it all has to be paid for (small beer)

or so steve remarked about the furlough. all the government can ever do (horsemouth supposes) is bribe you with your own money. even if they should lay hands on the money of the billionaires (like they are currently promising) it's still your money (the product of your labours)

horsemouth is with the hopeless revolutionaries of ivan turgenev's virgin soil. they don't want to be with the aristocrats, with their class origins and with their patrons, but they have no way of communicating with the peasants or the workers (who just think they are mad and incomprehensible) so they end up in some kind of alliance of progressive forces with the factory managers, disgruntled nobles,  tutors, step-daughters and (horsemouth would guess) police spies. 

there are several wrong'uns in the group (in fact the problem is deciding which of the wrong'uns is the police spy. maybe there's more than one).

the weather is cooling off. which is good because people's brains were starting to boil (horsemouth's included). there are all sorts of tensions in society which are usually be managed to give the appearance of harmony but crank up the temperature by 10 degrees and the conflicts start coming out into the open. lots of people are getting the shitty end of the stick and while they may not be able to get their hands on the people actually responsible  they can find someone guilty of some kind of infraction. 

yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the grenfell fire. 72 people died in a fire spread by insulating panels and uPVC double glazing installation on a tower block in west london. 

in 1991 the government was investigating these technologies and funded and installed them on a tower block in west knowlsey in liverpool. there was a fire, and while the fire doors and alarms worked well because they had been recently installed and were in a good state of repair and nobody was killed. however the insulation clearly helped spread the fire and the the poor uPVC window installation helped spread the smoke. the report seems to have been downplayed by the government. 

this is the earliest fire that horsemouth has found. thereafter there were a large number of tower block fires all over the globe where exterior insulation panels were implicated in aiding the spread. in 2009 there was the lakanal house fire in camberwell, the coroner reported in 2013 highlighting the role of the exterior cladding in spreading the fire. 

the inquiry has done good work in exposing the sheer buck passing ineptitude of building regulation and housing management in the uk but there will be no criminal charges until after the inquiry is over, if then. given previous inquiries the crown prosecution service may decide that given the complexity of the cases there is little realistic chance of securing convictions. there would then be private prosecutions, campaigns to get a CPS prosecution, further public inquiries etc. in the unlikely event of any convictions there would be appeals. 

and even when this inquiry reports the government is not legally bound to implement the changes required. there is a government bill coming forward on building and fire safety but given the failure of the state to learn any lessons from  knowlsey heights or lakanal  not much can be hoped for from it. 

and of course this is now all small beer compared to the ongoing coronavirus debacle. 

howard has posted a demo for a new tune (if time was a lie/ if time was alive) over on soundcloud, 

er. and then he made it private. before he did several people liked it (it's a good tune). that's howard playing guitar on it and there are some harmony vocals. 

horsemouth could do some babysitting if he liked. but he plans to be away for the next chunk of the summer (until the school holidays) plus he was finding it tiring (so he thinks he'll say no). if he wants to get into it he will do it slowly (no rush).