Delusions

Well I’m knackered. Grass is getting its first cut and it’s full of pine cones. Not just one or two. There are branches loaded with cones that have fallen over winter and they have sunk into the grass. If I don’t spot them in time they are anti-lawnmower mines.

I can’t use the ride-on mower yet. I need to be on the ground so I can spot the branches. It has to be the old petrol mower – that thing doesn’t stop for much but if it hits a branch full of cones, I get peppered with them. The grass box is no use, it fills too fast. So I leave the cut grass to dry for a day or two then rake it up, pulling out the deeply-embedded branches with the rake.

I’ve completed two lawns and cut the big one. There’s only one small one left to do and then the raking. The goal is to get it to where I can use the push mower because that gives the best cut, but one pine cone will stop that thing dead. I’ll get there. I did it last year, took months, and over winter the giggling trees refill the grass with cones and branches. Apple tree branches are seriously hard – they don’t mince like pine branches, they shatter into little flying stakes.

Still, what I lack in gardening skills I make up for with sheer bloody-mindedness. I just will not give in.

A little like Tessie Maybe, I suppose, although my decision to engage in an eternal and ultimately unwinnable battle with the forces of nature doesn’t affect the rest of the population. Her delusion that someone out there actually likes her stupid plan is in danger of killing the country, and has very likely ended the Conservative party as a major political force. Even if they replace her now, a lot of the damage is likely to be irrevocable.

There are deluded people who think that stopping Brexit will neutralise parties like UKIP and the Brexit party. This is a serious mind-twist. Stopping Brexit is what the government have been doing all along, and that is what has re-energised UKIP and brought Nige Farrago back with a new Brexit party. Combined, they could make a serious dent in a general election.

Unfortunately, they hate each other, are likely to field candidates against each other, split the Brexit vote and lose massively. No doubt each will blame the other but if they could just get along, they’d be a new political force.

I’d vote for UKIP or the Brexit party but if both are standing on the same ballot, there’s no point. They’ll split the vote and both will lose. I won’t vote Tory, Labour, Lib Dem or SNP so it could just be a ballot paper with a drawing of something primitively obscene on it and the words ‘What’s the point?’

Vote Green? The most delusional party of all? Never. They still push ‘man made global warming’ even as we enter a Grand Solar Minimum in which all those massively anti-conservation windmills are going to be even more useless than they are now. At least if they switch the damn things off, bird and bat populations will have a chance to recover. If they gave up on those things and the solar farms, China’s lakes of toxic waste might finally stop growing and the concrete and steel industries can go back to making houses and cars. You know, actually useful things.

Man made ice age, man made global warming, man made climate change, it’s all bollocks. We have been ten years from human extinction since at least the 1950s and delusional people still believe this shit. Worse, the building of massive numbers of houses with no chimneys – and therefore no means of independently heating them when the power fails – is going to kill an awful lot of people. As will the proposed ban on wood burning stoves. I will never buy a house with no chimney.

We experienced the Green world last Thursday. There had been a problem with the local electricity substation over the winter. A storm knocked it out and they couldn’t fix it during the storm because, well, high voltage, driving rain, very bad mix. If I worked for them I’d have refused to go out too. Last Thursday they did some fixing to make sure it won’t happen again this winter but it meant the power was off from 9 am to 3 pm.

We have oil fired central heating but the pumps and timer are electric. No electricity, no heating. Apart from our wood burning stove and the (bottled gas run) cooker hob. Also, our water comes from a well (which as Dan Holdsworth pointed out, is actually a holy well or at least a borehole into the same water – and that’s the next Halloween theme). It’s gravity fed downhill into a holding tank in the utility room and then pumped through UV treatment and filters. The pump is electric. So we filled lots of things with water before the power went off.

Yeah, we drink holy water here. I put a dash of it in malt whisky since it has no chlorine or fluorine to mess with the flavour. It’s better than bottled water – no plasticisers from the bottles.

It also means that if we ever get visited by vampires or those possessed by demons, a glass of tap water will do the job. That’s if the flying apple tree stakes from mowing don’t get them first.

I just need to cut a hatch in the tank cover and we can access the well water direct in a power outage without having to lift the whoile cover off. We have a Brita filter and we can boil the water on the gas hob so we can have pretty safe water for drinking even with no power. Heck we can boil it on the wood burning stove at a pinch.

Did you see the mess left behind by the climate loonies in London? Plastic bottles, plastic bags, litter everywhere. And not one of the bastards walked there. They posted footage of the event with their iPhones and claimed they were saving the planet. The delusion is strong with these people.

Pollution is something I can get worked up about. We do not need to have rafts of plastic floating about in the oceans but that has nothing at all to do with climate change. Plastic can be melted down and made into something else. I once tried making bricks out of it for garden use – I’ll have to revive that idea.

Most of it comes into the sea from rivers in Africa and Asia but that is because we send them all this crap for recycling. They don’t produce it, we do. If we weren’t so goddamn lazy we could melt it into blocks ourselves. If you are going to build a low garden wall, five or so bricks high, multicoloured plastic bricks could be just the thing. You can give them a cement coat if you want or just let the light catch them. They could be quite a feature. They might not be strong enough to build a house but then again, maybe they are. I’m not a plastics expert. Maybe they would be a fire risk.

I should say something about Diane Abbott…

…but I have to be careful in case she calls me ‘racist’.

As if I care. We are all racists now. Not judging people on skin colour is racist. Dogs are racist. Saying Hi to someone is racist. Not saying Hi to someone is racist. Whether you know them or not. You are racist whether you are or not. Just shrug and move on.

Anyway, the last post was about Diane Abbott having a quiet sip from a booze can on a train while not bothering anyone at all. I was on her side and still am, for the first and possibly last time ever. It is a stupid law.

However, as many have pointed out, she is part of the lawmaking mechanism. It is a stupid law but she apologised for breaking it instead of saying ‘This is a stupid law’. So yes, she should pay the fine and suffer the public humiliation of being a convicted criminal MP. As if that has made any difference to any of the rest of htem.

I was recently called for jury service (fortunately not chosen). If I had had a criminal conviction, I could not have been called. If I had a criminal conviction while being an MP, no problem. This seems wrong. Very wrong.

Any criminal conviction of any kind should disbar the criminal from forever being in a lawmaker position. Lawmakers who defy the law are clearly dangerous. Any arrest for anything, ever, and you cannot enter government. That makes sense to me.

Hm. There wouldn’t be many MPs…