For where two or three do not gather in my name, I am not there with them

 

Another day, another dodgy property investment expert mouthing off all over social media...

"I wanna buy churches like this that are shutting down across England.  So if you know a church that's for sale and potentially closing down, let me know. I wanna buy a church.  I don't care if it's got planning permission to return to flats redeveloped. I don't care.  I wanna buy it. I don't care how profitable the conversion will be.  If it was built as a church, I believe it needs to stay as a church.  I want to save churches like this one from being shut down and sold off to developers all across the UK.  I love making profit in property, but when someone's being built as a church to honour Jesus Christ, that's a no no. There's revival coming in England and we need to keep our churches open. Ready for what’s to come. Is this a good idea you would support?"

So speaketh Mr Samuel Leeds who seems to make a living selling property investment advice like many other monotonous mouthpieces in what remains of the British economy.  You gotta have a gimmick though whether it's buying churches or living in Monaco.  I spoke to my Christian neighbour Dorothy Cotton who said that whilst she wished to bless his heart and chip in, suspiciously lacking from the grim faced Mr Leeds's social media entreaties is any mention of stuff like prayer.  Or any mention of Biblical inspiration.  Perhaps we can provide some?

One is reminded of John 18:36 "My kingdom is not of this world".  Or the tale of the Widow's mitre in Luke 21 "He sat down opposite the treasury and observed how the crowd put money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow also came and put in two small coins worth a few cents. Calling his disciples to himself, he said to them, 'Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury. For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.". Still, at least the rich people did put in money, not ask for the Temple's postcode.

St Predator of Bandwagon

Coming onto more practical matters, if you were to purchase a disused church (and it's conspicuous that Mr Leeds is not offering to buy one, just asking for intel on where one might be) the first most obvious problem that would spring to my mind would be that there is a bit of a staffing problem.  When I was a child the Sacred Heart and St Thomas at Whyteleafe had three priests living together in a house in a not-unlike-Father-Ted situation.  There were about 5 masses.  One at 6:30 on a Saturday.  Then 8am, 10am, noon?... I forget the others.  We always went to the 8am because my father had a low boredom threshold and this was the shortest.  With none of your folk singers and organists wanting to perform to an audience that was still in bed Father Harrington could skip through the whole thing in half an hour - often 25 minutes.  According to my father when he was in the RAF some priests could get it down to 20 minutes.  Priests were appreciated for their brevity.  Get it out the way quickly so you can enjoy the rest of your Sunday... sort of like a visit to the lavatory.  St Thomas's is now flats and there is only one priest.  According to Canon Law one priest can say only 3 masses in one 24 period and only two maximum on one day.  This has greatly reduced the number of masses... With increasingly frail priests covering ever wider areas.  I'm sure other denominations have similar staffing problems...  But a church is a living thing made of people... Much like a Comedy Club.  Without acts and an audience any venue is little more than an empty room.  

Indeed, I was reminded of the time PJ started a failed Comedy Club in the backroom of a pub in Stockwell which he shared with a religious sect who had it the other day of the week and seemed to regard him as a venue thief.  The religious regalia such as Crucifixes had to be hidden every time the dirty comedy was on and the comedy posters taken down whenever Christ was there because unlike Paul Kerensa no one had adapted their act for our saviour by removing the swearwords.... A bitter battle for control ensured which PJ lost ... For even though there are less churches and services than there used to be religion still pulls more punters on a Sunday than most of the entertainment industries combined.  At the end of the line if he really wanted to help churches why not fund ones that still have congregations - there is a collection plate, mate? As the good Lord said: "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them ... and where they are not ... there is a Property Investor"

Don Corleone's Post Box

Will people please stop knitting creepy shit and putting it on top of postboxes! Are there not real people you can knit for?  I'm reporting these as a fly post.  I've just had enough of hideous Santas and horse's heads?  It's like something out of the Godfather... 

I mean, I'm up for Chinese New Year as much as the next man but this is like something out of a nightmare.  Like something off Colonel Blimp's wall of hunting trophies.  There's no escape as the three heads eye you from every direction.  I've never really liked wool as a material and this makes me like it even less.  Maybe I have a wool phobia.  I had a woollen toy as a child that I really didn't like.  I think it was meant to be a pixie.  It gave me the evil eye and I didn't like how it felt.  Horses can be scary when they look at you sideways and being looked at sideways by three horses heads is too much for me.

