Falling On A Bruise

Special Guest Blogger: Lolo Ferrari

2026-10-11T00:30:00.000+01:00

When you spend your life as a living, breathing Guinness World Record, people tend to have opinions. They look at the numbers, the volume and the sheer, industrial-strength engineering required to keep me upright. But looking back at the 37 years I spent on Earth, I realise my life wasn’t just a medical marvel but a performance of pneumatic proportions.
Every girl dreams of her Prince Charming but mine just happened to come with a criminal record and a few years of state-sponsored orange jumpsuits.
In 1988, I met Éric Vigne. He was fifteen years my senior, fresh out of prison, and possessed the kind of bad boy energy that makes a girl think, He seems like the perfect person to manage my career.
People asked me why I married a former drug dealer. Honestly? I liked that he wasn’t intimidated by a challenge. If a man can navigate the French penal system, he can certainly navigate the logistics of finding a bra that requires the same structural integrity as the Golden Gate Bridge. We were a match made in well, perhaps not heaven, but certainly in a very interesting niche of the witness protection program.
I had 22 breast enlargements. Twenty-two! Most people go to the dentist 22 times in a decade I went to the surgeon like I was trying to earn loyalty points and by the end, the Guinness Book of Records (the 2003 edition, if you’re keeping track) noted that each of my girls weighed roughly 2.8 kilograms.
That's nearly six pounds of saline on each side. Three liters total. For perspective, that’s like carrying around two large bottles of cola strapped to your chest at all times.
My bra size was a 58F. If I leaned forward too quickly, I didn’t just lose my balance, I threatened the tectonic stability of the European continent. I was essentially a human airbag.
Of course, the world didn’t just want to measure me, they wanted to see the spectacle in motion so enter the TV Show, Eurotrash.
Oh, the fun I had on Channel 4, Working with Antoine de Caunes and Jean-Paul Gaultier was the highlight of my career. I became a regular on the show because, let’s be honest, nothing says European Culture quite like a French woman who looks like she was drawn by a cartoon artist with an unlimited budget for ink.
I did a few adult films, too, though honestly, calling them films feels a bit generous, It was a job and a way to fund the dream.
There’s a funny thing about being famous for being big. People forget that there’s a spine involved. My back was doing the work of a Roman column for over a decade. I walked with a certain Lolo sway, which people thought was a sexy strut, but in reality, it was just me trying to prevent my center of gravity from betraying me and launching me headfirst into a display of apples at the Supermarket.
I’d like to think I was the original pioneer long before everyone was getting Brazilian Butt Lifts and lip fillers I was there, pushing the boundaries of what the human skin could technically hold together.
I left the party at 37. A bit early, perhaps, but Suicide is a heavy word, but from where I am now, it feels less like an end and more like a very dramatic exit through the gift shop.
My body was a temple, sure, but it was a temple designed by someone who really, really liked balloons. I lived life at maximum volume. I broke records, I broke chairs, and I probably broke a few surgeons spirits.

And The 2026 Peace Prize Goes To...

2026-10-10T23:59:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Navanethem 'Navi' Pillay, a South African jurist and former UN for human rights commissioner who once represented Nelson Mandela and now has a Nobel Peace Prize upon her mantelpiece.
The Norwegian committee said she was: 'A source of hope and inspiration to all those who seek to bring about a more peaceful world' and 'Instrumental in ensuring war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted' which annoyed a certain Orange toddler in the White House who showed his magnanimous side by dismissing Ms Pillay as an unknown liberal person who hates Israel and claimed he should have won for settling eight wars.
Obviously he must have expected it because he said said before the announcement that: 'They don't give it to people like me' by which i assume he meant sex offenders who are almost certainly pedophiles who start wars and is backing Israel's genocide which admittedly all would have gone against him i suppose.
He did say that: 'I’ve done stuff that nobody else has ever done. I’m not bragging, I’m just telling you the facts' which is true, shame some of those things were with children, porn stars or a woman in the changing rooms of a certain Manhattan department store or even Moscow Hotel Rooms which again doesn't scream Peace Prize winner.
Last years victorious recipient, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, gifted her Nobel Peace Prize medal to the big sulking cry baby and Navi Pillay took taken a swipe at Trump by joking that she would offer to share it with him if people kept clapping but still, there is always next year Don although from the way you are looking these days, it would have to be posthumous.

Burnham Going All The Way With EU

2026-10-10T20:30:00.000+01:00

Andy Burnham has said that he was prepared 'to go all the way' in terms of the UK’s relationship with the EU which most of us took as a commitment to rejoin the EU in the next Labour manifesto.
Another non committal kite flying exercise, the idea of reversing Brexit seems to have wide public support and the EU seem to be taking the idea seriously, with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, promising to welcome the UK back.
It's not difficult to see why the idea of rejoining is tempting, the UK economy is languishing thanks to to the estimated 6% cost of Brexit to GDP and even Brexit enthusiasts struggle to find any benefits to being outside of the largest single market on the planet which just happens to be literally on our doorstep and even non European countries, notably Canada, Australia and New Zealand, appear to be moving closer to the EU so how stupid would you have to be to not want to rejoin the Party?
Burnham's predecessor Keir Starmer, did make noises about moving closer to the EU and he did make some headway but Burnham seems to have come in with a speedy determination to change things and has been impressive so far and a TMG Poll last week found that rejoining is supported by almost half of all voters and would boost Labour’s vote share by as much as seven points.
We may need another referendum but Labour are thinking if they make it part of their Manifesto that would serve as a mandate and we have non-European nations negotiating membership of the single market via the European Economic Area which is a template we could attach ourselves to rather than go the whole hog.
The biggest thing in Burnham's favour is that he can point to what a complete nightmare it has been economically and politically for Britain since we left and i'm sure creeps like Nigel Farage will fight to try to keep us out but again Labour have the trump card of pointing to look how wrong he was about everything last time and the consequences for our country, so would you honestly trust him again?

