(1626) Hurricane evening coming up in Bama, fish n chips here.
23. Latest at 1740 our time prayers please
My understanding … and better to know Toods’s … is that the worst might just bypass them where they are but there are still surrounding winds.
Just going to repeat that, decades ago, I was on a road east from Katherine, NT, Oz, had turned to go back to town, some cars were stopped. With good reason … a cyclone crossed the road north-south, didn’t touch us at all. But it was awesome.
1921 our time … Toods’ Cuddles thinks they may be out of the cone but are still heading for the riverhouse now to check.
22. Is it so?
No need to say your age of course, just if it works.
21. The hurricane lands soon
Toodles points out that though pop-up disturbances can be arranged, their ones come over from Africa.
20. DAD at 1513
David Shaw writes: “I have just seen the latest socialist blueprint from the Institute for Public Policy Research handing John Healey another excuse to raid your wallet. Labour is quietly plotting a massive 1.5 billion pound tax on online retailers right before the October Budget. Andy Burnham and the Treasury want to brand this an Amazon tax so they can pose as champions of the local high street.”
19. Moo corner
18. Good move
17. Know the feeling, Charlotte
16. What were the chances?
15. Coordinated global reach
14. Sincerest apologies to our Penseivat
… only speaking of modern policing … promise.
13. The IYE recipe
Flour-less Rich Fruit Cake
1 cup dried apricots roughly chopped 1/2 cup medjoul dates roughly chopped 1/2 cup dried figs roughly chopped 1/2 cup dried cranberries (optional) 1/2 cup currants 1/2 cup raisins 1/2 cup stoned đ€Ș prunes roughly chopped
1 large orange â zest and juice 3 tablespoons coconut oil 3 large eggs, beaten 2 heaped teaspoons mixed spice 1/2 teaspoon of ground ginger 1/2 cup of chopped pecans or walnuts (optional) 2 cups ground almonds Pinch of salt
A generous 1/4 cup brandy đ
20 cm loose bottom tin lined with greaseproof paper, baking parchment or whatever it is called in your neck of the woods Oven temp 150 C or gas equivalent? Cooking time 1 hour 15 â 1 hour 25 mins.
Method Day before you want to bake put all the dried fruit in large bowl together with zest and juice of the orange and the brandy. Stir well, make a wish, cover with a plate or cling film and leave overnight. (No nibbling now!)
Day after, gently melt the coconut oil â donât over heat. In another large bowl mix ground almonds, salt, spices, beaten eggs and the melted coconut oil. Mix well. Add the dried fruit and any remaining liquid ( wonât be much!) and mix thoroughly. Add the chopped nuts if using at this stage too.
Empty into prepped tin and bake. Check after 1 hr 15 â stick a skewer in the middle â should be cleanish and the cake firm. When done leave it in the tin to cool completely then wrap in grease proof paper and then in tin foil. Keeps well for a couple of weeks. It makes quite a dense cake. Delish served with a chunk of farmhouse cheddar and a glass of port. Note thereâs no sugar in it â sweetness comes from all the dried fruit.
Hope that all makes sense â have written it in my bestest writing. đ
……
(JH: Pic BBC Good Food guide)
12. The new brutalism
11. On Quora … signs of dangerous people
… which of these do you score on?
1.âThey stick with the same haircut for decades.
â2.Any shopping trip is done in under 20 minutes.
â3.They never compare their clothes to anyone elseâs.
â4.Phone calls last seconds, not minutes.
â5.A five-day trip only requires one pair of pants.
â6.Friendships donât need constant invites to survive.
â7.Zero drama, low maintenanceâtodayâs outfit works for tonightâs party too.
Mum used to make her own mincemeat. I e got her old 1930s recipe book. Iâll have a gander and put it up.
…..
Here we go, late night and just got back from the pub. Apologies for misspellings etc.
2lb cooking apples, 1lb raisins stoned (#metoo), 1lb sultanas, 3/4lb mixed peel, 1lb suet, 1lb caster sugar, grated rind of 2 lemons, juice of 3 lemons, 1 nutmeg grated, 3/4 lb raspberry jam (optional)
Put all fruit, peel and suet through a mincing machine or chop together as finely as possible. Texture will be slightly different, matter of taste. Stir in sugar, grated lemon rind and the juice, the nutmeg and jam if used. Sprinkle in a few whole currents, and, if possible a little brandy or whisky. Mix thoroughly. Put into pots and cover closely. These quantities make about 8lb of mincemeat. Smaller amounts mean reducing ingredients proportionally.
Mmm, I might give this a try. Good luck finding SFA free suet. If you do let me know please.
