It is a deeply uncertain world, full of tiresome news featuring the “serious” and “concerned” voices of various politicians, who still embrace the idea that welfare benefits are more important than actually defending the state. They fail to understand that if their worst-case scenario happens, for which they haven’t prepared, it is entirely feasible that the situation will correct itself because nobody will ever be able to collect any welfare benefits ever again.

Conversations at the Château d’If have touched on the subject of wind-up radios and portable powerbanks and I have looked, (more in nostalgic terms) at the availability of the UK 24hr Ration Pack or the US version of the single Meal Ready To Eat or MRE pack.

The latter though contains unimaginable things, such as

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Monday and already we suspect that John Healey will essentially kill off the idea of the family-run business. 93% of UK businesses are family-run and employ 15.8m people. When they tried it in Canada and Greece, many collapsed and investment in the remainder did as well. And if you think that is helping the farmers, think again.

Not content with that, Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Mike Wood asked whether under the SPS “deal” being agreed to, farms and food manufacturers that currently do not trade with the EU and only trade within Britain would be bound to the rules. DEFRA minister Stephen Morgan replied: “The SPS agreement with the EU means that Great Britain will apply certain rules in line with the EU. These arrangements will apply domestically, regardless of whether a business trades directly with the EU or not.” He then admitted “the precise scope of the agreement remains subject to ongoing negotiations with the EU”. This also means that Britain will have to take on every existing EU regulation plus any future changes Brussels makes to them.

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Before midday, Labour had declared that the Chagossians do not have the same right to decide their future as Falkland Islanders. Tory MP Sir John Hayes asked whether the Government’s policy on self-determination “applies equally to the Chagossian people as it does to the Falkland Islanders.”. FCDO minister Uma Kumaran replied: “The British Indian Ocean Territory is not comparable to inhabited Overseas Territories such as the Falkland Islands. It has no permanent population and has never been self-governing.” Given that our Uma is a Sri Lankan Tamil and several Human Rights groups have cited similarities between the plight of the Tamils and Chagossians, (forced displacement, and ongoing struggles for self-determination for example), you might think she’d have a bit more sympathy.

Hours to go, and already I’m looking forward to Friday!

I have already suggested elsewhere, (HERE), that the student riots would morph thanks to the enlarged support of the radical left party La France Insoumise (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. What I had not surmised was just how quickly and dangerously the protests have attracted an additional, substantially male contingent of local neighbourhood rioters and looters whose televised activities have shocked and dismayed le quidam moyen. However in doing so, the rioting is merely throwing petrol onto the Le Pen bonfire of Macron’s record. These citoyens lambda will be remembering every torched car, every refused insurance claim, every broken shop, every closed business and every destroyed icon of their former quieter, more affordable past, and they will blame not only Macron, but the EU.

Part of the Franco-EU issue, other than having nothing in the bank, are the EU demands surrounding the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, which came into force in June 2026, replacing the European Agenda on Migration, which was a massive, highly publicised policy framework announced by the European Commission in May 2015, which essentially focussed on the Dublin Agreement, (first EU country arrival country, accepts responsibility).

So far, so problematic. Because if Marine gets in, then as a comprehensive survey conducted by Ifop in October 2026 highlighted, 41% of all French respondents stated they would refuse to obey laws they considered unjust under a far-right government, a figure that jumps to three-quarters among Mélenchon voters. The same poll, found that 21% of total respondents across France would consider leaving the country if Le Pen won. This sentiment is highest among marginalised and younger demographics, with 46% of French Muslims and 44% of Jewish respondents indicating they would weigh moving abroad due to fears of increased social friction and discrimination.

Marine Le Pen’s central voter pitch is focussed on a "Europe of Nations" model. Her plans include unilaterally cutting France's annual contribution to the EU budget by approximately €11 billion to fund domestic fiscal strategies, introducing strict national immigration laws that override EU rules, and withdrawing France from the New Pact on Migration and Asylum.

This time next year, Paris could make the past weekend look like a quiet day at Brighton racecourse in the 1950s.

