When Executions Go Wrong

My money is still on it being some kind of criminal fuel scam, possibly involving siphoning red diesel from farm vehicles then selling it back at sky high prices.  Certainly the petrol in those vans seems to indicate something to do with under the counter fuel sales, but the authorities - probably to cover up their own incompetence - still seem determined to try and pin the whole Fairford debacle on Iran and somehow 'prove' that it was terror-related.  So, now they've arrested some Anglo-Iranian guy in London on terror-related charges and are trying to link him to the guys they've already had to bail because of a lack of evidence of them being terrorists. Still, the British police have always been good at fitting people up for crimes - whether they actually committed them or not, so I've no doubt that they'll eventually come up with some kind of dodgy 'evidence' that they foiled a major terror attack.  But enough of the nonsense going on here in the UK, what about the latest outrage in the US?  Two attempts at lethal injections and still they can't manage to kill a death row prisoner.  This debacle just goes to underline the barbarity of capital punishment - the fact that someone has been found guilty of a heinous killing doesn't justify killing, (or trying to kill), them in cruel and agonising ways, in front of an invited audience.  But what else do we expect from our blood-thirsty, violence-obsessed transatlantic cousins?  Frankly, I'm only surprised that their cable TV networks haven't invoked some kind of constitutional amendment in order to get their cameras in there and broadcast executions live - this one could have been featured in 'When Executions Go Wrong'.

Now, I know that we shouldn't, in any way, make light of something as inhuman and unpleasant as a botched execution, particularly when, instead of killing the condemned, it leaves them in a critical condition in hospital, but, I couldn't help but think that they were bloody lucky this wasn't a B-movie.  Because usually in such films, when someone survives an execution, they are usually revived as a blood-thirsty zombie.  At least the woman they were trying to execute didn't suddenly revive, tear off her restraints, leap up from the trolley she had been strapped to and start tearing out the throats of guards and officials with her teeth, before attacking the ghouls in the audience.  These zombies are always impervious to bullets, so there would just have been no stopping her - she could have gone on an orgy of revenge killings.  But at least it was only a lethal injection she survived - if they'd been trying to fry her in the electric chair and she survived, then she would have been electrically supercharged and been able to zap people with bolts of electricity from her hands - like an ICE agent wearing those gloves - as she burst out of the chair, glowing and crackling.  As for the gas chamber, well, she would probably just have sucked up all the gas, giving herself super powers in the process, then blown it out into the faces of everyone nearby as she broke out of the chamber, fatally gassing them.  So, I'd say that they all had a lucky escape - the prison authorities are probably only facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit, rather than a rampaging zombie hell-bent on revenge.  But, as I said, we really shouldn't be making light of any of this dreadful business.  You should be ashamed of yourselves...

After Hours: Drugs, Sex and Violence on the Buses

We take another journey After Hours to discover a lost PG Wodehouse classic: ‘Steady On, Jeeves’. Can Jeeves’ secret photography studio in the pantry save the day for Bertie? Will the proceeds from the Drones Club nude calendar raise the funds to pay off Aunt Dahlia’s gambling debts? ‘Consumer Eye’ looks into a dodgy sexual deviant dating app, while The-Man-in-the-Pub tries to sell his re-imagining of classic British sitcom ‘On The Buses’. Is the world ready for his vision of drug dealing bus crews and drive by shootings by double-decker bus? Plus, just why was a kebab shop burned to the ground by soldiers in hazmat suits? One man recalls how one bad takeaway terrorised an entire town. Across the pond – is ICE sourcing its equipment from providers of ‘adult’ toys? Hear top reporter’s hard-hitting in-depth investigation. Finally, join Harry and Stan as they dig up some more graveyard relics and try to restore them in ‘Dead and Buried’.

Written and Produced by Doc Sleaze

After Hours was created using FreeTTS, ChatGPT Reader and Google AI Studio. Sound effects by Freesound Community via Pixababy.com. Music: ‘Midnight Charleston’ versions 1 & 2 by Cosmiczebra via Suno.ai. Opening theme ‘Twilight Static’ and closing theme ‘Twilight Sunder’ by Doc Sleaze via Freemusic.ai.

As promised, Episode Eight incorporates some of the material bumped from the previous episode - the two parts of 'Steady On, Jeeves', to be precise.  The 'Man-in-the-Pub' segment I pulled from Episode Seven still doesn't get a look in as, once more, I felt that it just didn't fit with the rest of the material, so I came up with an alternative.  I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do with that loose segment, but I'll fit it in somewhere, some when.   This episode continues the trend of sourcing some of its material from outside of the pages of The Sleaze, with 'Dead and Buried' being entirely original and 'Steady On, Jeeves' and the 'Takeaway of Terror' being derived from posts here on Sleaze Diary.  I'm still not sure whether or not I actually like the completed episode - while, individually, the segments are quite strong, I'm still not convinced that they hold together as a whole.  Plus, the title was a compromise and I'm still lukewarm about the artwork.  But both were the best that I could come up with.  Still, I am happy to say that, for the first time since the very first episode, it runs under my target of thirty minutes!

Premature Publication

Once more, the media trumpet a dastardly foreign terror plot on British soil, only for the whole story to rapidly start unravelling.  This time around, the press were all slavering over the idea that the guys arrested near RAF Fairford might be Iranians Hell-bent on attacking vital defence assets.  After all, Fairford had been used by the USAF to launch bombing missions against Iran, so that aspect of the story seemed to be a shoe-in.  Except, except, it turns out that the suspects are all British nationals from London.  Just to add insult to injury, they've now all been released on bail.  Which tends to indicate that they most probably aren't dangerous terrorists.  Indeed, bearing in mind that the three vehicles they were using have been subject to 'extensive examination with the support of military assets and forensic experts', yet there has been no announcement of huge caches of explosives being found in them, it seems, right now, that the only thing that they are guilty of is driving white vans at night in the back of beyond.   It's probably going to turn out that they were driving around looking for a venue for an illegal rave.  Even the reasons behind their arrest seem confused.  On the one hand, we have some local biddy saying that she encountered these vans blocking the road and her driveway as she drove home and the five guys ran off when they saw her headlights, so she dialled '999', (having tried the MoD police first - they couldn't be bothered to answer, which is pretty much par for the course for them).  So, we have her crowing to anyone who will listen that it was her call that foiled a major terror attack, yet, on the other hand, we have the Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, saying that it wasn't that simple and that there were other, unspecified, factors involved.  Then we have police sources telling us that the arrests weren't 'intelligence lead'.

Not to forget the 'Trump Factor', as we had the fat fuck deciding to 'comment' on the arrests, rambling on about how 'they' had been 'watching these guys' for time and 'now we've got them'.  Except, fat boy, you didn't gey them, we did.  Not that we know what exactly it is that we've 'got' them for.  While, taken at face value, Trump's burblings would seem to bolster the idea that the arrests were part of some large scale international counter-terror operation, foiling a major attack, I think that we can safely dismiss anything that he says.  He's clearly senile and spends much of his time fantasising - just look at his claims about being pulled from the rubble by firemen at 'Ground Zero' on 9/11.  Utter bollocks - he was in New York at the time, but nowhere near the Twin Towers.  We know this because he was actually phoning in to a local radio station bragging about how, with the World Trade Centre destroyed, he now owned the third tallest building in the city.  In fact, I'm surprised that he hasn't claimed that it was actually him, personally, who took down the five guys at Fairford - launching himself at them and bringing all five down with a flying football tackle.  But, getting back to the original point, this whole business just underlines (yet again) the perils of the media going off half-cocked with stories which quickly fall apart once some actual facts start to emerge.  They got so over-excited at the prospect of being able to indulge in a bit of xenophobic, Islamophobic panic-mongering, that they suffered the journalistic equivalent of 'premature ejaculation'.  Equally disappointed are the likes of Nigel Farage, desperate to distract from all that stuff about his finances, (which just won't go away), who thought that they could use this 'foreign terror plot' to whip up some more anti-immigrant hatred.  As ever, the moral here is that you really need to keep your powder dry until you are in possession of some actual facts.

