...but at least you can laugh eh ?

Love free "local" magazines and newspapers.

I'm just reading the latest edition of "Cookridge Life" which gets shoved through our door once a month to inundate me with all of our friendly plumbers, pet shops, tanfantastic studios and tarot readers and I've read this amazingly condescending free "charities" advert, which is at the same time is being "awful" in the Dick Emery "ooh you are awful" meaning of the word ...


Just a little background - Cookridge Hospital is the area's leading cancer treatment facility - just so you know.


Wanted ! Comedy DVD's
Cookridge Hospital is seeking DVD's of classic comedy series like Dad's Army, Fawlty Towers etc, to show to cancer patients, if you have any to donate please contact etc etc etc


I'm not sure how to take the advert - I mean, are they showing these DVD's to terminally ill patients in a "look what you're going to miss" stylee, or perhaps "cheer up, its terminal but it doesn't have to be sad", or maybe "well I'll put it on but I'm not sure that you'll get through all of the episodes love"

Pumping Iron...

Oh dear, this one is going to be a tough one to write without sounding snobby and eliteist, so I'll just write it as it happens and I'll be snobby and eliteist then.

Yesterday I joined a gym...........again.

Its (I think) the fifth gym that I've been a member of, but there is a difference this time - the four (at least four) other gyms have all been private affairs, hotel gyms or a big "country club" gym with its own golf course, I'll leave you to imagine how burgeois and expensive that one was.

This one belongs to the council.

Its, erm, not very posh.

Its not very big either but its got the latest range of equipment by Lifestyle and in that respect is much more up to date than the expensive "country club" option who's aerobic equiment is six or seven years old now.

There is one other difference - at the council gym you can pay-as-you-go or join for a year for a third of the price of all the other gyms - suddenly I'm interested and not so snobby any more, just think of the money I'll save I kept telling myself.

The other attraction is that two of my friends already go there and one thing that you need when embarking on a year long gym commitment is enthusiasm caused by competition - and someone to talk to when cycling nowhere for half an hour.

Two of us arrived for our "induction" yesterday, which is basically an instructor showing us around all of the equipment and how it all works, which we both knew anyway having used similar equipment for the last fifteen years. We made our first faux pas and discovered the first big drawback of using a council sports centre when we walked into the male changing room and found it full of 15 year old boys changing into a football strip, one of the ones who could speak informed us that the male changing rooms were closed to the general public until 4pm every day as the high school next door had exclusive use.

We had to use the swimming pool changing rooms downstairs which was a bit of a bummer, but still, think of the money you're saving I reminded myself.

The building is a community sports hall that was built in 1976 (I remember it well on its opening day) and its shabby. Like all community use buildings it gets abused by the community it serves and it doesn't receive good maintenance, that is it gets maintained but never improved.

A couple of years ago Leeds City Council benefited from one of those central government campaigns to get everyone into a gymnasium and in a similarly funded campaign to the 1976 "Sport for All" push for glory, our council received funding to equip all of its twenty sports and swimming complexes with a state of the art gym, giving affordable access to the poorest of our citizens.

The only problem is of course that most of these sports centres were built in the mid 1970's during Harold Wilson's last Labour Government soviet style sports funding campaign to get us all fit and healthy and the emphasis at that time was so much on gyms but on swimming pools and mutli-use sports halls - these facilities do not really have the space for a "proper" gym.

So our local facility has used what used to be a bar area, a fairly small room (in gym terms) in which to squash a number of aerobic and weight centred machines, its slightly bigger than your typical hotel gym but much much smaller than anything that would be commercial.

Still, think of the money you're saving I kept repeating.

Still it was fairly empty yesterday afternoon and the one good thing about local authority run facilities is that there are always plenty of staff, three fitness instructors in the gym yesterday for a maximum of five clients while we were there, thats far better than any private establishment I've been in.

Its just down to the clientele then - what you might call the lower end of the social scale, a mixture of young kids in nylon shell suits trying to establish the first growth of a bicep or two, right up to the middle aged tatoo embossed bruiser in a sleeveless t-shirt who looks as though he is not unfamiliar with the regular friday night scraps in the local council estate pub - we saw examples of both yesterday - but think of the money you're saving I kept repeating.

These people are the salt of the earth I kept repeating, and think of the money you're saving, and so I tried to look as tough as they did and I didn't smile at anyone like they don't and I called them all "mate" like they do - and I think I fit right in.

Just think of the money I'm saving.

Mate

Greybeards, IAM, and other observations...

Todays gripe at the world at large is about a section of society who are a vexation to the spirit in their never ending quest to tell the rest of us how we are doing things wrong and how we should be more like them.

Yes good people, today I am discussing greybeards.

I haven't a clue who the gentleman in the photo above is, but anyone who is reading this will recognise him, hell you might even be one yourself.

He is a greybeard and he knows all of lifes secrets.
And he never tires of telling you so.

What has brought on this sudden vicious attack on those for whom life has sapped the natural colouration from their very chin hair you may ask ?

Well driving the short distance (4 minutes), (I'm a lazy bas'tad) to work this morning I found myself listening to the lovely Georgie on Radio Leeds interviewing a representative from the Institute of Advanced Motorists, and without the aid of a visual reference (this is the radio remember) I just knew instictively that he had a greybeard.

You can tell immediately when greybeards are on the radio, its that air of condescend-ation (new word ?) that pervades everything they say, the clipped tones of someone who is totally confident in the fact that their facial decoration makes them far superior to any other member of the human race, unless that other person also has a greybeard in which case they are merely equals.

And theres another thing - you never see two greybeards together in the same place - I have no explanation other than, thats the way god planned it (with apologies to Billy Preston).

I've always fancied a go at the Institute of Advanced Motorists, I drive 25 to 30 thousand miles a year and have done for 33 years with only one collision (six months after I had started driving) to my name, so I think that I'm an OK sort of driver and would like to see what an IAM examiner thinks of me.

But I daren't go.

Because I know for a fact that the examiner would have a greybeard, and he'd talk smugly to me like the bloke on the radio was doing this morning, and I know, I just know, that at the first roundabout I would have had enough and would stop at the nearest bus stop, give him twenty pence for his fare back to his office and tell him to go do one.

Which would probably mean that I'd fail his examination and then my insurance company would get to know about it because the greybeard would feel obliged to tell them (he just would, they do that sort of thing), and then I'd be stuffed for car insurance, again.


Greybeard pervades all society, but there are precautions that you can take to avoid them - you will never eliminate them entirely from your life, but you can minimise your contact with them...

1. Avoid examination by the Institute of Advanced Motorists (see above)

2. Avoid any other form of self-important club or association, look regularly in your local free newspaper at the list of local society meetings such as camera clubs, gardening clubs, and especially hiking clubs, note the times and dates that they meet - then avoid all of them.

3. Do not go caravanning. Drive past a caravan being towed on a motorway on the Friday before a bank holiday and I will wager high odds with you that it is being driven by a greybeard, it follows that you should avoid Caravan Club campsites on bank holidays at all costs (see also point 2, club membership).

4. When looking for employment avoid the civil service as a career choice, it is riddled with middle management greybeards, all of whom book their flexitime leave on the Friday before a bank holiday. in fact the best time to go to a meeting at your local job centre, courthouse, tax office etc is on the Friday before a bank holiday, safe in the knowledge that you've just passed all the greybeards heading out of town on the motorway.

5. Avoid doctors surgeries, especially the ones who promise you that you'll feel nothing in a minute love, just this little injection and then you'll be fast asleep...


And with point 5 I rest my case.




And for those from outside of the UK who are now thinking "I've missed something here, that point 5 was a clue wasn't it ?", then you may wish to click here.

Sand and Water

I've decided, its time for another "Songs to improve your musical education", and this time you get a bonus - as well as being a "song you really should listen to" this one is also a "lyric that you really should read".

Beth Nielsen Chapman's "Sand and Water" was written in memory of her husband who died from cancer at an unreasonably young age and its become an anthem for those who are grieving or simply remembering - read the chorus and agree.

I haven't heard her write or record one bad song yet and they all deserve a good long listen, the sort of listen where you really listen to the words, long and hard, in a darkened room.

So here its is, "Sand and Water"...


