Camberley Observed

This is a statue of the only man in Troy who saw the trap. He tried to warn everyone, and this is what the gods did to him because of it... His name was Laocoön, a Trojan priest. When the Greek army vanished and left a giant wooden horse outside the city gates, all of Troy celebrated. Only Laocoön refused to believe it. He warned his people the horse was a trick and, to prove it was hollow, hurled his spear into its side. In Virgil's telling, he spoke a line that has outlasted almost everything else about Troy: "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts." He was right. The horse was packed with soldiers, and Troy was hours from destruction. This sculpture shows what he got for it. Two enormous sea serpents rise out of the sea and coil around him and his young sons, dragging all three down together. The father's whole body is knotted in the struggle, every muscle straining, his face locked in a scream. The gods wanted Troy to fall, and Laocoön was in the way. The Trojans watched him die in agony and drew exactly the wrong conclusion: they decided the gods were punishing him for attacking a holy gift. So they pulled the horse inside their own walls, and that night, Troy burned... The statue is called Laocoön and His Sons. It is the work of three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes, Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, and dates to the Hellenistic period, making it well over two thousand years old. Buried for more than a thousand years, it was dug out of a Roman vineyard in 1506, and Michelangelo rushed across Rome to see it the day it was found. It has been called the single greatest depiction of human suffering in the history of art, but it endures because of what it is really about: the man who sees the truth, says it out loud, and is destroyed for being right while the crowd watches... It is one of the oldest patterns there is, and it has never stopped repeating. There is nothing new under the sun.

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, once traveled to Switzerland. When he arrived, he took a taxi and the driver told him he wouldn't charge him if he autographed a book. Conan Doyle, surprised, asked the taxi driver how he knew he was a writer, and the taxi driver replied: "Easy, your shoes are covered in dust that isn't from here. From the pattern of your shoes, I see that they are English shoes. So it's English dust. You have an ink stain on your toes, so you are a writer, a British writer." Shocked, Conan Doyle replied: "You are smarter than Sherlock Holmes." "Yes sir, and your suitcases clearly have Arthur Conan Doyle written on them."

@TheSisterHavana @stuartpowell @ClareCraigPath World Health Organisation and the fact that a large number of other countries already do it.... so all the dangers aren't so immediately apparent.

@stuartpowell @ClareCraigPath Can anyone explain why the government are so keen to do this?

I am really concerned that only 38K have signed this petition. I presume that the other 70M people in the country are happy with shit being added to food products. Government overreach does not begin to describe it.

@stuartpowell @ClareCraigPath People just seem resigned - no amount of explanation on my part is having any effect!

9 months later it is in even more food. Sign the petition petition.parliament.uk/petitions/7695…

@Su55Mc @MartinSLewis Or, at least appear to - I suppose, technically they could just send out that message to everyone, all the time and they’d be bound to hit gold often enough?

@MartinSLewis Amazon Prime subscription got renewed last week.Got an email from “Amazon Renewals”Account frozen as the “renewal payment hadn’t gone through”Link to change payment details.Scam email. But it illustrated how hackers have got access to real account details.

Scams can happen to anyone! I nearly got caught by one yesterday. I was in the studio, rushed in between recording my two podcasts. I got a Whatsapp call from 'Amazon'. Brain elsewhere, man on phone asked 'had I ordered a new iPhone?' as they had reports of suspected fraud. I said no. He said to cancel he'd sent me a six-digit code to reply to. I was feeling rushed and pressured, as the team needed to record, but finally enough of my brain turned onto the call and alarm bells started. I said I wanted to first check that this call was legit. He got pushy and said if I didn't send the code he wouldn't stop the iPhone being sent. This felt wrong to me... why would he want to risk sending a high value item, if the customer says it wasn't ordered. So while talking & prepping the podcast, I managed to search the telephone number and yes, it was a recognised 'Amazon scam number.' Clearly, had I replied with the code he'd sent he would have then asked for further details and that would've started the data mine. Of course, by answering (not something I normally do to unknown numbers, but did by reflex) I did inadvertently confirm that my number is a real one, so I'll have to cope with that. The real lesson here is how sophisticated and plausible it was. And even though I'm obviously hyper-alert to scams as my face is in half of them, catch someone at the wrong time, when they're not paying attention, and anyone can be caught out!

@VeganRecovering One problem I've found with trying to improve sleep is that your brain will keep waking you up at a time you've been awake (gone to the loo etc) before. All helpful like! With me it was 4am so I'd just say 'bl**dy 4am' to myself and turn over. Brain gave up eventually...

Day One no 🍷 Sleep was even WORSE. Woke up 2:22 am. Wide awake. But I felt clearer and calmer in the morning. So… it’s not just alcohol. Time for a food journal again. To learn exactly what and when food, sleep hygiene and habits affect my personal health and fitness.

Bryce Dallas Howard has shared a video of the late Sam Neill singing “Blackbird” with Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern. “Sam had an immense passion for life. Generous with his wine, his stories, his time. One of the most unassumingly attractive and magnetic people I've ever met.”

@SarahCholwill Day of the Triffids??

@CamObserved They definitely are. I have to regularly avoid getting slashed across the face by some in a cut through near me

Everything is patched but luckily there’s just enough moisture for weeds to seed all over the shingle 😅

@spfooz That's the absurdity. The rain lands whether the cow's there or not. Grazing doesn't make the clouds work overtime.