IYE
Thanks Andy, have noted and passed it on. No such thing as suet over here though đ Shall have to research what the alternatives are. Watch this spaceâŠ.
Also food processors back in the day were our mums and grandmums â thinking of mincing machine â no doubt a modern food processor carefully controlled would do the job. Goes away with dreams of a mincemeat plait and custardâŠ.đ
Btw have got a flour free fruit cake recipe if anyone is interested.
(JH: Yes please, kindly.)
Okay, suet substitutes. Have conferred. The resident Domestic Goddess recommends either butter or coconut oil. Butter has been used for over a decade in our Christmas puds.đČ Make sure the butter is cold first then grate it. Same with coconut oil but trickier to handle. For savoury uses use lard.
Toods summarised
Andy! Yum! I really love minced meat. Ashamedly I must confess I usually buy it. The brand was pretty good. My mother used to make it. I have no idea where her recipe is so I am anxious to try your âmumâsâ! Thrilled to have it. It makes so much I might put it in jars as gifts for friends too!
IYE â have you tried asking the butcher for some suet. Originally thatâs where youâd get it from.
Iâm loving all these recipes. Trouble is, my Beloved is drooling over them and now it looks like Iâll have to try them out. Only to keep him happy, of course. I hate to say it, but I already have all those ingredients in my larder. It seems I have no excuse.
Iâm making some bread and butter pudding for tonightâs dessert. I found some hot cross buns in the freezer and felt it was about time they got eaten!
Theyâre mini ones, so Iâll simply cut them in half and butter each piece, then lay them in a dish and scatter a bit of mixed dried fruit over them, plus a tablespoon of demerara sugar.
Then beat together an egg and half a pint (300ml) milk and pour over the top.
Quite often I do two eggs and a pint of milk because beloved likes the eggy bit.
You leave it for half an hour to all soak in, sprinkle the top with another tablespoon of demerara sugar and then cook it for 1 hour at Gas 4 / 350F / 180C / 160 fan oven.
Yummy!
……
(JH: This is the issue though, Isilme … milk, butter (bovaer poison), bread flour (folic acid). We need independent sources of milk and flour. This is what we’re banging on about.)
Isilme adds:
“Today, not long after reading your blog about the folic acid stuff, I received an email from this online company with the title “Check out our range of unfortified flour” and it explained in the email that none of their organic flour had folic acid in it (white bread flour, plain flour, self raising etc). How did they know I wanted ‘non folic acid’ stuff? I could have just bought the wholemeal flour because that’s what I wanted, nothing to do with folic acid. How do they know I glanced to the side of the page to see the ingredients? Very weird!”
(0559) Started dark, now nondescript wet out there. (0702)
5. Pause and consider this, dear reader
Now, we have a few readers here who might be called “techies”, one or two in a major way. Developers and managers of the old kind, before the uni grad scriptkiddies took over near the end of the 90s. My experience of the old style techies, maybe from the early 80s, is that they shy away from the Ggl control and anti-user tactics, from Apple’s total control and post-Jobs $$$$ angle and MS’s control freakery and other things now.
Besides, these boys tend to be hands-on DIY. I’m what’s known as experienced or super-user whom techies get frustrated with, rightly so I fear … so our systems here are part wise techie, part just me finding ways aroubd, laterally.
One of those workarounds is to never go for All-in-Ones … keep it super-simple, manual, no java, no anything else afap. But it’s taken me two decades to get this far.
4. Steve at 1512
CNN Data Analyst Harry Enten Reports Republican Voter Registration is Way Up in Key Swing States Ahead of Midterms
President Trump Announces US Wonât Attack Iran Prior to Midterm Elections
Trump Awards Elon Musk the National Medal of Science, Calls Him a âModern Day Thomas Edisonâ
European Parliament Adopts Resolution Calling for an EU Strategy Against âIslamist Entryismâ and Muslim Brotherhood Networks
Chasing a Victory That Canât Be Won, Washington Eyes Attack On Iran Before Elections
Merz Goes To Kiev With Nothing To Offer But His Own Survival
Nurse Alleges Stillbirth Surge at Fresno Hospital After COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout
CDC goes against FDA approvals and reinstates recommendations to inject healthy children with COVID vaccines
While a debate rages on about the humaneness of lethal injections, Canada announces a delay in expanding its MAiD programme to include mental illness
Much more.
3. Therapist?
An “independent writer” named “Arthur Ellis” writes this at Lord Toby’s site:
“As a graduate living in London who is constantly juggling the usual mix of modern uncertainty, mental health walks have become essential to my routine.
My anxiety seems rather inevitable given that the only jobs in the whole city seem to consist of waiting tables or pouring pints, rent eats into most of my income and the dating scene is entirely based on pixels.
