vivweb01blog

  Our brand  new chancellor has now delivered his much-heralded 'mini-budget'....how do his tax changes really look,  now that the market has responded and the dust has started to settle ? Although advancing the planned 1% reduction in the basic rate to 19% to April 2023 is of course welcome, it only represents an annual increase in take home pay of a maximum of £375 for someone earning £50,000, and proportionally less for those lower down the earnings scale. It comes against a backdrop of spiralling inflation, which is likely to undo all its potential gains before it even kicks in.  The reversal of Sunak's ill-judged  NI increase will help some of the working population, but will mainly benefit the better-off earners. Anyone  earning below £12.5k will get nothing out of either change; pensioners of course won't get any benefit from the NI change - they have already paid for their state pension and healthcare during their working lifetimes, and quite rightl...

  In the past few weeks the UK supermarket  ‘majors’ have finally started to take stock of consumer responses to the cost of living crisis. ASDA were one of the first to act on their budget ranges earlier this summer, largely in response to their ‘shaming’ by campaigner Jack Munro, whose efforts earlier this year  effectively exposed their policy of only offering their full ‘Smartprice’ range in their biggest superstores. ASDA, I suspect fearing a social media ‘storm’ in response to Jack's revelations, quickly extended most of their ranges to their medium-sized stores at the time, and (so far) seem to have maintained reasonable stock levels on most of these items. Other majors are now following their lead with scale-ups of their own budget ranges, increasing both availability and restocking levels to cater for projected demand for lower priced items. The latest twist in this tale is that ASDA have now started limiting their budget ranges to 3 items per person.  Thi...

  The Polio virus is back – at least in our sewage system.  Does this mean we’re in for yet another another viral epidemic ? It could do, if we take no action – how then can we prevent it happening ? The reasons why polio virus has suddenly started to appear in our sewage system are not completely clear, given that no cases of active disease have been reported in UK so far. The most prevalent view amongst epidemiologists at present is that it has been imported by vaccinated individuals from areas of the world where vaccination is via the old-style oral attenuated live virus vaccine. This vaccine continues to be used in 3rd world countries because it is a) cheap and easy to administer and b) gives very good immune responses over a short period. It is the ideal rapid immunisation strategy in the few remaining areas of the world where the live virus is still endemic due to religious antipathy to vaccination (Afghanistan and Pakistan). It is also used as a rapid response t...

  On present evidence, yes….. Those of us old enough to remember the excesses of the 1970s will recall one of the most notable of its meteorological ones - the ‘great drought’ of ’76. Contrary to popular belief, this was more extensive and prolonged than the current one, with both a dry autumn and winter in 1975 and a dry spring in 1976 contributing.   In June 1976 there was actually a period of two weeks where maximum temperatures in southern England never fell below 32oC. The prolonged nature of this heatwave, and the following dry, hot period which continued until early August, resulted in severe consequences for crops and domestic  water supplies, with taps in some areas actually running dry. This culminated in the Drought Act being rushed through parliament on 5 th August. This legislation   included more draconian water restrictions, installation of standpipes, water bowsers, etc. ….and the appointment of Dennis Howells as ‘Minister for Drought’ by the th...

  F or many of us at this time of the summer our thoughts turn to tennis…. The trigger for this is of course the annual spectacle of Wimbledon, renowned the world over as one of the premier tournament venues for World Class tennis.  I suspect I may not be alone, however, in feeling that this 2-week ‘tennis-fest’ is becoming a little less interesting each year, with the same top players winning year after year, particularly in the singles tournaments. This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course - Djokovich and Nadal have monopolised the limelight for some years now in the mens’ tournament and the Williams sisters have managed between them to engineer a virtual 'closed shop' in the womens’ version for over a decade. Inevitably their collective advancing ages and accumulated bodily wear and tear will eventually put a stop to their monopolies, but this could take a few years yet. Why is this a concern ? As for any sport, ‘new blood’ is key to its advancement, and talented would-b...

 I n a recent post on this subject which I authored back in March,  I mentioned that Putin had recently agreed a pact with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping. This was much heralded by both governments at the time as a mutually beneficial arrangement in the face of increased ‘aggression’ by NATO and the West, and was clearly intended to present a counter to Western influence prior to the start of the Ukraine invasion. It appeared at the time that Putin had been the main architect of the pact, and many speculated that Xi had agreed to it only on the basis of Putin’s ‘guarantee’ that he would quickly achieve his objective of subjugating Ukraine without much resistance from the Western alliance.  As the war progressed, some reports in the media suggested that the Chinese leadership were becoming restive in the face of the marked lack of progress by the Russian military and its failure to achieve its objective in bringing Ukraine quickly back into the Russian empire, suggest...

Please note that this article was compiled way back in June 2022 towards the end of the main pandemic - for a more recent update you might want to look at the following: https://vivweb01.blogspot.com/2023/08/new-covid-variant-ba286-how-bad-could.html https://vivweb01.blogspot.com/2022/11/china-and-covid-2-sequel.html https://vivweb01.blogspot.com/2023/04/covid-update-new-variant-arcturus-first.html I also plan to compile an update in the near future, and will include a discussion on the likelihood of a new pandemic and the virus strains most likely to cause it.... A s predicted, the Covid case rate has continued to rise again in the UK, and shows little sign of abating. The latest UK-wide estimate is that 1 in 18 of the population is infected, up from 1 in 25 last week. Scotland seems to be the worst of the home nations affected with even higher rates. We should remember that both figures are much higher than the peaks seen in the first 2 Covid 'waves' in 2020. Given the high i...

  S o now we know….the long- awaited secret of what her majesty keeps in the Royal Handbag has been revealed. Or has it….. The fascinating glimpse we were treated to last weekend into a familiar, but hitherto completely opaque, receptacle actually poses more questions than it answers… Firstly there is the question of containment of the royal ‘emergency’ sandwich. My own experience of marmalade sandwiches is that they have minds of their own....  On the occasions when one is careless enough to drop a full-slice marmelade sandwich, not only do the wretched things always manage to split apart into their constituent slices on the way down, but both slices invariably end up preserve-side down on the deck.  I’ve never managed to divine how or why this happens, but I’m reliably informed it’s something to do with the Coriolis force….if so, it would be interesting to see whether the slices fall marmalade-side up in the Southern hemisphere. However, I digress….back to the to...

This is by way of a follow-up to my first blog on Google Indexing. First a quick recap of the background…. I set up one of the new Google Sites offerings last June with the intention of using it as an online repository, primarily to share information and small amounts data with friends and acquaintances.  As the site developed, I added new pages. These were intended to provide some space for more general guides I had been asked for, and to share information on various topics with the wider community. I have to admit I'm not a great social media 'fan' for a number of reasons,  so I prefer to use a website and blog for this purpose.  At this point, I wanted to establish whether the site had already appeared on search engine indexes, and if not, what I could do to expedite the process. To cut a long story short, I found within the first 3 months that almost every major search engine had indexed elements of my site except Google . Needless to say I was quite surprised ...