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About what seems like fifty years ago, one of my absolute marketing heroes, was Faith Popcorn. She was (and remains) the pioneering American futurist, best known as the founder and CEO of BrainReserve, a trend forecasting firm established in 1974. Nicknamed the “Trend Oracle,” she changed swathes of corporate thinking by applying the study of long-term cultural shifts directly to their business strategies, boasting a documented 95% accuracy rate across decades of forecasting.

The entire background story is simply too long, but her list of “credits” is truly mind-boggling. Her provably accurate predictions, her understanding of the mass-human condition and the likely resulting outcomes, have changed our lives.

She predicted that our homes would become a sanctuary - Popcorn said make them warmer, softer, more comfortable. Bigger sofas. Better bedding, more security make the music centre look sexy and create the home theatre. She told everyone who’d listen, (and they paid handsomely to do so), that Joe and Betty Schmoe were “nesting” at home more - so deliver them all the services they need. Martha Stewart and every “Domestic Goddess” since, owe their living and financial empires to FP’s insights. She advised the development of Blockbuster and Deliveroo and Netflix and Waitrose deliveries, five to ten years before they were there.

One tiny example: In 1981, she walked into Coca-Cola’s main board and told them that the future of beverages was not sugary drinks, but pure, clean, unflavoured bottled water. Coke’s execs initially scoffed at the idea of selling plain water, but her data proved correct, entirely reorganizing the global grocery and wellness landscape as bottled water grew into an everyday lifestyle staple.

In the 1980s and 90s her concept of Egonomics, led her to start telling major corporate boards that women were becoming the primary financial decision-makers. That directly led to, for example, a radical shift in how cars were designed and how wealth was managed. She made the effective case for abandoning condescending marketing materials and for institutions to start treating female entrepreneurs as sophisticated, high-net-worth individuals. The rise of dedicated female-focused wealth advisory divisions, holistic financial planning, and values-based investing portfolios throughout the 1990s and 2000s directly tracks back to the corporate strategies she pitched to Wall Street decades earlier.

This history is important. Because when Faith Popcorn talks - a wise person listens.

She was already telling us over a year ago [HERE] that we are now in an era marked by deep social anxiety and institutional distrust. In her current briefings, she emphasises that the traditional social contract is officially fractured, accelerating a trend toward “ParanoiaLand” and severe surveillance fatigue where consumers feel actively watched everywhere, all the time. For the 2026/2027 consumer market, her framework focuses heavily on the rise of deeply curated digital identities and an intense craving for local micro-communities. She believes we’re now seeking smaller networks that we trust, that are truly local.

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And on AI, (and before we get to her frightening predictions for the mid-2030s), Faith Popcorn believes that AI is navigating its critical “kindergarten” phase. Rather than an immediate replacement for everything, it functions as a tool, driving early “human-hybrid” trials and automating our logistics, such as driverless deliveries, but always setting the stage for the deep biological integration, she projects for the next decade.

Popcorn has identified a sharp rise in aggressive consumer behaviour, where deeply polarised communities completely reject mainstream organizations. She labels this a period of “cultural civil war,” where fractured populations form insular, defensive networks (”clanning”) to protect themselves against a broader society they view as volatile and unsafe. She defines our current era not as an absence of trust, but as an active, widespread conviction that “someone is out to get you”. She also warns that this collective mindset will directly trigger deep civil fracturing, tribalism, and localised disorder.

Sadly, Faith’s future view is bleak, but the reality is that she isn’t saying anything that our Amygdala and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex wasn’t already telling us. Of course, I could simply be wrong. I could simply be suffering from too much protein or Quinoa or Fava beans and of course, it could all just be El Niño’s fault.

But if both Faith and I are wrong to even be concerned, and we’re just a couple of old 1970s has-beens …why am I reading these?

