Watching Garden rescue for a couple of oldies with steps up to garden. New plan still has steps. Why not include a gentle ramp to make life easier? Garden did look nice after makeover.

Warmer than I thought this morning. Had these for over 40 years from a garden then. They have never been particularly happy here because of the shade but I moved them to a veg bed. 😊 I would guess they were from Kelways.

ORCAS! The highlight for guests (and guides!) on our @shetlandwild tour last week. We watched this pod in Quendale Bay and on reviewing images and footage, the Scottish KW Photo ID team (Karen Munro, Saana Isojunno, Karen Hall and myself) matched them to encounters off Oban and Ardnamuchan in western Scotland a week earlier! @Seasaver @NLFerries @saana_is @kasmunro @kazcustard @Shetnews

This is what a tick looks like after a full feast ! Ps it wasn’t me it was feasting on - hope you’ve already had your tea 🤢 away to respray all gear 😵‍💫🫣😂 (in all seriousness please check for ticks - it’s not nice getting Lyme …..

What’s in it for Iberdrola the Spanish company who own MachairWind? A government-guaranteed, inflation-linked revenue stream from 2GW of offshore wind. Their own annual report calls it “delivering shareholder value.” What’s in it for Scotland? £25m supply chain fund (UK-wide), up to £500 community grants, and a Community Benefit Fund with no confirmed amount, structure, or legal binding “to be determined over the coming months and years.” In return: 91 turbines up to 335m high. Electricity to Kilmarnock and Wales. Profits to Bilbao. An irreversible change to one of Europe’s most celebrated Atlantic seascapes. Crown Estate Scotland leases the seabed. Iberdrola builds the turbines. The electricity goes south. The profits go to Spain. Alastair McIntosh: “All else is colonisation of the common good.” Who is this for?

🚨 JUST IN: ​FIFA, acting on orders from the US, has canceled tickets allocated for Iranian fans at the World Cup. ​And they said the US was the land of freedom?

Priorities

This made me laugh out loud! I have saved it for the 6 y o

Privatisation doesn't create competition. The free market doesn't lower prices. All it does is degrade the service because the profits go to shareholders and company execs, not back into the business for improvement. All the selling points of privatisation are fucking lies.

HOW BRITAIN REWARDS PEOPLE WHO TRY TO SAVE TAXPAYER MONEY: FIRE THEM Mike Kiely spent 22 years inside BT (@BTGroup). He knew how the telecoms industry operated. So when the government hired him as a consultant to oversee the £2.5 billion rural broadband rollout, he knew exactly what he was looking at. BT had won all 26 government contracts. All of them. Kiely did the maths. Installing a street cabinet in Northern Ireland cost around £13,000. On the mainland, BT was charging the government between £61,000 and £80,000 per cabinet. Public money covered roughly 77% of every single one. He suspected BT was simply inventing tasks and inflating charges to absorb as much public funding as possible without doing more work. So he shared his analysis with local councils. The people whose job it was to negotiate these contracts and spend public money responsibly. Then his document leaked to a broadband blog. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport trawled his internal emails, found what they needed, and sacked him. The man who tried to protect public money. Margaret Hodge (@margarethodge), chair of the Public Accounts Committee, told the Guardian (@guardian) she was getting increasingly concerned at the way whistleblowers were being bullied. She pointed out that hiding behind commercial confidentiality was denying the public the right to know how their money was being spent. Her committee later confirmed what Kiely had warned all along. Taxpayers had been ripped off. £1.2 billion had gone to BT shareholders. Kiely was eventually vindicated when a community in Oxfordshire paid £28,000 per cabinet. Exactly in line with what his numbers predicted was fair. He lost his job for telling the truth. BT kept every contract. This is what accountability looks like in Britain. The consultant who raises the alarm gets sacked. The company he raised the alarm about gets the cheque. Support whistleblowers. They are the only audit most public spending ever gets. SOURCES @BBCNews @TheRegister @guardian @margarethodge

Just been out to check G/H as forecast here for tonight is 7C. Turned heater on. Midsummer a week away.

Jamie Mann and Petra Matijevic have examined all of the known offshore entities in the Land Register and checked whether they have made a declaration on who controls them in the RCI. In results that are both shocking and unsurprisingly they found that two thirds (956) of the 1447 offshore entities that own Scottish land registered in the Land Register have failed to register a recorded person or any associates. 2/7 theferret.scot/offshore-land…

Why should our flora and fauna have their homes destroyed ! it makes more sense that we as a nation preserve our ancient woodlands, and areas that are unique like Penrhos! How many parts of the uk have trees meeting the shoreline, red squirrels , little egrets, mistle thrush , viola odorata in one area ? So why was penrhos sold like it was just a bit of wasteland? Why was planning given ? Oh right jobs… well in 15 yrs it hasn’t created a single job yet! But if we as a community buy Penrhos we could conserve,protect ,enhance and ensure penrhos was safe in perpetuity. Join our fight for Nature #SavePenrhos #AchubPenrhos 📸Shirley Blease

Nigel’s poster is going viral

Listening to BBC Moneybox just now. Re rented housing, nobody seems to mention the rise in private landlords from about Y2K when interest rates were crap, mortgages cheap and it made sense then to buy somewhere and rent it out for a better return.

Authentic testimonial

Britain has cleared its uplands twice before. We are most of the way through the third, and almost nobody has said the word out loud. The first was enclosure. Across the 1700s and 1800s, act by act, the common land that ordinary families had grazed for generations was fenced off and signed over to private owners. Millions of acres. A cottager with a pig and a cow on the common went to bed a commoner and woke up a trespasser, his animals grazing land that now belonged to the big house. The second was the Highland Clearances. Families were burned out of their glens and put on ships, because a hillside of sheep paid the landlord better than a hillside of people. Whole valleys went silent. Walk far enough today and you can still find the rooftrees lying in the heather. The third is happening now, and it arrives in a green coat. The hill farmer is squeezed out by carbon money, by tree-planting targets, by schemes that pay him to keep fewer animals, by land-use plans that quietly file his fields under surplus. A drinks company buys the glen to cancel out its emissions. The valley empties on schedule. Only the cover story is new. Enclosure was sold as improvement. The Clearances were sold as progress. This one is sold as saving the planet. Notice what does not change. The same families lose the land. The same hills fall quiet. The same large interests end up owning the ground, and the same comfortable people, a safe distance away, explain why it was all regrettably necessary. History rarely repeats itself exactly. It just keeps clearing the uplands, and reaching for the kindest available word to do it.

I wrote to @FCDOGovUK Minister of State, the honourable @HFalconerMP, demanding that the UK Government ban the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event”, scheduled to take place in London on 14 June 2026. The event promotes the sale of property in Israel’s illegal settlements built on occupied Palestinian land. Such activities constitute flagrant violations of international law and are in direct contradiction of the UK’s own long-standing policy and obligations under UN Security Council Resolution 2334. The UK must not allow individuals, companies or charities to promote or profit from activities linked to illegal settlements.

I’m with Carole .. I feel about you about the same as the audience of HIGNFY felt last week. You were totally outed for all the back stabbing lying traitorous behaviour you’ve been responsible for over the years

Utterly absurd, and an abuse of the judicial process for political ends. And at the urging of the Israeli lobby. The Government could have stopped this absurdity: they did not. Another reason, I’m afraid, why I can never vote Labour again.