Special Guest Blogger: Louis Braille

2026-10-09T00:30:00.000+01:00

Childhood is a minefield of bad decisions. Some kids stick coins up their nose, others try to fly off the garage roof with a bedsheet parachute, and then there was me.
At the age of three, I decided that the most logical use for a sharpened leather-working awl was to aggressively poke holes in a piece of scrap leather and one slip and suddenly i was the poster boy for not playing with pointy objects.
By the time I was five, the infection had finished its work, and my world went from vivid colors to no colours at all.
When I arrived at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth, I was ready to learn everything. The problem was that the library was basically a decorative collection of heavy, embossed wood blocks. Trying to read those was like trying to decipher a secret message carved into a piece of furniture, it took forever. I wanted to read books, write letters, and most importantly, get through my music scores without having to memorise every note through sheer, exhausting repetition.
Look, my eyesight would have been nice to have for, say, checking out the architecture of Paris or maybe finding my socks in the morning but living in the dark forced me to look at the world through my skin. It forced me to listen carefully, to think structurally, and to realize that if the world wasn’t built with you in mind, you have two choices of complaining about it or building a better system.
Then, Captain Charles Barbier showed up with his writing system which was designed for soldiers to read messages in the dark without lighting a lantern because, you know, being spotted by the enemy while reading your map is a bad career move. His system used a grid of twelve dots. Twelve!
Imagine trying to read a tactile character that’s the size of a postage stamp. By the time your finger traversed the whole thing, you’d forgotten what the first word was.
I looked at that clunky, oversized grid and thought, I appreciate the effort, but at fifteen, I did what any grumpy, overachieving teenager would do and tore it all apart. I simplified it and shrunk it down to a six-dot cell that perfectly fitted under a single fingertip.
I presented my system to the Institute in 1824. Keep in mind, I was fifteen, and I was basically telling the established faculty, Hey, your reading methods sucked so I fixed it and they patted me on the head, said, Nice try, kid, and went right back to their bulky, inefficient wood blocks.
I spent the next several years refining the system, including music notation but it wasn't until long after I was gone, tuberculosis, that people realised, Oh, wait. This blind kid ws actually on to something . You're welcome, by the way.
I went from being a kid who couldn’t handle a simple leather-punching project to creating something that started in a teenager’s bedroom because he was too stubborn to accept that reading had to be difficult.

Post Trump USA

2026-10-07T01:30:00.000+01:00

Donald Trump is becoming increasingly unpopular which seems a bit strange after all his successes so how is this possible?
The Orange Fatbergs administrations approval ratings are plumetting and a cynic may point towards voters having had enough of the racism, tantrums, extra judicial killings by ICE, support for the Israeli genocide, the corruption, lying, creepy weirdness, climate denial and refusing the release of the Epstein files he's in and the incoherent babbling and disregard for anyone that refuses to bow down to him.
That is unlikely as his MAGA crowd love all that or rather they did but the problem seems to be runaway inflation, the high cost of petrol and the whole Iran war thing but many people who voted for the Tangerine Toddler are most upset because they thought he was just going to do all the horrible stuff to other folk, not them.
It's got so bad that even some Republicans are even turning against the Grapefruit Gaddafi and as his power continues to wane, Humpty Trumpty will lash out even more, banning more news outlets from the White House, destroying all the Kennedy centres and reflective pools he can get his hands on.
Despite everything, millions will keep voting for Baron von Shitzinpantz anyway as many of his voters are filled with hatred and fear and will pick a sex offending criminal who is almost certainly a pedophile over just about anyone from any other Party but if the Mid Terms go as everyone expects, Americans can start looking at a Post Donald Trump USA but there is a problem with that.
With his penchant of being a utter jerk, he has wounded the USA past the point of return where he somehow managed to make the Iranian regime look sane, with most of the world rooting against America (and enjoying Iran's mocking videos of the orange cheeto) which sucks for the American people and although history will not be kind to him and deservedly so, the rest of us know that if the USA collapsed and had to stop interfering in the rest of the planets business, the world would be a much nicer and better place so win win for the rest of us, oh dear for the US of A.

Special Guest Blogger: Brazilian Goddess Pomba Gira

2026-10-07T00:30:00.000+01:00

Sit down, darling. No, not there dolt, you’re sitting on my silk skirt, and this shade of crimson is far too expensive for your fat backside to rumple.
Honestly, the youth of today. You walk into my crossroads with your store-bought roses and menthol cigarettes and you expect the Queen to just drop everything?
My path is paved with the bones of men who thought no was a suggestion, but it has a certain charm because a woman has three choices of being a wife (boring), being a servant (tiring), or being a problem. I chose to be a catastrophic problem. I had hips that swung like a pendulum and a laugh that
could shatter a stained-glass window from three streets away. I lived in the taverns, the cabarets, and the places where the respectable people went when they wanted to feel alive and then spent the next morning praying for forgiveness.
Being a Pomba Gira isn’t just about wearing red and looking fabulous, it’s about the Crossroads. Every time you’re stuck, between a bad job and a worse one or between a boring husband and a thrilling mistake or even between life and death, that’s my office.
I’m the Queen of the Seven Crossroads. I’m the one who stands at the gate of the cemetery, laughing at the people who thought they could take their money with them. You can’t.
When you call on me, you’re not calling a fairy godmother. I’m not going to turn a pumpkin into a carriage, i’m more likely to set the pumpkin on fire and tell you to walk.
You come to me with your little red candles, crying about some boy named Kevin who hasn't liked your photo on the internet. Seriously? You want the Queen of the Night, the Lady of the Labyrinth, the Woman of Seven Marriages, to intervene in a digital spat?
I remember when people asked for real things like protecting your house from the police or making sure your husband’s mistress loses her hair but now, I spend half my time looking at your tweets and blog posts and think I’m not a feckin' delivery service, I’m a spirit. If you want a miracle, go talk to
a saint, they’re much more patient, though their parties are terrible. No smoking, no drinking, and everyone wears white. Dreadful.
People find my laugh, the gargalhada, quite scary as they think it’s the sound of evil. Idiots, It’s the sound of a woman who has seen the beginning and the end and realized that most of what you worry about is utter horseshit.
I'm the perfume you smell in an empty room and the red rose that blooms in the middle of a graveyard, I’ve seen empires fall because someone wanted a kiss they weren't supposed to have and seen men ruin their lives for a glimpse of a red pair of knickers and I sit at my crossroads, sipping my cider, and I laugh.
But don’t get it twisted. I’m not your bestie, I’m a Queen. If you bring me cheap wine, I’ll make sure your next haircut is a disaster. If you lie to me, I’ll make sure you trip every time you try to look cool. I demand respect so take your roses, leave the cigarette pack (the full one, don't be cheap) and remember, life is too short to drink bad wine or smoke those French ciggies which smell like burnt tyres.

