Starmer said he had ‘full confidence’ in McSweeney a couple of days back. That phrase always used to be the knell of doom. Nice to see that some things remain constant in the current political world.

I wonder if Irish/Scottish/Gaelic speakers can pick out anything

Those are from the Q-celtic branch. Cornish, Breton and Welsh are P-celtic. They are pretty different.

The year has never been the problem.

Now, if there are plans to rename the months Thirtyseconduary, Fortyfirstember and so on, we might be getting somewhere.

Mixed feelings on this one with Waitrose in particular as a target. Whilst not exactly a workers cooperative, it is employee owned: staff have non-transferable shares. Thefts will hit employees directly as a result.

Clearly this is not going to be any kind of significant dent in the overall profits of the company - it is very much about the publicity - but, even so, couldn’t they have chosen one with a more standard corporate model?

With our current one, it really isn’t a lot - it is more taking the the garden furniture apart and getting in the shed and that kind of thing really, although Mrs Greyshuck is going for a bit of winter planting this year, so there are a couple of cold-frames that I will be building for some of the seedlings - partly from the temperature, partly from grazing deer etc.

We are very unlikely to get much snow - or even too much cold, given the climate situation - but it will probably be below zero some of the time and we’'ll definitely get rain if nothing else so we will need to protect some things from that.

From today, I will be using my remaining holiday days to have Fridays off for the rest of the year leading to the fortnight off over Xmas and New year.

I’m not going to be doing much with these 3-day weekends beyond winterising the garden, doing a few household jobs and reading etc, but that’s pretty much the point as far as I am concerned.

I’m a Direction can be Left and can be Right, with Other Danger on the cusp.

And of 14 other commonwealth realms, if it comes to it.

but now you’re saying this shouldn’t happen?

To be fair, the very first words that OP says are “I’m not saying anything about this particular case”, and indeed they do not say anything about Israel after that.

Fuck Netanyahu’s Israel. I really don’t see that OP is saying anything to the contrary here.

Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain - a huge, solid, black Readers Digest compendium that covers the UK region by region and around the year and full of wonderfully gruesome linocut illustrations. I still have it on my shelves and bring it out from time to time.

I noticed with great pleasure that Charlie Cooper used it as a reference in his recent TV show Myth Country.

Blackadder already did it back in the '80s. The Sense and Senility episode was taking the piss out the ‘heroic’ stance long before the Tories actually starting doing it seriously.

From things that are current, I’d a toss-up between Shrinking and The Great North. I’d probably lean to the former, but my wife would go for the latter.

Otherwise, The Good Place would definitely be high on my list and quite possibly at the top.

Looks like it will be warm but with some rain, so I’m planning to spend a while reading in the gazebo while it is raining. There is definitely something enjoyable about being outside, but out of the rain and not having to do anything.

I’m just having my breakfast. Doing that on a sunny Swiss balcony overlooking a spectacular Alpine valley would suit me.

There have, evidently, been a few of these in the past. Neither my personal phone nor my work one has ever received one though. Nor has my SO’s if it comes to it.

Edwards insisted that lessons had been learned and that in 2023 National Highways had carried out a full soil survey and a three-month tree analysis.

This revealed they had planted the wrong species in the wrong place, and provided valuable lessons about the most appropriate season in the year to plant a tree, he said.

As someone who has been involved in planting schemes, I can say that this is absolutely bog-standard basic stuff. There is no excuse for this at all. No-one employed as any kind of ecologist should have got this wrong. People should be sued for this at the very minimum.

As far as TV is concerned, Murderbot, The Eternaut, Babylon Berlin & Your Friends and Neighbors continue to be the best that we are watching at the moment - pretty much in that order.

Film:

• The Penguin Lessons (2025) - Steve Coogan puts in a fine, morose performance here. It takes a while to engage, but pays off well in the end. Nothing groundbreaking, but well worth a view.

• The Salt Path (2025) - a solid adaptation of the book which, perhaps inevitably, focuses more on the emotional journey of the couple than the incidents of the walk as the book tends to. It did not entirely grab me and felt rather overlong as a result, but still an interesting and well acted tale.

Most recently, spot the car that isn’t black, white, grey, blue or red.

Commercial vehicles don’t count. Gold/bronze gets 1 pt; yellow gets 2 or 4 if it isn’t a sports car; pink gets 4; dark/british racing green gets 4 or 8 if it isn’t vintage; any other type of green gets 6.

We were making this up at the time. That’s as far as we got.

We have played the legs game occasionally, but not much fun on motorways.

And “Horse” from Eagle vs Shark. You win the round when you see a horse and say “horse”.

I really can’t recall but not a lot at all. To avoid the whole blood-diamond thing we bought a vintage one from a charity, where it had been donated.

Yes, much the same here. Forgettable is, disappointingly, the key word.

I’ll carry on watching, but largely in hope that it improves rather than for actual enjoyment as it is.