Second verse hardly needs changing: Before the fiddlers have fled Before they ask us to pay the bill And while we still have that chance Let's face the music and dance Soon, we'll be without the loon He'll be humming a different tune - and then ... There may be teardrops to shed... Let's hope!

At the beginning you can see a couple of flight lights, then my cottage with our Christmas-lit bay tree, and then December 2025's Cold moon, the last supermoon of the year. Happy Cold Dark Season all. May you find peace, love, and kindness in 2026. Somehow somewhere. youtube.com/shorts/FQ0nL...

70 years it would have been, and I've followed it for most of those years. And on the 70th anniversary, they've lost Spain (huge fan base), Ireland (one of the two biggest ever winners), Netherlands (biggest contributor outside big 5), almost certainly also Norway, Iceland, Slovenia ... It's over.

Didn't even hold a vote, just got their "amended rules" pushed through and ya está. Fine, have your contest, seems to be the feel of the moment, just as in women leaving public life, fine have it ... Bullies win. Again. The only solution is to ostracise them personally.

They needed five broadcasters to demand a secret vote, they got eight, Spain among them. The vote is expected this evening on Israel's participation in Eurovision 2026. www.20minutos.es/television/r...

She supported the nomination for my own MBE so it was only appropriate I did the same for her BEM for exceptional services to British and others in Tenerife. I had the last honour from the old Queen in Tenerife and she has the first from the new King! Congratulations @clioflynn.bsky.social

My generation has benefited most of all from this, and we share some of the responsibility, but the real blame is due to an officially-approved and rampant capitalism that's rocket-propelled "growth" since the 80s and caused social collapse through inequality. That can't be laid at boomers' door.

And not just about Die Hard ... of course it's a Xmas film, but expecting sanity from the UK right now is a big ask. I must be one of the few who've never seen the UK's apparent actual "favourites" - Home Alone, Love Actually, and Elf!

A lie for the monied interests of a few against that of the many, in which experts who understated the truth were not just disregarded but dismissed as mendacious idiots ... believed by flag shaggers who believed their colour and Englishness made them superior. And why it can never ever be forgiven.

Got a flea in my ear recently for telling someone about this wonderful news about macular degeneration on the grounds that it's "incurable". People are often unaware of some really good medical advances while everyone's yelling into the void ...

😅 I do actually love whatever it is we call Christmas, just not in the public form we now suffer much of the year. Never could stand flashing lights, metallic tinsel, shrieky songs, jingly music ... but the quiet dark half of the year? that's something to celebrate. As a season, not a day. 🧣🧤❄️🌲💚

Not just Sweden, not just political life. Women are increasingly looking at this man's world and saying Fine, have it ... leave me alone. That's pretty much where I am too, and it's not fear, it's disgust. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

I never once saw a panto where Widow Twankey was played in suspenders and high hells by an act with a very suggestive name. I am not prudish but Merry Drag Tales is not a traditional panto, and whatever the time and place, cocks and suspenders for under 5s do not qualify as family friendly for me.

Existential threat. As is the disappearance of European water. We can talk politics about Trump, Putin, Venezuela, Brexit, the EU, whatever we like, but there really is only one story in town. That people don't recognize that is why it's an existential threat. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Just thinking back to early Christian times, don't remember there being a Conservative Party either, so there's that, but no-one needs that to be reminded of that to see the Tories are un-Christian ... only need to look at them ...

Wonder if the English patriots claiming their right to jury trial is enshrined in Magna Carta have the first idea they'd be the ones classed as serfs and peasants, and so the ones whose rights were specifically not actually covered, them not being landowners or barons or similar ... Guess not 🤪

Poignant, and true. I was what Margaret Thatcher, whom I knew personally, called one of the Wets: we were quite a group. It always used to be a truism that people became more right wing as they aged. For me, the opposite is true simply because the political landscape has changed, not my views. As 👇

Hopefully the Streisand Effect will ensure that despite the BBC's abject craven cowardice everyone knows this historian considers Donald Trump “the most openly corrupt president in American history”. I'd imagine most of us consider the shyster in similar fashion as I reckon we all do the BBC.

Someone who has proven again and again that he knows how to think about "conflict" and who knows Russia ... 👇

I think we are all increasingly aware now, and not before time, that "our friends" and "our enemies" need redefining ...

Do read the link! As I often say, the USA's origins are rooted in projectile pestilential Protestantism, Puritanical Christian white nationalist extremism which saw Cromwell's harshness as far too weak. Nothing has changed except in an inevitable evolution of the foundational idea of Providence.

I've been told to my face that performative cruelty is needed because these "animals" don't understand anything but a hard-faced approach, so that's how it is, suck it up, get used to it, and "I don't give a f**k if people don't like it". They are not nice people. Yes, this 👇

The olive-coloured building is a hospital. The camper vans are in its car park because their resident occupiers have to live somewhere ... But we have record tourism numbers. Yay 🤪 Some call it a paradox. Others call it parasitism, especially of the politics-development revolving door system.

Since travel is now just what everyone does everywhere absolutely all the time, I don't think anyone will stop consuming. And I've reached the point now where I don't even think it's the corporations' fault. We all know what we're doing. We are the ones to blame. The "we" who consume, that is ...

