2024 approaches. The fireworks are ramping up, and the pigeons are getting unsettled.

Is it possible to create an arbitrary bookmark - not bookmark a post - using the microdotblog API? @help

I thought 15C was too warm for snow at Christmas, then looked up and saw it was a tree in blossom.

TikTok is evil beyond redemption. Its community safety is a sham, and it seeks to profit from misery and suffering. This cannot escape its employees and enablers. If you work for or do business with TikTok, make quitting your new year’s resolution. The choices we make matter.

Friends and followers, we have the winners for the winter solstice 🆆⚓️ on 🛞🛞competition.

Oh. The Substack clowns have de-cloaked. And to no one’s surprise they’re the RealNazis™. If you’re not bailing right now, then, we see you - we know what you are.

Should you ever find yourself sarf of the river in need of a decent lunch, you could do a lot worse than Marcella on Deptford High Street. Good food, interesting wines, friendly staff.

marcella.london

Principled Tories? Uh-uh. No. Nope. There are none.

Relief for Rishi Sunak as Rwanda bill passes first vote in Commons

Here’s the thing about neoliberals: they would rather “go fash” than tax the rich and build affordable housing

Political and financial journalists should be clear as to whether they are writing about the “market” or “Mah-Ket”, the infallible god of the Neoliberals.

The idea that Sunak and the Tories gave two tosses about the jobs of hospitality workers is laughable. Property portfolios of city centre landlords more like.

A lasting legacy of neoliberalism is that in place of solidarity it has created a culture of belligerent victimhood.

The obvious, rarely stated.

Policy is more responsive to preferences of the well-heeled than of the worse off, and people know this - but it [is] a blind spot for most politicians

Next UK election set to be most unequal in 60 years, study finds

The people who build and operate TikTok are ghouls.

How will Labour leader and earnest Thatcherite Keir Starmer outdo the Tories’ cruel “no families for foreign care workers” proposal? Indentured labour?

Plan to cut immigration raises fears of NHS staff shortages

Christmas Menu - first of the second thoughts

For Christmas Day, I’m thinking a starter of wild mushrooms preserved in olive oil, silken beancurd with chopped capers and dukkah, lamb’s lettuce alongside the friselle salad.

The original: Christmas Menus 2023 First Draft

So, last week’s OpenAI chicken coup was a grift to hype their Q* product.

Few things say global Britain more than a freight train of empty FreightLiners trundling to Tilbury.

More more puzzling still is why this cabbage is called a hispi cabbage in restaurants and a sweetheart cabbage in supermarkets.

Why the humble hispi cabbage is the new cauliflower steak

The OpenAI game of thrones reminds us that in the broösphere you will be replaced by AI, not them.

Interesting that OpenAI’s backers and funders are keen to hang on to insubstantial TED-talker Sam Altman: it suggests that OpenAI in fact have nothing.

I wonder what causes the painful broken glass in the ears treble that I hear when listening to digital music. Is it my ageing ears, crap equipment, or the wrong settings? Or have people got used to sharp but lifeless, shallow and un-nuanced highs in pursuit of thumping bass?

A tugboat pulls a large float advertising pesto (of all things) past the O2.

Tories to ban themselves under new extremism proposals.

Revealed: plan to brand anyone ‘undermining’ UK as extremist

Britain’s elite institutions appear to be spectacularly incapable of producing a governing class able to run a modern country. Perhaps this explains the dominant reactionary thread that is woven through an establishment that aspires to rule the past.

Okta, the new way to spell disingenuous cowboys. Joking apart - whole governments trust identities to these muppets.

Working from home? Here’s a tip. Get yourself a cuckoo clock. Muji sell nice modern-style ones.

The Covid Inquiry so far - journalism and Oxbridge need a long period of sober reflection.

I was at a good Newham community event today on their People Powered Places strand. It got me thinking about transformative people. I had a (sad, ageing GenXer behind the curve) epiphany: I’ve been privileged to know some transformative people, and 9 out of 10 - I say again: 9 out of 10 - are women.

