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Remember last weeks blog about how the London 2012 Olympics seemed to be, well, sort of disorganised at the moment ?
And remember last weeks blog about how we get the politicians that we deserve and about how most of them nowadays are professional politicians who come striaght from university into politics without the benefit of a real job/life experience ?
Well have a little read of this.
It seems like our professional politicians don't even have the budget ready for the construction work yet, which is probably why there doesn't seem to be much work going on at the moment, and probably explains why the International Olympic Committee were dropping hints last week that something should really be moving by now in London.
It seems like, if we don't yet know what the budget for the games is going to be, then could it just be the case that we bid for the games without knowing what the budget would be ?
And if that is the case, can you imagine the board of directors of a PLC (lets call it The UK plc), bidding for a contract without knowing what their costs would be or whether they would make a profit - or not ?
Like I say, we vote people into government who have no experience of business life and then expect them to run the largest organisation in the country - The UK plc - as if they know what they are doing.
Here's a snip from the biography of the official Olympics Minister, Member of Parliament Tessa Jowell ;
"Before her election to Parliament in 1992, Tessa had a career in psychiatric social work, social policy and public sector management."
So she was a social worker in the real world, that makes an excellent CV for the person in charge of the biggest building project in this country since the second world war, an excellent background for the person responsible for what could possibly be an £8,000,000,000 budget, I'm stuffed full of confidence, no really.
And we all know of Lord Sebastian Coe's CV for his post of Chair of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games don't we ?
Yes thats right, he, erm, ran some running races for a while and then, erm, became a politician, makes him emminently suitable for running the whole shooting match then.
They have got some professional people at the helm though - Chief Executive of the London Olympic Delivery Authority (no I don't know how many other organisations are involved either) is David Higgins - the bloke who delivered the Sydney Olympics on time and on budget, so erm, David, how about the budget then, have we got near to one yet ?
I'm beginning to think its true.
Returning from running my eldest and her boyfriend to Leeds Station - actually returning from the (nearly) hour long trip having been conned into giving them the lift (I thought they meant our local five minutes away station when they asked for "a lift to the station") - I noticed one of the shrubs in our front garden has started sprouting a new growth of leaf buds, before the old leaves have finished falling off.
We used to have defined seasons in the UK, autumn was the time for all the leaves to fall off and for the trees and shrubs to shut down, winter was for shivering in and shovelling snow off the driveway, and spring was for the new buds - thats spring in about five months time, sometimes spring wouldn't happen until April or so...
Not now, we haven't had a good snowy winter for about ten years now, and Leeds is quite a long way up the country, we're on the same latitude as Northern Germany/Denmark, now we just get wet mild winters with only a few weeks of frost and one, maybe two days of snow (thin, unimpressive snow) at worst.
So as far as the shrubs in my front garden are concerned its spring right now, we've had a wet week but the temperature has not dropped and its not really been cold so I kind of understand how the shrubs are getting confused , but I've never seen a year where they are making new growth before the old leaves have even finished falling off.
And since my attention was grabbed to all things horticultural I looked in the two oak half barrels that we have by the front door - the Gerbera or African Daisy's that had died back in one of the planters have come back again and look like they are almost ready to flower, and the trailing lobelia in the other one which were pulled out dead a few months ago must have seeded because that planter is full of new growth.
Leeds a tropical climate ?
Looks like it to me.
"They" say that the public get the press they deserve, its true.
And hanging onto the coat tails of the popular press come our Members of Parliament - casting laws by the latest newspaper headlines, actually believing and following the newspaper polls.
What other explanation is there for this story ?
Since christmas hamper company Farepak went into liquidation back in October the popular press and GMTV have been campaigning and championing the cause of all the poor little children up and down the country who will now simply not have any christmas presents to open on christmas day this year because their mums were daft enough to hand money over to someone in their street who then hopefully paid it into Farepak's bank account who then hopefully would send them some Argos and Aldi vouchers in time for little Johnny's christmas box.
You may think that I sound a tad unsympathetic.
You would be correct.
I don't believe for one minute that the uncounted families up and down the country will have nothing at all this christmas, ok they might not have all of the Argos vouchers that they thought they would have, but (for example) since the collapse of Farepak and before christmas they will have three family allowance payments, with two children thats £300+ or £150 per child, plenty enough to avoid a distraught christmas using just a few seconds forethought.
So why do we get a group of MP's signing a petition to ask Britains FTSE100 companies to donate a days profit to the welfare fund that has been set up for the "victims", nay, "innocent wee victims" of the Farepak crash ?
This isn't another tsunami appeal, no-one has died, no-one even knows how many creditors there are nor will they ever know because like other such credit clubs, Farepak didn't deal direct with its savers, the savers handed their money to "agents", often women in the same street as them who agreed to collect the money and distribute the vouchers at christmas, no written records, no membership details means incredibly inaccurate creditor numbers and leaves any appeal fund wide open to massive corruption - all I need to do is find a Farepak agent and offer her a 50% share of anything I get in compensation if she puts me on her list of members.
So far the "victims of Farepak" appeal fund has raised around £5million and they "think" that there could be "up to" 150,000 "victims", so thats £33 each then - thats a nice xmas day turkey dinner and a bottle of cheap whisky to wash it all down with then, so who's christmas has been spoiled ?
Its another example of Members of Parliament jumping on a tabloid newspaper band wagon in order to garner what they see as "good publicity" whereas the non-stupid members of our society can see right through what they are doing and sum them up as shallow, unthinking media whores with a desperation to be re-elected over and over again and make a lifetimes career out of this politiking business, especially as most of them have arrived at the sharp end of politics straight from studying politics at university and without having had the benefit of a real job in the real world first .
We get the professional politicians that we deserve, is there any wonder that they are so far detached from our lives ?
In theory we have a free trade situation throughout the whole of Europe.
My company could, for instance, win a contract in Belgium and I could go and work there without the need for permits or an export licence or any other such crap.
In theory, when I travel to Europe, anything I buy there is not supposed to be subject to any further taxation when I bring it back to the UK because I've already paid tax on it in the EU country of origin, in theory you shouldn't be taxed on purchases every time you cross an EU border.
And by and large thats how it works.
Fly into Leeds/Bradford Airport from (say) Barcelona and you'll be lucky to see a customs officer there, you just walk straight through arrivals with your bags stuffed full of Barcelona-type stuff and no-one here asks you to pay any more tax on it than the tax you already paid in Barcelona.
A few years ago HM Customs decided to remove their office at Leeds/Bradford Airport and instead stuck up a sign advising that if you had anything to devclare to them you should take a taxi to their offices located in Lawnswood, about three miles distant, I'm only guessing that over the course of a couple of years they weren't ever troubled by visitors at Lawnswood because they've moved back to the airport again, but still, they are not over-worked.
The overwhelming principal to the European Union is that because there should be an equilibrium of taxation throughout all of the member states then it doesn't matter which of the states you have paid your purchase tax (VAT), and as an EU citizen you don't have to pay it twice.
Thats the theory anyway.
In practice there is nothing like tax harmony throughout the union and there is no other area where this is more apparent than in alcohol and tobacco sales.
Here in the UK we have been hammered mercilessly by successive governments who use alcohol and tobacco sales as a huge cash cow - £16,000,000,000 was collected in taxation last year from such sales in the UK and so of course the UK government is very keen to prevent any sort of outside interference in their ability to soak our population for every penny that they can.
For instance a humble bottle of wine in Belgium will attract 35 cents (Euros) in taxation and in 13 EU countries there is zero taxation on wine, including France, obviously. In the UK we pay 1.80 Euros tax on the same bottle, while the poor sods in Ireland have to pay 2.1 Euros.
We aren't daft though, with flights from local airports to hundreds of destinations throughout Europe available for as little as 5p (yes I booked one such flight last year) we are well travelled and most of us would think nothing of popping on an flight to a random city for a weekend break once, or several times a year - and we notice things.
We notice first of all that the bas'tad French keep all the best wine for themselves and of course its much, much cheaper than in the UK, so we bring some home, we bring home as much as we can carry actually, then some more, and our kids get to carry packs of wine and beer too, its a good idea to take the neighbours kids with you on a weekend break, especially teenagers as they can carry more.
And while I have never smoked, even I can see the massive descrepency between French tobacco prices and UK tobacco prices, so carton upon carton of cigarettes are stuffed into suitcases too and not content with that, many people hire large vans and trucks and catch one of many, many ferries plying the channel trade, and bring back mountains of booze and ciggies, thus denying HM Government of nearly £1,000,000,000 worth of taxation last year.
And HM Government is not best pleased.
For several years now HM Governments Customs Officers have been instructed to apply limits to the amount of alcohol and tobacco that an individual can bring back to the UK, in direct contravention of the EU law which states that anyone can buy any amount of such products as long as it is for their own personal use and not for commercial gain.Anyone who is found to be carrying more than the invented and anti-EU-law UK Government limits will have their cargo confiscated and in some cases will even have their vehicle confiscated and sold to pay the excess duty, the excess duty that is not actually chargeable according to EU law - and they've been doing this for years.
It was all due to change today thanks to random Belgium chap who had challenged his own country from doing something similar to the UK government - he argued that the wine club that he was running should be able to buy wine in France at their rate of taxation (zero) and then sell to his Belgium customers without any further taxation - this opened up a flurry of speculation about how suppliers in low taxed EU states could now sell products to high taxed EU states on the internet, which would of course be bad news for HM Government and chancellor Gordon Brown must have spent a sleepless night last night wondering where he was going to find the £16billion in lost taxation next year.
But he needn't have worried.
The European court has just ruled that a third party cannot sell such products across EU borders to individuals without regard to the destination country's different taxation laws, you can still go to another country and bring home stuff for your personal consumption, but it still cannot be commercially sold across borders without being taxed again.
Boo-fekkin-hiss.
Are we suprised ?
No.
Why ?
Because who stands to lose more ? Yes thats correct, the governments who impose the draconian levels of taxation.
And who makes up and funds the European Union ?
Yes, the governments of each European state.
We should have seen right through this one, it was too good to be true.
I'm sick of selling our house now.
Fed up, I've had enough.
I've had enough of endless showing people around our house, whittering on about the layout and why its got a downstairs shower room ("I don't fooking know"), why its hasn't got a garage ("theres no fooking room, can't you see?") and how big the kitchen is and why its got three, sometimes four computers in it ("so we don't fight").
Its been five months now, the estate agent promised it would sell "without a problem" but its true that she didn't exactly explain how long it would take to sell without a problem.
