FRIDAY MUSIC: Christmas 2025 (2)

Drive The Cold Winter Away - Traditional:

“Drive the Cold Winter Away” is an old traditional winter tune that has been used for both secular winter celebrations and for Christmas celebrations, with a large number of verses and variations. Versions of it are also know by the titles “In Praise of Christmas” and “All Hail To the Days”. Some versions of it appear to go back to at least about the year 1625, and the melody was originally based on the even older tune of “When Phoebus Did Rest”. Published versions of it dating back to at least the 17th Century can be found in the archives of both the Pepys Collection and the Roxburghe Collection. The lyrics appear to have evolved somewhat over the years, but many of the lyrics are sometimes attributed to Tom Durfey (1653-1723), or to “Anonymous” by others.

A Child is Born (Official Music Video) | Celtic Worship

Beautiful Star of Bethlehem

O Come, Emmanuel - Lindsey Stirling & Kuha’o Case

Trans-Siberian Orchestra - Christmas Canon (Official Music Video) [HD]

Lindsey Stirling - Celtic Carol

The Caretaker: PMQs 10th December 2025

People feel there is something wrong about Sir Keir. Quentin Letts says he is boring but to an extraordinary degree. Does the energy drain hint at an emptiness in the PM’s psyche? Someone who dealt with Starmer in his family law days told me “Nothing happened around him. He was good at critiquing others but had no ideas of his own.”

His 1986 Czech workcamp visa shows a man in his mid-twenties, one who should be past teenage angst yet has a curiously intense yet blank gaze. Is this the look of a seeker, someone who needs an ideology; the face of a potential fanatic, ripe for seduction? The French socialist who recruited him at Oxford at about this time said how surprisingly easy it was:

“There is something strange about Keir in general… Normally when you recruit someone… it takes a while. You need to go through lots of stuff. I have no recollection of doing this with him, so that’s kind of strange.”

Kemi Badenoch hopes to see Sir Keir out of Number Ten, but should worry about who would take over. Do the Tories want to face someone who is more effective?

Reportedly Blair is planning a “major intervention” into Labour’s leadership but that is to do with presentation not content. Starmer’s political direction is a continuation of the Blair-Brown mission to destroy conservatism and Middle England permanently. He served the Party’s purpose in defenestrating Corbyn and suckering outsiders into thinking New Labour is more moderate; but Sir Keir himself is too obviously far Left, and charmless to boot. Kemi should help keep him in place until next May’s elections at least.

That’s assuming we’re all still here then. For in his preamble in this week’s session the PM paid tribute to a member of the Parachute Regiment who has been killed in Ukraine, so confirming that we have boots on the ground opposing Russia. Sir Keir stressed that the soldier was away from the front lines and merely observing. Who are we to doubt his word? Yet the US involvement in Vietnam also began with “military advisers” and unlike Hanoi Moscow has nuclear weapons and a stated willingness to use them.

The first two questions did the Labour PR work formerly done in Starmer’s preambles before the Speaker blew up about it last week. Sarah Olney (Lib Dem) asked for clarity on “leave to remain” for a couple of her constituents, which allowed the PM to say (twice) that Britain was “compassionate” to refugees. Labour’s Rachael Maskell raised last week’s issue of lifting children out of poverty; Starmer was glad to respond positively and to criticise Badenoch’s view that maternity pay is “excessive.” There, that raised a couple of emoji flags against the Nasty Party.

The Leader of the Opposition had fun teasing Sir Keir with queries about targets he hadn’t met and with calling him a caretaker PM. As we have said, she should fear premature success. Starmer replied with his usual broad-spectrum counterattacks and yet again used Liz Truss’ name as a sort of Patronus Charm to ward off the evil Tories.

The Lib Dem leader worried about President Trump’s new national security strategy and its “far-right tropes” of “civilizational erasure”; Sir Ed’s Patronus Charm was to wave Vladimir Putin at us, for that wicked Slav has welcomed the strategy. The PM told Davey:

“What I see is a strong Europe united behind Ukraine and united behind our long-standing values of freedom and democracy, and I will always stand up for those values and freedoms.”