Undeterred by this, Scott C. Waring, (I assume to distinguish him from Scott A Waring),

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Once upon a time, I spent some time with BAOR in Paderborn in Germany. I was near fluent in German having learned the three most important phrases: Möchtest du eine Zigarette? (Would you like a cigarette?); Möchtest du mit mir tanzen? (Would you like a dance with me); “Ich hätte gerne ein großes Bier und ein Kalbsschnitzel mit Pommes, bitte.“ (I’ll have a large beer and veal escalope with chips please).

I also discovered for various reasons, that they were excellent at keeping paper, producing paper, filing paper, and referring to paper years after the other paper activities had ended. It was what had made their internal intelligence systems, at the most mundane level, so effective for centuries and regardless of which political power was in control. There were of course the occasional blights such as girls and boys selling their paper souls to AN Other for whatever reason, but their product was always considered first-rate because they kept brilliant records.

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I mention all this because, post Kings Speech theatre, I had been pondering the Duke of Windsor’s predilection for the German world view, and what might have been. Random thoughts of there but for the Grace of God, but surely Hitler would have gone by now, but we’d have still had the Russian menace and so on and so forth, and then I was away down the rabbit hole. Simultaneously, across my desk, came the latest health report from Germany’s National Stats Office, Destatis, which on 8th October published the cost of illness per person by age and sex, for 2024. Somewhere near the bottom of the hole, (so applicable when chatting with the GP), I heard the Doc say that if I failed to comply with instructions, my chances of dying would increase over the next ten years by 45%!

Stap me vitals, I exclaimed. What…. I could be dead by the time I’m 85… what are the chances! (45% greater apparently) ??? Also (and thinking of Destatis), can I just ask from a P&L perspective, wouldn’t the NHS be better off financially at my ignoring the odds?

And here is the point.

GPs can’t answer that and not on Hippocratic or moral grounds. Bizarrely neither can the Health Secretary, the PM, the chancellor or any civil servant. No one in the UK knows what it actually costs every year for the NHS to look after a sprightly 65-year-old girl and a rickety 75-year-old chap. Why???

Why is there no basic set of stats that says there are X patients 52% are women and 48% are men, (yeah, yeah trans blah), and women cost a% more than men, because of children, and men cost b% more after than women over the age of 73 or whatever? There’s your budget and unless you intend changing the system, that’s what you need. Simples. Surely?

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We know that in 2017, York University did a study which published the data for single-year age-by-sex NHS costs for 2014-15. Nuffield has done some work since, but it is only on a hospital spend basis and without the sex split. Nobody routinely publishes NHS cost per person by age and sex., and the reason is that the NHS doesn’t cost patients, it costs activity - e.g the cost of a hip replacement or an A&E visit, not what each person costs.

A per-person figure has to be built by linking hospital records to costs and dividing by population. There’s no patient-level costing for GP visits or prescribing, so every study estimates it from consultation rates. The OBR uses an age-only health spending profile in its long-term projections, including the 2026 Fiscal Risks and Sustainability report. But that isn’t published by sex, and the values are statistical estimates.

The extremely detailed Destatis report can state without fear of contradiction that women’s higher overall cost is mainly due to longer life expectancy, plus pregnancy, childbirth and sex-specific conditions. That said, their report is also much wider. It covers all health spending (state insurance, private insurance and out-of-pocket) and includes long-term nursing care. So the real German medical cost for the combined age group of 85+ is €30,000 per annum. The extrapolated York figures and using worst-case inflation figures and remembering that the NHS figures exclude social care, (because NO ONE KNOWS), is £9,690.

Knowing what we know about German efficiency and their abilities with paper, one can only conclude that the NHS is woefully under-budgeted, or isn’t providing the same level of Germanic care, or the figures are wrong.

Sadly, I wish this absence of real data only applied to the health costs… but of course, it doesn’t. Only recently the nation was told that the UK’s main unemployment survey is so badly answered that the statistics regulator says it can’t be relied on for regional detail, and its replacement is running at least eighteen months late. We also know that whilst the government is preparing to approve a new wave of hyperscale data centres, it has no record of who uses the existing ones or what for. Starmer promised to cut spending on consultants, yet Whitehall still has no consistent figures on how much each department actually spends.