All alone I didn't like the feeling
All alone I sat and cried
All alone I had to find some meaning
In the center of the pain I felt inside

All alone I came into this world
All alone I will someday die
Solid stone is just sand and water, baby
Sand and water, and a million years gone by

I will see you in the light of a thousand suns
I will hear you in the sound of the waves
I will know you when I come, as we all will come
Through the doors beyond the grave

All alone I heal this heart of sorrow
All alone I raise this child
Flesh and bone, he's just
Bursting towards tomorrow
And his laughter fills my world and wears your smile

I will see you in the light of a thousand suns
I will hear you in the sound of the waves
I will know you when I come, as we all will come
Through the doors beyond the grave

All alone I came into this world
All alone I will someday die
Solid stone is just sand and water, baby
Sand and water and a million years gone by

Music and Lyrics copyright Beth Nielsen Chapman

Step back in time...

One thing that we have in abundance in the UK is heritage.

But it comes at a cost.

And that is why we have organisations like English Heritage and The National Trust.

Take Brodsworth Hall near Doncaster for instance.

Brodsworth is what the victorian gentry called "a country house", its not a stately home and the Thellusson family who built it in 1860 did not have impressive titles, but they were rich victorians, having made their "brass" (as we say oop north) in banking and mining, so rich that they bought the Brodsworth estate with a stately pile already on it, but they didn't like it so knocked it down and built their own house on the same spot.

And they lived there for several generations right through to 1988, the amassed family fortune from the industrious Thellussons lasted for just over 100 years until it was all spent, but boy did the descendants have fun spending it in their own ways.

Horse racing and yachting were their vices and the house is packed full of their trophies from both sports, and they spent lots of the family money on their gardens too until finally there was only one old lady left, Mrs Sylvia Grant-Dalton for whom the upkeep of what was by then an old house proved too much. When she died in 1988 the house was in a derelict state and looking at the English heritage photographs of the time its hard to believe that someone could have lived in the ruin.

The house had suffered, in an incredibly ironic turn of fate, from subsidence, caused by the underground mine workings of the original Thessullon family's pits, ceilings were collapsing, the roof was all but gone and the magnificent country house was riddled with damp and rot.

Which is where English Heritage stepped in and started a 15 year restoration project with the admirable aim of not only restoring the building structure, but restoring all of the accumulated possesions of the Thessullon family which Mrs Grant-Dalton had hoarded like a miser in rooms packed full of the sort of junk that a rich family collects over 120 years.

We've visited Brodsworth three times in the last eight or nine years and every time I find it a fascinating place to go. Its unlike our closest stately pile (Harewood, home to the Queens cousin) in that Brodsworth is a home, rather than an array of rooms displaying the family gold and silver, and in that respect it is also matched by Lotherton Hall near Leeds, another victorian country house which has been preserved with the families possesions as if the family still lived there , to the extent where you can see, touch, and read old newspapers left lying around on side tables.

Its in complete contrast to another great Hall that I once visited back in the late eighties, Beninbrough Hall had been handed to English Heritage completely stripped of anything evidence that anyone had ever lived there and in that first year that we visited most of the rooms were completely empty save for a few dusty old portraits hanging on the wall that had been borrowed from The National Portrait Gallery and didn't even relate to Yorkshire let alone the house itself.

The likes of Brodsworth (which has just opened its last phase of work) and Lotherton, are prime examples of how we should preserve our history and present it to our children, both houses have very busy education schedules for their local schools and are so much better at teaching history than sitting in classrooms reading old books on old subjects.

Boy aged three buys himself a new car

I wish I could have done this when I was three.

Young Jack Neal from Sleaford in Lincolnshire, where the internet must seem like witchcraft to the elders, simply logged himself on to his mum' s PC, opened up eBay, where she had carelessly left her account to auto-log-on, and saw a nice big pink car listed - a retro-styled Nissan Figaro.

He simply had to click the "Buy it now" button and the £9000 car was his, isn't technology wonderful ?

Then his spoilsport parents got involved and contacted the seller who agreed to void the sale and relist he car, spoiling a good story in the process. This one could have run and run as the parents would have been forced to take out a finance agreement for the car and take delivery of it, listing Jack as the registered keeper - what fun they could have had trying to get insurance for him, I would have loved to have been the one on the phone speaking to Budget Insurance trying to get a quote.

"Pah !" we all cry, "that could never happen to me"
And indeed thats exactly what I did cry.

And then I thought about my eBay account, sitting on the kitchen table right now, snuggled up inside my laptop, which is already plugged into the mains and the home network, it just needs a small finger to press the "on" button and it will boot up without a login required, and then one more click and a small person could find him/herself inside eBay, and guess what ?

I've got eBay set to automatically log me in each time it opens because I'm hopeless at remembering passwords and in any case can't be arsed with two many keypresses when the programme will log you in without any effort.

And I'm at the office now, and my wife is at home, and on "My Favourites" list a few months ago she added that diamond merchant in Birmingham who sells "genuine" three and four carat diamond rings for "just a few thousand" and now I'm thinking that I need some serious security on my laptop, no not more passwords but a fekking git big padlock and chain wrapped around it and the eBay icon named as something like "Car Mechanics" or "Fishing gear".

Rottweillers kill baby...

Full story here

Its a terrible news story.

But there is also some terrible news reporting about it.

Perhaps unsuprisingly GMTV made a muddled, amateur, half-cocked mess of things this morning when the reporter bumbled her way through the few facts at her fingertips and described the dogs as "trained guard dogs" and insisted that the dogs be "placed back on the dangerous dogs list".

Two small pedantic points maybe, but you don't, can't, "train" dogs to be "guard dogs", and rottweillers were never on the dangerous dogs list so cannot be "put back" on it - the definitive description of what is a dangerous breed of dog and what isn't is here, and it includes only four breeds, all of whom were specifically bred for dog fighting.

Its being pedantic in what is still a tragedy which ever way you look at it but the point needs to be made that dogs, all dogs, are capable of killing babies, young children and even adults - but they don't do so as a matter of course and there is nothing in the Rottweiller breed that makes them more likely to do so than for instance a Doberman, German Shepherd, or a Chihuahua - once again, the 1991 Dangerous Dogs Act specifically made the possesion of four breeds of fighting dogs a criminal offence, and its been very difficult to police ever since.

We're a dog family, always have been. We had a German Shepherd bitch when we first got married who was a lovely dog to live with but who had a very protective nature (its natural in most dogs but especially in GSD's) and would bark like crazy and look very ferocious when anyone knocked at the door. We didn't teach her to do this, it was her instinct.

All of which was fine and dandy, in her twelve years with us she never attacked anyone, she would look fierce but if you came into the house she'd relax as soon as she realised that we had let you in and accepted you as part of "our pack" - and that is the secret of owning a dog, you have to understand that you are their family pack in the same way that a pack of wolves work.

Your responsibility when introducing a puppy into your family pack is to ensure that it knows its position in that pack, dogs are very hierachy driven animals and if you allow a puppy to have its own way then it will grow up under the impression that it is the dominant creature in the family.

We were given some simple rules to ensure that our first GSD knew that she was at the bottom of the ladder in our pack, easy stuff like she was never fed with us at meal times, we would eat in the evening and then feed her afterwards and not feed her food from our table - relate that to a pack of wolves where the weakest eats last at a kill and you start to get the picture.

Keeping them behind you is also important - walk into a room and if the dog pushes past you to be the first in there then shove it behind you and show it that you go first, and play fighting with a puppy is very important in its development (see pack of wolves example) but you always make sure that it ends with the dog submitting to you, it doesn't have to hurt the dog and its not cruel but you simply have to hold the dog to the ground until it stops struggling against you, when it does it has submitted to you and the lesson is enforced again.

When Amanda our first daughter came into the house we were very nervous about what Samantha (Sam) the GSD would do, but she simply sniffed the baby basket and then lay down next to it - we have photographs of that first meeting between baby and dog and its frightening to see how big Sam's head was in relation to Amanda, she could easily have killed her within seconds, but she was in fact very good with her especially as Amanda got older and would crawl all over her, grasping huge chunks of skin and fur to drag herself upright - when Sam had had enough she'd get up and walk away.

There is a rider to that last paragraph though - confident as we were that Sam would not do Amanda any harm we were never confident enough to leave the two in the same room together - thats a hard thing to say and do when you live in a small house like we did then, but you have to enforce it in the same way that you'd never leave a toddler in a room with an open fire burning.

