Friday extra plus update repeat reading

 Although I am on a blog break I am interrupting it to say something on the Middlesbrough/Cleveland police problems following the feral youth of the country, their jubilation at the death of five of themselves, filming and whooping about it with flares, balloons, masks and partying,  and the two policemen  who were in the wrong place at the wrong time at the weekend. The whole thing has made me me feel sick to the stomach about the state of Britain.  The jubilation with the partying and coloured flares into the sky and the full face masks all in celebration of this terrible loss of life.  This dreadful state of right and wrong and what makes the youth happy and jubilant and in celebratory mood while mothers mourn.    Since the weekend two more people have died in a fire in Middlesbrough which was deliberately started, at least one house has been rammed by cars, and police have made many arrests in connection with all the  deaths.  They are not necessarily connected in death terms but they are all on Teesside.  Middlesbrough has the highest crime rate per head of population of the whole of Britain.   The arrests are gang and drug related.  Yorkshire is in the thick of criminal Britain.

I would like to point out the elephant in the room with all of this  and as far as I have seen has not been mentioned and that is drugs.  Maybe is it so obvious that drugs and county lines and dealing in public parks in broad daylight is now so normal that it has become forgotten that once not so long ago we didn't behave like this.  

Drugs and gangs in towns across England are now accepted.  Weed is in the kitchen, cocaine in the pocket.   It is getting beyond the control of police who can barely cope.    Drugs are the recreation of choice.  

You do not drive the wrong way along motorways, drive into houses, attempt all sorts of crazy, deadly things if you are stone cold sober, just had your tea, just going out to see your mates.  You would be digging the garden or watching television and you might go for a drink later. You might be unemployed and helping your mum. You would have recreation but not drugs.  Once upon a time.  But that is not the way now.   You are out with your mates in your gang and you all take drugs and it is all very different.  It doesn't matter if you don't have a job, welfare will pay.  Stoned and you will do all sorts of crazy things.  

When I was doing my crimes in Yorkshire series I found Cleveland police had a big drug swoop in February with cocaine suppliers and other drugs dealers arrested.  The ages were young, some only 17 who could not be named,  through to older men. As I have said before it used to be pegs and scrap metal, now the money is in drugs.

These youths in the crash are young, one at least with a baby at 17.

Drugs are accepted as what young people take, cocaine and other drugs and marijuana plant houses in every town with Albanians featured all across this country.  You saw my news from Norwich, that had one Albanian weed house and I know it is one of many.  Today in the local paper an Albanian wasn't even jailed for supplying drugs, he was given a suspended sentence and a pat on the back.

This country is finished.  It is unemployment, it is poor priorities on the part of governments, it is the fabric of Britain gone and it is drugs that are making it worse.   They're more concerned with net zero, more illegals, more travellers and more tax for the wicked older folks who earned it through grit and determination without drugs and without expectation of handouts and welfare. 

I wrote this blog post twice, two versions of it.  I didn't publish the first because I just felt good enough writing it and then relaxed.  Now I publish the first version today because I think on reflection I should have published it there and then and it is better written.  I headed it No outlet for our fury.  This is a line from a film on the Kremlin and why Stalin was popular in spite of his responsibility for millions of deaths - he demonstrated to people that he was in charge and when a train crashed and lives were lost he had the head of railways shot.  Stop and think about this before anything else over your breakfast.  Also stop and think about why I said last week that Burnham was weak when he did not, and would not,  decree without procrastination that the killers of a policeman, the boys who smirked in court, should be made to serve their sentences.  This has now been done but it was a no brainer and should not have caused doubt and debate and procrastination.  Do it and get on with it.   So apart from all that let us see the first post I wrote about the seven deaths in North Yorkshire and the feral youth and the state of Britain:     (I might bave published it separately this morning, Bank Holiday Monday, but as blogger took five days to up-date there is no point in complicating it further). I am aiming for 67 comments in support of this blog today. 

 Although I am on a blog break I feel strongly that I must write about the news from Yorkshire which is the seven dead in the deadly accident on the A66.   It is not clear if the car was intending to go the wrong way down the dual carriageway before it ended up that way so I will not speculate. 

Five young travellers were out fot a night of fun, high as kites - things like this do not happen without drugs and the gangs are drugged up to the eyeballs.   Middlesbrough is a North Yorkshire town which once upon a time had the best heavy industry of the country, ICI at its peak and bridge builders around the world from Dorman Long.  Middlesbrough was in the North Riding but over the years since local government divisions in 1974 it has moved to Teesside, short lived and now stands on its own administratively. 

The city has the hightest criminal record of the whole of Britian in terms of crimes per head of population.  The unemployment is high.  The youths in the accident were known criminals from aged 17 to 23 and the two policemen who died were unfortunately in the wrong place at the wrong time, not directly before the crash involved in this load of youths travellilng like bats out of hell.  But they were being pursued by another squad car.  

Drugs are high on the agenda in this crash and for the youth of Britain and as we continue to let in the illegal migrants we have let in more and more drugs, and more and more weed they call it which is a recreational drug for all with pills and alcohol,  we have Albanian drug houses in every city of the country, as in my case in Norfolk shown the other day, this is now common throughout the country.  Gangs and criminals run riot in towns from Middlesbrough to Bournemouth and all in between. Gang warfare and violence are treated as ok and old people do not go out after dark.   Social media makes drug-fuelled postings of murder, rapes and misdemeanours on phones on TikTok the pleasure of the drugged and the drunk and criminal behaviour is considered an occupation of fun.

What rubbed salt into all this was the vigil the young had for their dead five - they partied with balloons, coloured flairs and drugs and filmed it all whooping it all up in masks and full face coverings remembering their dead brothers.  One is leaving a baby behind fathered at 17 and the travellers community mourn.  

The problem is drugs before unemployment because unemployment alone does not make a criminal.  A wild west, run wild, with policing unable to cope with it is the state of many towns in Britain now.  A culture of showing off the most violent activities for likes and laughs is how far we have sunk to. 