There is wide talk of the exciting innovations in a Regional Growth policy, but they might be even more exciting if the government actually had any data to show whether its regional growth spending works. It doesn’t! The government doesn’t know how many of its answers to Parliament are drafted with AI, and after spending years planning to replace the census with administrative data, the UK has neither the coverage nor ability to reliably count people in high-migration areas.

Police recorded the ethnicity of only about 37% of grooming-gang suspects, a gap Baroness Casey called a “major failing”. The Ministry of Justice says its conviction data can’t show whether a sex offender is a foreign national, and it is appealing an order from the Information Commissioner to publish convictions by nationality. The Home Office admits it doesn’t know how many illegal migrants or visa Overstayers are in the UK, has never published an estimate of the illegal population, and hasn’t published exit-check data since 2020.

Germany can provide at least 60% of that data.

Simply put, we cannot function without accurate data. We cannot make political, financial and social decisions without real knowledge. We are making matters so much worse for ourselves.

PS: Do not go to that most gentlemanly of all rails bookmakers, Sunderland’s, at any decent meeting, and ask for a price on my reaching 85. Simon can be very generous with his odds, but he knows a ringer when he sees one!

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I can exclusively reveal that Boyd’s Own Paper has been the subject of possible Russian interference. When I started BOP I specifically asked Ivan Tokutchyakokov, whilst I interviewed him for the post of BOP cybersecurity, if he was Russian and he said Da. I did not employ him as I later discovered he had been dismissed from his last position for rifling the drawers of the girls in the typing pool. The NKVD’s evil machinations have been stymied as far as BOP is concerned, but patently one should be deeply suspicious about the result of the last General Election which seems to have bought a hard-line socialist into the very bosom of the nation. I shall be revealing my sources when appropriate!

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Last night, a moment of social respite from the bloody back and shoulder niggles of autumn mizzles, and the far more painful and growing effronteries of modern British life. An early evening of munchies and theatre with jolly people, what could be better to cheer one up? So off to the Barn Theatre in Cirencester, to see The King’s Speech, via a local Arkell’s pub, The Admiral Sir John Talbot, which has been totally revamped and resurrected in the last four months. They have stolen the chef from the Polo Club and he is settling in. It was a jolly party hosted by the production team at the Anthology Theatre company. Among the guests, was someone I have only met briefly before, who went straight into my Book of Very Good Eggs, if only because she and I agreed that Ascot had moved beyond the pale in its vulgarity, and Cheltenham is now unhappily over-commercialised, and in danger of no longer being fun.

Then a five-minute stroll for the polo players (longer for others), and in to the play. Having seen the film and its lavish production values, I was concerned at how the story would unfold in terms of “Royal Standards.” I need not have worried. The staging was a triumph and as a result, it’s sheer simplicity, made the unfolding story of an unlikely friendship, all the more poignant. The appalling upbringing of the Kings Edward VIII and George VI had damaged them both; the former devoting his life to running away from his duties and embracing every sort of situation that would end his unhappiness, and his brother’s total devotion to his perceived duty at whatever cost and despite his dreadful self-doubt and very public speech afflictions. A well-known story, but beautifully portrayed, not least by the Aussie actor (inevitably Neighbours of long-standing), Stefan Dennis playing Lionel Logue. I am no critic, so I’m not going to go through every nuance, and performance and rate them. It was well done, it was moving, it had pathos. I sat in my seat, having accepted the unspoken contract that what I am seeing is an illusion, full of lines, compressed in time, and surrounded by fake doors and chairs that come and go. I set aside all that logic and was totally emotionally invested. It was better than Good, it was Excellent and is going on tour. Go.

As a footnote, the Barn Theatre has also had the Million Dollar Quartet (brilliant) and Yes Prime Minister (Funny and au courant), both on tour, or already in London.

