Herbert Henry Asquith

It didn't make me laugh as such but The Card by Arnold Bennett, written by a local author who is legendary in these parts and criminally underrated elsewhere.
http://www.thepotteries.org/bennett/book_card.html

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Denry Machin, a lovable rogue and all-round "card", comes up with all kinds of wild schemes that always come off, despite the lack of anything conventional middle-class people would call merit or achievement, and you can't help rooting for him in his struggle against the lowchurchandhightea society that oppressed our great-grandparents in this city.

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"What a card!" said one, laughing joyously. "He's a rare 'un, no mistake."

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"Of course, this'll make him more popular than ever," said another. "We've never had a man to touch him for that."

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"And yet," demanded Councillor Barlow, "what's he done? Has he ever done a day's work in his life? What great cause is he identified with?"

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"He's identified," said the speaker, "with the great cause of cheering us all up."

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As usual I will quote abook :)
In One Night in Winter, by Simon Monefiore, two people who had always been faithful to their spouses have a love affair. They are both senior people married to other senior people, and it's seriously dangerous to do such un-bolshevik things in Russia in 1945. Hercules Satinov loves his wild sex sessions with Dashka Dorova, but wishes he could have more than just sex and envies her husband.

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"He hated Genrikh because true possession is to share the fabric of someone else’s life, he decided; it’s about proximity; love as geography. He longed to know the soft sound of her sleeping and the sleepy smell of her hair in the morning; he wanted to be standing next to her when she brushed her teeth and at the foot of the stairs when she descended them. When she sat down to read, where did she sit?"

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And that's why, like millions of others, i am monogamous even if my girlfriend isn't always that interested, I couldn't just have sex with someone I don't know, it requires a emotional connection.

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I haven't, but my sister in law is allergic to dairy so we all eat vegan food or food that otherwise doesn't involve dairy and I quite like it, so long as no one asks me to give up my carbs I'm happy, I'm happy with the vegan bakery, it's quite good :)

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She is also allergic o peanuts, they actually live in Singapore and I've got no idea how someone can eat in the Fae East without p aunts but she has made it so far. When we visit them me and my dad both eat peanuts but we have to sneakily eat them when my sister in law isn't there.

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I always say we are like the Israelites whoring after other gods when they think they can escape the LORD in the Old Testament. They must have felt exactly like that when they were worshipping the golden calf, fornicating and most of all enjoying their strong drink and pork!

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It's a very complicated matter and difficult to tell what happened in that case, and in general.

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There are so many forces involved and so much propaganda, much of it coming from Russia, but certainly not all, and I don't think Russia is the worst force here. I likwe to follow some people on twitter.
https://twitter.com/jo_bouk

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She aren't perfect but she expresses that the worst offenders are the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and whatever the rest of them are called, trying to destabilise the region and wanting Assad out because he stands in their way. Yes, Russia just wants Assad to be their client but as we know there are worse things in this world than Russian clients, such as the Islamic State and the "moderate" "rebels", half of whom are al-Qaida, a Yank tradition of arming the Islamists they claim to be fighting that dates back to the 80s and before then.

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Staggeringly, the Gulf states are allied to America. There have been challenges to this and might be more with Bernie Sanders or Gary Johnson, but the majority of pols and certainly the far-right neocons don't want to know.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/stop-calling-the-saudis-our-allies/

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Their atrocities in Syria and Yemen have the support of all the neocons around Hillary Clinton , and who even knows what the Donald would do, except it would probably be wrong.

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America's "response" to 9/11 was exactly the opposite to what should have been done, the axis of evil speech when we should have accepted Iranian help against al-Qaida, and now Obama has made peace with Iran and they are fighting Islamic State but it's too late and 0 often behaves just like Shrubya but with bigger words.

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II think the biggest baddies of all are the Turks, with their imperialist and generally shameless attitudes towards the Kurds and the Arabs, as jo_bouk will tell you. (I also like https://twitter.com/KarlreMarks from the Middle Eastern perspective).

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If they weren't our NATO "allies" we'd be gtalking about how the brutal Erdogan regime must be overthrown, and the rebel Kurds are far more sympathetic than the Syrian "rebels", most of whom want some form of Islamic state.

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Putin is acting cynically and the Iranians, while better than Islamic State, Saudi, Qatar etc, are close to terrorist movements like Hezbollah and oppress their own people, and have driven my Persian friends to seek asylum here. But a big mess has to be cleaned up somehow and it's all a mess.

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The illegal war in Iraq, the axis of evil speech, and underpinning it all, runaway population growth (the average woman in Palestine has more than 5 children, and how's THAT going to end?), and let's not forget climate change, which Donald Trump doesn't even think is real, let alone sort it out.

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The refugee crisis is a whole new bag & I know this post is long but if you ask those people I've linked to they offer a persepective that western pols will generally not tell you.

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After a relatively successful, if tiring, cycle to do this:
http://dry-valleys.tumblr.com/post/143742941254/biddulph-grange-country-park-a-cousin-to-biddulph

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I got back in time for me and my dad to take my granddad on a trip to see the bluebells here:
http://www.rodehall.co.uk/

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It'a such a great place, we'd been here for the snowdrops and had a great time and when I spoke to my granddad he was really keen on going. Unfortunately when we went round the door was locked and he didn't answer the door or phone, and as it turns out he had forgotten all about his trip and gone into town to buy his bread the way he does every Monday since my nan died.

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So everyone was quite upset really, my granddad most of all, but we'll have to try and go another day before they close access for the bluebell walks.

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I'm a history buff, I've been reading the series of books by Dominic Sandbrook about British history from 1956 to 1979. And given that it's 100 years since World War 1, I'm after programmes about this-for instance there recently was good coverage of the Easter Rising, and factual and fictional and somewhere in between programmes.

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Like this for instance.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/37-days-tv-review-a-political-thriller-that-grippingly-uncovers-the-countdown-to-war-9174790.html

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It isn't perfect- I'd rather have th French, German and Russian characters speak their own language and have subtitles, but this was all in English- but I really recommend it, it's very Eurocentric but I suppose that's because it focuses on the decision makers and their decisions affected people worldwide but colonial subjects including Australians and Canadians were never asked!

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in my favourite scene the French ambassador
http://quotulatiousness.ca/blog/2015/07/13/qotd-paul-cambon-french-ambassador-in-london/
is waiting to see the British foreign secretary and the German ambassador comes in. There is the tension you'd expect given that it was just before August 1914.The French ambassador moves across the room to avoid him. The German ambassador tries making polite conversation by asking if the French ambassador has been waiting long.

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"Only since 1871"

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Over time I have come to understand that changing a bad situation is often for the worse. An old regime may be bad, but what follows it even worse, as in the cases of Saddam Hussein and Basher (what an apt name) Assad giving way to Islamic State and their adversaries like Hezbollah who are almost as bad.

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After Shrubya Bush achieved his mission in 2003, and Hillary Clinton's involvement in the Libya farrago, and the neocons trying to get their hands on Syria and still refusing to follow practical ways of fighting Islamic State.

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That well-known scientific analyst, Jesus of Nazareth, explained the second law of thermodynamics.
"When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first."
That is what I say about David Cameron and his regime. They are always "reforming" things, mostly in ways that involve selling off public assets to their own cronies. Old-fashioned conservatives didn't like radical change, but neocons love it at home and abroad. Personally I don't like change and I don't like people interrupting my life, but the neocons have never heard of"if it ain't broke, don't fix it" as a concept.

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