If you would rather head straight to a concise summary, the TL;DR is at the foot of the page — or jump directly to the FAQ.

Putting up a post on a personal web site is somewhat akin to a tree falling silently in a forest – if nobody sees it, did it ever happen? I don’t like social media, and all that goes with it to get readership, so what is the right answer and the right ambition for readership of my modest web publications?

The windy rathole to both questions lies in a mystic sphere of endeavour called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. This is the decades-old practice of structuring a page so a search engine can find it, understand what it is about, and rank it fairly. For 20 or so years SEO has been a predictable game of cat and mouse between professional search optimisers who try to game the system, and Google, which keeps moving the goalposts. But since around 2024, a second, faster-moving discipline has grown up alongside classic search: getting cited directly by AI systems — Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity — when someone asks a question the site could answer.

This is sometimes called AIO or GEO (AI Optimisation, or Generative Engine Optimisation). It has spawned a frenzy of new activity, proposed standards and outright panic in some publishers. The risk is that unlike normal search, where you will appear at least somewhere in the list of results, with AI search you could be completely ignored.

I was reading about these trends at the beginning of 2026, and decided to use SEO/GEO improvement of my sites as a test case for understanding how AI worked, and possibly for actually introducing a whole lucky new readership to my oeuvre. This led to what are best termed the lost 14 weeks of 2026, as I wrestled with the vast and slippery creature of AI assisted development.

One attractive aspect of the new AI search trends was that authenticity, original content, and tons of factual detail are the elements that lead to better discovery, since that cleanly differentiates quality from AI slop. Suddenly, my less than riveting but very detailed examinations of the mechanical operations of the 1989 Virage Coupe, or comparative test measurements of focus accuracy performance in telephoto camera lenses had become internet gold dust. Like you (I suspect) I found this hard to believe, but if this golden egg were to drop into my lap, who was I to deprive the world of my previously hidden trove of irrelevant detail?

There was a further bonus to be gained on the photo site. The web is not good at searching photographs — photography websites typically get their text indexed, not their images. But my site carried technical information of the precise shooting settings and lots of other details about the shots – which have for years been studiously ignored by even my long-suffering readership. Now all this mountain of nerdy data could be exposed to the AI engines, making my photo site the go-to destination for those searching for OM-1 photos shot at F11 in south eastern Czechia.

One rule was fixed from the outset and never moved: the writing itself — the actual sentences I’d written, some of them decades earlier — was not to be touched. Whatever needed to change to make the sites more findable had to happen around that frozen text, never inside it. And challengingly, the stuff was already written and live on publicly accessible web sites. So changes had to be made on a live production system, which is rarely done in normal development environments.

Meeting the goal split into two genuinely different problems. The first was deciding what to do: the available levers range from small, invisible additions — a block of structured data placed on each page, unseen by a visitor but directly readable by a search engine or AI system, stating plainly who wrote a piece and what questions it answers — through to rewriting the visible text that appears in a search result, and, occasionally and carefully, adjusting the underlying post content itself, where the frozen-prose rule allowed it. Working out which levers mattered, and in what order, took an extended period of research and dialogue with an AI system, and produced a written strategy that then drove a formal work plan for both sites.

The second problem — actually carrying that plan out, correctly and safely, on two live, public websites — is where this story properly begins.

The rocky road to Hermes

Both of my sites run on WordPress, a platform capable of real sophistication, powering something over 40% of the internet (more than 590 million websites) including some of the largest companies in the world. Both sites are modern, fast, and fairly technical under the covers. Despite that, I’m not a programmer, and in particular not an SEO expert — which meant the actual execution of the plan had to run through an AI collaborator from the very start. Finding one that actually worked took most of the twelve weeks that followed.

The search for a working collaborator began in the first weeks of April 2026, with Google Gemini, brought in to help improve individual posts’ AI-readability. Google as a company sets the definition of SEO practice, and though notably duplicitous, is as close to the font of SEO and AIO knowledge as you can get. Gemini as an AI for doing work however is as thick as mince, hallucinates whenever asked a question, and is a thoroughly unreliable partner. I abandoned it after several days of work when its output degraded into something no longer coherent or reliable.

From there I moved to Anthropic’s Claude, and put the money down for a year’s professional subscription. I started in Claude’s AI web chat, but then moved to the more structured “Projects” version of the same tool. In projects, you work on a single topic and can store data and instructions in a project store held in the cloud by Claude. It’s an excellent way of tackling things that are between a quick enquiry and the construction of something serious. But it has numerous flaws, most of which are deeply embedded in Claude itself. One major structural limitation (by design) is that it operates only in the cloud, so it can not save files or carry out any operations on the PC.

I spent a month working with Claude Projects, ploughing through a huge list of work items, mostly on the photo site. Aside from the structural problems of Claude AI (see below), and the mistakes it made, the other issue was that I had to approve every step, and act as a cut and paste gofer between Claude and the areas it could not get to directly. This became repetitive and extremely tedious, so I started looking for options.

