Bristolian to the core, loves quality family time, motorsport, enjoys photography and great photos, a good dinner and a local pint, days by the sea or on Exmoor
The powers that be at the yard have had new toilets built.
Building started last October, surprise surprise they aren't fully finished.
Every week someone appears to make an alteration.
These were added last week, and for some reason I find the type of screws offensive 🤔
A farmer dies in April 2026.
His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847.
The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle.
On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify.
In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable.
The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft.
The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let.
A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up.
The Treasury collects £140,000.
The land never produces British food again.
These are some of wild flowers sprayed with pesticide on Sheffield streets today by @SheffCouncil Harts tongue fern, Forget-me-not, Herb Robert. In a nature reserve we'd delight in seeing them. Why do we poison them on our streets? We need to rethink our relationship with nature
There was a time when every adult in Britain owned at least one woollen jumper that had been knitted by a relative.
An Aran in cream báinín, smelling faintly of lanolin because the wool had never been scoured. A Fair Isle in eight muted colours from the dyer in Lerwick. A Guernsey in tight navy worsted from a port on the Channel. The yarn came off sheep grazing the same hillsides a great-grandfather had grazed sheep on. It was carded, spun, and knitted by a woman who had been doing it since she was nine.
The jumper lasted twenty years. It was warm when wet. It was naturally flame-retardant and did not melt onto your skin if a spark from the galley stove landed on it, which was not a hypothetical concern on a fishing boat.
The mill towns of Yorkshire and the Borders ran on this. Bradford alone had seventy-three worsted mills by 1836 and considerably more by 1900. Hebden Bridge, Halifax, Hawick, Galashiels, every river valley a chimney, every chimney a wage packet for the village around it.
Most of them are flats now. Or coffee shops. Or empty.
The decline started in the 1950s. By 1995 the British Wool Marketing Board had ninety-one thousand registered producers. By 2015 it had forty-six thousand. A British sheep fleece in 2026 is, in many cases, worth less than the cost of paying the shearer to remove it. Some farmers compost the wool. Some pay to have it taken away as agricultural waste. The same fleece their grandfathers had clothed the country with is being treated as a disposal problem.
The jumper in your wardrobe is now polyester, manufactured in Bangladesh from petroleum, shedding microplastic fibres into the washing machine on every cycle, most of them ending up in the ocean and staying there for the next three hundred years.
The sheep is still on the hillside. Still growing the fleece. Still needing the shear.
Waiting for someone to remember what it was for.
🚨: 'My battery is low and it's getting dark'
This was the last message sent by Opportunity Rover before losing the contact with Earth and shutting down forever after battling an extreme sand storm on Mars.
Rover was expected to survive only 90-days on Mars but it kept exploring the Red Planet for nearly 15 years.
Sent from 225 million miles from Earth, these last words will forever be remembered.
Does anybody from the Kingstanding area of Birmingham recognise this fella?
He stole a lion statue from the front of my nans house at 8:45pm on Friday. It's more than just a lion statue though, as it was bought by my late grandad who sadly passed in January.
Any information about this bloke is appreciated.
Please share, repost, anything you can to push the post and get him recognised and get the statue returned.
#Birmingham #theft #stolen #crime #police
Despite a few residents emailing @SEGROplc about the nesting Skylarks the long grass bund, removal will go ahead on Monday ..apparently their ecologist will locate the nests and create a buffer zone around them..how the hell does that work when surrounded by construction machinery?! 😡
And why wait until summer to remove the bund exposing residents to a panoramic view of a desert and construction machinery ..it’s WRONG!
@RupertEvershed@libdemdaisy@RosieP4@paulpowlesland@StAlbansCouncil@RSPBAction
Activist: "Your cows are putting carbon into the atmosphere."
Farmer: "Where did they get it?"
Activist: "What?"
Farmer: "The carbon. Where did the cow get it before it put it anywhere."
Activist: "From... eating?"
Farmer: "From eating grass. And where did the grass get it."
Activist: "The soil?"
Farmer: "The air. The grass pulled it out of the air last spring. The cow ate the grass. The cow breathed some of it back out. It went back into the air it came from."
