for 26 years as a soldier but the “peace process” in Northern Ireland meant that he was pushed into an early grave by this wretched faux Tory Government.

There are some folks out there who suggest that to make amends for Britain’s role in slavery we white folks here in Britain should ALL have to pay reparations to ALL people of colour on the basis that their ancestors were slaves. Heck, I know we did not enslave the Indians but I am sure we must have committed multiple Imperial sins in India, becuase in the new narrative of 2021 Empire is always bad, so surely my Mrs gets a look in as well? No. Okay well let’s talk about Alex Scott, the former footballer and TV presenter who is a person of colour and about me.

The cooking apples keep falling from the tree which sits on the edge of my vegetable garden, the area formerlly known as “the jungle.” There is only so much stewed apple we can make – I still have two large jars in the fridge and you can’t eat apple crumble every day. So last night it was chutney making.

The murder of Tory MP David Amess is shocking and horrible and, naturally, one thinks of his family. But the reaction of the media and political class has been telling, a sign of just how completely and utterly out of touch they are with we dirty plebs. The same could never have been said of East End born David Amess but he was an unusual fellow inside the Westminster bubble.

The chilli bushes are still spitting off firey red chillies and so, as you can see below, I am still threading chain after chain to hang up in the kitchen, close to the aga, to dry. And after just over two weeks, the first chilis have dried. I bit one to taste and, gosh, one tiny nibble and my mouth was on fire.  Those dried chillies have now been put in an airtight jar where they will last a year. 

Joshua and I are now almost at the end of On the Shores of Silver Lake the fourth of the books by the great libertarian author Laura Ingalls Wilder. My old babysitter, DD, is also re-reading the series, just for her own pleasure, and is now a book ahead of us in The Long Winter. She says I must store up well at the Welsh Hovel as tough and cold times lie ahead. However, on that front, today saw a gut-wrenching setback.

There was a mad old coot sitting in the middle of the road yesterday explaining how she was doing it to stop the world running out of oxygen. I kid you not. It turned out that this woman aged 61 was a retired GP. She had quit a while back to concentrate on saving the planet and the point is that after years troughing it and with a bumper, taxpayer funded pension, she could afford to quit at an age when nearly all of us still face years at the coalface.

Having spotted some blackberries in the churchyard yesterday morning, when the Mrs arrived home to take charge of Jayarani, I headed back through the drizzle with young Joshua to harvest. We discussed the weather in Welsh as walked up the hill. We both know all the key phrases and also “it is sunny” not that we get to use that very often.