I'll not mention our current dog Jake in this - Jake is a freak of a dog in that he was bred to specifically be passive, he is a gun dog and gun dogs have to stay quiet on a hunt - in the Alpha/Beta pack-dog scenario, Jake is a Delta dog and if he were in a pack of wild dogs he would be the one left asleep in the cave while the others went out to hunt and he wouldn't give a toss whether they brought any food back for him or not - Jake has never barked at anyone or anything, does not care who comes into the house, will not protect any of us against anything, is frightened of several inanimate objects, and awakens only to eat, he is the softest dog in the world bar none - but I still would not leave him alone in a room with a young child.

Its jumping to conclusions to assume that the parents inthis tragic news story left the baby alone with the dogs, but likewise its also jumping to conclusions to call for a ban on Rottweillers or any other breed of large dog just because they have the capability of killing - responsible reporting ?

Lazy reporting more like.

50 candles...

Ever wondered what fifty candles on a birthday cake looks like ?
It looks dangerous, thats what it looks like, it looks like a fire hazard.
There's me above counting them all, just for accuracy of course.

Just get us down

The great thing about living one mile away from one of, if not the highest located regional airports, is that on days like today when the cloud level is down to a few hundred feet you can hear the aircraft above your head circling around looking for the runway lights.

I've just been out in the garden to get my tools from the shed and in the few minutes that I was out there I could hear three seperate big jets passing slowly overhead, not landing, just moving around up there somewhere in the cloud.

And you just know that on board each of those aircraft are a hundred or so passengers all clinging hold of their seat arms, gazing out of the window and thinking "I should be able to see the ground by now", and there's at least a few of them starting to scream "Just get us down for gods sake".

There are several flight attendants smiling at the passengers in that way that says "Frightened ? Who's frightened ? This is all very normal, please climb down from the overhaead lockers sir and take your seat for landing so that I can go and get one of those rear facing seats at the front, the ones that are statistically much safer in a crash landing"

And on the flight deck there is a young first officer who has never done this outside of a Microsoft Simulator game who is staring out of the window so hard that his eyes hurt and his intestines have twisted themselves up into so many knots that he won't be able to shit for three days.

And next to him is his Captain who is not looking out of the window at all but is gazing at his gauges and silently chanting "trust the instruments, trust the instruments, trust the fooking instruments"...

"Can you see anything yet First Officer"
"No sIr, wait a minute....... errr. no sir.............wait a minute...................er, no sir.................wait a minute.........."
"Calm down First Officer, this is all very normal, we've done this many time before on the Microsoft Flight Simulator game, err, Easyjet very expensive simulator rig"
"Yes sir, wait a minute...................I can see something........... er, no sir.................wait a minute.........."
"Now sit back and stay calm First Officer, the instruments will not let us down, and they are currently saying what ? Read the instruments First Officer, what do they tell us ?"
"Er, they are telling us that we are five miles out, three thousand feet up and on the correct approach line sir, wait a minute, whats that, oh nothing.............wait a minute........"
"Yes thats correct, we are on the perfect glide slope First Officer, this aircraft will land itself even if we can't see the lights, but we are still five miles out, understand"
"Yes sir, wait a minute...........no, carry on"
"What was that bump First Officer, are we down ? Reverse thrust please, told you it would be a doddle"
"Yes sir, reverse thurst, are you sure sir, the instruments say we're still five miles out sir"
"Yes First Officer, reverse thrust please, before we hit those trees at the end of the runway please. Fooking instruments"

Pensions and all that guff

One day I'll look like this old man.
And when I do its nice to know that the British Government will be there, standing by, to support and nurture me in the twilight of my days.
No really.

Yesterday I received a letter from a Government Department called "The Retirement Pension Forecasting Team".

Now I'll ignore the irony of the fact that "The Retirement Pension Forecasting Team" are a group of civil servants on the promise of a very nice civil service pension forecast thank you very much, and that Dave Stirling who signed the letter as the Pension Centre Manager is probably a lifelong civil servant on a final salary pension scheme - no I'll ignore all of that irony and concentrate on what they've promised me instead.

Just one month ago I received a pensions forecast from a company who promised wrap my retirement future in roses and chocolates, leave it to us they said, you'll be taking world cruises with all the other old bas'tads twice a year on the pension that we're going to provide for you, just give us some money and we'll sort it all out for you, just don't ask us what we're doing with your money because you won't like the answer.

Well, those good people at Friends Provident have excelled themselves and so far are promising the incredible sum of £55.12 for my pension.

Per annum that is.

To be fair its a dormant scheme, one that I haven't contributed to for 15 years, but still, I gasp at the kings ransom that I can expect when I reach 65, I do hope they can pay it out weekly and not as an annual lump sum, I don't think I could cope with all that money all at once.


So yesterday HM Government wrote to me to inform me what they are going to pay me as my official state pension in 15 years time. Before I stagger you all with the large sums involved you have to know one thing. I am now officially 50 years old. I started work at 17 years of age. I have never been out of work. I have only changed my job once and I changed within the same day, I left my old employer at lunchtime and started my new job straight after lunch.

So I've been in work and contributing to the state scheme for 33 solid years - so far.

My forecasted state pension will be equivalent to £109.56 in todays money.

So its all been worthwhile then hasn't it ?

Of course the mainpurpose for this letter is to put the fear of god up people like me and get them to start saving for their retirement now, its the first small baby step on the road to HM Government telling people like me to "fuck right off" when I turn up at the Post Office with my pension book in fifteen years time.

As it happens I do have a private pension scheme, both myself and my wife have made what I feel are substantial contributions into it via our company for many years now and so I can relax in the knowledge that NatWest will have invested wisely and will be sure to keep me wrapped in luxury consumer goods and world cruises until the end of my days.

Wait a minute though - this would be the same NatWest who took £10,000 of my money in 1998 and "invested" it in two ISA's, then two years later told me that I had the grand total of £6,000 left ? The same NatWest who five years later handed me back the princely sum of £10,124 for my five year investment ?

Those are the wankers - sorry, bankers - that I speak of ?

I'm bursting with confidence, no really I am.

Just for fun I'll be contacting the be-suited red-braced tools at NatWest next week for a pensions forecast, I could do with a good laugh, I bet there's no-one in their office who has the balls to read the figures out over the phone.


The bottom line is that pensions are a Government issue and yet succesive governments have weasled their way into a position where they have almost convinced the population that pensions are our problem and not theirs, just because its too difficult an issue for them to sort out.

Well actually its not so difficult as MP's have sorted their pensions out just fine, and they've got a good grip on most civil service schemes too, but the rest of us can go fuck ourselves, in fact its probably the only pleasure that we will get after we've retired on £100 a week.

Its a Government issue, and the prospective parliamentary party who stand up at the next election and promise that they will sort out the abject failure that is the state pension scheme once and for all will get my vote and I don't care who they are - Nazi party, the Reverend Moon, I don't care.

So,

Where can I go on my 2021 cruise ship ?

Lionel Blair - my hero

Lionel Blair in suicide pier jump drama

At last Lionel is given the recognition he deserves.

For years the light footed dancing-on-TV supremo who also thinks he can sing a bit has been the butt of too many comedians homophobic jokes, and to date his only claim to fame has been that his name is used as rhyming slang for a pair of 1970's trousers.

But now Lionel has revealed himself as the superhuman being that we fans have always known him to be.

For on Wednesday night Lionel-the-luvvy had just finished filming for Channel 4's "The End of Pier Show" on Blackpools North Pier (I'll guess that Twinkletoes Lionel had some sort of dancing role) and was enjoying a small snifter in the bar with producer Alan Carr (who he), when into the lounge raced a burly security guard yelling for help as they'd found a man dangling off the end of the pier intend on killing himself.

Braveheart Lionel and Alan Carr (who he) raced to the end of the pier where they found what police later described as "a man" hanging off the end of the pier, clinging hold of life by his very fingertips.

Now me, in that situation, I'd have berated the idiot for interrupting my end-of-shoot snifter and then stamped on his fingers and gone back to the bar, but not so the sometimes foppish but now revealed as extremely brave Lionel, oh no, interviewed this morning on GMTV he revealed his secret weapon, the words that he used to banish all thoughts of suicide from the poor saps mind, the life-saving phrase that all professional rescue folk should commit to mind the next time they are called out on such an emergency...