Today is #StSwithunsday - a 9th century Bishop, famous for a weather-myth & buried here in Winchester Cathedral Winchester crypt floods regularly while Gormley's 'Sound' stands ‘sounding’ out the depth of the water. This was the first Gormley I ever saw & was instantly smitten🧍‍♂️

@AjRockatansky And a pretty/handsome face…..

If I ever decide to go convincing the world to eat a fully meat-based diet, I am going to buy a clipboard to hold while I say my piece. I am quite surprised at how many people just hand over their self-governing to someone holding a clipboard.

The World Bank ranked every country on earth for practical solar potential. Britain came second from bottom. Not second from bottom in Europe. On the planet. Out of everywhere they measured, the only place with worse conditions for a solar panel is Ireland. Norway is above us. Norway, where the sun clocks off entirely for part of the year, is a better bet than Lincolnshire. The reasons are not a mystery. We sit at 53 degrees north, the same line as Edmonton, Alberta. The sun in December gets about as high as a first-floor window and then thinks better of it. And there's the cloud, which is not a detail, it is the national personality. A square metre of London gets 0.52 kilowatt hours of sunlight a day in December and 4.74 in July, so the panel does nine times less work in the month your heating is on than in the month it isn't. Across the whole of 2024, British solar ran at 9.5% of what it's rated at. The other 90.5% is a photograph of a power station. Now the other column. The ground we're bolting it to is Trent valley silt and Lincolnshire fen. Some of it took three hundred years to drain. It grows wheat at yields that most of the planet cannot get near, in a climate so reliably damp that grass grows here without anyone asking it to, which is the entire reason this island has cattle and cheese and a butcher. So we are, measurably, one of the worst places on earth for sunlight and one of the best on earth for food. And we've had a good long look at both of those numbers and gone with sunlight. Somewhere in Namibia, which the same report ranked first, there is a patch of absolutely nothing, in full sun, wondering what it did wrong.

Dark chocolate. The sophisticate's health treat, rich in antioxidants and flavanols, the sensible square you are practically obliged to eat for your heart. A word before you snap off another row of the 85%: - Consumer Reports tested twenty-eight dark chocolate bars and found lead in every one and cadmium in every one, no exceptions - Most carried more than California's safety threshold for one metal or both, and several organic wellness-shelf bars were among the worst offenders - Cadmium the cacao plant draws up out of the soil. Lead settles on the drying beans and gets ground straight in - The higher the cacao percentage, the very number the health crowd chases, the bigger the dose of both - And the sugar is still sitting in there regardless of how serious the packaging looks You thought you were buying a supplement. You were handed a delivery system with a cocoa finish.

The people spoke, their local council ignored them. Shameful. ➡️ Before / after In Dec 2025 a remarkable 9-day occupation of the humble 1950s Sheringham Bus Shelter thwarted an attempted demolition by Norfolk County Council. The protest attracted nationwide media attention - from The Guardian and Daily Telegraph to BBC News and Have I Got News For You - drew support from the Prime Minister, and was recognised with C20’s inaugural Activist of the Year Award. Yesterday, their beloved streamline moderne shelter and its railway mural was unceremoniously flattened in under an hour. There are, quite clearly, more important things going on in the world right now. Yet this modest piece of modern heritage really meant something to people.

An Oxford student asked Lord Alan Sugar, a billionaire worth £1.2 billion (101st on the list of the richest people in Britain), to help him get work. Sugar answered in front of a packed hall, without softening a single word: 19:30 - "I'm going to have to say no. I succeeded because I had to. No one sorted anything out for me. I didn't go to any government and say 'pretty please, find me some work'. It would have been a waste of bloody time. If I was going to do something, I had to do it myself. And I would say to every one of you here: don't sit around waiting for some government to magically create an environment that makes it easy for you. You've got to go out there and fight for it yourself. No one else is going to control your destiny. Not unless you've got a rich dad. Have you? No? Then you're going to have to do it yourself." Plenty of people were offended by this. But where is he wrong? Over 52 minutes of blunt, honest answers from Sugar, and advice few people dare to say out loud ↓

I do find the ability to fact check via Grok really, really useful..... x.com/i/grok/share/7…

I've pieced together this incredibly rare & precious Edwardian colour movie, filmed 118 years ago at Upton Manor Farm in Southwick, England. This is the Autumn Harvest of 1908, showing rural life in the UK just 7 years after the end of the Victoria Era, when our life and work was considerably less mechanised. This is amongst the earliest British colour films, which was made via Kinemacolour, developed by George Albert Smith in 1906. It employed a spinning 2-colour filter system of red and green filters to replicate "full colour". The separate colour frames line up pretty well, except fo shots of lateral movement, such as the horse's legs where the individual coloured filters become much more apparent. The music I've used is the Largo movement from Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World", which is rather ironic considering the film shows us scenes of the Old World long gone. Watch until the end, which leaves us a charming little love story. Though perhaps she waved her fellow off to War on the Western Front 6 years later... (One of my hobbies is to collect old colour film footage, and if you enjoy this example I might share a few extra videos on my account)

Why isn’t @ProstateUK speaking out against folic acid in all flour? Are they not a serious charity or just existing to collect our cash?