To adapt Claud Cockburn, disbelieve nothing until it is officially confirmed.

What a shame that Soviet communism collapsed; it had been such a convenient bogeyman for generations and in its absence we feel no need to defend personal freedom and the nation state. Instead the heads of the Army and MI6 ramp up scare talk of war and that will justify further Government assaults on civil liberties; if the “superflu” woo-woo doesn’t do the job first.

Davey concluded with his familiar call for a customs union with the EU, which would wreck the advantageous trade arrangements we have been able to make as a result of Brexit. Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville Roberts seconded him and was again reminded of the negotiating edge given us by Leaving.

Not that Starmer’s heart isn’t in the “right place” as the decision to re-join the EU’s Erasmus scheme shows (how many foreign student visas will that validate?) He and Brussels are like a re-run of “My Wife Next Door.”

It will get worse before it gets better. Our only hope is that we retain enough of our identity and love of country to rebuild afterwards, as the Poles rebuilt Warsaw’s Old Town.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Christmas 2025 (1), by JD

Christmas Must Be Tonight | The Band | OFFICIAL LYRIC VIDEO

Boney M. - Mary’s Boy Child - Oh My Lord (1978)

Irish Pub Christmas Song – The Bells of Ballyclare

Helene Fischer | Adeste Fideles (Live aus der Hofburg Wien)

Good King Wenceslas Loreena McKennitt

It Came Upon the Midnight Clear (Harp Twins) - Nordic Winter Lullaby

Riding Out The Storm - PMQs 3 December 2025

To begin at the ending, a very good place to start. Starmer was finally told off for his time-wasting habit of making a speech before questions commence. According to Quentin Letts Speaker Hoyle fumed “Never again!” We shall see if the PM heeds the scolding.

The latest speechlet was inter alia about the cost of infant formula and the Tories’ failure to lift children out of poverty. That linked well to the first query, Ian Lavery’s, which spoke of the low incomes and shortened lives of his constituents in the North-East and asked Sir Keir for a discussion about the way forward.

Lavery blamed the crippling legacy of deindustrialisation on the Tories but sadly Sir Keir had little to offer by way of solutions. Instead the PM boasted of abolishing the two-child benefit cap, raising the minimum wage and a £150 discount on domestic energy bills. That is palliative care, not a cure.

Life on poorly paid employment and government handouts is killing Lavery’s people - deaths of despair (from suicide and alcohol/drug abuse) are more than twice as common than in London. What they need is decently-paid work so that they can support themselves and their families and pay taxes.

Manufacturing has not disappeared, it’s gone abroad. So has much of our cash, spent on importing the goods we could have produced for ourselves - that is one reason why money now circulates half as fast in our economy as it did in the 1980s.

We have to rebuild our industrial base and above all we need cheap energy. Until we abandon Net Zero the country’s finances will continue to unravel, ever faster as we import millions more who Labour hopes will be a replacement loyal voter base for them.

For rather than fight for national recovery the PM has given up on the Northerners to focus on Labour’s re-election strategy. ‘Starmer’s abandoned us,’ a Red Wall MP told the Mail’s Dan Hodges. ‘It’s basically every man for himself.’

In the exchanges between the PM and LOTO, Sir Keir said the Chancellor’s Budget last week would “create the conditions for economic stability.” He claimed growth was up, wages were up. So was unemployment, retorted Mrs Badenoch; “no one believes a word the Prime Minister says.”

Hearing Starmer’s cheery claims one is reminded of Iraq’s “Comical Ali,” reporting victory as US tanks rumbled in the background. He is correct in saying the Conservatives have failed us, but he (or would that be the Cabinet Office?) shows no awareness of our economic vulnerability and how to mitigate the damage. If Steve Keen, one of the few economists who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, is correct we are facing another deflationary collapse like that of the 1930s. Even the Bank of England is warning of a crash.