He said to the man...

"Hello, I'm Lionel Blair..."

At which point we all expect the man to release his grip and fall to his untimely death.

But he apparently just said...

"Oh"

To which Lionel replied...

"Come inside and have a drink with us"

At which point we all expect the man to release his grip and fall to his untimely death.

But he said "No I want to go"

At which point I would have berated the idiot for interrupting my end-of-shoot snifter and then stamped on his fingers and gone back to the bar.

But dear brave Sir Lionel and Alan Carr (who he) grabbed the man and dragged him inside the bar for a snifter with them thus saving his life, until the police turned up and arrested what they later described as "a man", presumably for wasting the national heroine Lionel's valuable time.

A bashful Lionel told GMTV this morning in his unique dulcet tones, "I was amazed, there we were surrounded by huge Arnold Schwarzeneger type security guards, and they left it to me and Alan (who he), the campest guys on the pier to rescue the man"

All hail this morning - Lionel Blair - national hero.

TV Presenter in "critical condition"

The news that the BBC's Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond has been seriously injured in a car crash whilst filming for the programme is one of those news items that initiates two instant reactions.

The first reaction goes something along the lines of "Oh poor sod, I like him, hope he's ok" but then a few seconds later the second reaction that kicks in is something like "I'm not suprised though".

I like Top Gear. I like the three presenters. The BBC have messed about with the format until they have accidently stumbled upon a winning formula. Led by the extremely dry witted Jeremy Clarkson, a man who is very funny in ten minute doses but would have to be on everyone's list of "The ten most irritating people to spend a four hour train journey with".

He is counter balanced by the dullness and university lecturer presenting style of James May, a "BBC man" in the old-style true sense of the word, you just can't imagine May working for a commercial channel and if he wasn't presenting Top gear you'd imagine that he'd have a day job as the pub bore who sits quietly at the corner of the bar every night only interjecting to offer the correct answers to various pub arguments, he probably knows all the chemical element symbols - he's that sort of bloke.

And then you have Richard Hammond, a diminutive man who can't seem to stand still, even when he's standing still talking to camera, he is this generations John Noakes, a TV presenter who can't just talk about dangerous things but has to actually get down and dirty and do them too.

So I hope he makes a full recovery, not just survives, but makes a full recovery, because I can't imagine that Top Gear would continue without him and it wouldn't be very nice to watch if he was in any way permenantly incapacitated by his injuries, which is a selfish thing to say, but head injuries are the most unpredictable things to heal and many victims of serious head injuries are affected by non-physical scars for the rest of their lives - I hope he makes a full recovery.


But to address the other issue that is lurking in the background - are we suprised by this ?

No has to be the truthful answer.

As someone pointed out in a TV interview this morning, once upon a time a programme like Top Gear would have a presenter standing next to a car talking about it, someone like Raymond Baxter, James Burke, or Fife Robertson dressed in a suit and tie would wax lyrically about the rocket powered 300mph car that Richard Hammond was trying to break a land speed record in, but they would never in a month of sundays ever dream of sitting in the thing, even with the engine switched off - the driving of the car would be left to those who knew what they were doing and/or didn't care if they died in the attempt.

But that is not good enough now, we as viewers ask, demand more than that from our TV programmes. Its not enough for a factual documentary style TV programme to inform, it has to entertain too or else we will switch off. This point was also made just two weeks ago with the death of Steve Irwin, another presenter who was prepared to get down and dirty with his subjects, and another presenter who paid the ultimate price.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg - I have one big problem with Top Gear.

Enjoyable as the programme is, it is fixated with speed.

Years ago it was a half hour programme on BBC2 that presented car related items in a magazine style, very simple and straightforward, various presenters would talk about all things to do with cars and they would test drive one car a week, usually a bog standard family saloon that had been upgraded by the manufacturers, a new ashtray or coat hanger here, a slightly bigger wing mirror, or a wing mirror at all. It was all staid and proper and factual and achievable and men (mainly men) would watch it and think "hmmm, a wing mirror, thats a good idea" and the besuited presenter would take it for a spin around the block and that would be that, even when they employed Tony Mason, an ex-rally driver, they let him do nothing more than take a spin around the block in this weeks bog standard saloon.

But that is not enough today, today we need (apparently need) speed and its apparently vital for us to know that a sports car that costs more than our house can accelerate to 100mph half a second faster than the sports car that cost more than our house that they had on last week - that sort of information is apparently vital to us viewers and we apparently demand this information of a show like Top Gear.

We also apparently demand to know just how fast a celebrity guest can drive a bog standard Toyota Corolla around a pre-described racing circuit, not just drive it, but drive it as fast as they dare, sometimes on two wheels, and then its vital that we know how many seconds they took and just how that compared to the multitude of other celebrities that did the same daft thing a few weeks ago.

Its all about speed and how fast they can make this weeks car go and how loud they can make it scream for mercy in each gear - and I must be the only one who shouts at the TV that its completely irrelevant to someone like me who drives his car on the normal roads at normal speeds for five days a week to do his job.

And so, harsh though it may seem, Richard Hammond's terrible accident is at the same time his own fault, and the fault of the presenters who think driving fast is good, and the fault of the shows producers who think driving fast is what the viewers want to worship on TV, and its the fault of all of us who watch the programme every week and don't bother asking for some items that actually relate to driving in the real world.

Random paintings from Menorca, August 2006

For no other reason than they were lying around on this laptop and I thought they were OK for unfinished sketches.

How much can it possibly cost ?

"Once again here is your action news reporter bringing you all the news that is the news across the region ..." with apologies to Ray Stevens, but this local news report has got me puzzled today.

Its about Ilkley Moor (see above piccie).
Its about the one image that is as close to a Yorkshiremans heart as Taylors Yorkshire Tea, you can't find anything more representative of Yorkshire as the photograph above of the cow and calf rocks high on the moor above Ilkley - my brother had his wedding day photos taken at the cow and calf rocks - they left the reception in their bride and groom attire with hiking boots hidden underneath, and stood and posed on top of the moor to the general amusement of all the hikers and climbers.

Ilkley Moor is a Yorkshire intitution.
And during this long hot summer it burned.
So now huge swathes of it are cinders instead of being heather covered moorland.
Which is a shame as a lot of the heather only flowers in the autumn and at this time of year all of the moorland around here is clad in a fantastic display of low-growing but highly colourful flowering heathers and gorse.

But nauture being nature we know that next year the heather will return, it just will, its what nature does, and there are some land managers who would argue that a good fire every three years or so is necessary to encourage a vigorous growth of moorland flora.

So exactly what bit of the miracle that is nature recovering from a disaster do Bradford Council (who manage Ilkley moor) feel that they have to fund ?

In a meeting of the council to discuss the scorched state of the moor they voted to continue their management of the priceless assett rather than handing it over to a national institution like The National Trust for instance, but also voted to sell off a building on the moor in order to "finance the recovery that it needs following the fire" and also "attract further funding".

So what bit of "lets wait until next spring for the new growth to start" will need money to make it happen ?

What did moorland do in the days before public management meant that it needed money to make its plants grow ?

Or are they thinking of a sequence of pansy and lobelia flower clocks sponsored by local garden centres all over the famous landmark ? Maybe even a nice water feature to be designed by that nice Charlie "Baps" Dimmock ?

Oh for gods sake just give it back

First of all - this news sprung off the page at me.
Imagine my disappointment at the third reading when I realised that it read "PARITY" and not "PARTY".
A party would be a mighty fine concession to bargain with your employers over, maybe a party every Friday afternoon, with cakes and buns and fizzy pop and a bouncy castle in the garden and someone sick over the azalea bush at the end - I'd strike for that and I'm not even a teacher.


But then I saw this news story, its a head shaking "what the fook is going on" sort of news story.

For those not in the know (ie anyone outside of the UK or Spain), Gibraltar is a headland.
Its part of southern Spain.
Most of it is a big rock sticking out to sea.
Most of it is a British armed forces base.
It is British sovereign territory.
Which means that it belongs to the Queen.
Which means that we get to pay for it via taxation.

