It was New Years Day away from home but managed to avoid chocolate. We were treated like royality and I ate like I was starving but the food was very tasty.

Earlier I had helped R out with some foraging for wood. We watched the footie but the rain put pay to having a bonfire.

Don’t know what I weighed.

We set up a LiveMeeting for our joint get together. Worked really well except when A tried to show us a video. Just saw purple. But think I’ve seen it already. Despite the meet running to time I had to leave for my appointment. Had a tooth extracted and another may be declared non-viable. Dosed up on paracetemol and ibuprofen during the following hours which worked a treat.

More snow and ice.

J wouldn’t settle so stayed upstairs and got an early night. She woke at 530am for a feed. Good job Mum is breastfeeding as the house is very cold these days.

17 December

Engine Failure – what’s happening?

First Transpennine Express – Manchester Piccadilly to Cleethorpes – no service
First Transpennine Express – Service suspended between Manchester Piccadilly and Cleethorpes due to adverse weather conditions.

The US journalist MattTaibbi has another instalment on how the major US banks’ rip-off is now crushing homeowners with the club of the state.

On the micro level, here’s how the scam worked:
- The major US banks buy politicians with campaign contributions, in exchange for rights to expand into more markets and a reduction in regulations;

- Freed from effective oversight, the banks proceeded to aggressively lend to hundreds of thousands of home-buyers, entirely aware that they were lending to people who couldn’t afford repayments;

- The banks then took all those shit mortgages, bundled them up into impenetrable finance packages, and sold them off to pension funds, trade unions etc. as top-notch, ultra-secure investments rather than the near-worthless bags of shite they actually were;

- After a few years of making out like bandits, their pockets stuffed with fraudulently-earned cash, the financial crisis finally exposed the scam, causing major financial institutions around the world to explode. Those that survived did so by robbing taxpayers at gunpoint – give us fifteen bajillion dollars, or we take the entire planet down with us.

- Engorged with taxpayers’ cash, they then refused to lend it back to citizens – theoretically the reason they were given it in the first place – and awarded themselves another round of massive bonuses instead, before enlisting the aid of the state to repossess the very homes they’d used to cause the disaster in the first place.

Result! Bonuses all round at Goldman Sachs; a lifetime of crushing debt and exploding government programmes for you and your offspring.

We’ve had a visit from the community midwife.