…you will see not only the wall painted white (that I did last night) but a new vertical that I’ve fitted – where I’ve uprooted some of the floor.

Well, it isn’t exactly fitted but merely stuck in position for now.

This morning I did some tidying up and so on and had a look at the batteries in the barn. One of them is going a bit duff and although I haven’t identified which one it is yet, I’ve identified the bank that it’s in and isolated that.

I’ve also been playing “hunt the tools” and collected up a few that were hanging around.

Claude came for a chat too and was here for about an hour. As you know, he had his open heart surgery back in the summer and since then he’s been told that he needs to walk 4 miles each day. For the last couple of days he’s been in hospital having a check-up so I asked him if that was his 5000 mile service.

This afternoon I cut the lets into the new beam and then had a look at where I’ll be putting the bedroom wall. That’s important as the lower half of the “U” shape of the stairs to the attic will be fastened to the verticals that will support the new bedroom wall. So I measured up where the central pillar will be – the one that the bedroom and bathroom doors will pivot around, and that’s the one that you can see in the image. The bathroom door will be between the two new verticals and the bedroom door will be to the left of the newest vertical.

In other news, I wanted to mention something about catchy soundbites and cliches. They are quite good when used in unexpected and novel ways but quite often they become hackneyed and banal. In other cases they are used totally out of place and when they do, they become ridiculous. Just like the one used yesterday by Baroness Ashton, the EU’s new Foreign Affairs spokesman (that’s all she is – a spokesman. She won’t have any influence at all on policy).

There was a kamikaze attack on a gathering of students in Somalia and she described it as “a cowardly attack against civilians“. Now I don’t know about anyone else reading this blog, but I wouldn’t call a kamikaze attack “cowardly”. I certainly haven’t the courage to do it, and I doubt if Baroness Ashton has either. If she would volunteer to undertake one I would gladly withdraw my accusation, but in the absence of such an announcement, the only word that I can use to describe her statement is “pathetic”. If this is the best spokesman that the EU can come up with and if this is the finest example of her speeches, then I cringe for the future of the EU. How can anyone take seriously an organisation that employs someone to make such stupid statements?

I suppose she thinks that it’s really brave of someone to sit in a bunker 5000 miles away from the action and presses a button to launch a rocket that kills civilians, or flies at an altitude of 50,000 feet and presses a button that drops a bomb that kills civilians?

But on this subject I want to draw your attention to a paragraph from a book that I have recently been reading. It concerns a man who undertook to wear a greatcoat loaded with explosives and detonate it – and himself – in the middle of a meeting. The author describes him as a man of “high courage and self sacrifice”. Definitely not cowardly at all.

So who was the author and what was the book? Well, the author was, would you believe, a westerner. Now isn’t that a surprise? He is Anthony Cave Brown, a journalist and historian. And in his book Bodyguard of Lies he is actually describing an attempted suicide attack on Hitler.

So there you have it – a westerner attempting to kill someone we don’t like – “high courage and self-sacrifice” but someone with a brown skin killing people about whom we neither know nor care – “cowardly”

I don’t know if you remember the episode “General Hospital” in Blackadder Goes Forth when General Melchett talks about the leak of information from the hospital
“One of our spies (brave heroic fellow!) says that one of their spies (filthy rotten bounder!) ….“
and we all laughed at that because it was funny. But here we are 20 years later and it’s all becoming true to life. As I have said before and I’ll probably say again, the blatant hypocrisy of the western world is totally staggering. No wonder no-one in the vast majority of the world (the 80-odd percent who aren’t westerners) can’t take seriously anything that we do and doesn’t believe a word that we say.

And for Baroness Ashton as EU Foreign Affairs spokesman opening her account by saying something so stupid and ridiculous, and also so hypocritical, I really do despair for the future of the west. We don’t stand a chance.

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