Bob Coats

@WhatNowDoc Live and love each day. God bless.

So I’m on my last lap. I’m dying. We all are but some of us sooner than others. I’ve been living/dealing/coping with cancer for fourteen years. That’s longer than anyone has a right to expect. During that time I’ve seen both my lovely boys marry and, although James cruelly kept me waiting, long enough to be delivered of two gorgeous granddaughters and a wonderful young grandson. Also in that time I created Ichi-Coo and founded ClipFest and, apart from my descendants, those are the most important achievements of my life. I have a history book about the garden, there will be a full length documentary made at ClipFest in an attempt to encourage someone else to carry it on. I have finished writing the memoir I wanted to write for my grandchildren. I’m very tired and my work here is done. The return of my lung cancer is the least of my problems. Any minute now, my leukaemia is going to spiral and it won’t stop until it kills me. There is no other outcome on offer. This one IS terminal. This is the last time I’ll ever tell you, “sorry, I’ve been diagnosed with cancer”. Now it’s true there are “treatments” but these have not even the most wildly optimistic hope of stopping the inevitable. If I’m unlucky enough to be in the 25% of people who don’t respond at all, I die then. If I respond to it and continue taking the punishment till my last breath, I still die. I just spend the limited extra time it buys me, unable to think straight, exhausted by fatigue, swallowing more drugs to fight constipation, diarrhoea, nausea, antibiotics, anti fungals, etc. I spend my life in and out of hospital, some visits routine, many for emergencies. Many die from the treatment itself, even in the first month. Sepsis being the most common cause and pneumonia a close second. This is no way to live. It’s an existence in suffering in a desperate bid to buy more time with no guarantee of anything. It’s not me. The alternative is that I live my remaining time with a clear mind, mostly able to carry on as normal until I can’t. I’ll need palliative and supportive care both from my doctors, from hospice nurses and from my friends and family. There might well be the odd emergency along the way but on a whole different scale. Eventually the fatigue will take me into a coma and I will give up the struggle and fade blissfully asleep - if all goes according to plan. The people closest to me are those who will have to live with the ultimate consequences of my decision. They’ve given me their blessing and pledged their support to give me the courage to see this through. Better 3-6 months of glorious life, spent with all of you, than two years of vomiting, diarrhoea, hospital emergencies, fatigue and vegetable-like stagnation. I love you all and I need you now to show your love me. I’m not committing some act of suicide, I’m letting nature take its course whilst deploying the very best supportive care to make sure I’m as comfortable as possible. As you all know I have absolutely no interest in following any faith of any kind into the contradictions that pass for religions. I know these are a huge comfort to the vast majority of people on earth but not me. I am of this universe, my atoms are part of it. For 72 years they’ve been rearranged into me and shortly they’ll be returned into something else in time, in the stock of atoms in soil and air, ready to be used by anything from a moth to a tree, maybe many things, a bit here, a bit there. I’m not going anywhere. My atoms will return to the earth, in my barrow. My energy will go wherever it goes, it’s part of this one universe because we are all one, manifest in our myriad different forms, rocks and trees, goats, babes and ladybirds. That energy is the wind, the sun, the rain, the music, the laughter, the joy and the pain. It’s in all of you and in every living thing. ClipFest is coming, that’s my Swansong. Help me make it wonderful. 😘😘😘

@SamaHoole Carbon credits. Probably written by a goon whose only visit to countryside was to get to centerparcs

A farmer dies in April 2026. His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847. The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle. On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify. In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable. The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft. The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let. A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up. The Treasury collects £140,000. The land never produces British food again.

@JournoStephen AFUERA!

First genuinely radical policy Reform has proposed.

@DalgetySusan The private school thing is a cheap hit and misses the point. This lad got elected due to where he came on green OMOV list ballot. He probably received less than a 100 votes. Look who was 4th on their list and it probably tells you everything about the capture.