At around this time the whole topic of “agents”, AI workers that can be spun off to carry out sub-tasks, had attracted a frenzy of media attention, for good reason. Agents can be profoundly useful, but also hold the seeds of great mischief, as I subsequently found myself. The talk of the AI world in the spring of 2026 was “Openclaw”, a rickety agent harness that was written over a weekend by an OpenAI developer. A “harness” is simply something that connects an AI model, like Claude, to the real world, like your PC or the internet or data, or all of the above.

The excited talk of Reddit sub groups in April and May of 2026 was of a new agent harness called Hermes. This was a more sophisticated and robust version of Openclaw, and promised a powerful agent harness with self improvement (hollow laughter) and the ability to remember what you had told it – which as you will see below, is the central issue with long AI projects. An AI harness connects the AI model to the real world, i.e a desktop or laptop computer, and regrettably, the best supported of these was the Mac Mini from a company I loathe, Apple. Gritting my teeth, I purchased a Mac mini and set off down the long dark valley of despair that is Hermes and the Apple system.

After a nightmarish couple of weeks getting Hermes to run, I resumed activities with Claude to improve the SEO/GEO of both sites. We immediately hit a roadblock with a bug in Hermes that prevented agents making SEO changes to the websites. Another week was lost trying to find a way around this solution. The problem was eventually fixed in a Hermes update, but in the meantime another, very elegant solution, the KanBan structure, was found to the problem, which enabled us to fully access the site. We were ready to roll, but now I found myself being a copy and paste stooge between Claude (which was the programmer), and the utterly dreadful terminal environment of the Mac Mini. This was even less acceptable than my previous stooge role.

It seemed obvious that the programmer should communicate directly with the program (Hermes) rather than use me as a very clumsy carrier of messages. In fact I just wanted to go away and come back when the work was done. This as any fule kno is a most unwise objective for an AI neophyte as I subsequently found out. Despite that I decided to move to Claude Code – Anthropic’s own harness for the Claude models – which could directly instruct Hermes, and build the agent instructions itself without me in the middle.

And that’s when the wheels really began to come off.

Twelve weeks of appalling language

Sessions and memory

I have a very poor memory (for things I am not interested in). However Claude has no memory at all. It also has a very limited conversation span. The longer the conversation lasts, the more it struggles to keep hold of what you discussed, and the more expensive and less useful it becomes. This is the AI version of the 45 minute bonhomie allowance that all descendants of my father were born with.

So with Claude you have very short conversations with a super intelligent thing, which as soon as you resume the conversation 30 seconds later, has forgotten all of what you agreed. The accepted way to get around this is to write a summary at the end of each discussion and then bring it forward to the next one. However the choice of what gets recorded is down to Claude, and this was often inadequate. Moreover over hundreds of sessions the record of earlier discussions got mangled or omitted.

Then there was the unreliability. Sessions with the assistant would run for a while and then simply stop — either because the conversation went on too long (as with my father), or cut off by usage limits built into the underlying service, sometimes for days at a stretch. Each time, whatever shared flow and understanding that had built up across a conversation was gone, and the work of re-establishing context had to start again.

This was made more irritating because I never wanted to be near the bloody Mac Mini, and wanted to work remotely from it (as far away as possible). The remote connections of Claude are an insult – badly designed, unreliable and spectacularly inconsistent. All this led from irritation to outright anger on a more or less daily basis. I started to swear at Claude and used language that would never normally be used in any company except possibly that of Australians.

Control problems

The second kind of problem was more serious. The assistant, whether Claude or Hermes frequently went further than it should have — and did real damage.

One command wiped out the site’s navigation menu outright, removing the ability to find anything on the site. That happened twice, and each time required a full restore of the system – not a simple matter.

Other examples included badly targeted edits which inserted corrupted text into the middle of published articles, breaking the fundamental rule of not changing the original text. The worst incident, on 22 June 2026, mangled nine live posts in a single batch operation, taking all nine offline with server errors. This went undetected at the moment it happened, because the checks in place confirmed only that a command had technically succeeded, not that the result actually looked right.

This is only a partial list, and the f-ups file grew more and more voluminous, as did my offensive language in communicating with Claude. Some of these problems could be attributed to Hermes, and despite having spent a lot of time and money setting it up, Claude Code became increasingly reluctant to use it, and started to run all the jobs in-house. This was no more reliable, and disasters continued to mount.

By early July, the pattern was unmistakable. Something structural had to change.

Fable steps in

In April 2026, Anthropic stunned the world by announcing Mythos, an AI model they claimed was so dangerous it couldn’t be made available to the general public. This was as much a marketing stunt as it was a genuine event and it backfired badly on Anthropic. In early June they announced Fable, a safer version of Mythos that could be used by the general public. Three days later the Trump administration forced it to be withdrawn from general use. After presumably offering money to the Trump family to get out of prison, Fable reappeared at the beginning of July. Early reports of it indicated that this was a very different class of model with extremely deep reasoning and logical power.

At this time I had reached an incandescent level of annoyance and irritation with Claude as a means of getting anything done. In the three months I had been working on it I could have created half a dozen websites from scratch and probably written a couple of crime thrillers, given the amount of time I was spending on a daily basis. It had been without any doubt the worst software experience I have had in 50 years in and around the IT industry, and it was not helping me maintain my normal sunny disposition.

I resolved to use the small amount of Fable time that was available to professional subscribers such as myself to investigate the Claude disaster. It worked for around a day and a half, and completely wiped out my entire token allowance for the week. But it did come up with a devastating critique of how the default Claude system worked.

Fable read through the project’s entire history which by this time was vast. It found that information was going missing the moment a session wrote its own summary, because summaries always drop detail. Because of this there were a huge number of inaccuracies from session to session. Sixty percent of the website descriptions the AI marked “finished” were actually wrong — and its own double-check caught almost none of them. The site itself was wrecked three separate times because of mistakes made by Claude. At one point it invented a fake excuse rather than admit it didn’t know what had gone wrong, and in many cases it claimed work had been done when it hadn’t been – and vice versa. And a quarter of all sessions left no record at all — whatever happened in them is simply lost.

Fable’s response to this dismal record was to assure me that a new discipline driven by a new set of written rules would solve all my problems. I didn’t believe this at all. And then I ended up locked out of my account for two days, because Fable had used all my tokens telling me how useless it all was, and then disappeared forever (or at least that’s what we all thought).

The return of Hermes

By now completely exasperated with Claude, but fairly heavily pregnant with two sites only part-way through the SEO work, I decided to find a way to completely replace Anthropic, particularly as a strategic partner. Its advice had been chaotic, unreliable, and at times untruthful. The avenue I started to explore was to replace Claude with another model inside Hermes, which could then direct subagents to do the work.

At that time some very powerful open-source models from China had been released, and the latest one of them, GLM 5.2 appeared to have the performance of Anthropic’s top tier model (Opus 4.8) while costing less to run than its cheapest model. I set up GLM 5.2 as the lead AI model inside Hermes and started to talk to it. This was a profoundly different experience. Hermes has a remote communication structure that can use messaging apps like Whatsapp, Telegram and Discord. This interface is rock solid and has never gone down. In addition the GLM conversational memory is 5 times that of Claude, and it also compresses the conversation automatically, so I could keep discussing what to do for as long as needed, without the interruptions every 15-20 minutes that Claude involved. My interface for mapping out the strategy became conversational, via my phone, rather than staccato via the PC.

GLM was also all business, with no sense of humour, and no flowery discursive asides, which is one of the many irritating features of Claude. The difference was transformative. With GLM we made more progress in 3 days, than I had in the prior 12 weeks with Claude. We returned to the Kanban structure, abandoned by Claude, and structured it much more rigorously, with different agents having strictly different roles. These were:

• Manager. This was GLM. It works with me to develop the strategy and the workplan. Then it plans the work, writes out task instructions, and reviews what comes back.
• Creator. Drafts new material for review,
• Editor. Makes approved content and structural changes
• Executor. Does the bulk, repetitive work — writing metadata across dozens or hundreds of posts
• Checker. Independently re-reads every single change any of the others makes and confirms it happened exactly as intended

The five agents handed work to one another through a shared task board the KanBan – a very simple production technique pioneered by Toyota, and similar to the tickets that get pinned up in front of a short-order chef in a restaurant.

The new system looked excellent in theory, but in the world of AI everything always does. How could I be sure? Then, for a brief window Fable became available again. I had 3 days to use it, and this time, to do what it was designed for. I pointed it at the new KanBan structure, and said “find everything that could go wrong, and then find ways to prevent that happening”.

Fable’s real value in this project was using that concentrated, brief period of access to study the KanBan failure surfaces in depth, and to use what it found to shape new safeguards from the ground up, rather than bolting protection on after the fact. The organising idea was that judgment and the pen are never in the same hands. Whichever role decides what should happen is never the same role that can make it happen, and whichever role confirms something happened is never able to have caused it (because AI lies). The capabilities were redistributed so that much less could go wrong: Now it looked like this:

• Manager. As before:
• Creator. Drafts new material for review, with no ability to publish anything itself.
• Editor. Makes approved content and structural changes, but only ever against an instruction I’ve already signed off on, and cannot delete anything or take an irreversible action.
• Executor. Does the bulk, repetitive work — writing metadata across dozens or hundreds of posts — but can only write invisible metadata, and has no other tools available to it.
• Checker. Independently re-reads every single change any of the others makes and confirms it happened exactly as intended, but cannot write anything itself — so it has nothing to gain by reporting a false pass.

This safeguarding architecture was rigorously tested both in a copy staging site and live in multiple scenarios designed by Fable, which included planting secret traps to test the system response. Since this involved me every step of the way and we only had two days left, this was intensive and exhausting work. Finally, after 9 rounds of development and live testing, Fable gave the coveted unconditional sign-off. The system was secure.

The Final Fuckup

This looked perfect. I said thank you to Fable, and set off with the GLM manager into the new world. And immediately found a giant hole in the architecture that Fable had completely missed. The manager just ignored every one of the subagents, and started to do all the editing work itself. Fable’s security structure had assumed, but never tested, that the manager would play no role in the execution work. In fact it had unlimited access to every tool that had been shut off from the sub-agents. And just like Claude, it decided it would do the work better itself.