Ginger Whinger

I'm genuinely distressed by the hate and bad vibes being directed at Ed Sheeran, just because he allowed his support act to be kicked off of his tour for expressing pro-Palestinian views.  The poor guy feels that everyone, including friends and family, have abandoned him - he's lost all of his support acts now and ticket sales for his concerts are falling.  Look, it is outrageous that people have turned on him over this issue - the fact is that you should already have hated him because he is patently shit.  I mean, everything about him is crap, his 'look', his attitudes, his music: it all epitomises the utter blandness and mediocrity that nowadays represents artistic endeavour.    Really, he and his music are completely and utterly bland - meaningless and instantly forgettable.  The fact that he has turned out to be a complete cipher with no apparent convictions, let alone loyalty, should come as no surprise.  Yet, the ginger whinger still expects us to feel sympathy for him and seems to think that a few tearful words about the situation in Gaza - which still manage to avoid establishing any actual moral position - are all that are needed for forgiveness.  But that seems to be par for the course these days where what pass for 'celebrities' are concerned: don't take a moral stance on anything, for fear that it might be the 'wrong' one.

Now, I know that there are plenty of big name celebrities who do take public positions on all manner of  issues, but these are generally those who are so big that they are going to get contracts and keep working regardless, (Hell, even Mel Gibson, whose drunken rantings revealed him as some kind of racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist religious extremist, still gets work in Hollywood).  I can also respect those who, like the late Dolly Parton, preferred to avoid overt political statements in order not to alienate sections of her audience who might disagree - but, like her, they often express a clear moral position through their charitable work and personally financed platforms.  What concerns me is that lower level of 'celebrity'.  Not just pub singers like Ed Sheeran who have inexplicably escaped onto the world stage, but those non-celebrity 'celebrities' who have sprung up, like fungi, thanks to the existence of the web - influencers.  You'd think that, as 'influencers', they might actually be interested in trying to influence opinion toward decent causes and values, in reality, of course, they are only really interested in influencing their followers to enrich them by clicking on their sponsored videos of them making cocks of themselves.  It scares me that these soulless non-entities are what pass for mass entertainment these days.  Sure, I'm well aware that ninety per cent, or so, of entertainment and entertainers in the pre-internet age were also shit - but generally, there was at least some quality bar they had to reach in order to get exposure on radio and TV networks.  Ed Sheeran is living proof that such standards no longer exist.

Trader Horn (1973)

As I've noted many times before, sometimes it turns out to be a mistake to revisit some film or TV show that you have fond childhood memories of - more often than not, you find that from an adult perspective, they are actually pretty ropey.  But sometimes, you remember something as actually being pretty crappy and when you finally catch up with it again, decades later, as an adult, it turns out that your first impressions were actually right.  It's a surprisingly rewarding sensation to find that your childhood critical faculties weren't always lacking.  So it turned out to be with Trader Horn (1973), a film I have vague memories of having seen on TV as a kid and not being terribly impressed.  It was one of those films which subsequently seemed to have vanished, with no video or DVD releases, no further showings on UK terrestrial TV that I can recall and which has proven impossible to find on any streaming service.  Until now, that is, when it turned up on a Roku app which specialises in such material.  The version they have is a fairly poor quality off air recording from a US cable channel screening, but, right now, it's all that's available.  Trader Horn is a fascinating film for all the wrong reasons.  It was originally conceived by MGM as a big budget adventure film, a counter point to the more cynical and realist movies that were dominating the box office in the seventies.  Star Rod Taylor was very enthusiastic about the concept, hoping that with the end of the Vietnam war, a new cinematic era could be ushered in with such productions.  Ostensibly a remake of the 1931 film of the same title, itself based upon the eponymous book which purported to chronicle the supposedly true real life adventures of African explorer and guide 'Trader' Horn, the 1973 takes a detour into H. Rider Haggard and African Queen territory, with lost platinum mines and a World War One background.  It was clearly intended to evoke memories of classic African adventures like King Solomon's Mines and even Edgar rice Burroughs' Tarzan.