Bluesky asked me for my date of birth, but will only let me enter a date that is 1,000 years older than I admit to being.

The BA app for iPad is excruciatingly useless. All it presents is a screen to book a flight. No other options. If I enter a destination to book, nothing happens. Great work, British Airways!

Britain’s housing crisis needs radical action not Labour’s technocratic small beer.

Labour would oversee ‘biggest boost in affordable housing in a generation’

Having impoverished the country and precipitated a housing crisis, the Tories can’t kick off a culture war between homeowners and renters because no one can afford either. Instead in bargain basement Britain we get a government-sponsored culture war between car drivers and the rest of us.

My tip to people trafficking entrepreneurs struggling with burdensome government regulation: make a lot of noise about using AI and don’t forget the generous donations to the Tory party.

I’m doing the Hackney Legal Walk on Saturday to raise money for Citizens Advice. Their advice helps people assert their rights, leading to over £2M income gained by residents of East London in July and August alone.

londonlegalsupporttrust.enthuse.com/pf/citize…

More proof should you need it that the Tories think you are stupid.

Rishi Sunak considering inheritance tax cut, report says

Hello younger voters👋. You’ve heard that politics doesn’t offer you anything because you don’t vote. That’s only half the story. Politicians didn’t pay attention to deplorables or Brexiters until they voted the wrong way. You don’t need go fuck-barking, but do put the shits up the politicians.

What is remarkable about this is not that almost 80% of the electorate don’t trust Sunak on the environment, but that 20% of them are so terminally gullible and stupid that it’s a wonder they’ve lived to reach voting age.

Only 22% of Britons trust Sunak on climate, finds Guardian poll

Have we got to the stage yet where the parasites shuck off their Tory and begin to seek out a Labour host?

Sunak would not have given his climate speech if the Tories didn’t think us fools.

Rishi Sunak announces U-turn on key green targets

Tories vs ruinous Brexit: “Get it done!”

Tories vs existential climate crisis: “Let’s just slow things down for a culture wars poll bounce”. Not before shuttling over to the US to ensure UK banks get IRA bonanza dibs.

Sunak planning to drop net zero policies in pre-election challenge to Labour

I’m pretty sure everyone who booked Russell Brand knew what kind of person he was. Still, they went ahead and booked him.

Crazy how these credentialed white men reacted with a fantasy projection when an algorithm got as good at passing the tests they took as tokens of their entitled intelligence. “It’s a really clever machine and it will get cleverer and cleverer and, and, and turn you into paperclips! So there!”

What a steaming pile of crap Resy is. Truly awful user experience that must take some experience to have so enshittened.

It’s curious just how many boomer and gen-x academic and academic-adjacent types who spoke of the need for the young to develop critical thinking skills in the face of nascent Web 2.0 are now covid-denying antivaxxers railing against being imprisoned in 15 minute neighbourhoods.

Currently reading: The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel. Thoughtful and articulate on how meritocracy has metastatised in neoliberal societies 📚

Neoliberal meritocracy doesn’t stand up to even the lightest scrutiny. I thought that its credentialed elite advocates championed it for self-congratulatory or self-serving reasons. That they do it out of ignorance and incuriosity seems now both more likely and considerably more depressing.

Oxford university, Britain’s educational Mordor, spewed out hordes of neoliberal PPE graduates who laid waste to public life and brought a Britain they had broken to its knees. Now its dank courtyards nurture the neofascist Longtermist death cult.

“What Britain needs is more spineless, visionless neoliberals whose big idea is NHS privatisation” said no one on the doorstep. So who are Labour talking to?

I was shopping for bird food at the Range at Surrey Quays this afternoon. What a nice store! There was a bit of a queue at the checkouts, and they put on more staff. The customers didn’t break queueing order, and the staff were friendly and helpful. Also, I scored 12.5kg of bird seed for £7.50.

