LAshby

[Pseudo Moi @moi_pseudo]

The most silent minute of silence I’ve ever not heard

Respect

[neil orpen @neilorpen]

I mean how is this skill even possible

[Racing Post @RacingPost]

Like this post if Saffie Osborne should be crowned the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year ❤️

She is "still in shock" following her historic victory at Doncaster 👇

🔗 https://t.co/g6p9vq5ajh

[Don Winslow @donwinslow]

Paul Simon pays tribute to 9/11 by performing "The Sound Of Silence".

A native New Yorker, you can see the deep emotion in Paul's face as he sings.

Heartbreaking.

[Jonny Wilkinson @JonnyWilkinson]

We all need a little loosener sometimes!

[The Royal Family @RoyalFamily]

Remembering the late, great Dolly, who brought joy, comfort and inspiration to so many - including the millions of children given free books through her Imagination Library. We will always ❤️ you.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Two hundred of the thousand acres at Diddly Squat grew nothing at all this year. That was a decision taken in advance, on a spreadsheet. Wheat or barley on that ground was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed, so Jeremy Clarkson left it bare and explained why in his Sun column this week.

One line from it went everywhere. Farmers have reached the point where it is quite simply impossible to make money from growing food. Every paper carried that sentence, and every paper stopped there.

The list underneath it did not get printed anywhere.

Because he went on to set out what two hundred acres of good English ground could do instead of feeding anyone, and there were four items on it.

- Rent it to a global agri-company growing crops for anaerobic digesters.
- Cover it in solar panels.
- Put a data centre on it.
- Sell the farm to a Chinese company for a multistorey high-intensity piggery.

Every one of those pays. The only use of that land which reliably loses money is the one that puts food on a British plate. He added that he was not being ridiculous, and that anybody in 1926 would have laughed you out of the room for suggesting the factories would be gone by 2026.

Now the bit with a date on it.

From 1 January 2027 the UK's carbon border tax applies to imported fertiliser. The Treasury's own costings put the take at £140 million in 2027-28, rising to £180 million the year after. Estimates of the hit run from around £33 a tonne to £75, which is a fifth to a quarter added to the largest input bill an arable farm carries. The Central Association of Agricultural Valuers has warned that a typical 500 acre cereals farm could be down as much as £70,000 once fertiliser and fuel costs land.

So the fertiliser that grows the wheat gets taxed on a known date, in writing, by a government that says out loud it wants food security.

Nobody in Whitehall has ever signed a policy to stop Britain growing food. They have signed a great many that make every alternative pay better, which arrives at the same field.

And understand whose field this is. Diddly Squat has a television crew, a farm shop with a queue down the lane, a pub, a lager brand, a bestselling book every autumn and one of the best land agents in the country. It is the most commercially advantaged thousand acres in Britain, and two hundred of them were left bare this year because putting seed in them was the losing move.

Every arable farmer in England is doing that same sum this autumn. Almost none of them have a production company to cover the difference.

Those two hundred acres have not gone out of production. They are waiting to hear which industry wants them more than you do.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The last overseas shearers Britain intends to let in are on the fells right now, working out the final weeks of their leave.

The door shut on 30 June. No vote, no debate, no announcement, just a date passing quietly in a summer when everyone was looking elsewhere. Those still working the Borders this week are here on leave that expires on 1 October, and when they fly out that is the end of it.

Understand what is walking out.

Six New Zealanders spent three months in one Northumberland valley last year and sheared nearly 90,000 sheep. Fifteen thousand head each, across farms from the Scottish Borders down to County Durham. They have been coming into Coquetdale for over thirty years. Since 2011 a concession has let up to 75 of them in each spring, and between them they take the wool off one and a half to two million British sheep in a window a few weeks long.

The Home Office rejected the application on 2 February. Twenty-six days of farmers writing to their MPs got it reinstated on 10 March for one final year, with a line about the sector having had fourteen years to train British workers and now being expected to transition to domestic labour.

Here is what that sentence is standing on. British Wool trains over 800 people a year, most of those courses are basic level, and most of the people on them are sheep farmers learning to do their own flock. Training was never the bottleneck. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes, calm hands, no panic in the animal, hundreds a day for weeks on end, and reaching that standard takes years of conditioning and a place in a global trade that follows the season around the planet.

Fourteen million breeding ewes. A few weeks to do them all. A sheep left in fleece gets eaten alive by maggots, so the job is not optional and the date is not negotiable.

