Last night's gig was magic!

Great band, great friends, questionable venue.
The venue was all lino floors, dining tables and chairs, white walls and ceiling, pool lighting and a profusion of casino machines. But it was full of regulars, some with far more physical impairment than one would normally expect in a regular pub, and who had obviously arrived without assistance, confident that they would receive whatever support they needed from the regular crowd. I was seriously impressed.
Amusingly, the venue is called “Daley's” which is a nod of recognition to the starring role in the TV series “Minder”, and the regulars do indeed all look out for each other. Respect!
Our little group was joined by a new member – recently moved up from Kent.
He looked vaguely familiar, but only in the way that all bald middle-aged men with pot-bellies hidden under sloppy sweaters and blue jeans look familiar. In just the same way that all babies look like Winston Churchill and only their next of kin are blind to it.
Where in Kent? I asked.
Rochester, he replied.
Two Brewers? I queried.
Sunday afternoons, he confirmed.
So yes, I have indeed seen him several times before, but never in Bedford.

Today I ripped through some more work stuff and then took my camera out for a walk – lots of treats bagged for the forthcoming week :-)

The radio has been discussing economic migrants from Albania today, and it is a subject I do actually have an opinion about.
I moved to Greece in 2005 when the world was perfect and the Greeks were complaining about economic migrants from Albania. The Albanians I met were really good workers and fitted in with local society incredibly well. They laid all our stone floors with artistry and we swapped healthy chickens with one another to prevent our flocks from becoming too aristocratic. In 2007 Goldman Sachs crashed the world's economies by selling bad debt defaulting mortgages to greedy idiots who thought that might make them a profit, and some French banks jumped on the bandwagon by selling unsecured loans to the dodgy Greek government.
When it all began to haemorrhage, world banking chose to apply sticking plasters everywhere they cared about, but applied leeches to the wounds in Greece. The result was that Greece had to stand on the naughty step and take the blame for stuff that had gone on in New York and Berlin. The other result was that all the Albanians left and the only arrivals we had were coming in little rubber dinghies from Afghanistan and Syria via Turkey.
So here's my message. Crash the economy, just like Truss and Kwarteng were aiming for. Then you know that the only people trying to reach us really need to. No need to put them in detention centres, just let them in and give them jobs. How hard is that?