A working class hero is something to be…😂 The private-school past of Green MSP who ‘grew up starving’ thetimes.com/article/afeda0…

Treated with contempt. Cowards

When I was a child our teacher taught us about risk, money and economics in the most interesting way possible: She made us run a pretend farm, as a competition. It was genius, because I still remember it three decades later, which I wouldn't have otherwise. It went like this: Every student had a ‘farm’ on a little piece of paper, with four fields. Every year you had to decide what crops to plant in what fields, and buy them with any available money. Some crops were like wheat; cheap, boring and low-yielding, but dependable. Others were like peas; expensive, super high-yielding if things went right, but unreliable. Get the wrong mix of sunshine and moisture for peas and you'd make a huge loss instead of making bank. We all competed for the most money over a series of ‘years’ and on each year the teacher would roll dice to determine if the weather was hot or cold, rainy or sunny. There were four combinations of weather for your four fields and up to four crops. There was all to play for, and you'd be built-up or broken by the roll of the dice. Some kids played it safe with lots of wheat and no risk. Others bet the farm on peas, peas, peas! Others hedged between sunny crops and rainy crops. With each round, a few of us exited the game and went bankrupt. The eventual winner had taken a lot of risk, but had hedged just a little bit and rode out the bad years. He got lucky, but that's what the game was all about. The teacher could have taught us by lecturing us. She could have gassed on about risk management and economics and market economics and blah, blah, blah… and been ignored by a bunch of teenagers. Instead she made it fun, she made it a competition! And after that short period, a classroom of kids walked out with heads full of strategy, debating how they'd run the farm, who got the most money and how they'd play differently if they did it again. In a little classroom in a Northern English secondary school, a bunch of adolescents had been introduced to capitalism and loved every minute of it! I forgot almost everything else from those years, but that lesson sticks with me. Good teachers really matter. And a little competition goes a long way.

Scotland swapped a Secretary of State and six ministers for a billion-pound parliament, a six-billion-pound quango state and 25 years of constitutional psychodrama. Hard to call that progress.

A British school dinner in 1975 was cooked on-site, from whole ingredients, by a dinner lady who knew, without consulting a nutritional database, what a growing child needed to eat. The dinner was: roast beef, gravy from the drippings, boiled potatoes, cabbage, and sponge pudding with custard made from eggs and milk. Or shepherd's pie from real mince. Or liver and onions. Or fish on Friday, battered and fried in beef dripping. In a single sitting: haem iron from the meat, calcium from the custard, B12 from the liver, vitamin A from the gravy fat, vitamin D from the eggs, zinc from the beef, omega-3 from the fish, collagen from the gravy, complete protein from every component, and roughly 800 calories dense enough to carry a child through an afternoon of running around a playground in January. Then the system changed. In the 1980s and 1990s, local authority catering was outsourced. On-site kitchens closed. Dinner ladies were made redundant. Central production kitchens began manufacturing meals reheated in convection ovens. The roast beef became a turkey twizzler. The shepherd's pie became a pre-formed disc of processed potato and reconstituted meat product. The liver disappeared entirely. The fish was coated in breadcrumbs and fried in vegetable oil. The custard was made from powder, water, and yellow colouring. The sponge pudding was replaced by a yoghurt tube. Jamie Oliver's 2005 campaign filmed children who could not identify a tomato. Kitchens where the only equipment was a deep fryer and a microwave. Menus that contained less nutritional value in a full week than the 1975 dinner contained in a single sitting. The government pledged reform. But the on-site kitchen did not come back. The dinner lady did not come back. The roast beef and the liver and the custard made from eggs did not come back. The 1975 dinner lady, who had no nutritional qualification and had never heard of a DIAAS score, was producing, at approximately 30p per serving, a meal that contained more bioavailable nutrition than anything the modern system produces at three times the cost. She has been replaced by a supply chain. The supply chain is more expensive. The children are less well fed. The dinner lady knew what she was doing. Nobody asked her.

@DouglasRob0 $113 in 2014 =$155 in 2026. 🫣

Nothing seems to reduce Nationalists to tears like reminding them the SNP sold their independence fantasy on the price of oil being $113 Even with all the disruption in the world, oil today is $95.5 "But, But... Baby boxes and bus passes!" 🦄

@PressSec @WhiteHouse Therein that may be the reason they’ve never built anything. Talk is easier.