And its been that way for 300 years.
And Spain have asked "why" or "Que" for 300 years and they want it back.

It is theirs after all, we stole it from them when they weren't looking and when Britain had a navy made of wood that just blew up everything that didn't smile and wave at them from the shoreline. Picture the scene, some British admiral sailing past an island, or in the case of Gibraltar a headland, looking through his telescope at the natives lined up on the beach...

"Carruthers, carruthers, come here man, look younder, be those natives on that thar beach ?"
"Aye captain, that they be, aye, ooh arr"
"Be they waving at us Carruthers ?"
"Nay Captain, they be cursing"
"Right, give the bas'tads a broadside or two and we'll have their fekking island or headland off them by lunch, be quick about it man"

And in this manner the British navy captured the whole of the world in just a few short weeks and gave it all to King James or whoever was King/Queen of the day, maybe it was King George with a number, who knows, google it if you're really that bothered.

The point being that we own these daft bits of rock all over the world and on these daft bits of rock we place military garrisons to pretend that they are still important to us, we even fought a war back in the early eighties to pretend that we really cared ever so much about a group of rocks in the southern atlantic even though we had a buyer for them in the shape of Argentina, but did we do a deal with them, no did we buggary, we pretended that we still wanted to keep them, spent trillions of pounds defending them, not to mention hundreds of lives, and now we've forgotten all about them again - ask someone on the street to point to a map of the world and tell you where the Falklands are and they'll point to the tip of Scotland again like they did pre 1982.

And so for the last 300 years succesive Spanish Kings and governments have, every year, asked the British government "Hey you, how about you geeev us dat rock back huh ?" and every year the British government reply "Get stuffed Manuel, its British sovereign territory, it belongs to the Queen, how dare you". and every year the British population gaze heavenwards and whimper "why for fook sake, why don't we just give it back to them, its fekking obvious that its a part of Spain, its attached to the fekking country for gods sake, you can walk from Spain to Gibralter without getting your feet wet, its a headland in Spain - give the bugger back and stop wasting our money"

On the other hand, the British have already taken over every square inch of Spanish coastline territory from Gibralter to Salou in the North, another square mile of rock isn't going to make that much difference to the flow of British currency into the Spanish exchequer.

Been and gone...

Well thats it then.

50th birthday been and gone yesterday.

The party is next Saturday to fit in with availability of friends so yesterday was a nice quiet family day, so traditional it made you squeak with whole-some-ness.

I made breakfast, a full cooked one, bacon, Lincolnshire sausage, mushrooms, fried egg on toast, tomato, and with a concession to healthy eating I fried it in olive oil, so thats ok then - all washed down with a bottle of Bucks Fizz, special offer at Aldi, fizzy and sweet, crap really but it feels so bourgeois to be drinking what you could imagine is champagne for breakfast.

We then took Jake for a walk in Golden Acre Park (which should really be renamed "Golden One Hundred Acre Park") in glorious sunshiine. It really was very warm yesterday and we sat on a bench near the lake fountain with a gentle breeze blowing a fine spray all over us, it was very pleasant, the park full of families all enjoying the late summer warmth - we had an ice cream too.

Even the presence of Mr and Mrs Chav and family couldn't spoil the morning, in fact it provided an object of amusment as Mr Chav was wearing the latest "must have" clothing for the underclasses this season - a sleeveless T-Shirt which displays your fat, tattoed upper arms to their best advantage - I'm not sure who or which magazine it is that informs the Chav clans of their sports-style clothing of choice but they have a great sense of humour whoever it is.

Returning home I made the traditional sunday lunch, a huge slab of Aberdeen Angus topside which had cost a childs ransom in Costco and tons of vegetables, which only I ate as vegetables are deemed to be food of the devil amongst the females of the household.


Real, proper, champagne was opened for dinner, French stuff, bubbly, sweet and £10 at Aldi, it must be good at that price, why the last "proper champagne" that I bought was about £30 a bottle, Aldi's buyers have their heads screwed on properly. To be honest it could have been fizzy turpentine for all I care, I hate the stuff, but again, it feels so burgeois to be drinking champagne for the second time in one day, just because you can.

And then finally all squashed onto the big leather sofa in the living room we watched "The Missing", Ron Howards attempt at a mystic cowboy film which was absolutely panned unmercilessly by the critics for its "native indian mumbo-jumbo". But I thought it was quite good, especially at the start when the snow covered plains scenery was just beautiful, maybe the story was crap but the cinematography was first class.

We also paid-to-play a film called "The Hills Have Eyes" on Saturday night but had to switch it off halfway through, mainly because Jodie was getting spooked by it but also because I thought it was complete bollax. We watched the rest of it yesterday afternoon and the rest of it was complete bollax too and is filed away now as an "18" film that should only be viewed by those under the age of 18, anyone over that age who thinks that it is not complete bollax has simply not mentally developed properly - see also "Jeepers Creepers" or any Scooby Doo cartoon.

Not almost a perfect day, but a fine day, very relaxing and just what I wanted for my landmark birthday, I'm 50 now and it was a bit weird looking at all the birthday cards that screamed "50" at me from the fireplace, realising that they were refering to me was strange as I still think I'm in my 30's but as my dad and Sinatra used to sing - "Thats Life, and I can't deny it"

I'm never going up in one of those - ever

Now this is a bit weird.

Especially if you believe in soothsayers.

Thursday night at the famous southstander.com curry neet I had arranged to meet everyone in a pub close to the restaurant, but as soon as I walked in the pub I was dragged to one side by Carolyn, that well known soothsayer of the group, to be informed that she had dreamt of me the previous night.

I threw up my hands in horror and told her that I didn't want to know about her sordid fantasies and that dreams rarely come true you know, but she insisted that just for a change it wasn't one of her "normal" dreams about various and assorted male friends and TV stars, but one in which I was involved a light aircraft crash with her.

Apparently we were trapped in the wreckage of the crash on the edge of a cliff, with her on the side that was dangling over the cliff and my substantial weight on the opposite side being the only thing that was preventing the whole thing from toppling over the edge - she was shouting at me to stay still and not move.

So, and in her words, I ever-so heroically managed to manouvre myself into a position by the door where I could jump clear, and then very slowly reached over towards her...

...where I grabbed my hand luggage from under her seat and leapt clear from the wreckage.

I agreed with her that it sounded like the sort of thing I would do in real life and we had a good laugh about it - weird, but you should hear about some of her other dreams...

So,

We made our way over the road to the restaurant where the rest of the crowd was waiting for us and the first thing that happened when I walked in the door was that Paul, the owner of the excellent southstander .com, grabbed me and told me that he had something awful to tell me.

He had been talking to his brother on the phone that night and explained that we were having my birthday curry neet when his brother gasped and told Paul that he had dreamt about me the previous night - in his dream I had been involved in a light aircraft crash but in his dream I had died, but he reassured me that everyone at the airport was really upset at the news of my demise - which was nice.

So, plane crash dreams.

According to the dream moods dictionary being involved in a plane accident can mean the following ...

"....suggests that you have set overly high and unrealistic goals for yourself. Your goals may be too high and are impossible to realize. You are in danger of having it come crashing down. Alternatively, your lack of confidence, self-defeating attitude and self-doubt toward the goals you have set for yourself is represented by the crashing airplane; you do not believe in your ability to attain those goals. Loss of power and uncertainty in achieving your goals are also signified..."

"...your dream seems to describe a positive transformation that has occurred in your waking life. You had previously been suffering from self-doubt or a lack of self-confidence as is suggested by the imagery of the crashing airplane. Since the airplane, managed to ascend and crashed away from you, it signifies that you have turned a bad situation from becoming far more worse."

... to which I can only say "bollocks", it really means, don't ever agree to elope on a light aircraft with one of your friends wife for it will surely end in tears and you will be the villian. Its a metaphor for my life, anytime I have a good idea some bastard will come along to make sure it ends in tears.

Heyho.
Fifty tomorrow.
No-one talking to me in the house yet.
Don't know why but at least they're not nagging me.
Every cloud has a silver lining.

Wonder if Leeds/Bradford airport willl hire me a Cessna ?

The birthday weekend starts right here

It started last night - the 50th birthday celebrations.

Along with a crowd of good friends from the RLFans.com network we adjourned to the Aagrah Indian restaurant in St Peters Square in Leeds (top picture) for another of our famous Southstander.com Curry Neets.