This is the county of Yorkshire where we are led to believe nothing ever happens, it is quiet and not the Britain that others know.  As we all know this is not the case and Yorkshire is just the same if not worse.  

Up-Date on Tech and Peace and Quiet.

 From late on Friday night, through the weekend, I did not have internet connection.  Living where I live I do not have mobile phone signal, not even one bar, so I felt very cut off for 48 hours.  I also had no television because my television is all streamed through Wifi.   So it was very quiet here and I am not a person who likes radio. 

BT kept in touch with messages that did get through to me to inform that the problem was in the locality affecting many people and they were working on it.  I went out Sunday lunchtime to park where there was a mobile phone signal and pick up messages and even paid a bill via my bank app that needed attending to.  It felt a bit weird sitting in my car doing these things.  I sat for an hour and thought a lot about life without technology. I returned home and felt liberated that the house without technology is more peaceful and less intrusive. 

The long and the short of it is that the two day break of not having any technology made me think about quite a few things and I decided that for a while at least I am taking a break from it.   I have the television back so my evenings are much the same as before. I am reading and doing things in the house and I do not want to be distracted by my phone notifications and it feels like I do not want to be distracted by it ever again but I am sure that is a bit pie in the sky and just how I am reacting to my tech free weekend at the moment and it will probably change.   But for now I am staying quiet.  I have been out for my newspaper as usual and I am up to speed with the news but my phone is not taking a big part in it.  I am reading, writing and cutting out stuff to keep.  A new scrapbook was delivered Friday (just at the right moment)  and I am filling it rapidly. It just feels like more of a simple life than phones, lap tops and all that stuff that comes with it. I have not lost interest in what is going on, I just need to process it differently.  

I just thought I would post this so that those who might wonder where I am will know I am ok.  Thank you for reading.

News From Norfolk

This is a post I wrote a few days ago and didn't publish.  So it is from last week's papers.   Please note I have written two posts today, Friday.  The other one is entitled Friday Jump.  

As a continuation of my news from Yorkshire illustrating that Yorkshire is not a quiet county, I am including some headlines from Norfolk today. I don't expect you to read the three items but the headlines will give you the gist.  The Migrant camp headline appeared last Thursday, the Afghan rape case appeared on Friday and the cannabis production is in today's paper.

1.  Is the news of the Migrant camp to house 1250 men in Barnham, Suffolk that I wrote about the other day.  Barnham is on the Norfolk Suffolk border and has a population of 600 people or less.  Previously under the Tory government the old RAF camp at Coltishall outside Norwich was used for temporary quarters for 200 asylum seekers but this was only used for a few months due to its isolation in a rural area and it was deemed not to have worked.    RAF Coltishall was far less isolated than RAF Barnham.  Labour do not seem to have learned from this little snippet of history from their predecessors. 

2. 8th Afghan man denies rape which is an on-going case in Norwich 

3. Nine set to stand trial over Norwich cannabis production. Albanian and Mandarin interpreters engaged. 

 This is but a small snapshot of news here in 2026.  

Up date: Of course the leaflet to be handed out to illegal migrants in the boats should stop the cases of rape and mistreatment of women overnight.  Joke of the day. 

Friday jump

Tombstoning is jumping vertically into the sea, dead straight like a tombstone. Arms by the side.   Jump jump jump, die die die.  Splash splash splash.  Prepare thyself for death in the sea and be like an idiot. Jump and die jump and die jump and die. Hand out the leaflet and let them read it before they come and take over our lands with the idiots who run this country. All gone and you have yourselves to blame.   ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb

The two who want to come back from the US whose names I don't even want to say beggars belief.  Are they blind to the fact that Britain doesn't want them back after the way they have abused their family here? Do they think that their children won't be bullied in school?  Even posh little children in London will have plenty to say about their mum and dad probably even touching on surrogacy accusations and false bumps and lots to say about mummy and her jams and make up.

Well that's it for today.  There is plenty to get on with with thinking about them and the multi-culture Britain that doesn't obviously have a culture of its own because it needs to import foreigners who don't respect girls and women but, hey, we can give them a leaflet on how to behave and hope they can read it and remember it, and come on,  they do bring in the most amazing food as if we didn't have any amazing food of our own to be proud of. But come on, we know we would be so adrift if we didn't have these amazing foods and cultures of mosques , disrespect for women and Friday prayers and jihads and flip flops.   What's wrong with greens and potatoes and a church with a spire;  at least we used to get our vitamins and forgiveness for our sins on Sunday.   I mean to say you can alter a culture in a leaflet in one easy lesson. If only it were that easy.  You stupid fools in charge.    And if anybody objects, just call them racists. 

Oak Street

 I went to see The End of Oak Street yesterday.  It is a strange kind of film but enjoyable enough.  I am not usually a fan of Anne Hathaway but I thought this was one of her best roles yet and she seemed made for it.  Ewan McGregor plays Hathaway's husband.  He was good too.  I don't know much about him but loved him in A Gentleman in Moscow on Paramount a couple of years ago.   

This is a film about a shift in time when a street suddenly overnight with light flashes goes back to the time of dinosaurs in the streets and the people start getting eaten by them. 

Hathaway and McGregor have two children, a girl and a boy,  and a dog named Starbuck.  They are just a normal suburban family with the usual family problems of their age and time.  Suddenly all family issues have to be forgotten while they survive the dinosaurs coming after them. 

We see them surviving the attacks until McGregor gets eaten by a T Rex and disappears.  Hathaway is Denise and I can't remember his name.  The kids are Brian and Audrey.  I don't think I knew any Audreys at that time, supposedly 1982 we learn although it looked more like 1972 to me and even then there weren't any teenage Audreys.  However, that is by the by.  It is funny in parts and made me smile at the nonsensicalness of being chased by pterdactyls in the streets and big wormy things in the house although it is all very serious in the film and not meant to be funny.  The kids are great and the dog is too.  I wondered how they train dogs for movies whilst I was watching.  

