• First-world problems

Today it was about 31º and it felt like double that inside my office which is on the top floor and not that well insulated, so taking on most of the characteristics of the weather outside.

Recently, these have included, as well as heat and cold, rain: some of which enters the room from a leak above the Velux whenever it comes down heavily from the south or east. Other rainfall can at such times be heard dripping in through other gaps in the bathroom next door, or seen gushing out of the shaver socket in the bathroom underneath it.

We finally accepted that this problem wasn’t going to fix itself – rather the reverse – and that professional help was needed. To get at the roof, the solar panels needed to come off. This makes more noise that I’d thought possible. The sound of the metal panels being slid down the metal brackets could probably have been heard a mile away. Inside the room, the effect was extraordinary, best compared to being inside a metal violin which someone is trying to cut in half with a hacksaw.

Then I had to take my son to Heathrow and spent an hour in full sun on the M4 as a result of a massive tailback. About half an hour in, one of the motorway sights said “40 animals in road ahead.”

My first thought was that this was quite specific, before realising that this was the speed limit. Three mph would have been closer to the mark. It turned out to be only one animal, a horse (which looked dead). Full of that unworthy sense of relief that we get when we pass an accident, no matter how serious, that’s been holding us up and see a clear road ahead, I sped home and opened a bottle of cold white wine.

• Consuming history

Well, lucky me. Temperature of only 31º? Rain that only comes into the house when it rains hard? Solar panels to generate power? The ability to pay for expert help? A car to get me to Heathrow and a bottle of wine to drink on my return? Well, really – what am I complaining about?

I could, to pick just one example, be in eastern Ukraine, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Gaza or one of a dozen other places in the world where, in addition to none of the above advantages, people I’ve never met would be trying to bomb me.

Israel now has two wars on its hands. It seems unbelievable that it didn’t launch this latest one without a thumbs-up from Washington. Trump has said (see video clip here from 8.22pm on 18 June) with regard to US strikes on Iran that “I may do it, I may not do it – I mean no one knows what I’m going to do.”

This last phrase seems so far to be the hallmark of his presidency and shows how much he’s learned from his previous besties, Kim and Vlad.

Indeed, living in this offshore European island with its erratic but fairly benign weather (for now) and it’s functioning government (ditto) already puts me in the top whatever per cent of the world in terms of pure luck, regardless of how leaky our roof is, how noisy my office or how long my M4 holdup.

The thing about Britain is that it’s created a lot of history – but, like a polluting and exploitative multi-national, it preferred to set up shop overseas rather than have the turmoil of doing this at home.

The Middle East, on the other hand, produces even more history but far more than it can consume locally. It’s always been this way. It’s one of the birthplaces of civilisation, on the crossroads of three continents and cursed with being the sacred place of the world’s three most influential religions. It has exported the results for consumption elsewhere but the factories remain where they always were, each one claiming to be the true Jerusalem.

• HS2

Oh Lordy, here we go again.

The BBC reports that Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said that there was “‘no route’ to delivering the line on schedule and within budget, describing the HS2 project as an ‘appalling mess’.” The article goes on to quote her recent comment in the Commons, that “billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been wasted by constant scope changes, ineffective contracts and bad management.”

There were three real problems, it seems. The first was that back in the day someone insisted that the trains should travel at a billion miles an hour, an idiotic ambition in a country this small. This ruled out any routes that involved any but the most gradual curves and gradients.

The second was that it wasn’t started in the north and built south.

The third was that the very management consultants – what is the collective noun for these people: an invoice? a Powerpoint? an aspiration? – who were asked to justify the original case were then handed the job of helping to run the project.

My personal problem is that in a couple of weeks we’re going to France. I will, once again, have to explain to our French hosts why it’s costing us four times as much and taking four times as long as are similar TGV extensions there. I can’t do it, in English or in French, because I can’t explain why any of these three crucial decisions were ever taken. Brunel (who spoke both languages fluently) would be turning in his grave.

• Reform’s performance

All eyes are now on how our new mould-breaking, common-sense, immigration-freezing, border-controlling party is doing following its spectacular election gains in the last few months.

At a local level, it doesn’t look great. This article in Byline Times reports on hardly any new councillors filing their register of interests within the deadline (Durham); a member considering resigning because council meetings are “dull n boring” which he “doesn’t do” (Staffordshire); a slew of cancelled meetings (Kent); and a 19-year-old councillor who doesn’t believe depression is real being put in charge of a multi-million pound health budget (Leicestershire).

Private Eye 1651 adds more: a very early-doors suspension in West Northants, a young DOGE-style member in Kent who resigned within weeks and the Deputy Leader in Leicestershire describing a fellow social-media user as “a fat fucking pansexual immigrant.”

The Guardian added that, only a week after the election, “up to 12 newly elected Reform UK councillors are facing allegations of sharing social media content ranging from support for the far right to explicitly Islamophobic comments.”

This all makes the job of covering life in West Berkshire, The Vale and Wiltshire seem rather tame.

Nationally, the picture seems equally murky. The Week considers the sudden resignation, and equally sudden de-resignation, of its Chair Zia Yusuf, a decision he blamed on “exhaustion”. Farage allowed him back into the fold but only in a more junior role.

