June 28th, 2022.
The decision of the Supreme Court of the USA on Roe vs Wade has reached the UK, and the usual people on both sides of the argument have surfaced.
I see that in the USA the pro-choice (or anti-life, choose your own position), have been demonstrating. The more virulent supporters have threatened to withdraw from sexual relations with males. Now I’m just a simple person, but if that happened nationally, wouldn’t it solve the problem?
As far as the UK goes, it keeps getting sillier by the day. Usually, the silly season is August, but it has come early this year. The census has just been released and the population of England and Wales reached 59,000,000, up 6.3% from 2011. 51% of the population are women, or given the difficulty in defining what a woman is, 51% are non-men.
The biggest increase was in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets which grew by 22.1%. In 2011 32% of the population of Tower Hamlets was of Bangladeshi origin.
An interesting fact is that the populations of Kensington and Chelsea, and Westminster, fell by 10%, which has major implications for calculating funding for schools and housing etc. It turns out that the census was held on a Sunday at the height of the Covid lockdown and it is thought that the missing population was at their second homes in the country. I can verify that as my little part of England was full of non-locals at the time.
There has been an increase in the pressure to use pronouns of preference. When I receive government letters asking for my pronoun of choice, I use my self-determined pronoun dgas, (pronounced deegas). No one has yet asked for its derivation, but it stands for Don’t Give A Stuff.
One of the leaders of the Rochdale child grooming gang was due to be deported after serving his jail sentence and appealed the decision. Five days before his appeal he renounced his Pakistani citizenship (he had dual UK/Pakistani nationality) and therefore was not qualified for deportation.
The dispute between the EU and the UK over the Northern Ireland protocol continues. The Johnson Government is putting a bill through parliament that will unilaterally withdraw the UK from the agreement. This is complicated by rumours that the EU won’t negotiate seriously with Johnson as they don’t believe that he will survive the year.
In Plymouth, Border Force agents were accused of insensitivity and endangering life after they stopped an ambulance as it came off the ferry from France. A 36-year-old woman was returning from Spain after brain surgery. She wasn’t allowed to fly back to the UK but was cleared to be driven back in a second-hand ambulance bought by her husband. On arrival at Plymouth, they stopped the ambulance and removed her from the vehicle. She was connected to oxygen and lying on the gurney as she had been for the journey. The Border Force ripped the ambulance apart, thoroughly searched it and after allowing sniffer dogs full access to the ambulance, after 4 hours they found nothing. The sniffer dogs didn’t even find the high strength opiates that had been legitimately prescribed.
On a better note, my little town which always seems to have something going on, held its gin festival last weekend. 12 stands with different gin suppliers and various food stalls. Tasting was available, and all the gin was made in Cornwall.
I didn’t stay until the end as by 7pm it was already getting raucous. There had been bands all day and the tempo warmed up through the day. A wonderful event with no violence, no police, no council jobsworths (most of whom were testing the gin!), lots of fun. Just how rural England used to be.
Here is a glimpse of what it was like.
I will finish on that note, that there are still some corners of this land that don’t seem to have been infected with stupidity, ignorance, and pedantry.
Apparently, we have a Dickens evening coming up in the Autumn where the locals dress up in Dickensian outfits and we have food, bands and drinks. I am looking forward to it.