Friends, what is the Magic Technocrat lever that the Tories haven’t used which Reeves and Starmer will pull to deliver growth and prosperity with otherwise the Exact Same Policies?

I’m reading Show Me the Bodies by Peter Apps 📚

Fuck me, this is a painful, important book. First non-fiction book this year that I’m crying as I read it.

Got home before the dishwasher finished for the first time and noticed it rather swankily projects its progress onto the kitchen floor. Maybe this is something all dishwashers do? In which case, shows how unobservant I am!

Do you live in Newham? Have a great idea? Residents can apply for grants of up to £5,000 for community projects through People Powered Places. There’s two weeks left to apply. You can get help with your application at your local library. newhamco-create.co.uk/en/pages/…

Saw this pigeon down at Telehouse. It looks like CGI, but there’s no trickery. The flesh had been torn from its neck, exposing the spine. It was steering clear of the flock there, but was quite agile, and dodged my attempts both to feed it and to grab it to take it to the pigeon hospital.

Not sure if it’s the weather or it’s time to fly home, but the swifts are massing over the Olympic Park.

Philosophically, neoliberalism is superficial and incoherent - almost as if it were designed to appeal to uncritical, incurious swots. In practice it is a failure: enabling a rentier plutocracy’s march to fascism

“Principled” conservatives: you may think the “dash for fash” is a cynical ploy to attract voters disenfranchised by neoliberal technocrats, a plan to entrench a rentier-capitalist plutocracy, or merely an unintended consequence of incompetent electioneering. Whatever. Why are you enabling fascists?

Here’s the thing about technocrats: they find themselves running a death camp, so they set about improving the productivity of the gas chambers.

One of the problems of the modern political class in Britain is that being a person of action means being photographed in front of a whiteboard gesturing with a dry wipe marker.

The didgeridoo player at Stratford station always attracts pigeons, who stamp their feet in time to the rhythm. The electric guitar player seems to drive the birds off though.

Rejoice, elder peasants! Those high-paid, high-skilled, high-productivity jobs could soon be yours.

Over-50s could deliver takeaways, says work and pensions secretary

So, the right wing argument for not doing much about climate change is, “It’s not so bad. It’s not as if everyone will die.”

Banking printing money from interest rate hikes. The extractive energy sector struck a money gusher after Russia invaded Ukraine. Now the Tories are working assiduously to promote the interests of these sectors, which were shrewd enough I guess to direct some of the free money the Tories’ way.

I occasionally see a dilapidated ice cream van around Hackney that looks like a horror movie prop. Surely a spoof, it’s emblazoned with the company name “NAZ Ice”.

I’m not sure why a public transport service whose exhortations fail to get people to do self-interested things like “keep to the left” or “let the passengers off first” thinks that a few posters will be effective in combating the harassment of women on the network.

The choice in British politics is between weak, unprincipled invertebrates and weak, unprincipled invertebrates who try to make themselves look strong by kicking migrants and transgender people.

What electoral constituency is Starmer trying to appeal to?

Two nasty parties

Twenty is plenty

So, I am posting in greyscale from an eInk device.

Does “elite overproduction” explain all the mess the UK and the US are in? I don’t think so, but it sure is an important factor.

Remember all those “think of the children” Tories during the pandemic? Where are tbey now?

Home Office had murals for children removed at second asylum centre

In the battle of East London leisure destinations, Canary Wharf is advertising at Westfield Stratford

I’m at St Marks Gate/Cadogan Terrace. The Greenway - a scenic walk down a Victorian super-sewer starts just a few meters away, as you can smell in the breeze. This is also the site of the death of the first person to be murdered on a railway train.

“Torn” is a great song. Fight me. (And Mrs Moorhen).

Maybe don’t throw bacon sarnies and toasties at the nesting coot.

Was wondering why the pot wasn’t boiling. I hadn’t actually turned the hob ring on.

What are we looking at, Sarge?

3 to 5 years for crimes against architecture, lad.

So I tried Threads today. Definitely not for me. But the promise of federation is … promising.