The New York Times had three random people who have “studied fine arts,” “long written about urban planning,” and never built anything to write an article criticizing the new White House ballroom. President Trump and his lead architect have built world-class buildings around the world, and they are ensuring the People’s House finally has a beautiful ballroom that’s been needed for decades — at no expense to the taxpayer.

@BrianSpanner1 Creak Thomson

@BrianSpanner1 C. Orangutan Binmen.

Today is the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith's best seller The Wealth of Nations. Pretty much the best guide to group prosperity ever written. Now is the perfect time to re read it...

@OssianLore When Aitken announces an ‘international design competition’ that’s when to be afraid. The individual merits of the building (which it has a few) kind of misses the point- it formed the fabric of one of the most unique city blocks anywhere in the world. We should respect that

Not lost on me how shocking it is seeing something go from this to this, and it's just one building. Heaven and small mercies, I suppose. Timeline below. Now, do we re-instate or take this fantastic opportunity to balls up a spectacular Central central Glasgow corner site🤔😏

Someone will ask why an account about nutrition and training has made a dozen posts on a bull in Ledbury, a goat without borders, and a ewe with a complicated relationship with topographic dips. Here is why. Because the argument that these animals are destroying the planet is not a fringe position. It is in the newspaper. It is in the policy document. It is in the dietary guideline. It is being taught to children and repeated by adults and acted on by governments and it is wrong, and it is wrong in a specific, demonstrable, measurable way that becomes obvious the moment you look at an actual field with an actual animal in it. Gerald is not an abstraction. Keith is not a statistic. Doris is not a carbon calculation. They are specific, real, working animals doing specific, real, measurable things to specific, real pieces of land, and the argument against them has never once required anyone to look at the land. So we looked. And the land is fine. The land is better than fine. The land is a meadow in Ledbury, a fell in the Lake District, and a Devon field with a rank corner that Keith has been improving without Brian's permission for four months. Come back tomorrow. There's more.

@NoContextBrits Glasgow Oyster

@seanmdav @MattWalshBlog All of the above and in the order you put them.

Is the goal to eliminate the Iranian regime or free the Iranian people or degrade their nuclear capability or degrade the conventional weapons capability or eliminate their regional hegemony or to cut off their oil supply to China or to help Israel or what? The lack of any coherent message seems to suggest the lack of any coherent objective.

@YesterdaysBrit1 A two way Argyle St!

The year is 1973.

@MailOnlineScot @Jeanniewmd Making stock in the circumstances

'Boil in a bag' funerals come to Britain: Scotland is the first part of the UK to introduce alternative technique that sees bodies dissolved and flushed down the drain  Visit our homepage at dailymail.co.uk/scotland dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ar…

@Annemarieward @ForWomenScot Amen

I am unapologetically full of admiration for @ForWomenScot & all the women who take this work forward. I agree with them wholeheartedly, and I think history will recognise the scale of what they carried. These were not women chasing publicity or argument for its own sake. They stepped forward because they believed something foundational about law, language and reality was being quietly altered without proper democratic scrutiny. They were prepared to endure years of pressure, criticism and personal cost because they believed that clarity in law matters, and that the meaning of words written into legislation is not something governments can casually reshape through guidance or interpretation. What stands out most to me is not simply that they won, but that they were willing to fight in the first place. Taking on the state through the courts requires extraordinary resilience. It demands courage not just in public, but in private, when the noise is loud, the support is uncertain and the outcome is far from guaranteed. There is deep wisdom in what they did. Democracies rely on citizens who are prepared to defend boundaries when they believe those boundaries are being crossed. Courts exist because power must always remain accountable to law, and law must remain anchored in clarity and truth. I respect them immensely. I am grateful they stood their ground. And I believe their courage has strengthened democratic accountability in a way that will protect many more people than just those directly involved in the case.