I must admit that I was most impressed with my birthday present from Rob (middle picture), a genuine greek captains hat and although it was a little on the small side I was certainly the belle of the restaurant and won many admiring glances from the ladies, and some from the men too as I carelessly and with abandon left the cap lying on the corner of the table for all to see and admire.

Carolyn graciously left a five pound note in my birthday card which will come in useful for a drink or two at the rugby match tonight but then tarnished the effect slightly when she told me that she'd found it on the pavement outside the pub along with a ten pound note - she'd kept the ten and put the fiver in my card, but still, its the thought that counts.

The ten would have been better though.

Not that I'm ungrateful or anything.

The food and service was excellent and although I always take some stick for being limp wristed in my curry choices I opted again for a Kashmiri curry that was full of lychees and bananas with a Pashwari nan adorned similarly with fruit and nuts - in my mind you smply cannot seriously consider a curry unless it looks like Carmen Mirandas headgear, or as I put it last night "If it doesn't arrive looking like the fruit basket prize in a working mans club raffle then I'm sending it back".

And better still, when the waiter found out that it was my birthday I got a free ice cream (see bottom picture) which I couldn't get anywhere near until the roman candle that they'd stuck in the top expired, by which time it had almost melted the ice cream - ice cream served with dangerous fireworks in it, wonderful, just wonderful.

But the best was saved for last - the bill. I didn't see it. It got passed around the table for a couple of circuits and then they all chucked enough money in to pay for it without me having to contrbute - thanks you very much for that guys it was a nice gesture and I appreciate it, mind if I'd known at the start I wouldn't have gone for the cheap curry, but still...

I'm still a sucker for stuff like this

See, I was brung up on the Apollo space missions, James Burke and Raymond Baxter in the BBC studios with the lunatic Patrick Moore trying to explain technical things about the moon in a language that only dedicated moonmen could understand, as a 12 year old I actually got out of bed at 3am one school morning to watch Neil Armstrong step down onto the moon and when i got to school all the other kids had done the same, and we all fell asleep in our lessons that day, luckily the teachers did too.

And so I'd love to fly in the space shuttle, it still seems like an awfully uncomfortable way to travel anywhere, but I'd love to do it anyway, and now it seems like NASA is veering more towards people like me and you rather than dedicated moonmen.

Sure they need one pilot on every mission but most of all they need builders, and thats where you and I come in. No, I'm not a construction worker but I've done a lot of DIY around the house and thats what they are looking for now because the space shuttles job for the foreseeable future is to take builders and materials up to the international space station and wait for them to finish their jobs before bringing them back home - its a sort of Ford Transit of the sky, and it is white after all.

Have a look at the latest Wikepedia entry for the current shuttle mission and then tell me that it isn't white van man and his mates off to do a cash-in-hand job ?

At the moment they're doing the proper construction stuff like putting up strutts and installing some solar power stuff, but when the international space station is properly built (I'm imagining Thunderbird 5 here) then I'm available to do a bit of painting and decorating.

Or plumbing, I'm a dab hand at plumbing with compression joints, assuming that plumbing works the same in space as it does on earth, maybe the water flows the wrong way around or something, but I'd have a go at plumbing too.

I'm no good up ladders though, I can "foot" a ladder all day long for more brave people, but I won't go above head height on a ladder, especially if its standing on grass, which it won't be in space of course, but still, we'll see how the ladder thing goes eh ?

So if anyone from NASA is reading this blog then this is my application for employment, handyman for hire.

Just one thing puzzles me - the current shuttle mission is up there for a few more days yet but the first thing that they do now is to put the space suits on and crawl all over the aircraft looking for stuff that might have been damaged on takeoff and that might cause problems on re-entry (for problems on re-entry read, burns up in a huge fireball all over three states in America).

To me thats a bit like the pilot of my holiday flight to Menorca walking down the aisle of our 737 while we're at 37,000 feet, parachute strapped to his back, telling us all "just popping out to see if the wheels will come down when we try to land in Menorca folks, toodle pip", its a bit off-putting to say the least and the fact that NASA have already stated that a rescue mission for the current crew would be launched sometime around November 11th suggests a bit of a lack of urgency , it might be just me being jittery though, I'm like this when I have to fly anywhere - don't let this put you off though NASA, I'm good with a brush.


POSTSCRIPT
I've just read that the builders on the shuttle are having problems this morning.

I should be up there now, I could sort that out for them, a software problem, I could do that.

Software problems are easy, you just reboot the PC, or reinstall the software, or download another version off the internet, or borrow your mates install disc and use that if yours is corrupted - see, I have all of the solutions, I could fix that.

But like all builders they'll all be stood around looking at the problem right now, sucking the rareified air in through their teeth and shaking their heads while telling NASA, "oooh its yer extrapolator joint pal, its a bad one, never seen one as bad as this, have you John, no neither have I, it'll cost you will this one mate, you got cash ? John can you take this man down to the cash machine ?"

Is it fair ?

I have a little problem with this news story - part two.

Not in the fact that some serious driving convictions cannot stand up in court because of technicalities - there is no excuse for the case mentioned in that news report where a driver escaped a drunk driver conviction due to a police balls-up with evidence collection - and thats not to mention that the driver was only persued for a drink driving offence when he had allegedly caused an extremely nasty road crash.

No, the problem that I have is in the way that the simple stuff will be targeted first, the simple, money raising stuff like speed camera convictions for instance.

It happens thoughout the public service sector, there is a finite amount of money to spend on specific projects and initiatives, and the success of those projects are measured by the amount of cash they bring in.

Which is why the introduction of speed cameras at random intervals throughout our land has been so successful, the ratio of cash income against initial cash outlay for the equipment is immense and if a private company had been set up to run the UK's speed camera network it would by now be quoted on the FSTE100.

And which is why, in the BBC report, the heart-rending stuff about serious road accidents and crippling injuries to innocent road users is just a smoke screen to hide the paragraph that states that people who wish to appeal against a simple 3 penalty point £60 speed camera notification may be put off by the fact that the defence costs will be quoted at £4000.

I have had three speed camera convictions in the past and I paid every one of them without fail, no excuse, i was wrong, I now watch my speed far more than I ever used to, so the speed camera debate is dead and buried as far as I'm concerned - it works and its better for all of us that it does.

But for most citizens the plop of the speed camera notification on their doorstep is probably as close an involvement in the public prosecution process as they'll ever have, its bad enough being told that you're in the wrong, its bad enough paying a £60 fine, but if you genuinely doubt that you were the driver on a particular day, or that you were indeed speeding on that particular location, then it is just not on to be threatened right at the outset with a £4000 cost if you dare to appeal.

I appealed against one speed camera notification, I won.

I won because the authority who issued the notification were inept and incapable of doing the job that they had been appointed to do, but I seriously doubt that I would have appealed if the threat of a huge cost to me had been made and in that case ineptitude and careless administration in the law would have been rewarded.

It wasn't my speeding that caused the arrival of the self-convictiing letter, the one that says "we have a photo of you speeding, you know you did it, we have the proof that you did it, now tick this box and send us £60 and your drivers licence", no it was my brother - or to be precise, we think it was my brother, in fact I'd better be careful here, it was a pool car and so it could have been any one of three of us who were driving on that date.

How could you not remember I hear you all asking ?

Well, here is where the ineptitude comes in - the date of the alleged offence was 12th June - we recieved the notification on 4th November.

I spoke to a lawyer friend and he advised that the notification should be sent to you within 14 days - I wrote back to the authority and told them that because more than 14 days had elapsed we couldn't ID the driver without seeing the photo and in any case was their approach absolutely legal at this time ?

They replied that the 14 day rule only applies when vehicles can be instantly traced to their owner, our vehicle was leased and so they were allowed to take as long as they liked when tracing the registered keeper of the vehicle, which was me, and PS they don't release the photo as its their evidence, they'll show you it in court - if you dare go that far.

I replied to inform them that the leasors of the car were Peugeot UK and had been since the car had rolled off their own production line, they were the only people on the registration document and they knew who I was, and they would have informed the authority within 14 days of who I was as they would have been prosecuted if they hadn't done so - I asked them again what th ereason for the five month delay was and explained why the five month delay made the ID of the driver so hard and could I see the photo as it was the only way that I could help them.