I can’t find a single quantity theory of money bro who’s loudly blaming inflation on pandemic stimulus demanding 100% tax on the excess pandemic savings of the upper half of the income distribution.

Hey, @help - is something up with the CDN or with image uploads from the MacOS app?

Yes, it’s a pokeria

Bergamot soda - “green gold of Calabria”

Over the decades I’ve been taking the train south from Napoli Centrale, the station has got busier and busier. And like other European cities, the growth in the number of homeless people living around the station is shocking.

Naples Central Station

Starhotel Terminus, Naples, Italy ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I accidentally one-click bought some climate denialist garbage on Amazon by swiping too hard. I hesitated for a second before returning. Perhaps I should consider alternative viewpoints. I didn’t want to give the crank any money, though. Have I just cancelled?

I’ve got superstitious over the years over the order I put the vegetables into a ciambotta.

Mitigating the risk of extinction from an out of touch and amoral billionaire class should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

Your occasional guide to understanding the right:

• Classical Liberal = over-credentialed incel reactionary.
• Free Speech Absolutist = loves sound of own voice. In a sexual way.
• Contrarian = broken down boomer journalist desperate for clicks.

A coot among the pigeons

The bourgeois populist press coverage of inflation and interest rates is as howlingly vacuous as the national populist press coverage of immigration and “small boats”.

The already awful Horizon scandal that saw innocent sub-postmasters gaoled because of computer system errors gets worse and worse. Shocking, depressing, it lays bare Britain’s dark side.

Post Office Horizon inquiry used racist term for Black people, documents show

I’ve noticed that elites tend to use “intelligent” as a shorthand for “narcissistic, Machiavellian, self-serving” rather than, say, “insightful, inventive, clear-thinking”. This informs elite views of “artificial intelligence” - both what it is, and how it will be used.

The staff canteen has been replaced by a staff food-bank. You know when you’ve been Toried.

Still wrestling with a working (and workable) definition of political centrism. My latest is “bourgeois populism”. I know it’s an oversimplification - centrism applies to the credentialed elite more so than the wider bourgeoisie - but an ever-increasing share of the bourgeoisie is credentialed.

From the media round today, it seems Keir Starmer has decloacked. Disappointingly but unsurprisingly he’s a “centrist dad” neoliberal.

Citadel. OMFG. I don’t think it’s ironically bad, just absolutely, utterly terrible. Still, attractive leads - though Richard Madden’s brain-wiped character is rather grating. I’m sure if I get the lobotomy and watch the season the sexism will be re-upped with racism, homophobia and transphobia.

I can recommend Belvoir - pronounced Beaver - Farm Ginger Cordial. I make it at double strength with sparkling water. It’s lovely.

I don’t get the mint business. Does it really make sense to airlift bagged sprigs of mint from Ethiopia to Blighty?

When I see people with their Instagrammable dogs, I think of chickens - 3600 years from prestige pet to discarded bones in a polystyrene box with chip-bits picked over by pigeons.

Schrödinger’s civil service is both woke, lazy and incompetent, and orchestrating a devastatingly effective deep-state conspiracy to frustrate Brexit and derail the Tory government.

Fox News has collapsed beyond degenerate matter and, spinning wildly, has become a griftar.

The 0816 Overground from Stratford always leaves late. Except when the next three trains are cancelled. Then it leaves 2 minutes early.

If government has to give incentives to business to invest, doesn’t that imply poorly-regulated and uncompetitive markets?

Coots are one of nature’s great bricoleurs. This coot is one of a pair who’ve built their nest entirely from rubbish thrown into the Royal Docks from visitors to the IFSCloud cable car.

A young female pigeon (I think - not 100% expert at pigeon sexing) is roosting on the patio door handle. I know they can be messy birds, but she seem so precarious - landing there can’t be easy - I don’t want to disturb her. She can rest for the night as the police helicopters clatter overhead.

