Stephen Pepper

“Remember, life’s not short enough” Stan Laurel “between the wish & the thing the World awaits” Cormac McCarthy

[Stephen Pepper @Pepper2Pepsi]

@CultOfBritCom Absolutely brilliant, difficult now to realise what a huge star he was and how good his impressions were. Nothing like it anywhere today. How light entertainment has diminished and shrunk.

[Stephen Pepper @Pepper2Pepsi]

@Skint_Eastwood1 Get a life mate. Jesus! Nothing better to do?

[Stephen Pepper @Pepper2Pepsi]

Lovely heartwarming post, thank you.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There is a new field in this universe, and standing in it, at last at ease, is an old soldier. His name is Hector.

He is a Cavalry Black, a big Irish-bred gelding the better part of seventeen hands, and for seventeen years he served with the Household Cavalry in London, on State and Ceremonial duty, which is a polite phrase for the hardest thing you can ask of a horse.

Understand what that means. A horse is a flight animal. Every instinct in it, refined across millions of years of being prey, says one word in the face of sudden noise and pressing crowds: run. Hector was trained, over years, to do the opposite. To stand. To carry a rider in a steel breastplate down the Mall through a wall of sound, past the bands and the cheering and the saluting guns of the King's Troop, and not move a muscle. To hold himself still on a state occasion while every nerve in his body screamed at him to bolt, and to do it again, and again, faultlessly, because the man on his back and the crowd at his shoulder were trusting half a tonne of flight animal to master its own nature on command.

He walked behind a gun carriage at a state funeral once, at the slow march, the drum beating the step, a nation watching through its tears, and he never put a hoof wrong.

He is retired now. The shoes are off. The clipped parade coat has been let go woolly and unmilitary, the first sign the people who tend old service horses look for that one is finally letting down. He shares a green field with a small unbothered donkey called Nelson, because a horse should never be alone, and the black charger who stood behind kings and the donkey who has never had a worry in his life are now inseparable. When his old groom visits, Hector lifts his head and nickers across the field before the man has said a word.

And here is the part that undoes everyone who knows what they are seeing. One afternoon they found Hector lying flat out on his side in the grass, dead still, and a heart stopped, the way every horseman's does at that sight, because a horse down and flat looks like the worst news there is. Then an ear flicked at a fly, and the breath went out of them in relief. He was simply, deeply asleep. A horse only sleeps like that when it feels entirely safe, because flat on the ground is the one place a prey animal cannot flee from, and most never dare it. For seventeen years Hector stood, awake to every danger, holding everyone else's nerve so they could rely on him. Now, in a quiet field, he has decided it is finally safe to lie down and close his eyes.

He gave his courage to the rest of us for seventeen years. He has earned the grass. He is taking it lying down, in the sun, with the donkey keeping watch.

[Allison Pearson @AllisonPearson]

Keir Starmer: “We are reforming welfare.”

Sorry?

5,000 new claimants for Disability benefit every day.

EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

Benefits bill is now higher than the entire income tax take.

[Tom @tomwhx]

"He is the Prime Minister that is fit FOR THE MOMENT"

Straight out of The Thick of It!

[Stephen Pepper @Pepper2Pepsi]

@AllisonPearson @NHSWales This is not unusual. My 96yr father taken seriously ill at home dials 999 late at night. Told there would be a long wait. There was - no-one came at all! Had to await arrival of GP at lunchtime the next day.

[The Rest Is History @TheRestHistory]

As today is the first day of the World Cup, @dcsandbrook crowns an unlikely player as the greatest of all time...

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

On June 9, 1944, the French Resistance captured a senior SS officer named Helmut Kämpfe near Limoges. The next morning, his unit, the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, was looking for a response. They had already hanged 99 men from the balconies of Tulle the day before, chosen at random from townspeople, leaving them to strangle slowly in front of their families because they couldn't find enough rope for a proper drop.

Now they needed something more.

On June 10, Sturmbannführer Adolf Diekmann led his men to Oradour-sur-Glane. Some historians believe he confused it with Oradour-sur-Vayres, a different village where the Resistance was actually active. Others believe he knew exactly where he was. Either way, at 2pm his soldiers blocked every road in and out of the village.

They told everyone to gather in the marketplace for a routine identity check. People complied. A dentist came. A farmer left his fields. Schoolchildren were told by their teachers not to worry, they'd be back by dinner. A man cycling through town stopped to see what was happening.

By 2:30pm, around 650 people were standing in the square.

Then the soldiers separated the men.

The women and children were marched to the church. The 190 men were divided into six groups and taken to barns across the village. The mayor, Dr. Paul Desourteaux, reportedly tried to negotiate. There was nothing to negotiate.

In the barns, the soldiers opened fire but aimed deliberately at legs. At thighs. At knees. The goal was not to kill but to incapacitate. To ensure that when they piled straw over the bodies and lit it, nobody could crawl away. Men who were on fire and still conscious screamed while soldiers stood outside the doors.