I think I'll quieten myself down now by looking at something less terrifying like the war in Iran.  I passed another post box today without a wooden hat, just flaking red paint and rusty iron.  I felt a little better ...

 

I venture the great Li H'sen Chang himself would have appreciated that...

 

One of the questions that comes up in various Doctor Who threads from time to time is the racism or otherwise of the Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang - the epic 6 part adventure that closed the 14th season of the program.  There is much to recommend this serial.  

Tom Baker dresses as Sherlock Holmes (I think of the Man with the twisted lip in the opium den), there are hansom cabs, the production design is lavish with real theatres and fantastic sets, Magnus Greel is a homage to the Phantom of the Opera, there is the double act of Henry Gordon Jago (a satire of the Good Old Days who inhabits the Palace Theatre built by Richard D'Oyly Carte for the Gilbert & Sullivan operas before it became a Music Hall?) and Lightfoot the pathologist (Dr Watson reference?) ... it's all jolly good fun with many elements of Victoriana interwoven including ... less fortunately Fu Manchu ...the 1912 brainchild of Sax Rohmer whom Li H'sen Chang himself looks suspiciously like.  Fu Manchu was always controversial from the first publication.  Indeed even as early as 1980 the Peter Sellers parody "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu" was picketed by protesters.  It was a box office bomb anyway however so they need hardly have bothered...

Matters are made slightly worse by the casting of a white actor John Bennett with uncovincing make-up which I've always excused in my head as being the result of him being 500 years old.  Magnus Greel is also played by a white actor but he's so hideously deformed it doesn't matter but ...

The producers explained their casting of John Bennett in make-up to be down to the difficultly of finding Chinese actors in London at a time when they were all Burt Kwouk who was probably otherwise engaged trying to kill Inspector Clouseau.  However, this excuse seems wafer thin when we consider that the cast included several actual oriental actors - so why not use one of them?  Tony Then who played Lee was a Singaporean actor who was primarily a dancer, Vincent Wong who played Ho was actually Jamaican-British (presumably with Chinese heritage) and John Wu who played simple "Coolie" was ...well, who knows?  What we do know is that having them all playing nincompoops and thugs is a little racist.  Only Chang has something approaching sympathy to his character and he's still a psycho who's been accomplice to Greel's Jack-the-Ripperish antics.  "Despicable Chang has other intentions" indeed...

But all this got me thinking about Fu Manchu - was he actually the model for Li H'sen Chang as we all suppose?  We can't ask Robert Holmes because he went to the Great Palace of Jade in the mid 1980s... 

Chung Ling Soo

... but I did discover there were certain supposed models that Sax Rohmer might have used for Fu Manchu who are quite interesting.  Notably a famous 19th century magician called Chung Ling Soo who looks not a bit unlike Li H'sen Chang.  Chung Ling Soo died (like many others) performing a bullet catch... Li H'sen Chang also performs a magic bullet trick with Tom Baker's Doctor ... "Please to be very quiet.  Chang shoot many peasants learning this trick".  Coincidence?  

To make things murkier Soo was not really Chinese, his act was simply stolen wholesale from real Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo resulting in them having a bitter feud over many years.  Foo hailed from the US so Soo simply borrowed bits of his act hoping no one in Europe would notice... in the same way that some UK comedy acts ripped off US comedy acts in the 80s and 90s before VHS and DVDs circulated more widely and they couldn't get away with it anymore.  Although the feud was quite complicated.  Foo said he would pay $1000 dollars to anyone who could explain one of his tricks.  Soo said he knew how it was done but that Foo refused to pay up...

People were shocked when Soo died to discover that he was not (like John Bennett) really Chinese at all.  He concealed his true identity (William Ellsworth Robinson) by simply speaking in broken English, saying very little on stage and keeping his private life very private.  It seems there was a long pattern of what would now be called cultural appropriation at work not just in the creation of Fu Manchu or Li H'sen Chang but going right back to 19th century... so maybe John Bennett playing a fake Chinaman is historically accurate?

