So, Mr Milliband. When are you going to wean us off woodchip and close Drax? Just after you wean us off Gas-Peaking power plants, right? And well before Hinckley C comes on line and Sizewell C is cancelled […]

That row of senior UK Politicians. We're just stuck with Liz Truss now, like a bad smell.

The Irony of the right complaining about the left wing bias of the BBC and getting the senior management fired. Who were put in by the right and were directly responsible for the right wing bias of the BBC. With an unhealthy dose of Zionism in the mix. Complaining about the Antisemitic […]

#cocktail - Rouge Clary 50ml Gin, 30ml Cocchi Rosa, 7.5ml Campari, Lemon Twist, rocks or up. Not quite happy with the name yet. How about Clarie Rose? Based on Rouge Claire which has Suze instead of Campari

On this Remembrance Sunday. Never Forget. Never Again. Will we ever say "Never Again" and mean it? Looking at all the war and war crimes around the world, apparently not.

Whatever happened to the Gaza ceasefire? Seems like a lifetime ago.

Mmm, Fireworks. It must be Remembrance Saturday.

#cocktail - Diplomat 40ml Red Vermouth, 40ml Dry Vermouth, 7.5 Maraschino, dash Orange, dash Angostura, Lemon twist Relatively low alcohol cocktails? It's Sat, Yes please, I'll have another one. Diplomat? I can't really imagine Kate or Hal Wyler drinking these. Also 50, 50, 2.5

#cocktail - Chrysanthemum #2 50ml Dry Vermouth, 15ml Benedictine, 2.5ml Absinthe, Orange twist #1 is 75, 15, dash Really quite unusual.

Just Say Neigh! Lol. Not just Brands Hatch and Corsica Studios with incomers complaining about the noise. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/07/newmarket-horse-owner-receives-notice-of-complaint-over-constant-neighing

#climate. https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-2025-track-be-among-three-warmest-years-third-warmest-october-record Daily average global 2m air temp in the records - Oct-25 was the third-warmest Oct - Oct-25 was 1.55°C above pre-industrial - 25 is virtually certain to finish as the second- […]

#cocktail - Brandy Gump 50ml Cognac, 20ml Lemon, 20ml Grenadine, Lemon twist Another of those non-conventional sours. Tastes exactly as you would expect. "Gump", though. What's that all about?

You love Peas. You love Cheese. You love AI. You'll love Cheesy Peas-i-AI peas, with added AI. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/picture/2025/nov/07/give-peas-a-chance-even-ai-peas-the-stephen-collins-cartoon

1. This is a thread on freedom, and how easy it is to lose. Over the past 2,000 years in Europe, there have been few periods and places of freedom. For much of the time we lived under highly oppressive tyrannies of various kinds, whether small or grand, local or imperial, secular or religious.🧵

It's been unseasonably warm. Old enough to remember when 5-Nov was when the first hard frost arrived. > Temperatures overnight only dropped to 14.4℃ at Teddington in London, provisionally making it the mildest Bonfire Night on record > The previous record for the night of 5th-6th November was […]

Reform UK are just Conservatives without the organisation or discipline. Or any policies. But then that's true of the Conservatives now as well.

#cocktail - Marianito (Vermut Preperado) 75ml Red Vermouth (Carpano Antica), 15ml Gin, 15ml Campari, Orange twist or Olive or Lemon Twist, rocks via Mr Godwin https://thespirits.substack.com/p/the-spirits-183-the-marianito

I do hope Labour is proposing planting forests in and around new towns and not building new towns in forests. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/05/new-set-of-forest-towns-to-be-built-between-oxford-and-cambridge

Is Zohran Mamdani a Social-Democrat or a Democratic-Socialist? This report used both framings. Huge Congrats to NYC by the way for choosing him as Mayor […]

Are the Flaggots going to take the flags down after Armistice day so we can put up the Xmas decorations?

On VirginMedia cable? Check your contract for when the big discount expires. Upgrade to the exact same service on or around that date and get the big discount again. Don't check and your bill will have just jumped by 30% or so. You might want to set a calendar warning for next year.

#cocktail - Milwaukee 60ml Rye, 30ml Abricot, Lemon twist Abricot is quite a strong favour and tends to dominate in cocktails. So at least once, lean right into it. It may look a bit like a Manhattan but it's miles away from NYC, in Wisconsin.

Doomer Thought For The Day We can't stop climate change now. But we can decide how to try and survive it. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/01/climate-change-adaptation

#cocktail - Martinez #1: 45ml Gin, 45ml Red Vermouth, 2.5ml Maraschino, dash Orange Bitters, Orange twist The origins are in the dim and distant past when people first started trying to cover up cheap gin with vermouth. So there are lots of variations. 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, varying amounts of […]

It's the season of https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-season-motherfuckers , motherfuckers.