Six men survived by playing dead beneath other bodies. One died from his burns days later. Five lived.

In the church, the women had been waiting almost two hours with the children. Soldiers carried in a large wooden box and placed it in the nave. They lit a fuse and left. The explosion released a thick, suffocating smoke. Soldiers then entered and opened fire on anyone still moving. Then they piled wood, straw, and chairs onto the bodies and lit everything.

The church bell rang for hours as the fire climbed the tower.

Women broke windows. Those who reached the ledge were shot before they could jump. One woman, 47-year-old Marguerite Rouffanche, crawled behind the altar, found a small window, and squeezed through. She dropped three meters to the ground. A 19-year-old named Henriette Joyeux saw her and followed, throwing her seven-month-old baby out first. Soldiers shot the baby out of the air. Then shot Henriette. Then shot Marguerite five times as she ran.

Marguerite survived by lying still beneath pea plants in a garden while the village burned around her. She lay there until the next morning. She was the only person to leave the church alive.

The youngest confirmed victim was seven days old.

After the killings, the soldiers spent the afternoon looting every building. Food, valuables, livestock, wine. Some burned homes with elderly residents still inside. Then they ate dinner. That evening. In the area.

The next morning, relatives from surrounding villages arrived looking for their families. They found 642 dead and a village of smoking ruins.

The aftermath is almost as horrifying as the massacre itself.

At the 1953 war crimes tribunal, 65 men were indicted. Only 20 could be found. Fourteen were Alsatians, French citizens, and Alsace threatened to riot if its sons were convicted. An amnesty law was quietly passed. Almost everyone walked free within a year.

Nobody spent meaningful time in prison for Oradour-sur-Glane.

By French law, nothing in the original village may be moved, repaired, or altered. The rusted cars sit in the street where they burned. The sewing machines are fused to the shop floors. The baby carriages are still there. The church stands open to the sky with a plaque listing the names of the children killed inside.

You can walk through it today.

82 years ago this morning, those 642 people had no idea. The dentist was thinking about his afternoon appointments. The teachers were relieved the children were behaving. The man on the bicycle was annoyed about the delay.

By 6pm they were all dead, and the soldiers who killed them were eating dinner.

Never forget Oradour-sur-Glane.

[Paul Embery @PaulEmbery]

Here’s the problem. The liberal political class wants us to treat atrocities like Belfast as single, random, isolated incidents. “Yes, it’s horrific, but don’t overreact,” they say. “Let the police do their job. Justice will be delivered. Let’s remain united,” and so on.

But the public can see that such incidents *aren’t* random or isolated. They are, in fact, all the consequence of massive state failure in the area of asylum and immigration. All roads lead back there.

That’s why people are angry.. They are sick of the platitudes that get trotted out after each fresh incident. They don’t want to hear them anymore. They know that the decisions of establishment politicians have brought us to this current pass, and they don’t trust those same politicians to fix things, especially when some of them refuse to even recognise that the public’s anger is justified.

There has been a huge vibe shift in recent years. Imagine - God forbid - there were another 7/7. Does anyone think the public response would be anything like as restrained as it was then? We are in really dangerous territory.

The public don’t want flowers and candles and “Don’t let them divide us.” They want someone who says, “I recognise that the state has failed abjectly. We have allowed far too many people to settle in the country without knowing who they truly are. It has disrupted your communities. Your anger is justified. And I will do everything in my power to put things right.”

Any politician unwilling to articulate that message, fully and sincerely, is effectively sanctioning more years of growing social disharmony and discord. Things cannot heal until those in power recognise the extent of the problem and what it will take to fix it. And, on both counts, most of them don’t.

That’s why the next few years are going to be very, very turbulent.

[Stephen Pepper @Pepper2Pepsi]

@nicolelampert Best just ignored - well past any sell by date he had.

[Bernie @Artemisfornow]

Just when you think Claire Fox couldn’t be more brilliant … she is. Here’s Claire on Alien Culture.

“We do not think for example that stoning women for adultery is modern, that it’s just a cultural practice, what’s wrong with that? We do not think that child marriage is an interesting cultural expression. We have to say that’s a backward medieval thing. So ‘Alien culture’ was well chosen, it’s importing Alien culture”

Exactly what we were all thinking🔥

[Stephen Pepper @Pepper2Pepsi]

@MichelleDewbs @NatalieFleetMP Never mind Michelle, love your show its a ‘must watch’ in our house 😊👍

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

Ray Lambert had already been shot twice and blown up once before he ever set foot on Omaha Beach.

He had survived the invasion of North Africa in 1943. Then Sicily. Each time he had been wounded. Each time he had gone back. By June 6th, 1944, the 23-year-old Staff Sergeant and head medic of the 16th Infantry Regiment's 2nd Battalion was on his third invasion in two years. He had already won a Silver Star for running through German lines in North Africa to drag wounded men out.

