Will US Outlaw Bump Stocks? Cable Blames Over 65's For Brexit. Cheese Cake Success on Mother's Day

Ash black slug on wall in Ely

President Trump's decision to agree to talks with the leader of North Korea continues to make waves as it is not clear whether there any prerequisites for the talks. e.g. North Korea giving clear signs of moving on nuclear weapons. In the meantime, it actually looks as if the US Justice Department is moving towards making the bump-stocks illegal. The is could be by classifying them under 'machine guns', as they help convert semi-automatic weapons into fully automatic ones. Whether the legislation will come to fruition is another matter. in the meantime, the EU-US talks about the US tariffs on steel and aluminium broke up without any decision. 

Liberal Democrat Leader Vince Cable baldly blamed the Brexit vote on an over 65's who had a "nostalgia for a world where passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink". This contrasted with the 70% of under 25's who voted to remain. He was speaking at the party's Spring Conference, where he also pointedly commented that ."Looking around the auditorium, we are very, very white. We must prioritise making our party more ethnically diverse." By the evening his comments had drawn a backlash from mainly Tory MPs. 

Chancellor Philip Hammond was on the political chat show circuit today with the message that this year would see the tipping point when the budget deficit would begin to decline. However, he also refused to state that there would be more money available for cash strapped councils.

Salisbury nerve gas poisoning story takes a new twist. The 500 plus visitors to the pizza restaurant and nearby pub being urged to wash the clothes they wore on the day. This was to avoid the effects of slow accumulative poisoning by any traces of nerve poison

I had a second try at making a cheese cake with Quark that wouldn't collapse on removal from the oven - this time, yesterday, with success! Just mixing the cheese layer ingredients together rather than mixing in a stiffened separate egg-white worked.

With today, Mother's Day, being grey but drier than yesterday, we took a trip to Ely for a walk around the town. We dropped into the Babylon Gallery for the last day of an exhibition of sculptures and caricatures by Sid Burnard and Ralph Steadman. Since most pubs and restaurants were full, we stopped off for a small snack at the Cathedral cafe. On the way back to the car, spent some time photographing bricks, plants, mosses, lichens and an Ash black slug before returning home to tea and cheese cake.