After a rodent hiatus, when they seemed to have learnt that the traps were only dangerous at night, I decided to move them to a manhole cover in the duck-free part of the garden. I’ve been baiting them for a few days, and set them last night. Nothing first thing, but I’ve just gone to put the washing out and needed to empty both!

We had a real cloudburst yesterday afternoon — 15mm in under half an hour — so I wasn’t especially surprised when Dog later came in with muddy feet. Just been and had a look, though, and the path is covered in sediment and what I assume are bits of left-over render. Given that I had the rendering done nearly two years ago, I assume all this crap has been sitting in my drainpipes since and finally got flushed out by the shear amount of rain. I’ve swept it up as well as I could, but the path is so filthy that I’m somewhat glad Dog didn’t want a wee this morning.

We are coming apart

How asylum, multiculturalism and contempt for the masses turned Britain into a tinder box.

Asylum, in particular, is becoming the defining issue of our globalised, hyper-mobile, increasingly war-torn times. And yet the way our careless establishment has handled it seems almost designed to generate social conflict. The most impoverished communities in the UK have been forced to shoulder the burden of the small-boats crisis, purely because the hotel rooms there are cheaper, all while concerns about crime, safety and integration are ignored. You don’t need to be a fire-breathing bigot to recognise that some of the young men willing to enter a nation illegally, and unvetted, languishing for years on handouts and black-market employment, might commit other crimes. Nor do you need a PhD in social cohesion to recognise that the arrival of people from more misogynistic, violent cultures, into a nation uninterested in integrating them, will breed fear, tension and very real risks for citizens.

Woohoo!

Nick Timothy

Help me to defeat Labour's rigged 'Islamophobia' consultation - Nick Timothy

Please see a message from Nick Timothy MP below: I am campaigning to stop Britain’s new Islamic blasphemy laws, and I need your help. Angry mobs ...

I am campaigning to stop Britain’s new Islamic blasphemy laws, and I need your help. […] And now Labour plan a new definition of “Islamophobia”, which will kill our free speech and embolden extremists. Even worse, their “Islamophobia” consultation is rigged. The Government has sent it to handpicked organisations to get the results it wants. Ministers even refuse to say who was invited to take part. So I have produced a suggested response to the consultation. If you agree with me that we need to fight back, please use my suggestions — or anything else you think — for the answers. It should take no more than three minutes.

Any idea what these are on my kale? Cabbage white eggs for scale.

The Spectator

We’ll all pay for Ed Miliband’s zonal pricing folly

Philosophers have debated the concept of ‘fairness’ for centuries. Intellectual heavyweights like Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Aristotle have ...

Electricity isn’t like other markets. When the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy guaranteed high prices for butter and wine, we ended up with butter mountains and wine lakes. Wasteful? Yes. Absurd? Entirely. But an excess of these products didn’t cause any other problems. When you have too much electricity though you end up with Spanish-style blackouts. Put simply, our grid needs to balance. Put too much power in it and bad things happen. The lights go off. Expensive equipment blows up. So when supply is on course to outstrip demand, urgent intervention is needed. At the moment this means wind farms in Scotland that have been paid an artificially high price to produce electricity are then paid again – at the last minute – to switch off. This, to be clear, isn’t a hypothetical scenario. In 2024 billpayers handed companies such as SSE Renewables a collective £393 million in ‘constraint payments’ to stop their blades spinning. They then paid gas plants near where the demand actually was £1.23 billion to fire up at uncompetitive rates. National Grid warns these combined payouts could hit £8 billion a year by 2030. Off the coast of Angus, sits Scotland’s largest offshore wind farm Seagreen. Since it came fully online in 2023, almost two-thirds of its potential output has been dumped. https://archive.ph/IxV08

I know these staged photos always look a bit awkward, but this one is really bad:

You what, Aldi?

London 7/7: the atrocity we don’t talk about

Twenty years on, we have still failed to reckon with the threat posed by homegrown Islamist extremism.

Both of these easy answers to the central question that haunts 7/7 suffer from the same problem. They look almost entirely over there for the answer as to why this gang visited death on the country in which its members were raised. They point either solely to their Islamic heritage, or they blame the Western wars in the Middle East and its near abroad for driving them to atrocity. But the problem of homegrown jihadists isn’t just over there, it’s here in the West, in Britain, too. These young second-generation Muslims growing up in a down-at-heel suburb in Leeds were shaped by their own situation, not that of people in Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan – of which they knew very little. As Kenan Malik argues in From Fatwa to Jihad (2009) the root of their embrace of a militant form of Islam lay in a profound estrangement from and resentment towards mainstream society. A curdling sense of grievance. A sense that life in Britain was not offering them what they felt entitled to. A sense that mainstream society was alien to them.

