Oh gawd! I’ve been intrigued for a while about the Village Hall suddenly seeming flush with cash — fancy leaflets advertising events, “FREE burgers”, “FREE concerts” and so on, so when the latest one (“Join us for The Big Lunch: free soup, sandwiches and cake”) popped up on the WhatsApp I asked what the deal was, thinking maybe a legacy. Turns out they’ve been diligently applying for every grant under the sun, to which fair play, but now I’ve got a deluge of “We hope you’ll join us!” and “Shall I pick you up on the way past?” in my replies…. I should have kept quiet!

All my own veg.

That digital pattern that I bought from Etsy the other day turned out to recommend a number of very specific US-made threads that aren’t widely available here. Not wanting to spend a fortune on postage, I did my best to put together a selection of coordinating colours from a UK website that had most of the brands, if not the colours, specified. I think I did pretty well to only end up with one “nope”, given the tiny thumbnails.

Morrison’s gave me a “you’ve not been in for a while” £6 off £30 voucher, so it would have been rude not to go in. While I was wandering around with my basket, a man came over and said “are you the lady who walks her dog near [village]?” When I said I was, he explained why he’d seen me a lot, and gave me the most delicious bit of local gossip, of which I had not heard the slightest whiff from anyone. I can’t wait to tell Mrs DT, and I am very glad I got that voucher!

This metallic embroidery thread is an absolute git to work with.

I usually have porridge for breakfast on a Friday, but it’s going to be much too warm. Speak to me of overnight oats, lovely people. The internet is firmly telling me a 1:1 ratio of oats to milk, except when it’s equally firmly telling me 1:2, but that’s by volume so no surprise as it’s wildly imprecise. Anyone with a recommended ratio by weight?

The girls are slacking. (There will be one waiting for me in the garden, but I need six for baking tomorrow so didn’t want to risk it.)

The only human society that has not made marriage in one form or another central to the way it is organised is the Na people, of which there are about 30,000 living in the Yunnan Province of southwest China. They live in sibling-based households, and sexual relations occur in the form of nan-sese, meaning to visit furtively: the men walk to the houses of the women at night, but return in the morning. They are, however, the sole exception in recorded history.

The hilarious collapse of the cult of the keffiyeh

From Greta’s ship to the Global March to Gaza, the white saviours of the ‘pro-Palestine’ set have never looked so silly.

Don’t you just hate it when brown people reject your white saviourism? So rude! Such mannerless ingratitude greeted the Global March to Gaza last week. These valiant few from the US, the UK, Ireland and elsewhere had planned to trek to Rafah in Gaza to save poor, hungry Palestinians from Evil Israel. But they came unstuck in Egypt, where instead of welcoming these fearless foreign liberators of the benighted Arabs, local folk ridiculed them, pelted them with plastic bottles and roundly told them to fuck off. Wait, you people don’t want to be saved by a plummy white lady from London in a keffyeh? I know there’s a lot going on in the world right now, but can we please not overlook how unbelievably hilarious it is that the Global March to Gaza has been thwarted by angry Arabs. That this swarm of pompous gits who fantasised that they would shield the Arabs of Gaza from the ‘genocidal lunacy’ of the Jewish State were instead roughed up by the Arabs of Egypt who don’t want their nation used as a stage for moral masturbation by every puffed-up Palestine fetishist of the West. That instead of getting bottles of water to Gaza, these people had bottles of water lobbed at their own heads by pissed-off Egyptians. The mirth of it all might just get me through the rest of this year.

Ahead of our quilt show next month, we’ve had fancy new quilt stands and decided that the old backdrop cloths were looking shabby. Someone bought some flat sheets, and I said I’d put hanging loops on them: how hard could it be? Just fold over the top and do a double line of stitching, then a smaller loop at the bottom (to thread a weight through) and a single line of stitching there. I even already had my walking foot on the machine! God, these sheets are hideous! They’re not square, either in terms of shape or in terms of bias direction, so after unpicking the first line of stitching I had to use way more pins than expected, and then I realised that the edges weren’t straight, so I’ve been resorting to sticking tape on my machine to give me a guide line to sew against.

Pizza night!

The Spectator

Did Greta Thunberg refuse to watch the October 7 video?

Israel just saved you from a bloody warzone and you accuse it of war crimes? How about showing some gratitude?

Many shrill claims are being made about Israel’s interception. We’ve been ‘kidnapped’, said Greta. They haven’t. They’re fine and they have sandwiches. ‘If anything happens to us, this is a war crime’, cried one of the boat folk as the IDF boarded. This is teenage petulance masquerading as activism. Israel just saved you from a bloody warzone and you accuse it of war crimes? How about showing some gratitude? If these people want to see real war crimes, they could do worse than watch Hamas’s own footage of the racist terror it inflicted on the innocents of Israel. And yet, according to Katz, they turned a ‘blind eye’ to those war crimes. They looked away from the screen. His allegations are being widely reported in Israel and beyond. Self-styled warriors for human rights refusing to watch one of the bloodiest assaults on human rights of the 21st century so far? Implacable anti-racists turning away from the worst act of anti-Jewish racism since the Nazis? If this is true, then it surely speaks to a profound moral blindness among the activist class, where they will sympathise with suffering humans everywhere except in Israel. https://archive.ph/Do0R9

Well, this is annoying. One of the neighbouring dogs has been judged safe, but Dog is always a bit wary of her because she yaps and jumps around rather than just coming to say hello quietly. The little bugger has just bitten him on the bum, which she has form for but has never tried on Dog. I suspect he’ll be even more wary of her in future, if not actively hostile, but I really hope it doesn’t set him back with the other dogs, where he’s been making such progress.

