The Sunday Ishmael 23/10/2022

Comrade Truss -  chapeau, mr mike 

 

 

She's looking remarkably well in her uniform - considerably better than when she dresses herself. Those ghastly skimpy little jersey dresses, so thin you can see the lines of her underwear through them. With an estimated net worth of £8.4 million, she could do a bit better than a Tesco dress and Claire's Accessories earrings. The King evidently thought so, as he muttered "dear, oh dear".

 

Not being sexist, honest. We made quite the fuss about Rishi's tight little rent boy suits - sleeves and trouserings way too short.

 

then there's Boris' failure to wear a waistcoat when it would hugely improve his look:

Now then, mrs ishmael, you pay far too much attention to clothes rather than policies. No, no, it's called Impression Management Theory, devised by Erving Goffman back in 1959 in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It's important if you want people to believe in you as their Alpha - you have to look the part. Maybe this is why the Tories keep trying on new Alphas - none of them know how to dress themselves.

Apart from this one:

I swear, I'm half in love with her myself, and, as all ishmaelites know, I'm just a poor deluded cis socialiste ancienne. 

Beautiful, poised, groomed, appropriately clad, with a good voice, calm hauteur and a spot-on killer punch - remember when she floored Ian Blackford - Penny looks like a Prime Minister. 

Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to have any policies. On the Laura Kuenssberg show today, she announced that she was half way between one thing and the other, so she was a Unity candidate and she'd been into the Treasury - actually into it, and had a lengthy discussion with Jeremy Cunt. Further than that, she would not stray. She fielded every one of Laura the Nose Kuenssberg's questions with variations on "nice try, but I will not be drawn on the details" . She's only got 23 MPs who have declared for her, so we'd best not waste any more time on Penny I-will-not-be-drawn-on-the-detail-Mordaunt.

Lord Mervyn Peake,  Lord Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England

told the nation today that there  “isn’t enough money there amongst the rich to get it back” when it comes to meeting the “strong case” for extra spending in certain areas to help recover from the lockdown. He said that politicians should explain the consequences of soaring inflation, the reduction of living standards caused by supporting Ukraine, and helping future generations cope with the increased national debt. When Laura The Nose suggested that the Markets ran Britain, not the Government, Lord Mervyn indignantly responded that it was not the Markets, but The Bank of England (pictured above) and the government running Britain.

For those ishmaelites who haven't got their heads round how the Tories have fucked the Eckonomy Stupid, it goes like this:

you know how if you want to buy a house, you get a bank (or building society) to lend you some money and tell them that if you don't pay back the money they can have the house instead. It's called a mortgage, derived from  Old French, literally ‘dead pledge’, from mort (Latin mortuus ‘dead’ and  gage ‘pledge’). Because you've got their money, you have to pay them something called interest. Which is a sum of money calculated as a percentage of the amount borrowed. Back in the eighties, that percentage was around 10%. On the 16th September, 1992, under John Major's Government, the percentage rose to 15% on a day known forever as Black Wednesday, because we were very racially insensitive. This is why persons of a certain age have little sympathy for younger adults who borrowed huge sums of money at 2.96% in 2021, thus forcing up house prices when too much money chased too few houses as every kid expected to buy a house and was not prepared to move to Darlington, (where you can still buy a 3 bed semi for £83,000). So, having survived paying high interest rates by not taking foreign holidays, not having Deliveroo bring cooked food round to the house at midnight, nor walking around carrying take-out coffee to go, when the aforesaid persons of a certain age finally paid off their mortgages and had a little money left over, they received in interest less than 0.05% on their savings. 

