The New Avengers? Bit early?…Maybe. What is clear is that with every passing day the political power is slipping away from Rishi Sunak. The smell of decay is really starting to become unbearable. Does this mean that the next Government of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will be shaped by these powerful women? Not yet. Many things can happen between now and when the Sunak Government finally faces the electorate.
If Sunak decides to go long then I suspect he could be facing a wipeout similar to that Labour experienced in Scotland in 2015. If that happens then it doesn’t matter what this or that right wing noise maker says. They won’t be MPs and have no power. Who might want this?
In 1514 Francis Hastings was born. He went onto become the 2nd Earl of Huntingdon and had a very successful life marrying very well indeed. However, according to his Wiki entry, he possibly was the son of Henry the 8th. However, he probably wasn’t it is far from clear.
I visited St. Helen’s Church at Ashby de la Zouch again today to try and capture some better images of Francis tomb with a ‘proper‘ camera. It worked out quite well.
In England I think we’re just a little too accepting of all the history around us, take the memorial to Margary Wright as an example. She appears a good upstanding member of society who after her death a fine little memorial was placed on the wall of her local church. Nothing too unusual about that until you see the date when she died – 1623. Now if you are an a US citizen you would probably be aware that this was just 2 years after the Mayflower pilgrims landed at Plymouth rock. So if this were in the States a great deal would have been made of the monument, here it just gathers dust in the corner of provincial church.
One final lesson from the church involves this fine alabaster memorial to Robert Nundi and his wives. He died in 1525 or 1526. He was a well off local tailor and in his will he left sums of monies to local religious establishments as well as my old school. He no doubt expected the nuns at Langley and monks at Gresley to pray for his soul for a very long time. Unfortunately just a few years later the possible but probably not father of Francis Hastings had other ideas and caused all the religious establishments he had endowed to close, pocketing all the money from the proceeds. There’s a lesson there somewhere.
I have say, and this should come as a surprise to no one, but a ‘proper‘ camera with some excellent lenses puts an iPhone in its place, a very distant second. This is not to downplay just how good an iPhone is but rather to take a poke at some of the nonsense that Apple spurts each time they have a new iPhone to flog. Apple oversells goods hardly breaking news. I say this as someone who is totally enclosed in the Apple walled garden.
So winter is officially here. I woke up this morning and found we had had a light dusting of snow. Time I think to get some housekeeping done whilst sitting in my nice warm little study.
Day two of winter and it has got colder. The weather forecast suggests that next week will be a bit warmer. I do hope so.
This morning we were treated to some freezing fog. Everything is pale and somewhat washed out. I decided to just use one lens and use nature’s zoom lens, my legs – it was just too cold to keep changing lens.
The first day of winter, a bloody cold one to welcome in the new season, found us walking through Victoria Park. We seem to have gained a couple of new monuments since the last time I was there.
It was so nice to get out this morning and enjoy a beautiful dawn. There only animal I had any communion with this morning was a buzzard who didn’t appreciate me waking him, could have been a her, up from his roost. He was not happy and let me know by screaming at me as he flew overhead.
This autumn has been a really strange one. Back in early September it was baking hot. Then for most of the time we seem to have had more rain in a day than a month. But as it slowly collapses into winter normal service is starting to resume and frosts are starting to become a thing. There is even talk of snow at Christmas, although if that were to happen it would be really unusual so I guess yes we’ll have snow at Christmas!
Whatever happens this morning the Welland Valley was beautiful with just a touch of Tuscany? Perhaps, perhaps not.
It is around 10 years since I visited Ashby de la Zouch town centre. To make things even more ancient it must be around 50 years since I sat in the pews of St. Helen’s Church. Then I was some disreputable youth who was rebelling against anything you might wish to mention. Oh how half a century can knock an awful lot of rebellious edges off of a person.
What I didn’t know all those years ago was that just metres away was final resting place of one of the best connected couple in Tudor England. The second Earl Huntington and especially his wife Katherine Pole had connections and blood lines that were probably better than the then current king Henry the 8th.
Now, of course, I’m fascinated by grave, the alabaster, which was probably quarried locally at Chellaston and the carvings probably created at Burton upon Trent or maybe Coventry. I could go on and I’m sure my feckless youth version would be yawning. Thankfully, I’m not that person.
Lovely morning – just right for my morning constitutional. What is better than having some grand old trees for company.
Perhaps not quite as grand or old…
The iPhone is a peculiar piece of equipment – especially when you use the camera but not the photo app. RAW images, as I am discovering. Without the ever helpful(?) hand of aunty iPhone the image it produces can be a bit rubbish. However, when you see the data from the camera you realise it is doing things other cameras just don’t even contemplate:
1/10900th of a second – one of the joys I guess of having a fixed aperture of only f1.6 around f8/13 in old money, sorry, full frame. Anyway, this is what the camera captured.
There are times, every now and then, when I do just wonder at the awful way the world is turning out. I don’t mean the thankfully abstracts, such as the suffering in Gaza or whatever dreadful international situation that you are concerned about, but rather the everyday things back home. For me at the moment it is the slow collapse of the old Conservative Party and its replacement by a mutation that seems to view everybody and everything with suspicion. The other is to be rejected and feared. Whilst at the same time we must not, under any circumstance, question why over the last 20 years the rich have got so much richer whilst the rest of us haven’t. Or perhaps ask why in the last 13 years the country in which I live in and have given quite a bit of my life to is in many ways so much worse than it was 13 years ago. Are the two connected? Only you can answer that.
“As long as the press sees sex and drugs behind the left hand, you can park a battle carrier behind the right hand and no one’s gonna fucking notice.”
PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN – Gust Avrakotos
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)
So what exactly does appointing David Cameron (Baron Cameron of Greensill fame) bring to the table? I have seen it argued that one of the reasons why Baron Cameron has been appointed is to reassure the more liberal Conservative voters in the Home Counties of England that things are OK under a Conservative Prime Minister who is a hard Brexiteer. If I were one of those voters I would take one look at Cameron and think he was the one who allowed the referendum to take place and thus split the country down the middle and then immediately quit. Not sure how much of a reassurance that would be.
Perhaps it was all a distraction – a Gust moment if you will. All of the Westminster media will be fixating on Cameron and not on Suella Braverman. How long will that last? A day or two at best and given the political skills shown by Sunak and his team he will probably squander the political restbite, afterall the Rwanda policy is about to reenter the political domain on Wednesday. If things go against the government then that is going to be clammer to revoke membership of the European Conventionon Human Rights (ECHR) from some of the loader members Sunak’s back benches. What does the new Foreign Secretary think about coming out of the ECHR?
Even if the Government wins the case at the Supreme Court the opposition will no doubt appeal to the European Court of Human Rights…more noise in the Mail and Telegraph…again Foreign Secretary what do you think? Perfect time for a Braverman opinion piece me thinks. And it is only Friday. Monday will seem such a long time ago.
That is before thinking about cabinet meetings where the former Prime Minister of over 5 years experience will sit opposite the current Prime Minister. Wonder what Cameron’s first intervention will be on? No one has as much experience as he has. He is the big beast amongst a crop of mostly Neophytes, and that includes the current Prime Minister.
So what is the question that Cameron is supposed to answer?
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