Registering with the Raw Tobacco Scheme III

Mission accomplished! In the post today I received a very dull letter on gray paper from HMRC, providing me with me Raw Tobacco approval number which “should be quoted on all correspondence relating” to my “controlled activities”. I still wonder just why growing plants and throwing them away should be controlled but there you go. I’m now approved for a year to throw away up to 15kg of dead Nicotiana plants. All it took was a short letter and a phone call to be allowed to throw away legal garden waste. Time will tell if they come round to inspect … Continue reading

Cologne madness

Hopefully anyone reading this is aware of the incidents that happened in Cologne and other German cities at new year. Just in case you’re not it would seem that large crowds of me of “North African and Arab appearance” (as the BBC put it) gathered in Cologne’s main square and around the train station where they fired rockets at the crowd threw bottles and sexually assaulted (include at least 2 rapes) a large number of women. Now normally I wouldn’t write about this, there’d be no need I mean drunken men causing trouble and sexually assaulting women social media and … Continue reading

A year since the Charlie Hebdo attack

Today is a year since the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris and the murder of some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, as well as related attacks on a kosher supermarket. A year down the line it seems to me impossible to conclude anything but that the attack was a roaring success and that the terrorists have, by any metric you choose, won. I’m not going to really say anything which other people haven’t already said better, but the claim of “Je Suis Charlie” was weak from the start with few people or publications actually prepared to show … Continue reading