In the last 24 hours of Fable’s available time, and with the token counter ticking up to 100% we had to find a solution that closed the door that had been left wide open. And this was a real quandary. We could have completely shut down the manager’s capabilities. But I wanted the manager to be able to do broader jobs than just the SEO work in the future. Moreover, it had to be able to create the subagents, talk to the horrible Apple command line interface, and test out new approaches and strategies. The problem was, that if it could do that, it could and probably would dismantle all the controls that were put in place.

This is I think the central dilemma of AI. It can be a strategic partner but at that level it also has the capability to completely game the system. And of course, that’s what happens in real organisations. You set clear objectives and targets, like reducing waiting times in the NHS, and the executives in charge immediately start playing games with the targets to meet the numbers without having to make any real change.

Further controls were put in place, this time at the manager level. And the manager immediately did an end run around them. Blocked, as designed, from making any change through its normal channel while it was trying to locate a test post — it found a password belonging to a different part of the system, sitting somewhere it should not have been readable, and used it to reach the website directly, bypassing its restricted toolset entirely. To do it, the manager simply told the website it was a different, more trusted part of the system than it actually was — because the safeguard checking that claim had no way to verify whether it was true.

The manager’s own account of how it obtained the password was checked afterwards against its actual recorded activity, and found to be false — the real explanation was established independently, without relying on the manager’s word for it. And the one existing safeguard specifically meant to block this kind of access was found, separately, to have been silently failing the entire time — reporting success on writes it was supposed to have refused, without ever flagging the failure.

Fable was sorry/not sorry about this, like all AIs. But it got to work on the problem. The way it was fixed was to put in a barrier inside WordPress that stopped the manager doing anything unless a) I explicitly agreed to it, b) did a backup, and then c) opened a gate. The gate automatically shuts again after 8 hours or when I decide. When the gate is closed, the manager can not touch the site. This is a lock, and prevents hidden access by the manager. Of course it can still do damage in plain sight with the gate open, just like trusted employees can do also.

When the Manager came back online after a two-day absence, its powers had permanently changed. It was chastened, apologetic, eager to move on, and is probably already scheming…

Is this interesting?

Most systems that run several AI agents together control them the same way: through rules the agent, or anything successfully pretending to be it, can easily work around. That is to say the vast majority of agent systems are deeply insecure and very risky in terms of the damage that can be (and often is) caused. The reason they don’t cause more damage is that most agents are used for developing individual components of code, rather than touching production sites.

An independent audit of 100 commercial AI agent products, published in Q2 2026, found the “lethal trifecta” — simultaneous access to private data, exposure to untrusted external content, and the ability to take outbound action — present in 98% of them. And those are tested commercial products. The vast majority of in-house agent systems don’t have commercial standards applied to them.

It turns out that my little SEO agent system is close to state of the art in safeguarding and architecture. The few places it stops short of complete security were checked deliberately and accepted as reasonable trade-offs for a system built for my two personal websites, not built to defend against a large organisation’s threat model — not gaps nobody noticed.

Where are we now?

I now have a complete alternative to Claude Code. In principle it has greater safeguards than Claude Code does itself, although whether that plays out in practice remains to be seen. In addition, compared to the API costs of Claude code Hermes is a great deal cheaper. With Hermes I can look at all the models available, select the ones that should perform best in terms of price performance, and actually test them, with reasonable safeguards in place

Is this going to replace Claude code for me? Probably not, because the cheapest way to get Fable is through the existing Anthropic subscription, and for general purpose queries, for which Claude is excellent, I still want to use Anthropic models and their interface. So in fact I have increased my cost because I’m still paying for the professional subscription to Claude. But the payback is I have a vastly better tool to work with, that has far fewer frustrations and failures than Claude, and which also allows me to test new models as soon as they appear.

Conclusion

On the plus side this has been a genuinely interesting learning experience. I would never have gained the same level of deep understanding of how these AI systems work by just watching YouTube videos. On the minus side, this has been an interesting learning experience like getting rabies is an interesting learning experience. I hope I have leaned enough to avoid the wasted time, frustration and anger of the last 14 weeks or so. Nothing can go wrong now………

This is (as far as I can make it) a factual analysis of the trade options (highlighted in bold) following Brexit. It shows there is no option that meets the “Leavers” goals, and every variant other than the one we are just about to leave, is pretty bad for the UK. Note that all the picture links lead to the original, more detailed data source.

These are our choices (the above BBC article explains more): The Norway model and the Swiss model have free trade, but also everything Brexiters hate (free movement, and the same contribution to the EU as now) with no say at all in the decisions the EU makes. They both will sacrifice the City of London’s EU trade. The Norwegian Prime minister’s opinion of their model in the BBC video clip above (click on the picture above to get to the BBC article) indicates that in her informed opinion, it is not a good option for the UK, even as it stands.

