“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?

Local bird ground effect over water update

  • Local coots are the ground effect champions. If they ever actually fly out of ground effect, they do it in secret
  • Cormorants always break ground effect and fly over bridges carrying power cables
  • Crows won’t fly under bridges in ground effect. They’ll happily cross the Lea in ground effect, but very few will fly up-river. The ones who do will always pull up over the A13
  • Pigeons use ground effect for rapid course corrections and high-speed, high-risk bounce landings. For pigeons it always seems tactical. They use a range of frankly insanely risky flight strategies
  • Not sure if grey wagtails count - their flight is ballistic - but it seems the do ground effect bounces over stretches of open water

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.

A young pigeon with a serious and probably life-threatening neck injury

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