Owl Watch – The Two Ring Circus

A distinct lack of activity on the blog for only one reason. . .work! But everything stopped yesterday for the arrival of the owl men – Alan and Maurice. They were here to ring the owlets. Mrs H. has been worried that the owls had been too quiet and we had seen very little activity from the adults, apart from the pair of them roosting, somewhat appropriately, underneath our barn. The lack of activity during daylight hours was because they have had plenty of dry nights and they have been able to feed their brood. Last year we had 5 chicks so this year with better weather, and as it turns out only two chicks, it's all been a lot easier.

Alan went up the ladder and the whole process began.


Next came the job of weighing them. The are put in this soft cotton sacks to protect them and weighed. One weighed 415 grams the other 380 grams. Their wings were measured which showed they are 7 and a half weeks old – they fledge at 10 weeks.


In the bag they can be placed on their backs and left while the other owlet got weighed; next both of them were ringed with a unique number.
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It's even possible to take them out of the bag – they just lay still and 'play dead'. Did you know that owls have the biggest eyes of any bird?


Then it was time for them to go back in the box. . .these two men made Mrs. H. a very happy woman. . .

Go(Ed)Balls and Go Now!

The seriously delusional berk, Balls, has got himself embroiled in a fantastic spat with Fraser Nelson the Spectator columnist. You can read it HERE.

All I want is for Balls and his other loony Labour luvvies to bugger off. . .all they need to do is leave their offices tidy for the Conservative that will follow them.

Millionaire Blair at our Expense

Last year there was a good deal of controversy over the fact that Tony Blair shredded much of the information surrounding his parliamentary expense claims. Here is the heavily 'redacted' claim from September 2007 for £305.50. So not only did the spinmeister shred the evidence, but we paid for it! Really you could make none fo this up and of course nothing will happen to millionaire Blair. The whole thing is almost too amazing for words.

Update

I have found I'm late to the party. Mr Guido Fawkes got there yesterday, I should have known!

Owl Watch Update

At the weekend we had Alan and Maurice, two experts, come to look inside our owl box. Alan, the man up the ladder, is a bird-ringer who went and opened the lid – inside was the female and two, maybe three young. They were too small to ring and he'll come back in about a month to do it.

Just as he was finishing up the female tried to do a runner out of the front door. Calm as you like Alan just picked her up and held her so Mrs H could get some pictures. Apparently Barn Owls are not vicious like Tawney Owls! In future when Mrs H is putting a fallen bird back in the nest I will no longer need to stand guard with a broom!

Celebrity Politics TV Anyone?

Muriel Gray knows a thing or two about the telly so it's very revealing what she has written in the Herald on Sunday about Alan Sugar's appointment as 'business tsar' – whatever the hell that is. No one in their right mind can honestly believe that Sugar can do anything for British business; he is after all just a TV presenter. However, what his appointment is ultimately all about is the mindlessness of Brown and his henchman Lord Mandy.

Most damning of all in Ms Gray's piece is this. "Nothing wrong with any of that. It's a terrific show. Sugar does what he's told by the producers, appears to follow a script as he often stumbles over the words, and is probably, if other reality shows are the benchmark, told by the production team which contestant to fire each week."

Read the whole thing and weep for what a nonsense this government has become. Maybe instead of elections we should have Simon Cowell and half a dozen other celebrity judges should help select our politicians. Pick our Politicians or The Ballot Box on the box? We'd probably get more people voting and would they be any less competent or qualified?

60,493,912 of us are marching to the beat of one man with 24,278 'friends'

So let's get this straight. Gordon Brown, a man elected to serve his constituency in Fife by 24,278, who then becomes Prime Minister in some kind of stitch-up with Tony Blair wants change. He's a man who has brought into government as his de facto No.2 someone who has been disgraced twice and continues to show little more than contempt for everyone who comes into contact with him. He's also a man who has added more unelected people to his front bench than any Prime Minister in living memory. This is the man who is now proposing electoral reform of our democracy. It's bloody staggering!

You'll pardon me for being somewhat sceptical of his reasons. At best he's looking for ways to deflect yet more criticism of his patched up government. At worst he's trying to save his own skin. In fact everything that Gordon Brown does is about 'me', not about the country and the people he constantly claims to serve. Naturally to do a job like PM you have to have a highly, a very highly, developed ego. It seems like we have a man who is so convinced of his own rightness that he does not tolerate dissent, is prepared to sell his soul (to Mandelsdon, if not the Devil) and who is more focused on himself than the job he has to do. Despite all the talk of getting on with the job all he has succeeded in doing is getting on our collective nerves. In a random poll across the country I doubt that Brown would make double figures in the popularity stakes.

