An Island Nation and A Nation of Islands
Hello, and welcome back to the new season of politics! Summer is over, thank the Lord, the Mother of all Parliaments will recommence sitting on Monday, and Laura Kuenssberg has resumed delighting us every Sunday morning on the BBC with her interrogation of any politician mad enough to expose him(her)self to her barbed wit and sleekit questions.
I do realise that our readership is spread across the globe - Google Analytics tells me which countries enjoy our nonsense - and, as you would expect, it is the English speaking world logging on most regularly. Europe is fairly well represented, and Russia, of course, but China, Latin America and Africa - not so much. The thing about Call Me Ishmael is that it is, at heart, British. It is a Britocentric view we have. American politics is (are?) enjoyed at a distance, with a wry, or outraged, smile. Australian news tends to be of the whatthefuck variety - I call in aid the story of the Australian politician naked from the waist down during his Zoom conference call, masturbating like Billy-oh, and his colleagues protesting mate, mate, turn the camera off, for dingo's sake. Or the story of the summer - the live worm (was it eight foot long, or is that my fevered imagination?) removed from the brain of an Australian lady who had been foraging for wild nourishment in a boa constrictor-infested area and the boa's parasitic worm hopped a ride: the solemn wokery commentariat remarked that this is what you get when you encroach on nature. Oops, that's me told - no more blackberry picking for me. I'll just buy the insecticide-covered ones from the supermarket, then. The suffix cide, by the way, means killer, slayer, or act of killing, as in homicide, infanticide, pesticide etc. It is used to form words that refer to substances that kill a certain thing. It comes from the Latin word, caedere, which means to cut down or to slay. Do wash your fruit and veg before eating.
The Blog is not only British, readers, but has an Orkney perspective - Orkney being an archipelago of 70 islands, 20 of which are inhabited - mr ishmael and I moved to Orkney long ago to make better life, mr ishmael having been persuaded by Simon Schama in his History of Britain TV show, photographed striding across wind swept beaches and fondling standing stones and divers Neolithic archaeological remnants. Orkney's strategic oil reserves now sit at £600 million, Orkney Islands Council having steadfastly refused to spend them, insisting on keeping them for a rainy day, unlike Shetland, which, apparently, has a magnificent infrastructure of roads and public buildings but nowt left in the bank. These oil reserves were built up using money linked to oil production at the Flotta oil terminal since it was commissioned in 1976. No wonder the Scottish "Government" refuses to help out with the cost of replacing the inter-isles rust-bucket ferries: pay for them yourself, it growls, you've got money enough. But we need it for a rainy day. The Financial Director and the Chief Executive of NHS Orkney were all over the radio last week, declaring that NHSO was £6million in debt this year with no prospect of paying it off. They spoke of the layers of fragility and staff who were damaged by their time at NHS Orkney. They invented a little mantra: People First, Not Processes. Whatever the fuck that means. Basically, it costs a lot to run an NHS on Orkney, what with the eye-wateringly high costs of transporting patients to and from Aberdeen for tests, consultations and treatments, bringing in agency staff because there aren't sufficient local people to undertake the specialised roles, and all round incompetence. That £600 million could be invested in an under-sea tunnel between Orkney and mainland Scotland, and the saving in transport costs would balance NHSO's books.
Another little gem of Orkney news relates to the Orkney Wildlife Project - you'll remember mr ishmael's moving account of the Project's visit to him and their mission to eradicate stoats in favour of other wildlife: The Day the Stoat Killers Came 29/5/2019.
Well, in this week's Orcadian newspaper the Project had the following tale: On an October night in 2006, John Kelly, an 89-year-old Irishman, woke from his sleep to find a stoat with "its head in my mouth sucking the blood out of me." He pulled it out of his mouth and threw it against his bedroom wall. He said that he heard the thump of it hitting the wall but that was the last he heard or saw of it. Police were called and searched the house but couldn't find it. In case this sounds like the rankest anti-stoat propaganda, the Project also described trapping a stoat that lived in an Orcadian resident's attic and a stoat that had made its den under someone's kitchen floorboards, from which the smell of the stoat's kills in its little pantry alerted the householder that something was not quiiite right. We are warned to be alert to a strong, musky smell, animal carcasses stashed in discreet spots, a high-pitched chirping sound, stoat prints and poo.
Which brings us to this gentleman: Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor of the Exchequer, formerly Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport from 2010 to 2012, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care from 2012 to 2018 and Foreign Secretary from 2018 to 2019. He has been the Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for South West Surrey since 2005. This is what happens with politicians. They keep getting recycled from job to job, not on the basis of performance, far from it (it is generally agreed that Jeremy Cunt, as he is widely known to friends and in the media, was absolutely useless in every job he held) - but because they won't rock the boat, they can wear a suit with aplomb and will go on the Laura Kuensberg show and spout the latest government line. Even though his brother died of cancer just 3 weeks ago. Laura held back in her interrogation out of respect - maybe that is why J. Cunt was given the gig of fronting the government's response to the schools-are-falling-down-because-they-have-been-made-out-of-rubbish-concrete crisis.