They eventually sent me a copy of their evidence - the five month old photo that they were hoping to present in court.

We pissed ourslelves laughing when we saw the picture of the front of our car on a very sunny day in June with the windscreen completely bleached out by the sun and the knuckles of the driver just about visible on the steering wheel, and nothing else to ID him/her/whoever.

We had a quick meeting in the office and agreed that we'd all love to have our day down at the magistrates court where we could all stand in line and hold our knuckles out for the magistrate to decide who the driver was and I wrote back to the authority to inform them so.

That was two years ago - they haven't replied to me yet.


The Road Safety Partnership that was involved had obviously made a huge balls up of this case and I dare say that our photo was one of a batch from that June day which had been misplaced and only discovered five months later, but the authoritiy had the brass balls and arrogance to still send out the speeding notices in the smug knowledge that a good percentage of those folk involved would simply cough up the £60 and stand the 3 points on their licence - when we stood up to them they backed down (or at least I think they've backed down, I wouldn't put it past some fuckwit civil servant to write to us again sometime soon).

And that is where we are heading with this new initiative, only those willing to risk a £4000 cost will question the validity of their speeding notifications, and ineptitude and crass bad evidence handling will be swept under the carpet.

Financial threats for asking question is not how the justice system should work .

Would you smote down one of your employees like this ?

I have a little problem with this news story.

In fact its not so much the news story itself, but the whole basis of organised religion.

Poor old Archbishop Lord Dr Hope (that man has an impressive list of titles) has been smote down with a "debilitating illness" which is nothing to laugh or point fun at, I do hope he is OK and that he enjoys his retirement.

Just as a bit of background filler poor old Archbishop Lord Dr Hope is the bloke who used to be the Archbishop of York, which is the second most important job in the Anglican church behind the Archbishop of Canterbury.

OK so its the third most important job in the Anglican church, given that God is the boss first, then possibly his lad Jesus (what does Jesus do in the organisation these days since we nailed him to a tree all those years ago), so maybe the Archbishop of York is a bit further down the pecking order - but hey, its a big job ok ?

But having clawed his way up the corporate tree, no doubt kicking lots of other aspiring Archbishops in the teeth on t he way up, ex-Archbishop Lord Dr Hope stuck out the job for a short while then told God that he couldn't be arsed with all this Archbishop-ery stuff and that he wanted to be a parish priest again.

And God saw that it was so and gave the job to someone who wanted the job much more and he made A-L-D Hope a simple parish priest again.

But as we all know, God can be a right vindictive bas'tad when he wants to be and he has obviously sat and stewed on this one for a long time, who knows, maybe he started recieving prayers from some of the priests that A-L-D Hope kicked in the teeth on the way up, maybe there is a lot of infighting and cats-claws within the Anglican priest business, maybe there is truth in the motto that you shouldn't upset people on the way up as you'll have to meet them again ont he way down - whatever the truth God has seen to it that A-L-D hope does not have the quiet and happy retirement that he wished for himself and has smote him down with a debilitating illness to cope with .

"Ha !" said God, "See how you like that you bas'tad. That'll learn'ya" (for God has spent too long in the Bronx)

And thats where I have the problem with organised religion - as an organisation its just too vindictive for me, the range of punishments meted out to transgressors is so ferocious that the Cosa Nostra would be calling for reforms to their punishment book if they followed the same course.

I once had the misfortune to visit a church - yes just the once - it was the church where we were getting married and the bans were being read - and the vicar, who had been a very nice man when we met him in his house, turned into a raging, spitting, fire-breathing, brimstone-hurling fekking maniac who terrorised the dozen or so old ladies in his congregation by graphically explaining how Gods punishments would rain down on their heads and tear them limb from limb if they didn't sing up a bit when he got to the hymn singing part of his sermon - I left his church absolutely terrified and couldn't sleep for four nights, I still check the sky for falling meteors from on high whenever I swear and I dread to think what will happen to me today after wrtiting this piece.

Have to go to Hull now (God works in mysterious ways) - toodle pip and good fortune.

I hate paying for car parking ...

If there is one thing that I enjoy in the avoidance of paying for, then its car parking, and on Friday night I had the most bizarre experience of avoiding car parking fees that I've ever seen.

We've spent this weekend again in the North East (nearly found our holiday home, but more later) and on Friday evening Jodie and I went to Kingston Park, the home of the Newcastle Falcons Rugby Union team to watch their 2006 Guinness Premiership opening fixture.

A little earlier in the evening we had dropped by the ground to purchase our admission tickets which at £21 (£11 for Jode's) to stand behind the goals caused a sharp intake of breath, and whilst doing so had "borrowed" a car park slot in the official car park which I noticed would have cost me £8 if I wanted to use it for the actual game itself.

"Bollax to that" was my first and only thought, "we'll park in the streets".

But they (the club and the local council) have now introduced a residents parking scheme where, on a match night, it is legal for residents to trash any strangers car which is parked ont heir streets without the necessary badge or permit - or something like that - suffice to say that you can't park on the streets within a mile of the stadium anymore.

"Not to worry" thought I, "last time we came I parked on a grass verge on a country lane" they could shove their £8 parking fee, I'd use the country lane again.

But as we approached it in the car I could see no other vehicles using the grass verge which sort of set the alram bells ringing, maybe this area was enwrapped in the residents scheme too ?

And then just a few hundred yards further on I saw where all the other cheapskates like me were parking - an abandoned field where a rough track entrance had been forged out of the waist high grass, we followed a Land Rover into the field and should have been a little alarmed by the way in which it bucked about in the entrance, riding up and down ruts and potholes like it was crossing the sahara - and me in a ordinary saloon trying to follow it.

Jodie had her doubts, I could tell by her screaming "You can't be serious dad" at me as we negotiated, ever so slowly, the moonscape-like entrance to the field. I had noticed that the Land Rover had by now disappeared into the field and that only its lights were visible as a ghostly green glow beneath the head-high grass but hey, this field was for free, and so, as if in an episode of Daktari, I followed its tyre tracks and eventually after fifty yards or so of bumping up and down rows and rows of earth mounds we found the end of the row of cars and in tears of laughter abandoned the car there.

Jodie pleaded with me to drive straight back out of the field and even offered to pay the £8 to use the official car park but I was well chuffed with myself by now at having found this secret hidey-hole for cars and wouldn't hear of it although I confess that wading out of the field was a little tricky and the fact that you couldn't see any of the cars from the roadside was a little disconcerting, still, it was free though.

We walked the short distance to the ground and took a short cut through the official car park where disgruntled drivers were being fleeced for £8 to park in raw sewage - there was a problem somewhere int he vicinity with a burst sewer pipe and the car park was being gradually flooded with a stinking brown gunge which got to be so bad that at half time and throughout the second half the club pleaded with spectators to take great care when retrieving their cars from the new sewer lake, or as I explained to Jode "Pay £8 and park your car in poo"

9/11 and my fear of tall buildings

Yes, everyone knows what today is, but even if you'd been hiding in a cave for the last five years like, well, erm, like a terrorist leader for instance, then you would have noticed that in the last seven days the TV companies have had a glut of documentaries, drama-documentaries and outright fictional accounts of what went on in New York five years ago.

But one thing offers a crumb of comfort to me,
I could not have been in the World Trade Centre on the 11th September 2001, it is just impossible.

You know the feeling when you are watching a dramatised account of what those poor people went through, you sit there in your nice warm living room with a nice cold beer in your hand and your mind wanders and you find yourself saying things in your head like "I'd have evacuated the building immediately, stuff the announcements telling me to stay at my desk".

But I know for a fact that I would never have been in that situation to start with.

Because I hate lifts, elevators, ascenseurs, call them what you like, I hate them.
Which is a bit of a drawback if your office is on the 102nd floor.

And unlike other people with phobias I know exactly where and when my one started.
It was at Leeds College of Technology circa 1975.

My first lesson on a Monday morning was at 9am on the fifteenth floor of the college.
The college had two lifts for something like 1000 students to be elevated to their classrooms at every start/finish/break time.
And each lift held exactly 15 students.

Not one more than 15, and sometimes a few less.
I don't have to describe the scene on the ground floor of the college at 8.55am every Monday morning with every student in the building trying to get into a lift do I ?