Over the next days, the cacophony of fake stats and earnest tosh rolled out by the Massed Collecting Tins of The Healey Budget Band will be heard relentlessly progressing from studio to studio trying to calm the markets. There will however only be the most superficial benefit cuts, probably linked to heaping the tick box exercises onto others, such as GPs; ISA’s will take a spanking; IHT properties will be linked to the cost of the original property even if you have spent a million on it and bought two hundred acres of your neighbour’s land; and online marketplaces will be made responsible for collecting the tax due on goods sold.

One simple tax-saving method would be to introduce a moratorium on anyone under 30 on benefits and unable to provide payslips for the last six months showing regular tax payments, taking out new car loans, purchasing full Sky TV subscription packages, or being able to purchase cigarettes.

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Watching The Greens playing politics makes the Traitors look like the Teddy Bears picnic. Deputy Leader Nothing Normali said he will not support any amendment to the Zionist Racist motion because it might make “our member-led democracy” look a bit iffy. The second Deputy Leader Rachel Brokensword, said: “To those members who feel disorientated by this deluge of divisive headlines… I see you.” Phew, and for a moment, there Zak I thought you were in trouble. Apart from the fact that you have totally buggered up Burnham’s election plans for a coalition in the event of a hung parliament. What’s worse the second fall-back is now wobbly because the Lib Dems don’t know the name of their future leader, who will only be selected on the grounds that she doesn’t own a wetsuit, Life is just peachy in Parliament.

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I don’t often wail, but I happened to see a press release from the Dreaming Guru formerly known as Charlotte Church, who set up The Dreaming at Rhydoldog House near Rhayader, Powys, Wales (the former home of Laura Ashley), in some 47 acres of ancient woodland. I add nothing and say nothing to this marvellous piece of creative writing!

Dear Dreamers,

After five years of unfaltering practice, tending with diligence to the dreams of the land and our guests, we announce with hearts-a-brim that The Dreaming will be pausing its work at Rhydoldog from December 2026.

Through the harvest season, it is important to discern what requires attention from that which is falling away, what needs to be put to compost. We need the chance to compost, mulch, go fallow, listen deeply to the earth, so that we can germinate new dreams for the future. After all, we would be nowhere had we not first had a dream that was given time to sprout and blossom.

Over the last five years, over three thousand people have been welcomed as guests on our retreats. For many, it was their first step towards a life more aligned with, and with greater awareness of, nature and spirit. Hundreds came as part of our “pay-what-you-can” scheme, offering as little as £1 per night. Our free-to-attend retreats for NHS workers and activists respectively remain amongst our proudest achievements, along with pioneering retreats for Muslim women, melanated women of African and Caribbean descent, and the queer community.

And then there are the hundreds of amazing people who have joined us as part of our work-exchange and artist-in-residence programmes, each of whom, in offering their own gorgeousness to the land, found themselves in receipt of deep teachings that the valley had for them, and them alone. This collaboration: these glorious humans living in reciprocity, will forever be the beating heart of the story that has been The Dreaming.

The gifts have been unexpected, exquisite, life-changing, and too numerous to even begin listing. But it is a different world today than the one we started off in just a short half decade ago. As we stare clear-eyed at the exponentially complexifying crises that have been spreading out ahead of us all like cracking ice, we at The Dreaming need to reassess, with candour and courage what it is we should be offering to be in service.

And so we must dream. And to do so we must hibernate. We cannot say when exactly we will be returning from the dream realm, but return we shall. In the meanwhile, there are a few spaces left for our last Signature, Samhain, and Witch retreats, so book now to avoid disappointment. If you want to keep updated with new developments then please sign up to our newsletter, and you can always subscribe to our online course – a perfect companion for the darker months ahead.

If you feel like you would like to feed your own ideas into our dreaming we would love to hear from you. Please get in touch us directly. Finally, deep and loving thank you to all those who have supported us over the years, each one of you who has stepped through our faerie door and poured your own dreams into the cauldron. It has been a great honour to conspire with you in magic and mystery.

Until we dance again
The Dreaming x

There is so much in there that should appear in The Healey Budget.