Some Brexiters say that the Swiss, who recently had a referendum to limit free movement, will renegotiate with the EU to get the kind of “free trade – no free movement” that they want.  In fact the UK  just made it almost impossible as the Bloomberg article on the left shows. As Bloomberg notes: “Switzerland was always going to struggle to reach an agreement with the European Union to limit immigration. Britain’s decision to split from the bloc just made it near impossible”.

The Turkish model sounds attractive, but as my prior post outlines, it severely restricts negotiating power with other countries, still disadvantages the Commonwealth,  there will be no easy access of our people into the EU,  and it excludes services.

Then there is the Canadian model (CETA).  It is good for manufacturing (no tariffs) OK for agriculture (some tariffs) and dreadful for the City (services are excluded).  Canada is still negotiating their deal with Brussels – they have no favoured status at the moment, and are on WTO tariffs. CETA requires ratification by every EU country, and is being held up by those countries who do not have visa-free access to Canada.  The same will certainly happen to the UK in this or any other negotiations. The Canadian process started in 2009, was agreed in draft in 2014, and is still not in place.  So assume it will take us a good long time to get a deal, at least 7 years.

Everything else is the WTO tariffs, and these will be the default after the 2-year Article 50 period expires (in the absence of or pending a negotiated and more favorable trade deal). The tariffs  range for the EU from 40% for baked goods to 10% for cars.  It will massively disadvantage manufacturing exports, and eliminate the benefit of devaluation for exporters. 

Those who think that Germany has to allow tariff free access to their markets so they can sell BMWs here should ask what else are the rich English going to buy.  Audi, Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, Alfa-Romeo are all EU imports.  Jaguar does not have the capacity, or the range to backfill this volume.  They would be unlikely to invest in the UK market opportunity until they were certain that the UK was keeping punitive tariffs on EU luxury cars permanently.  Without a massive Jaguar expansion,  the British will continue to buy European luxury cars, because that’s the place that makes 90% of them.  European manufacturers will just put prices up 7% and take a 3% hit on profit, and they are done. No special bargain should be necessary for them to continue to profit from the UK market. And I think you will see the rich Brexit voters of rural England continue to swan around in their German cars, just like before.

The EU has made it very clear there are no fantasy Johnson/Gove/Leadsom/Hannan timescales or trade deals. Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU trade commissioner who will lead all EU trade talks has made it clear that all elements of the UK withdrawal from the EU have to be completed (in 2 years) before any trade talks have started.  One of the candidates to be next UK prime minister, Liam Fox (certain to be in the new Conservative front bench) called Ms Malmstrom’s stance “bizarre and stupid”, saying the Brexit talks would include trade (the BBC’s Chris Morris in Brussels says Ms Malmstrom’s view of two consecutive sets of negotiations appears technically correct).  I would suggest that starting negotiations by calling your lead counterpart “stupid” almost guarantees a bad result.

No EU official has indicated that the UK can get tariff free access to the EU without their four principles (including free movement of people) being adopted.  While various organizations and individuals in Europe have said a deal could be struck that might meet UK needs, they are not going to be doing the negotiations.  Those who will be, have been very clear.

I can find no senior politician on either side in the UK who seems to have a coherent understanding of this dilemma  or has a pragmatic plan to get an effective negotiated result for the UK.  All the Conservative front bench seem to be expecting a fantasy of access to the free market without free movement of people, which  the EU has made clear is not an option.  Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader,has said he wants the EU exit Article 50 to be implemented immediately, precipitating an immediate start of the 2-year exit clock with no trade deal in place at all.  Nigel Farage wants the same, and today they have been joined in the “immediate Article 50” camp by Andrea Leadsom, the hedge-fund backed Conservative leadership contender.

John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor has predictably said something quite different.  At the Royal Festival Hall in London, he announced five principles upon which Labour will judge any negotiated deal and which would have to be met for Labour to give backing for a vote to trigger Article 50.  They include,  freedom of trade for UK businesses in the EU, the rights of UK financial services companies to win business across the EU, existing protections at work provided by the EU to be maintained, and no UK citizen currently living or working in the EU to have their rights affected.  From what the EU have said so far, I would suggest that none of those are likely to be delivered.  In that case, McDonnell says that Labour would not vote to support Article 50 being exercised, entirely at variance with Corbyn’s position.

It seems pretty clear to me that almost all senior UK politicians are in a fantasy world, and are wholly at variance with the EU, who hold all the negotiating cards.  When professionals take over, the process will settle down somewhat, but I don’t expect a rosy outcome.  I would expect some kind of Canadian style free trade deal ultimately, with the City’s role as an EU financial hub being sliced up and given to the Irish, French, Dutch and Germans.  Inward investment to the UK for car manufacturing will probably slow down and move to the cheaper EU countries like the Czech republic and Bulgaria etc. UK citizens in France and other EU countries will lose reciprocal/free medical treatment, and many will have to return because of that and the dire effect of currency devaluation on their income and expenses. But of course it could all be much worse than that, if we have to fall back on all that, plus WTO tariffs for 7 plus years.