And we all thought it couldn't get any worse.

Hollywood to Remake Flipper

Gordon Brown – Nero Without a Gun (Or the Bullets)

Gordon Brown when he became PM promised us a government of all the talents and set about granting peerages left, right and centre to bring in people to positions as 'ultra special advisers'. But with this latest reshuffle Brown seems to be bringing in more and more talent' to do jobs that others could just as easily do. Mrs Kinnock, while experienced in Europe, gets a great gig to boost her personal standing and do precisely what? Is there really nobody among the 350 Labour MPs who could do the job?

Of course we've already had Mandelson who is now according to reports defacto Deputy Prime Minister. Lord Adonis is the Transport Minister and Alan Sugar has been given a peerage to be 'Enterprise Tsar'. In many ways the appointment and peerage of Sugar is the worst of all. It's a flagrant attempt to cash in on his profile as a TV face and got little to do with 'enterprise'. It's arguable what anyone in a position like his can actually do. I also doubt, among British business leaders, that Sugar has the highest respect quotient.

Democracies are wonderful things; we are blessed in this country with one that is much better than most. However, Brown's actions are making a mockery of the whole thing. Unelected cronies, hangers on, self servers and out of touch is what most of them are. It's the out of touch bit that's probably the worse thing in all this. But that's Brown's Achilles heal. He has been in government for so long that he has lost touch with people. Not content with bringing people into government his bunker mentality is what has done for him.

There's more than a whiff of "I'm going to take you all down with me." The moral compass was lost a long time ago. His emotional radar never has worked and now it seems the 'brain the size of a planet' has gone into lock down. We are about to witness a very unpleasant few months in which Brown finally implodes before our eyes. Do I feel sorry for him? No, not one bit. But I do feel sorry for Britain though. His arrogance and delusional behaviour has brought the office he coveted for so long down to a level of disrespect I never thought I'd see in my life time. Defiance is not strength. Saying you are, "not going to walk away", does not make you a leader.

Fundamentally Brown is a weak man. He's no leader as he's proved, yet again, over his dithering about Alastair Darling's removal. How can a man who cannot command the respect of his party get the respect of the country – let alone run it. It's all going to get very nasty indeed as Brown impersonates Nero. Unfortunately such is the ineptitude of his cabinet that none of them thought to take a gun, let alone the bullets into the bunker.

The Stones in The Park

“I hope they don’t think we’re a rock ‘n’ roll outfit.”

The words of Michael Philip Jagger in July 1962 when the only thing he and the rest of the fledgling Rolling Stones wanted to be was a blues band. Seven years later, almost to the day, Sam Cutler who worked for Blackhill Enterprises, the company that arranged the free concerts in Hyde Park, went on stage to announce the band to the hundreds of thousands gathered in the royal park.

“The greatest rock and roll band in the world. They’re incredible; let’s hear it for the Stones!”

It was 5.25pm on Saturday 5 July 1969. For the Rolling Stones it was their first full concert in over 2 years, barring a short, 2 song, cameo at the NME Poll Winners Concert a year earlier that had been Brian Jones last appearance with the band. In June 1969 Brian left the group, setting in motion thirty-three days that would change the Stones forever more. Mick Taylor replaced him, before Brian then spawned a dozen conspiracy theories by dying in mysterious circumstances. Surrounding these events was uncertainty about the band being able to tour America due to Mick and Keith’s, as well as Brian’s, drug busts.

We will never know all that happened between Mick and Keith and the rest of the band over Brian’s situation as a Rolling Stone. It’s quite likely they can’t remember themselves all that went on during the later part of 1968 and early 1969. The truth always depends on who tells it, and in this case there were numerous different truths. For the last 40 years there have been stories and whispers from people saying that Brian wanted to leave of his own accord. This was probably true. He had lost his band mates along the way and he knew he was never going to regain control of the group that he had formed.