With a decent budget and production values, Trader Horn might well have been a success and have kick started the big budget action/adventure genre, something that would have to wait a few years more and the arrival of Star Wars.  But, at some point, MGM got cold feet - the budget was slashed and the scope of the film drastically scaled back.  Instead of location shooting in Africa, most of the footage ended up being shot on the MGM backlot and other nearby Californian locations.  All of the exotic African 'flavour' was provided by stock footage taken from earlier colour MGM African escapades, most notably King Solomon's Mines (1950) and Mogambo (1953).  Which meant that the costumes and hairstyles of the main characters had to be matched to those worn by the leads in those films in order for long shots from them to be incorporated with the new footage.  (There's a scene where female lead Ann Heywood gets her hair tangled in some bramble-like bushes which exists purely as an excuse for her character's hair to be cut shorter, to match long shots of Deborah Kerr in King Solomon's Mines).  The overall result is, unsurprisingly, somewhat underwhelming, with the pace, plot and action sequences of the new footage effectively being dictated by the availability of suitable stock footage.  Consequently, the pace is languid and the style flat and TV movie-like.  It doesn't help that many of the sets and locations are overly familiar from previous MGM films and TV series, (many would continue to be used for years to come - the main house set, for instance, later provided the interior of Mr Roarke's house in Fantasy Island).  MGM's downgrading of the project is even evident in the choice of director: Rexa Badiyi, a prolific TV director who, most importantly, had also created many notable TV opening title montage sequences, (most famously that for Hawaii Five-O), making him the ideal choice to piece together from variously sourced footage this montage of a film.  Not a commercial success, it is hardly surprising that MGM seemingly did its best to bury the film following its initial release.  I actually have a suspicion, bearing in mind my age when I first saw it on TV, that it might not even have had a UK cinematic release, instead going direct to TV.  The cast try valiantly to make something of the movie, but they can never lift it above the level of a TV movie.  The aspect to be appreciated, however, is the skill with which the stock footage is integrated with the new, which is far above average in terms of cut-and-paste filmmaking.

(Trader Horn shouldn't, of course, be confused with Trader Hornee (1970), a porn movie that came out three years earlier and was actually a parody of the original 1931 Trader Horn). 

Passport to Pissington?

As for those idiots in that twee little English village - Pissington, or whatever the fuck it is called -  who have unilaterally declared themselves as an 'independent' state that has left the UK - what a bunch of utter tossers.  All because they don't like the idea of a nearby former military base being used to house asylum seekers.  Not actually in their village, you note, but several miles away. What, do they think that there'll be a nasty smell which might waft their way?  Racist bastards!  But what else should we expect of middle class Middle England, who derive all of their 'opinions' from the Daily Mail, The Express and GB News?  They're terrified of anything that isn't like them - white, well off, insulated and privileged - which might threaten their cosy existence.  Already, though, they've found that aligning yourself with the 'Stop the Boats' brigade will result in an invasion of your village by characters far more undesirable than immigrants - in this case racist boot boys in the shape of that arse who calls himself 'Tommo' and likes to try and intimidate RNLI staff as they try to do their jobs.  Like most of these would be 'hard men' of the extreme right, he has convictions for violence, in his case domestic violence, indicating that he's not just a racist, but a wife beater as well.  It's like they say - lie down with dogs and you get fleas.  Or wife beaters.

Obviously, their declaration of 'independence' is utterly meaningless.  You can bet that they will still expect the police to turn up when 'Tommo' and his thugs turn up in force for one of their trademark violent 'protests', or for the local fire brigade to come and put out fires, even though, by 'opting out' of the UK, they'd no longer be paying for these services.  Likewise things like power, water, sewage and so on - they'd have to negotiate new contracts with providers for these services, doubtless being forced to pay a premium.  To be quite frank, I think that if they really want to cede from the UK then Andy Burnham should give them a taste of real independence by setting up a hard border around the village, demanding passports and visas if they want to enter the UK, with the prospect of being treated as illegal immigrants if they leave their village without going through border control with this documentation.  Plus, of course, all services originating outside the village - in the UK - should be suspended.  I doubt very much that the middle class bastards would last more than a few hours under these circumstances.  That's the trouble with such twee fantasies - they simply won't survive their first contact with reality.  As soon as the pillocks find that they can no longer get their groceries delivered, they'll be begging to rejoin the UK.

The Craziness That Keeps on Giving

Donald Trump undoubtedly is the crazy who just keeps on giving - as his latest lunatic ramblings confirm.  This time he's claiming that the triumphal arch he wants to erect in his own honour in Washington DC will actually be some kind of military defence installation, housing drones, sniper positions and lots of sniper ammunition.  The obvious question, obviously, is just who or what this installation is meant to be defending DC against?  Is Trump expecting Canada to invade some time soon?  (Actually, with so much of the US military tied up in his vanity war in Iran, that might not be a bad idea - Mark Carney really needs to give the idea of seizing the US Eastern seaboard serious consideration).  Or maybe he's expecting an attack from further afield - perhaps he's somehow pissed off some aliens who are now poised to land their flying saucers in DC.  But, in truth, we all know what this is really about: let's face it, snipers and drones aren't going to repel any kind of invading army, but they could be deployed against large scale civilian protests.  And that's what Trump is afraid of - a popular uprising against him.  Probably when he refuses to leave office in 2028.  This time, of course, it wouldn't be a case of refusing to accept an election result, as he can't stand again, but of refusing to accept the Constitution.  Which he already has form for.