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Anyway, he is going to leave no tern unstoned, no penny unspent, to get the schools fit for the little darlings to resume what we laughingly refer to as their studies. So what devastating meteorological or climatic event suddenly occurred over the school hols to cause 156 English schools to fall down? Not so. Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). (looks a bit like an Aero bar) was used as a lightweight, cheap building material in public buildings between the 1950s and 1990s and is "life expired". Government was made aware of the situation in 1994 and has been "monitoring" it since 2018. The Department for Education has "changed its assessment of the risk that RAAC poses to building safety". Probably because of this:
Scotland says it will survey its own school buildings.
A 16 year old schoolboy confided in me that he had particularly enjoyed lockdown because his home schooling involved him logging into his lesson, then firing up his Play Station for the duration. There's a lot of guff talked about inspirational teachers: its really not hard to teach intelligent, motivated kids who can use words like inspirational. The teachers who can get teenagers to put down their PlayStations and knives, pay attention and learn something - now they should be given good working conditions - we're not talking about the playing fields of Eton, here, just classrooms that don't collapse mid lesson. How about my friend's suggestion: put the schoolchildren to work repairing their crumbling schools? Would
give the little bastards pride in their establishments and give the
non-academic majority a grounding in practical life-skills (build your own
bunker when WW3 is even more imminent than usual.)
Which may possibly be less imminent as Ben Wallace has shuffled off to spend more time on the parts of his life that he had previously neglected due to saving the country when Defence Secretary. Honest, not Invent. Nothing to do with wanting to cancel the agreement with America to supply 14 Chinooks. Nothing to do with Joe Biden having then thwarted Wallace's ambition to become head of NATO.
Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Ben announced in his resignation letter that he had coordinated the response to a number of threats and incidents:
“From Wannacry, the 2017 terrorist attacks, the Salisbury poisonings, Afghanistan, Sudan and Ukraine, it has been an honour to serve alongside the men and women of our Armed Forces and intelligence services who sacrifice so much for our security..... The Ministry of Defence is back on the path to being once again world class......As I finish my tenure, I can reflect that the Ministry of Defence that I leave is now more modern, better funded and more confident than the organisation I took over in 2019. As well as being active around the world we have also invested in prosperity at home.”
I'm glad he's confident. Our new recycled Defence Minister is Grant Shapps, who, I am delighted to report, is a self-avowed Indifferentist. No, I hadn't heard of it, either, so I looked it up. Indifferentism is the belief that no one religion or philosophy is superior to another. Maybe, then, he will back away from the American belief that Democracy must be imposed upon the rest of the world by force of arms. Doubt it, though. He's just calling himself an Indifferentist to obscure the fact that he's a non-practising Jew. Shapps must be a man of tremendous skill, ability and knowledge, as he has held five Cabinet posts in the last year. Or it could be that he owes his current appointment to being Sunak's close ally - Shapps announced he was standing for leadership of the Conservative Party on the 9th July 2022, following Johnson's resignation, but withdrew three days later, endorsing Sunak's bid for leadership. So Sunak owes him. Shapps is considered to be a safe pair of hands, despite knowing very little about defence, as Lord Dannatt, former chief of the general staff of the British Army, huffed and puffed, saying it will take him “quite some time to get up to speed”.
Where to begin with Shapps? Well, here's a couple of things...
In May 2008, Shapps was cited as one of several shadow ministers who had received cash from firms linked to their portfolios. The donors were originally recruited by Michael Gove who previously held the shadow housing portfolio.
In 2012, The Guardian reported that Shapps's English Wikipedia article had been edited from his office to remove embarrassing information and correct an error. Shapps stated that he edited to make it more accurate.
In 2012, there was controversy surrounding his use of the pseudonyms Michael Green, Corinne Stockheath and Sebastian Fox. Shapps denied using the pseudonyms after entering Parliament. He threatened a constituent with legal action in 2014 for stating that he had used a pseudonym after entering Parliament. In February 2015 he said " "I don't have a second job and have never had a second job while being an MP. End of story." It wasn't quite the end of the story, however,
as the following month he he admitted to having had a second job while being an MP, and practising business under a pseudonym, saying he had "over-firmly denied" having a second job.
In August 2018, the Financial Times reported that it had discovered a "secret pay deal" between Shapps and OpenBrix, a British blockchain property portal company. The story alleged that Shapps would have received payment in cryptocurrency tokens with a future value of up to £700,000. Shapps resigned from OpenBrix and from his position as chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on blockchain which he had founded.