Anyway in the end they find a way out of the dinosaur period and manage to jump back through a bubble  to the present (1982) and return to normal again.  

All things considered it was a pleasant enough afternoon out to the cinema and whilst I don't normally go for this type of movie with monsters,  the dinosaurs were not really scary and Hathaway and McGregor did a lot to make this a movie worth seeing.  How they ever got to doing it I will never know but I am glad they did.   Given the poor assortment of movies on at the moment it was the best of a bad lot really and my visits to the cinema are currently at an all time low  (ignoring 30 years of never seeing a movie at all of course).

Norwich has its own Oak Street, an important street in the city and where I first used to go out when I was 16 to a forbidden venue so the title made me think of those times too.  I am sure many other people in Norwich will think of our own Oak Street.  The street got cut in two by the inner ring road in the 1970s and was never the same after that anyway.  Our own end of Oak Street. 

The monster doctor

 I watched the documentary on the Truro cardio-vascular surgeon last night, the one who froze his own legs and feet so that he could have them amputated.  I remember hearing about him at the time of his arrest and now they have made this documentary about him.  I watched it on Prime. 

He had a fetish about amputations and not only did he hate his feet and want to get rid of them he also had a fetish for watching the Eunuch Maker videos of men having their penises and testicles cut off.  He got very involved with the Norwegian who ran Eunuch Maker and enjoyed the videos and got  sexual gratification from them.  Those who used the Norwegian monster were mostly queers.  The Norwegian has now been locked up.  After the botched operations in a London basement the amputees minus penis and balls would end up in A&E on the NHS.  I am puzzled as to why it went on without any flagging up from the NHS that men kept appearing with mutilations to their genitals but that is another story.  Perhaps the NHS are not allowed to ask questions due to civil rights.  He was eventually caught when one man who had taken part in a "procedure"  decided enough was enough and told the police.  This eventually led to them coming across Mr Neil Hopper, surgeon, Truro.   Meanwhile Mr Hopper went about his daily work mainly doing limb amputations in Truro.  How about that for a story. 

Keep away from the surgeons knife as our grandmothers would tell us.  Now hospitals are regarded by most very differently.   I personally keep away from all things medical and do not go along with the fads of new knees, for instance,  which seems to be popular and talked about like the weather.   Any surgery is invasive, unnatural to the body and can come with complications and in some cases possible lies from doctors as this illustrates.  Surgery should only be engaged as a last resort as many good, honest doctors will tell you.  Get out the exercise bike before considering the knife.

Many in Cornwall are now wondering if their amputations were really necessary given the fetishes and gratification that the surgeon got from amputating limbs.

In order to get to the point where he had to lose his legs, he sat with his feet and legs up to his knees in an ice bath.  He waited until his wife and children had gone out and sat for eight hours until his legs froze, went black.   He requested and received information on how to do this from the Norwegian monster above. 

His main crime was the money he obtained under false declarations of sepsis under a life insurance policy.  

He has now been struck off and cannot work as a doctor anymore.  His sentence is a couple of years in prison for the insurance fraud. 

Apparently hating part of your own body is an extremely rare psychiatric condition.  You hate a part of your body so much you want to get rid of it.  Hopper had this and also the fetish about watching others losing their genitals.   He was a married man with two children.  

There are certainly some very strange folk around and you could just meet one of them in your local hospital. 

And then there is Lucy Letby's former hospital married doctor colleague who died last week the day after being sacked for his exchanges of messages with Letby.   They spent quite a lot of time together socially.   He is now looking very suspicious.  How he died is not being released at the moment and he has forever been not named for legal reasons.  Quite why that should be seems unfair.  Letby cried in court, the only time, when he let her down and didn't support her while all the time prior to that he had supported her and been the person she thought was her friend.  All very puzzling.  Now he is dead so I doubt we will ever know.  

Arday is Dead

 So Arday is dead.  Did he kill himself or was he another like Dr David Kelly and knocked off by those to whom there would be gain?  The left are certainly making sure they gain from the sad passing of Mr Arday, read only one if you read any, Mr Khan lays the knife in. 

I could be nasty and say is it a stunt from Arday and is he going to come back and say he rose from the dead.  I hope they checked the identity for sure of the deceased in the mortuary. 

If only Rod Liddle were still alive and hadn't snuffed it just too early.  He'd have put Cambridge right and the left and found sympathy for Arday to boot.    RIP Mr Arday. 

Don't forget, he is entirely responsible for his own death as a suicide and he does not automatically become a special put-upon victim as soon as he does so. 

Government Gone Crazy

 I have received 2 very scary emergency alerts. I was not expecting them. They were an hour apart. One was bad enough. Why 2?

They are British Government alerts about fire danger:  Check your BBQ. 

I thought a government alert was for warfare, bombs, shooters, attacks, missiles,  stay indoors, don't move.

I see this as causing more fires from arsonists. Most fires are started  deliberately all over the world.  By arsonists. I repeat.    Forest fires, heath fires, stack fires.  

Our government is mad with not one iota of brain.  

The arsonists are getting out the matches as I write. They are laughing.

Asylum Camp

Andy Burnham, the man of the people, decides that the Crown  planning permission mechanism for change of use can be rushed through in order to send 1250 asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, to Barnham on the Norfolk Suffolk border.   Normal town planning legislation will not apply. 

Isn't this just the wonderful sort of thing you wanted when you voted in every way to not get a Tory government, you would punish them, but little did you think about how you would be punishing yourself and everybody else.   

Barnham is a village of 600 people or less.   The new asylum camp will be in existence for 10 years we are told today.   It will be guarded round the clock.    The camp will house all males we are told.  

The inhabitants of Barnham and Thetford which is the nearby town with supermarkets and amenities but no pathways because this is rural Norfolk/Suffolk will be demonstrating outside the camp again tonight.  The Barnham camp was an RAF base in wartime and beyond.  

My neighbour Sue's son lives in the village where he went for peace and quiet.  I wonder what he thinks about the camp of men in flip flops and jihadist attire.   I haven't seen her to hear the news.  The village was nice she said.  