#cocktail - Alberto #2 30ml Gin, 30ml Cocchi Americano, 30ml Fino, Orange twist discard The other Alberto : 30ml Gin, 20ml Cocchi Americano, 20ml Manzanilla, 2.5ml Cointreau, rocks, Orange twist They're both quite strange if you were just expecting something like a wet Martini.

We need to stop conflating all the immigration in the UK. "Stop the boats" is a totally different problem to French health care consultants, Polish plumbers and Australian bar staff. - Asylum seekers - Refugees welcomed from specific countries. eg Ukraine, Afghan collaborators, HongKong - Long […]

Why are revolutions and civil wars in Africa *so* brutal? Or are revolutions and civil wars *by force* always brutal, everywhere in the world?

I was looing forward to a Samhain fire tonight in the woods, but it looks like it's going to be heavy rain. Bonus LoFi House track. Sample from Night Of The Demons. https://youtu.be/sdQInPwdnt8

#cocktail - New Deal: 60ml Rye, 20ml Picon, 2.5ml Simple, Orange twist Not that different from the "Blessed Manhattan". Rye and Averna.

The first rule of Danny Kruger Club is that you think that you're not a member of Dunning-Kruger Club. Nominative Determinism in action.

- Israel kills > 600 Palestinians since the ceasefire. >100 last night. - Israel controls half of Gaza - Aid slowed down or stopped - Weapons testing, continued bombing and demolition And then there's West Bank, East Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen Can you see what it is yet? […]

This is not good. #climate The 2025 state of the climate report: a planet on the brink https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biaf149/8303627?login=false https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1ojk1a6/unprecedented_threat_to_earth_22_of_34_vital/

#cocktail - Jasmine 20ml Gin, 20ml Campari, 20ml Cointreau, 20ml Lemon, Lemon Twist

Old enough to remember Track and Trace apps on phones that used the Google-Apple Bluetooth Exposure Notification system. Why did we close it all down and discontinue the apps when the pandemic wasn't over? Why couldn't it have been extended to cover other common illnesses like Flu, RSV, Noro?

If Wind Power has cut energy costs so much in the UK, why are consumer energy prices still so high? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/28/wind-power-cut-uk-energy-costs-ucl-study Privatisation, energy contracts, National Grid, Artificial energy markets, Profit!

Old enough to remember when I could use many of my fav websites without having to wait 15 seconds for Cloudflare to decide if I'm a bot or not. And then do a Captcha to prove I'm human.

I have a very bad feeling about this. That's no ballroom. (c Mark Hamill, https://bsky.app/profile/markhamillofficial.bsky.social/post/3m46uuaavzk2p)

There's no official PIOMAS data yet for Arctic Sea Ice Volume minimum. But unofficially it looks like it was 2nd lowest in the records on12-Sep-25 https://greatwhitecon.info/2025/10/facts-about-the-arctic-in-october-2025/#Oct-27 […]

They were just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life's Rich Tapestry.

Pull that Overton Window and pull it good. Normalise the language in the Chatroom to Policy Pipeline. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/27/monday-briefing-how-radical-views-became-mainstream-from-remigration-to-birthrates - Remigration - Cancelling Indefinite Leave to Remain - […]

Happy first sunset of GMT. London 16:44. The two months either side of the Winter Solstice are the dark times. Lean into them and enjoy late afternoon walks in the dark.

Try and avoid NHS hospitals this winter. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1982384049999278504 > “It feels like [Winter] is going to be armageddon, to be honest. We’re already full.” And here's the megathread about how NHS IPC got so bad. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1860781843244634365

The horror! The horror. The horror?

#cocktail - Puerto Rico 60ml Light Rum, 20ml Lime, 20ml Grenadine, Angostura Very easy to drink, but less interesting than an El Presidente.

#cocktail - Maiden's Blush #2 50ml Gin, 20ml Cointreau, 10ml Lemon juice, 10ml Grenadine, Lemon twist

Tactical voting works. #gtto - Get The Tory Out #kro - Keep Reform Out #glo - Get Labour Out Smaller parties for the win. Plaid Cymru, LibDem, Green, SNP, Sinn Fein, This post brought to you by the Caerphilly Senedd by-election. Labour first loss ever, Plaid Cymru 47% win

Did this Covid wave peak in the UK? We hit 140 official Covid deaths in the first full week which is well above the yearly average and definitely not good. But just maybe the drop in positivity is a leading sign that it's stopped climbing […]

#cocktail - Batiste 60ml Aged (or dark) Rum, 15ml Curacao (or Cointreau), dash Orange Bitters, Orange twist, rocks Doesn't come much easier than that. You might want to swirl it in a mixing glass with a couple of ice cubes first and use one big rock.

No rain and high winds up the hill for today's walk. We had a full Parliamentary PMQs of Rooks. Lots of flying about and shouting. A Whip of Crows keeping an eye on them. A Thinktank of Pigeons flying through the middle. And a Donation of Red Kites in the public gallery above.