The magazine goes on to point out that neither this not any local ructions seem to have dented its appeal. “Farage & Co seem more authentic than mainstream politicians, who are robotic and disciplined in public, but knife each other behind closed doors.”

This is farcical, depressing and alarming in roughly equal measure. Service on a local council is often tedious but also often important. Real decisions are taken on the hundreds of services which these provide which can change people’s lives. There are no revolutions which local councillors have the power to effect. However, they can do a lot of damage.

I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise, but Reform’s interest in the local elections seemed purely one of electoral gains to bolster a national assault. Local government dances to a slower and less dramatic tune than does Westminster. There are, however, real problems to be addressed there. Early days: but it doesn’t seem that Reform cares about this very much. Next time round, the voters will reflect on its record.

• Land grabs

Many people in England will be affected by changes to the way their local councils are structured. The three main changes are

(i) doing away with the two-tier councils and replacing them with single-tier unitary authorities;

(ii) ensuring that all unitaries have at least around 500,000 people; and

(iii) creating strategic authorities above these for making some decisions.

In some cases, including in West Berkshire and southern Oxfordshire, stages (i) and (ii) are, at least by the councils themselves, being looked at as part of the same exercise.

Attempts have been made by some authorities to use this disruption to try to re-draw boundaries. Reading, for instance, has long felt that the eastern part of West Berkshire is really part of a vague “Greater Reading”. This is the kind of talk that abounded in the late 1930s. My understanding is Angela Rayner doesn’t welcome this. I can see why: if the boundaries were to be de-drawn as well as anything else then nothing would get done.

It was pointed out to me that some of the divisions are illogical. Well, yes: with the exception of places like the Isle of Wight, all local divisions are illogical and arbitrary. Why is Chilton Foliat, two miles from Hungerford, in a different district and a different region? You move the border three miles west and you have the same problem with Ramsbury. It never ends.

When Africa was de-colonised after WW2, one of the few things that everyone agreed on was that, deeply flawed as they were, there was nothing to be gained from re-drawing the map. There were certainly some oddities. The Caprivi strip was tacked on to Namibia so the Germans could have access to the Zambezi River. Mount Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania as it now is because Queen Victoria had two mountains in that part of the world and her cousin the Kaiser had none, so she gave him one.

These are hardly logical divisions but this policy has largely been maintained ever since. Indeed, I can only think of two major instances : Sudan/South Sudan and Ethiopia/Eritrea. The former division existed during the Anglo-Egyptian joint rule so was, decades later, perhaps an easy one to make; while Ethiopia was the only African country that was never colonised at all.

• And finally…

• As a fully paid-up member of Team Cat, I’m both disappointed and relieved that cats have not been given the gig for controlling the epidemic of rodents in the House of Commons. It would have been good, in a way, to see their skills recognised. On the other hand, trying to get cats to do anything that’s not exclusively on their terms is doomed to disappointment. There have been enough false dawns in that building as it is.

• The Week reports that the UK “is now the largest consumer of cocaine per capita in Europe, and the second largest in the world (behind Australia), according to a 2023 report by the OECD.” The article suggests one reason as being its relative cheapness compared to alcohol. For all its short-term advantages, in my experience it’s a horrible drug, promising much and delivering virtually nothing. Perhaps that’s why, according to the tabloids, it’s so beloved of politicians and TV celebrities.

• I’ve not recently been able to engage with or contribute to the ever-growing WhatsApp group about the CIL scandal to which I’ve referred many times. Were I younger, brighter and with more time I would love to be able to more. As it is, I can only be appalled by the exchanges about the savage injustices which householders across the country have faced from their councils in the form of eye-watering charges for domestic development which this system was never designed to exploit.

Two recent exchanges have also proved to me that dearly-bought KC’s opinions can disagree and so cancel out. The whole business also makes me, once again, wanting to celebrate what our own West Berkshire Council has done in making a stand on this. Other councils, including Waverley, seem to have ignored their moral compass.

• There have been some odd games in the World Club Championship, not least Bayern’s 10-0 mauling of the amateurs from Auckland, a result that does little to promote (one of) FIFA’s aims of spreading the beautiful game across the world. (Another is the further enrichment and prestige of the main players).

However, this week’s football news is not about such matters but the more vital question of an end-of-season report from one of the most remarkable clubs in Europe.

I’m referring to the buccaneering pirates of the Bundesliga, Hamburg’s St Pauli, a club which has long taken a stand on matters of inclusivity and anti-racism which set it apart from most. It has a brown-and-white home strip: another first, so far as we can tell. Its captain sometimes sports a dyed pink beard and plays guitar with a local punk band. Clearly we’re dealing with a football club that’s a bit out of the ordinary.

Fortunately, Penny Post has a Hamburg correspondent who, in this as other matters, has been able to explain what’s going on. You can click here to read his end-of-term report into St Pauli’s nail-biting survival in Germany’s top tier. In these days of intensive commercialism, it’s great to be able to celebrate a club that’s trying to keep it real…

Across the area