The camp was used by Norfolk and Suffolk constabulary for training in the trees and lawns and old buildings with pretend aggravated situations acted out.  They rented it on an annual basis until June when they approached the Ministry to make an offer to buy it.  They were immediately told it was no longer available at all and they, the government,  would have it themselves.  

Perhaps until that point they didn't remember it existed.  So now the police can have real live practice of dealing with unrest, unhappy people, and jihadist garment clad young men, where mobile phones are to be banned (dream on) and no alcohol.  No bar maids to be murdered there then, well that's a relief.   No doubt you will see Barnham on the news, possibly referred to as Theford up the road cos it's bigger than a little quiet rural parish in Suffolk.   

How will medical facilities be provided in a part of rural England where doctors and dentists are in short supply and cannot serve the people as it is?

Plans to stop migrants Andy?  No, I thought not, you have no plans to stop them whatsoever.

I bow to thee my country?

Recap

 Catch up time on the blogs is obvious from the page views that it lags  24 hours to 48 hours.  I get used to it but I am not pleased with it but blogger is what it is, free and useful, unpredictable.  Yesterday Ilona alerted her readers to a post she said I had just published when in fact I had published it 24 hours before.  Her side bar had not caught up.  And this morning it has still not caught up and the Eclipse and Mourinho post is not shown.  It will be 48 hours behind.   There seems no rhyme nor reason to the updating.  It is a lottery and no two blog lists on side bars are updating at the same speed.   Magnons Meaderings sometimes updates as soon as he publishes, other days it doesn't.  On my reading list he often takes 24 hours to update.  Linda in Greece, Kiwi Alien, can take 48 hours to appear on my list.   Ook does not appear for 48 hours or longer.  This morning I caught up on three posts that I had missed.  Some people look at their favourite blogs regardless of updating on blog lists, I am one of those, but many others only look if the reading lists update.  And it is easy to forget to look like I did with Ook.  For topical stuff  updating is important in my view.  News that is old news is stale and uninteresting to the reading public.  I have a post on further news from Cambridge University but I haven't written it because I want immediate publication and reaction which I won't get here. 

Yesterday I wrote about the eclipse and Mourinho on tv and a massage that may or may not take place. It has been read by an eighth of the eventual number.  The massage did not take place.  The doctors appointment she had was later in the day than she anticipated and as time passed I messaged her to say I would stay home.  It was getting too hot to travel in mid afternoon even if she had said yes.  I gave her the name of Anthisan cream for her insect bite to help her with itch relief.   However later she messaged to say it was not an insect bite and she had been told it was a heat rash.   I am no further with appointment with her but decided to leave her to deal with her heat rash for a few days. 

I went back to the eclipse last night and the shadows on the house at exactly the same time 24 hours later and found it all to be very different.  So my house shadows had given me my best view of the eclipse without me knowing.  I have now confirmed it.

Eclipse and Mourinho

 I am supposed to have a massage later today but she messaged me last night to say she had an ichy leg.  I said to let me know later if I could still go, keeping words to the minimum as she finds texting in English a trifle difficult.  I believe she probably has an insect bite and nothing in the house to treat it and little knowledge of insect bites in England.  She said she is going to the doctor this morning.  Although my Thai lady has lived in England for over 10 years she has little understanding of English problems, all things medical and I have found that she will attend the doctor for any minor ailment.  I am hoping to hear from her later to say it was nothing more than an insect bite and I can go for the massage.  It is disappointing when I look forward to something only for it to be cancelled.  Such appointments are often my only contact with another person all week. 

I sat outside for the duration of the eclipse last night with the cats.  We were very underwhelmed. I think they wondered why I was sitting outside holding the colander.   I did notice that it went kind of dull but the birds did not stop like they did in 1999 but that was during the middle of the day and I remember it going eerily quiet and dark and cold.    Last night it was like sitting outside as the sun was going down on any day and had I not known it was the eclipse hour I probably wouldn't have noticed. 

My viewing over the past two nights has been the Mourinho documentary on Netflix.  It is well worth looking at whether you like or follow football or not.  I think it should be compulsory viewing for Burnham to watch it and see leadership in action with singularity and fortitude.  Mourinho is a great football manager, an unusual fellow and dedicated to football and the human condition.  

Useless Party

 Andy Burnham has no intention of stopping the boats coming across the Channel.  The number coming over has increased and the boats are bigger.  Far from any urge to stop them he talks about where the illegal migrants are to go in this country. 

They are to go to middle class areas to mix with middle class people who don't want them.  Let us not mince words.  Nobody actually wants them.  

The Rwanda scheme would have been good and well underway now.  Migrants going to a dormitory in the sunny and hot climate with their own people of Africa from where they come, not Britain and with Christian people of the Church of England who respect and honour their wives and daughters, who asylum seekers from Muslim cultures  know not how to behave with.   They have learned from their mothers to expect cooking to be done and a woman to be to their beck and call and those with short tops and bare skin to be raped and murdered because they are not covered, are free to walk alone and not shut in only to be allowed out chaperoned.  

The Rwanda scheme was immediately killed by Labour.  Rwanda has not been a country of genocide for 30 years. Many people do not realise this.  They say, oh my god, Rwanda! Shock horror.  It was 1994 and you can blame Belgium for the left overs of the colonial days and King Leopold in neighbouring Congo for what went on in Rwanda.  He was evil and he planted all the seeds for death, torture and punishments and human suffering.   Rwanda has green and pleasant gardens, good income from mining and good work ethic.  The migrants would have been integrated into Rwanda following the processing of their claims to be asylum seekers if suffering persecution in their homeland and Rwanda know for all their experience of who is actually in danger.   Their mothers would have been happy they were in Africa and the boys would have one day been African workers and earning a living if seen as needing to stay.  If they were fraudulent asylum seekers instead of coming to upset everyone around the world they would have been sent back to their original starting place, back with mother.    But no, this plan was seen as too good for the British people and therefore not to be implemented.  Instead, the migrants would still come and land on the shore with wet feet, be picked up and slung into our society to upset everybody as usual. 