State Pension Age Conundrum

2026-10-06T15:25:28.978+01:00

The state pension age is currently set at 67 and there are plans to rise it to 68 and even 69 but the Government are pondering aloud on at some point maybe thinking about possibly lowering it instead.
Very much a kite flying exercise where they mention something in passing and see how it lands with the public and if it gets a bad reaction, they can just say it wasn't actually a thing and forget about it but the idea of putting your feet up a few years earlier than thought seems to be quite popular so they may ponder on it a bit harder.
I have never been able to sort out in my head if the pension age should go up or down, up means less pensions to pay out because in all honestly there are fewer 67 year olds than there are 65 year olds and being dead is a handicap when it comes to claiming your old age pension which saves the Government money but by people staying in employment longer it creates a bottleneck with less jobs for the new generation as the oldies roll on.
Of course by retiring people earlier opening up more jobs, the Government will save on Unemployment Benefit so i guess it comes down to will it cost them more to pay out Pensions earlier than they will save by not paying out Unemployment Benefit and if not, would seem a bit of a economically backwards move.
There are some ways that I can think of which might work as you presently need 35 qualifying years of National Insurance (NI) contributions or credits to get the full UK State Pension so one option could be you are entitled to retire once you have reached the threshold because working beyond that isn't going to earn you anymore and I can see how that would be popular, even putting it up to 45 years would mean if you began work at 16 you would be clear and eating Wurthers Originals by 61.
As it is only at the 'Hmm....maybe we could' stage there are no plans for what they are thinking or the age they want to lower it to but i'm still unsure if it is a good thing or not, but by making it you can take it earlier if you have the qualifying years if you want to, it seems a happy halfway between what we have now and what most people seem to want.

Eurovision Withdrawals

2026-10-06T01:00:00.000+01:00

Canada is joining Australia as being temporarily European for a week in May 2027 when they both compete at the Eurovision Song Contest but Ireland and the Netherlands won't be there in Bulgaria because they have confirmed that they won't share a stage with Israel again due to their continued Genocide in Palestine.
Ireland was one of five countries, along with Iceland, the Netherlands, Spain and Slovenia, that refused to take part in the competition this year in protest against Israel’s participation.
Eurovision's director, Martin Green, said he regretted the withdrawals but: 'They remain a valued part of our family and will be missed' although he won't miss them enough to keep them in and kick out the murdering Israelis instead like they did with Russia.
The European Broadcasting Union has tried to address broadcasters concerns over the participation of Israel by announcing that nations involved in armed conflict or sensitive geopolitical situations will no longer be eligible to host the Eurovision song contest but stopping Israel from hosting it if they win was not enough and off they popped in protest.
I imagine as we get closer more nations will withdraw and I hope they do and would fully support the United Kingdom withdrawing in protest and allow our children, Australia and Canada, to represent us instead because Israel need to be ostracised and to be fair, they would have a better chance of not finishing towards the bottom of the leader board as we tend to do recently.

Cheating Football Teams

2026-10-05T15:18:29.367+01:00

Much joy from Football fans at seeing Manchester City finally getting their cumuppance for their decade of cheating but while many fans of other clubs are reveling in the Citizens demise, a few need reminding that their own teams have had points docked or fines for their own cheating.
With 43 teams on the list for reasons ranging from breaking Financial Fair Play rules to administration, it would almost be quicker to name the League teams which haven't been caught out trying to gain an unfair advantage but where's the fun in that so here is an alphabetical list of every team that has been docked points over the last 30 years.

AFC Bournemouth       −10 and another of -17
AFC Wimbledon           −3
Aldershot Town            −10
Birmingham City           −9
Bolton Wanderers        −12
Boston United            −4 and another of -10
Brentford                    −3
Bury                          −12
Cambridge United    −10
Chesterfield                −9
Coventry City            −10 and another of -10
Crystal Palace            −10
Darlington                −10
Derby County            −21
Everton                   −8
Hereford United        −3
Hartlepool United    −3
Leeds United            -15 and another of -10 and another of -10
Leicester City            −6
Leyton Orient            −3
Luton Town                −30 and another of -10
Manchester City        - pending
Macclesfield Town    −17
Middlesbrough            −3
Morecambe                −3
Nottingham Forest    −4
Portsmouth                −10 and another -9
Plymouth Argyle        −10
Port Vale                   −10
Rotherham United       -17 then others of -10, -10 and -3
Reading                   −6 and then -6 and another -6
Sheffield Wednesday −18 and another of -6
Sheffield United        -10
Southampton            −4 and then another of -10
Stockport County        −10
Torquay United            −1
West Bromwich Albion −2
Wigan Athletic            −8 then another of -3 and then -12
Wrexham                   −10

That sure is a lot of teams which ended the season with an asterisk next to their name.

