The Fox Covert

Thanks for posting. Photos of Glenfield station, which closed a century ago, are very hard to come by!

I wish, but Joe Rogan can go and do one. Ignorant knob. Would probably say 'Lie-sess-ter'.

Made from milk from cows which live at a rather famous farm in Mid Somerset. They have free access to the unusual plant species which grow in the supersized hedgerows. It is actually quite difficult to get them to turn up at the dairy for milking time because although they set off with the best intentions, somewhere along the way they can't quite get it together to remember where they are supposed to be going!

I would say that is true. After a previous term in office and another four years since, Trump has no tolerance to anyone calling him out. If the people in his cabal don't stop him he will go to any lengths to go after people who challenge his authority, which probably means billion dollar lawsuits, trumped up criminal charges, and every covert effort to damage their personal life and career. After the election I posted this and got quite a lot of unpleasant pushback from people who think Trump is the second coming. I spent about an hour blocking all the nastier ones who really are Nazis.

My house is full of foxes. Foxes on mugs, a fox in a painting, fluffy foxes, big foxes, little foxes, even a real taxidermy fox. There was a fox head door knocker but my ex took it.

Hat er große Männertitten?

I hate Selhurst Park as the whole area looks dodgy. Last time I went there I drove and parked well away from the ground in a council estate on the other side of the railway. I drove until I found somewhere which looked like a decent residential area. Nearer the ground I felt my car might not still be there after the match. Spuds have very fickle and ignorant fans who quickly turn against their own team if things are not going well. Chelsea's old ground was the worst I have ever been to. Away terrace miles away from the pitch, dreadful toilets and herded along like sheep by police on horseback after the match.

Charlton was and probably still is one of the most friendly awaydays in London. The nearest pub is I think the Antigallican.

I once worked in a place where there was someone who sat in his little cubby hole of a personal office reading the Daily Telegraph all day. He came out from time to time to poke his nose into someone else's work before disappearing back into his hole with a cup of tea. A new girl started work in an adjacent office and she asked who kept some kind of an official register. I knew this was one of the official responsibilities of the Telegraph reader so I said you need to go into the next office and ask for Mr Twitmarsh. She thought that really was his name. A minute later everyone in the other office burst out laughing when she went in and asked who Mr Twitmarsh was. 'Fraid to say, Telegraph reader was stuck with being Twitmarsh, probably until he retired. That place doesn't exist any more and probably there isn't anywhere else like that on this planet.

I grew up in Leicester and trump was a fairly polite euphemism for fart. I don't think I have ever heard it anywhere else. What about a bit of rhyming slang - Donald Trump = Dump, as in 'I need to go for a Donald Trump!'

Can you get Trump toilet paper? Or a replica gold plated Trump toilet?

I think it is a big-money corporatist thing which has grown to dominate most sports and entertainments. Glastonbury and other large festivals used to have their own identity, which is still true to a certain extent but the corporate junketing and concentration of all the money at the top of the tree means that the spontaneity which used to be there when I first went in the 1980s has largely gone. Yes, it was a much wilder place then, but so were the terraces of most large football clubs in the days before corporate boxes and ticket prices beyond the reach of anyone on an average income.

Gets a laugh for Snottingham (Snotingahame). I once got a two week ban from 606 for commenting on their forum and calling the city Snottingham. I got a snotty message from the mods that people had complained and it was insulting to the city and its people!

My dad, a former teacher, used to lead guided walks on summer evenings around the city centre. He didn't like photographs being taken of him and would not have considered putting them on YouTube but I imagine they would have been an interesting watch.

Remote working can work for you depending on the industry and the company you are working for and your career aspirations. In my previous job, I had been working for the company for several years before remote working was enforced by the pandemic and the first covid lockdown. So I knew all the project team and the major contacts for the customer quite well and the transition to remote working was successful. Some of the major projects this company had in its portfolio dried up last year and I moved on to another company in the same field, which has remote working as part of its business strategy. This has been less successful as I rarely meet anybody in the project team and have still never met any of the customer's project team. Things are OK when the job in hand is straightforward, but when things are not and you need more information or have queries sometimes that work package just goes on hold for months. Very often the information you need would be readily available in an office environment. The job would probably only be on hold until the next day, or maybe the beginning of the following week. Remote working is also a career killer. I just don't see that you would ever be able to get the all round career experience to progress to, for example, a project lead position. I couldn't care less about the last one as I am now in the run-down stage of my working life and will definitely quit if I am still there when I get the state pension, because even the miserable pittance from the state, that I have contributed to for over 40 years, will push me into the higher tax bracket. The job is engineering technical documentation and the customers include many leading names in the aerospace, defence and engineering industries.

