days of yore

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Good morrow Dear Reader.

I hope the sun has risen with you and your hay rick is rat free, your cow is managing to keep producing milk from her one remaining udder from the dried straw you've been feeding her over the 'driest summer since '76' and your well hasn't run dry just yet.

Why the evocation of days gone by ? Well it does seem to me that with every passing day we appear to be coming closer to calamity day, judgement day, call it what you will. Electricity being the item foremost on my mind, as I use the stuff to extract honey, warm wax, steam clean frames, warm honey to bottle it and do a lot of this by the light of a bulb. How in the name of all that's holy will an 'average' family of 4 be able to pay, from after tax income, a fuel bill of £3.5/£4.5/£5.5k over the coming year when they are used to paying (a fair price) £500-£750 a year for their energy needs.

Even if we decided to stop supporting the Ukrainians in the war (and I'm not supporting that for one minute) the sanctions would remain and the price of gas on the world market would remain stubbornly high as long as the Nord Stream pipeline remained closed, and other pipelines diverted to 'favourable' countries. And one doesn't just build an ACME unfolding nuclear power station like they do in the cartoons do they ??

I was talking to my father when he was helping on a honey stall at the weekend (helping is actually pushing it - he had accompanied my mother to the event so he and she could go on a river trip and he was merely resting his legs in a folding camping chair at the back of my stall) and he said that for the past 40 years - as long as he'd been married (actually its 56 years but who's counting) he and mum had said we needed an energy policy that didn't pander to the CND (at the time) and the non-nuclear brigade and we should have built two new reactors for every one coming to the end end of it's life using the British designed PWR reactors that were proven and safe. I have to say I couldn't agree more.

Then a chance conversation in the week with an elderly ex-engineer who had a good rant about the anti-fracking brigade saying that they (and the media) conveniently (or ignorantly) ignored the fact that north sea oil was largely extracted using the same technique after the initial surge of oil flowing from a new well. The fact you have to 'force' it from the ground using a method not unlike hydraulic fracturing, and has been done safely for 50+ years, has been completely overlooked.

Going back to my own energy use - having had more than my fair share of troubles extracting this season (two broken extractor speed controllers) and a bee shed that is increasingly not bee proof as the wood warps and flexes with age, resulting in many midnight oil burning sessions to extract the next batch of supers, my mind was cast back to the 'old days' when honey wasn't spun, it was cut into squares and put into oil cloth and packaged in little cardboard boxes (no polythene cases or windows then) or the entire crop was crushed and strained using, one presumes, muslin or sacking, and bottled in early glass bottles with cork lids, all during the day in a lean-to full of robbing bees (no electricity to work by night) and then a big fire and cauldron to boil down and melt the wax for candles and industry.

I sometimes wonder when people hark back to the 'good old days' whether they were 'as good' for beekeepers anyway. I know I'd rather have a proper extraction system that can spin a few supers at a time in a bee-free environment and have the ability to warm/strain honey as required into clean glass jars with secure lids or buckets for longer term storage. I certainly wouldn't want the faff of rendering just wild comb, even if it were from just a few hives (skeps) and wonder how some of these 'modern' natural beekeepers put up with the inevitable mess, and lets face it, waste of honey, in the processing of the comb.

I suppose the only benefit is they do it in the spring after their colony has died out and they render some honey from some dark combs left in the hives so the bees won't find the honey....

On the stall yesterday a 'know it all' 'the bbka says it isn't allowed' beekeeper who has 3 hives said I can't label my honeycomb (sections and cut comb) as 'Raw' or the chunk honey as 'Raw'. (even though neither product is strained or processed in the conventional way). I said I could do with it as I liked as it nicely surmised the state of the comb, and I didn't claim other run/set jarred honey was 'raw' as that had been through more filtering etc etc. Her lips pursed and I could tell she would be 'having conversations' with well known local beekeepers in her group as she name checked them. I couldn't give a scoobies...This year I've seen and heard more absolute codswallop and utter excrement being spouted by ever more 'experts' who've 'done all the exams' and then it transpires that they have 2 hives and one died last year and the other has swarmed and they have managed to take 19lb of honey off the total.