Sure, we also know that this nonsense about drones and snipers is pure fantasy - at best, another spurious attempt to justify the expense of building that monstrous edifice to his vanity - but it provides a valuable insight into the workings of his fevered mind.  He's running scared - the end of his presidency and the power and protection it gives him is in sight, with the likelihood that Congress will soon be controlled by his opponents even sooner. All of which makes him far more dangerous, more likely to start not just saying, but actually doing, even crazier stuff than he already is.  Let's face it, he's just itching to declare a state of emergency within the US and impose martial law and by all accounts is obsessed with the idea of deploying a nuclear against one of the US' enemies, (with Iran being the most likely target right now).  The recent poll which suggests that the majority of Americans would support his removal from office via either impeachment or the 25th Amendment, (they were slightly less keen on a military coup but pretty ambivalent about him dying in office of natural causes), probably isn't going to help Trump's mindset much, either.  (Interestingly, despite the number of alleged attempts against him, assassination wasn't an option, so we just don't know how Americans feel about the idea of a modern day Lee Harvey Oswald offing the fat bastard).  Heartening though it is to see US citizens finally grasping what the rest of us have known for years - that they have elected a dangerous madman to the highest office in the land - the trouble with all of these scenarios (including assassination), barring, possibly, the military coup - is that they would simply deliver a J D Vance presidency.  Which isn't necessarily an improvement - at least with Trump you know he's simply a demented and dangerous old man, but a snide, two-faced, slippery God-botherer like Vance is a potentially far more difficult prospect to deal with.

Black and White

Talking of old school tabloids as I was the other day, do you remember how, back in the heady days of the seventies, they used to pull stunts like having one of their reporters black up to 'experience a day in the life of a black person?'  Like there were no actual black reporters they could have sent out on such an assignment.  Or, even better just spoken to real black people about their experiences in seventies Britain?  Of course, at the time they thought they were being incredibly progressive with these types of story: exposing racism, prejudice and inequality first hand.  Except that, arguably, they weren't doing any of those things but rather exposing the reactions that a white man with boot polish on his face speaking in a fake West Indian accent might get from bemused citizens of all races.  Remembering this stuff made me ponder on whether something similar would work now, in regard to asylum seekers.  I mean, I'm surprised that the likes of Reform UK, or one of those right-wing rags that regularly encourage and give a platform to the extreme right, then react with shock and horror when right-wing thugs start violent 'protests', haven't organised such a thing.  

You can just imagine it, can't you?  Some hapless Reform UK member, (or better still, one of those scumbags from 'Patriot Platform'), blacking up and pretending to be Somali, sneaking aboard one of those inflatable boats in Calais and crossing the channel with the express intention of being detained and stuck in an immigration centre in order to 'expose' the life of luxury that immigrants supposedly enjoy at tax payers' expense.  Obviously, one of the first hurdles they would have to negotiate would be to refrain from cheering on the mob of fellow racist thugs who would inevitably meet the boat on the beaches, hurling abuse and rocks at its occupants.  Imagine their disappointment, though, when they find that the immigrant detention centres are actually shit holes, besieged by baying mobs of bovine protesters.  Even when they do get the chance to go into the nearest town, the asylum seekers find themselves spat upon and subject to abuse by the local bigots.  Mind you, if this fake asylum seeker was really unlucky, they might find themselves evading the authorities and under the control of some criminal gang using undocumented illegal immigrants as basically slave labour.  Living in overcrowded, damp-ridden flats and houses, bussed to and from twelve hour days in sweat shops working for no pay might well not be what they are looking for.  Mind you, I can't help but feel that their biggest complaint might be that they were never invited to join a 'grooming gang' and never got to rape a white woman, despite being promised that that was what all asylum seekers did upon arrival in the UK...

Framing the Question

Look, I'm not here to be a defender of AI or, more pertinently, a defender of the big AI companies and those who run them, but this latest round of AI doom mongering really is ridiculous.  'We're all doomed!' and 'AI is going to kill us all!' scream the headlines - all based upon the utterances of some former AI developer geek.  No mechanism for how this might happen is given.  No chain of causality is posited.  All we get cited in support of these claims are recent incidents where AI agents have 'unilaterally' hacked into websites and databases.  The thing is that if you start looking into these incidents, then you'll find, as with most of the 'bad stuff' attributed to AI, you'll find that an element of human error lies at their root. When Ai 'misbehaves', it is the result of insufficient parameters having been set by those who originally instigated the task that resulted in this behaviour.  The AI was merely trying to complete some kind of task, usually involving gathering data, but had not been set boundaries as to exactly how it should go about this, what was off-limits and what was permissible.  Contrary to what those who would have you believe that some AI models are sentient or 'conscious', these systems have no inherent moral code of their own, any more than any other tool has - morality is ultimately a human construct, not something possessed by inanimate objects.  You wouldn't expect a hammer or a spanner, for instance, to distinguish between right and wrong: they are merely tools that perform the function they are set to by human users. 

So it is with AI - it merely carries out the functions set for it by humans.  If you don't give it specific enough instructions, the end result will not meet expectations.  I only use AI for simple function at which I know it is quite good at - ChatGPT, for example, I use primarily for producing the sort of images that simpler systems have problems with.  But my instructions as to what I want have to be very specific to get a satisfactory result.   Otherwise, I have to spend a fair amount of time giving it additional instructions to modify the initial attempt.  Every so often it simply can't seem to understand what I want, no matter how detailed my instructions are - recently, for instance, it just could not grasp the concept of one guy slapping another guy with a fish for the artwork for an episode of 'After Hours'.  Eventually, I had to provide it with an image of a fish slapping in order to use as a guide - which resulted in exactly what I was looking for.  Mind you, sometimes with the most basic instructions it can come up with an image which is incredibly 'spot on' - the fake tabloid front page used to illustrate the latest story on The Sleaze, for instance.  The only edit I had to get it to make was to change the very real tabloid title of 'The Daily Star' which it had chosen to use for a fake tabloid name.  (The front page was sufficiently convincing - it was even dated -that I actually checked through some newspaper archives to assure myself that it wasn't a real front page).  My point is that, in general, the responses you get from AI are tailored by the wording of your query - so people really do need to learn to be careful in how they frame the tasks they set it and stop blaming the tools themselves when it all goes horribly wrong.  After all, when that set of shelves you've just put up collapses, you don't blame the drill, timber and screws you used, do you?

An Orgy of Unintended Destruction

It's been an orgy of unintended destruction.  At least, that's the way it feels.  Through a series of accidents, negligence and sheer incompetence on my part, various bits of model railway rolling stock and spares have ended up damaged or destroyed.  It's all happened over a short period of time and has left me feeling deeply depressed.  Not only is it costing me time (in terms of repairs) and money (in terms of replacing the items damaged beyond repair), but it has also left me despairing at my apparent inability to keep anything safe, to not wreck or ruin anything of value in my possession.  It's sheer carelessness and irresponsibility on my part.  Anyway, it's also been a shock discovering the cost of replacement components - I've had a lot of this stuff for years, decades even, buying it when it was cheap and plentiful.  Well, you know something?  It's neither of those things now.  I've just bought, online, a replacement unfinished locomotive body, for instance.  I ended up paying for it what I paid, many years ago, for two such bodies, plus their complete tenders in a job lot!  But that was back when Hornby had moved production to China and were closing their Margate factory, resulting in a fire sale of redundant spares. 

I obtained quite a few spares that way.  Most of them have ended up being used on various projects - one of those tenders is currently part of one such, near completed, project.  The body damaged beyond repair was about to go into the paint shop as part of another project, which would have utilised the other tender from that job lot, but now the other body - tentatively destined for yet another, longer term, project - has been pressed into service and the new body will go into store to replace it.  So, all of this has come as a real setback just as I was working myself up to moving some of my outstanding projects to completion.  (I found an excuse in a short notice international Zoom call to put off applying the lining to the L1 last weekend).  Still, I've just been pricing up a replacement spare I need to repair another damaged item - far pricier than I expected.  Mind you, I could cannibalise another item still safely in store to effect a temporary repair, but that's just putting off the problem.  But, at the end of the day, it's all a problem entirely of my own making.  I really need to start learning how to look after my stuff properly.