Good luck with that up here…. You’d have to do a lot of willow shelter/drainage belting, I think. Not my field, sadly, or I would certainly be doing a lot more with it.

Did you not get called in for overtime? (Police, I assume? Or army?)

Got your potato onions in there, too.

I remember 7/7 very well. I was already off the tube and walking into work when the bombs happened, and I spent most of the morning glued to IRC getting updates from a couple of friends who worked for the BBC and passing them around the office. At lunch time, my boss bowed to the inevitable and sent us home, which for me entailed a five mile walk to meet up with my then-husband at Tate Modern, because we had a small problem. We’d lost (as in misplaced) my mother-in-law: my ex had waved her off to London Bridge bus station on his way to work, with a vague plan to have lunch at Tate, and it was about 3pm before she finally managed to make her way there and find us. He bought her a mobile phone the next day.

I watched a bit of that earlier in the year, purely because Huw Richards was on it, and I couldn’t believe how old he had got :(

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/06/london-7-7-the-atrocity-we-dont-talk-about/ Both of these easy answers to the central question that haunts 7/7 suffer from the same problem. They look almost entirely over there for the answer as to why this gang visited death on the country in which its members were raised. They point either solely to their Islamic heritage, or they blame the Western wars in the Middle East and its near abroad for driving them to atrocity. But the problem of homegrown jihadists isn’t just over there, it’s here in the West, in Britain, too. These young second-generation Muslims growing up in a down-at-heel suburb in Leeds were shaped by their own situation, not that of people in Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan – of which they knew very little. As Kenan Malik argues in From Fatwa to Jihad (2009) the root of their embrace of a militant form of Islam lay in a profound estrangement from and resentment towards mainstream society. A curdling sense of grievance. A sense that life in Britain was not offering them what they felt entitled to. A sense that mainstream society was alien to them.

;) ;) I use it a lot!

Phew: quilt show all done, everything put back how it should be in the hall. Getting the stands back up into the attic was actually easier than getting them down, weirdly. My mum came over to see it (and ended up helping to move the lighter stuff, bless her), and she’s just headed for home after having dinner. Very flattering the number of people who wanted to know how one of my quilts was made: it was a bit experimental / technically interesting, which is why I put it in. Apparently the woman from the Big House in the village wants to buy it, not yet decided whether I’m willing to part with it or not. I might tell her it’ll be £500 or something daft and see if she still wants it…. My cakes were also very well received, especially the savoury one that I forgot to put the baking powder in: it was all gone before lunchtime on the first day.

I hadn’t noticed quite how much I’d got into the habit of phone-for-friends, laptop-for-work (although I realised a while ago that it makes me worse at personal emails that require a proper reply), but I’ve had a letter from a friend sitting on the coffee table for a month, looking increasingly accusatory. Just now, I thought “what if I type it on my phone?” and twenty minutes later I was copy-pasting a thousand words into a word processor on my laptop, adding a last minute thought, and hitting print. Who knew it was so simple?

lol at “Buxton in the middle”! Smaller than in my head: will I pot them up and plant out next spring, do you think?

That will do the garden good!

Last summer, I had a brief disagreement with next door: I’d got sick of the six foot high nettles blocking the view from my kitchen window and chopped the tops off them, and he was being sniffy that I should have asked for permission. I just replied that I shouldn’t have needed to do it at all (ie: it’s his job), and that I hoped the roots weren’t undermining the boundary wall. He’s been out doing something noisy all morning (in the weather!), and I’ve just been out to pick lettuce only to find that he’s neatly strimmed the whole boundary. Olive branch, maybe?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/justin-marozzi-book-shocking-truth-slavery-islamic-world/ What is remarkable today is how one version of slavery and the slave trade continues to dominate Western public consciousness. To take just one example, A Short History of Slavery, by the historian James Walvin, was published in 2007. Of the book’s 235 pages, 201 focus on the Americas. By contrast, the history of slavery in the Islamic world – so long, various and controversial – has been neglected. That is starting to change: a new generation of Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian and (in particular) Turkish researchers are poring over the archives and asking uncomfortable questions. Among other things, their work will demonstrate that, although it has become fashionable in some quarters to vilify the West as the supreme historical villain, such a stance is historically and factually incorrect. https://archive.ph/31b2y

The Met Office: Warning! Heatwave! Danger! Amber Alert! The north of England:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/02/christian-artist-reported-to-police-gender-critical-views/ A Christian artist was reported to the police and banned from her own exhibition because of her gender-critical beliefs. Victoria Culf also claims a council worker wrongly accused her of being under police investigation when she was not. Mrs Culf launched legal action against Watford borough council last year on nine grounds, including breach of contract, discrimination and harassment. The 44-year-old, who has been an artist for 20 years, had been setting up her independently funded exhibition at Watford Museum when she became engaged in a conversation with a council worker about transgender issues. https://archive.ph/iht5P

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/26/grooming-gangs-multiculturalism-and-the-silence-of-the-progressive-feminists/ Woke feminists refuse to address the elephant in the room. Which isn’t race or ethnicity, but culture. Of course, there is no biological reason why Eritrean men in Britain should be over 20 times more likely to be convicted of a sexual offence than people born in Britain. It is not down to genetics that Congolese nationals are 12 times more likely to be convicted of violent crime. Nor that Pakistani-origin men have long been overrepresented in grooming prosecutions. Sadly, there remain many non-Western cultures where misogyny is prevalent, where women are seen as inferior, where ‘impious’ Western women are seen as ‘fair game’. Local traditions, religion and tribalism can all play a role. These are not ‘racial’ matters, and nor are these cultural factors fixed. Culture can be challenged and changed, just as backward attitudes were once challenged in the West. You would expect feminists of all people to recognise this.

I had 2mm overnight!

Seems weird it’s just those couple of plants. If anything, they should be doing well as they’re on the sunny side, although I guess that also exposes them to more weather.

You what, Aldi?

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/glastonbury-has-become-a-sinister-festival-of-anti-semitism/ Let’s speak frankly – our moral crisis is too pressing for pussy-footing. ‘Death to the IDF’ means the death of Jews. First, because the soldiers of the IDF are predominantly Jewish. But more importantly because this is the force tasked with defending the Jewish homeland from the armies of anti-Semites that surround it. The IDF is the only thing standing between the Jewish State and its genocidal obliteration by the apocalyptic bigots on its borders. The death of the IDF would be the death of the world’s only Jewish nation. Untold numbers of Jews would perish in the event of this thing dreamt of by the preening middle classes of Glastonbury. ‘We didn’t think of that’, some will say today, as shame intrudes into the sick joy they derived from praying for the death of other human beings. Well, to borrow a slogan beloved of you people: ‘Educate yourselves.’ https://archive.ph/PP1bV