I've never been convinced by the breezy references to building on Leazes Park and 'money talks'
It's not only about the council and we remember the threatened quagmire of objections to castle Leazes.
This lad must be bored to tears.
I swear he's been saying this every week since I signed up for twitter 15 years ago or whenever.
A mate wanted Enjoy the Silence as his first dance at his wedding until he reflected that the lyric “vows are spoken to be broken” wasn’t the most appropriate.
Is the BBC early evening news just doing rage bait now?
No reception for streaming music.
Don't ask me to explain why, but one of my few Spotify downloads is a compilation of Male Stripper remixes (Man 2 Man meets Man Parish), which is providing a lively soundtrack
It's listen to that or the older person behind moaning about tax and immigration.
Obviously the toilets smell as bad as usual and we've the bonus of no catering.
It's chocka too. They've explained that this is because the train has only four carriages - announced like it's an act of god and nothing to do with the company.
It's the Easter school holidays, which means the joy of a Cross-country train from Newcastle to Exeter.
In turn this means middle class bluesky moaning about trains.
That's an obvious piece of bluesky sneering but even a polite and real life "but what do you think of the big spending cuts they've talked about ?" is dismissed as a leftist slur.
I've noticed that "doing your own research" is very popular among Facebook boomers when it comes to things like vaccines and the world economic forum
...but nobody wants to do any of their own research or free thinking on Richard Tice, Zia Yusuf etc, or Reforms UK's fiscal/economic policies.
I have now. That is bizarre. It's like 45 minutes long.
That is fantastic.
I'm still seeking the holy grail of regional promo films - the One North East "Great North Revolution" video featuring the leadership team rendered in constructivist style.
Jaws were on the floor. I think it cost a fortune
Whether it’s the Greens or Reform, a big factor in business as usual or doing the same as everyone else is maybe that there’s not a huge amount of flexibility, power, or resources in local (or regional) government.
Maybe the Vice President will intervene when he's back from Hungry where he is campaigning for Orbán's re-election.
Remember though - this is all the fault of you Bluesky liberal lefties for not allowing racist jokes on TV anymore.
Starting to feel like that episode of the Goodies where the world is scheduled to end at midnight
I’d say except without out the dated, politically incorrect seventies element, but Trump provides that too.
Edging a lawn is a good way to look superficially neat. You can say the overgrown beds are a 'cottage garden look'
A twitter anon says I'm complicit in the death of my cultural identity.
I looked at my recent tweets. They were about the Lindisfarne gospels, Newcastle united, and the east Durham former coal town of Horden.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=e32l...
A combination might have looked a bit more rigorous
The indicative interventions look a bit back of a tab packet too – “organise stuff to bring people together”
Also, announcing 20 million, spatially targeted funding pots with social media posts from the local MPs didn't appear to save anybody’s skin in 2024.
It all feels a bit policymaking on the fly though. Pride in Place has been partly pitched as a replacement for UKSPF that was itself supposed to be a replacement for the EU funds... but it's being spent on very different things.
Anyway...thinking aloud...I shall write this down properly.
The net result is that more goes to London and the south east.
I’m not against this in principle. London has lost all of it UKSPF, same as everyone else, London boroughs aren’t all flush, and London used to get heaps of European Social Fund. Like we always say, it’s a very unequal place.
Pride in Place is saying “you are not eligible for any of the £20 million unless your residents tell this survey they don’t ‘pull together’”.
The same indictor would have been used for "top up" money in local area agreements too – but maybe only a few hundred thousand £ at a time when resources were more generous.
Are there examples? I don’t think so on this scale. I think the cohesion indicator from the local government residents’ survey might have been used when allocating some area-based grant in the new labour years but that wasn’t much money.
It is very unusual to use a single perception indicator from a survey to allocate quite large sums of public money like this - 800 million at 20 million a pop.
www.gov.uk/government/p...
Seems to be a canny bit of money going into Pride in Place – 5.8 billion so far. I’m not sure there’s a clear strategy.
The “community cohesion filter” in the latest round is interesting. The community life survey is official statistics but that question hasn't usually been used to dole out £.
Now I think about it, dedicated MP3 devices are now maybe not obsolete but definitely niche.
Was 8-track ever a car thing here? Sorry if that sounds a bit what did you do in the war, grandad?
In my lifetime minidiscs have come and gone but when I go into a record shop now it's full of teenagers like my son buying "vinyls".