Streaky94 @Streaky94

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TheMonk88 @themonk1967

9 hours ago

Friday innit 😎

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In a rush between meetings today, usually walk but needed a black cab. Must have tried to flag about 20 with what looked like the 'yellow light' on, but it wasn't. Is this just me or is it design error on modern cabs. It's hard to see the on off state, especially in sunlight.

Wes is back. So are we…💙 19 x beautifully designed matchday posters, one for each @IpswichTown home games in the @premierleague . We’ve already got some exciting artists lined up - comment below with anyone else you think we should be looking at... Uppa Towen ✊ #itfc

Is the 7am replay going to be delayed an hour? It should be, surely.. 🤪

Wow! Some watch that 😬🫣 MEXvENG

Watch the pattern. It only ever runs one way. When butter was demonised, Unilever was ready with margarine. When lard and tallow were demonised, Procter and Gamble was ready with Crisco. When eggs were demonised, Kellogg's was ready with a bowl of cereal. When red meat was demonised, Cargill was ready with soy. When breastfeeding was demonised as backward, Nestlé was ready with formula. When leather was demonised, BASF was ready with plastic cut to look like hide. When wool was demonised, ExxonMobil was ready with the feedstock for polyester. When animal fat itself was demonised, seed oil climbed from industrial waste to the most used cooking fat on earth. Every one of them was a food or a fibre humans had thrived on for thousands of years, condemned at the exact moment a cheaper factory copy was sitting ready on the shelf. The product came first. The science came trotting along behind it, right on cue, the instant there was a substitute to sell. Follow the money. The advice starts to make a great deal more sense.

@benstokes38 Thank you. 🏏💙

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TheMonk88 @themonk1967

a week ago

Friday innit 😎

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It is a grey morning in 2026. The cows go in for milking at half past five, the same as every morning for forty years. This is the last time. The herd is a hundred and twenty Friesians. The farmer knows most of them by sight, some by name, and a few by the particular trouble they cause. His father built the parlour. His grandfather bought the first of the land. He gets forty-four pence a litre for the milk. Two miles away the same milk sells for seventy-two. The maths stopped working three years ago, and he has been farming on his overdraft and his stubbornness ever since. His father died in the winter. The inheritance tax bill that landed this spring, calculated on land valued by buyers who want it for carbon and have never kept an animal, is more money than the farm has cleared in a decade. There is no vet within forty minutes any more. The young ones do cats in the town, and the last large-animal practice for miles cut its farm work last year. He cannot find anyone to take it on. His son saw all of this coming and trained as an engineer, and he does not blame him. So the cows are sold. The herd that took three generations to build is gone by Friday, loaded into a single line of lorries. The parlour falls silent for the first time since 1985. The land is bought by a fund that plants it with trees, to offset the emissions of people he will never meet. The barn becomes a holiday let. And a long way off, a ship is already loaded with the milk that used to come from his field, bound for a country that decided, one reasonable policy at a time, that it would rather not bother making its own.

Dame Penelope Keith (2 April 1940 – June 2026) R.I.P

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Lissa Evans @LissaKEvans

2 weeks ago

Margo Leadbetter was snobbish, humourless and entitled, & Penelope Keith managed to make her into one of the most adored (and oddly vulnerable) characters ever seen on a sitcom. She delivered every line as if it were a jewelled crown on a velvet cushion. An utter genius.

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Congratulations to Mike Atherton and his Kiwi co-commentator for giving the Stokes-led surrender of the series a pasting ….

Bob Geldof did not want them on the bill. He had agreed to include Queen in the Live Aid lineup only reluctantly, pushed by promoter Harvey Goldsmith. By the summer of 1985, Geldof was not alone in thinking their moment had passed. Their biggest hits were nearly a decade old. Critics had started writing them off. Privately, the band itself was wondering if it was finished. Then came July 13, 1985. What nobody watching that day knew was what had happened the week before. Queen had booked the 400-seat Shaw Theatre near King's Cross in London and rehearsed their 21-minute set down to the exact second. Not the general shape of it. The exact second. Six songs, every beat drilled until nothing could go wrong. And then, reportedly, their roadies disabled the sound limiters on the PA before the set. Every other band on that stage was capped. Queen was not. At 6:41 PM, Freddie Mercury walked out. White jeans. White tank top. Studded armband. Seventy-two thousand people erupted. He sat at the piano and played the opening of Bohemian Rhapsody, not the whole song, just enough to set the crowd on fire. Then he stood. Strode to the microphone. Radio Ga Ga filled the stadium. Seventy-two thousand people raised their hands in perfect unison, one of the most iconic images of the entire decade. Then Freddie stopped the band. He turned to the crowd. He opened his mouth and sang a single sustained note. ""Aaaaaaay-o."" And waited. Seventy-two thousand people sang it back. He went higher. They followed. Higher still. They stayed with him. Back and forth, the note climbing, the crowd holding on, the moment stretching into something that felt almost sacred. It would later be called The Note Heard Round the World. They tore through Hammer to Fall, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, a shortened We Will Rock You, and finally We Are the Champions. The stadium shook. Twenty-one minutes after they walked on, Queen walked off. Bob Geldof, the man who had not wanted them there, said afterward: ""Queen were absolutely the best band of the day. They played the best, had the best sound, used their time to the full. It was the perfect stage for Freddie: the whole world."" An estimated 1.9 billion people across 150 nations had been watching. In 2005, music industry insiders voted it the single greatest rock performance in history. Not one of the greatest. The greatest. Authors and musicians who were there have said those 21 minutes may have saved the band itself, that Queen was on the verge of a permanent split, and that afternoon reminded all four of them what they were still capable of together. Freddie Mercury died on November 24, 1991. He was 45 years old. But on July 13, 1985, for 21 minutes, standing before 72,000 people under a London summer sky, he was the most alive person on earth.