Spectre Haunting Donald Trump

2026-10-05T07:00:00.000+01:00

A spectre is haunting Donald Trump—the spectre of impeachment and going to Prison for being a pedophile and that is what is facing the orange moron because he knows he's onto a hiding come the midterms unless he can rig the elections and that's exactly what he's trying to do.
Not the brightest knife in the drawer, Trump could not even spell Communism let alone explain what it is but it hasn't stopped him from describing his Democrat opponents as a Communist Menace which is meant as an insult, yet he has as much idea of what constitutes communism as he does about what is a red card offence in football.
Without even mentioning the Trumpstien Files where he is exposed as almost certainly being a pedophile, he can't focus on the US economy where his tariffs have been a disaster or his awful foreign policy and the war in Iran going so poorly, he’s scrambling around and has taken the usual slur of radical leftists have taken a step up to calling them Communists.
Trying to scare Americans about Democrats who advocate Medicare for All, Universal childcare, free public higher education and higher taxes on the super-wealthy to pay for them has not worked as as these initiatives are supported by most Americans so he is now trying to paint them with the scary label of Communist.
The last time this was tried is in the history books under Joe McCarthy which provoked witch-hunts so of course Trump would reach for the Communist scare card when he has almost no other cards left to play and could end his career in prison for all manner of corruption charges as well as being exposed as the pedophile he almost certainly is.
According to one poll i wrote about previously, an Axios-Generation Lab poll of young Americans, 67% say they have a positive or neutral association with the word 'Socialism' compared with 40% who are positive or neutral toward 'Capitalism' and it is easy to understand younger generations growing disillusionment with Capitalism so it is unlikely Trump’s new red-baiting is going to help.
Obviously then the sex offending President is trying to distract Americans from his corruption and the Trumpstein files but if they won't be fooled that easily then his next step is probably going to be to something much more menacing at the polling booths or afterwards at the count.

Special Guest Blogger: Savannah

2026-10-05T00:30:00.000+01:00

Existing for as long as i did in a world that thrives on chewing up and spitting out girls like me was impressive although i'm not sure if i will be remembered for my art, my temper or my impressive list of rockstar exes.
The AVN, bless their little cotton socks, once ranked me at #19 on their list of the top 50 porn stars of all time. #19! Not bad for a girl who mostly winged it, showed up late, and probably caused more headaches than actual cinematic masterpieces. I should’ve been #1, obviously, but modesty always did become me, just not very often.
My career was never just about the skin flicks, I had range and artistic depth or, at least, I had a great agent who told me I did. I dipped my toes into the shimmering, slightly sticky waters of B-movies. And let me tell you, if you think porn sets were wild, you haven't seen anything until you've been on a low-budget sci-fi horror comedy set at 3 AM with a prop severed head that looks suspiciously like last night's dinner. I played everything from a possessed cheerleader to an alien seductress to a zombie's love interest. The roles were diverse but I gave them my all or as much all as I could muster after a long night at the Sunset Strip hot spots.
Billy Idol, Vince Neil, David Lee Roth, Billy Sheehan, Pauly Shore, Slash, Mark Wahlberg, It was like a who's who of every poster I ever had on my teenage wall, except they were actually in my bed. It was exhausting, thrilling, and frankly, a lot of fun.
My reputation, much like my hair, was big, bold, and sometimes a little untamed. It was said that I always arrived late and was a temperamental Diva and not inaccurate I'll admit.
My financial acumen, or lack thereof, also became legendary. Substantial income they said and it was for a fleeting moment. But where does all that money go when you're living large, loving harder and buying every ridiculous thing that sparkles? Apparently, it goes. Quickly.
I was a girl who broke barriers, hearts and a few studio couches and lived full-throttle, consequences be damned and while i I survived the 90s, dated everyone you had a poster of in 1988 and the adult industry, what took me down was a car crash. A simple, stupid crash that broke my nose.
Now, to an average person, a broken nose is a bummer where you wear a bandage, you get some flowers and move on. But for me? In my world?
I looked in the mirror and didn't see Number 19. I saw a girl who couldn't take a close-up. And in my line of work, the close-up is the pension plan so I panicked and I didn't just get a little sad, I went out with a bang, literally, self inflicted gun shot to the head.
So what did i leave behind? A few dozen porn tapes, a collection of very expensive leather jackets, and a Rolodex that looks like the guest list for a 1991 MTV Video Music Awards after-party.

Suella The Racist

2026-10-04T18:00:00.000+01:00

Officially, being English is a matter of nationality and residency so anyone born in England or holding legal citizenship is legally and culturally English so that seems clear cut, unless you are Suella Bravermann of the Reform Party who made the bizarre claim on BBC Question Time that she isn't English despite being born here as she has an Asian Heritage.
Credit to the man who then argued with her that he has spent his whole life being told he is not English by racists because he is Black and she is therefore reinforcing the racists arguement for which she dismissed because that would mean she is being racist towards herself for which he shrugged and said, 'You are'.
She repeatedly refused to answer the presenter’s direct question of does she mean that you only be English if you are white but Suella was always a right wing nut so it is no surprise she stepped across to the even further right Reform Party and is coming out with nonsense such as this.
To my mind she is setting it out to her fellow Reformers that people with brown and black skin can’t be English and she agrees with them, and she is a brown woman herself which is toxic and bizarrely, appealing to the sort of people that would throw her out of the country without a second thought.
To be fair i would throw her out also but not because of the colour of her skin, but because she is vile and always has been.

