Continued rain. Shopping. Flu jabs. Added glitter. T-shirts. YIMBYs. And De Niro has his say.

 Last night I think it rained all night. At any right I woke a few times and heard it hammering down. And by the time I got up it was still raining! 

My daughter contacted me early in the morning and suggested we go shopping; she had dropped her small daughter at school and was on her way to my house with the small boy. 

As far as I know the rain continued all day, unless it eased for a while when we were inside IKEA, but it was certainly still raining when we emerged. 

Phil and I walked into the village in the rain in the  mid-afternoon for a flu injection. Finally as we made our way home the rain stopped. By 4.30 pm we had blue sky and even some sunshine. Crazy weather! 

Earlier this week, a young man called Yaz Ashmawi managed to approach the Labour leader as he was about to make his conference speech. He had evaded security people and sprinkled Kier Starmer with glitter, shouting “We demand a people’s house!”. Perhaps he also felt that the Labour Party needed a bit of sparkle. He has since apologised, not for the glitter, which is unbelievably difficult to remove from clothing and hair, but for touching Kier Starmer unexpectedly and without his permission. 

Now Labour, it seems, has sought to maximise the publicity from the incident, selling T-shirts for £20 with the slogan: “Sparkle with Starmer.” I suppose it is one way of raising funds.

(As an aside, I am rather fed up of supposed fans of famous musicians, live ones such as Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young, and unfortunately also dead ones such as Leonard Cohen and Tom Petty, using the various groups of social media to market T-shirts!)

In her “Digested Week” in the Guardian, Emma Brockes reminds us of a possible Kier Starmer neologism: 

“The term “yimby”, an acronym for “yes, in my back yard”, and in opposition to the more commonly used “nimby”, was referred to by Keir Starmer in an interview with the BBC, in relation to his promise to build 1.5m homes if elected. Yimby generally refers to pressure groups devoted to addressing housing shortages, rather than, say, people lobbying for a nuclear power plant to be built in their neighbourhoods, and is thought to have started in San Francisco 10 years ago in response to soaring house prices brought on by the tech boom. The Labour leader did not, in the interview, specify the exact nature of the housing he’d be happy to see go up in his back yard and may, at some point, have to clarify whether he is a yimby, or in fact, several clicks to the left, a “phimby”, which refers to advocates for public housing over market-rate developments.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, the actor Robert De Niro has described Donald Trump  as “evil” and “a wannabe tough guy with no morals or ethics”. He should have been speaking on Wednesday at the Stop Trump Summit in New York City but was unable to attend because he tested positive for Covid. So his statement was read out by someone else. 

It’s not the first time he has criticised Mr Trump. Back in 2016 in a pre-election video he said: “He’s so blatantly stupid. He’s a punk. He’s a dog. He’s a pig. A con. A bullshit artist. A mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” 

He reckons he has played so many baddies in films over the years that he recognises them easily. He doesn’t mince his words though, does he?

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!