London has urban foxes, Madrid has ... urban boars! The renaturalized stretch of the Manzanares river in Madrid is seeing such life return, including very many birds and, it seems, more than a few wild boars, our jabalíes! 🐗💦

Do read the whole thread, but as it says, "it’s especially ironic because the lecture is exactly about the ‘paralyzing cowardice’ of today’s elites." A perfect example of the paralyzing cowardice of the BBC. Not biased in any way except in blowing with any prevailing wind due to lacking a spine.

The necessary other half of "hope for the best" is "prepare for the worst". The latter without the former is paranoia. The former without the latter is where we are, blindly sleepwalking into the future we've already burnt. We need both, but above all we need leaders with the mind to see the need.

The world needed better. And by a country mile. We are f*cked.

A very good point. While Labour insist on making work something they say cannot work and is disastrous, they are taking people for mugs. It's all just sophistry to try to appease the bigots who'll vote Reform in any case. Labour don't deserve any support until they act in line with reality.

Seems quite fair to me ... would do everyone else a favour too. The EU has to stand up here or we may as well call it quits. Today.

Not quite Sid James' Mark Antony's "Hail, snow, rain, thunder, lighting – the lot!" but not far off. Depending on areas over the next few days, we will have a potaje meteorologico, a "weather soup" of rain, snow, calima, and costeros ... in which respect please see this: bsky.app/profile/jane...

COP30 has a first draft, and the words "fossil fuels" do not appear once. Now Iran has to move its capital. "People said it was impossible, but now it’s no longer optional." Much more of this is coming, and it will involve the movement of millions, and it won't be the poor migrants' fault ...

As the article ends, the "ignorance — often proud ignorance — of the far-right is not just funny, it is very, very dangerous." And despite the UK's best efforts it does seem that the US leads the world in dangerous ignorance, indeed it's loud and proud.

Just "potentially divisive". Presumably between insiders on the white nationalist Right and everyone else ... Swastikas now OK, following the already accepted "Roman salute". And nooses, why the devil not?! Who could object? A crow? called Jim? To hell with that ... It's not "coming". It's here.

However "appalling" it might be, what passes for "mainstream news" in the UK is not "journalism". It is outrage generation to prod people to vote against their best interests and in the vested interests of media proprietors and their political backers. The error is to consider it "journalism".

I yearn for politicians to do something that actually needs to be done because it needs to be done, not because it appeals to their base, or fills their donors' pockets, and despite any feared tabloid generated "outrage"... and argues the reason ... Called decency, morality ... anyone seen any?

Democracy in Spain, 50 years but Franco still divides, just not "half and half" now. And absolutely in the "half" you'd expect we find a "culture" of horrendous cruelty that should shock, but doesn't. Everyone knows it's torture. Only difference is between those who like to inflict it and the rest.

Possibly the only way to get over social annihilation is with some form of reconciliation commission for legal forgiveness, but when part of it requires society to agree to sweep something under the carpet, it means younger generations simply forget the past ... www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A story of our time deserves nothing less than a Pullitzer! . "Homeless migrants" being rehabilitated or mocked (in the bible they're Jesus' parents)? or a C16 Bruegel pastiche of melting ice and a "seasonal" fair - for Xmas? Hate seems the seasonal "must" now in the UK. Evergreen tree anyone?🎄

Copying the Right loses to the Right, and loses everything measure of human decency in the process. What a choice to make when you could set out a moral stall of your own. Unprocessable except in a society that has lost all cohesion, and all sense of direction.

I see gammon widely outraged at Tesco selling "non-Christian *evergreen* trees". It's all English apparently, the lot of it. Christ's birth, Yul, decorated Weinachtsbaúme, Lebkuchen ... Born in a manger in a stable ... where? Portsmouth? White English men of a certain disposition ... uff ...

It's not *all* men, and sometimes it's not men at all, but the overwhelming majority are men. And the overwhelming majority of their victims are young women. The power imbalance is nauseating, based semingly on a tacit acceptance of "powerful men's needs". Not *all* men are bastards but ...

Incapable of shame, embarrassment, decency, thought, or any comprehension. Brits in Spain shouting in English about foreigners in England not speaking English, invading someone else's country ... after coming here as foreigners and speaking English ... Stupid and vile. A national mortification.

He wouldn't have attacked had he not intended a shakedown. This was always coming.

If not now, then we will fully deserve the deluge that comes after us.

The UK's basic problem is that people think things haven't changed "since the pandemic". No-one mentions Brexit, no-one admits its failure, costs, damage. No truth at all. Brexit predated the pandemic and its poison continues to work. And they won't admit it because they were warned, by us. Cowards.

Starmer thinks it's a game of scissors rock paper but Trump's just going to thump anyone in front of him. You can't deal with a thug. You have to block all avenues and then sever relations, then resist and if necessary fight.

Problem in a nutshell, not just in this respect but any. "Money is money and people will jump" ... They've no choice because their situation was made for that purpose. No different to shouting dance at someone and firing bullets round their feet. Guillotines and pitchforks is where we're at.

Wow, they're trying to kill the NHS at the same time. Will this go under the radar with all eyes on the beeb?

The dog that didn't bark ... the Sherlock Holmes story of the thief who was an insider the guard dog did not bark at ... the "victim", I've read elsewhere, was Virginia Giuffre. Shame he's not around any more to corroborate his emails, so frustrating he isn't here to speak ...