You'd stand there outside the lift door in a crowd of several hundred, glancing around you thinking "we won't all get in this one" and then with a "ping" and a groan of sliding doors the lift would arrive and you'd be forced through the open door to find yourself rammed against the back wall of the lift...and you'd wait.

You'd wait until someone near the front could shove enough people back out of the lift until there was a clear space for the doors to close...and they'd press the buttons to select a floor, in fact they'd press all of the buttons, they'd press them all individually and then they'd press them all together at the same time, but to no avail.

There above our head would be the big red sign that flashed out the word "OVERLOAD" with a smaller sign below it that read "Max load 15 people", and you'd glance around the rammed full lift and you'd count at least forty bodies in there and without the aid of the technology degree that sooner or later you were hoping to obtain at the college, you'd just know that 40 people is too many for a lift that wants to take just 15.

And the stupid thing is that some of the students who were stubbornly refusing to leave the lift in the vain hope that the mechanics would somehow change their mind and take all 40 of us in one go, were actually trainee lift engineers.

So you'd stand there for a few minutes and then someone, probably a trainee lift engineer, would mutter, "some of you will have to leave" and the ones at the front would mutter "fekk off" back to them, and everyone would shuffle around a bit as if shifting their weight by a few centimetres would alter things.

And the stand off would continue, and continue, and continue, until eventually enough people near the front had lost their patience and stormed off to the staircase, probably the ones who only needed to go to the first floor anyway, and after enough of them had alighted the lift would suddenly reconsider its obstinancy, turn off the OVERLOAD light and close the doors to a resounding cheer from us intrepid passengers.

And then someone would shuffle one inch to the left and the OVERLOAD light would come on again and the lift doors would open and we'd be back to square one, to a round of resounding groans and "who fekking moved ?"

So we'd all shuffle around a bit more to redistribute the weight again, and the light would go off, the doors would close....and we'd start to move ever so slowly upwards, cables and panels groaning and straining to take the weight of 23 students, 7 of whom shouldn't be in there, all of us trying to stay absolutely still so as not to trip the OVERLOAD again, and then someone would move and we'd stop mid-floor and the doors would open to reveal a concrete wall and everyone would moan and boo and we'd all start shuffling our feet around again until the lift changed its mind.

Half an hour later we'd arrive on the fifteenth floor, late for lessons - again - and having read every piece of graffitti on the inside of the lift shaft onthe way up, clearly the lift doors were fairly superflous pieces of equipment as the college lifts spent more time inside the lift shaft with the doors open than closed.

And it was all repeated again at lunchtime and again in the evening, it was actually quicker by ten minutes or so to use the staircase than to go anywhere in the college lifts - and so was born my irrational hatred of lifts and the not so irrational fear that whatever lift that I am in will open its doors mid floor somewhere leaving me to stare at a concrete wall with "Janice Ecclesly shags Gordon Barmpot" written in blue biro across it.

Robbie chaos predicted

The amazingly untalented Robbie Williams is in Leeds this weekend, playing two gigs in Roundhay Park tonight and tomorrow, they've sold 90,000 tickets for the event in the natural open air amphitheatre (think Hollywood Bowl but much bigger).

(No not the ten pin bowling arcade, the proper Hollywood Bowl, open air concert venue.....oh never mind)

The local radio and TV stations love events like this as they can confidently predict "Robbie chaos" on the roads and send out reporters to the scene to interview the disgruntled residents of Roundhay who didn't realise that the huge city park that is on their doorstep, the same huge city park that they love to use for 362 days of the year, the same huge city park that increases their house valuations by £200,000, is occasionally used by the city fathers for open air summer concert venues like the one that Mr Williams is presenting this weekend - no radio interviewer ever asks the question of a disgruntled resident "well why don't you just fekk off somewhere else for the weekend ?"

But this event seems to have captured the media attention for another reason - schools have had to close because of Mr Williams its a disgrace, the BBC say its a disgrace so it must be.

Fortunately I will be out of town this weekend, back up to Newcastle for two rugby games so I'll miss the whole Robbie schmozzal, not that it would have affected me anyway as Leeds is a big enough city for the screaming Robbie pant-wetters to keep well away from my neck of the woods, but even if I was staying home this weekend I'd be able to rely on the BBC Radio Leeds "Robbie-Watch" quarter-hourly travel bulletins to alert me to road blockages of fainted young females or their similarly excited mothers.

The suprising thing is that the diminuative self-proclaimed warbler can manage to sell so many tickets for two successive events, its very likely that most of the purchasers will be going for both nights, and the aforementioned Radio Leeds was telling the story yesterday of one poor girl who's sister had paid over £400 for two tickets in the VIP area which hadn't turned up in the post and would not be replaced by the promoter - presumably on the grounds that the two sisters were obviously mentally unstable for having handed over the money on a promise in the first place.

Last month when on holiday in Menorca I was unfortunate enough to be trapped in a bar with some beer in my hand (it was an awful experience, honest) while a Robbie Williams "tribute act" tried to generate some interest from a totally uninterested audience.

To be fair to him he was as good as the real thing.
But thats not really saying much is it ?

So at 3pm this afternoon I'm heading two hours north, to sanity and a Robbie-less town, two rugby matches this weekend to watch and some beer to drink.

Thats Life.

When you're ready Tony...

So you're at work and you sit next to a bloke who keeps mithering on about how he wants to retire and at some point in the past he's told you that he's going soon and that you can have his chair when he's gone.

And thats quite a big deal to you because in the office hierachy he's got the best and newest chair, the cup that he keeps his pencils in is better than yours is and you've got your eye on his waste paper bin too because it doesn't smell of sour milk like yours does since that day you threw away a McDonalds milkshake thinking it was finished whereas in fact it was only frozen hard in the bottom.

So all year long you've put up with his sighs as he sits down in a morning and his gentle moan "not long now" as he sits down every morning, and the way he crosses off each date with glee on the calendar every morning and you really thought that by now he'd be gone and you'd have the chair, the pencil cup and the non-milky bin.

So for the last seven days you've been pushing him, gently at first , just prods really, you started last week with "Not long now eh ?" but all he said was "No you're right", so the next day you tried " Be putting your feet up soon eh ?" and he just gave a non-committal "Aye", and on Friday you pointed out that he'd be having a good lie-in very soon now, no more number 19 bus to catch at 8.16 every morning, but he just smiled at you.

So this week you got a little bit more serious, involved some of the other office dwellers, got them to nag him a bit to try and prise a retirement date out of him, he was having none of it, just smiled at them and said "Aye, not long now".

So yesterday you waited at the lift door down in the entrance lobby and as he arrived you held the lift door for him and then shoved that fat Mrs Workington out of the way when she tried to get into your lift, telling her "its full" when in fact there was only you and your non-retiring collegue in there, and as the lift door closed and started its ascent you grabbed him around the throat and told him in no uncertain terms that if he didn't step aside very soon, like possibly next week very soon, even this Friday very soon, then you'd be tempted, sorely tempted to open the office window and howk him out yourself, laughing as he fell, all fourteen floors worth of laughter.

He stared at you with saucepan eyes and promised that he'd make a statement to your boss tomorrow and you released your grip and nodded in agreement, that would be a good course of action you assured him as you straightened his collar and tie.

And today when he arrived at work he went straight into the bosses office and spent a half an hour in there talking to him, then came out and went straight to the photocopy room and while he was in there your boss came out and said that he had something to announce to the room.

At last you thought, at last you get to see the back of your miserable bas'tad of a colleague, he's off, he's retiring, and you shuffled a little closer to his desk so that you could have first dibs at his chair.

"As you know" your boss had started, "Tony has been talking for some time about his retirement" and you all nodded your heads in a tired acknowledgement of the fact, "and this morning we've been discussing a date for that retirement...."

This was it, here it comes, he's got to go now, no later than tonight, the weekend at the very latest, and you reach out and take a hold of the arm of his chair so as to drag it towards you as soon as the boss finishes his speech.

"...and we've concluded that the best time for Tony to step down and retire is ..."

Yes, yes, come on man, out with it ...

"...is sometime in the next year"

What ????

"...or so..."

Or so ???

"...thank you for listening"

And you find yourself searching in your desk for a key to the window in the corner...