Pre-lapsarian Sunfish

Freshwater ray-finned fish belonging to the order Perciformes. Prefers clear, cold, slow-moving water. Pronouns: glub / glub

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@LBC @mrjamesob James O’Brien - all the nuance and empathy of a foghorn.

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@DAaronovitch @MargaretBluman Fair enough. But OJ was always frivolous, lost in the culture wars. Trans dogma needed pushback from serious people, like you. Too many on the Left didn’t want to rock the boat or blot their copybook.

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@DAaronovitch @MargaretBluman @DAaronovitch has always been a 'no enemies to the left' type. It takes courage to go against one's fellow travellers, even for something as simple, and self-evident, as "women don't have penises". A pity David never had that courage, nor the courage to support those who did.

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@scabbadeebah @DAaronovitch @mort50187 You sound dreamy.

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@sipryor @dcsandbrook Are you wearing a lanyard Simon?

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@RichLowry Thanks America. We gave you Shakespeare, Democracy and Charles CW Cooke. You gave us BLM, obesity and DEI. This lot’ll be taking the knee again next. Gee, thanks Rich.

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@andyburnham You’re taking too much in tax. The tax burden has never been higher. Stop tinkering with ‘cheap days out’ and ‘free school breakfasts’ and the like. Just take a bit less of what is ours and reduce what you are giving to the Welfare vote. Can you manage that?

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@nathancofnas @Rosalind_Arden_ So people are angry about #JasonArday being hounded by his detractors for the lies he told and are now going to hound the guy who helped to bust him? You’re all hypocrite. Blame @Cambridge_Uni and Arday himself, not @nathancofnas.

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@treesey @Channel4News Good to see Channel 4 News can occasionally still ask difficult questions of its fellow travellers on the Left. I remember when @LiamHalligan was their economics correspondent - unimaginable now.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The World Bank ranked every country on earth for practical solar potential.

Britain came second from bottom. Not second from bottom in Europe. On the planet. Out of everywhere they measured, the only place with worse conditions for a solar panel is Ireland. Norway is above us. Norway, where the sun clocks off entirely for part of the year, is a better bet than Lincolnshire.

The reasons are not a mystery. We sit at 53 degrees north, the same line as Edmonton, Alberta. The sun in December gets about as high as a first-floor window and then thinks better of it. And there's the cloud, which is not a detail, it is the national personality. A square metre of London gets 0.52 kilowatt hours of sunlight a day in December and 4.74 in July, so the panel does nine times less work in the month your heating is on than in the month it isn't. Across the whole of 2024, British solar ran at 9.5% of what it's rated at. The other 90.5% is a photograph of a power station.

Now the other column.

The ground we're bolting it to is Trent valley silt and Lincolnshire fen. Some of it took three hundred years to drain. It grows wheat at yields that most of the planet cannot get near, in a climate so reliably damp that grass grows here without anyone asking it to, which is the entire reason this island has cattle and cheese and a butcher.

So we are, measurably, one of the worst places on earth for sunlight and one of the best on earth for food.

And we've had a good long look at both of those numbers and gone with sunlight.

Somewhere in Namibia, which the same report ranked first, there is a patch of absolutely nothing, in full sun, wondering what it did wrong.

[GB Politics @GBPolitcs]

🚨NEW: New court documents reveal Henry Nowak's final words to his killer, Vickrum Digwa, were "I'm not a racist"

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@AaronBastani The rich will always be with us. Musk / Bezos haven’t impoverished me. The recipient of half my income is the government. They’re the ones destroying middle class incomes, via tax, inflation and an imported underclass. None of these are things you seem to want to talk about. Why?

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@EssexPR They’ve got to get those votes from somewhere.

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@afneil @YouTube Another Labour dud. #wearesofucked

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@lewis_goodall Amusing to see so many commentators lose their hearts to Burnham before he’s even done anything. Many have been used to whoring themselves out to the usual metropolitan elites, but are now twerking just as readily for the MP for Makerfield. Watch all those wankers head north.

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@DavidLammy All of them educated in the Thatcher era, David. Your own private education never did you any harm, but now you’re happy to pull up the ladder from those who could benefit from it today. Two tier Labour, as always.

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@SamaHoole What a wonderful post! Man as ‘weather’. Thank you.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There are four hens in the back garden of a retired widower in Yorkshire, and there is, unmistakably, a government.

Beatrice runs it. This was never put to a vote. Beatrice is a four-year-old Light Sussex, and she holds office the way the genuinely powerful always have, by being first out of the coop every morning, first to the worms, and entirely beyond challenge. The other three understand the arrangement completely. None of them has ever seen it written down. None of them needs to.

A backyard flock, it turns out, is not a democracy but a small and rigid court, and beneath Beatrice sit the other three in their settled order.

There is Brenda, a Rhode Island Red, the deputy and enforcer, who administers the order of things with the joyless efficiency of a woman who runs the village hall committee and has firm views about how the urn is filled. Brenda does not aspire to the top. Brenda has seen what the top requires. Brenda is content to be second and to make absolutely certain everyone below her knows they are below her.

There is Pam, a blue hybrid of uncertain parentage, who occupies the middle and worries about it. Pam is the first to raise the alarm at a sparrowhawk, a falling leaf, the neighbour's cat, or a carrier bag, and she is right just often enough to be tolerated and wrong just often enough to be a trial to everyone. Pam means well. Pam means well at volume.

And there is Susan, the youngest, a flighty brown hybrid who arrived not knowing the order and learned it the hard way, one firm peck at a time. Susan is at the bottom. Susan has made her peace with the bottom. She gets the worm nobody else wanted and the perch nearest the draught, and she is, for all that, the happiest hen in the garden, because the foot of a settled order is a more restful place to stand than the middle of a contested one. Pam could learn a great deal from Susan. Pam will not.

The man watches all of this from the kitchen window with his tea and believes, in the manner of all constitutional monarchs, that he is in charge. He opens the coop. He scatters the feed. He digs the vegetable bed at quarter past six because Beatrice taught him to, though he would tell you it was his own idea entirely.

He thinks the garden runs on him. The garden runs on Beatrice. The man is, at most, the weather.

He lost his wife some years ago, and a daughter who could not be there every day brought him four hens instead, on the theory that a man does better with something to get up for. The theory was sound. He gets up at first light now, every morning, because four small dependents are counting on him, and because one of them, a white hen with a black collar, will put her head on one side and regard him in a way that has become, without his ever quite deciding it, the first conversation of his day.

He talks to them. He has stopped pretending he does not.

Four hens. One government. A worked vegetable bed, more eggs in a week than one man can get through, two dead rats so far this year, and a reason for a good man to be out in his garden at dawn with the dew coming up and the kettle on.

This is the smallest farm in England. It is also, by a quiet distance, one of the best run.

Eat the egg. Keep the hens. Mind the old men in their gardens. They are doing better than they let on, and so, in their settled and governed way, are the hens.

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@NicholasTyrone Loving your prescience here, @NicholasTyrone. This Burnham coronation is no accident: https://t.co/jcMnw6l5kH

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@MrAndyNgo Why do these types all have to look so freaky? Maybe if they were less ghoulish and more conventionally attractive they’d find it easier to fit in and have less need to take provocative positions.

[Pre-lapsarian Sunfish @Sunners_]

@Donna_Rachel_ @agentsilverfox1 So why is your response to this effort to investigate an issue you purport to know and care about, which government has wilfully tried to avoid, to find an error in terminology? No wonder people are sick of self-proclaimed experts - so many of them have been captured - like you.