Patch

Recipe notes:

Romaine lettuce is what I had so it's what's in it. I cannot personally vouch for the results with other lettuce varieties, but I can't see it working especially badly with any variety. Your mileage may vary.

I've said "tinned mushrooms" because it's what I had and used and this is an honest recipe, but obviously use fresh mushrooms if you prefer.

Maggi liquid seasoning is a solid staple for South Asian cooking; it's made from wheat, but it's functionally just a vehicle for tasty, tasty MSG. I'm told there are other brands, but Maggi is the one you tend to see in supermarket World Food aisles. If you don't have it, soy sauce (especially the dark variety) is a decent substitute.

A lot of quality small local newspapers doing an amazing job are financially struggling. It's very sad.

Sadly not as many as you'd think. The overwhelming majority of local newspapers were owned by a handful of national companies. The three biggest are Reach (owner of the Mirror and the Express, amongst others), Newsquest and National World, who between them own 70% of all local papers. Another 10% are owned by the next biggest company (Tindle News). Only at most 20% of local papers are owned by smaller companies, and most of those aren't independent, they're just smaller companies than the big 4.

Anyone lucky enough to still have a genuine independent local paper with at least passable quality should cherish the fuck out of it.

ReactOS is a very fun project, but anyone expecting it to be a real useable OS is absolutely mad. It's been going for almost 30 years, and they're almost at the point of binary compatibility with Windows Server 2003...

The headline could equally have been "Olympic athlete forced into prostitution to pay bills", but that makes it sound like a serious institutional problem rather than a quirky and finally story.

Half term this week, so spent most of it wrestling with the kids. Lovely but exhausting.

Currently trying to fit a week's worth of work into one day, which is also exhausting but rather less lovely.

I think you mean "carnifico Latinum!"

Typhoo is kind of a dead brand at this point; they went into administration and closed their factory, and now it's owned by a vape company who just resell tea made by others.

Tetley is a plausible contender I guess, but I didn't think they were that well known abroad.

PG Tips strangely is pretty much unknown abroad because it's owned by Lipton who sell essentially the same product under different brands elsewhere.

Yorkshire Tea/Taylors of Harrogate seems like the most likely brand to beat Twinings in global recognition though.

Recipe notes: Any smoked fish will do, really. I like smoked kippers, and I also sometimes use smoked mackerel. Smoked haddock is most traditional (and arguably best), but it's not the cheapest and it's a bit of a faff to poach it.

I use oat milk rather than dairy milk as there are allergies in the family, but it's all good. Water works perfectly well as the paste liquid too.

I sometimes stir peas through it too, but didn't this time.

I thought I had usable photos of the finished dish, but apparently they all have semi-naked children in. Such is parenthood. So the thumbnail is a picture still in the pan, minus artistic eggs.

This article incorrectly suggests that they'll be running out of St Pancras, when literally the core part of their announcement was that they weren't going to be doing that. Poor journalism.

Leaving the Uber bollocks aside, the really interesting thing about their bid is that they're suggesting using Stratford International as their terminus (and not St Pancras), and reopening Ebbsfleet International. Which would be a really good thing; it'd take the pressure off the capacity issues at St Pancras and provide a genuine "value add" to their service beyond just competing like-for-like with Eurostar.

I don't reckon it'll ever come to anything (they don't have any rolling stock or money to buy any, and their rivals in the race to use the spare capacity are much further along), but it's an interesting angle.

Technically St Pancras is still state owned, but it's on a long-term lease to a private consortium. Once the lease expires it'll revert to direct state ownership too, it's just that that's got quite a long time horizon on it compared to the TOC franchises (still another 15 years away yet).

The company that owns the lines (Network Rail) is already nationalised. Its privatised predecessor (Railtrack) collapsed spectacularly all the way back in 2002.

All stations are owned and managed by either Network Rail or a train operating company, so this will bring all stations into nationalised ownership.

The only thing that isn't being nationalised as part of this plan is the existing rolling stock, which is owned by yet another set of companies. But there's no reason why new rolling stock won't be under direct ownership, so that should sort itself out eventually.