What do we get instead? Emotive language. “Shame” was a word used six times by Sir Keir as he clobbered the Opposition with poor kids, the NHS and the Conservatives’ hurty words about the Chancellor. Also “apologise“ and “decency”, twice each. Pretty soon he will reply by holding up emoticons like this 😳 🙏😔😇 for the benefit of our increasingly subliterate electorate. Not that they will have the chance to vote, if he has anything to do with it.

The Leader of the Lib Dems described as “wise” the PM’s chief economic adviser’s suggestion of a fresh customs union with the EU. Starmer told Reliably Wrong Man that the UK was working on closer relationships with the EU but that there were “red lines.” If there is any doubt as to the folly of running back into the arms of Brussels remember that David Lammy has also been promoting the idea.

We really don’t need to tie our little ship to the rudder of the Titanic. We should concentrate on battening the hatches.

Why No Xmas Wines? A Matter of Taste! by Wiggia

I normally manage to put together an article on the best wines for Christmas according to what I have tasted, but this has been a strange period in my imbibing journey and I explain below why I have had to pull the plug on this year’s edition.

Some of the following has been published before but it was written for the blog on the Wine Society of which I am a member. Nonetheless I thought it was sufficiently interesting to be seen here. I could be wrong of course but decided to give it a go, so bear with me for the intro which may seem familiar.

I haven’t commented on here very often in the last three years, for a variety of reasons one being health. I have written in detail about my experiences within the NHS organisation, the good the bad and the ugly-plus an extra ingredient I won’t elaborate on again just about covers it.

Three years ago I collapsed and woke up six weeks later having undergone two brain operations within 24 hours and a serious bowel operation a week later. Fortunately I was sedated during my time at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge so knew nothing about what had happened and the subsequent procedures. I was then transferred back to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital where I eventually started to recover, after catching Covid and contracting a bowel infection that was supposed to finish me, a change of doctor - long story - and a change in medication, and treatment.

The reason I mention all this was that what happened to me and what happens to other people if brain surgery is involved one suffers a change or loss, temporary or otherwise of faculties, memory, smell, taste.

At the time wine was not on the list of things I should be worrying about, far from it. Various tests and exercises brought about improvements in memory function. At first even my birthday was beyond recall and constant illusions muddied the progress - seeing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at the bottom of one’s bed as I did earlier is not to be recommended when you are trying to be positive!

After rehab home at last and the question of food that I could eat and the thorny question of what I could drink came to the forefront. The food was relatively easy: no spicy items, very little green stuff and a lot of trial and error was involved.

Now to the drinking. I was told no problem with wine in strict moderation, so I started to sample and the fun started.

At the start red wine caused problems so was cut out completely, later to be reintroduced a little at a time, so white wine was my staple, again in moderation.

All my long held preconceptions went out of the window. Some had no smell, some had no taste, those that did have one or both had changed completely from my inbuilt conception as to what they should taste or smell like. In many cases the taste or smell was amplified way beyond that which my memory could remember, particularly fruity reds such as certain Rhone varieties with matching sometimes glorious over the top aromas.

As for my extensive Riesling collection many, but not all of the trocken/dry wines became dull and lifeless and it became a case of suck it and see.

Two things came out of this for me. Firstly there was after a period of seeing where all this was going, i.e. would my tastes get back to something like the previous normal. They did with most foods, and did settle with wine, but not as before, so after much consideration I made the decision to sell all that which was obviously out of kilter with my new tastes. Out went what was left of my Bordeaux; I had previously off loaded nearly all my EP, en primeur, in storage, of the region anyway; Chianti tasted like battery acid and Barolo not far behind. The list is too long to expand on here but you get the picture. In whites many became just dull; for Riesling spätlese seems to be the sweet spot, no pun intended and buttery Chardonnays over the leaner versions, acidity over other components is now a no-go area, though not totally, which is strange.

The second part is interesting in that it assumes there is a right and wrong appreciation of wine virtues/values, but if I had been born with the appreciation of wine I have now my outlook and taste would be totally different from that which has guided me for the last fifty years. No longer can I say that such and such lacks x because now it doesn’t. Is it a dilemma? No, it is simply another’s view of the same product; in some ways I have been lucky to have two bites of the same cherry.