Experts.

Yeah right.

Yet all the BBKA can do is raise petitions and make political rumblings and align themselves with all sorts of organisations who aren't beekeepers and simply want the beekeeping shilling to fund their own subscription services. They don't understand the real merits of beekeeping to provide pollination services or management of colonies to provide a proper surplus of honey, let alone manage the health of their bees - I shook my head in disbelief when I saw their press release about thymol earlier in the year.

As for my own season - record honey crop and still 4 apiaries to clear which I need to do before the ivy starts (it's about to burst into flower about 4 weeks early) and plans afoot for next year. Beekeeping certainly helps take your mind off the problems of the world and oneself, now if only I could get a bee-proof extraction facility sorted this week !


KR


Somerford
 
Well I think we should learn to cut our cloth and help ourselves instead of crying out to the government for help every time we feel the pinch. (Tin hat on)
 
Well I think we should learn to cut our cloth and help ourselves instead of crying out to the government for help every time we feel the pinch. (Tin hat on)
says he sat there with a nice fat police pension and grant funded solar panels
 
In the UK, the constant implication we sense is that privately owned business operates most efficiently. The actual fact is that politicians enable any opportunity for profit to be exploited for private gain.

I think it was very much the case that state-owned businesses were viewed as wasteful by the government during the mad rush to privatise them all in the 80s and 90s and that in doing so they'd become far more efficient. To a certain extent I think the former might be considered true. My dad worked in one such business when he left school. They took on lots of school leavers as apprentices each year and the common practice was that they'd be under the control of whichever foreman first gave them a job to do. After that none of the other foremen would have anything to do with them which meant that if their own foreman was unavailable to give them work for any reason, even for days at a time, they just sat around and got paid to play cards all day.

Privatising these companies probably did lead to improvements in efficiency in many cases, but it also led to the businesses being run for the benefit of the shareholders rather than the people they were supposed to serve and in turn that's led to business decisions being made not on the basis of the benefits to the customer (which may be things that won't pay off for a number of years) but rather on what effect they'll have on the share price and profits. Generally I think this has led to a crap deal for the customer who, for instance, still has to cover the costs of making the water supply drinkable even if it leaks out of the pipes before anyone can use it, or suffers repeated loss of some service because it's cheaper in the short term to allow it to fail and then bodge it up until next time than it is to fix it properly so the problem doesn't happen again.

Sometimes it's led to greater inefficiency, of course. Electricity and gas suppliers (the businesses that actually bill us rather than those who produce it) have become little more than operations for billing and gambling on the future price of energy to the point where customer service is utterly dire because it's a cost that generates no profit. When they get it wrong they go bust, as has happened to quite a number over the last two years, and their customers suffer the consequences or the state (ie. the taxpayer) has to prop them up. How exactly is that "more efficient"?

There surely should be a better way to do things, particularly in the case of services that are considered essential, where genuine waste is prevented but the business is still run with the customer as the prime beneficiary and where profits are kept only for future investment in the business and to cushion the kind of spikes in prices that we're seeing now.

James
 
says he sat there with a nice fat police pension and grant funded solar panels
I haven't always been so rich. Most of us have had hard times. It was those times that taught me to save every spare penny, only have one holiday every five years, work all the overtime I was offered, learn to grow my own veg on a piece of land the size of a postage stamp. Buy wrecks of houses which we had to live in, spend every waking hour renovating so that I could sell for a profit, use offers wisely to buy PV panels etc to save money when times got tough. ( Although the only pay back I get is 0.04p per kW produced. I paid for the installation!
Now, because of the way we lived when we had little money I now have loads and am very grateful. It just makes me cross when people say they are entitled to a holiday, they will have to start using a clothes line instead of a tumble dryer, they are not considering cancelling their sky package, they need a mobile phone at £100 a month ( I pay £5). All I am saying is that they shouldn't expect the government to bail them out! 😱
 