We had three lots of people looking around on sunday, two of them for the second time, I'm so sick of explaining what the function of each room is ("this is called a toilet, we shit down that bowl thing there and it goes into the ground somehow"), so sick that I just open the door, wave my arm in the direction of the hallway and tell them to show themselves around, so far no-one has come back to ask if those rooms upstairs are where we sleep so I guess my method is ok.
We had an old couple come and look around last night who freely admitted that their house wasn't up for sale and they weren't even sure if they'd be selling their house or buying a new one, they just wanted to look around, I was writing that piece below about the London Olympics when they came so just waved them on their way upstairs, they didn't stay long and I checked to see that my ipod was still at the side of the bed after they'd gone.
I'm also fed up of looking around other peoples houses, of walking around, smiling, nodding, saying "oooh thats nice" when in fact you're thinking "jesus how do they live like this" and then telling the estate agent "its not for us".
We looked around a house on sunday on an estate that we used to live on 15 years ago (we've moved four times since then), it was a new house 20 years ago, its quite a nice house, it would do for us, but the lazy bas'tad people who live in it haven't done a thing to it since they bought it in 1984. Its still got the same tired old kitchen in it and its still got single glazing for gods sake, single fooking glazing when you're one mile away from an international airport, how bloody gormless is that ?
If we put an offer in for that one, and we may, then I'm going to knock £20K off the price, see if they like that, idle bas'tads.
We're going back to the street we used to live in tonight to look at an identical house to the one that we used to live in eight years ago (we've moved twice since then), its just three doors away - just to give you an idea of how enthusiastic I am to live back in that street again, think of those people tonight when they are showing me around their house, me with a face like Jack Dee on downers, "its alright but its not for us", "has it got a garage?"
I'm going to see a mortgage advisor this afternoon and I'm not going to give them any personal details, no salary details, nothing, I'm just going to tell her how much I want to pay each month and then get her to find out who will lend me enough money so I can buy the house I want, in other words I'm going to make the old cow work for her money.
Am I in a bad mood today ?
You be the judge.
PS - mentioning mortgages there - thats going to get me loads of spam isn't it ? Bas'tads.
Hands up all of you UK taxpayers who were not suprised today when Tessa Jowell announced that the estimated cost of hosting the London 2012 Olympics has just increased by 40%, in one year.
Thats all of you then.
Let me fill in some background to those from outside of the UK.
Our government is fucking useless at project management, A1, 24 carat fucking useless at organising anything that involves a budget and public spending.
Example : Back in the mid 1990's the conservative government decided that the UK should greet the oncoming millenium with a huge year long celebration of Britishness and to that end they commissioned the building of a big tent in Greenwich, London - The Millenium Dome.
It was estiimated that the big tent and the stuff that went inside it (they didn't know at that point what to actually put inside it) would cost £399 million and would attract 12 million visitors in the year that it would be open.
At the end of the year 2000 it was revealed that it had in fact only attracted 6 million visitors and that the total cost of the project was £789 million, of which £603 million was pick-pocketed out of the National Lottery Fund, the fund that was created to raise money "for good causes".
Example : Wembley Stadium (London again), closed to a huge sigh of relief from those of us who had ever been there, in October 2000 for redevelopment, with a plan for demolition before the end of 2000 and the new Wembley Stadium to be completed sometime in 2003, however at that point Tony Blairs labour government were still bickering about what should be included in the "new national stadium" and all sorts of weird and wonderful suggestions were bounded about with an elevated athletics running track suggested to get around the fact that the seating for the football and rugby events needed to be too close to the pitch for such a track to be included.
After it seemed like every single member of parliament had stuck his or her oar and spanner into the works the contract was finally started in 2003 at an estimated cost of £757 million with a scheduled opening date of 13th May 2006.
Its still not finished.
Luckily the main contractor had signed a fixed price contract which is probably the only sensible thing that the government insisted upon during the whole design phase, otherwise we could easily be paying over £1billion for our national stadium by now - it is however well worth noting that the Welsh National Sports Stadium in Cardiff, 74500 seats and a sliding roof, only cost £126 million in 1999.
Example : The Leeds Supertram Scheme, I can't even bring myself to recount this tale again, its here if you want to read some of it suffice to say that our national government led our local council a merry dance for ten years and made them spend £40 million of our local rates money on a project that they never intended to fund, nett result, nothing, zippo, fookall to show for our £40 million, sorry, one altered road junction and, erm, thats all.
So back in July of 2005 when London celebrated the winning of the bid for the 2012 olympics the first question on everyones lips was "who pays for it ?" and the second question was "who project manages it ?" and after hearing the answer "the government will" the third question was "you're fooking joking aren't you, have you forgotten the dome already ?"
The original estimate to build the olympic village, all of its stadia, and to host the event was put at £2.4billion, thats just £2,400,000,000 then, plus a bit more for extra security and a bit more on top for clearing up some of the sites after the olympics and converting the accomodation into social housing schemes.
We all gasped at the sums involved and then laughed when government ministers promised that the 2005 budget was "robust" and "viable" and we all shouted "remember the dome" and "look at wembley" and in Leeds we all shouted "where the fook is our supertram" and none of us believed them.
Sure enough, today Tessa Jowell, Minister for Culture asked parliament to stump up an extra £900million, thats a 40% increase in just 15 months with not much evidence of any work actually having started on the project yet, and I laughed very loud when driving my car today as I heard on the radio one of our local MP's ask Tessa Jowell why she thought it necessary to spend an additional £400 million on a firm of consultants who were being employed to make sure that the budget didn't increase any further, presumably they'll start consulting after their £400million has been banked ?