Hello journalists! Voter in a democracy here. Sunak’s government is not the one that made the manifesto commitments in 2019. So, what key pieces of legislation do the Tories intend to get through before the next general election? And why?

🐦‍⬛A blackbird is singing over the hiss of the traffic. In the dark. In the rain.

It’s kind of pathetic watching successive senior Tories do their “Chemical Ali” turn over Brexit border chaos.

www.theguardian.com

Suella Braverman denies Brexit to blame for Dover queues of 14 hours

Struggling to get my palm rest out of the packaging because my wrists are so bad.

I am just beginning the planning now for the 10 year anniversary of this sign not coming down.

Local drivers need parking practice.

The abandoned Nike outlet is a mirror to the Overground tracks.

Keir Starmer in drag.

A slice of delicious home-made apple pie with a bit of custard.

I wonder how many terminal prompts the servers at Telehouse support. Here’s a view of Telehouse North Two at the Tower Hamlets side of Leamouth in East London.

The bridge on the left supports Aspen Way. On the right, the DLR.

Let’s see ChatGPT 4 drive a car.

The customer service fail at Franco Manca Canary Wharf this evening isn’t evenly spread. One young couple were kept waiting to order, had their starters delivered late, had their pizzas forgotten about, then got the wrong pizzas. I’m sure a piano is going to land on their heads.

Honestly the pizza points are not worth the pain of using Franco Manca’s utterly useless app.

Culinary instruments on display at John Lewis, Canary Wharf.

Scored a kilo of Panch Puran (Bengali five spice). This is an essential cooking ingredient for me - really elevates brassicaceae.

Imagine the derision if a member of the working class declared the invention of the shovel the dawn of artificial general intelligence.

Food courts disconnected from the encumbering shopping mall are an increasingly popular destination in East London. Here’s the Cargo Market Hall in Canary Wharf. Notice the very English door-blocking yellow cone - but sadly for completists, no plastic fencing this evening.

A pigeon under the pedestrian ramp at Homerton Station grabs the chance of a bit of morning sun.

I get it’s disappointing that few high-follower-count folks have left Musk’s horror-platform. Heck, I’m disappointed, too. But let’s not forget Facebook orchestrated the Rohingya genocide and folks stayed there too.

Lots of interesting insects at Praia a Mare last summer. Me being me I was mainly taking pictures of the famous local pigeons. But here’s a large black bee collecting nectar from lantana flowers on the corner of Gramsci Road.

A couple of key right wing terms:

Declinism: the opinion that a bonfire of regulations and tax cuts for the rich is not an industrial strategy.

(Plan for) growth: the belief that industrial strategy consists of deregulation and cutting taxes for the rich.

Every right wing talking head: “Rant, rant, woke this, woke that, rant bathrooms, woke deep state. Why are the left wing establishment declinist wokerati arguing about woke and not delivering our ‘plan for growth’?”

If you are over 50, the writing on the labels of food packaging is too tiny.

What an odd hill Mark Rowley has chosen to die on. Chopping logic over “systemic” vs “institutional” prejudice is way more political than the term “institutional” itself.

Casey report: Met chief accepts review diagnosis, but will not use term ‘institutional’

I’m looking for a houseplant. Nice display in M&S at Crossrail Place - but they’d sold out of the plants I’d had my eye on. I’m passing through Stratford tomorrow on my way home, so may take a look in the shops there.

The area south of A13 between Silvertown Way and Freemasons Road was called Cherry Island. Here is our sakura analog.

Pigeons on the quasi-portico of Canary Wharf Underground Station

I got up late so my early walk to Canary Wharf this morning was a dash to the Custom House Elizabeth Line station.

Passing through the Custom House portal to Canary Wharf lives up to its sci-fi name. Two Londons couldn’t be more divided if they were in parallel universes

Manor Road between Canning Town and West Ham, with its temporary pedestrian crossing chicanes, narrow, uneven footpaths, and poor drainage is the pedestrian’s nemesis.