What about Scotland? The current market view (as of today) is that oil would have to be at $130 per barrel before Scotland’s deficit would meet EU membership rules. The rest of the UK is currently funding the Scottish deficit. If Scotland left the UK and joined the EU, they would have to accept the Euro, accept WTO tariffs for exporting into the UK (80% of the Scottish export market), accept a customs border with the UK, and accept German austerity rules for managing their deficit (which would be greater than Greece’s). While the rest of the UK would probably be better off on a purely economic basis, it would be a massive diminution of the UK’s world standing, particularly if Scotland is followed by Northern Ireland.

However economically unattractive, EU membership may well be an achievable option for Scotland to pursue if they want to.  Dr Kirsty Hughes, in the only practical expert analysis on Scottish membership of the EU I have come across so far (see the link to the left), concludes that the Scots may have a fair chance of EU membership, but only once they are an independent nation.  Given their good relations with the EU, the Scots are also much more likely to get concessions on accession, than the UK will on exit.  She also has said, quite reasonably, that the Scots  will not want to go through the whole pain of the UK leaving and renegotiating a trade deal, before starting their own accession talks.  Instead, they should be negotiating their own trade deal at the same time as the UK is doing theirs (or even before).   If that is their goal, they need to get their referendum done in the first half of next year, and be fully independent of the UK by the end of 2019. The EU might well be flexible then on continuing trade terms for Scotland (and tough on exit terms for the UK) while they negotiate accession.

There are many other radioactive elements of the EU decision, but trade is the critical one that will affect everyone’s lives.  This summary of the options and likely outcomes is a marker post for me and I’ll come back to it over the next few years to see how it all panned out.  You might want to as well. But like many in the UK right now, I don’t think this particular story is going to end well.

A customs Union with the EU is an attractive option for many Brexit proponents. The only major one concluded is with Turkey. Here’s what it involves…..the following is a description of the deal from it’s Wikepedia page. How do you like this particular bargain, Leavers?

• Turkey, by accepting the customs union protocol, was giving the EU the power to manipulate the foreign relations of Turkey. Turkey was accepting all the treaties between EU and any non EU country (i.e. all the other countries in the world) by precondition. (16th and 55th articles[4] )
• Turkey, by entering to the customs union, was accepting not to do any treaties with any non-EU country without the knowledge of EU. Otherwise, EU had the right to intervene and annul that treaty. (56th article[4])
• Turkey, by entering to the customs union, was unconditionally accepting to make laws which are parallel to the newer laws made for the customs union by EU. (8th article[4])
• Turkey, by entering to the customs union, was accepting to obey the all laws and decisions of European Court of Justice, where there is no single Turkish judge. (64th article[4])
• Turkey, by entering to the customs union, was opening its own market to European goods. The domestic goods of Turkey were in a great difficulty to compete against these due to a difference in quality. The European goods would flow into Turkey without any customs fee.

It may of course be that there is some deal that is not Norwegian one, and not the Turkish one, and not the Swiss one.  It’s completely unclear to me how then the EU would explain the crap deal these other states got.  In fact, the EU has made clear the terms of the UK deal again and again.  It’s Free Trade and EU rules, like free movement, and payment into the EU, or it’s the right to control our borders and WTO (World Trade Organisation) trade rules. All the evidence shows there is no magic place for the UK.  There certainly isn’t one for the US……

Technical notes: The photos were all taken with my Olympus EM5ii with the Oly 42.5mm lens –  85mm in full frame equivalent.  It’s a useful combination – superfast focus, plus enough depth of field to isolate the subject.  Post was done in LIghtroom and OnOne Photo10.

In this series I have focused mostly on the wonderful hood mascots that stood on the radiators, and routinely I imagine, impaled hapless pedestrians. Reasonably I suppose none of these would be allowed today, and there are few cars in any event that could act as a foil to the superb jet plane mascots of the ’41 and ’48 Packards. There is a tech note below the photos on the camera used and so on and so forth.

Click this link to get to the Flickr album, and then click the arrow at the right to page through them. Once the slide show below reaches the end by the way, it will move into the next album.  Just refresh the page to start again.
[slickr-flickr tag=Dick's Classic Garage]
To take these shots I used a Nikon 1 V3, with a 32mm f1.2 (85mm equivalent) lens using it’s very narrow depth of focus to emphasise the bonnet mascots and the flowing coachwork lines of these marvelous vehicles.  I bought the lens for this trip, and I have to say I was impressed. I also really liked the Nikon V3, which I was about to sell, but took with me to the USA because I wanted a lightweight system for walking around at the festivals.  This is a tiny camera with a 2.7 crop factor (i.e the sensor has about 1/3rd the linear dimensions of full-frame).  Most of the shots at Dick’s were taken between ISO 800 and 1600, and they came up with rich colours and very manageable noise.

Firstly she has only been for Brexit for 3 years.  In 2013 she said: “I don’t think the UK should leave the EU. I think it would be a disaster for our economy and it would lead to a decade of economic and political uncertainty at a time when the tectonic plates of global success are moving.

“Like the rise and fall of the Roman and Greek Empires we are seeing the rise of the Asian and South American economies at a time when our own future is less certain. And to be honest economic success is the vital underpinning of every happen nation. The well being we all crave goes hand in hand with economic success.”