New Age Spirituality Not The Same As Religion

2026-10-04T17:30:00.000+01:00

Back in the dark day's the Church knew everything and the Earth was flat, the Sun revolved around the Earth and that woman with the black cat and the wart was definitely going to end up in the lake because the Church said so but then along came people like Galileo, Copernicus and Issac Newton and the grip on the masses began to slip but for science to really make headway, what it needed was to get rid of that pesky God character so take a step forward Charles Darwin.
Since then the Church has never regained the dizzy heights of its popularity but some on the religious side of the fence keep trying and the Evangelical Alliance (Together we are making Jesus known) has launched a guide for Churches to: 'Take advantage of New Age popularity in the Supernatural'.
I assume, and i know this guide wasn't issued for my eyes, but the idea is to piggy back on the rise of all things New Age and say 'Nice Crystals and Venus being in the House of Pluto means there is no better time to read the Bible and come to the Church'.
Somehow, Christians and their ilk see what the Bible Society called: 'A Quiet Revival' which suggested a huge increase in religion although it is not turning into newly filled pews as it is growing online and its opponents are not necessarily religious.
Religious things may not be my bag but they very much are the bag of my blogging partner and he explained that although New Age spirituality with its astrology, crystals, meditation and impersonal cosmic energy or universal consciousness, is not the same as a traditional religion with God as a distinct creator.
Maybe to the Evangelical Alliance the line between New Age Spirituality and Religion is blurred or it is concerned that its flavour of Faith is being replaced and it wants to bring the New Agers into it's fold to keep its stranglehold on the believers tight by deliberately conflating what they believe with that the New Agers believe although it patently isn't.
My personal view is you can believe what you want if it helps or brings comfort to you in some way but a God or the position of a Planet is too wacky for me to take on board because the latest God is just a copy and paste of many earlier Gods and the Planets do not give a flying one about you and if you had said they had a couple of hundred years ago, you would be looking down from the top of a pyre from the same people now trying to recruit you.

Special Guest Blogger: Inuit goddess Sedna

2026-10-03T00:30:00.000+01:00

Every time someone bites into a succulent piece of blubber or dons a warm sealskin parka, they are, quite literally, enjoying a piece of me.
I was the daughter of Anguta and Isarrataitsoq, which is a lot of divine pressure for one girl to carry but both my parents were always on about me finding a nice hunter to settle down with but my main priority was mainly, eating. I had this Great Hunger, an appetite that could swallow a caribou whole. I occasionally tried to nibble on my parents while they slept but we’ve all made mistakes in our rebellious teens. Some kids dye their hair blue, I tried to consume the architects of the universe but instead of getting me a therapist, dad decided the best course of action was a scenic boat trip and
throwing me overboard into the freezing Arctic Ocean.
There I was, treading water and I did what any sensible person would do, I grabbed the side of the kayak but Dad was having none of it took out his knife and snip, snip, chop, chop and as my finger joints slipped away into the abyss, they didn’t just sink. They transformed with the knuckles becoming the ringed seals, the middle joints Walruses and the tips those magnificent, blubbery whales.
I watched my own digits sprout flippers and swim away which is a strange feeling to see your pinky finger blow a sprout of water and swim off.
My body became the foundation of an entire civilization’s survival and it’s hard to stay mad at your dad for being a homicidal maniac when you realise you’ve just accidentally solved world hunger for the next ten thousand years.
After the finger-chopping fiasco, I sank to the bottom, grew a tail (very mermaid chic) and founded Adlivun, the underworld which is like a gated community, but for the dead, and the gates are guarded by some very grumpy sharks.
As the Mother of All Marine Animals, if you want a seal for dinner, you have to stay on my good side and the power trip is immense, when i see a whale swim past my window I feel a strange sense of pride but it’s not all glamour, there’s the hair because the downside of having sea-creature fingers for a legacy is you can’t hold a comb so i summon a Shaman to do it for me.
Having a shaman travel through the spirit world to the bottom of the ocean just to comb your hair is the height of luxury but take it from me, if you are feeling peckish see what's in the fridge, especially if you have a father who owns a kayak and a sharp knife.

Ain't Nothing Gonna Break Our Stride

2026-10-02T15:00:00.000+01:00

For some bizarre reason, Newton's third law of motion always stuck in my head from my schooldays long after most of the rest of what we were taught has been replaced by what day to put the bins out and 80's song lyrics (who needs to know Henry VIII's wives when you can still sing along to 'Break My Stride' 40 years later) but Newton's third really stuck.
As anyone who just hums along to Matthew Wilder's classic tune can tell you, Newtons 3rd Law of Motion is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction which is why Rockets can launch from Earth because when a rocket's engine expels exhaust gas in one direction, the gas pushes back on the rocket with an equal force in the opposite direction and up it goes, ain't nothing gonna break it's stride, nobody gonna slow it down, oh no, It's got to keep on moving as it were.
That lengthy introduction through 80's nostalgia is a happy segue into news that NASA are looking to introduce Nuclear Engines to their Space rockets which will half the time it takes to get to wherever we point it towards with Mars being the most obvious destination in what was a 6-9 month trip now reduced to 3-4.
So what you may think, our nearest Solar System is 4.37 light-years (about 25 trillion miles) away from Earth and would take roughly 75,000 years traveling at our current top speeds so half that is still 12.5 trillion miles and a 37,500 year long trip which is a fair point which is why nobody is talking about that, it's the Red Planet we are looking at and who knows, they may be looking right back and thinking Gawd, i hope them awful Earthlings don't come here.
There has long been debate about life on Mars and if there is life underground, inside it's salt crusts or in a dormant state and we know from our own planet how resilient and adaptive life can be so I am all for anything that can improve our odds of getting to Mars and back again because we're on a roll and we pray it lasts, yes the road behind was rocky but now we're feeling cocky and we can look at Mars and we see our past, that's the reason why we're running so fast as some curly haired performer almost said.

