“There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.”
Day: February 28, 2018
For work or pleasure
Share this:
Snow falls in winter,what a shock!
From the Rochdale Herald
After blowing 28 million pounds on Winter Olympics the UK grinds to halt after first sign of snow
Peyongchang 2018 was the most successful Winter Olympics for team GB and just one day after the closing ceremony Britain has begun its annual mass panic as snow flakes have been spotted all over the country.
Corner shops and supermarkets have been totally cleared out of milk, bread and other essentials, but still at least we are the worlds best at going like a I bat out of hell on a tea tray even if we can’t make it the 1 mile round trip to the office because it’s a little bit slippy.
The British Olympic committee are hopeful that the great British public will be inspired by the games and pop down their local toboggan run or giant ski jump and get active during the big freeze however because no true Brit can get anywhere in this weather the likelihood is everyone is just planning to stay home eat soup and watch Jeremy Kyle all day.
Many towns are already at a stand still with as much as 2cms of the white stuff falling in just 9 hours and every single school in the country has been closed until further notice.
People have been asked to definitely not call 999 unless they are actually dead and even then think twice about it.
Share this:
The window
Love
Share this:
UK does not have open borders for EU residents even while we are in the EU
https://fullfact.org/europe/border-security-eu/
Controls at the UK border
The British government retains full control over its own border controls. Travellers who hold EU passports can’t cross the UK border without having their passport or identity checked, and the same applies for travellers from non-EU countries.
The UK can, and does, perform passport and identity checks at its borders and refuses entry to travellers who do not travel with valid identity documents even if they are from another EU member state.
The benefit of holding an EU passport, or being the citizen of a European Economic Area (EEA) country (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein) or Switzerland, is that you travel through a separate channel at UK border controls. This normally results in a swifter identity check.
Non-EU citizens need to conform to all the UK’s border and immigration checks, even if they’re travelling from the EU, and are checked in a separate channel from EU, EEA and Swiss citizens. Citizens from outside the EU also face different visa, or visa waiver, requirements depending on the purpose of the visit and its duration.
There’s no difference here if the person is travelling from a Schengen or a non-Schengen country.
The requirements to enter the UK from outside the EU (for example, whether you need a visa) are a decision made by the UK government
.
What this means for terrorism
Terrorism, just like many other crimes and other threats to countries’ security, operates across borders.
Concerns have been raised that terrorists may take advantage of refugee routes to Europe. As the UK retains its own border controlsand national control over asylum-seeking processes it has the capacity to address any such development itself.
In recent years, there’s also been more focus in the UK on ‘home-grown’ terrorism, as the House of Commons library and othershave said. The government has been developing policies to counter the development of extremist beliefs among UK citizens identified as vulnerable to radicalisation.
According to UK in a Changing Europe Fellow Richard Whitman, collective information sharing has evolved on criminal justice issues between the EU’s member countries to help them apprehend criminals, including sex offenders, people traffickers and terrorists, by unifying the procedures for and speeding up extradition and distributing security related information among EU members.
The UK has chosen to ‘opt in’ to some of these arrangements and cooperate collectively with other EU countries through the SIS, European Arrest Warrant (EAW),European criminal records system and EU-Interpol cooperation.
For example, the UK’s National Crime Agency issued 219 EAWs for suspects in other EU countries in 2013, and 228 in 2014. In return the National Crime Agency received 5,522 EAWs for requests in 2013, and 13,460 in 2014.
If the UK decides to leave the EU it might lose direct access to some these arrangements (such as the EAW which doesn’t currently apply to non-EU member countries). That said, other non-EU member states, such as Norway, still participate in the SIS without being members of the EU and have negotiated similar arrangements to the EAW.
Outside the EU, the UK would be free to decide on which issues and with which countries it would wish to pursue such cooperation. That isn’t much different to the situation now, according to Professor Whitman. The UK also already collaborates with other countries outside the EU, such as the US, on these issues on a one-to-one basis.
This article was written by academic experts at the UK in a Changing Europe initiative, with support from Full Fact, and used as the basis for a feature on ITV News at Ten. Any opinions or professional judgments of the authors are labelled as such.
Isn’t it nice to have the whole picture?
We rely on your donations to continue and grow our factchecking efforts – to help us maintain our independence we need 1000 donors to give £10 a month. We are currently at 502 – please help Full Fact grow.
Share this:
Woman seen wearing a jacket in N E England
Met Office alert after sighting of Geordie woman wearing jacket in Newcastle
We have a joke here that women in the North where I come from never wear coats even in winter….
Share this:
Old man
Share this:
Poem in a dark time
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43347/in-a-dark-time
In a Dark Time
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright © 1963 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday, 1961)
How my heart sings 