J Morgan 🐉🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Mrs. Jenkins, 1970, walks down the high street with a wicker basket. - Beef topside from Mr. Pearson, for Sunday - Streaky bacon, sliced thick on the slicer - Lamb's liver for Tuesday tea - Pork sausages, made on the premises that morning - A whole chicken, giblets in a paper bag inside - Suet for the steak and kidney pudding - Butter wrapped in greaseproof paper - A wedge of Lancashire from the wheel - Two dozen eggs from the farm down the road - Double cream for the trifle - A pound of dripping in a stoneware pot, for the chips - Four kippers for Saturday breakfast - A loaf baked that morning, four ingredients Total: about £6. She fed a husband and three children for the week, with leftovers for Monday. Nobody was overweight. Nobody had high cholesterol. Nobody was on any pills. Her granddaughter, 2026, opens the Tesco app on the sofa. - Six chicken breasts, water-injected - "Low-fat" turkey mince - Yoghurts with 14 ingredients per pot - Flora "buttery" spread, palm oil and rapeseed - A bottle of skimmed milk - Pre-grated "mature" cheddar with anti-caking agent - Two ready meals branded "Healthy Living" - "No added sugar" cordial, three artificial sweeteners - "Soft white medium" loaf, eleven ingredients - "Fruit and nut" bars, glucose syrup and rapeseed oil - Squeezable mayonnaise - Pre-washed salad treated with chlorine - Olive oil, for the "Mediterranean" diet she read about Total: about £127. She feeds herself and her husband for three days and orders again on Wednesday. She is, in her early forties, on statins. Her husband is on metformin. The grandmother traded a butcher for a megafarm. A cheese counter for an anti-caking agent. A dairyman for a logistics chain. Dripping for rapeseed oil. A four-ingredient loaf for an eleven-ingredient one. A wicker basket for an app. She paid twenty times the price for worse food, less of it, and threw her health in as part of the deal. The supermarket called this progress. Mrs. Jenkins would have called it being had.

The state pension is not a random government favour, it’s the back end of a 35–40 year compulsory “contract” where people are forced to hand over National Insurance on the clear promise of a basic pension at the end. Politicians and think tanks helped design an unfunded, pay‑as‑you‑go system where today’s workers pay today’s pensioners, then have the gall to call it “unsustainable” as if the public dreamt it up. If a private firm sold you a retirement product on fixed terms, took your money for four decades, then announced at 66 that you “didn’t really need it” and would henceforth be means‑tested or frozen, they would be in court for mis‑selling and fraud. The crisis here is not pensioners “leeching off the young”, it’s a political class that built a Ponzi‑style NI system, diverted the proceeds for other spending, and now wants to default on the people who kept their side of the bargain. You do not blame the victims of a defective product for believing the brochure; you go after the people who wrote it.

Myth: "I only wear vegan fabrics. Better for the animals, better for the planet." Let's check in on Doris's annual contribution. Once a year, in late spring, Doris is sheared. The procedure takes approximately three minutes. Doris does not enjoy it. Doris does not, by any visible measure, suffer from it. Doris is, immediately afterwards, a noticeably more comfortable animal in the British summer. The fleece weighs approximately 3 kilograms. It is sold to the British Wool Marketing Board for, depending on the year, between £0.40 and £2.50 per kilogram. The shearing costs more than the wool fetches. Brian is shearing Doris at a loss. The wool is then: - Naturally flame-retardant - Naturally antibacterial - Moisture-wicking - Biodegradable - Renewable, annually - Carbon-storing while in use The replacement, in performance fabrics: - Polyester - Polyamide - Acrylic - Polypropylene - All petroleum-derived - All shedding microplastics on every wash - All requiring fossil fuel inputs to produce - All non-biodegradable, with a typical landfill lifespan of 200-500 years A single wash of a polyester fleece can release up to 700,000 microplastic fibres into the water system. These fibres are now in: every tested water source on earth, every tested human placenta, every tested rainfall sample, the deep ocean, the Arctic ice, and the lungs of marine mammals. A single wash of a wool jumper releases: nothing. The wool, when eventually disposed of, returns to soil within a few years. The fabric being marketed as the "ethical" alternative to wool is plastic. The plastic is "ethical" because nobody has been asked to slaughter the polymer. The polymer also has not been asked. Doris, by being a sheep on a fell, is producing the most thoroughly sustainable performance fabric humans have ever made. Brian is selling it at a loss. The fashion industry, meanwhile, is selling petroleum at a profit and calling it ethical. Reject plastic. Wear wool. Doris is, this morning, growing next year's batch.

People rave about Waverley station but for me, Glasgow Central is Scotland’s great terminus. Full of light, easy to find your platform, and lovely old wood shop fronts.

American women will stick a newborn in a crib across the house, hook up a speaker system, and sprint up and down the hallway several times a night. The co-sleeping Nordic brain cannot comprehend.

'A Blue Room in Kensington.' (1930) An art critic reviewing an exhibition by James Durden wrote in her report: 'Mr. Durden’s chief trait in common with other Manchester born artists is his adherence to light, clean colour, and other qualities quite foreign to Lancashire.'

MAY ELECTION Merryn Somerset Webb, (55) yet another wealthy individual who shows her distaste for Scots. She hates that we have the temerity to throw off England's wilful colonial stranglehold on our country.