You don’t know any poor people then?
Yes, I also know lots of people who think they are poor but are not. I don't decry those that need money getting benefits. I do decry the middle class who feel they are owed a standard of living by the government.
 
crass, arrogant and insensitive I'd call it - the typical cry of a daily mail reading gammon.
There are people in my MS support group who are beside themselves and fear for the future. Turning down the heating and putting an extra cardigan is no solution for some MS sufferers and being wheelchair bound in a ground floor flat or managed accommodation does not afford the luxury of managing half an acre of land to grow a few spuds on.
I think the comment, if nothing else, was downright offensive
 
crass, arrogant and insensitive I'd call it - the typical cry of a daily mail reading gammon.
There are people in my MS support group who are beside themselves and fear for the future. Turning down the heating and putting an extra cardigan is no solution for some MS sufferers and being wheelchair bound in a ground floor flat or managed accommodation does not afford the luxury of managing half an acre of land to grow a few spuds on.
I think the comment, if nothing else, was downright offensive
So I see!😱
 
Of course there are benefits to private ownership and sure some govt. entities are wasteful but these three companies owned by our provincial govt. make big profits. If you can give back $100 for every car in Saskatchewan and still show a great profit that is not something to sneeze at. Sask. power is a profitable business and at the start of the Covid epidemic gave financial aid, not to mention the well paying jobs and the many contracts they hire out to private companies. IMO that is one of it's strengths, it does not do all jobs internally and works with the private sector. All this goes back into the local economy.

Are they perfect, absolutely not, but IMO at least complaints and accountability is easier to enforce, in the ballot box.

To the many naysayers, tell me again how govt. run operations cannot succeed, they can if there is the will to make it happen.

"SaskPower introduced financial relief for customers within a week of the first reported case of COVID-19 in Saskatchewan, and the company continued to demonstrate its commitment to its customers throughout the pandemic," Minister Responsible for SaskPower Don Morgan said. "In addition to direct measures such as Community Rink Relief Program and waiving interest on outstanding bills, SaskPower contributed $1.8 billion to the provincial economy in 2020-21, including $573 million in contracts to Saskatchewan suppliers."https://www.saskpower.com/about-us/...2021/saskpower-releases-2020-21-annual-report
 
I haven't always been so rich. Most of us have had hard times. It was those times that taught me to save every spare penny, only have one holiday every five years, work all the overtime I was offered, learn to grow my own veg on a piece of land the size of a postage stamp. Buy wrecks of houses which we had to live in, spend every waking hour renovating so that I could sell for a profit, use offers wisely to buy PV panels etc to save money when times got tough. ( Although the only pay back I get is 0.04p per kW produced. I paid for the installation!
Now, because of the way we lived when we had little money I now have loads and am very grateful. It just makes me cross when people say they are entitled to a holiday, they will have to start using a clothes line instead of a tumble dryer, they are not considering cancelling their sky package, they need a mobile phone at £100 a month ( I pay £5). All I am saying is that they shouldn't expect the government to bail them out!
And yet, you had a job and the freedom to work overtime, something people with a young family or those looking after a disabled, sick, or elderly family member cannot do. You had a piece of land, no matter how small, and the money to buy houses to fix, not to mention the ability to do the work. All are things which some people do not posses, to fix a house to sell you need both the skill and the finances to purchase the supplies. There are many, many types of people that the old 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps' brigade fail to see simply because they only view society in terms of their own life experiences.
 
And yet, you had a job and the freedom to work overtime, something people with a young family or those looking after a disabled, sick, or elderly family member cannot do. You had a piece of land, no matter how small, and the money to buy houses to fix, not to mention the ability to do the work. All are things which some people do not posses, to fix a house to sell you need both the skill and the finances to purchase the supplies. There are many, many types of people that the old 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps' brigade fail to see simply because they only view society in terms of their own life experiences.

