Diesel fitter

Busy day today. Up with the larks to take my car to the garage for a safety upgrade and gear box oil change. Managed to convince them neither took very long so they had it done by 2pm. In the meantime I decided to spend the time in Liverpool rather than go home.

Then I had a thought......Everton's new football satdium was just down the road so I thought I would go and stare through the fencing and see it in all its glory. Its a mighty fine structure but not quite up to the Tottenham Hotspur stadium level. It is built in the old Liverpool dockland on the site of Bramley Moore dock,  and is bordered on one side by the Mersey on another by Nelson Dock and on the third side by the old dock wall.

This dock wall extends into Liverpool from Seaforth and it was here that my investigative journey started. I wondered how long it would take to walk to the nearest (but 1) Metro station, one I can reach without changing trains. 35 minutes was the answer. So it has some similarity to aforementioned Tottenham stadium.

Both are over 30 minutes away from a mass transit underground system and both have an unfit for purpose overground station much closer. In Evertons case it is Sandhills which is small old and decidedly unsafe for 60,000 fans every fortnight. Interstingly the nearest tube station to the new Brentford stadium, Gunnerbury, is closed on match days exactly for safety reasons. Why do authorities let these large stadia be built without the infrastructure to allow people to get home safely. Wembley is another example.

The area around the stadium is comprised of cleared land and dereliction with the exception of a gin distillery and Ten Streets Social, both of which should make a killing on match days.

So let me finish with a bit of culture. While walking the dock wall home, I passed several drinking fountains imbedded in the wall. These fountains were installed by a Liverpool philanthopist, Charles Pierre Melly, in response to the dockers need for fluids which were being met by a stroll across the road to the beer and spirit outlets which sprung up to meet the demand. Dockers were arriving back after their break drunk and dangerous so Melly felt something had to be done to address the problem. A very enlightened solution in 1854!!

So that was my day completed, although a bit frustrated that my car now says it needs an oil change in 1300 miles. Why could they not have done that at the same time? Hey ho, thats BMW where even the steering  wheel is extra!! 

Putins AD Vance helped by JD

 Goodness me, already the 2025 blog content is focusing on Donald Trump again. There is an expression used up North,  'Always the victim, never the blame' and I suspect that might just have crept into the presidential word bank, goodness me there is enough room for it.

Was Zelensky ambushed, or did he just misread the situation? US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, implied that the 30 minute exchange behoind closed doors did not go well and that Zelensky was the blame. Then Brian Glenn, a white House correspondent highlighted Zelensky's combat clothing as being disrestectful. Does he not do his research very thoroughly? If he did he might have found this.

Trump is a bully pure and simply, surrounded by likeminded people, many of whom  are on the Worlld stage for the first time. They are used to getting their own way and so the rest of the World are in for a rocky time in the short term. Maybe the Saudi's or Isreali's could advise on how to make people disappear?

Putin will be delighted to be Trump's new best friend and must already be working out how the Ukrainian Earth minerals can be divided up. Hold on to your hats we are in for a bumpy ride.

Dave 'Dodgy' Jones (1954-2025)

 I heard the news yesterday that my great friend and social activist Dave Jones passed away recently. I can't say that I will miss him, as I have already had that experience while he has been shut away in a dementia care home in Teddington West London for close to 15 years. I visited on occassions when other reasons took me down South, but as is always the case, his memory of me or SWMBO diminished to nothing very quickly. One has no idea if the visits do register as certainly the exchanges indicate they do not, but I was advised to keep going as long as I was able, to keep the care home on their toes, and in case there was some cranial activity I was stimulating.

Dave was a long standing member of the Tuesday club, a group who convened at 9pm in The Prince Blucher in Twickenham, and pretended we had all been rugby training and needed a recovery pint or three. Clearly in our fourties, our rugby training days were long behind us, but the social couple of hours were always rich in stories and memories.

There were memories for SWMBO and I as well. We would often meet him in Paris when England were playing, although his allegiance was always to Wales!! We stayed in his apartment in Amsterdam and in Rome when his work with Cellnet took him away for months at a time, but most memorable, we were with him in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympic Games as he was liaison officer for Helen Rollenson of TV fame, and we were working in the Georgia Dome. Dave sorted accomodation and had a good knowledge of  Buckhead and its bars and restaurants and we had a real blast for two weeks. 

The World was always a livelier place with 'Dodgy' around, and I felt priveliged to call him my friend. May you finally be free .

Trumpton

 One consistency during our Caribbean adventure was the unanimous loathing the Americans have for their new President. He would almost seem like a US equivalent of Enoch Powell, the Midland MP who would gain support for his controversial policies by preaching to the less intelligent members of society who were easily led.

Trump is clearly targeting the'good old boys', rednecks and others of a similar outlook to fuel his radical approach to changing the World. His pardoning of the Senate rioters looks like it will set the scene.

There may be trouble ahead!

The great British belly

 So off we go with the second blog of the year, SWMBO and I have just returned from ten days in Barbados, our first proper holiday since our Safari two years ago and first visit to the island since before Covid.

There are several theme's to expand on but the one which captured my interest was the ability to study a cross section of the UK population, and understand the challenges facing the NHS now and in the future.

There were huge beer bellies, chain smokers of a nature I had not experienced for years, and tattoo's a-plenty and that was just the women. It is clear the population has an obesity challenge, and it extends further than Birkenhead, where thunder thighs are a common sight amongst young girls and probably genetic.

There is much talk of the elderly bed blocking in our hospitals, so why I wonder does the Government not reintroduce the Nightingale hospital programme and use then to free up main hospital beds. Student nurses can train on the job under the supervision of an old fashion Matron and its a win-win situation

Kenneth Williams eat your heart out!

Must do better

 Did I really only do eight posts in 2024? It wasn' t that dull was it? Well maybe it was, Do my reader's really want to hear about me winning golf trophies, well only one actually but it is impressive and 98 years old, More to the point have I got many readers left, I can check see how many hits l get but I can't even be bothered. Its all done as a friends update, a bit like the Christmas Round Robin, but drip fed and a historical record of grandad if the grandkids ever want to know what I got up to.

Interestingly l could not have done a Round Robin last year as I was without technology for a few weeks as l got hacked. I was financially compromised earlier in the year and lost a few hundred pounds. The Bank re-imbersed me but as a tech savvy chap l was well pissed off that l got duped, imagine then how l felt the second time?

I manged to disengage before we got to the finance bit however the left some ransomware behind as a free gift. After a lot of effort l had no success removing it so had to reload from scratch. This is the first blog since then as all bookmarks and cache entries were well corrupted 

Anyway I am back and news will start to flow more regularly, starting now.

Light at the end of the Tunnel

 Liverpool will not fail for want of trying. There is always something going on, or being planned for, and, after the Eurovision Song Contest, this weekend is the Festival of Light. It consists of a series of art sculptures either based around light, floodlit or just plain light oriented.

Here are a few examples. We were fortunate that it opened on Friday when we were in town, just to be in town, so we got a sneak preview.

 

I am in town again on Wednesday, when my golf Captains group are having a pub crawl. I took the opportunity to show Maxine the first venue, The Vine, or 'Big House' as the locals call it. It is one of a number of traditional pubs which a group has taken on and refurbished. they concentrate on wet sales so it will be interesting to see how they make end's meet