Some thoughts

School broke up last Tuesday, and on Wednesday I went to Belgrade for 4 nights. This was my third trip this year (in Feb I went to Malta and in April China and Japan), bringing my total number of countries visited up to 44. My aim is 50 by 50 so am on track for that, after getting behind during the pandemic. Belgrade was very hot, an interesting mix of old and new. One thing I hadn't known before was that it was right on the border with Hungary before WW1 (the Sava and Danube rivers were the boundaries), and there is a suburb on the west bank called Vemun that was a Hungarian town. I spent my time there mainly in the old town, visiting various museums, churches, and galleries. I also did an evening boat trip on the rivers and went to the cinema to see Deadpool and Wolverine. Coming up I'm going to Brussels on the August Bank Holiday weekend, in October will be visiting Glasgow and Belfast, while next Feb will be going to Cape Town and the Garden route in South Africa. 

I spotted this meme recently and it sums up pretty well the main problem I have with generations as a demographic group: Simply, a 20-year 'generation' is too long. The idea of a generation is that members have a similar outlook due to their formative experiences. My generation is defined as anyone born between 1981 and 1996, a period of 15 years. Yet someone born at one end will have had very different experiences than one born at the end.  I often find talking to people at the tail end of the cohort don't remember songs, TV shows, etc that I did from my childhood. I can remember some events from the late 80's like The Herald of Free Enterprise and Hillsborough disasters but my brother (3 years younger than me doesn't). I often find more in common with tail-end Boomers (born 1965-80) than them. I'd suggest decades of birth are more useful for defining a cohort. 

A good analysis by Dominic Frisby . I have long been a fan of returning to a gold or silver-backed currency, at the very least as a store of value, ever since I bought my house. It is a typical Edwardian terrace. When new it cost around £400 (when a pound was a gold sovereign). When I bought it in 2008, I worked out that the purchase price was approximately the same as 400 sovereigns. Its value in gold was almost unchanged in a century!

As Low Status Opinions has succinctly put it, Labour has not just hit the ground running , but gone 'full on Tonto, absolute double nut job bat shit crazy crackers looney tunes, on Week One'. Today, we saw the King's Speech, which committed to a range of measures. The main one this post will focus on is rail nationalization. First, I'll point out how most of the UK network was built by private firms in the 19th and early 20th century and was nationalized in 1948 after being commandeered and run into the ground twice in the world wars. I'll also point out that what is usually considered to be the best rail network in the world, Japan's, is mainly private (JR is a consortium of 7 firms, each covering a specific area. Last I heard only the 3 on Honshu are private and the 3 covering Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku are still state-owned. In addition, numerous private firms compete with JR, often running parallel tracks on similar routes (where I lived there were JR and

F*ck Starmer, F*ck Labour,  F*ck everyone who voted for them. (exhales) Now I've got that off my chest, let us reflect. The Conservatives deserved to lose Labour didn't deserve to win.  I'm used to being disappointed with elections, but this one was a new low. I'd hoped Reform would come second in % of votes and  10-20 seats. I wanted the useless fake Tories reduced to below 100  and was annoyed the watermelons (Greens) got 4. The SNP wipeout was a plus, but the Islamist independents are a worry. Turnout was low, as I'd expected apathy was a big winner.  In the end I voted Reform. I saw my local (now ex-) Tory MP at a school event last week. I was helping run the BBQ at our summer fair and he bought a hot dog. We chatted for a bit then he suddenly said 'I'm REDACTED, by the way' as if annoyed that I hadn't recognized him. I asked if he was confident about the result and he replied not really, and blamed 'Reform voting idiots' for his impendi