What are we to make of all this in any analysis of Li H'sen Chang?  Well, it is more than possible that some of this was known to Robert Holmes.  We don't know.  I've often theorised that Henry Gordon Jago is in fact "The Father of the Halls" Charles Morton who would have been running the Palace Theatre at that time ...

... although, of course, if Jago's theatre is really modelled on the real Palace Theatre well ... that's on Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road so the River Fleet could not really be going underneath... it goes up through Holburn towards Kings Cross... and he's more likely to be modelled on Leonard Sachs than any real historical character but then trying to figure out how much reality there is in fiction is kind of part of the fun...

It's curtains for Western Democracy

Once upon a time the Producers of Blake's 7 ran out of money to build plywood sets so they put up lots of curtains and drapes in the studio instead to save money.  Donald it seems has also availed himself of this gambit as his operations room seems to be entirely made of black curtains hastily erected in a barn.  Fans of the James Bond film franchise will be bitterly disappointed to see that instead of giant screens and walls of monitors, the Leader of the once Free World appears to be conducting his war in front of a small cardboard map of the Middle East presumably with pins stuck on.  Or perhaps magnetic clouds like the ones Michael Fish used to attach to his weather map.  Oh, well, at least there are plenty of phones kindly provided by Israeli firm Cisco.  But what else can we glean from this photo?  It appears to be in some kind of barn above ground and not in the bunker Obama was snapped in the last time the US carried out an assassination.   From this I conclude that Trump's plans were so secret that he didn't even want some people in the White House knowing.

After all, Trump's Mr Real Estate - interior design is his thing.  He recently redecorated the Oval office in ugly gold leaf.  Not that gold is usually ugly but it is when Trump squeezes it everywhere like toothpaste.  Still, no one went broke catering to people with no taste.  But this is a man who has knocked down a wing of the White House to build a new ballroom and stops meetings to look out the window at how the work is progressing.  A man who talks about the textiles for the ballroom windows unprovoked.   But when erecting his operations room it's made out of black drapes?  Why?  Except to hide...?
 

Can we not quote Jesus now...?

 

I am, of course, paraphrasing Luke 17 : "Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!  It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones."

But I guess that's too subtle for Kemi... and Musk's AI... sorted in less than an hour - jolly good!

Hello,

 

Our support team has reviewed your account and it appears we made an error. We’ve determined there was no violation and have restored your account to full functionality.

 

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate you taking the time to submit your appeal request to us.

 

Thanks,

X

 

...assuming, of course, I'm not being reported for "harassing" the Leader of the Opposition.  Diddums.

We earn £345k, but soaring private school fees mean we can’t go on five holidays because we don't exist

Ian Fraser complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that Telegraph.co.uk breached Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors’ Code of Practice in an article headlined “We earn £345k, but soaring private school fees mean we can’t go on five holidays”, published on 25 May 2025.

The complaint was upheld, and IPSO required Telegraph.co.uk to publish this adjudication to remedy the breach of the Code.

The article – which appeared online only – reported on the impact increases in private school fees had had on a named couple and their three children.

The complainant said that the article was inaccurate in breach of Clause 1 because he did not believe the family referenced in the article existed.

While the publication accepted it had not taken due care over the accuracy of the article, it said it was satisfied any error had been rectified promptly and prominently.  It said the article was “expunged” from online and from its social media as soon as the issues in question arose. It added that it had become clear shortly after publication that there was an issue with the images, which had led to an internal investigation. It said the investigation revealed that the issues which arose stemmed from a failure to make pre-publication checks.

On 18 June, the publication published a standalone apology, in which it said it had “not been able to verify the details published”.

Given that the publication had indicated that it had lost confidence in the article as a whole, IPSO considered that, in such circumstances, there was sufficient information before it to find that the article was significantly inaccurate.

Publications are expected to demonstrate what steps they have taken not to publish inaccurate information – this shows compliance with the Editors’ Code, and a commitment to high editorial standards The publication had not provided any evidence of adequate pre-publication checks, and within hours of publication it had evidently been able to establish that it could not stand by the story.  In these circumstances, IPSO found that there was a serious failure to take care not to publish inaccurate information and a breach of Clause 1 (i). The Committee acknowledged that, given the unusual circumstances of the case, the publication could not identify each specific inaccuracy in the article and correct it; this followed from its earlier failure to take care. Nonetheless, the consequence was that the publication could not verify any of the remaining details in the article in a manner which would allow it to adequately correct the record in the manner required by the Code.