• Madame Deputy Speaker: The Chancellor of The Exchequer

• The Chancellor The Exchequer: (for it is he). As we stare clear-eyed at the exponentially complexifying crises that have been spreading out ahead of us all like cracking ice, we on this side of The House, will need to reassess, with candour and courage what it is we should be saying to this country as regards our finances. We need the chance to compost, mulch, go fallow, listen deeply to the earth so that we can germinate new dreams for the future. To do so we must hibernate. We cannot say when exactly we will be returning from the dream realm, but return we shall. And whilst we sleep I shall set CGT at 35%, change the taxation system of all second houses and introduce a maximum holding in any ISA of £100,000 after which CGT will apply.

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Yesterday, I hope I managed to give you an idea of how Racing’s relationship with the bookies has put us in the current financial bind we find ourselves in.

There are no easy solutions, and very many vested interests, and, as I have been suggesting for some time, schism is the most likely outcome. I can easily see a breakaway group forming, and I can easily imagine some people will want a finger in every pie that does break away. We would be naive to think that resolution will be some simple, everyone-sitting-round-the-campfire-singing-Kumbaya moment. In my view, the principal problem is the Bookmakers and their entirely correct commercial position that they’ll take as much as we can give them, but they’re not going to pay what we believe it is worth.

We have a further side issue: ARC, formerly known as Arena Racing, a single entity that largely controls All Weather Racing, the fodder of the betting shop, and which owns a majority of the fixture list. Many owners believe that they are not paid enough prize money by ARC when they win and have been threatened with legal action if they try to strike! ARC’s position is entirely bookmaker-centric. Racing’s financial woes are, in the main, a bookmaker issue.

So just consider this…

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As the new National Hunt season gets underway, you would have to be a close relative of the ostrich not to have realised the enormous pressures that the racing industry (by which I mean Owners, Breeders, Racecourses, and all the various suppliers that support them from Trainers and Jockeys to Feed Merchants and Farriers) is facing.

The principal pressure is, of course, financial, stemming from a broken funding model and exacerbated by broader commercial costs that weigh on every stage of the foal-to-breeding-shed cycle. Couple this with a loss of interest among some demographics; the potential loss, on several grounds, of the so-called Social Licence to operate (due to concerns over animal welfare, environmental concerns such as water consumption, and betting harm); and, crucially, a widespread failure to understand the racing industry and its relationship with the entirely separate bookmaking industry.

Part of the solution might simply be to redefine racing’s relationship with the bookie.

The bookies have, for decades, argued against every one of their financial contributions to Racing, citing a variety of conflicting, conflating, and confusing accountancy positions that require a Harvard MBA supplemented by membership of the ICAEW. Not least among their arguments is the contention that racing has become increasingly unimportant to their business model. There is some truth in that, I do admit, but it's not necessarily a truth the bookies would like us to grasp.

Sadly, we need a history lesson to make sense of it all.

When the statutory Levy was conceived, during the debates on the legalisation of betting shops, the Commons was told that more than 90% of the average off-course bookmaker’s turnover came from horseracing. Greyhound racing accounted for about 2%. Without racing, William Hill and Joe Coral had very little to sell. Hansard, 17 November 1959

Then, because the newly legalised betting shop was expected to reduce racecourse attendances and gate receipts, it was agreed that a portion of the proceeds would be returned to the sport which made that betting possible, and so the Horserace Betting Levy was established.