He was not supposed to survive a third one.

Lambert landed in the first wave at Omaha Beach. Of the 31 men in his landing craft, only 7 survived the day. The other 24 were killed before they even reached the sand.

He started working immediately.

The first bullet hit his right arm and shattered the bone. He kept going. A second round tore through his right elbow as he was pulling a wounded soldier through the surf. He kept going. Something hit his leg and opened it down to the bone. He put a tourniquet on himself, injected himself with morphine from his own kit, and kept going.

He found a slab of concrete on the beach that offered a few inches of cover. He set up a treatment zone behind it, dragging men out of the water and working on them one by one under constant fire. That piece of concrete is still there today. People who visit Omaha Beach call it Ray's Rock.

Then a loose landing craft ramp swung loose in the surf and slammed into him. It broke his back.

He kept going.

Lambert lost count of how many men he treated. The official record credits him with saving at least 15 lives that morning. Other accounts say closer to two dozen. He worked until his body physically stopped, collapsing unconscious at the edge of the surf, bleeding from multiple wounds, his back broken, still in the water.

A doctor spotted him. A landing craft pulled him out.

Here is the part that does not feel real.

Lambert's brother, Euel, had also been wounded at Normandy that day. The two brothers were loaded onto the same evacuation landing craft. They were placed in the same wheeled ambulance. They were taken to the same tent hospital in England. They were brought into the same operating room at the same time.

Lambert spent almost a full year recovering before he could walk properly again.

He went home. He lived quietly for decades, rarely talking about what happened. In 2019, at the age of 98, he went back to Normandy and stood on the beach again. He published a memoir called Every Man a Hero. It became a New York Times bestseller.

In 2021, Ray Lambert died peacefully at home. He was 100 years old.

He had three invasions, four serious wounds, a broken back, a Silver Star, multiple Bronze Stars, multiple Purple Hearts, and two dozen men who came home because he refused to stop moving on the worst morning in American military history.

Today is June 6th.

Remember him.

[Stephen Pepper @Pepper2Pepsi]

@OldGassy1984 🤣🤣🤣😀😀😀👍

[Dr Sanjoy Kumar @drsanjoykumar]

Exclusive:
Prosecutor Alan Murphy from complex case unit, midlands CPS placed Dc Neil Beddoe’s investigative report in the MG6D schedule. This was the only file he placed in this schedule. Locked it away for no one else to see.
I will now share Dc Neil Beddoe’s report in full

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

The only thing that stops violent men from raping you and your society are other men who are equally willing to be violent in stopping the rapists. The West has decided that the highest virtue is to quietly comply with the destruction of your civilization because to do otherwise is bigoted toward the rapists. It really is that simple.

[Henry Winter @henrywinter]

456. The number of reasons why the pyramid’s importance is highlighted by today’s Champions League final. 456 EFL/non-League games Arsenal players have played. David Raya turned out 16 times in the Conference for Southport, 45 times in League One for Blackburn Rovers and 147 times in the Championship (53, Blackburn; 94, Brentford).

Eberechi Eze played 20 League Two games for Wycombe Wanderers and 104 times in the Championship for QPR. Viktor Gyokeres played 113 times in the Championship with Coventry City and 11 with Swansea City.

You can add another 63 to that 456 with Christian Norgaard (who played in the Championship with Brentford) on the bench. And another 103: watching on will be the unfortunately injured Ben White, who played 46 times in the Championship with Leeds United, 15 times in League One with Peterborough United and 42 League Two games with Newport County.

622 reasons why the Premier League is supported by the pyramid and why the elite league needs to increase financial support with the long-delayed New Deal. #UCL #EFL #UCLfinal #PSGARS

[Stephen Pepper @Pepper2Pepsi]

@Dapper_DanUK Nothing to do with it being 3 females (I worked with females who would have restrained him the moment he moved) it IS about sloppy practice and poor training. Basics! First, grab hold so he doesn’t run while telling him he’s under arrest then handcuff. They were 3 spectators!

[DapperDan 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @Dapper_DanUK]

Three female police officers walk up to a man sitting on a barrier and tell him he’s under arrest. He stands up, casually shrugs off the attempt to restrain him, and jogs away while they make a half-arsed comical chase.

This is British policing in 2026.

How embarrassing is this?
These are the people you’re supposed to call when you’re in trouble.
You’re meant to feel safe knowing that you can rely on them.

When forces lower physical standards, dropping the bleep test requirement from 5.4 to 3.7 in many forces, removing the upper body strength test entirely in 2016, and prioritising diversity targets and recruitment numbers over real competence this is exactly what you get. Public safety becomes optional.

Get rid of DEI.

[David Keyes @DavidMKeyes]

🚨🚨 Iran deal NEARLY finalized. Last sticking points are Iran's insistence on destroying West, killing all infidels and imposing Islam on the world. Fingers crossed!