“Nat has herpes” is scrawled all over East London. Should I feel sorry for Nat, or does this have another meaning?

You have got to wonder about the folks who take their dogs to shit outside the school gates.

In sum, seems like a budget to keep self-interested Tories onside. I guess it presages a ratcheting up of culture war cobblers to gin up Tory supporters who vote against their own interests.

Hmm. Seems like the Tories have given back around 2/3 of the recent corporation tax hike in tax reliefs. Corporations already don’t know what to do productively with the money. Share buybacks FTW!

Imagine if the Tories had given wealthy savers the same pension tax breaks, but required the money be invested in net zero and social housing.

You need a lot of patience to drive down Morning Lane in the, uh, morning. I walk - and there isn’t much patience on show.

The unimaginative build-it-by-numbers regeneration strategy is to throw up high-rises around public transport hubs, which leaves tracts of East London without a horizon, little sunlight, and very windy streets.

This is Canary Wharf Station on the Elizabeth Line. It has no direct connection with Canary Wharf Station on the DLR, and neither of those stations have a connection with Canary Wharf Station on the Jubilee Line. One location: three stations.

Against the grey afternoon sky the silver leaves sprouting from the tree growing out of the taxi aren’t so shiny.

Flying Tiger - this is the Crossrail Place branch - gimcrack ground zero.

I can be a bit slow on the uptake. The people who get het up about “declinism” are the same people as “classical liberals” who rail against the “woke” and decry “cancel culture”.

The Tapping of the Purple Reader is the essential ritual of East London travelling people.

Public address speakers paired together on the lampposts at Hackney Central station.

Passenger on the train has a “specially selected” mozzarella and sun dried cherry tomato wood fired sourdough pizza - cook at home - on her lap. The most prominent aspect of the packaging is the Union Jack.

Hackney is gridlocked this morning. The average British car is the size of a small bus these days. Nevertheless most have just the driver.

The immigration “debate” in the UK is always radioactive. With their small boats stunting the Tories have gone the full Chernobyl. How do they shut it down when it explodes?

Saw this on my walk to the Hackney office today through sleet and snow. It explains why so many exterior light-fittings in England are round.

Tory “libertarians” overcome cognitive dissonance by believing free enterprise only applies to people they went to school with or who pay them off. Small-boats people-trafficking needs to be profoundly financialised before it becomes a global British success story to be turbocharged via deregulation

www.theguardian.com

Rishi Sunak ‘extinguishing the right to seek refugee protection in UK’

Shameful. All the more so because this “law” is merely a political stunt by the Tories.

The whole display has crashed at EY, Canary Wharf.

Crossrail (the Elizabeth Line) is an engineering marvel. But they never take account of passengers when designing rail infrastructure.

This art piece in Crossrail Place at Canary Wharf is made up of LED tiles. The art itself is maybe a little condescending, but the motion is interesting.

Almost 45 years in, and I thought that neoliberalism would have its “reflections on forced collectivisation” moment. But nope. It’s it’s not going to happen, is it?

The pilot hen is the moorhen who’s always leading the other water birds to the food. This time, she’s jumped out of Telehouse Pond as is zipping along on land towards me.

One of the interesting things about the Windsor Framework is that it is not, say, the Barnsley Framework.

The crows are running around on the roof. I can hear the distinctive hopping gait.

The crow on “crowverlook” duty on the Star Lane office today watches in solitude.

Gosh @help - am I doing the photoblogging challenge wrong?

It’s London “nope” weather in Hackney this morning.

The crazy thing about neoliberals is that they love markets right up to the point that someone tries to create a market in their ideas. Biden has been forced to confront neoliberal madness head on

Highbrow media are setting up Sunak v Starmer as a battle of the centrist dads. Never was a frame so improbable. Sunak is a “state capacity libertarian” and Starmer a “reforming” Christian democrat. A right-wing battle far from the failing systems of country crashing into penury.

Some tools in the can. Looks pretty secure.

Okay. So, thanks to Geofency and Pipedream, I can annoy you all with my arrivals at and departures from selected locations.