The good news is that most of the extra £900,000,000 will come from London taxpayers - serves the bas'tads right for nicking all of the blue riband events for themselves every time - but once again HM Government will be dipping into the "good causes" lottery fund, you know, the fund thats there for worthy causes like charities and government overspending and such like.
One of the crazy accounting anomolies is that HM Government are now having to pay VAT (a sort of sales tax) on the new buildings, which they apparently didn't think they'd have to do - well slap my buttocks and call me Daisy but I'd hazard a guess that VAT would be chargeable and I ain't nobody's treasury minister - so we taxpayers will pay the VAT out of our lottery fund which will go back to, yes, the government, who will spend it on, yes, anyone, more weapons for our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, correct at the back, creative accounting at its best.
And despite Tessa Jowells assurances that she doesn't expect the budget to rise much further, she readily admits that she still has not yet costed the security measures and the post-olympic costs into the budget and some soothsayers are predicted a final cost of between £5billion and £8billion, thats £8000,000,000 - it looks better with the zeros on the end.
When you doubt politicians its not being cynical, its being realistic, this one will run and run, we've six more years of new budgets to come yet.
Yesterday a god-botherer lost her second appeal against her employer who had requested that she not wear her cruxifix over the top of her company uniform.
Full story here
British Airways are the employer in question and their company uniform policy states that religious symbolism should not be visible - end of story.
You can wear a cruxifix, they are not preventing you from wearing a cruxifix, you just wear it underneath your shirt, blouse, whatever.
But that wasn't good enough for Nadia Eweida, check-in desk clerk, who insisted that she be allowed to wear her cruxifix over the top of her uniform, to the extent where she was suspended without pay pending an enquiry into her complaint.
She has now been ruled against twice by the airline who have asked her to return to work with the cruxifix suitably concealed, or to take another job in the organisation which doesn't require a uniform and where the cruxfix rule doesn't apply - she's refused to do both.
Why ?
Because she is more than just a lady with a strong religious belief - she is a god-botherer.
She confirmed this when interviewed on that bastion of news gathering this morning - GMTV. During the interview she displayed all of the atributes of 100%, nailed-on (no pun intended) god-botherers, in that every sentence that she used had to contain a reference to her religious beliefs and/or her "father", "saviour", "lord almighty" and other such tosh.
She actually stated that it was not in her remit to decide how to wear the cruxifix, she had been told by the almighty to wear it outside of her uniform and she could not deny her saviour as she would have to face him one day and explain why she'd tucked the cross inside her shirt - lady that is one very petty and vindictive god that you are worshipping.
She's even got the Archbishop of York on her side who called the BA decision "nonsense", but of course he would say that wouldn't he, being that he wears the biggest cross you've ever seen outside of his frock on a sunday.
I have nothing but sympathy for people such as Nadia Eweida, but its sympathy for her state of mind rather than sympathy for her cause, she has a serious problem inside her head if she thinks that her god gives one flying fuck about how she wears her cruxifix, but therein lies the problem with god-botherers - they honestly believe that they have a direct line to their god and their lives are totally ruled by the voice in their head or the voice of a bloke in a frock at their local church.
We used to have a business competitor in Leeds who was a 24 carat gold-embossed god-botherer, the rep for Yellow Pages once came to us straight from a visit to his business and she couldn't get over the fact that he wouldn't make a decision on whether to take out some extra advertising until he'd popped upstairs and had a word with god to see whether He thought it was a good deal, she was flabergasted when god said that it was too expensive and would not make a good enough return on the investment, even more so when Bob, the god-botherer, explained that god ruled his whole life, god had given him his wife, his house, his business, the food on his table, and his Yellow Pages advertising budget.
Bob would sometimes pop in to see us at our office, have a cup of coffee, chat about business - but he never failed to leave us without trying to press a god-bothering leaflet into our hands, or to bless us, or get us to sing one of his little hymn-things with him, he never left our office without the words "fuck off Bob" ringing in his ears.
I will finish with a parable from that great prophet Eddie Izzard who tells the story of how God looked down at earth in the 21st century and was displeased with what he saw, he called for his son Jesus and pointed out to him all of the evil corrupt ways of man and how the world was in a much worse state now than when Jesus had been sent down to sort it all out 2000 years previously.
God spaketh unto Jesus and told him to go back down to earth and sort the mess out properly this time, to which Jesus replied "You must be fuckin jokin dad, don't you remember last time, they're animals down there, they nailed me to a fuckin tree for gods sake"
Somewhere in our house is a Sony Playstation 2.
Gathering dust in a box in a cupboard it rests there with its plethora of PS1 and PS2 game CD's, unwanted, unloved, un-needed.
We have moved on, me and my teenage daughters.
Somewhere in our house are two Sony Playstation 1 consoles, probably in the loft, probably in a landfill site somewhere actually, we have moved on, we no longer need them.
Which is more than can be said for these sad bas'tads here.
In my defence I will categorically state that I bought the Playstations for the girls, when they were young, they persuaded me that they were good things to buy and all their friends had one and they were as vital to a childs life as food was.
I caved into their demands after five minutes, bought them their first PS1 and some random games that were girly inspired plus two car racing games which I thought would be mildly amusing to my goodself - we then quickly aquired a second PS1 when the children complained that they couldn't get to use the first one because I was never off the bloody thing.
