Fuchsia
I think this is still my favourite flower. If you’re ever in Kerry at this time of the year you can drive down country lanes where the hedgerows appear to consist of little else.
Quote of the Day
”If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
- J.D. Vance June 26, 2026 Link
Sadly, it’s true.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel | Bist du bei mir | Placido Domingo & Sissel Kyrkjebjo
This beautiful air — which has often been wrongly attributed to J.S. Bach because his wife had included it in one of her notebooks — came to mind yesterday. A beloved sister-in-law had passed peacefully away on Saturday morning after an horrendous battle with cancer and, like everyone else, I was hit by contradictory feelings — sadness at her loss, and relief that at least her suffering was over. The great thing was that her death was peaceful, something captured by the (translated) lyrics.
Long Read of the Day
Killing Keir and admiring Andy
If you are, like me, perpetually pissed off by the shallowness of mainstream media coverage of British politics, then this essay by David Aaronovitch may cheer you up. It’s triggered by the remarkable in-house coup which brings Andy Burnham into office with no noticeable mandate, and consigns Keir Starmer to the condescension of history. David has been a formidably cussed and independent commentator on these things for as long as I can remember and he’s spot-on here. His point, he says, is that,
Starmer may not have been good but he wasn’t a disaster, and yet he ended up underwater by 40 points and with commentators claiming that he was “hated” by the voters.
In these polarised times it’s impossible to escape being hated by someone. Starmer was labelled a genocidal war criminal over Gaza by the Left and an abettor of antisemitism by Netanyahu supporters for his recognition of the state of Palestine. Some gender-critical feminists loathe him for being slow to appreciate the pitfalls of gender ideology, and transgender supporters for appreciating them eventually. Latter-day discoverers on the Right of the historic wrongs imposed upon the people of Diego Garcia (almost entirely a “Left” issue until 2024) now call Starmer a “traitor” over a Chagos deal that was very nearly the policy of the last Conservative government.
In recent weeks new kinds of crimes have been laid at Starmer’s door. He was a disappointment in the tearoom, failing to stimulate his backbenchers and thus displaying the parliamentary equivalent of erectile dysfunction. He was strangely incurious. He was unsusceptible to argument. He callously didn’t even tell his staff that he was about to resign (which, if they hadn’t realised it by last weekend, made them a political version of the WASPI women).
But the voters? Why would they hate someone who has tried pretty hard not to upset them? (In fact, polls seem to suggest that very negative feeling about Starmer is limited to around 30% of the electorate.)
Read on to see his conclusion. It isn’t complimentary to the great British public.
Books, etc.
Although (as usual) I’ve got too many books on the go, Edward Luce’s review of this new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan might have to be moved up the queue.
One thing that surprised me is that Trump has now become “almost entirely housebound”. And in that house,
He is now surrounded exclusively by loyalists, many picked because they look like they are “from central casting”. He observes that often about Scott Bessent, Trump’s imposing Treasury secretary, and especially about Pete Hegseth, his swaggering, trash-talking “secretary of war” and former TV anchor. The daily intelligence briefing is just as chaotic. Hegseth’s party trick is to show Trump short videos of US missile strikes or boats being vaporised in the Caribbean. These are known as “Hegseth’s snuff films”, which Trump prefers to normal briefings.
Other principals, such as Howard Lutnick, Trump’s secretary of commerce, are there mostly because they are rich. Trump tells people that he puts up with Lutnick’s “bullshit” because he donated $25mn to the planned Trump library in Florida. But Trump’s library will be no such thing. As Haberman and Swan report, it will be a skyscraper hotel and luxury development accompanied by the Qatari gift of a Boeing luxury jet. After Trump leaves office, the Pentagon will “turn over” that jet to the “library”. The land, worth $67mn, was a gift from the state of Florida.
Regime Change is replete with such telling detail.
Which of course is the disreputable reason I want to read it. I should be ashamed of myself, as my mother would have put it.
My commonplace booklet
Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning
Having read this I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps everyone else should too. As a child I once got caught in a large Atlantic roller and thought I would drown. I’ll never forget it and for at least 30 years I avoided going to the beach on which it happened.
Here’s a sample:
- Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
- Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.
- Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water, permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.
Read on.
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