My friend Christine sends me this celebratory post from sunny (apparently) Wiltshire. ‘Here in our Wiltshire village last Saturday afternoon, we celebrated our newly-won freedoms with a wonderful, crazy and very English ‘Flower & Vegetable Show’. It was the happiest day, not just because the notoriously grumpy English weather decided to cooperate, but also because […]

A while ago, I posted ‘The Illusion of Safety’, and I left it feeling it was somehow incomplete. A survey in Britain early in the epidemic revealed that fully 50% of the population believed that 1% or more of the British population had already been killed by Covid. That’s about 667,000 deaths. The true figure […]

My friend David Wood, a fellow lockdown sceptic, sends me a link to The Manufacturing of a Mass Psychosis – Can Sanity Return to an Insane World? Quite persuasive, but I’d take issue with a couple of things. Chiefly – the 20th century’s tyrannies were not established by the ruling elites, but by intellectuals. Bien-pensant […]

Our geography, and the willingness of our government to imprison us in fortress Oz, has deferred, but not saved us from, the contagion which has swept across much of the rest of the world. One regrettable consequence of the apparent success of this policy has been that the loss of a sense of proportion which […]

Is to keep on doing what you’re doing, and expect a different result. When someone tells you that they are baffled by an adverse turn of events, yet quite certain that the only way to prevent its recurrence is to use more of what didn’t stop it in the first place, you should suspect that […]

There are many objections to the lockdown strategies being inflicted upon Australians. Many of these I leave to others to address, but one of them – the goal of ‘zero Covid’ touches upon my personal experience of virus infection. The original intention of the gross curtailments of liberties we refer to as ‘lockdown’ was declared […]

One of the consequences of having suffered an exceedingly rare attack of a disease – poliomyelitis – which almost everyone believes to have been eradicated, has been that I have not succumbed to the creeping trend of safetyism which has overtaken the developed world. By safetyism, I mean the increasingly prevalent mindset which is simultaneously […]

Cygnett 5,000 mAh Portable Power bank. We may be grumpy old Harrumpfers, but we’ve become avid users of mobile phone technology. On our earlier visits to the UK and Europe, the map/GPS function had become indispensable. I’m a fully paid up, ocean-going, industrial grade range-fretter; if my phone goes below 80%, I start gently sweating, […]

OK, let’s rip into kitchen design. What do we Harrumpfers want in our kitchens? We want stuff that’s intuitively easy to use. Our eyes are not quite as good as they used to be, so hot/cold water mixers with tiny little red and blue dots to indicate temperature are a pain in the neck – […]

Let’s have a look at what’s right in front of us. This is a picture of my laptop, with power, memory stick and USB mouse disconnected, much as it would be after returning from a meeting. The job of reattaching them ought to be a matter of seconds. Instead, Acer have deliberately set out to […]