Over time, the percentages changed and by 1990, horseracing accounted for 69.8% of the combined horse-and-greyhound turnover in off-course betting shops. That remained an overwhelming share, but greyhound racing had grown from 17.6% of the total off-course market in 1977 to 27.9% in 1990. Horserace betting had declined by 4.3% over the same period. The bookies thought it time for the deckchairs to be rearranged. Hansard, 18 February 1991

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It’s quite possible that few English people remember the Sorbonne riots of May 1968. Just a few old farts who now realise that the roll-neck, Gitane-puffing students of yesteryear who occupied the Sorbonne, shouted at les flics on the Boulevard Saint‑Michel, and hurled cobblestones at Les Gendarmes are probably grandparents now. Sitting at home, wringin…

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If you can get the 6/1 from Coral, you should be

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I am aware that we rarely cover the Arts here and that I have not touched on the Theatre for over a year. I must make amends, and no better time to do so than with the very exciting news that Emmy- and Golden Globe-winner Elizabeth Debicki will make her Royal Shakespeare Company debut as Richard II. It marks the first time that the company has staged th…

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I have already mentioned the very low levels of UK diesel storage (21.5 days), which the Millipede, Defra, and the Kumbaya Labour Farming Group (This Land is Our Land) have engineered through the dual socialist sins of stupidity and ignorance. Today, the problem was exacerbated by the Fawley refinery in Hampshire announcing it will be closed until Decem…

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A good start to the week. I met someone in the NHS who first of all declared that the majority of their admin systems either do not work at all or, at best, are inefficient. Secondly, she actually did some good and made things appear to happen, including initiating contact with the different Trust hospitals who had failed to send X-rays, appointment not…

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Two in one day - you lucky, lucky people. I don’t want to flood you out, but the GP in Baku is on today, and I know not all of you find it as fascinating as I do. The sheer investment in a tiny piece of tungsten with a small piece of electronic circuitry attached could easily have cost a million quid, and that’s without paying for the people developing the sproggle-thratchit.

What is it with it Mayor’s like Burnham and Khan? Why do they want to play The Fat Controller at any opportunity? As I slept through a rail delay, Khan announced that, despite an overall £14bn deficit for TfL, he had got into bed with Unite, the union, and

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We live in strange times. Yesterday we travelled to London for the annual Single Stables Winners lunch, a jolly, celebratory event with some 20 members marking the 12th running of the competition. (Essentially a Fantasy League based on 12 horses from a single NH trainer, with two more added in February.) It’s a very handsome pot accompanying a small sil…

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A vulgarian might suggest that this has been a bit of a shite-week. Another might say that this has been a week when God and the rest of the heavenly throng have all been having a ball, laughing their heads off at seeing my increasing head-throbbing spin.

As you know, He opened the batting last week by sending fire down upon my PC with a large blown-out power unit. Off to Kieran, who seems a perfectly nice Techie who is going to rush me for a couple of hundred to fix it. I replaced that PC pro-tem with my late father-in-law’s machine, which has taken three days, and some three hours a day, to install a different profile, all my programmes, some racing data, three email programmes and their profiles, two security systems, and my personal recipe notes onto it. This was patently too much for the box, whose memory began to wobble, resulting in a couple of blackouts. Geoff’s old PC was a great machine for a nonogenarian but doesn’t seem to cope with recipes for Balli Mahmudiye - Google it… delish.

I only know all this from a long session with my AI, going through various solutions to the collapsing RAM that, to an outsider, would have looked like I was hacking into the Pentagon. How do hackers stay sane?

Long story short -

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Ofcom has done a survey of the people who have used various news channels in the last month. The survey asked them who they considered the most trustworthy. This is Ofcom, not the Socialist Workers Party or Reform or The Monster Raving Dusty bins. It is Ofcom! And the survey says: GB News; 74% - Sky News 71% - ITV1 67% - BBC TV 66%

The survey was never released due to… “an administrative error” Hmmm

Boyd’s Own Paper will doubtless soon fall foul of the latest Quango from HMG… the “National Centre for Information Defence”. They have reassured the population that the unit will work with intelligence agencies, the police, and social media companies to focus on “improving local community cohesion.”

The people of Piddington are probably bamboozled by the word Cohesion. The Man on the Clapham Omnibus is probably confused by how reporting the financial inadequacies of this government, our increasingly weak defensive capabilities, and the endless cancelling of those of any political hue whose ideas are at odds with the liberal elite might fail some cohesion test.