When the time came to upgrade to PS2 we did so, but by now the eldest daughter had grown tired of gaming and moved on to horses, real horses. The youngest however wanted a PS2 so that she could play a game called "Crazy Taxi" which turned out to be the only specific PS2 game we ever bought - daughter number 2 grew tired of Crazy Taxi an hour after we had bought it and the whole kit was dumped unceremoniously somewhere where it still probably lies until we move house sometime soon (more on that later).
So we moved on from gaming, in the same way that you can never watch a dvd film more than twice, we found it mind numbingly boring to start the same game and use the same procedures to get to the same level in the same time, every time we played any of the games - its boring, simple as.
So why do these people quit their jobs and sleep on streets for several nights on the strength of a rumour that one shop may have some stock of whatever is the latest "box" to have this christmas ?
What sort of a brain does a person need inside their head to spend their whole waking life clicking buttons, waggling joysticks, and imagining that they really are killing deadly laser toting Quarks from the planet Zarg in order to save the world, how many times do you actually play at being a soldier in a combat zone before you actually believe that you really are a soldier in a combat zone and walk down the street shooting random people - and more importantly and more pertinent, how many times do you drive your imaginary car the wrong way down a one way street smashing any vehicles out of your way without damage to your car or yourself, before you steal a real car and try to do the same thing ?
Or does none of that really happen and its just a harmless way of keeping nerds off the street who would otherwise annoy the rest of us in so many other ways ?
Carry on queueing nerds, it makes good news stories and the rest of us get to put the shopping down for a few minutes and laugh at you before we have to carry on with our real lives.
This weekend, like all weekends, the UK Style satellite channel is dominated by the scrumptious Amanda Lamb and her "Place In The Sun" TV programme.
For those too poor to have cable, satellite, or freeview, or for those few people left in the world who have not emigrated to the UK, "Place In The Sun" takes two people to an exotic resort every week and shows them around four or five properties on the pretence that they are actually actively looking to purchase a holiday home in another country.
And its not just Europe that they look in, this mornings programme featured four properties in Barbados and the lucky couple "apparently" and "allegedly" put in an offer on a villa in St James - yes of course they did Amanda, you didn't exactly show us living in their new villa though did you ?
Thereby hangs my plan.
Nobody on "Place In The Sun" ever buys anything. They get a week in a sunny foreign country of their choice and all they have to do is put up with Amanda Lamb (what a chore) for two days and look around four houses, pretending to be all enthusiastic about each of them.
An interview at the end of the show follows where Amanda asks if you've made up your mind about which house you'd choose and whether or not you're going to put an offer in - and if you are like 90% of the people on the programme you'll tell Amanda,
"Well Amanda, we loved the little pink villa on the beach, it really ticked all our boxes and we'd love to buy that one please"
To which Amanda will say,
"Well thats fantastic, so what are you going to do now"
"Well Amanda we're going to go home and think about it"
End of programme.
You've had a free holiday in your own choice of foreign resort and if you're lucky, and if the production company are particularly stupid, you could apply again next year using a slightly different surname and do the whole thing over again.
I just can't wait to see the "Place In The Sun Special Day" when UK Style show "Place In The Sun" back to back all day long and I'm on every episode using a slightly different surname each time in my quest to visit every resort in the world before I die.
A 50th birthday present for a friend's birthday in December, this is the view that he requested from his favourite hole at Sandmoor Golf Club in Leeds.
Its not quite finished and Suzanne has complained constantly that the sky is too dark but I'm happy enough to leave it for the time being and get on with my next commission - a view of Robin Hoods Bay for Amanda's boyfriends Grandma (I think thats who its for) - it'll be watercolour so a different set of demands than pastel.
Its back, its that time of year again, its the night to stay indoors rather than visit anywhere that could possibly attract another member of the public - because that other random member of the british public is likely today to ask you for money.
Back in the days when I could always be found in The Fox every friday night, this is the one night of the year when I would stay in the house, and like a fool I would watch the blanket BBC coverage called "Children In Need", from 7pm right through to the early hours of the morning I would sit there like an idiot and watch other idiots make idiots of themselves and call it "entertainment" - then they would, at regular intervals, tell me where to send money, all of my money.
It still hurts to confess that for several years my wife rang the freephone numbers and left my credit card details with instructions to take whatever amount they liked out of my account.
It won't happen tonight.
This afternoon I will close the office at 4pm as per usual and ajourn to The Fox where myself and my good lady will partake of some fine real ale and stuff some extremely palatable food down our gullets for a couple of hours at which point we will scurry from the place before the students get there with their fancy dress and begging bowls.
The stuff on BBC1 tonight will be to its usual low standard, already I have heard of a team of newscasters paying a musical tribute to James Bond - for christ sake no - and ex-spice girl Emma Bunton has recorded the "official" C-I-N record this year, a remake of Petula Clark's "Downtown" which only serves to highlight just how pointless remakes of old classics can be, the spice girl with the weakest voice manages to make herself and her record sound exactly like Petula Clarks 1965 recording , in fact I think they may have saved money by using the old backing track and the whole thing leaves you with just one word in mind - "why ?"
