Russell and Carol - hayle and hearty

From the Guardian
Phoney and Boney
guardian.co.uk, Thursday September 9 2010
In December the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) reported that, between 2000 and 2006, UK 15-year-olds fell from seventh to 17th place internationally in reading skills, and from eighth to 24th place in mathematics. Now we learn from the OECD (Report, 7 September) that between 2000 and 2008 Britain's graduation rates fell from third to 15th.

According to Nick Clegg's pledge: Conservative pact is for one term only | Politics | The Guardian

Nick Clegg . . . urged his party to take a leaf out of the Tory right's book by communicating unhappiness about illiberal policies.

Mr B's were holding a Macmillan Coffee morning

Please come and support our Macmillan Coffee morning on Friday 24th September. We'll be making loads of Coffee ice creams and a couple of fruity tea sorbets. There will be a raffle and other cakey type things to help raise money from 10.30am until 5.30pm

with lots of coffee flavoured ice creams and cakes, it was a beautiful day, so we thought we'd best do our bit for charity and check it out ;)

Fabulous

The floods in mid-Cornwall on Wednesday have caused a lot of pain to a lot of people but I was struck by this very beautiful picture or the car park at Respryn from NTDevonCornwall

Then there's a rather different picture....

Having been castigated for failing to uphold the right to peaceful protest at the G20 demonstrations, it seems the Met has learnt nothing, except that if you arrest people and take them to the police station there's a lot of paperwork and solicitors, whereas if you simply kettle people in a small area on a bridge you don't have to bother with any due process of law, provision of basic facilities, paperwork or bothersome solicitors and legal rights.

But then presumably the kettled protesters were particularly virulent and violent - the authors of this letter are

Rhodes professor of imperial history, Kings College London
Reader in international relations, University of Cambridge
Professor of history and public policy, University of Cambridge

How's that? Not violent protesters?  Surely the Met didn't make a mistake? Surely they ensured full compliance with the law

Letters: No explanation was offered for what amounted to mass internment, in very dangerous circumstances, of a crowd of demonstrators

As part of the comment on the cot death storyline in Eastenders Giles Fraser had an article in The Guardian with a very interesting quote

For there is no version of "it is going to be all right" that can work in circumstances such as these - nothing religious, no homespun wisdom about time being a great healer, no kindly meant distraction. Few people have the confidence to walk empty-handed into the pain of another and be prepared to do nothing other than accompany them in their grief.

So, the News of the World phone hacking saga drags on.... and then reading about Andy Gray being a sexist pillock you come across:

The ricin plot continues to thicken slowly from

Two more interesting letters today from:

While Simes was here, we introduced him to Formula which Shaun had introduced us to at Christmas - though Jed started it all! - we loved it so much we decided we needed a copy!