This is no different to the way the brain interprets sound and vision. Illusions cause the brain to come to different conclusions. It all brings the tasting both amateur and professional into focus: it matters not a jot what someone else says about a wine food music etc, it is what gives you pleasure at any given moment in time.

To finish a short story, my oldest fiend died of dementia recently in Adelaide, Australia. We had known each since we were five years old so it was a long relationship. In ‘95 my wife and I managed to get three months of holiday during the winter and went on a world wide trip including six weeks plus in Australia and stayed with my friend for three weeks-plus in Adelaide.

He was not into wine other than drinking it! but we stayed in the Barrosa for some days and visited some forty wineries in the Barossa and sub regions…

Back home the following Christmas a case of wine arrived from my friend from Oz. He knew little of wine but a friend of of his did so it was selected by the friend on his behalf. At the time it seemed a good idea if this was made an annual event, so a sum was agreed which I sent him and some suggestions for the case; wines unavailable here in the UK would be included.

This worked well for years but recently as the dementia took hold he started to make mistakes and his friend was longer involved, and the last case before I stopped the exercise showed why. Virtually the whole sum allocated was spent on one bottle, I had to make good the shortfall.

The bottle as below:

Out of curiosity I looked up to see if this was available in the UK, and B&B wine merchants have it at around £350 a bottle. I would never pay that for any wine, though in the past I pushed the boat out before wine prices hit the stratosphere.

Was it any good? A lot of hype surrounds it. In my current phase of appreciation the nose was phenomenal, a glorious sniffer; in the mouth for me it was a tier class Bordeaux so I’m probably not the best person to judge that aspect now, or maybe I am?

And yes it is a screw top.

Anyway a glass was raised to my old friend.

And a glass was raised to my consultant who explained it all to me.

It is now over three years since the operations so not much is likely to change now and I have to accept that my receptors have a different slant on the things and will remain that way. Not the end of the world, as I said earlier I should in many ways be grateful as certain wines and food that did nothing for in the past now are very acceptable. Funny old world.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Stephen Wilson Jr., by JD

This is a country music artist new to me and he is the ‘shot in the arm’ it needs to rescue the genre from its current stale and tired state.

Born on July 11, 1979, Wilson was raised in Seymour, Indiana. Introverted as a youth, Wilson and his brother were guided by their father into competitive boxing. This experience, culminating in Golden Gloves amateur boxing competitions, helped him conquer stage fright.

Wilson recalls how country singer Tim McGraw’s song “Don’t Take the Girl” profoundly impacted him as a child. Raised poor by a single dad, and with an absent mother who suffered through abusive relationships, the song’s storytelling sparked in him a passion for lyrics and poetry, leading him to begin writing his own songs.

Wilson’s father died in September 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wilson_Jr.
https://stephenwilsonjr.com/

Stephen Wilson Jr. - “Stand By Me” [Ben E. King Cover]

Stephen Wilson Jr. - Calico Creek (Acoustic)

Stephen Wilson Jr. - Grief is Only Love (Acoustic)

Stephen Wilson Jr. - “The Devil” (Live at the Print Shop)

Stephen Wilson Jr. - Year to Be Young 1994 (Later... with Jools Holland)

Stephen Wilson Jr. - “Father’s Son” (Live at the Print Shop)

Wiggia's Week: The lost ‘art’ of lying

 

Politics has always contained statements and speeches riddled with untruths, adjusted facts, downright lies and hypocrisy, being economical with the truth has become an art form. That of course was in the days when we had political figures who could carry all that off to a degree lost in today’s ‘amateur’ world of the current incumbents of Westminster.

The belief among them that nobody will notice their deliberate distortions is in the case of the current Labour government off the scale, lies are trotted out at such a rate that the use of u-turns to reverse the obvious faux pas, has everyone in a spin as daily we get fed evermore untrue and manipulated ‘facts’; even those with popularity ratings in the minus section continue to trot out the same garbage.

