The writing is on the wall(paper)

Well, that's that, all bar the shouting and some predicatable Staffordshire county results. It was a great set of election results for the Conservatives, bar the likely result in London.

Taking it on a timeline:

First up was Labour being crushed in the big Hartlepool by-election, as we all now know. The Conservatives reportedly won the seat by a landslide 7,000 majority.

Then on Friday came the laugh-out-loud news that Conservatives 'make history' with Stoke-on-Trent by-election win, taking the 'safe' seat of the city's former Labour leader Mohammed Pervez.

Later on Friday evening came the more predictable Police & Fire Commissioner result. Conservative Ben Adams romps home as new Staffordshire Commissioner. Reform UK (former Brexit Party) were also on the ballot there, but very few had a clue who they were among the various micro-parties and tendencies of similar name. Reform, Reclaim, Realise, Reboot, Resist, Revive... who has a clue which is which? They might as well be ReRe and her Performing Rabbits, as far as most voters are concerned.

On later prodding the news engines, good news then popped out from across the Midlands. Local councils in Bromsgrove, Nuneaton, Walsall, Cannock — and even the Black Country 'key town' of Dudley — had come over to the Conservatives. Five seats in Wolverhampton were also quietly voted to the Conservatives. Parts of Tipton such as Great Bridge have gone Conservative, which would have been utterly unthinkable 20 years ago. The Conservative mayor of Birmingham is also fairly certain to be re-elected. Cheshire also seems certain to elect a Conservative Police & Fire Commissioner.

Predictably, no media outlet outside Stoke bothered to mention Stoke. Which, in a way, is good. When Stoke votes Conservative, it's now just 'to be expected' and is no longer national or even regional news.

Where does Labour go now? Frankly, who cares? Outside London they're now about as important as Boris's choice of wallpaper.

Return of the pong

I spoke to soon, on 'the pong'. It's back in central Stoke tonight, and it's 'a super-strong pong' now the high wind has moderated. A low NW wind is dragging it down the valley. It used to be a bit sickly, but now it's very slightly acrid. There's obviously some connection with heavy rains.

The pong is gone, for now

The "great pong" seems to be gone, or at least gone from Stoke-on-Trent. For those who have not experienced it, a 'bad eggs' smell has been periodically wafting down into and through the Stoke valley since about the end of last summer. It was very bad by the end of January, and returned briefly and in a much lesser form at the start of March.

Perhaps it's the general lack of rain that's caused the pong to go 'poof' and vanish, but I haven't sniffed anything untoward for about five or six weeks now. Doubtless the month of May will see the rain returning, though, and May Day Bank Holiday has a fearsome reputation for being a windy washout. So we'll have to see what happens after a few good downpours.

Walleys Quarry landfill in Silverdale is blamed, but they say they have proof that the ultimate cause is off-site. Regardless of where it's coming from it can't be very pleasant for those living on the lip of the dump or trying to sell their houses there. All I can say that central Stoke-on-Trent appears to be no longer affected, at least until the next heavy rain comes.

The one-year death-map for Stoke-on-Trent

Here's the official 'death by the virus' map, showing the total from March 2020 onward.

The wide view. Size of the green dots indicate total number of deaths. Leek appears to have been badly hit in the end, re: its population size, although it initially had low numbers.

The Stoke-on-Trent map, here with the actual numbers added to the circles. Central Stoke-on-Trent seems to have been relatively lightly affected, and Trentham heavily hit.

Got milk?

Where did all the flocks of small birds go in the 1990s and 2000s, that had been so abundant in the 1970s? Well, it might have been the legacy of 1980s pesticides and the diminution of hedge and meadow habitats. But it may also have been partly that we were no longer giving millions of them a rich milky breakfast each morning, after they had pecked their way through the foil tops on doorstep milk-bottles.

This used to be a very common thing, up until the nationwide move to supermaket carton-milk and the stopping of doorstep 'milkman' deliveries of bottles with foil tops.

