The only function of economic forecasting is
to make astrology look respectable

Beth and I just returned from our summer holiday – a week in West Cornwall. Even for someone born in St Austell, we were a long way west. The Penwith Heritage Coast was the heart of Cornwall’s hard rock mining industry which extracted tin, copper and arsenic in particular. With other employments including fishing, farming, smuggling and wrecking, Cornwall was a tough place in the nineteenth century, when tin mining there peaked and declined.

The sunsets over the sea were particularly beautiful:

Further photos here.

Each year, the good people of High Wycombe weigh the Mayor, the councillors and the MP to check who is gaining weight at taxpayer expense. It’s a magnificent idea but strangely my Westminster colleagues seem reluctant to institute the tradition on Parliament Square.

Unfortunately, I put a little weight on in my first year, it turned out. Here’s me making the most of being booed as a pantomime villain after the fateful cry of “and some more!”

Happily, the weight was handy during the past week, as Beth and I took our summer holiday early at the spectacular Wildwind in Greece. I’m helming the large catamaran on the left:

I thoroughly recommend Wildwind and Vassiliki Bay for sailors and windsurfers. A gentle sea breeze develops through the morning and early afternoon before a quite predictable katabatic near gale arrives late in the afternoon. What’s more, Wildwind is, I think, the only place where powerful boats are provided in strong winds for competent sailors and where they will allow you to single-hand the awesome Hobie Fox in lighter airs. This was my fourth visit and I am sure we will be back.

Meanwhile, with me turning 40 tomorrow, the minor public humiliation of weighing in couldn’t be more timely. I feel inspired to return to regular exercise…

Some of my (hopefully!) more interesting photos from Northumberland may be found here.

This emotive shot is most likely to be used again:

I was pleased with this falcon(?) too:

It was hunting on the updraft around Dunstanburgh castle, with a swift(?) bouncing in playfully:

Beth and I just spent a few days in Cumbria with old friends and their wonderful children. When he and I graduated together from the Royal Air Force College Cranwell, we never imagined that today I would be an MP and he would be managing a major manufacturing facility, but that is a story for another day. It was, of course, picturesque:

I am indebted to my old mate for the notion that what he wants is an organisation of heroes, not victims: people who boldly do the right thing, picking themselves up from setbacks on their own initiative and striving to take others along with them. I’m struck that one of the things heroes do is rescue others, not leave them behind.

It reminds me of Reagan:

It is time for us to realise that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. Those who say that we are in a time when there are no heroes… they just don’t know where to look.

It’s a theme I shall mull over.