Blow winds and rack your whatever

I’ve just been having a look at my wind farm and the manager is highly chuffed with the way things are going. When there are gales blowing, the government pays him not to send power to the National Grid to prevent an overload, so he diverts it to his pumping station for a hydro-electric storage system. Which provides carbon-free (and therefore heavily subsidized) power when the winds don’t blow. Magic!

Another silly story?

According to the papers, we’re having the mildest November in living memory and it’s warmer in Shetland than Syria. So what did I come back to yesterday? Gales. Rain. Fur-coat weather. Just how gullible do they think we are?

What does the weather have in store?

A couple of local amateur expert forecasters reckon that we’re in for a tough time starting in the middle of December. They expect 16 weeks(!) of Ice Age cold with the temperature dropping to -25 deg.C or even -30 deg.C in places! But not the places where I’ll be lurking if things get that bad.

Well, fancy that!

It’s the little things that you notice that give you most pause for thought. Like the “mission statement/motto” of the Dutch bank ING Direct for its accounts in the UK: “A decent way to do banking”. Which implies that all other banks do it an indecent way. Which, given the state of some of them, notably Lloyds Banking Group and the Royal Bank of Fred the Shred, is probably true.

It was the worst of times, all right!

Good grief. Who does our prime monster think he’s supposed to be? A cross of the worst elements of Tony B. Liar and Gordon Effin Broon? One minute, he’s trying to get us into yet another foreign war on the side of the Good ‘Ol US of A against Iran. The next, he’s promising billions of pounds, which we don’t have because Gordon Effin Broon spent us into bankruptcy, to prop up Greece and the euro. Is there a Lee Harvey Oswald in the house?

You just can’t win!

Just back from a summit conference in southern climes, where it’s a bit warmer than England after dark. Arriving back in the vicinity of the mansion, I was rather dismayed to see a big black cloud hovering over it. All around the horizon, it was blue sky, fluffy bits of white cloud and the sun shining. But a big black cloud where I live. Sometimes, you suspect the universe has got it in for you. A conclusion a guy living on my route home must have reached.
     I noticed, while waiting for traffic lights to change, that he had covered his roof in solar panels. I also noticed that they were in shade because the guy across the road had a Leylandii hedge that looked about 30-odd feet tall! So the guy with the solar panels won’t get much output from them for about 5 months of the year. But I don’t suppose the cowboy who installed the solar panels mentioned this slight problem at the time.