Back to pong

The "bad eggs smell" is really bad today, and seemingly floating south down the Stoke valley in the light southerly wind. The worst it's been yet. What a nauseating way to start the key 'back-to-school day' for the kids and nervous parents. If it is the Silverdale tip, as everyone assumes it is (though I've seen nothing by way of proof on that, and it might not be the ultimate source) then I wonder if the site is trying to vent the gases 'first thing Monday morning', before some sort of inspection later today? The Sentinel reports there's finally to be a emergency meeting of councillors, MPs and others, seemingly this week, though no date is given by the paper.

Roaming drone

I may have spotted an autonomous drone, the first I've seen. It was buzzing along in a straight level line parallel with the West Coast mainline at Etruria, going south to north, and did not appear to be under any human control. Possibly it was inspecting the West Coast Main Line by HD camera?

Frosty, with a chance of bollocks

You can no longer believe a word of what's written about "weather warnings" in the legacy newspapers, if you ever could. Go look at the actual hour-by-hour day-by-day forecast, and every time you'll see it's just blatant clickbait.

Today it's claimed that a two-week 'ice apocalypse' is due from Iceland, headed for Stoke. What we actually have coming is wind from the east during five cold nights when it'll be a bit frosty in the early mornings and cold most of the day. That's all.

The pong over Stoke

Back in the day, when school science lessons were not yet a branch of the Politics Dept., kids did real science with chemicals and test-tubes. Then we all learned about the famous 'bad egg smell' at first hand. This smell, as all swots who had Chemistry Sets at home will recall, did not come from our bench-mate 'Pongy' Podger. Rather it was from the noxious chemical we had just made, Hydrogen Sulphide.

Now this same eggy 'stink bomb' smell hangs intermittently over a large part of Stoke-on-Trent. The Sentinel has just noticed it today, but I can tell this blog's readers it's been around Etruria for months, on and off. I think I first caught a whiff when the workmen were resurfacing the rat-run road between Shelton New Rd. and the Festival park flyover. That was a long while ago now, possibly even the end of the summer. I thought it was the workmen and their tar, but it has persisted on and off.

Lately it's become ever stronger and more frequent, likely aided for me by a north wind. The local newspaper can offer no solution to the mystery, but does add to the facts by finding that there are reports of it all over the city.

It's not the canals. My theories have been:

* Rumbling and burpings from the weedy old gas-holder site at Etruria, near to the Holy Inadequate pub. Old-timers in Etruria will recall the gigantic gas-holder that stood there until about 15 years ago. But if that was the case, surely those living opposite it would have been in the paper before now.

* The works to put in the new business units on the Shelton Bar site, as the final stage goes in and there's apparently an ongoing move to clean up the highly polluted Fowlea Brook which runs nearby.

* On the same site, deep pilings being driven in to hold up the immense Wolstanton Flyover that's planned to cross the valley. However, I'm fairly sure that work has not yet started.

* Seepage of gas from some opened and un-noticed shaft leading down to the city's deep and flooded mines. Possibly the most likely solution. But where is it? Surely such a fissure or shaft would have been noticed? Unless it's bubbling up through a lake or large pool?

* New test-wells, drilled for geothermal heat-sources that might one-day power Etruria and Hanley for free. Again, the site was said to have been at Etruria, where the old Garden Festival greenhouses used to be. But, so far as I know, that Labour pipe-dream of free energy has been abandoned by the new Council.

* Drains and sewers. But again, you would have thought the services concerned would have things like Internet-connected gas-detector devices bolted to the brick-walls down there, that would have detected such things before now.

There you go, take your pick. And be careful not to flick a cigarette end down any mysteriously smelly shaft. Apparently the gas is explosive when hanging in the air in dense quantities.

Cumulative map of all Stoke-on-Trent virus deaths

Map of all Stoke virus deaths since the virus began. Latest from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) interactive map, which shows the total of all "Deaths involving COVID-19":

And, for comparison, the map as it stood at 15th August 2020: