The Fox Covert

Bull shit may be, but true bull shit none the less! I am not really a farmer but I am all at home walking across a muddy field.

Interesting post. I don't remember the Wyvern Hotel but I can picture Elizabeth House in my head. A pretty dismal piece of seventies brutalist concrete architecture and putting coloured panels all over it does not make it look any better. There is a Wakerley Road in Evington which is presumably named after this man. This stimulated me to a little bit of lunchtime research. Arthur Wakerley was a Leicestershire man, born in Melton and became Mayor of Leicester. He has his own Wikipedia page and there are fourteen buildings in Leicester that he designed which are now listed buildings. Not just large and impressive buildings but the 1920s council houses, pretty revolutionary for the time, in Highfields and Knighton Fields. YouTube video linked. I will give it a watch later.

If you remember what the canal was like when I was at school, a watery rubbish dump full of car tyres, shopping trolleys, traffic cones, mattresses, Honda 50 mopeds and other stuff too horrible to mention you will know what I mean. The school fishing competition once yielded 3 tiny fish as the total catch, with the largest a stonking 5 grams! One day it will be tidied up as far as Frog Island. It's getting there.

I might sometimes walk out from Temple Meads if my town still had a railway. It once had two! The area round Temple Meads is dreary and much less pleasant than the walk from Leicester London Road Station down Granby Street to the city centre.

I used to tell the Nigerian scammers that I was a farmer from Somerset, and I can't keep my slurry on my land any more because of the protests from the middle-class incomers from London and the Ramblers Association, and all the other self-centred do-gooders. I told them if the scammer would let me keep it on his land I would let him have half!

Completely agree with this. I live twenty odd miles south of Bristol which is my nearest city. Bristol has its good bits, a waterfront (which Leicester also has) and College Green, but the streets nearest to the main shopping streets are a traffic nightmare and the traffic congestion generally is officially recognised as the worst of any city outside London. Bristol's public transport network is also desperately haphazard and although the city now has a ULEZ in the centre I bet it has not made a jot of difference to the level of air pollution in the city centre.

I have had several of these in the last week or so. And a follow from an 'Elon Musk'. Righto! There's always someone who was born yesterday.

One of my Instagram followers is Hamoudi, a Leeds fan who lives in Syria. He tells me that his house has been damaged by the earthquake and he and his family are looking at what to do next. I do sometimes get hard luck stories from around the world but I have exchanged messages with Hamoudi for a long time and I am convinced his plight is genuine. As you can see from the attached screen grab from his Instagram page his art is absolutely stunning and he would like to sell this piece. I would love him to do paintings of our Leicester heroes but this is purely selfish and I desist! I have suggested he post on Leeds forums like Marching on Together if he hasn't already. I will ask him for a larger resolution picture because the one I have posted is quite small. There are many others and they are all as good. One footie fan to another - in expectation of a bit of sympathy and help if you know where you can it, because we are actually only rivals to Leeds for 90 minutes twice a year!

The club needs a few older professionals about next season. There is a lot to be said for having a native English languare core to the squad. I think Evans will retire in the summer and so might Vardy. If Marc wants to come back next season and start to get his badges the club will benefit enormously from his presence, even if he does not play very much.

Huth against Man City. Even if true that is far too long ago.

It is very sad to see a thread like this about a club which once cheered so loud the vibrations registered on the Richter scale.

In Somerset we have Rees-Mogg and Warburton.

I generally can't conceal my disgust and contempt for Tories but I shall bide my tongue (fingertips) a bit to see what happens with this thread. Andrew Bridgen is already serving a short suspension from the House of Commons for breaches of lobbying rules including allegedly accepting bungs in return for lobbying ministers and government officials and failure to declare a personal interest. He has now been suspended from the Tory party for comparing the roll-out of the Covid vaccines to the Holocaust. This is after he had previously declared he had received the two initial vaccinations and the booster jabs. There is a flip side, because he has previously championed the cause of sub-postmasters who have been unfairly convicted for theft of Post Office funds, after a lengthy campaign it has been revealed that the vast majority are innocent and the scandal was caused by the Post Offices own faulty software. It is a bit like finding a diamond in the middle of a turd, because he was one of the few politicians who kept pushing this until finally the courts started finding in favour of postmasters who had been wrongly convicted. Successive governments since 2011 continually dragged their feet and only agreed to allow an official enquiry into this scandal last year.