So, when the UK Government want to borrow some money to spend on manufacturing drones to fight a war in Ukraine or pay disabled people to loll about at home,  they pay interest to the person kind enough to lend it to them, that interest being set at a rate that reflects the solvency of the Government. When the Government begins to look dodgy, the people holding the Government's promise to pay back the money borrowed, understandably get cold feets and sell the debt. The new owner, recognising this is now dodgy, will expect a higher interest rate to compensate them for the risk  of everything going phooey. When Truss and Kwasi said they would stop raising as much money in tax, but continue to spend as much or more than ever, the people to whom the Government owed money collectively said, oh no, you don't. Then Lord Mervyn's lot at the Bank of Gormenghast bought all the debt, to stop another Black Wednesday. However, because we are now racially sensitive, it would prob'ly be called Grey Wednesday.

Is all that clear, class? Jeremy Cunt has got it all sorted now. Just a question of who he wants to be his Prime Minister.

 

At least the Belligerent Mrs Truss was not escorted from the Chamber, unlike Hu Jintao, 79 year old former president of China.

He put up some slight resistance, and asked his old buds to help him, but it seems the security guards knew he needed a bit of a lie down.

Anyway, moving rapidly on, and taking advantage of Orkney's subsea internet cable not having been attacked by the Phantasm Flying Fucking Fishing Boat of Doom (see comments on the previous thread), here are the autumn photos I promised mr bungalow bill. 

Harris, the blogdog, in the ornamental grasses

Reminds me of Rupert Bear's Nutwood - the trees just on the turn before the gales tear off the crisped leaves. We never have the full reds, oranges and yellows in Orkney - not quite cold enough in autumn to turn them.

The long, fruiting stems of New Zealand flax

Pink hydrangea, the papery seed discs of honesty and a cow parsley skeleton. Also known as Queen Anne's lace and hedge parsley, this pretty umbellifer is poisonous - I was told if you pick it and present it to your mother, she will die - hence its other names of mother die and stepmother's glory.

I don't know the name of this plant - anyone?

Blue hydrangea. Hydrangeas can be blue, red, pink, light purple, or dark purple. Color change occurs due to the presence of aluminum ions which are available or tied up depending upon the soil pH. They say you can change the colour of your hydrangea by burying some tin cans near its roots. I tried it once, but nothing happened.

Candy pink nerine - to be found in gardens across Orkney in September and October. It has huge bulbs that must be planted proud of the soil, as it likes to bake in the sun. Masses of strap-shaped leaves through summer die back in September, giving way to tall erect stems bearing umbels of lily-like  pink flowers 6 to 8 cms. in width. It is from South Africa, and the story goes that a ship with a cargo of nerine bulbs was ship wrecked in Orkney and the bulbs were distributed across the island. It does well here and also in Cornwall and Guernsey, hence its other names of the Cornish lily or the Guernsey lily.

Another plant that does really well here is rosa rugosa - proper sweet rose scent, vigorous habit, makes a great burglar-deterrent hedge as it is woody and thorny and impenetrable - but it is very invasive, needs cutting back with a big fuck-off hedge-trimmer and you need to run your lawn mower over the suckers, or before you know it there'll be nothing but rosa rugosa in your garden. These are the hips - big, red and shiny, full of vitamin C. During the second world war, kids were paid to collect bucketsfull of hips to be turned into Delrosa rosehip syrup, because there was no orange juice to be had. I've got a big bag of them in my freezer, as I'm going to have a go at natural dyeing. Or make rose hip syrup, should the current war necessitate it.

Now Available

 
Now that we have clearly reached the End of Days, should you need something  to cheer you up, look no further than  Ishmael’s Blues - which is now published, in both paperback and hardback editions; both editions are immediately available from lulu.com.  The paperback is also listed on amazon. Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack, the first two books in the sequence, are also available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.
Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :
 Unless you’ve done this already, please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box.  Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.
The book’s full title is "Ishmael’s Blues – further Chronicles of Ruin", and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of blogdog Buster retiring from the fray, cat gloating from a safe distance. The cover is the same for both editions.
Link for Hardcover :  https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr
Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux
At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage.  If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.  
With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.

So, what are you waiting for, Fat Boy?