 Today an Afghan has been sentenced to nine years in English jail for rape of a teenage girl.

Burnham has said that he cannot stop the PC Harper's killers from being released from prison because he cannot make an exception.  If the Prime Minister cannot say "hold those laughing, mocking, despicable boys in jail for the entirety of their sentence" then what good is a prime minister at all?  Why doesn't he be bold and make a stand and say " they are to stay inside, end of story".  

The Murder of the Essex Boys: Blood and Betrayal

 Many of us will remember the news item of the three men found dead in the Range Rover down a snowy farm track in Essex one December morning in 1995.  It was particularly horrible because it was clear that it was an execution, not a road accident as one might have expected to hear on the snowy morning,  and the bodies were still in their seats, shot quickly one after another.   Two were in their 30s and one was in his mid 20s.   There were no clues as to who they were.  The police made an appeal for the identity of the victims via the reporters who had congregated at the site as nobody had come forward and surprisingly nobody came forward for a couple of days and nobody was reported missing.   They waited.  Eventually a young girl contacted the police and said that she thought her partner might be one of them but as he never told her what he was doing she wasn't sure.  It turned out he was one of the three and she was eventually to give a big clue as she remembered a name he had dropped in passing who he might be seeing that day: Mick the Pilot.  He was eventually one of the two convicted. 

The story is complicated and for someone like me who likes police investigations and detective work in real crime it is ideal viewing.  I have watched it twice now and in order to follow it have had to take notes.  There are so many people involved and so much history to it involving criminal gangs in Essex and London and reaching into Spain where, again, many of us will remember Ronnie Knight and other London criminals living.   The investigation takes us into Amsterdam and Ostend, boats, a small plane, and drugs. 

It was of course a drug gang murder as we were all told at the time, but the story is fascinating and there are many ins and outs and there are many who are still not convinced that the verdict of the two convicted was the correct one.   The conviction was made possible because a suspect turned supergrass in order to avoid conviction himself.  Clearly not a popular man with criminals.  Two police officers who were linked to the police informant were also suspended and investigated.  

A number of changes resulted in the use of undercover policing and police informants which exists to this day. 

Mobile phones were in their infancy at the time and the common one for those who had them was the Nokia used just for texts and calls.   Tracking mobile phone signals was unknown then and unused as a detectives tool.  However, the chief detective encouraged his team, young and old, to give all the ideas they could to convict the killers and a very young detective constable said that he thought that mobile phone signals could be tracked between masts.  This proved to be another major breakthrough in the convictions and,  of course, tracking mobile phones is now the major tool in all criminal investigations.  Then it was one unknown.  The police had suspects but they denied being in the area at the time and butter wouldn't melt in their mouths until the detectives questioning them said "well we know your mobile phones were in the area" and then suddenly they refused to answer any further questions. 

The death of Leah Betts also had some significance which many of us will again remember as the first death reported from taking ecstacy pills. She came from Essex.  Her father was a policeman.  She died three weeks before the murder of the Essex Boys.  Although never proven as directly linked to the murders it was a talking point at the time.   I am sure many of us will remember the name of Leah Betts.  I remember thinking that I would never touch an E tablet which at the time were the party drug of the moment and as easy to get as Smarties. 

Anyway, I think seeing the documentary twice is enough for the moment but I have my notes on those involved.  The Essex accents are also quite difficult to follow so note taking helped me and subtitles do not appear for all interviewed.  I have no idea why.    I would not wish to disagree with the police verdicts of the two convicted but I don't think anybody would fail to see that probably a lot more were involved.  If drug dealers and criminals do not get their money then threats follow and if threats still do not result in money then murder follows.  This is still the case.  Drive by shootings and murders and violence on doorsteps take place almost everyday in Britain, mostly drug related.   The overwhelming message from the friends of the three men who died in Essex was that before they got into drug crime they were ok.  Before that they were career criminals carrying out armed robberies, jewelry heists and bank robberies but prison and courts were the punishments to fear and avoid.  Drug crime changed it and it all became much more violent and nasty and dealt with "internally" by those involved.  This was a case of drug suppliers falling out with one another over money.  Things don't get any better and drug use and drug related crime has increased no end since 1995.  

The documentary is currently on Netflix.  

The Way We Are

 

August 2022

August 2026 

Heatwaves come and go.  In between we have wet summers.   

Fear not in the US, England does not need you worrying about us.  The grass will green over and we will be complaining of cold, wet winter before you know it.  

If you want to fear for Britain you can do so in respect of our government who do not care about the future of Britain.  Think yourself lucky that you have a president who cares about the US.  This is what our leaders care about:  handing out more welfare; making employers go elsewhere to run their businesses abroad; casting new foreign investors away from us: giving illegal migrants more rights; letting  prisons fill with foreigners who should have been deported long ago and then have to let out rapists, murderers, stalkers,  to depopulate the prisons and put fear into the population;  allow villages in isolated country areas to be given over to asylum seekers in camps and hotels without any consultation with local people; lock up British people for minor misdemeanors like flag flying and spouting mouthy facts for the Britain loved and cherished by its citizens;  let out the real criminals or not lock them up at all;  house foreigners before locals;  force people out of independent schools through tax and then send their own to the same schools and cheer the levy of the tax and laugh in the face of those who wish to put education first and endeavour to work hard and make sacrifices to do it but now cannot reach that level which has gone beyond them through vengeful, spiteful and bitter politicians; hope that the old age pensioners soon die and get out of their hair forever; see the trade unions take back control as they did in the 1970s and allow strikes to happen;   town halls look back to  Iceland to see where they had  put the money in 2008 when idiots in finance were allowed by Labour to invest your council tax in obscure Icelandic banks in  junk bonds where there was no money to meet debt demands, never to have recovered in 2008 nor 2009 nor can recovery ever be complete and now local government forever locked in schemes to cut local services. 

