I hope that all this blog’s readers had a very happy Christmas and Chanukka if that’s your thing. I’m back but I’ve not yet run out of wine. I have been lucky to have found a bit of a viniculture treasure in Aldi, at £3.29 it’s the cheapest most drinkable red wine I’ve had since I purchased three litres of homebrewed red served in a recycled vegetable oil bottle, from a stallholder in Southern Spain many years ago. It’s a most acceptable rotgut which appeals to my frugal side.

Also appealing to my frugal side and appearing in the servants quarters of Fahrenheit Towers are the produce that the supermarkets and ourselves over-ordered, namely Sprouts. Therefore I took 2lb of Sprouts, boiled them to buggery mashed them up and gently cooked them after liquidising with sweated onions, vegetable stock and 1/2 lb of Stilton. This soup seems to have been a success, for those who like Stilton that is. What’s left has been frozen in portion blocks for later.

I went to see some of those close to me who live in one of the UK’s worst Labour run shitholes. It’s a place where those who did not get out in time when the writing started to appear on the wall, now have to suffer a council that wastes money hand over fist on identity politics and green rubbish whilst doing nothing to prevent the stabbing and shooting fraternity from operating nor stopping Roma thieves from pickpocketing all and sundry. A visit there is I consider the ultimate deterrent from any temptation of voting for the Labour Party.

I was nervous about going away for a few days longer than usual as I’d left the chickens running free in their new DEFRA standard Avian Influenza proof chicken POW camp (complete with CCTV). I knew the old run was secure but since I acquired more chickens the old run became too small so I built a larger mesh covered one. I was a bit concerned that I had not made it predator proof enough but everything was OK. The chickens were fine and there was no need for me to don a Kimono, pick up a baseball bat and batter a Fox to death.

On the subject of our feathered friends, one of the season’s traditional food is making me wonder whether to try to raise some turkeys in 2023? I’ve been doing some reading up and they are more troublesome than chickens as young turkey’s seem to have an inbuilt desire to find out just how many ways they can die, including starving to death if they don’t like the food that’s given. Therefore I’ll be getting off heat growers that are the survivors of the fittest of the Turkey babies, the ones that did not win turkey Darwin Awards and going with that. Got to roof over the meat poultry run with tarpaulins as turkey’s hate rain and it can make them sick. Turkeys can also pick up parasites from chickens so that means the meat pen will need to be properly sterilised prior to acquiring turkeys. With turkeys and another run of Frankenchickens next year it looks like I’m going to need a bigger freezer.

On the gardening front I have decided to see if I can grow spinach and peas in pots on shelves on the fence I’m building that separates the lawn from the ‘technical area’ where the compost bin, useful junk and other unsightly crap lives. I need to use as much available vertical space for food production as possible as the area of the garden that I would normally use for veg is taken up by poultry. I think that if I offset and step the shelves then I might be able to ensure that all the plants get enough light. I am also considering using Israeli style leaky tube watering arrangements to both make watering the vertically mounted pots less of a bind and also to avoid wasting water as because I acquired fifty feet of hosepipe from a skip I can try to do this without much outlay.

Also on the subject of food and drink I’m going to have a go at brewing some cider in 2023. I did beer brewing years ago and made bitter, lager and barley wine so I should be able to manage cider from apple concentrate. If it works I might make another batch for Jewish New Year but with honey taking the place of some, if not all, because of cost, of the dextrose / brewing sugar, as apples combined with honey is traditional at this time.

As for the writing side of things I’m going to try to turn out minimum of two articles per day (barring other calls on time such as Laughing Boy flooding the bathroom again) but also post long form posts once a week. Because I don’t physically post on Saturdays for obvious reasons I might post long form articles written earlier via a timer on a Saturday. I might well bring back the Friday Night Movie strand as it was popular but I doubt it will be weekly, more like fortnightly or monthly as I rarely get spare time to watch the movies before I put them up, these days, some days I barely have time to write, especially with Laughing Boy about to start mountaineering lessons (it scares the shit out of me seeing him climb). I will also be doing some general tidying up around the place so bear with me on that. Things might get weird (or weirder).

I’m also going to try to find the time to have some fun with some junk I’ve acquired namely a NATO helicopter headset which I believe should work with one of the CB radios in the car if I craft a suitable adaptor. The only thing I’m concerned about with this is whether the headsets acoustic dampening that’s geared for use in a helicopter might be too much for use in a car? I might not hear all those pedestrians and others outside the car shouting ‘why are you driving around wearing a 1970’s helicopter headset’? However the headset and the radio’s vox feature will enable me to say ‘yes dear’ to my wife when she uses the radio to tell me to pick up more milk from Tesco without taking one hand off of the wheel. I just have to remember not to have a sound operated transmitter switch live when listening in the car to whatever woke bollocks is being shat out by BBC Radio Four. Could be embarrassing as my normal response to BBC Radio Four these days is to shout at the radio the words ‘oh for fucks sake’, ‘not more race grifters’ and ‘what a load of wank’.

I make no predictions for 2023 other than it looks as if next year will be ‘interesting times’. A lot of unintended or inconvenient consequences of political cock ups from energy to immigration and from the economy to societal matters may well come to the fore, that’s if what seems to have started in 2022 continues. There are a lot of political homing pigeons returning to their coops now that energy supply is less secure, cheap money is a thing of the past for a while and the consequences of policies that might have seemed good idea at the time but have now been revealed to be part of the nation’s problems, start to be felt.

Add these returning political pigeons to what are building social tensions and divisions in Britain and my prediction of interesting times looks rather too possible. The winter will probably see the media, especially Sky, shroud waving over covid resurgence, something that the government can’t go along with because Britain’s economy has been so badly mismanaged. However the rise in inflation caused by the lockdown fiscal splurge might be occupying peoples minds and make people less willing to fall for this scaremongering at this time. Spring will see the winter energy bills drop on doormats and I suspect that anger connected with this could be huge. With the government cutting back on subsidising people’s energy the public are going to be faced with huge bills and confronted with the negative consequences of governments whose energy policy could fairly be described as government by fact light Green soundbite. Who knows what next summer will bring especially if the winter and spring problems are worse than expected and the government continues to show that it is a world leader in mixing petty authoritarianism with a generous portion of incompetence and stupidity. As regards psephology, I’m looking forward to the locals next May. It will be interesting to see how the vote goes due to the economic, social and political problems Britain is enduring. It might, if all goes well, show a rise in support for challenger parties, or the challenger parties could collectively shoot themselves in both feet. Let’s wait and see.

Well I think that I’ve rambled enough around in this rather unstructured many roomed mansion of a post. It remains to me to wish everybody a very happy new year and may 2023 be all what you want it to be. Thank you for reading and commenting on this blog it is very much appreciated here.

Normal service will return 3^rd January 2023.

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