Flights of the butterfly

  • MERCENARY RIVER

    Just finished  a book, “The Mercenary River” by Nick Higham. It’s a hard read, but worth the effort. Hard, because It has to be. It covers four hundred years of history and does it in detail. Necessary detail to understand what happened and its implications. I am not going to precis, summarise or extract from…

  • LITERALLY ANYBODY ELSE

    I am so happy to see that somebody in the United Sates is hoping to run in the presidential elections under the above name. I wish him luck and hope he wins. It would be a wonderful comment on the state of politics, throughout the world, not just in one country. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t make…

  • The Speaker Apologizes

    The Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has apologised to parliament over his handling of an amendment procedure. There are two people who need never apologise to parliament: the King, and the Speaker of the House of Commons. The King agrees not to comment on or interfere in the affairs of Parliament, the body professing to run…

  • SPEND, SPEND, SPEND

    Got an email from my local authority. They do that from time to time to justify their worthless existence and make excuses for wasting my money. Among other things it  says: “Over the next four years we’re proposing spending: Let’s have a little look at that: £105 million on the highways network £25 million on…

  • Happy 2024

    And a Happy New Year to you too. And what a lovely year we have in store (that’s just me being positive, don’t take it seriously). Thanks to wind farms, solar farms and various other climatic fluidic switches, we are looking forward to months of flooding. Land that used to absorb rainfall and release it…

  • JOKES

    Difficult to know where to begin. Looked at the paper this morning and thought I’d opened a jokebook by mistake. Bojo will tell the Covid Panto that he delayed lockdown “amid concerns that people would tire of the restrictions and flout the rules”. Shorthand for “he thought they would be as greedy, self-centred and stupid…

  • FAKE NEWS

    This is from a posting on YouTube, by “New Newspaper Today”, titled “Italy now! A snowstorm with terrible winds buried cars and houses disappeared in the Aosta valley”. It seems somewhat strange that road signs in an Italian location are in English. How very cosmopolitan the Italians are. And how unfortunate for these tourists who,…

  • Inward Investment Outward Cash

    Richie Rich has just come bouncing up to the podium, babbling prettily about Billions of Pounds of Inward Investment into the UK. Must be the oldest scam in the book. “Inward Investment” has been around since the dawn of mankind in various guises. (not sure the “Dawn “ is appropriate for the beginning of one…

  • Red, Amber and Crash

    Instead of wittering on about speed limits and a whole load of other things, it would be really helpful if TDATS would bring in some useful legislation. For a start, the 30mph speed limit was brought in in 1934. At that time, there were still people about who had hardly ever seen a motor car,…

  • ISRAEL, GAZA AND FREE SPEECH

    The law does not allow me to express my opinion on this or any other matter. Consider this: You are asked a panel of ten questions and you have promised to answer honestly. Questions 1 – 8 are  no problem. But, your honest answer to question 9 is proscribed by law. Therefore you do not…