Special Guest Blogger: Black Sam Bellamy

2026-10-01T00:30:00.000+01:00

Greetings landlubbers, they called me the Prince of Pirates and say I was the wealthiest swashbuckler to ever grace the Golden Age and a man of the people and honestly? They’re right. I was fabulous.
Before I was the Prince, I was just Sam. A teenager in the Royal Navy, which, let me tell you, is a fantastic place if you enjoy eating biscuits made 40% of weevils and I fought in some battles, saw the world, and realised one very important thing, that the legal life is a total scam.
You work for the King, he gets the gold and you get scurvy which is an awful business model.
So, I decided to go into independent and started with treasure hunting. My friend Paulsgrave Williams and I headed for the Florida coast to find the wrecked Spanish Plate Fleet. It was going to be easy,just pick some gold off the seafloor and retire but we found nothing. Not a single doubloon and that’s when we met Pirate Captain Benjamin Hornigold and his first mate was a guy named Edward Teach who you might know as Blackbeard.
Now, Ed was a lot. Fuses in the beard? Check. Multiple pistols strapped to his chest? Check. A general aura of I might bite your legs off? Absolutely.
I learned a lot from them, mostly that I was much better looking than they were and that I had a better philosophy. Hornigold refused to attack English ships because he still loved the King and although the ships crew told him the King doesn't even know you exist unless he’s signing your death warrant he refused so eventually, the crew voted him out and I was made captain. I was in my late twenties, I had a ship and while everyone else was wearing those ridiculous itchy wigs, I just tied my long black hair back with a velvet ribbon. Simple. Elegant. Aerodynamic and Black Sam was born.
I didn’t see myself as a thief. I saw myself as a wealth redistribution specialist and my crew called themselves Robin Hood’s Men. I was merciful and generous, i lived by a rule that if you didn't fight back, I didn't kill you and I might even give you your ship back after I took all the good stuff.
In just over a year, I captured 53 ships and then came the Whydah. She was a beautiful state-of-the-art galley built for the slave trade and we spent months raiding the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast and I was the wealthiest pirate in history. I was winning at life.
I even had my own flag. Most pirates go for the basic skull and crossbones which is a bit cliché, if you ask me. Mine was a skeleton holding an hourglass in one hand and a speaking trumpet in the other and everything was going perfectly. I was heading back to New England with a ship full of gold and a crew of 145 men who thought I was a god, then came Mother Nature.
She didn’t care how many ships I captured. A storm hit us off Cape Cod and the weight of all that gold made us into giant golden brick and the ship capsized and out of 146 men, only two made it to shore. I wasn't one of them. I went down with the ship, the gold, and my very nice velvet hair ribbon.

Books That Inspired Me

2026-09-30T16:30:00.000+01:00

Being such a tremendous reader of books, I was asked to write about five that had changed my outlook on life or inspired me and after giving it some thought, i had to admit no books had.
There are some books which i really enjoyed and even thought they contained such a message that everyone should read it such as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, Animal Farm and Of Mice And Men, but inspired or changed me? Not so much.
I assume people of a religious bent will go with the Bible or the Koran or some such religious work but the only religious text i have read was some of the Bible and probably because i came at it with an angle of this will be nonsense, i couldn't take it seriously and was too busy looking for things i could ridicule such as unicorns, dragons, horses with lion heads and fire breathing sea creatures.
Being a proper lefty, there wasn't a book that made me find that political view, i had it before i even knew what a lefty was and found we happily meshed together afterwards so no author could lay claim to influencing my viewpoint, my parents i guess take the credit for that as they were both always up for a demonstration against something or other and protesting something unfair, my life mantra of 'Life isn't fair, so let's make it fairer' was certainly stolen from them and not from a book.
So sorry but i will have to pass on this one because i can't think of one left alone five.

Triple Lock Now Double Lock

2026-09-29T16:32:25.839+01:00

The main take away from Andy Burnham's Labour Party speech is that he will end the pensions triple lock, making it a double lock and using the savings to help fund adult social care reforms in England.
The triple lock means the state pension currently increases annually in line with inflation, average wage growth, or 2.5% - whichever is highest but the average wage growth is being dropped so now it's a rise rise every year in line with either inflation or 2.5%.
There has been a few conversations around the affordability of the UK State Pension recently and since it was introduced in 2010, it has been raised from £102.15 per week to £241.30 per week with the main increases coming in 2023/24 (10.1%), 2024/25 (8.5%) and 2025/26 (4.1%).
The State Pension has always been a bit of a hot potato because the over 65's are the group which vote the most and nobody wants to tick them off but as Burnham said, someone had to take the political hit and rip the plaster off although the 13.2 million pensioners currently in receipt may have something to say about it although stating that it is being down to fund free Social Care may dull their inevitable argument.
The age of retirement was raised from 65 to 66 and then to 67 with a rise to 68 penciled in to take place around 2045 but a common fallacy is that the National Insurance we currently pay go into a pot for our retirement whereas in reality our National Insurance goes to pay the pensions of current retirees and our pensions, when we get there, will be paid by those working and paying NI then.
As Social Care has been a sore point for Governments for years, it is not a bad thing that Burnham is looking to try and fix it and with one in 10 hospital beds occupied by someone who was medically fit enough to leave but were unable to due a lack of social care capacity, it is needed so we can only hope that the Pensioners, uppity at the best of times when it comes to their pensions, don't ruin it by voting for a Party that will undo all this good work.

Google Guide To Finding A Brit In Your House

2026-09-29T15:00:00.000+01:00

An estimated 4.7 to 5.5 million Brits live elsewhere in the World so there is a good chance that one of them may turn up on your doorstep but don't panic because Google has a survival guide just in case you find a Brit inside your house.

You need to find an electric kettle immediately, as your new guest will likely demand a cup of tea within minutes of arrival and then hourly throughout the day and pair it with a biscuit (digestive or rich tea) and use an electric kettle and never microwave the water as this is considered a minor crime and the Brit will exhibit signs of distress upon tasting.
Also be prepared for them to mention the weather within the first five minutes, regardless of what it is doing outside and they will apologise for everything, even if you bump into them

So what does Google suggest if it is an Australian and not a Brit in your living room?
Australians are generally docile when approached correctly but make sure you have a proper cup of tea ready and point them toward the couch, or if it is after 9am, substitute the tea for a cold beer.
Place a jar of Vegemite and some white bread on the table and if they start speaking, do not alarm them by asking for a translation, if they ask for a Chook in the Arvo or ask if you have seen their thongs, then just smile and nod and put some sports on the TV.