Interesting picture of a scene which has changed almost beyond recognition. There is a painting in there if I can find better resolution images of the buildings and the bridges. The train is easy. Here is a painting someone else did of the same scene from a different angle.

(7 hours ago, The Fox Covert said: This is a much nicer thread than the usual ones on YouTube and Facebook which are infested with ignorant and aggressive Reform/EDL bots. I got hassled by one recently who commented on my family name not looking very English. The name has actually been in England for at least 500 years which should be enough for even the most off-the-scale racist. I cracked up half way through the comment when I read 'imergrunt'. I didn't waste much time on my reply but I was careful to use only short words with no more than ten letters and two syllables!) My family name is Maries. I wasn't born in Leicester but I grew up there. I still have some family left in the city although most of us have left. The earliest known ancestor was a John Maris, a cordwainer (shoemaker) who was born about 1480 in Flyford Flavell, Worcestershire. It clearly isn't an Anglo-Saxon name, hence the keyboard abuse I got from some knuckle-dragger who probably has wet dreams about an England inhabited by a tall, blond and blue-eyed race with direct links to their ancestors from Germany and the Netherlands. I have no clear idea where the name comes from. I have a theory that the John Maris was a descendant of a local landowner called de Marisco who lived in the village in the middle fourteenth century. This is the period when the settlers who arrived after the Norman invasion finally decided that they ought to be speaking English rather than Norman French and their names tended to become Anglicised.

This is a much nicer thread than the usual ones on YouTube and Facebook which are infested with ignorant and aggressive Reform/EDL bots. I got hassled by one recently who commented on my family name not looking very English. The name has actually been in England for at least 500 years which should be enough for even the most off-the-scale racist. I cracked up half way through the comment when I read 'imergrunt'. I didn't waste much time on my reply but I was careful to use only short words with no more than ten letters and two syllables!

I have been watching the news of the riots with not a little concern because I still have family in Leicester, and a brother who lives in a location which is decidedly front line. I thought there would be a repeat of the clashes in 2010, when hundreds of hooligans were bussed into the city and there *was* major trouble. Loads of clips on YouTube. Happily it didn't happen. As I type, a message from a friend popped in. His partner was born in Leicester of Asian parents and I expect he has also been expecting trouble.

What, into water polluted with sewage discharge by Thames Water? He might be useless but that is too harsh a punishment.

I think we will see Farage most interested in questions and sound bites in Parliament, and grabbing media publicity. He has never shown much interest in the detailed investigation and implementation of policy, which is what the government committees do. There are some very good practitioners on both sides of the House, like Meg Hillier who is hugely respected in Parliament but hardly known to the general public. I don't agree about the SNP. The SNP cannot be compared to Reform or even the Greens because as far as Westminster is concerned they are a single-issue party with the prime objective of Scotland not being ruled from Westminster at all. I go to Scotland a lot and it is clear that since the restoration of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood most Scots are more interested in what is going on at Holyrood than Westminster.

Sam Baron hasn't got a clue what he is talking about. There will be plenty of space on the Opposition front benches but House of Commons protocol will dictate that the front bench is taken by the Tories and the Liberals. Farage and his knuckle-dragging henchmen will have to sit in the naughty corner at the back with the ever-dwindling ranks of the DUP. Farage hates not being the centre of attention and he will soon find out that he will only have the same right to question the Prime Minister as a back bencher from the major parties. About one question allowed per year, if he is very lucky.

The Labour Party in Leicester East completely lost the plot when they had the opportunity after the end of Keith Vaz - they selected someone even worse in Claudia Webbe. I don't think Leicester East has ever had a Tory MP in my lifetime. The South seat was Tory a very long time ago ... Tom Boardman? but most of that seat is much more prosperous and better Tory territory. A colossal own-goal by Labour.

Rees-Mogg is in the neighbouring seat to where I live and I can tell you I rarely hear anyone say a good word about him. I cartooned him as the Minister for Silly Walks today. Hopefully he is out on his ear and he can go back to his country mansion and learn to ride a horse properly and go fox hunting.

I haven't had one from my Tory candidate yet. The incumbent Tory is not standing again and the new candidate has been parachuted in by Tory Central Office. They are probably still printing her election literature, and they are certainly short of people to knock on doors and talk to people, even if the householder will sometimes be slam it in their face.