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.
My friend N has lent me her apple picker, a tall pole with a basket at the top. With an apple scratter now bought I will do a small test harvest of apples from the old orchard by the river tomorrow, with a view to pressing some juice. Those apples are starting to drop so some are clearly ripe. Meanwhile I have made a a little something for the Mrs…
We have one damson tree here at the Welsh hovel up in the vegetable patch. It overhangs the road down to the hovel and you know when the fruit are ripe as they spatter onto the road and your car crunches over them as you drive in or out. There was a second tree alongside it but the gales took it and I have planted a cherry tree in its stead. For there is already a second source of damsons. My neighbours have a tree which leans over into our garden so we are allowed to pick its fruit too. Our neighbours are in their nineties and their needs are not that great.
With a hat tip to Darren for this one, like so many signs of the sad decline of a flabby and decadent civilization comes from Canada. No it is not a ruling that bestiality can be legal as long as there is no penetrative sex. That happened in Canada ages ago, back in 2016. Keep up. From Darren’s excellent newsletter, the Ottawan:
My trip started at 10 AM GMT on a Monday and ended 2.30 AM GMT on last Thursday. I will not be doing it again. I describe exactly what happened.