Canadian's are also easily managed with the right resources according to Google, so say 'Sorry' immediately as in Canadian culture, exchanging 'sorries' is a formal greeting.
If the Canadian appears restless, if you happen to have a Tim Hortons cup nearby, place it within their line of sight to calm them and if you have maple syrup, ensure it is 100% pure because offering them high-fructose corn syrup masquerading as maple syrup will result in immediate, polite disappointment. As with the Australians, the language can be confusing but the formula is that 'Yeah, no' means No and 'No, yeah' means Yes.

As for if it's an American, the advice is not to panic and immediately fill every available tray with water and place in the freezer as they will expect a glass that is 70% ice, even if it is freezing outside.
Be prepared to intervene at the Kettle as there is a high statistical probability they will try to boil water in your microwave and calibrate your volume as Americans 'inside voice' is roughly equivalent to a public address system.
They might try to hand you cash after you make them a tea or help with luggage as tipping is a cultural thing and never offer them instant coffee as they will just not get it.

Thank you Google.

Did You Bring The Tin Opener Luv?

2026-09-29T01:00:00.000+01:00

El Niño is supersizing and is expected to be the strongest since the one in 1877-78 which saw the Pacific Ocean temperatures reach 3.5C and the result was the death of over 50 million people Worldwide through famine and droughts and with the 2026 version already topping 3C and rising and some forecasts predicting a peak of 4.0C in December, it's not looking good. Although a warming planet doesn't cause El Niño, the fact that it is happening in a warmer planet should mean that our Governments are finally taking Climate Change seriously.
For example in China, a 100-day campaign has been launched to prepare for extreme weather and help safeguard harvests against the opposing extremes of drought and intense rainfall. Beijing has plans to upgrade early warning monitoring systems, and in July, it launched a national plan encouraging cities to draw up climate risk maps to help identify areas most vulnerable to flooding and severe heat while in the UK....erm.
The Climate Crisis killed an estimated 35,000 Europeans this Summer, 2,877 heat-associated deaths occurring across the UK during May and June, and Brits are being encouraged to panic sensibly by stockpiling water, tinned fruits and vegetables and loo roll.
Depending on where you live (and the Southern Hemisphere is more in the firing line than us Northern Hemispherers ) you will probably experience storms, floods, starvation, heatwaves, fires and droughts and a recent scientific report projected that this unfolding super El Niño could lead to over 450,000 additional deaths globally from heat and extreme weather through early 2027.
Anyone who still has an old Y2K Survival Guide knocking around, this could be a good time to re-read it or you could move to China who's Government seem the only ones to be actually doing something.

Special Guest Blogger: Roman God Forculu

2026-09-29T00:30:00.000+01:00

Hello, Mortals, I’m the little-known but fiercely over-qualified Roman deity who watches over the doors that separate the chaotic outside from the cozy (or not-so-cozy) inside.
My ancestors called me the Keeper of the Portal but the big guy, Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings and endings gets all the stories about gate-opening and gate-closing, I’m the one who makes sure the wood doesn’t warp, the metal doesn’t rust, and that you don’t end up stepping directly over
a dreaded threshold.
The ancient Romans loved to split up responsibilities. Need a god for the door? Ask Forculus. Need one for the hinge? Cardea. Need a god for the sill that keeps the draught out? Limentinus.
My name literally means the one who watches the door which is not exactly a superhero name but back when Rome was a cluster of huts on the Tiber and a few ambitious road-builders, doors were very basic. A simple slab of timber, a rope tied to a stone, and a prayer to whichever Gods was handy would suffice.
I was assigned to a modest wooden door outside a blacksmith’s shop in the Subura district but fast forward a few centuries and I got promoted to double doors in a public bathhouse. Suddenly, my responsibilities doubled and I had to keep two doors synchronized, ensure they swished open together perfectly and the bathhouse owner paid me in loaves of honey-glazed figs.
Limentinus is the brother who always stands at the exact spot where you transition from one world to another, making sure you don’t trip over the unseen line that separates inside from outside.
Janus is the grandmaster of passages, the god with a face looking both forward and backward and loves to take credit for everything but Janus gets the statues, the festivals, the poems. Cardea gets a small bronze plaque in some Roman villa. Limentinus gets a stone slab that few notice unless they trip but I’m not a god who demands temples because a door teaches patience. You can’t force a wooden portal to swing open if the hinges aren’t aligned and every door you walk through offers a decision of either staying inside the safety of your house, or venture out into the unknown, i'm easy either way, that's your decision.

Blue Moon Standing Alone

2026-09-28T17:00:00.000+01:00

It took forever but finally Manchester City have been found guilty of 114 of the 115 charges against them for breaking Footballs the Financial Rules over a 10 year period, or cheating as it is also known to be able to sign more expensive players than their finances should have permitted.
The club was found to have systemically bypassed financial regulations to build its squad and failed to provide accurate financial information and details of payments to players and coaches but as yet the punishment for such mammoth and serious deception has yet to be announced although it will be seismic.
The penalties being whispered about include stripping of titles and cups, huge fines, points deductions and even demotion and as Everton were docked six points and Nottingham Forest four for their breaches of profit and sustainability rules, suggests a large points penalty, enough to see them relegated although it could be spread over a number of seasons which will ensure they do not bounce straight back to the top league.
One possible sanction is the removal of the eight trophies the club won in the period covered by the case, including three Premier League titles, three League Cups, one Community Shield and one FA Cup with the runners up in each case being handed the trophy.
As well as the Premier League flaying them, other clubs are seeking legal advice about compensation, claiming they have been impacted by City's illegal actions and Burnley did undertake such a move against Everton who were told they must pay Burnley £35m after they broke profit and sustainability regulations as their cheating impacted Burnley's chances of staying in the Premier League, and sought compensation for the losses associated with being relegated.
If you add together the clubs who just missed out on the Champions League, or failed to make Europe, or even those who were relegated by beating by a Manchester City team who were flouting the rules as well as the points deductions, fines and relegation, this is an extremely difficult time to be a Manchester City fan but a real boon for the rest and you cheating northern bastards will be sung at them at every ground for years to come. Good, they deserve it.