The TV show itself is, as always, as it has been since 1863, presented by Terry Wogan, the now officially unfunny Radio 2 presenter. Terry Wogan's breakfast radio show was original and amusing in 1972 but unsuprisingly the exact same format wore thin many years ago and the same goes for his year-on-year presentation of the C-I-N tv programme.
However tonight he will apparently, along with some posh totty, present the winner of a competition to find the new voice of the speaking clock (that alone is surely worth staying in for tonight), so-called music from McFly (seen them last week, offer zero to music heritage), Girls Aloud (watch for the ginger haired one, I just think "council house mongrel" every time), Sugababes ( who they), Westlife and several other bland stars of the popular music genre who will perform and then mention their forthcoming christmas single as instructed by their agent.
Oh yes, and David Cassidy.
But the worst, most cringeworthy parts of the whole evenings dross are the several sections where "stars" of soap operas appear to sing, or dance, or do a party piece, and Terry Wogan and his audience pretend that they were very good and please send some money or we'll get them back on again - tonights offering is predictable and I didn't even need to look it up on the web site to state that the cast of Corrie Street, Holby City, Bad Girls and Hollyoaks will all be "doing a turn" and mentioning the time and date of their next episode.
Is that really the worst bit ?
No, actually the worst bit is the parade of London's West End musical actors who turn up at the studio and do a quick turn from their current productions - Shepherds Bush must have a queue of actors in various musical costumes stretching all the way around the corner all night as these mercenaries bid to grab five minutes on the show and mention which theatre they are appearing at, what time is curtain up, and seats in all parts still available, its a busy night for theatrical agents and limousine drivers.
Fortunately tonight sees Emmerdale and two episodes of Coronation Street on ITV (how do they do Corrie Street and still appear on C-I-N at the same time), and for once I will be grateful that the women in our house choose the TV programmes that I watch.
The arabic TV News programme Al-Jazeera launched its English language version into Europe yesterday and in an effort to shit-stir at lunchtime our local Radio Leeds programme ran a poll of listeners asking if the news channel should be banned - fortunately the result was an overwhelming "of course not you fuckwits".
We like our news to have at least two flavours and here in the UK we have lots of choice...
The BBC - the bastion of truth and honesty the world over, except here in the UK where every month someone accuses the BBC of being too right wing, then too left wing, then over zealous in its selective employment of black people, or asian people, or homosexuals, or not as the case may be that month - as a public funded broadcaster it has to be seen to be neutral and if you listened to the critics it hardly ever is, still, its the BBC.
ITN News - the commercial side of broadcasting in the UK, funded entirely from crumbs of advertising revenue that the Rupert Murdoch empire missed or let fall to the floor, ITN News spends too much of its time trying to compete with the BBC instead of doing its own thing which sometimes results in unfortunate incidents such as their main news crew headed by vetran braodcaster Terry Lloyd being killed on one of the first days of the Iraq invasion when they went ahead of the allied forces without authorisation or armed backup and got themselves entangled in the crossfire - all in the quest for an exclusive report over and above what the BBC could garner from behind the tanks. ITN is usually seen as a poor mans BBC.
Sky News - the first UK broadcaster to present a 24 hour news channel and which revolutionised tv news in the UK, funded by the Murdoch global tv empire its seen as the channel of choice for anyone who wants the news NOW rather than wait for the BBC to catch up and ITN to arrive a few days later - it was Sky News that we switched on this saturday when we got a text message from our daughter in Trafalger Square to say that something was going on there - switched the tv on in panic and there she was in Trafalger Square at the rememberence service - really must explain to our daughter what rememberence day is all about.
The American broadcasters - the likes of NBC, ABC et all who sneak onto spare channels on our satellite providers for that exclusive USA-only coverage of world events - want to know what that nuclear explosion in Iran was all about this morning ? Switch on your choice of American News channels and find out what all the obscure college basketball scores were last night instead.
The problem with all of those channels is of course that we only get the one point of view, our point of view, our western point of view - watch an Isreali move to rid Gaza of arabs and you'll watch the coverage from behind an Isreali tank and you'll get the sanitised Isreali version of what happened and you might suspect that its not the full story, but you have nowehere else to see or hear the other version of events.
Until now.
Now you have Al-Jazeera to tune in to.
Presented by European correspondants the news channel provides the same stories that the western news channels provide, but their cameras show the action from the other side of the fence, and they pull no punches, and at last we can now get two often very obtuse and polarised reports and most importantly - MAKE OUR OWN MINDS UP.
There is one tiny little glitch in the news though - despite being available now to a 40 million European audience no American broadcasters have stepped forward to carry the channel yet, land of the free thought ?
Not yet it seems.
Tecumseh Valley
by Townes Van Zandt
A superb version exists out there in the ethernet by Nanci Griffith, ably assisted by another of my favourite singers Arlo Guthrie, it was on YouTube last week but I seem to have lost it, never mind eh, the lyrics are beautiful all on their own...
The name she gave was Caroline
The daughter of a miner
And her ways were free and it seemed to me
The sunshine walked beside her
She come from Spencer across the hill
She said her Pa had sent her
'Cause the coal was low and soon the snow
Would tuwn the skies to winter
Well she said she'd come to look for work
She was not seeking favors
For a dime a day and a place to stay
She'd turn those hands to labor
The times were hard Lord the jobs were few
All through Tecumseh Valley
But she asked around and a job she found
Tending bar for Gypsy Sally
She saved enough to get back home
When spring replaced the winter
But her dreams were denied her Pa had died
The word came down from Spencer
She turned to whorin' out on the streets
With all the lust inside her
It was many a man returned again
To lay himself beside her
Well they found her down beneath the stairs
That led to Gypsy Sally's
In her hand when she died
Was a note that cried
Fare thee well Tecumseh Valley
The name she gave was Caroline
The daughter of a miner
And her ways were free and it seemed to me
The sunshine walked beside her
And just for desserts, this working of Nanci Griffith's "Gulf Coast Highway", lush, just lush.