So, I begrudgingly began following my therapistâs advice and take myself for a daily walk, as if Iâm some Labrador needing to smell the great outdoors. However, much to my nervous systemâs dismay, my walks have begun having the opposite effect of relaxation.
As soon as I leave my overpriced-for-South-London flat, I find overflowing rubbish bins and empty baggies scattered along the pavements. I hear shouting between addicts and notice how the streets look more neglected than the mould in my bathroom grout. But this unpleasantness isnât merely observational; I also have been yelled at by black-out-drunk strangers and, most dreaded of all by Londoners, had my phone snatched by boys in balaclavas.
One time, some pro-Palestinian protesters asked me to join the âresistanceâ and upon declining their offer, I was hit by a wave of verbal abuse about being a government puppet. Protesting is an integral part of democratic life; I myself have participated in plenty. But Iâm also entitled to walk down the street without having to declare allegiance to a political cause. Safe to say that area has become a no-go zone for me.
My therapist and I often discuss how mental health is shaped by the world around us, not just the internal cogs of our brain. If my job feels like a pathetic excuse for a career, my rent is completely unaffordable and my street feels hostile, itâs no wonder Iâm in therapy in the first place. Perhaps mental health canât be âfixedâ with 10,000 steps if this is a wider societal issue.
When I opened up to my therapist about this, she told me that this feeling is called âanomieâ: essentially a sense of disorientation that comes about when social values and standards disintegrate. Not only are we more politically polarised than ever, but so too are we socially. Itâs as if we are blindly walking through life, ignoring the importance of âeyes of the streetâ, as Jane Jacobs famously coined as a term to describe the informal social fabric that helps people feel like public space belongs to everyone.
A healthy, functioning city depends on thousands of silent agreements between strangers every minute: do not steal, do not litter, do not intimidate. It seems like all of these behavioural codes have completely disappeared.
What worries me about London right now is how disconnected we all are…”
Where do we even start? Therapist? A man? Then again, it’s 2026. And the money to pay one of those? Or is it just a bit of journo creative writing? It reads to me very much as a girl in her 30s … girlish-man? What though if it really is a young man in his 20s? What chance “his lot” can now procreate their way out of this crisis? Hardly Danny Tommos or Charlie Downses. What warrior types? The female men today seem far more likely to do the Boadicea.
And then we get to the actual living in London. Possible? What about “mental health” walks? Given the state of the invaders en masse … is any sort of aimless walk in any major British city a viable proposition? As for me, there are certainly two tracks Can take if remaining vigilant and “sticking to the narrow rails”. Maybe.
2. DAD at 1512
a) France. An unholy alliance is being blamed for instigating the violence seen across France as experts point to a bond between extreme left and radical Islamic groups.
What began as protests over school conditions and funding is entering its third week, and the factors behind the widespread, more violent protests are being debated.
b) France. At the François-Villon high school in Beaugency, a town in Franceâs Loiret department, students were filmed on October 1st, 2026 chanting rap lyrics that referenced Mohamed Merah, the Bataclan massacre, and Salah Abdeslam.
The year in which there will be 50% immigrants in the countries of Europe (if the numbers and birthrates continue as now).
d) UK Navy Serviceman charged with spying for Foreign Power.
A 24-year-old Royal Navy member has been charged with plotting to disclose sensitive information to a foreign power following his arrest in Bedfordshire.
e) Cueta. Goodbye, TrampolĂn Beach.
The photo above shows police in the process of removing âmigrantsâ from the camp on TrampolĂn Beach in Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the coast of North Africa, ahead of next weekâs planned visit by King Felipe VI.
1. Trooble in Bama
Our Toodles here is in a real life situation, most likely this evening, our time (6 hour difference her side of the stateline, probably 5 if technically in Florida). One map puts the trooble as coming halfway from Mobile AL to Pensacola FL … my reading of the various maps Fri morn is that Toods would want (and she said it yesterday) it to be as far east as poss and … I’m thinking the main strike is just into Florida, yet the wind shadow is wide.
If so, it is still a very near think and she’s certain, with Cuddles, in the wind shadow … see for yourself, NBC first:
Now, with Toods as “one of ours”, I’m asking all our readers of the praying kind to do so for her … it’s the 10 mph fwd motion of the hurricane which puts everyone under such stress, as if there were not enough stress.
But here we come back to the subject of Faith, do we not? You’d need to believe prayer efficacious, possible to have a combined effect … in order for it to do that.
This is no time, today, to run the comment by flaxensaxon on the low moral fibre of the old testament players … I’ll wait till Toods is safe tomorrow before attempting that.