Activist: "But it's still going into the atmosphere."
Farmer: "It's going back. There's a difference between a thing going somewhere and a thing going back. You've described a circle and you're frightened of it."
Activist: "Then just don't have the cow."
Farmer: "The grass still dies in autumn. It rots where it falls. The carbon goes back into the air either way, just without anyone getting fed in the middle."
Activist: "It's not that simple."
Farmer: "It's grass, cow, breath, grass. Or it's grass, rot, air, grass. Same circle, fewer dinners. If that's complicated for you I'd stay away from the water cycle. That one's got clouds in it."
This is Brislington meadows, a designated local wildlife site in Bristol that Homes England and Keepmoat homes want to build over. This isn’t in our new local plan. Next week could be the end of the decade long battle to save it if Cllrs approve the application. Help us please 🧵
Can everyone mad about boat taxes get mad about a designated nature site being bulldozed? This rare habitat doesn’t need to be lost forever. We can save it but only if enough people know about it! This should be a source of shame for Homes England but no one is talking about it!
HALF A MILLION PEOPLE WERE DEFRAUDED
Imagine you are behind on your store card payments. You are already struggling. Then the bank quietly adds an extra charge on top of what you owe. Not because it costs them that much. Just because .. they can. And because they think nobody is watching.
Someone was watching.
Nicholas Wilson was a debt recovery lawyer. He goes by Mr Ethical @nw_nicholas on X. His old boss meant it as an insult. In 2003 he noticed that @HSBC subsidiary HFC Bank was adding an illegal 16.4% charge onto the debts of people who were already in financial trouble.
Store cards from John Lewis, Currys, B&Q, Dixons, PC World. Ordinary people. Struggling people. Being quietly robbed.
He told his boss it was illegal. His boss started calling him "Mr Ethical" as a joke. Then they sacked him.
He reported it to the regulators. @TheFCA ignored him for years.
When a researcher separately wrote to both HSBC and the FCA asking about the fraud...
... both wrote back with responses in the exact same wording, same punctuation, same paragraphs. The bank and the regulator were sharing the same script.
FCA's own independent Complaints Commissioner eventually investigated. He called it the worst case of regulatory failure he had ever dealt with.
FCA's response was to appoint Ruth Kelly, an HSBC director, and Baroness Hogg from John Lewis, onto its own board. The two people they were supposed to be investigating were now sitting inside the regulator.
You actually cannot make this up.
After 13 years of Wilson refusing to go away, HSBC quietly agreed to pay some money back. FCA announced 6,700 victims.
Wilson says the real number is closer to 500,000. HSBC has now set aside £223 million for repayments. No fine. No criminal charges. No one went to prison. No one was even publicly named.
Wilson has spent the last 20 years unemployable. Blacklisted. Living on state benefits. Fighting to keep his home. Someone even anonymously reported him to the DWP for benefit fraud while the actual billion pound fraud went unpunished.
The bank that robbed half a million people kept its licence.
The man who caught them lost everything.
Source: @guardian | @BBC | @PrivateEyeNews | @SundayMirror | @realmediauk | nicholaswilson com | @nw_nicholas and others.
Campaigners are racing to save the mother tree of the Bramley apple – a 220-year-old tree in Nottinghamshire that traces every Bramley apple in the world back to a single pip. Planted in the 19th century, it’s still fruiting today, but now faces an uncertain future as its cottage goes up for sale.
Supporters want to buy the site and turn it into a heritage centre, preserving a living piece of Britain’s culinary history for the nation.
#Apple #Heritage #Trees #Environment #FoodHistory #Conservation
https://t.co/dXjpDed1kR
How could anyone think that this haven for Red squirrels and other flora and fauna should be destroyed for a tourist holiday camp , 1000 space car park, we as a cic ( community interest company ) want a community buy out . The 79th group who bought penrhos from land and lakes last year ,went into administration after allegations of fraud.The administrators running the account /site have placed penrhos for sale with estate agents Lambert Smith Hampton by closed bid !
📸David Jones& John Trac Jones
An amazing new mural of David Attenborough has been created in Bristol ahead of his 100th birthday tomorrow. Happy birthday to a true national treasure 👏