Planting and Preparation Prevents Perverse Parsley Paucity

I read that posh people cannot find parsley or peppers in the shops. It took me a little while to figure out why they were going to the shops for things like these. 

To get peppers, I have to go to our conservatory (I know, delusions of grandeur or what?) where I have three pepper plants currently fruiting away merrily in pots. To get parsley I have to go as far as the cold frame in my garden, where I have far more than we can eat growing in a 12-inch by 18- inch box.

A little forethought, some compost and a packet of seeds, folks. I mean, if I can do it at 600 feet above sea level in cold, wet Scotland, anybody can.

Instead, the MSM will probably start another panic, just as they did with petrol. It’s becoming a little annoying how easily the Great British Public can be stampeded these days. Whatever happened to the stiff upper lip?

If you wanted to set yourself up as a prophet today, you’d have no need to do a complete Mother Shipton. Just start a scare story that there’s going to be a shortage of mince pies at Christmas and watch the self-fulfilling prediction unfold.

Why do we need to use standard English and bias-free language in writing? (Quora)

If you want to write fiction, you can only use standard bias-free English all the time if all your characters are standard bias-free English-speaking persons.

You will find this difficult, because although quite a few people speak standard English, the only people who are bias-free are dead. Though many people may try to be, anyone claiming to be actually bias-free is either a fool or a liar.

All human beings are influenced by their upbringing and personal experience to see the world in a way that is peculiar to themselves, and that is assuming they all start with relatively similar perceptual apparatus. (Obviously if you have unusually good, unusually poor, or just different sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell or ESP, your perception of the world will differ from standard). This doesn’t mean your way of viewing the word is right or wrong, or even that there is a right and wrong, it just makes you honest when you acknowledge that it’s your way.

In addition, our senses are not set up to show us how the world is, but to show us how the world is in relation to ourselves. As an example, both the timing and the volume of a sound will differ according to how close you are to its origin, whilst if a light is associated with the sound, the light will reach a distant observer first. I well remember, on my first visit to a cricket match as a child, how puzzled I was by the delay between my seeing the batsman striking the ball and my hearing it. We simply do not possess and cannot acquire omniscience.

Particular care needs to be taken when dealing with the self-professed unbiased, who include some of the most biased and intolerant people you will ever meet.

As a writer of fiction, you can only be true to yourself. If you try to fit your writing around somebody else’s prejudices, you are likely to render it insipid and bland at best. I remember one writer who contrived to render a story quite unintelligible by substituting ‘they’ and ‘their’ for every masculine or feminine pronoun. Which is fine if you want to be insipid or unintelligible, but otherwise not.

A writer in a dictatorship or living under a totalitarian regime may not have this choice, but I still believe a writer in the free world should be able to choose to go full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes!

How should the old Brexit Slogans be Updated for 2021? (Quora)

I hesitated to answer this question, since the five-year-old ashes of the referendum campaign are stone-cold and blown away by a great wind called Covid that neither side foresaw.

In the wake of the genuinely catastrophic damage done to the world by that wind, the hyperbolic 2016 claims of Brexit catastrophe should ideally be quietly forgotten and the widely-foreseen adjustment problems of leaving the EU pale into insignificance. I don’t think efforts to blame Brexit for worldwide phenomena reflect much credit on those concerned.

Suffice it to say that nearly all Remain slogans should today be amended by the addition of a single word. The word in question is ‘not’. I’m sure you can work out for yourselves where it needs to be added in each case.

There really was only one important Leave slogan: ‘Take back control’. No-one seriously expected British politicians overnight to become hugely efficient paragons of virtue. In fact, we expected it to be quite tricky to take over from the remote pilot that had been charting our course for so long. But the crucial thing is, if British governments mess up, we can get rid of them.

As it happened, the first result of taking back control was the UK’s much-condemned, but in the event astute, decision to go it alone on the development and distribution of Covid vaccines. This led to an early start to the recovery of economic growth that outpaced the rest of the EU.

Major economic changes, like any long-term investment, usually have their costs front-loaded and benefits delayed. In the circumstances, the UK has been fortunate to see some early benefits. Before the pandemic, Leave-favouring economists tended to estimate five years or thereabouts to break-even. It may turn out to be slightly less; we’ll see.

But for better or worse, it’s done. What on earth is the point of seizing upon every piece of news that, unremarkably, tells us there are costs as well as benefits?

We need to go forward, not keep looking back to the road not taken.

On Receiving Political Advice from Celebrities

Let’s face it, the problem with most 'celebrities' these days is that you’ve never heard of them. They’re not even famous for being famous. This means they are probably actors in TV soap operas that you don’t watch.

Last I heard, you did not need a degree in politics or economics to get into acting school. Mind you, if you had a degree in politics or economics, you’d be even less famous, like me. I read PPE.

But since nobody listens to me, why should anyone listen to them? See? Nobody can remember who we are, because they never knew in the first place. That’s called logic, that is.

Or, as the man said in the film, ‘I’ll never forget what’s’isname.’