Phew: quilt show all done, everything put back how it should be in the hall. Getting the stands back up into the attic was actually easier than getting them down, weirdly. My mum came over to see it (and ended up helping to move the lighter stuff, bless her), and she’s just headed for home after having dinner. Very flattering the number of people who wanted to know how one of my quilts was made: it was a bit experimental / technically interesting, which is why I put it in. Apparently the woman from the Big House in the village wants to buy it, not yet decided whether I’m willing to part with it or not. I might tell her it’ll be £500 or something daft and see if she still wants it…. My cakes were also very well received, especially the savoury one that I forgot to put the baking powder in: it was all gone before lunchtime on the first day.

That will do the garden good!

The Telegraph

The shocking truth about slavery in the Islamic world today

Up to 17 million people have passed through the slave trade in the Muslim world since the 7th century. Tragically, the practice lives on

What is remarkable today is how one version of slavery and the slave trade continues to dominate Western public consciousness. To take just one example, A Short History of Slavery, by the historian James Walvin, was published in 2007. Of the book’s 235 pages, 201 focus on the Americas. By contrast, the history of slavery in the Islamic world – so long, various and controversial – has been neglected. That is starting to change: a new generation of Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian and (in particular) Turkish researchers are poring over the archives and asking uncomfortable questions. Among other things, their work will demonstrate that, although it has become fashionable in some quarters to vilify the West as the supreme historical villain, such a stance is historically and factually incorrect. https://archive.ph/31b2y

The Telegraph

Christian artist reported to police over gender-critical views

Victoria Culf launched legal action against Watford borough council after it banned her from her own exhibition

A Christian artist was reported to the police and banned from her own exhibition because of her gender-critical beliefs. Victoria Culf also claims a council worker wrongly accused her of being under police investigation when she was not. Mrs Culf launched legal action against Watford borough council last year on nine grounds, including breach of contract, discrimination and harassment. The 44-year-old, who has been an artist for 20 years, had been setting up her independently funded exhibition at Watford Museum when she became engaged in a conversation with a council worker about transgender issues. https://archive.ph/iht5P

I hadn’t noticed quite how much I’d got into the habit of phone-for-friends, laptop-for-work (although I realised a while ago that it makes me worse at personal emails that require a proper reply), but I’ve had a letter from a friend sitting on the coffee table for a month, looking increasingly accusatory. Just now, I thought “what if I type it on my phone?” and twenty minutes later I was copy-pasting a thousand words into a word processor on my laptop, adding a last minute thought, and hitting print. Who knew it was so simple?

The Spectator

Glastonbury has become a sinister festival of anti-Semitism

The punk rap act Bob Vylan appeared to whip the Glastonbury crowd into a frenzy of Israelophobia, chanting ‘Death, death to the IDF’.

Let’s speak frankly – our moral crisis is too pressing for pussy-footing. ‘Death to the IDF’ means the death of Jews. First, because the soldiers of the IDF are predominantly Jewish. But more importantly because this is the force tasked with defending the Jewish homeland from the armies of anti-Semites that surround it. The IDF is the only thing standing between the Jewish State and its genocidal obliteration by the apocalyptic bigots on its borders. The death of the IDF would be the death of the world’s only Jewish nation. Untold numbers of Jews would perish in the event of this thing dreamt of by the preening middle classes of Glastonbury. ‘We didn’t think of that’, some will say today, as shame intrudes into the sick joy they derived from praying for the death of other human beings. Well, to borrow a slogan beloved of you people: ‘Educate yourselves.’ https://archive.ph/PP1bV

Last summer, I had a brief disagreement with next door: I’d got sick of the six foot high nettles blocking the view from my kitchen window and chopped the tops off them, and he was being sniffy that I should have asked for permission. I just replied that I shouldn’t have needed to do it at all (ie: it’s his job), and that I hoped the roots weren’t undermining the boundary wall. He’s been out doing something noisy all morning (in the weather!), and I’ve just been out to pick lettuce only to find that he’s neatly strimmed the whole boundary. Olive branch, maybe?

Talk to me about sandwich fillings. I pretty much always have salami, cheese, tomato and lettuce. I occasionally mix things up with ham instead of salami, and the two are pretty much the only thing in my diet that count as UPFs. What could I have instead? There are those packs of precooked chicken and beef slices, but they’re expensive and presumably also full of chemical preservatives. I guess I could buy a beef joint and cook/slice/freeze it, but even by my standards that seems like a faff. (I’m not after elaborate stuff like Philly steak or fried chicken caesar, just stuff I can take out of the fridge and slap on a slice of bread.)

Eww. One trap missing this morning, after some searching I found it hidden away in a corner, in the general area from where I saw a live one skitter away when I went outside, the content’s entrails hanging out.