@afcbpodcast.com Just read Sam's item on the BBC website. Good summary of where we are. Chapeau Sam! 🍒🍒

❤️ Copenhagen #cycling

Continuing the birthday celebrations in Paris. Today, Musée d'Orsay.

A Night at the Opera. Ariodante by Handel. Written by a German. Set in Scotland. Sung in Italian. Performed in Paris. Excellent performance!

On the train. Châtellerault to Paris, 300kms in 1 hour 40 minutes. Cost ? 44€ 🙂

“Farage “broke Britain" with Brexit and is now, outrageously, capitalising on the vast damage he caused” Article argues there’s no need to mention Reform’s racism as the Brexit shitshow is failure enough. But that had its roots in racism too. So let’s do both. app.independent.co.uk/edition/uk.c...

Wowzer! Vivid.

And a red evening, with sunset vapour trail.

Pink morning here

Still got some House Martins and Swallows today.

It’s gone so quickly from ‘boat people’ to all immigrants. So quickly from ‘I don’t mind if they come here legally and pay taxes’ to ‘actually it’s anyone foreign’. We are living in the ‘first they came for’ poem. All to give the population a scapegoat so the super rich can hoard yet more wealth.

I saw a few Swallows and House Martins today. I'm wondering if they will be the last I've seen this year. I'm at 46.5°N 0.2°E 🇫🇷

CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1965: 20-1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 1990: 75-1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio today: 280-to-1 Trickle-down economics was always a sham. Nothing has ever trickled down.

@romanroads.bsky.social The Fosse Way at Clandown, Radstock, Somerset on a dog walk a few years back.

Clouds, looking east at sunset.

I'm up early this morning. Moon, Venus and Regulus

Found at the vineyard.

14 years of austerity so bankers could keep their yachts while 20k police vanished, armed forces cut by 20%, childcare slashed, councils bled dry but given more to do, schools stripped, infrastructure left to rot, food banks normalized, and the economy reshaped to make reversing it near impossible.

Came across this amazing Deaths Head Hawk Moth, about 6cm long.

Morning rainbow.

I came across this Nightjar having a snooze at the edge of a gravel track when I was out on a walk this lunchtime. Apparently oblivious of me and my dog.

Fab rainbow at the end of a showery day.

Sorry Americans, there are many, many millions of decent citizens of the USA. But this is a very pithy summary of what the outside world thinks. 'Shining city on a hill', 'beacon of democracy' etc was all BS even before Trump.

Any fool blithely saying they’ve now had a bit of a think about the ECHR and we should leave - is part of why we’re now stuck in the mess of Brexit, being told by the far right to hand our human rights over to them to administer. FFS people. Have you learned nothing from the last decade of failure?

More sunflowers at sunset.

Sunflower riot breaking out in our garden!

Lovely day out to Chinon. Vibrant, massive equestrian statue of Jeanne d'Arc who visited in 1429, and the Forteresse de Chinon, high above the Vienne, where she visited King Charles VII.

Found we had an Asiatic Hornet nest. Called the Mairie (village mayor's office) and an expert arrived just over an hour later to neutralise it at a cost of 80€. Vive la France 🇫🇷

Trump brags that no other US President has held a meeting with so many heads of state. No other US President has needed a mass intervention like this. No other US President has been so played by Putin. No other US President has had so little understanding of what peace actually means.

There can never be sufficient sunflowers.

Up, up and away

Sunflower!!!!

New YouGov polling. A monumental failure of our political class to educate, a monumental failure of our media to report fairly, for a generation

Let us pray.

That clip of Pochin honking out her toxic racism with no statistics or even rudimentary analysis to back up her nasty, curtain-twitching beliefs… is a large part of why our politics is in such a mess. Viciously useless people being made MPs by voters persuaded to think that hatred will fix things.

I've verified my age by naming Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.

I think it's going to rain.

We could nationalise water for £20 – here’s how youtu.be/tnqPZNNx_rY?... English water companies are financially broken. So why is Labour ruling out nationalisation? They say it would cost too much. That's wrong. It could cost less than a round of drinks.

More drama in the sky this evening.

⏳Final week to sign up to the Green Party. 🗳️ Vote for Bold Leadership on August 1st.

Right, the BBC’s platforming of Farage is getting completely out of hand. On the left, the 4 stories mentioning Ed Davey on the BBC News app since April 1st. On the right, some of the 40+ stories about Nigel Farage in the same period.

RIP Ozzy. music.youtube.com/watch?v=YFl-...

Big sky

Leader! Command us!! We are ready!!!

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." -FDR, 1937

I found this pair of feathers close to each other on the ground this morning. I'm thinking they are from a Barn Owl. Can anyone confirm please? #owls

All set for le Tour de France this morning. Allez allez !!

Hay bales.

My ride to Mûr de Bretagne in 2018. It's tough!! I turned round for home at the top and had a frightening speed wobble on the way down during which an articulated lorry overtook me. #cycling #TourdeFrance