IPSO therefore did not consider that the publication of a correction was sufficient or appropriate to remedy the breach of the Code in this case, given the extent and seriousness of the breach and the difficulty of clarifying to readers the correct position. In such circumstances, IPSO required the publication of an adjudication.

Iran War Lord Haw Haw Corner

So Donald Trump's launched one of his seemingly unnecessary bombing raids on Iran.  To be fair although hardly a realistic threat to anyone since it posesses no actual ICBMs let alone the nuclear warheads to mount on them Iran's Nuclear programme causes me to sometimes doze off in the middle of the day.  

WMD?  He hasn't got any but let's get him anyway in a "pre-emptive strike" that futher flushes International Law down the U-bend of the 21st century.  

Of course you can't really defend Donald's attack (he didn't ask Congress, let alone the UN) but the shills are out to sell this dogturd of an illegal war anyway... so I preserved some for posterity...

First up some blatant neo-Nazi account trying to purport that Chamberlain was pushed into WWII by Churchill instead of Hitler ... who I spent some time arguing with about the Polish/British pact of 1939 which was like trying to nail the jelly of truth to a ceiling of lies.  But hey, that's what twitter does these days innit... Manufactures big lies on Goebbels levels...

Meanwhile with Keir Starmer sitting on the fence with Chamberlain-like cowardice Andrew Neil is on hand to have a go at John Healey for not picking a side...

James Heisn'tvery Cleverly also offers Trump support for his illegal war by attempting to "both sides" the argument when there clearly isn't any argument for this kind of unprovoked attack in international law.  It's just slam dunk illegal...

Meanwhile Baron Wolfson of Tredegar - a well known Zionist - attempts to argue about what internation law ought in his view to say ...because it clearly doesn't say what he wants it to say.  Actually, International Law does have an exception that allows for pre-emptive action - it is called the Caroline Test which states that :

The use of force must be necessary because the threat is imminent, and thus pursuing peaceful alternatives is not an option (necessity); The response must be proportionate to the threat (proportionality) and the necessity criterion is described as "instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation".

Clearly Trump's adventures in Iran fail this by a country mile.  

Leaving the general attack aside specifically targeting individuals for assassination is also specifically illegal under the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the the 1907 Hague Regulations.

But that's not going to stop former Conservative Defence Secretary Ben Wallace from lying through his teeth that black is white.  Party of law and order my left bollock!

Unlike Keir Starmer ...Emmanuel Macron explicitly condemns the war only to be called a windbag by Andrew Combover.  Pot and Kettle?

Meanwhile in the US they're very upset that we didn't just tag along for the usual round of middle eastern war crimes...

Still for sheer pomposity you can't beat ex-Conservative MP, US Green card holder, chick lit author and general all-round idiot Louise Mensch picking an argument with Pope Leo XIV and telling him he can't pontificate on war because it's a secular matter.  Actually he can pontificate he's the pontif .. it's what they do ... literally the job description ... and for any non-Catholic's wondering ...the Catholic Church's views on "Just Wars" are in your catechism, Ms Mensch, ....if you ever read it ... under sections CCC 2307 onwards...

And, of course, you can always rely on Piers "I was always against the Iraq War" Morgan to dissappear right up his best mate Trunp's arse...  The man could boil cats in public and he'd still lick his boots...

Where it all comes from is a mystery...

I was just sitting in a waiting room and Sky News was on and a Labour MP was literally spitting teeth at the screen about Keir Starmer.  Can't remember which one was only half watching but... I paraphrase but he said something like "And next week we're expected to vote for abolishing Jury Trials.  Where does this come from?". Good question.  Where does it come from? These policies appear from nowhere and become legislation.  But they're inimical to Labour values, as popular as slug yoghurt, authoritarian, no one wants them including Labour MPs, they weren't in any manifesto... And yet they're a hill Starmer seems prepared to die on.  Is this his revenge on juries that didn't convict for him when he was head of the CPS? Is it to keep the Zionist lobby happy?  Troubles the mind.  It's like the abolishing Winter Fuel allowance policy but 100 times as bad?  ID cards - in a manifesto? No.  It's like they go out their way to pluck unpopular policies out of thin air...