It will soon be illegal to suggest that leaving the EU had benefits; that someone with a penis is not a woman; that a Minister of the Crown failing to pay tax is an issue or that enhancing your CV in order to suggest you are better placed for the job is a bad thing.

I’ve never been, so I can only tell you what I’ve heard. The Listowel Harvest Festival is one of Ireland’s oldest racing festivals and runs over seven days. Today is the big day: the Kerry National, which Gavin won last year with FLOORING PORTER.
That aside, Listowel is regarded (possibly by the burghers of Listowel, or maybe it’s the talk of Brussels’ corridors) as the Literary Capital of Ireland, hosting a literary festival, and supporting the Kerry Writers Museum. It has a castle and 23 pubs - although it once had over 50. I’m told that Mike the Pies is still a rowdy hell-hole if you like live music; otherwise, it’s off to Keane’s Bar with you. You get a decent plate in Allo’s and a good bed with a proper breakfast in the Listowel Arms Hotel. I can tell you no more, although I think Luke Harvey once mentioned some place where he’d had more fun than was considered appropriate by Catholic standards - but I forget its name!

Talking of best forgotten, some selections here for Listowel and the Kerry National…

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Lunch at the Château d’If before Johnny the Fish’s memorial; then onto a packed church. Hendo giving the eulogy, decent rousing hymns, a real sense of loss, a greater understanding than I had before of just what a kind man Johnny had been, and the vicar playing a supportive blinder. All as good as it possibly could be, and the real joy of seeing many of…

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Disaster. A major flash, a smell of scalded squid and a dead pc with, please God, just a burned-out power unit. Sans eyes, sans brain, sans data, sans everything, bar this six-year-old Android tablet.

This, however, simply presents us with a challenge and not one we will shirk. Now is the time to reawaken the spirit of Churchill. Never in the field of… on the beaches, in the office, and in the pub we shall… then imitate the actions of the spawn of Ed Chamberlain and Circa Starmer; our hearts go out to the scalded squid, and we’re sorry on behalf of computer manufacturers everywhere, and rest assured, lessons will be learned…

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Starting 1st September 2026, we are going to simplify our presentation and ask Archimedes the Arthritic Intelligence machine to make six selections based on its vast knowledge of the interweb, water polo, racing, and the mysteries of organised religion. We wish humanity well.

The rest of the ratings are based on a mix of various data points, and their performance and/or reliability can be seen in the accompanying stats. Of course they won’t all win or be placed - but at least you have a fighting chance of narrowing the search for your holiday money.

Yesterday’s results:

• Willolarupi (IRE) — Southwell 16:50 · 2nd of 13 at 3/1F (below-5/1 win-only, no return)

• Walsingham (IRE) — Pontefract 16:08 · 3rd of 10 at 3/1 (below-5/1 win-only, no return)

• Midnight Thunder — Yarmouth 15:45 · 8th of 9 at 5/6F

• Power Of Prayer (GER) — Southwell 20:30 · 7th of 9 at 5/1

• Knicks (IRE) — Ayr 14:00 · 13th of 20 at 11/1

• Age Of Baroque (FR) — Southwell 19:30 · 10th of 12 at 7/1

Running total for Today’s Selections (from 1 September 2026):

• Yesterday: 6R - 0W - 0P - P&L: -14.00pts

• Since 1 Sept: 95R - 10W - 10P - P&L: -93.17pts

TODAY’S SELECTIONS

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I am, and I may well be, alone amongst my peers in being familiar with the Mangelwurzel. I have eaten it and disliked it, although to be fair, I loathe its cousin, the beetroot. I was aware too, for example, of the mangel grinder, which allowed Old Bob Thatchit to make the mangelwurzel more accessible to Daisy by cutting the giant root into cow-sized pieces.

What I did not know was that there would be a fete in celebration this very weekend: The Great Polden Hills Mangelwurzel Day. Somewhere between Glastonbury (home of all things strange) and Bridgewater in Somerset, the contadini are busy growing spectacular examples for their mangled jamboree.

Aside from all this rooting falderal, there is something important to take on board.

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