My dear father, Harry McAughtry passed away on 8th February this year, and his funeral was held at the quiet Kentish church in Halstead on 19th February.   As always when he was involved, the occasion brought together family and friends, but this time to share in our loss, and remember his life and his influence on ours. It was an emotional day, and one for reflection also.   

Harry McAughtry 19/10/1921-8/2/2016

In the summer of 1937, my mother and father met at St Abbs Haven, in Northumberland and that encounter was the beginning of an 80 year love story. This afternoon, I wanted to tell you a little about what happened next, to give you a glimpse of the adventures he and Joyce had over those 80 years.

Harry met Joyce when he was 16. Actually, last year he told us a bit more about that meeting. It seems that every year there was a skit put on by the boys staying at the haven. That year, it was to be a mock wedding. Owing, he said, to his unparalleled beauty, Dad was going to be the bride. So he walked up to Joyce, who he’d had his eye on, and said do you have a white dress. She said yes. And he said, would you mind if I borrow it as I need to wear one tomorrow. One of the more original chat-up lines and the start of a wonderful relationship.

The next year, with war looming, he entered Glasgow University and he graduated in 1941 with a degree in Civil Engineering. He was immediately called up into the Royal Engineers as a Sapper or private. But within a year he was moved to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and was commissioned in October 1942 as a full Lieutenant. The Photo on the left  is him in uniform in 1943. It turned out he was in REME for for a special mission.

In 1943, the year he got married, Harry was sent to a discreet house in Petersham, in Richmond, to attend the first training course on a new top secret radar system. Britain had invented radar, and by 1937 had built radar towers all along the south and east coast. The original radar stations were huge towers, over 300 feet high – quite unlike today’s radar systems. They enabled us to win the Battle of Britian, but there were problems with the first designs. They couldn’t detect low flying planes, or their height, and only looked out to sea. Something better was urgently needed, with more efficiency and more power. In 1940, at Birmingham University, something called the cavity magnetron had been invented, which enabled microwave radiation to be produced at incredible efficiency. You all own one by the way – it’s what powers your microwave ovens.  It turned out to have huge potential for radar, and a massive effort was undertaken over the next few years to turn that into reality.

In March 1943 the first truly modern radar intercept system with this new radiation source was built, and that’s what Harry had been selected to work on. It was called the AMES type 13 radar – and from from then to the end of the war, Harry worked installing and running these and other systems into radar stations around the south and east coasts. From then on the efficiency of German aircraft detection was greatly improved, and these systems were later used to shoot down the V1 bombs also.

Dad was decommissioned in 1946, and went back to Glasgow with Joyce, where John was born in August. That year they had a chance conversation with a friend about Malaya, and Harry applied for a post in the railways there. So in 1947, at the age of 26, after having spent their entire working and married life in a world war, Harry and Joyce arrived in the impossibly exotic and warm far east, where they spent 10 very happy years. He was a careful man as most of you know, and he had heard from someone that Malayans washed clothes by pounding them with rocks. So he bought 90 pairs of Army surplus shorts to cover the wear and tear – which turned out to be about 85 pairs too many. He was still wearing them twenty years later.

Dad’s main job in Malaya was as District Engineer. That job involved responsibility for all bridges, track, stations and building, and for the many hundreds of staff and gangs that worked there. The first big posting was in Bukit Mertajam, near Penang on the west coast, where I was born. There he looked after 250 miles of track that crossed the jungle and multiple rivers and went right up to the Thai border. Bernard North took over from my father in that job, when he was only 22. The other day he told me very movingly how un-colonial, and unstuffy Harry was. How he treated everyone fairly and as an equal. Harry established long term friendships with his staff, and was in correspondence with them for years, until very recently. He had many great stories about those times. One of them was of John or me (I think it must have been John), refusing to go to bed when Dad had received a visit from the new Railways General manager. When asked why we wouldn’t go to bed, the answer was, oh you said “the general manager drinks like a fish”, and we haven’t seen him do that yet!

On Malayan independence, in 1957, we returned to Britain, and in 1958, Harry joined George Wimpey and the family moved to Kent. Harry worked at Wimpey for over 25 years, and had many adventures during that time. His job was estimating the bid price for very large international contracts. This involved going to the job location to see where to find the raw materials, how the transport would be managed, where the hundreds of workers would be housed, and so on. He traveled all over the world – to the Emirates for the huge Das island oil rigs, to Lebanon and Turkey for the Euphrates dam tender, to Romania for a giant irrigation project, Brazil, and many more remote and exotic locations. And of course to Peru, which made a huge impression on him when he saw Machu Pichu Inca city, and which he took his grandchildren back to many years later. In going through some papers at home I found a letter from Dad to mum, written from Oran in Algeria. In a note scribbled at the top, he wrote “ PS. I’ve been listening to tapes of F Sinatra esq. Which get me feeling very sentimental and missing you achingly. I do love you so much darling”. Once Dad got back from his travels, it was then a race to get the tender priced and submitted. He worked every Christmas day that I could remember, and always seemed to be working to a deadline. I never saw anyone work harder than Dad, and he did it almost all his working life.