If you want to feel sorry for Britain focus on the above.  We have a Deputy Prime Minister who lied about a mugging, lied about a mobile phone theft in order to get a new iPhone from her employer;   we have a Housing Minister who failed to pay stamp duty on a house purchase because she said she didn't understand stamp duty;  we had a Chancellor of the Exchequer who lied about her employment history and it turned out we had a clerk from a building society running our Exchequer for two years.   We have a Minister of Defence who is a man who has never been in the armed services and is responsible for those armed services, international security, and directing military operations.   Before politics entered his life he worked in charities.  We have the national scandal of Jason Arday and the storm of plagiarism, a fabricated CV and exposes how rotten our institutions are.  As an academic he was sub-standard;  progressive liberals wanted him and he was their golden child and they refused to investigate him.  He was black, neurodivergent and ticked all the boxes for them, the identity bingo card.  And of course the Police tried to shut down The Times Higher Education journalist who interviewed Arday in the first place, identifying him as the villain.

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

Following on from the reading posts of a few weeks ago, the Santa Montefiore book in a series on an Irish family of Deverills  turned out to be a decent read by very predictable from the outset.  (I haven't got the title now because I no longer have the book and can't remember it).   Within the first five pages I could see what was going to unfold.   There was a reading of a will and a letter that was not to be opened until one member of the family had been to Ireland from where the deceased woman originated (we are now in the US where she has spent her entire adult life) and then all would be revealed that there is to be a mystery legatee.  It didn't take a lot to work out about what had happened to the woman in 1950s Ireland which caused her to be put on a ship to the US and banished.   I finished the book but I did not particularly enjoy it and I read it very quickly skipping my way through it. 

The next one was Three Apples Fell From The Sky by Narine Abharan.  I got two pages in and didn't like it.  A girl planning her own death, a suicide. I found it depressing to say the least.   I tried again and got about 20  pages in and that was it.  The book was not for me.  It was hard going and miserable.  It went back to the charity shop quickly. 

The most successful read of all was Graham Greene's The Human Factor which was a well written, well crafted story, concise, easy to follow and acutely observant of life in the 1950s, with the office life, home life,  spying in the Cold War very reminiscent of Burgess and McClean and a life in MI6 that Greene knew from his own experience. Briefly the story is of a leak in MI6 which sparked off security checks, tensions and suspicions.  Maurice Castle is the main character where one soon conjures up the image of a kind of middle ranking member of the team in a brown suit, never late for work and a creature of habit and daily routine, the least suspicious man in the office.  However, married to a black woman he had worked with in S Africa, unusual in 1950s London, a mixed marriage brought some suspicion and questioning by his superiors and yet still he seemed like the unassuming clerk and they did not suspect him of any wrongdoing.   Not my usual kind of book but it was so well written with the balance of secrecy of MI6 and the normalcy of domestic life threaded together it was a book that I looked forward to every night.  We don't have many fine writers like Graham Greene today and if there are any they do not turn up on station bookstands unless they lurk in the crime writers which dominate the display and sadly not my genre. 

 

Saturday

 I am enjoying the heatwaves. I know from the small blog circle I follow that not many people do.  I cannot think of one who does.   I act in a sensible way and stay indoors out of the heat and I do not try to do otherwise.   I go out as early as I can for my newspaper, depending on what time I have the energy to get up. 

I met my friend C for our Saturday rendezvous.  It was especially good today as I went over the garden party of last Saturday.  She knows all the people involved but as you know she was absent.  It took over an hour of discussion. 

We eventually got back to our week's activities, human conditions, and then we got on to the current political situation.  All in all our analyses took almost three hours. 

I wore shorts and a tee shirt.  This is acceptable for the supermarket café.  

When I returned home I immediately began rearranging furniture.  I am not pregnant.  I seem to recall that major events like furniture rearranging can relate to pregnancy and nesting but I could be wrong.  Maybe it is just change in life.  C messaged me to say she was cleaning the fridge.  We energised one another. 

I have just turned a corner in the Long Covid and Thursday appeared to be that day.  I am hoping.  I cleaned for the first time in three months, other than cursory clean of the toilet seat during that time. 

I rearranged the furniture in the breakfast room, swept first, mopped and cleaned the room and every inch of the toilet.  I have not been able to do this since May 22nd when I returned from Azerbaijan, two days after which I went down with Covid.  For the next 10 weeks I have been unable to lift my arms or stir my porridge. A seat has appeared in the otherwise barren kitchen to save me when on the verge of collapse.  I took the Turkish rug outside and it is on the lawn.  I thrashed it and beat it. 

 Last Thursday I felt better all of a sudden. The troll will be checking this on his Apple Watch to see if three month long covid is by definition possible. 

I don't care about that, I am pleased to feel better and I can walk between rooms without pausing for breath. 

I have a hula hoop that has been delivered from Amazon.  That is the next thing to do and then I take up hula hooping and see if I can do it.  I was whizz at it as a teenager.   The hula hoop comes as a kit and I have to join it up to form a hoop. 

I have taken two days to tell you about the recovery and I probably should have waited longer but it is exciting to be able to walk through the house without near collapse and be free of  not knowing how I will feel when I wake up, whether the heart will pulse fast and whether I will sweat so much I cannot walk and whether I will have the energy to stand out of the bed.  I am keeping fingers crossed that this is not a false dawn and that I have recovered.   

Cro has suggested that the troll may be a AI robot.  If only that were true.  Sadly I know this is not the case.   He has been stalking me for 10 years.   He is definitely a he and not a she and he loves to fact check and run his own ChatGPT. His latest bit of enjoyment for himself via his techy watch.    It's a bit like the handover from Malaysian air traffic control to Vietnam on flight number MH370 that never actually happened.  I wish he would leave me alone but as the great and the good say "I can't be bothered with you" so I gain strength from that message of other bloggers and friends.   Never doubt yourself. 

Britain Remembered

 I added a few bits to the paragraph on "Professor" Arday because I had omitted the brain tumour he had whilst writing his PhD.   Seeing that he also taught at Durham is making me take university education less and less seriously and save your money.