Next spring those farms make phone calls that nobody answers.

Seventy-five shearers, once a year, and a government that could not find room for them.

[All On The Board @allontheboard]

Today we remember the 52 people who were killed, the people who were injured and affected, the heroes who helped and those who lost loved ones because of the terrible events twenty one years ago on the 7th of July 2005 in London.

#LondonBombings #NeverForget #7July

[History of Horse Racing @horsevault]

Remembering Campbell Gillies Who Died 14 Years Ago Today

[Rugby on TNT Sports @rugbyontnt]

When you wake up and realise it wasn’t a dream ❤️🏆

[Rugby on TNT Sports @rugbyontnt]

Lewis Moody has arrived at Twickenham, completing his 500-mile charity cycle challenge for MND 💪

The former England captain revealed his diagnosis last year and took on the challenge to raise money for research into the condition 👏

[Cat @catdeans]

This is awful. The last ever Denby Pottery going to the kiln. Why is there not uproar? Where’s the government in this?? We all have Denby in our homes, in family heirlooms, as our history and now it’s closing through lack of support, such a sad sad day. #SaveDenby @denbypottery

[🌸🎵 Beautiful Melody 🎶💖 @Ducnghia16]

I love that David Bowie's and Brian May's reactions were captured when Annie Lennox gives it everything, and that George Michael singing along in the back!

Fantastic video and the very best music.

[dominic dyer @domdyer70]

These are not just old saddles gathering dust in a forgotten corner of history.

Look closer.

Each one once rested on the back of a living, breathing animal that never asked to be there. A horse that knew nothing of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or the frozen hell that was Stalingrad. A horse that simply followed, because that is what horses do. They trust. They serve. They endure.

Romanian cavalrymen rode these animals into one of the most savage battles ever fought by human hands. The temperatures dropped to minus 40. The ground turned to iron. Men wept and horses collapsed, and the war kept moving anyway.

More than 6 million horses served on the Eastern Front during World War II. They hauled artillery through blizzards. They carried the wounded across open ground under fire. They pressed forward across frozen steppes until their legs simply gave out beneath them.

And when they fell, nobody came.

No burial. No name. No record. They were left exactly where they dropped, swallowed by snow and silence.

This photograph feels like the cemetery they never received. Every worn saddle is a nameless tombstone for a soul that once ran free, once breathed clouds of steam into the winter air, once gave everything it had to a war it never understood.

We remember the generals. We remember the battles. We carve names into stone walls.

But the horses? They got nothing.

Until now. Remember them.

#ForgottenVoices #WorldWarIIHistory #HorsesOfWar #EasternFront #HiddenHistory

~The History Today

[Richard Farquhar @RCFarquhar]

Not sure I’ve ever been as touched by a video of horses as by this one.
Queen’s Gamble returns to Ladyswood Stud having retired post a successful racing career with @Harry05Derham & @OliverSherwood to be reunited with her mother, Gambling Girl, 8 years after being weaned.

[Ethical Farming Ireland @ethicalfarmIE]

More Irish cattle arrived in Israel this morning, Ashdod Port. Thankfully it is a little quieter there. The shipment came from Romania so they were probably exported there as unweaned calves a year or two ago. They will be in quarantine for eight days then who knows where they will go. Conflict is escalating, it is totally reckless of the @EU_Commission to continue to allow these exports to go ahead
@OliverVarhelyi there must be an immediate suspension of all shipments to the region until the conflict is over #StopLiveExports
We thank our friends at @BanLivExport_IL for being there for the animals, always 🙏

[History of Horse Racing @horsevault]

1981 Becher's Brook

[LAshby @NortonsFarm]

@EmiratesSupport hi I’ve just dm’d you regarding my husbands cancelled fight today BNE-DXB DXB-LGW
Many thanks.

[Derek ‘Tommo’ Thompson @tommoracing]

Outstanding. 3520 people turned up at @Southwell_Races for CONSTITUTION HILL yesterday - for the horse. Not for music, partying etc but for the HORSE. This fills me with pure joy. Top jockey, top trainer, top owner - fantastic - but it was the horse. Thrilled for them but mostly for Constitution Hill who clearly loved his night of speed. Personally I hope his future remains on the flat and that we’ll be seeing him at Royal Ascot and the York August Meeting 🌟❤️