Are Tories blind to structural problems? Does their privilege lead them to really, truly believe the world is a Disney movie?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-p…

one of the best ways for people to boost their income is not only to get into work if they are not in work already, but to work more hours or get upskilled to get a higher income.

I like Yubico YubiKeys - sound idea for improving online personal security, I think. I own a couple. But their marcomms is utter kack.

Bought some nice-looking russets from the local M&S, but they’re rubbish: flavourless and squishy. So making apple pie with what I can find about the flat - “Classic Christmas spice”, ginger, Muscovado sugar, sweet-potato flour, and frozen vegan ready-made shortcrust pastry.

I generally avoid vegetables with trademarks, but Kalettes(TM) are seriously tasty. I braise them with shallots, dried chilli flakes, panch phoran, garlic and a splash of rice wine. Good enough to be probably illegal.

Alexa seems to like chicken.

Putting ANPRs on pelican crossings and fining every driver who runs a red light would seem to be an easy money spinner for London.

Is it that graffiti is not art, or that all that art is is pissing on lampposts?

Road racer’s engine is louder than the sirens of the police chasing after down the A13

I’m leaving Stratford International on the DLR from platform 2. Have literally never seen a DLR leave from platform 2 before. Let alone be on it.

What are the Americans shooting down? De-orbiting Teslas?

Uttering sound bites while wearing a high viz jacket is not an industrial strategy.

Reading Liz Truss’s piece in the Sunday Telegraph, I can only conclude that the UK political right has spent far too long, with way too much cocaine, talking to itself in darkened rooms. The only solution is sunlight and a lengthy period of cold turkey. Alas for us, we’re stuck the the Tories for another two years.

www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/…

Elon Cohaagen cutting off the oxygen in Venusville is fiction, right?

Reading about power outages and trees exploding from the cold, and the best we’ve got is the wrong kind of snow every decade or so.

Dockhunt: closer to that journalistic slip of the tongue than the UK chancellor of the exchequer.

Not sure how public sector workers contribute to the “wage/price spiral” given their labour isn’t sold for profit on the open market.

The workers being lowered into the sewer are all Irish. This is England! We expect foreigners to clean up our shit.

What is your worst walk? Mine is Canning Town to the Greenway via Manor Road. Nasty in all weathers.

The BBC’s review into its taxation, public spending, government borrowing and debt output is interesting and worth a look, as is this commentary from Richard Murphy.

Newham Council would like people to drive less and walk more. It’s a laudable aim even if, as we heard at the “budget summit” they favour the stick over the carrot. Today, it’s an icy morning and the walking routes to local schools are ungritted.

I have some thoughts and comments about reforming NHS bureaucracy. I tried referring myself to Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting, but they wouldn’t see me. I have to follow appropriate channels.

www.theguardian.com

The UK may avoid a recession for now but it won’t feel like it for many

Britain avoids recession because population permanently drunk.

www.theguardian.com

Hedge funds holding up vital debt relief for crisis-hit Sri Lanka, warn economists

Bastards will bastard.

With his sleight of hand promise to cut inflation, Rishi Sunak sure does think his core vote needs help with maths.

www.theguardian.com/politics/…

Seems to me that the people lacking numeracy skills to prosper in the workplace are the Tories. Except the people being let down are you and me.

www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/…

Finished reading: Rentier Capitalism by Brett Chistophers 📚- one of the most insightful books I read all year when it comes to understanding what ails the British economy

Could a politician or policy wonk explain the difference between “turbocharge” and “supercharge” when used in vacuous rhetoric?

I managed an average of 11.6km a day of walking or running in 2022. Not the 12km a day I was hoping for, but still pretty pleased.

The verdict is in. Anyone who voted Leave was duped. I hope once the Tories are out of office, politicians can start being honest about this.

www.theguardian.com/commentis…

Oh-ho! Discovered a mandarin negroni stollen that somehow didn’t get eaten.