Blogging will be infrequent until the new year at my wife’s special request. I’ll be finishing my constituency work today and then taking Christmas off. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this shot of St Lawrence Church West Wycombe at night.
Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New Year!
Snapped en route to collect the Christmas groceries by foot. It was a long way back up the hill!
Follow the link from the photo for more.
Thanks to West Oxfordshire Conservatives, I dined recently with David Cameron, experiencing his quick wit and good humour.
The statutory body “The Committee on Climate Change” has announced:
Cutting gross UK aviation emissions in 2050 to 2005 levels together with 90% emissions cuts in other sectors would achieve the required economy wide 80% emissions reduction which has been committed to by the UK under the Climate Change Act.
Yesterday, I learned there is an agile sports car in development which will achieve 75 mpg: very impressive, but cutting emissions by 90% means a target of about 300 mpg. In the meantime, this is what people want, Nissan’s new supercar, the GT-R, spotted on the way home amongst Subaru rally cars for the road:
We should note the presumption by the CCC that it is for government to plan society.
Meanwhile, it turns out there are plenty of peer-reviewed papers which contradict global warming alarmism. I read recently an article which asked “What will it take for the mainstream media to report reasonably on global warming?” I suggest the answer is a more serious “danger to the community” story, one which indicates where planned societies lead.
In the end, I made eleven jumps this weekend, seven yesterday and all good fun. Here I asked a tandem cameraman to shoot a solo exit:
Exit Steve
Originally uploaded by stevenjbaker
I find I must make way too much effort to match my fall rate to the average skydiver, particularly in big formations (which fall slower), so here goes the diet…
Today, Beth and I have been married only thirteen years.
I’m a lucky man 
Follow the link from the photo for a sequence of images showing how, when the main parachute is cut away in an emergency, the Skyhook RSL deploys the reserve parachute using the main as a drogue. The reserve is professionally packed in the white bag on the left, which pulls away completely in the air to release the chute. (The reserve needed its regular repack, creating this opportunity.)
This is an extra safety feature over the usual reserve static line arrangement, which just pulls the reserve pin and allows the reserve pilot chute — grey in the picture — to deploy the reserve.
The weather was unsettled at the Royal International Air Tattoo today. Nevertheless, the aircrew achieved some fantastic flying in the murk, particularly the pilot of this Hornet, who displayed in awful weather.
Of course, the Red Arrows were superb:
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