Today’s been another mixed day working from home with yet another early start. I ‘commuted’ from bedroom to office before 7am this morning in order to finish finding a whole series of pictures that would allow a client to advertise their wares. It took several hours to finish but I’m glad it’s done and dusted. The added bonus is that it threw up a couple of gaps in my picture library which I can plug later this month whilst doing other work.

Freed from that chore I had time to see that the campaign to keep the HS2 high speed railway in the public eye (especially in the North) has taken another step forward with the release of another report by the High Speed Rail Industry Leaders (HSRIL). At the same time, Jim Steer of Greengauge 21 had a very good piece in the Yorkshire Post newspaper. This is all a marked contrast to a few years ago. Nowadays the North is very much behind Hs2, with Transport for the North TfN and many others constantly banging the drum for the project and also Northern Powerhouse Rail, which it will form part of.It puts the failed anti Hs2 campaign into perspective. Apart from some on the Tory right who’re still trying to get Hs2 cancelled there’s little evidence of a grassroots anti Hs2 campaign. StopHs2 are very much a joke nowadays with Joe Rukin reduced to making utterly pointless videos for Facebook of him outside the Tory leadership hustings in Carlisle and Nottingham as he’s not been allowed within a million miles of either candidate!Even the few remaining antis on Twitter aren’t up to much, apart from recycling tired and trite spin & the same fake facts they’ve been trotting out for a decade now. Mind you they are good for raising a chuckle every now and then. To say that some of the stuff they trot out on Facebook or Twitter is pure tinfoil hattery is an understatement! If they’re an echo chamber, then that chamber would have been located in Bedlam!

Oh, there has been another bit of good news in the media. The pint-sized fascist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who class himself ‘Tommy Robinson’ has been sent down for 9 months. In one of those great twists of irony that his mouth-breathing supporters will never get, he wore a T-shirt to court that bore the slogan “convicted of journalism”. Yaxley Lennon’s no more a journalist than the next thug in the street. He was jailed for contempt of court, something no real journalist would do as they understand the law. So, what did his supporters do when he was sent down? They attacked real journalists reporting outside Parliament – after trashing a long established pro-EU protest down the road. Now, this is why I say that parallels with the rise of fascism in Germany in the 1930s are all too real. There’s little doubt that ‘Tommeh’ supporters will to a man (and woman) also be Brexit supporters and the Brexit has made fascism fashionable again. It’s let the genie out of the bottle and it’s also poisoned the body politic – to the extent the Tory party Leadership contest is dominated by it. Each candidate has to swear an oath of loyalty to a belief in Brexit Unicorns, because that’s what the tiny bunch of elderly Tory members want to hear – and damn the consequences for the country and the economy. As each day passes we look more and more like an unstable banana republic – only without the benefits of bananas (curved or straight)!

At least Dawn and I will escape the madness (even if for a few hours) tonight as we’re off to the cinema to see the new ‘Spiderman’ film. If I’ve time I’ll let you know what we think. In the meantime, here’s a picture taken earlier when I managed to get out for a stroll.