Where it all comes from is a mystery

It's like the changin' of the seasons,

And the tides of the sea.

But here's the one that's drivin' me beserk,

For whom are they doing all this dirty work?

Kemi's candidate loses their deposit

 

And so the Labour Party has lost the Gorton & Denton by-election to the Greens.  Reform came second and Labour 3rd but perhaps most shocking is the result for the Conservatives who managed only 709 votes.  This wasn't exactly a conservative stronghold in the first place but that's so few that they're only a couple of hundred votes above the Liberal Democrats and Sir Oinkalot.  Why is this? Are the Conservatives - the party that gave us Churchill, Macmillan and Baldwin, really that toxic?  Would people really rather vote for the really nasty party than the nasty party? Is Kemi weighed down by Sunak's baggage? 

Will their followers ever forgive them?  What is it about snakeoil salesman Mr Toad that still attracts people? Will the Tory party veer to the right?  Well, most of it's Jenricks and Bravermen would seem to have already jumped ship... as rats do when the ship is sinking.  Of course there have been other populist surges to small parties in the past... Some will remember the rise of the SDP in the 80s... The SDP alas without David Owen only managed 46 votes this time out.  But still that's more than the Communist League who couldn't even scrape 30.  Of course eventually ...

...the SDP bubble burst.... but we're definitely seeing a fracturing.... As voters drift off to the extremes of politics....  Of course the result is a disaster for Keir Starmer.  But for the Tories it's a muted catastrophe.  I wonder how long Kemi will remain with results like this.  Then again does anyone else want her poison chalice?  The problem for the Conservatives is an existential one.  What are they for? Recently Kemi has been attacking Labour over Tuition fees and promising to reduce student loan repayments.  It all sounds good but really... We all know we're more likely to see a pig with wings than the government reduce student debt burden ... particularly in the current economic climate... And with government debt so high and growth so low.  You'd have to be born yesterday to buy that one...  I mean if you believe that one you probably believe Clinton just hung out with Epstein for the charitable donations.  What both main parties lack is a sense of purpose.  There may not be money for much these days but...

...Kemi's official response is above.  As can be read clearly, her loss isn't even something that registers in her own mind, let alone a moment for self reflection.  Instead there's a lot of nonsense about stirring up grievance and sectarianism, but I can't say I've noticed either the Greens or Reform running a particularly dirty campaign.  Most of them don't seem to have much in the way of policies at all.  Most of them seemed to be relying on encouraging tactical voting.  It's everyone else's fault for fighting dirty.  Not her own for not listening.

Pear Shaped in Dystopia Series 2 Episode 7

 

Ants

 

It's a little known fact that the ant can carry 19 times it's bodyweight in gay Christians.  Red ants are well known for spreading homosexuality.  Ants are gay by default.  That is why they all congregate around a queen.  It's the ant equivalent of RuPaul's drag race.  The first thing you should do on discovering an ants' nest is to pour boiling hot water over it.  This is known as the antidote.  Ants didn't all used to be gay until the 1950s when gay ants were specifically bred at Porton Down.  On discovering that ants are one of the few creatures that would survive a nuclear holocaust the Eden government intended to eliminate them all by making them gay.  However instead of gay ants they created Adam Ant.  For a while the scientists were a bit of a laughing stock in the scientific community but eventually they decided that ridicule was nothing to be scared of.  Unlike homosexuality which is terrifying.  Homosexuals go to hell where they suffer the eternal torture of being bitten by ants.   Must be true Pastor Alex told me - special prayer only $100

Tactical voting is for idiots

 

As the Gordon and Denton by-election hots up I've noticed both Reform and the Greens encouraging people to vote tactically.  Please don't vote tactically.  Stop it.  It's silly.