The Hyde Park concert was far from the greatest gig the Stones ever performed, but this was the dawn of the ‘Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in the World’. Come December at the Stones’ finale to their hugely successful American tour – the massive free concert at Altamont, just outside San Francisco – things almost went spectacularly and horribly wrong. But life turns upon events, and the Rolling Stones survived to become the Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in the World, not just because Sam Cutler called them that for the very first time at Hyde Park in the summer of ’69 and throughout the US tour. They have done so because of all that happened over those fateful thirty odd days, forty years ago.

My new book is out this week and is available at all good bookshops as well as online from Amazon.

Lies, Spin, Connivance, B/S, Total Bollocks and Wind Farms

The opening this week of the Whitelee wind farm outside Glasgow exposes the lying and deceitfulness of both the wind farm industry and Alex Salmond.

Hurrah they all trumpeted! The 322-megawatt wind farm is going to be able to power the whole of Glasgow. Except it isn't. Government figures show that it will likely operate at a capacity of 28% which means it will be far from effective but just as expensive. It will do little more than keep half of Glasgow’s lights on, and not do anything to power TVs, dishwashers, tumble dryers et al.

Of course it will make a lot of people a lot of money because of the subsidies that are paid. Especially the Spanish owned company that built it and the landowners on whose land it's built. We will be paying massive subsidies so that these ultimate examples of gesture politics can keep turning.

Meanwhile, according to Jason Ormiston the former PR windbag for Scottish Renewables, which represents the wind industry, the vast majority of wind farms were sited out with highly sensitive landscape areas. What utter bollocks. Try coming to the Lammermuir Hills where most of the wind farms are built on AGLVs (officially designated Areas of Great Landscape Vale) and a SSSI in the case of the Aikengall wind farm. He also said, "One of the biggest threats to wild land is climate change and one of the most effective responses to it is the sensible development of renewable energy." He said this in his capacity of Chief Executive of Scottish Renewables, having been promoted from PR spokesman.

He went on to say, "The industry will continue to work with a rigorous planning system so that the building of productive renewable energy projects in the right places continues to follow good practice." He, and his organization, cares not a jot where they are built, just as long as they are. The wind farm planned by that defender of the Scottish Borders landscape, the Duke of Roxburghe on land he owns in the Lammermuir Hills at Fallago Ridge is case in point. It s on peat bogs that will be forever ruined by the concrete bases that are the size of football pitches that will be needed if the wind farm gets approval. It has been awaiting a decision by the Scottish Government's reporter following a public inquiry for over a year now. The reason that none has been forthcoming is nothing to do with the fact that it will complete the decimation of these remote hills, but because the MOD objected. Their radar will not work properly, creating 'holes' in its effectiveness. Ironically it would not be able to 'see' if an aircraft was approaching the Torness Nuclear Power station.

So desperate is the Duke’s company to develop this wind farm that they have got the former Conservative minister and now MP for Kensington and Chelsea, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, to write to Des Browne and another Labour Minister pointing out that they are acting contrary to the Prime Minster’s stated aims.
"As you know, the Prime Minister has indicated very recently the importance the government attaches to the development of alternative energy projects, and clearly wind farms must be a very important part of this overall strategy. It would be unfortunate if one arm of the government was pursuing a policy with such rigidity that it conflicted with the broader arms of the government."
Now that’s a first. A Tory helping the Prime Minister!

Then we have the downright untruths spouted by the great leader who opened the Whitelee wind farm. According to Alex Salmond, "Whitelee in its current form is already flying the flag for onshore wind power in Europe. The benefits of this investment go beyond South Lanarkshire and beyond our real economy. It is an investment in Scotland's potential and ambition to lead the clean, green energy revolution."

Back in January 2007 Alex Salmond was unequivocal. "There is a real difficulty with public acceptance of onshore wind. There should be a cap on future developments. We should concentrate the development of onshore wind into suitable areas.”
He went to say that financial support for onshore wind farms should be looked at again as he believed there was a danger onshore wind developers were getting too much financial support. Of course all that was done in order to help the SNP get elected and gain votes in areas where there was rising opposition to wind farms being built against public opinion.

This volte-face from Mr. Salmond is not totally unexpected; he is after all a politician. But such is the courting of the Scottish government by the renewables industry that even I’m staggered by the complete change in attitude. Does he not understand that wind turbines are inefficient, make little money for Scotland – other than for the landowners and the renewable companies, which are often foreign owned?

Are there any wind farms in Mr. Salmond’s constituencies? In fact how many wind farms have been approved in SNP constituencies as opposed to opposition constituencies? It might make for interesting analysis.