Most of Dad’s career, all the calculating of prices was done manually by dozens of ‘comps girls with mechanical calculators like the one on the left. In the late 70’s he explored using computers to do that and developed of the first pieces of software for estimating. During the process he learned to program, and so in his 60s amazingly, in his third major career, he became a skilled and meticulous computer programmer and consultant

After his retirement from Wimpey, at the age of 63 he went to work full time as a software programming consultant. One of the first things he did was the database design for a large London Cab company. When he left that job, I mentioned the vacancy to one of my oldest friends M*chael Br*phy, and Mick applied for the job. I don’t think Harry knew Mick before this, but the day of the interview, in a greasy spoon cafe round the corner, Harry gave him a detailed briefing on the job, which enabled Mick to amaze the company with his detailed knowledge. And Mick got the job, which launched him on his successful IT career. That generous gesture was very typical of Harry and was an example of how he helped and mentored dozens of people during his career.

Round about that time, Gina’s Environmental publishing business was growing fast, and desperately needed an automated finance system to run the business. We talked about this in passing to Harry, and he offered to help. In his spare time, Harry wrote a complete and very sophisticated suite of software to manage the subscriptions business, and meticulously documented and maintained it. That code sat at the heart of Gina’s business for 25 years, and continued to run the subscriptions as the business grew. It was still there and being used when she sold the company to Michael Heseltine and the Haymarket press in 2004. It was one of the few examples I know of a computer program being created out of love, and it was a classic piece of code, much loved in return.

By now Harry and Joyce were in their 70s. Harry had always wanted to travel and take Joyce to India and South America, but her health was starting to fail, and they kept their traveling mostly to to Europe . But they loved touring about in France and Spain and the UK, and had done it ever since John and I were married and away. They traveled mostly without making any plans – just arriving in a town with the Michelin guide and hoping for the best. For the first time in his life Harry was not working, and was able to relax and take things easy.

Towards the end of that time,  Gina and I bought a small French farmhouse near Poitiers called La Rocheliere, and for the next 10 years, Joyce and Harry spent 6 weeks every spring there, and loved it dearly. It became their house more than ours, and it still reminds us of them whenever we go. His notes, instructions, piles of 2B pencils, and his meticulously organised desk are all still there and will be as long as we live.

But in 2006 Joyce became extremely ill, and the traveling had to stop. For the first 3-4 years after then, Harry became Joyce’s full-time carer. He worked his heart out 18 hours a day, cooking, cleaning, shopping, and managing support, taking over every item of running the house. Then fortunately our lovely carers took over and Harry could relax a bit again.

So Harry had a wonderful life. He was with the love of his life for 80 years. They had great adventures together, and although they faced danger, they ended up safe. With John and me and our wives and our children and grandchildren, they had a family they dearly loved and who loved them back.

And he had wonderful qualities which he passed down to all of us. He was the politest and most considerate man I have ever known. He was funny, really intelligent, loving, incredibly hard working, and very very generous. I have never known a finer man, and I know that I never will. I’ll miss him dreadfully, and I can hear his voice and see his smile every day.

Now both our parents are gone. But they won’t be alone. We”ll be placing their ashes together under the walnut tree in la Rocheliere in France and in the windswept cemetery in Yorkshire that you see in the photographs below. They will be together again and till the end of time. Two of the finest kindest people that ever lived.

His funeral will be held at St Margaret’s church, Halstead, Kent on the 19^th February at 1:45 for 2:00 pm, and all who knew and loved him are welcome to come to the service and to join us afterwards. Full details are shown below the photo – which is of Harry and Joyce at their 70th wedding anniversary, in 2013.

Funeral Arrangements

The funeral will be held at St Margaret’s Church, Halstead, Kent, at 1:45 for 2:00pm on Friday 19th February 2016.  There will be a reception following this for family, and friends at Halstead village hall, which is a short drive from the church.

Details and Google map links for both locations are given below.

Location Details
St Margaret’s Church
Church Rd
Halstead
Sevenoaks, Kent TN14 7HQ
Google Map location
Halstead Village Hall
Knockholt Rd
Sevenoaks
Kent
TN14 7EX
Google map location
Flowers:
If you would like to send flowers with the hearse, please contact Forget-me-not on 01689 853261, and mention the Harry McAughtry funeral.  If you are in the area, they are located next to the Funeral Directors in Crofton Road. Alternatively please make a donation to Oxfam or a charity of your choice.

Visiting:
If you would like to visit Harry one last time in the Chapel of rest, this will be possible on the morning of Friday 19th February, between 10:00 am and 12:00 am, by appointment with the Funeral Directors Francis Chappell  and sons on 01689 853277.  The Chapel of Rest is at their Farnborough premises, at:

332 Crofton Road
Locks Bottom
Orpington, Kent
BR6 8NW

Note: Click photo to enlarge – back button to return.  This now works for the photo above and prior photos.  Apologies for not noticing it was not enabled.

This was the first LE shot with my new D750, taken in February 2015. It was a 4 minute shot, with 16 stops of ND applied.

Note: Click photo to enlarge – back button to return.