Don't Be That Guy

2026-09-28T15:13:10.698+01:00

It does seem that some men have not got the message about not being rapists and understanding exactly what consent is which is why an advertisement is going live tonight to explain these things.
The 'That Guy' advert is the start of a six week campaign aimed to reduce rape, sexual assault and harassment by having frank conversations with men about attitudes and behaviour around women and combat the dangers of social media 'manosphere' influencers.
The people behind the campaign said that: 'Young men and boys are growing up where attitudes towards women, sex and relationships are shaped what they see online, including messages about masculinity and how women should be treated. Manosphere influencers and social media algorithms can repeatedly expose boys to harmful attitudes and behaviours, which can become normalised and this extremist content is having a direct impact on women's safety'.
One misogynist has already spoken out and blamed female teachers for sending boys and young men into the arms of the manosphere by pushing a political, anti-boy and feminist agenda which teaches them that the world is anti-boy so in effect he is already blaming females for the way boys and young men act towards them.
It's quite something that we have to actually teach some menfolk not to rape woman and how No actually means No but seems like we do because the data shows a clear increase in misogynistic behavior and attitudes among young people and in schools, largely driven by online content and social media influencers.
Another reason why the Social Media ban, penciled in for Spring 2027, can not come soon enough.

Special Guest Blogger: Alexander Bain

2026-09-27T00:30:00.000+01:00

They say history is written by the victors but in my case, history is written by people who don't know how to spell facsimile.
If you’ve ever checked your digital watch or had the distinct displeasure of receiving a fax in the year of our Lord 2026, you’ve got me to thank or blame.
Being a pioneer mostly comprised of cold porridge, bad investments and people trying to steal your homework but not mine at school because I wasn't exactly the teacher’s pet. School was a place where I sat quietly, staring at the dust motes dancing in the sunlight and my teachers thought I was a bit dense.
I was apprenticed to a clockmaker in Wick and it was there, amidst the rhythmic tick-tock of brass gears and the smell of lubricating oil, that I decided everything was too slow. Why wait for a winding key to do the work? Why not use electricity? It seemed like a bright idea and little did I know, the path to glory is paved with people who insist you should stick to your day job.
I eventually found myself in London, on Hanover Street, running a workshop but innovation is expensive and electricity wasn’t exactly something you could pick up at the corner grocer's in the 1840s.
In my desperation, I sought out Sir Charles Wheatstone and I showed him my electric clock which was a beautiful, elegant piece of machinery kept in perpetual, pulsing motion by electromagnetic impulses but he dismissed it and said there was no future in electric clocks but three months later, I’m reading the paper and lo and behold, Wheatstone is at the Royal Society, unveiling his invention, the electric clock and I thought that claiming a patent you saw in someone else’s workshop three months prior is a level of chutzpah that even I have to begrudgingly respect.
Wheatstone didn't count on one thing, I was Scottish and we are famously stubborn when it comes to being cheated out of money.
He tried to block my patents but the House of Lords, in a rare moment of clarity, summoned me to give evidence and I walked into that room and explained how electricity actually functioned, and watched as Wheatstone’s face turned the color of a curdled porridge.
He was forced to pay me £10,000 and i put that money towards another invention, the Fax Machine or as i called it, the Chemical Telegraph.
I didn’t invent the fax machine so that you could send a blurry, black-and-white copy of an insurance document, I invented it because I thought we should be able to send images over wires! It was the 1840s! It was basically magic!
I spent three years tinkering with the synchronisation of pendulums and the chemical reaction on paper. It worked. It was genius. And yet, looking back, I realize I was the first person in history to inflict this machine upon the world.
The thing about being an inventor is that your brain is wired for discovery, not for the stock market and my fortune didn't last after I invested in some ventures that were, to put it mildly, optimistic, less mildly, just plain stupid.
I died with considerably less than I started with, and yet, I don’t regret it because I see you all now, walking around with your mobile devices, sending instant messages, peering at screens, and tracking time to the millisecond which are all descendants of my pendulums and my wires.
So, next time your clock ticks, or your fax machine screams at you for no reason, spare a thought for Alexander Bain. I may have died broke, but I certainly didn't die bored.

Heading For The Exit

2026-09-25T15:00:00.000+01:00

If Benjamin Netanyahu was in any doubt that he considered a pariah running a pariah state, he wouldn't have been left in any doubt after 77 nations saw him approaching the lectern at the United Nations and decided to walk out the door marked Exit rather than listen to the War Criminal try and justify the Genocide he is conducting.
Well done and much applause to the 77 but shame on the ones who stayed which included my own country which sat in the rapidly emptying hall and heard him talk about the leavers as 'moral cowards' although anything to do with morals is not the genocidal leaders wanted by the International Criminal Court's strong point so maybe he got confused.
The diplomatic protest extended across countries from Asia, Africa, Europe and South America and those outside wouldn't have heard Netanyahu use his address to reject accusations that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, describing the charge as the 'biggest lie of the century' and praising US President Donald Trump as a great leader so immediately showing he had not necessarily grasped the concept of what constitutes a whopping great lie.
He then went on to attack journalists for their coverage of Israel but to be fair it is hard to portray anyone who is murdering civilians and ethnically cleansing their land in a great light although some Israeli supporters have tried.
Of course no Netanyahu speech would be complete with at least once saying the words 'Antisemitism’ which he did when he accused New York Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, of it and claiming that Jewish New Yorkers no longer felt safe following his election to which Mamdani responded that: 'Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies designed to whitewash his genocide of Palestinians. No lie can change the fact that he bears an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity'. Ouch.
The Israeli murder (35th in our Table of leaders who have killed the most people in History, just two places below Vlad the Impaler) faces an election on 27 October 2026 and we can only hope that he follows the swift departure of the 77 nations who left him staring at a half empty chamber and is booted out the Knesset and into a Hague Prison Cell and a lot less murdery replacement is chosen.