Changing the subject, in a recent trial of a man who battered his mother to death after smoking cannabis, and having been a cannabis user for many years, the BBC in their report left out the cannabis issue altogether which was discussed in court and led to the trial judge issuing a warning to those who want to legalise the drug stating that cannabis was a drug that caused and exacerbated mental health issues.  The BBC said they make decisions on court reporting in line with editorial priorities and guidelines.  Clearly the BBC would not wish to be party to quoting the line of the judge warning those who want to legalise the drug to think again.  It would not fit in with the ideology of the left to not let everybody literally go to pot.  Jeremy Bentham said that it doesn't work, natural human rights are nonsense upon stilts.  I wrote a poem about it in the form of a letter from Bentham to Blair.   Khan wants to legalise pot smoking.  What does a little up-start like him know, what right does he have to say this as a mayor?  Shouldn't he be concentrating on street furniture and double yellow lines?   When we cannot turn on a water cannon to control mobs, we cannot put a flag up, speak of a boat of illegal migrants to be stopped without being called racist, want to have an uncrowded island of the people we are who eat shepherds pies, drink beer, go to church on a Sunday, eat tripe and onions, go to girls and boys schools separately if we choose to, have fee paying schools if we choose to, it isn't much to ask is it  really to be Britain as we enjoy it, and then you have a little Muslim leader with a majority in Tower Hamlets and Brick Lane and Walthamstowe and Tooting  to tell us that we should legalise cannabis when we live in the rest of Britain with something that is left of Britain and have a voice that does not say legalise cannabis because we like peace without drugs.

As the left try to take over our thoughts, the music industry is also caught up in the ideology.  Boy George,  who is still singing and writing songs, has had to pull out of a West End musical and leave his record label because he is pro-Israel. It is not clear whether he was sacked, asked to leave, or went of his own volition after it was made clear he was not wanted.   Other festival performers have pulled out of summer festivals when organisers demand adherence to Free Palestine.  Boy George's song, We Will Dance Again, says the song is for his many Jewish friends.  The lyrics he sings are about the Nova music festival massacre.  He sings "I stand with the Jews" and the chorus is "We will dance again".   He will no longer be in Jesus Christ Superstar at the London Palladium.   Madonna supports Israel and condemns Hamas.   Bono refuses to denounce Israel.  In London it is not so easy.  If you don't side with Palestine, wave a Palestinian flag on the streets, march and chant on a Sunday,  and you sympathise with Israel you are out as far as London and Britain is concerned condemned by those who do not speak for the majority but those who are big headed enough to call everybody a racist without knowledge or common sense or a head to see what is wrong with Britain and  who will never take in a refugee themselves, who will be a nimby to the end and will never stop being self-righteous and smug and welfare supporters who will grow the band of the young "who needs a job when welfare will pay it all forever" and see the country go down the drain and banter will end in the pub and become an offence if Rayner's last bits of the Employment Rights Act go through. Let  off steam in the pub after work about the boss or the jobsworth and thou shalt be arrested.  Return to the 1970s, a joke if Burnham wants to return to the 1970s he needs to read up on his history, IMF, inflation, strikes, green godesses, union bosses Red Robbo more strikes, more inflation, Jack Jones, Hugh Scanlon.  I wonder what the names will be this time and how Labour will sort it out.  Not hard to guess who will pay and the boats will still come and the cannabis will be smoked in the living rooms and the kids will run gangs from their phones and the 16 year olds will take over. No you don't want blogs with politics but you don't have to read it.

News

Jason Arday has resigned.  This is the story of the Cambridge University professor, their youngest ever black professor, who came from nowhere, couldn't read or write until he was 18 and then made these stunning accomplishments, university degrees, doctorate, charity work  and ended up Professor of Sociology at Cambridge University.  Claimed to have raised £5M in charity money, run in marathons where he was never seen, visited Water Aid charities in Africa although Water Aid say they never invite anybody anywhere and have never heard of him, gave donations to charities which were never seen, wrote a PhD thesis which was quoted over and over by his contemporaries and scholars as a work of  plagiarism.   All ignored by Cambridge University until now. 

Cambridge University at last announced a full investigation this week and Arday resigned yesterday.   He resigned saying he thought it time to draw a line under the events.   Yes, quite. 

Oh yes, I forgot to mention, he had a brain tumour whilst writing his PhD.  He completed his PhD in two and a half years in spite of the brain tumour.  He also had a post at Durham University as an associate professor.  Durham are now playing this down.  

At 18 he hadn't yet mastered how to read and write and by 22 he was taking a Masters degree.  

Norwegian, teenager paid £21,000 to travel from Norway to Yorkshire on a mission to kill on behalf of Iranian terrorists.  His target victim is unnamed but is likely to have been an Israeli in Britain.  18 year old Norwegian gets excited about finding organisation on the internet where he can get to kill and be paid for it.  He sets out from Stavanger which you will remember from geography is in southern Norway on the coast of islands and sea.  He finds the idea of killing appeals to him.  Foxtrot recruited him and the senior recruiter is aged 22.   He and Foxtrot have a deal with Iran to kill enemies of the Iranian regime living abroad.  The teenager told his friends what he was excited about, killing.  He told so many people he was coming here to be an assassin and would get all this money that his friends became more than suspicious and  very worried.  He flew into Manchester, got instructions to go to a wood in Huddersfield and pick up his guns and ammunition.   Oslo police and British police were on to him and he was arrested.  He stood trial at the Old Bailey last week and is awaiting sentence.  Meanwhile the 22 year old Iranian agent has been arrested in Iraq.    

The Foxtrot group, led by an Iraqi in Sweden, are linked to attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets in Europe.  They recruit young teens like the Norwegian to carry out the attacks.   The young Norwegian is set to spend some time in prison and his mother said she is totally baffled by his involvement in this organisation, had no idea about it and is devastated. 

Fact is often stranger than fiction. 