None of this is helped as the “here today, gone tomorrow” minnows in the political spectrum attempt to make a mark during the short tenure in a post, a post in most cases that they have absolutely no connection with in any form. They are all mediocre non-entities promoted above their abilities.

“Out of touch” is a phrase frequently lobbed in the direction of these nonentities that have by some strange means ended up in Parliament and even Cabinet positions. Nearly all have never had a job outside of politics or charity positions so it is not unexpected when they lie to cover their inadequacies having never had to deal with everyday living on a personal basis.

This recent interview with a former Labour supporter says it all about being out of touch. Not only was she a Labour supporter but he had visited her before, so a safe meeting, or so he thought. He didn’t like what she said about the changes in her area and resorted to his standard fall back phrase and called her racist, quite extraordinary that this person is leading (?) the country or supposed to be.

Much is made of the advisors and civil servants who do the heavy (?) lifting in the background as without them these inadequates would be no different to those cardboard cut-out figures one used to see outside of the likes of butcher’s shops and petrol stations - at least they served a purpose, to show the way in.

Our current PM is possibly the worst example of this genre. Not having the wit charm or guile to make any speech or statement believable he flounders and the following day makes things worse by either lying again or u-turning; in his case it is the total lack of any feel for what the nation thinks or believes. Surely his advisors cannot be of the same ilk to a man, but that is how it appears, they are all cut from the same cloth.

Albert RN - would anyone notice the difference if he was installed as PM?

Ed Miliband runs the PM close in the ‘economical’ stakes, he would be top if given more air time. His ‘the public will save £300 on energy bills’ has morphed into an increase of £150 and rising. Strangely he believes our most expensive energy costs, the highest in the western world, are the result of outside factors. These outside factors have no effect on any other countries to the same degree but we are supposed to swallow a blatant lie: his end of the world scenario is borne out by the science. We have heard it all before but he still spouts the same drivel. Naturally these ‘end of days’ statements have been official folk lore for a long time.

The Health Secretary and the PM have joined forces in lying about the millions of extra (?) appointments the NHS has provided this year, when if you speak to anyone who is waiting for any of the aforementioned they will tell you they have had cancellations and re-appointments a-go-go this year. I personally know of two recently that have had up to five cancellations for procedures in a short space of time, others have said similar. The only way you can get a firm date for a procedure is to arrive in the country in a dinghy and get your teeth fixed while you wait.

These people are not lied to. Agreements drawn up without the public’s consent see illegal migrants looked after with every detail fully adhered to, no lying in that area, but by now we know all that.

At all levels people tell porkies, as I said it is now so common that they can be seen through at first utterance. When Yasmin Alibhai Brown says she goes into pubs to argue with white people about how they are failing to integrate - I don’t think I believe her; when the Home Secretary talks as she did the other day about her many Jewish friends after the synagogue murders I don’t believe her.

When a recent Labour advisor during the Birmingham bin strike said that she knew what was behind the strike as she knew many bin men! she fell into the things that never happened category and lied.

TTK (Two Tier Keir)’s obsession, along with Blair about digital ID to stop the boats, was always just a fig leaf for other uses. He lied as a week on we have before being released, mission creep! Last week it was to stop the boats, now its bills and benefits, next week it’ll be your movement licence in and out of your 15 minute ghetto, followed by your carbon tracker and digital ration book plus how many of your Tesco Club points you can use on non-eco items.

This is her ‘frighten the children’ look

When Darren Jones, Labour minister, states on Question Time that 80% of the people on the boats coming across the channel are women and children! has he spent too much time in the sun? No one of sound mind could come out with that and expect to be believed; such a blatant lie.

Misleading is the replacement word used most. One would have to be very kind of heart to use that word in the situations shown and many others. The amount of misleading statements put out by our Chancellor are really just one gigantic lie, but then she lied about her CV so shame is another word that has been discarded.

It is very noticeable that when interviewed our Chancellor or her predecessors never have a real life accountant from the public sector that actually works daily in the sector interviewing them. Understandable really when the quality of those in charge is of such a low standard and that has been a trend for some years. When a lie becomes the stock answer to a problem we are in serious trouble, and we are.