Today sees the premiere of the latest James Bond film, Casino Royale and my Interest-o-Meter (above) is already showing signs of complete disinterest.
The suprising thing about this film is that the original Casino Royale starred David Niven and was actually a spoof James Bond film - is this the first time that a film company has remade a spoof film into its real object of derision ?
I hate James Bond films, always have.
I hated them as a kid for two reasons - Shirley Bassey and the terrible storylines.
Shirley Bassey was/is a pet hate of mine, a singer that shouts every line, it works in a punk band but not for Shirley Bassey, I cannot do with her and unfortunately they let her sing theme tunes from James Bond, even the ones that she wasn't supposed to officially sing, she's awful, just awful, my Auntie Irene likes her though.
The storylines are something else and usually involve some terrible person who wants to take over the world, but do it secretly so that no-one will know that he's taken over the world. To this end he usually builds a secret hideout the size of a large shopping mall and employs thousands of people to walk around all day dressed in white overalls, carrying clipboards and looking busy.
Some top secret method of dominating the worlds population is invented, secretly, in the top secret shopping mall, which is usually hidden under a mountain or disguised as a shopping mall, and the top secret method of dominating the world usually involves lasers or hi-tech bombs, anything as long as the James Bond film audience don't quite understand what is involved because its too technical to explain properly, which isn't that difficult really as the James Bond film audience , the ones who have actually paid real money to watch the film at a real cinema, usually can't maintain an IQ that can be measured in any way.
To stop the horrible villian, who manages to maintain his empire without anyone ever knowing, even the wives of the men who work for him don't suspect anything ...
"Don't forget your packed lunch love, what time will you be home tonight ?"
"I'll get the 5.05 from Paddington love, as usual"
"Oh good, I'll put the casserole on, don't forget to ask Mr X if you can have the first week in august off"
"I don't think we do holidays at Evil World Domination PLC love"
...to stop him, the world turns to one man, James Bond, who must be getting fairly pissed off with evil world dominating villians by now, and to aid him in his quest to rid the world of evil world dominating villians we, the British government, give him a pen that fires gas, or little bullets, or a laser light that can cut through steel.
And of course he gets captured because all evil world dominating villians know what he looks like by now, they've all seen the films before, James Bond must be the worst kept secret, secret agent ever. Even if you don't recognise him instantly you'd know who he was when you stand next to him in a bar and hear him order a vodka martini, shaken not stirred, for only a top secret agent or a complete plonker would order a nancy drink like that in a working mens club.
And instead of simply shooting him dead the evil world dominating villian usually ties him to a table where a huge circular saw starts to turn ever so slowly, moving towards his spread-eagled legs at the speed of a speeding glacier, threatening to split the top secret agent asunder at anytime in the next, well, half hour or so - and instead of hanging around to watch the top secret, secret agents demise, the evil world dominating villian buggers off to do something more important instead, leaving James Bond to escape with the aid of a pocket circular saw disabling tool that he hid in, erm, his pocket - why do evil world dominating villians never search James Bonds pockets when they capture him in every film ?
The evil world dominating villian is foiled once again, his top secret hideaway is blown to smithereens but he and all of his white overall clad employees escape without harming a hair on their head because no-one ever dies in a James Bond film. Meanwhile, James Bond gets to shag a girl who appeared halfway through the film just for the eye candy effect.
The End.
There, you don't need to pay to go watch the crap now.
The X Factor takes over saturday night viewing in our house and to be honest its getting to a point now with six "performers" left where the cream is rising to the top and the dross is struggling - or at least that is the theory.
On Saturday night there were two outstanding acts, Leona who has been consistently the best singer bar none right through the rounds, and Robert who has been very shaky some weeks and twice has had to sing for his supper at the end.
They were both head and shoulders above the rest and were both rightly voted through to the next round but all six of the acts are now showing themselves to be fairly un-versatile one trick ponies, even Leona who should be declared winner right now has not performed in anything other than a Whitney/Maria clone stylee.
The rest of them are just the best of a poor bunch.
Raymond, the twelve year old with a seventy year old's love of swing music will struggle to perform in any other genre, I predict that he may be the next one to go if Simon Cowell persists in introducing a big band element into his performance next week - he will then tour the UK's nursing homes performing for old ladies would will pinch his cheeks and tell him what a lovely little boy he is.
Robert can belt out a soul song as he showed on saturday, but as he has also shown, when he performs a song that is outside his skill level he wallows in complete confusion and embarrasment and he also sounds far too much like Frank Bruno to ever be taken seriously by an audience, he will not make the final and will disappear from the TV radar , appearing in panto as a Frank substitute.
Ben is starting to annoy me now, I wish he would stand upright when he sings instead of bending double on stage as if trying to force out a particularly wide and nobbly turd. His voice is suitable only for a "stadium soft rock" band of the sort favoured by mid-american college students, but he is twenty years too late in his application form, a return to a career erecting marquees while singing to himself is what he should be focussing upon.