I did my verge myself. I was careful with the disposal of the asbestos boards at the bottom of the verge and replaced them with a modern black plasticky material. It is an eighteenth century cottage so a dry verge would have looked completely wrong. I did baulk at replacing the barge boards on the main roof and got a roofer to replace these with plastic. From the ground you can't see what material was used thirty feet up so I am happy with a job which will probably outlast me.

Interesting post. Some things don't change. Russia does not use bombers to destroy Ukraine's gas and electricity infrastructure, but they do use long-range missiles to have the same effect. A major strike in this area, with a major power station and two main line railways would have had a considerable effect on the local economy and further afield. However Leicester's industry was quite widely dispersed across the city and a map of industry across the whole city would show a different picture. It looks like Filbert Street is outlined but not the Tigers' ground at Welford Road. Destruction of City's home would have had little effect on the economy but it would have hit the headlines and local morale.

Local competition has a great deal to do with it. In my small West Country town Tesco is the only fuel station - there were once three. So they constantly try their luck and charge top dollar. There is an unceasing series of threads on the local Facebook Community page and Tesco have made themselves about as unpopular as Tories in Barnsley. I have been savvy with checking prices on fuel apps when I go anywhere. I haven't once gone out of my way to drive to the next town just to get fuel yet I haven't bought any fuel from Tesco for at least six months. I suspect that if Morrisons in Wells or Asda in Frome charge up to 10p a litre less for diesel and most people in the town know this, it also has an impact on footfall in Tesco's store because many people will do a shop at the same time as they fill up on fuel.

Whoops! I think this is the building on the north side of Knighton Fields Road East. I was a bit puzzled as Knighton Lane East was built up between the wars, council housing on one side and fairly standard three bed semis and Lancaster and Johnny North schools on the other. If this is the building I think it is it is now converted to apartments which look as though they are a really impressive size, with plenty of light inside and nice well-proportioned rooms. I love these posts.

Nice try, but if Leicester were to have a modern tramway it surely wouldn't be down Braunstone Gate and up the Narborough Road. I imagine a good route would be along the trackbed of the Great Central, passing Fosse Park and probably going as far out as Narborough. At the city end leaving the Great Central to go down High Street and up Granby Street to the Midland station. A branch north along the canal, past Frog Island and then up the Melton Road. Might happen by the same time as the city finally gets electric trains to London!

I know exactly where Thurncourt Road is but with the wooden building on the left this looks a lot like the pictures we have been getting to see of the Ukrainian countryside.

Didn't someone throw a meat pie at one of the players in the dark days of 2007/2008? Pukka pies do have delightfully squidgy gravy!

A silent protest with everybody holding up a blank sheet of paper. It shouldn't upset the players who will soon get the message. Despite everything that has been going on quite a few of them have been making a real effort and they must be getting extremely frustrated. I am pretty sure it has not been done at a football match before and if thousands of people did it the media would pick it up like crazy. Followed by a silent protest outside the ground after the match.

No heating at the moment. 11 deg C outside and 21 deg C in my home office, which is extremely well insulated, drylined on the outside wall and with an insulated double ceiling. I have just been camping in Scotland where there have already been a couple of night frosts! In the evening I press the boost button on the combi to get an hour's heat which warms the rest of the house for a while.

YouTuber Supertanskii has just excelled herself with her latest vlog, darkly suggesting that hedgefunders close to the government got the nudge and the wink before the budget. Quite chilling if it is true. Corrupt and despicable behaviour on a Russian scale. While our investments and pensions tank, hyaenas like Rees-Mogg are laughing all the way to their offshore bank. Please nobody put her on the Birds you fancy on the telly thread, although I admit she is much more attractive than most of the women I have seen on there. Enjoy!!!

The Tory membership demographic is predominantly middle and upper class male and over 60. Give it time and their rotten corpses will be pushing up daisies and we will have grown ups running this country.

I also live in a constituency which is almost always Tory - Wells. Labour voters in this neck of the woods are about as common as Tories in Barnsley. I voted Lib Dem for the first and only time in 2010 because the sitting Tory was embroiled in the expenses scandal and there was a strong local Liberal candidate who seemed to have a good chance of winning the seat. Heathcote-Amory was the Tory who distinguished himself by claiming for a cart load of horse manure. At the election I designed and printed a spoof Tory poster which urged passers-by to vote for 'Horsesh*t-Amory'. It featured in the local press and the Tory political agent complained about it, but because it was on private land there was nothing he could do. Heathcote-Amory lost the election.