Victory for common sense (for now, at least)… It’s a relief that @EnvAgency have finally realised that prosecuting volunteers for cleaning & restoring a river (that they had left to rot) without permission was not a good look, so they have dropped their charges in favour of a ‘warning’. Thank you for all your support & encouragement, from across the country, the political spectrum & around the world. I’m certain that the comms disaster suffered by the EA over this was crucial in getting them to begin to see sense at last. This is, however, not the end of the story. The River Roding & its tributaries, like most rivers in the UK have still been abandoned & in parts left to die by the Environment Agency, with no plans to even put a stop to the serious environmental crimes taking place (like illegal sewage dumping), let alone to begin the process of restoration that the river so desperately needs. I am therefore seeking a meeting with the EA’s Chief Executive to ask (1) that the EA instead use its prosecuting powers for good, to demand a detailed plan from Thames Water to fix all illegal sewage discharges in years, not decades & (2) that the EA turns this whole saga into a good outcome by using the River Roding as a pilot scheme for how the EA can work with, rather than against, grassroots river guardians, to provide the protection & restoration our rivers so desperately need. I hope they will accept these very reasonable requests. But if not, I will continue to defy the EA, & will not be seeking their permission or authorisation to continue to care for & restore the river I love.

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Channel 4 News @Channel4News

2 weeks ago

The Environment Agency has dropped its threat to prosecute litter pickers over alleged environmental offences while clearing rubbish from a London River. It comes after Channel 4 News recently exposed legal threats made to Paul Powlesland and other volunteers for undertaking

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TheMonk88 @themonk1967

2 weeks ago

Friday innit 😎

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@ClarkeMicah Listening to your Vine and Hitchens blog, and you mention of war poets, reminded me of this. The Band Played Waltzing Matilda share.google/u57yzje4bSg42p…

Sibley and Burns take us to drinks without loss

Dear @EnvAgency. In February this year, after 4 years of asking you to look after the Aldersbrook, I led a team of volunteers to do your job for you & clean out tonnes of silt & leaves, as well as hundreds of bags of rubbish. Through the effort of community volunteers & donations, & at zero cost to the taxpayer, we turned a forgotten silted up ditch back into a river again. Last nights intense rain storm showed why our actions are the very definition of “strengthening water resilience”. A huge amount of rain fell in a short time, but the restored section of the Aldersbrook has been able to hold 100’s of thousands of litres more water, stopping this water running into the Roding, & thereby *reducing* local flood risk. The first photograph below is of the Aldersbrook after the rains this morning- a big contrast to the area before we did the work. Perhaps more importantly, this water, instead of running straight off into the Roding & hence the sea is now being held in the Aldersbrook & gradually released so it can be used by nature. It is feeding marshes, trees & wildlife, topping up groundwater & helping to reduce our flood/drought cycle. If you want to strengthen water resilience, we need thousands more projects like the Aldersbrook around the country. So the question I ask you, Environment Agency, is why you are threatening me with two years imprisonment, rather than offering to meet & discuss how we can work together to restore the Roding & its tributaries, which could become a blueprint for you cooperating with local river guardians nationwide?

Environment Agency @EnvAgency

2 weeks ago

Today marks 50 years since the last severe drought in the UK. We must continue to evolve to meet future water supply challenges. By working together across the sector, we can strengthen water resilience for the future. Read more: gov.uk/government/spe…

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The only person who seems to be pleading for Starmer to stay on his is wife. Understandable, he'll be shuffling around the house in his Arsenal slippers pointing at things he won't tolerate.

First Light Festival, Lowestoft. Wife's prize. 😊 My prize. FFS 🤮🤢