Safe hands, eh?
Remember this chap? Sunday Ishmael 10th January 2021
What could possibly go wrong? Here I am, at home, following the guidance. He won't make me cry this time.
You are in the toilet, Matt.
Yes, it's my safe place. Painted in Farrow and Ball's Womb Red, with my carefully-curated collection of normal-person objects and pictures. And my red boxes. Most importantly, it has a nice, strong bolt. He can't get at me in here.
It's the toilet, Matt.
No-one will notice, because I'm wearing my nice blue suit just the colour of my eyes.
But you are sitting on the toilet, Matt.
That's because it is kind of cosy in here.
Former Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, made 8 complaints to press watchdog, Ipso, this summer. These included that in a piece headlined "Shameful Record of Blunders", when stating that he had been found guilty of breaching the ministerial code over his financial interests, the Mirror should have made clear that the Adviser on Ministers' Interests stated that he had acted "properly and honestly" and "with integrity throughout" the investigation in question. The Sunday Mirror had described him as a "corrupt, lying, philandering, incompetent, disgraced ex-minister". Hancock complained that they had no evidence that he was actually corrupt and that they should therefore have merely described him as a " lying, philandering, incompetent, disgraced ex-minister". Ipso took the view that the word "corrupt" was used within the context of Hancock having contravened social distancing guidelines while being a member of the government that had created them by being intimate and gropey with that woman in his office.
Ipso dismissed all eight of his complaints, declined to force the Daily and Sunday Mirror to give him written corrections and apologise to him.
Obituary Corner: Another incredibly Old Bastard Pops his Expensive Clogs.
Aged 94, Mohammed al-Fayed died of being old on the 30th August. A bad taste vulgarian, he provided a refreshing change from the lick-spittle brown-nosing of the British establishment, its whores, flunkies and praise-singers. Even though he allegedly chased attractive women around his office and Harrods to stuff money down their cleavages, you've got to admire a man who had the balls to accuse Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, of having ordered the murder of al-Fayed's son, Dodi and his lover, Diana, Princess of Tarts, through the operations of M16, because he didn't want to admit into the Royal Family the brown-ish illegitimate child of Diana and Dodi. Al-Fayed turned court rooms into high comedy.
In 1994, in the cash-for-questions affair, Fayed revealed the names of MPs he had paid to ask questions in Parliament on his behalf, but who had failed to declare their fees. It saw Conservative MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith leave the government in disgrace, and a Committee on Standards in Public Life established to prevent such corruption occurring again. Fayed also revealed that cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken stayed for free at the Ritz Hotel in Paris at the same time as a group of Saudi arms dealers, leading to Aitken's subsequent unsuccessful libel case and imprisonment for perjury.
Al-Fayed was keen on Scottish secession from the United Kingdom, exhorting: "It's time for you to waken up and detach yourselves from the English and their terrible politicians...whatever help is needed for Scotland to regain its independence, I will provide it...when you Scots regain your freedom, I am ready to be your president."
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The Call Me Ishmael oeuvre now comprises four volumes, thanks to editor mr verge.
Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are 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 :
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.
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.
15 comments:
Juxtaposed against Cunt and HandCock, Mo Fayed was a paragon; he would have made a great Scottish President; I can see him in a kilt, the McFayed tartan, natch.
Back in the day, mr ishmael and I turned left off the A9 and headed to the Falls of Shin, as we had some time in hand before driving north to Scrabster to catch the ferry home. The Falls of Shin formed part of the Balnagown Estate, owned by Mohammed al Fayed. The Visitor Centre was known as the Harrods of the North and sold all things tartany, shortbready and kilty, at whopping great prices. The thing that delighted me most, though, was a larger-than-life-size waxwork of al Fayed, elevated on a plinth to gaze with sightless eyes on this Northern emporium and dressed in full Highland regalia. Firm and muscular legs were adorned by those long wooollen socks they wear, a beautiful and intricately-pleated kilt hung from the figure's trim waist and the fitted black jacket flattered broad shoulders. All topped with the chubby, twinkly head of our favourite Egyptian. I think the sculptor had taken a few liberties with reality. The kilt was the al McFayed tartan - just as you imagined, mr mike. Sadly, The former Falls of Shin centre was destroyed by fire in May 2013.
That's heartwarming to hear, Mrs I, but sad to learn of the fire.
Did you manage to have a peek under his kilt, to see what if anything he wore, unlike your King, who sports a tampon?
Far too intimidated by the atmosphere of hushed reverence to take kilty liberties, mr mike.
Btw, isn't he your King, too?
Technically, Mrs I, until we get a referendum. I see the press keep referring to Camilla as "Queen Camilla".