Exceptionally well said!

And yet it is natural to see things as @enrico describes because there are always exceptional people who expect an easy living and don't care that this is paid for by others. However, most of those people are not the ones we immediately see around us; in the UK you will find some of those who bleed off the most from public money that should be used for the benefit of everyone, amongst the politicians, financiers and entrepreneurs to whom we are told that we owe gratutude for their enterprise.
 
I have been so misquoted. At no point have I said that 'poor people' or those with 'disabilities' or those with no jobs or those who need benefits are in any way in the wrong. What I have said is there are many people out there that say they want government help when they don't. They need to learn to lower their standards for a while to get through this crisis. I know I am lucky. JBM made it personal by decrying my pension and the fact that I have worked hard to get where I am. I don't apologise for that. I am well off in comparison and I know it. I am grateful that I don't have to worry, but that is because I have had to make sacrifices in the past and I believe that some of us should learn to do the same! Those that need help should receive help. Those that don't shouldn't try and say that they do.
I knew I would get flack. I knew that people would not understand my point of view. It got personal far quicker than I thought but hey, I started it!
 
Sounds like he planned ahead, shame more folk don't do the same.
Many can’t. They live day to day. I built up my business from scratch and sold it to fund my pension. My brilliantly well educated and motivated daughter moved away from the U.K. because she couldn’t afford to do what she does here.
Opportunities that we had in our youth just don’t exist the way they did and to the extent they did any more.
JBM is right. There are many very fearful of the immediate future
 
I have been so misquoted. At no point have I said that 'poor people' or those with 'disabilities' or those with no jobs or those who need benefits are in any way in the wrong. What I have said is there are many people out there that say they want government help when they don't. They need to learn to lower their standards for a while to get through this crisis. I know I am lucky. JBM made it personal by decrying my pension and the fact that I have worked hard to get where I am. I don't apologise for that. I am well off in comparison and I know it. I am grateful that I don't have to worry, but that is because I have had to make sacrifices in the past and I believe that some of us should learn to do the same! Those that need help should receive help. Those that don't shouldn't try and say that they do.
I knew I would get flack. I knew that people would not understand my point of view. It got personal far quicker than I thought but hey, I started it!
No the gvt needs to move the focus from company profits and quango jobs for themselves. There is genuine unnecessary hardship in this country - gvt generated and its not acceptable.
 
Many can’t. They live day to day. I built up my business from scratch and sold it to fund my pension. My brilliantly well educated and motivated daughter moved away from the U.K. because she couldn’t afford to do what she does here.
Opportunities that we had in our youth just don’t exist the way they did and to the extent they did any more.
JBM is right. There are many very fearful of the immediate future
You can't knock someone who does plan ahead though.
 
I have been so misquoted. At no point have I said that 'poor people' or those with 'disabilities' or those with no jobs or those who need benefits are in any way in the wrong. What I have said is there are many people out there that say they want government help when they don't. They need to learn to lower their standards for a while to get through this crisis. I know I am lucky. JBM made it personal by decrying my pension and the fact that I have worked hard to get where I am. I don't apologise for that. I am well off in comparison and I know it. I am grateful that I don't have to worry, but that is because I have had to make sacrifices in the past and I believe that some of us should learn to do the same! Those that need help should receive help. Those that don't shouldn't try and say that they do.
I knew I would get flack. I knew that people would not understand my point of view. It got personal far quicker than I thought but hey, I started it!

Some people are averse to risk and dubious of their own abilities. That means that even when luck befalls them or external help is available, they don't make any progress with gaining financial stability. But most of us who do have confidence and good fortune, and who have less need for State support are still many miles behind in the race to the top.
In echoes of an ancient adage, as long as we fall out because of envy and grudges about each others' lifestyles, we are blind to what's being done with the bulk of National wealth that most of us help generate.
 
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