This was an interesting listen.

BBC

BBC Radio 4 - Shadow World

Gripping stories from the shadows - BBC investigations from across the UK

Investigative journalist Annabel Deas explores how “Nick”, a former soldier in the British Army, became a people smuggler working with organised crime gangs from Albania and Vietnam based in the UK. He has twice been to prison for his crimes. In this intimate portrait of a British people smuggler - we hear from the perpetrator directly, to uncover his motivations, methods and the consequences of risking the lives of desperate people. The investigation exposes how the smuggling techniques Nick used are still possible today and details the ease with which smugglers can bring migrants into the UK without being caught. Everyone knows about smugglers who bring migrants in on small boats, but the methods Nick used are rarely heard about. Across the series, he reveals how he illegally smuggled migrants onto cross channel ferries inside cars and lorries, and how he used private marinas to bring migrants into the UK hidden inside a sailboat.

Really bizarre encounter with Next Door, demanding to know why I kept putting my brown (garden and food waste) bin back out after she’d put it in (err, because the council told me to leave it out for recollection and if you’d asked I would have told you this?), which after several repeats got around to “It’s my land” (no, it’s not, I’ve checked your deeds myself; my lawyer says that if it belongs to anyone it’s the Highways Agency, just like (as I didn’t say, she was literally screaming by this point) your front garden), “I could just put a fence up”, etc, and then -- which I suspect is the nub, that I’d painted the fence without asking permission to go on their land (you gave me permission when I moved in, but fair enough, I won’t do that side again: no one but you and your B&B guests can see it). Given I finished painting the fence on the 10th April, and it was that day that they set that fire by my shed and about then that my bin started being moved (I don’t know wtf is going on, the other bins are being emptied fine), she’s presumably been stewing ever since and working herself up to a hissy fit. I went out to my sewing group shortly after, moving my bin back out but (in a spirit of conciliation) leaving it at the other side of my drive rather than in the usual spot between mine at theirs. When I got back, it had been moved back but left open to show it was empty, and a scrawled note stuffed through my door saying that egg shells are not compostable and it hasn’t been emptied because I had put them in it (as they never use their brown bin, I guess they have never checked the rules). She actually opened up my biodegradable food caddy bags, that were disgustingly stinky have been sitting out there through the recent hot weather. Wtaf? (I have no idea where she’s put the stuff that was inside it; they were working in the front garden when I got back so I just came inside. I may go out after dark to check it’s not in my landfill.)

Hmmm.

A view of two halves: The wind is coming from the lowlands, and the moisture is condensing out as it shoots up the slope to the highlands.

The Spectator

Keir Starmer is a shallow man

Keir Starmer thinks ‘this is the time now to lower the temperature’ on the gender debate. What a shallow leader the Prime Minister is

And, fine, it’s politics. You take a position for a while, it doesn’t work out, you ditch it and move on, all the while briefing that you’ve been consistent from the start. I get all that. What I don’t get is the prologue. There was a time when Starmer came to believe that men who called themselves women were women. How did he arrive at this conviction? Who did he read? What evidence convinced him? It must have been very persuasive to get a KC to adopt a highly contested interpretation of the law, doubly so when he was leader of a political party and eager to win the next general election. And now he no longer believes that men can become women. It appears that the Supreme Court judgment changed his mind, but that only returns us to the above questions. How did he get the law so wrong? Has he reflected on how these errors came about? Have they prompted any doubts about his wider judgment? https://archive.ph/6fcRQ

Any guesses what would do this to a leek? I’d been leaving it to flower :(

Final proof that party I once loved is hopelessly out of touch, writes PROFESSOR JO PHOENIX | Daily Mail Online

I could see then that, on the issue of trans rights, my party had lost the plot. It had veered so wildly from what I felt was right - and frankly w...

I was once a member of the Labour Party – but not any more. I left in 2021, the day that David Lammy dismissed women’s rights campaigners like me as ‘dinosaurs... hoarding their rights’. For good measure, he claimed that men can grow a cervix. I could see then that, on the issue of trans rights, my party had lost the plot. It had veered so wildly from what I felt was right – and frankly what the vast majority of the public feels is right – that I could no longer support it. The Supreme Court ruling should have been a wake-up call for Labour but the party has shown itself to be hopelessly out of touch once again. The silence from the PM on such a socially transformative ruling is tin-eared enough. But now the likes of Home Office Minister Dame Angela Eagle are plotting to thwart the judgment in a cowardly WhatsApp group of Labour MPs.