Eyes and Bowels

 Yesterday I was out in the heat of the city because I had my six monthly contact lens eye examination.  This goes with the territory of wearing contact lenses.   

I found the city hot and unpleasant and arrived at the opticians 30 minutes early in order to sit in the cool of their premises and knowing that if it was possible my contact lens man would see me early if he was able to.  Whilst waiting, with others doing the same incidentally, I tried on frames. (We were all hot and the temperature was 32C outside the shop.  The shop had air con).     I found a pair of amazing golden coloured frames which had I needed new glasses would have been my selection on the day but as I was not there for glasses I had to leave and ignore.   I kept looking at them though. 

We discussed my holiday and his, his being off to Bulgaria today to see his son rowing in Plovdiv.

Bulgaria is a place I have looked at for next year if I go on holiday although I am still drawn to the rail journey from London to Stockholm.  It will be a little later on when I will decide what I am doing, if anything.   It all depends on health.   My goal for this year is to lose a bit of weight.  

Incidentally talking of weight loss, a woman in Norfolk died on the mounjaro jabs and the inquest is currently on.  She had a faecal bind in the bowel which caused a leak in the bowel wall.  Be aware that you need good bowels to take this stuff that gives the weight loss by slowing the movement and digestion in general.  Can this be the right thing to do?   Knowing how important the bowel movement is should man be interfering with enzymes that hopefully cause us to do the right thing?   The jury is still out on this particular unfortunate woman and the inquest continues.  

My weight loss will come with eating less chocolate and biscuits. 

 

More News from Yorkshire

 Carrying on with my news stories from Yorkshire the latest is the funeral director Robert Bush who has been locked up for 20 years for failure to run a funeral parlour in a correct and proper manner. He was charged with fraud, prevention of proper and decent burial, fraudulent trading and theft.   He was a Hull resident and the funeral parlour was in Hull, East Yorkshire.   He was aged 48.  

Bush was raided by the police after other funeral directors became suspicious and when Bush was away on holiday they took the opportunity to take a peep inside.  35 rotting bodies were found and up to a 100 lots of ashes.  He was known to lie to funeral celebrants and this was what led to the suspicions from other funeral directors in the end. 

 Now it may not be known by all but the funeral parlour had been owned by another dodgy funeral director before Bush and he was being investigated by the police but died before the investigations were completed and the case against him was dropped.  In walks Bush to acquire the business, not connected with the first owner, but picks up where he left off. 

Bereaved families were handed any old ashes when they went to collect their loved ones ashes and it is thought that Bush found the "old stock" of the previous owner very useful for this and rebagged  and boxed them.  Meanwhile bodies remained in the fridge that didn't work, also bought in situ when he acquired the premises.  Rotting bodies were found, including a baby which was thought at first to be an animal in a bag.

Bush also offered funeral plans where you pay up-front for your own funeral in advance so that everything is taken care of before you die to save your relatives worry in the future.  Bush used most of this money for his own holidays and luxuries.  Beware.  There are a lot of adverts directed at us now to plan ahead in this way, the cinema ads are full of it although I guess the Co-op is reliable but who knows, I suppose the Daily Mirror and BHS employees thought their pensions were safe once upon a time. 

Money that was donated for identified charities by bereaved families in memory of their loved ones was also taken by Bush for himself. 

The Bush family were said to be intelligent and outwardly ordinary and good people.  His wife is standing by him.  His daughter worked with him in the funeral parlour and was said to have been embalming since she was 14.  No charges were brought against her or her mother.  I would say they were lucky to escape charges.    Underneath it all Bush hid this East Yorkshire funeral parlour of evil for his own selfish ends and kept a good front of house appearance.  

More stories from Yorkshire include a machete wielding Asian gang arriving at a house in the middle of the night in Huddersfield in an attempted kidnapping and the recruitment of a young Norwegian boy by Iran to carry out a murder in West Yorkshire.   The organisation recruit young teenagers to carry out targeted murders in Europe of those against the Iranian regime.  The boy was found guilty  at the Old Bailey last week of conspiracy to murder.  He will be sentenced in October. 

Garden Party in the Afternoon

 Yesterday I went to the Adult Education group's summer garden party which was held at the house of the Chairman.  As you will recall I resigned from the committee a year ago due to the dissertation writing which was followed by a bout of ill health.  In fact I had become disillusioned with the running of the group and I was at a rather low point at the time and needed little to push me over the edge to step away. 

A year has gone by and encouraged by my friend C who still goes to the group I decided to re-kindle my contact with them.   

I was made very welcome and saw old friends and made some new ones.  I was welcomed by the chairman and met the committee member who replaced me.  I spoke to old committee members and found that things continue as before confirming my decision to step away to be the right one. 

The afternoon was well organised with a jazz band to entertain, fresh cakes and sandwiches and lemonade and orange squash.  I was expecting that there might have been some Pims but no but it is good to see that a fine time can be had by all without the need for alcohol.  

On the day my friend C decided not to go.   She had been coming with me.   It was a very hot and sweaty day and she worried about being outside in the garden all afternoon.  We had left it flexible as to whether we went or not and either one of us we knew might back out.   As it was there was plenty of seating in the shade and cool areas.  The garden was a mass of shrubs in one area, low maintenance and cool and plenty of garden seats amongst the pathways and canopies had been provided in the open area where the jazz band played. 

I took one photo whilst the band set up which does not really do the setting of the house and garden justice.  The house is large with an added extension to the rear and is otherwise of Tudor brickwork to the front roadside.  The house immediately next door is 17th Century thatch.   The house had effectively two separate gardens which I would guess were the result of the extension.

By the end of the afternoon I was exhausted by the heat and basically doing nothing.  It is surprising how talking and listening and sunshine, sitting down and a few sandwiches can be so tiring!

I sat down when I got home and rejigged my day.  What I had planned for Saturday tea I no longer needed because I had eaten sandwiches mid afternoon.  I ended up with a late supper and read the papers and an early night.   I have just penned a thank you "note" email to the chairman for a splendid afternoon.