A blithering liberty, mr mike - weren't we promised that she would never be referred to as Queen? It isn't even Queen Consort - just Queen. The Duke of Windsor must be spinning madly in his grave, considering how times have changed in a hundred years.
Who could have guessed that filling concrete with air bubbles would make it - well - unlike concrete?
Usual story: doing the job on the cheap with contractors realising there is no come-back. MBE's all round, for services to building and education. If the problem is beyond my retirement, then it isn't a problem. FUBAR.
And everyone is now post-inventing the actuality to cover their backs - this rubbish product was invented because it was cheap, quick and easy to pour. I just had a quick squint at an entry on Roman concrete - which got stronger over time and has resulted in buildings that are still standing, in good order, 2000 years later, and underwater structures that are stronger now than when first constructed. Even the best of our concrete deteriorates over time, reinforced as it is with steel bars that rust.
Concrete cancer, Mrs I; coming to the NHS soon. A lot of those hospitals built in the last 20-30 years must have a dose.
The Romans were latecomers to concrete. In the building of the Great Wall of China, the workers mixed rice flour into their concrete giving it extra strength.
But air bubbles beggers belief - what strength or chemical properties does air bring to the mix?
The question asks and answers itself, thus - what profit do air bubbles bring to the mix?
Perhaps an air bubble is like an arch in every direction,When i worked on a motorway constuction site 53 years set samples of concrete were matured under water for several days in a tank, On hot days fresh concrete slabs were covered in wetted hessian sacks, Years ago i was told a story about cracking plaster walls in some Oxford Colleges The old plasterer said put some cow shite in the plaster mix then it wont crack
Regards Walter
I don't think its the arch principle, mr Walter.
Air is compressible, so if the concrete exerts extra pressure on the bubble the air will compress and the concrete move. The arch works on the principle of transferring the load to the vertical legs of the arch and hence to the structure below which should be designed to take the load.
As concrete cures it heats up. Too much heat and the concrete can expand and crack. Hence the cooling with water. Indeed concrete under varying ambient temperatures expands and contracts. This is why there are rubberised expansion joints between slabs, and if you look at a bridge, there are metal bearings on top of pillars which support a beam. All to allow for movement, otherwise cracks would result.
Just thinking a little more, the effect of temperature changes would expand/contract air bubbles at a different rate than the concrete, thus causing internal stresses. I can see all sorts of problems with aerated concrete.
As our resident engineer...
The air bubbles in the aerated concrete serve to make it lighter - very much lighter. Some of this stuff even floats! The applications this stuff is used for are mostly not structural in themselves save the important idea that a material must at least support itself. For instance, a breeze block is a very light aerated concrete block. I don't have the numbers to hand but I have slung both breeze blocks and concrete blocks about the place and the latter must be four or five times the weight of the former. So they are easier to use and bring less weight load in themselves. They are also good at insulation which is an increasingly thought about matter. One can also form it into useful shapes, and indeed cut and sculpt it quite easily.
Notoriously, aerated concrete is of itself porous. Point a hosepipe at a breeze block wall for a few minutes and the other side will show the water penetrating through the blocks. So if you are going to use aerated concrete materials, you are required to seal the outside, clad it or other wise look after it, yea, unto eternity. Also, the material is less strong and therefore in any appreciable span it will need to be reinforced. This reinforcement will need to be kept away from or proteected from water.
So say we have these light aerated roof panels spanning from beam to beam or wall panels attached to columns. If you let water in, they will get heavier (and may fail under their own weight), the sealing that there is will be undermined and the reinforcement will need to be thought about. So one has to look after AAC or it deteriorates and it will let you down. (We call this "maintenance". Even my beautiful 500 year-old pyramid of Tudor sticks and rubble would fall down if I did not paint it from time to time and fix its roof when required.)
Cheaper and more convenient materials are a good thing btw but one needs to know what one is doing. None of this BTW2 is not understood and it is all routinely taught in engineering departments and on vocational builders' courses. (The current hoo-hah is politically tactical.) I would imagine that the post-war public estate is chocker with this stuff and 75 years later it is coming to the end of its useful life in a lot of the applications for which it was very hurriedly used on grounds of us having spent every penny on the freedom of Europe and having spent about fourpence on maintenance in the 8 decades since.
Helpfully.
Mr mongoose: is the problem that they have been using the stuff for load bearing structures, to save a few bob?
Some of that, mr mike, and some of the "world has changed since we built it" problem. Stuff moves, bits are extended, stuff is hung off bits of structure it shouldn't be. Structural engineers exist for a reason.
BTW I have just checked and "breeze blocks" aren't AAC - they're cinder blocks made a different way. Who knew!? I wasn't aware of the difference and "breeze block" is a widely and apparently inaccurately used catch-all for a lightweight porous block material. And so if I don't know after 40 years of engineering - admitedly a different discipline - you can see how things get fucked up.
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