If you vote just to keep someone out you're not voting for anything. Really you're basing your vote on your fears of how other people will vote. You're voting through fear. Your 1 vote is mathematically unlikely to keep anyone in or out anyway. So you might as well vote for who you want to. I used to live in an ultra marginal. The lowest margin was 70 not 1. Vote tactically and "it's only a two horse race here" etc are slogans used by the main parties to protect the status quo.  Asking you to vote tactically is the most cynical thing a political candidate can do.  It really says "I have no respect for you.". 

You should vote for who has the best candidate and policy.  When politicians tell you to vote tactically they're really being lazy.  Instead of finding policy reasons for you to vote for them which is what they should be doing, they're saying vote for us because we're most likely to beat the bad candidate you hate which is negative campaigning & circular logic.  Instead of trying to win your vote they are trying to emotionally blackmail it out of you.  Don't let them.

So what were the police waiting for?

Probably for the media and the Daily Mail in particular to stop covering up and giving political cover to Andrew.  Year after year after year after year after year after year since 2019 we've been exposed to a regular diet of excuses, whitewash and he's innocent till proven guilty hogwash as one of the obviously biggest public liars, crooks and dodgy dirty old men was paraded in front of us like a prize pig.  

Turning up to the meetings of the Knights of the Garter in full regalia, photo bombing official events.  Appearing shamelessly at any and every function with his mum as if to rub it in our faces that he's untouchable... Even in September 2025 despite security funding having taken place in 2024, there was still a whole Prince Andrew Page on the Royal Family website (see here) stating that "On 13 January 2022, Buckingham Palace announced that, with Queen Elizabeth II's approval and agreement, The Duke of York’s military affiliations and Royal patronages would be returned to Her late Majesty, and The Duke would not return to public duties. Prior to stepping back from public life, The Duke of York undertook a wide range of public work, with a strong economic and business focus."  Andrew was de-Princed only in November 2025 and has only been de-Duked in 2026... because ... well...

It's only that the Epstein file dumps from the US are so complete and unarguable that it has forced the establishment to act after only 5 years of trying to sweep it all under the carpet and finding the bump is too large.  Checking the flight logs of private jets?  That's something they could have done years ago.  Even now we have the sorry sight of Andrew being repeatedly asked to testify by the US Congress and everyone in the Establishment wringing their hands and pretending that if he doesn't want to go nothing can be done.  

But it can.  They could get the list of questions off Congress and drag Andrew before a Select Committee where not answering truthfully would place him in contempt of Parliament.  Or better still they could launch a full Judge led Public Inquiry into the Epstein scandal, then if Andrew lied on oath it'd be perjury.  And the chances of that?  More likely to see a pig with wings...

Still Chuck is very concerned... At least for the monarchy... If not for the victims...

I've heard some people questioning whether there is something unseemly and French Revolution in the hounding of Prince Andrew.  

What after years of Lizzie and Chuck trying to force feed us Andrew - even keeping his page on the Royal Website?

Well, it's not that I don't have any sympathy but that's not stopping me sitting on a stool in the front with my ball of wool like the best tricoteuse.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor emailed them all

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had a great fall

All the King's media and his spinmen

Couldn't put Andrew together again

I've now watched the whole of DS9

Well, after some time I finally got to the end of Deep Space Nine.  Unfortunately I didn't manage to do this before it all got taken off Netflix who seems to have lost the battle for old Star Trek with Amazon and the new Paramount plus or whatever it is so I had to pay to see the end of the last series.  It's taken me about four years to get through DS9 and frankly some episodes are a bit of a slog.  The ending is kind of unsatisfying as we don't quite know when (and if) Sisko is returning ... The final face off between Gul Dukat and Sisko I think noticeably owes something to "The Final Problem" of Sherlock Holmes... Apparently the original intention was to kill off Sisko but they decided that killing the first black Captain wouldn't be a good look so what we're left with us a literal cliffhanger that is never resolved.  No sign the Emissary popping back for a Picard-like cameo yet...

Among the other things I noticed were Brunt and the various Weyouns being the same actor in the same episode (but only because the credits told me so ... You really can't visually tell).  Sisko's father being Tom Robinson from To Kill A Mockingbird - nice to see him still working in his twilight years... And the station set being cleverly redressed as other space station other episodes to save money...

Most amusing is the episode "Far Beyond the Stars" which takes place largely inside Sisko's head in which we get to see all the main characters without their prosthetics and Sisko becomes the writer of DS9 writing in the 50s who can't get it published because of racial prejudice... apparently a reference to sci-fi writer Samuel R. Delany who had similar problems publishing stories with black central characters.

"In the Pale Moonlight" is possibly the standout episode of the entire run as Sisko, unable to produce the evidence required to convince the Romulans to join the war on the Dominion, engages in a grubby False Flag operation faking the evidence instead with the help of Garak.  This results in at least one seedy murder and he gets away with it and conceals the truth from the rest of his crew but at what cost to his own soul?  It opens up deeper questions about the militaristic nature of Starfleet and how innocent it is...

Other standout episodes include "It's only a paper moon" where Nog tried to escape the PTSD he suffers after losing a leg in the war by going and living in a Hollosuite programme with holographic lounge singer Vic Fontaine who then has to start dealing with the problems of being real or nearly real like needing to sleep.  Perhaps an inspired twist is he then becomes obsessed with balancing the night club books.  When Nog objects that the financial transactions inside aren't real, Vic responds that they're "real to him" and he and Nog bond over financial planning... However, when you really think about it is course, all money isn't real.  It's value only exists in other people's minds.  More so in these days where physical cash is disappearing and all we have is numbers on computers ...

Interesting too is the Jake/Benjamin relationship.  It's fun that Jake doesn't want to follow in his father's footsteps and as a writer and later journalist is somewhat bewildered by the gungo ho attitude of some of the Starfleet cannon fodder.  It's interesting given the large number of casualties in the war that no one ever brings up the subject of Conscription.  Anyway, it's only something I thought of later but Sisko is the first Captain who is allowed to have any family.  Ok, Kirk had a family in the films but they were always kind of estranged.... And Picard was literally peadophobic... His worst nightmare coming in the episode where he gets stuck in the turbo lift with a group of children.... Although widowed Sisko is allowed a slight more rounded private life...

There are a lot of double acts in the series to the point it reminds me of Robert Holmes - Jake & Rom, Miles & Julian, Warf & Jadzia, Odo & Kira.  I feel Quark is a little underutilized.   After the early series he doesn't get quite enough exposure.... He almost has a romance with Ezri at one point but it's never fully explored... Which is a shame really.  The Klingons continue to evolve into a bizarre soap opera.  Kai Winn Adami is a particularly effective villain who sacrifices her people to her personal ambition ...with just the right level of religious hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness.  I find Kira a little hard to relate to.  I don't quite buy her as a hardened ex-terrorist ...although the episode in which she discovers her mother was a collaborator is very effective.  The Ferengi aren't as developed as I feel they could be ... But when it ends ... You do feel as though you'll miss all these characters...

Royal Carpet Sale

Designed by L. Gruner of 12 Fitzroy Street and made at Wilton by Blackmore Brothers for Watson & Bell of Bond Street the carpet in the great drawing room of Buckingham Palace was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

However, concerns have been raised of late that it is reaching the end of its useful life.  The carpet attracts general attention from its immense size (the extreme length being 52 feet, the width 38 feet), and from the brilliant, yet not gaudy colouring however Prince William has recently raised concerns that it is no longer capacious enough to sweep all the Windsor's dirt under. 

Although Prince Albert thought it ideal for the drawing room of Windsor Castle it does not seem large enough to conceal the family's complicity in the Epstein scandal underneath anymore.  "It was great in its day but we need to modernise," said the Prince.  

The fabric is entirely worked by hand and carefully designed so that any investigation of what is below it can be properly stitched up.  It is also toed through the back, so as to secure greater durability than in any other description of carpets as well as to increase its capacity to convincingly conceal conspicuous bumps. 

The work, which required the greatest attention to the working pattern and the selection of the various shades, was executed at Wilton, by Blackmore Brothers, for Watson and Bell of Bond-street, who claim that it is excellent for hiding things underneath and that it can conceal several hundred thousand pages of incriminating documents or photos.  

However, it no longer being large enough for the great number of three million Epstein files that His Majesty now has to catalogue which were previously kept beneath it, it is currently being offered for public auction at a starting price of £12,000,000.  All proceeds to be donated to the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor home for distressed gentlewomen.