And then we come to Louis Walsh's two groups, and deary me are these two scraping the bottom of the talent barrell.
Eton Road are right up Louis Walsh's street, another poor impression of a boy band, several years after the last of the boy bands were thrown on the scrap heap of pop stardom by the twelve year old girls who once worshipped them. The big difference between Eton road and (for instance) Westlife is of course that Eton Road are crap but dear old Louis can't see it - he chose the Beatles song "From me to you" on saturday for them and it was quite frankly appalling, a terrible choice of a song in the "love" genre where he could have chosen anything. When The Beatles had a hit with the song in '63 it was new and fresh and only two minutes long, on Saturday it was corny and badly delivered by a group of young boys who had no idea of what they were doing - they could well be the next ones to go if Louis makes another terrible decision like last saturdays.
And finally, the McDonald Brothers. Words fail me. Prior to X Factor they were making a few quid every weekend singing at weddings and their ambitions should have stopped right there, where drunken guests never actually listen to them and would dance to a screaming cat when they've drunk the bar dry. The Scottish vote has kept them in the competition so far and will continue to do so right through (I fear) to the final and if that happens then they could actually win the competition - this is not as stupid as it sounds, remember Michelle Mcmanus the zeppelin sized scottish bird who won X Factor a couple of years ago ? No ? Well its not suprising really, the Scottish vote won her the competition then, and she sunk without trace, which isn't that difficult to do when you're 35 stone.
The competition should be about talent, there is one talented singer in there at the moment, but now its about young girls and old ladies voting for the act that they'd like to meet in a shopping mall or in the common room of their residential home.
It'll be worth the Wedding SIngers winning it just to watch Simon Cowell storm off stage in the final though.
Our eldest daughter Amanda is away to that there London this weekend with her boyfriend Chris who has treated her to two nights in a swanky Piccadily hotel, the fool.
He's known her for long enough now to realise that, even more than her mother, Amanda lives to shop, and he should know by now that when she shops she does not use her own money to pay for the stuff she buys, she uses either her fathers money or her boyfriends money.
Even before she left, with her own money saved up and sitting safely in her bank account, she attempted to prise some "spenders" off her mother, who, showing great resolve, refused and told her to spend her own to which she replied "right I'll ask my dad then".
She did ask me, I diplomatically ignored her request as a reply at this stage would have upset either the wife or the daughter resulting in a two day tantrum by either or both - see how good I am at this woman control thing ?
However when I was taking them to the railway station on Friday morning I confess to giving her £50 "for emergency use only", so thats the last I'll see of that then as "emergency use only" to Amanda means seeing something else she wants to buy in Top Shop when she's spent all of her own money.
Some of my "emergency use only" money was no doubt spent on Friday night when we received a text telling us that they were in a bar waiting for food and that their round of two drinks (beer and wine) had just cost them £10, they wouldn't be able to get drunk on my "emergency use only" money then.
Unbeknown to both of them they have of course picked one of the busiest weekends of the year to go to London, yesterday was the 11th Nov, Rememberance Day, and an event in Trafalger Square completely spoiled her plans for a shopping morning as Chris wanted to attend - we got a very annoyed text message from her just before the two minutes silence at 11am telling us that "they were wasting time hanging around TrafalgerSquare because HE wanted to take some photographs".
Following the 11am event was the Lord Mayors Parade which I doubt very much she attended, by that time the clothes shopping frenzy would have started on Oxford Street, no more texts arrived after noon so we assume that shopping filled the rest of the day to total exclusion of sending messages back home, or anything else.
Today of course they have the proper Rememberance Service to battle through on the embankment although I have told them to head for Covent Garden this morning - its a typical touristy thing to do but sunday morning drinking over-priced coffee whilst beating off the beggars in Covent Garden is one of the more pleasant tasks that one can achieve.
Personally I hate London, its filthy, over-priced to the extent of robbery, teems with crooks just waiting to extract money from you in a variety of ingenious ways, and contains far too many ignorant, miserable, self obsessed people - and still the overseas tourists make it their first port of call and base their impression on English people from the rag-tag bunch of misfits that they meet there.
So I hope they enjoy their weekend and I hope they find someone to give them a lift home from the station when they arrive there this afternoon - I will be gently sozzled at a rugby club dinner all afternoon.
For some strange reason I agreed last night to go to the "Switching on Of The Christmas Lights" ceremony in Leeds City Centre.
I've never understood why the city have to do this, hold a ceremony I mean and I confess that I still don't.
I stood there outside Cuthbert Brodericks magnificent Town Hall with a crowd of probably ten thousand or so, in front of a stage and big screen, freezing our cobblers off for half an hour before the "turns" started.
We were richly rewarded (no really) for our wait by a preview of "The WIzard of Oz" which is lodged firmy at the West Yorkshire Playhouse through the winter, Dorothy and the Scarecrow sang a couple of songs and a pair of so-called "radio personalities" who I had never heard of got all excited when Gaynor Faye (her of Coronation St and Fat Friends) rushed on stage with Father Christmas who sounded like a pissed up Peter Cook - three songs from Santa later and I was convinced that it was a pissed up Peter Cook inside the costume.
The Lord Mayor was next, with a 16 year old girl from a High School who had won a competition to pretend to be mayor for the day - both dressed in their civic regalia of three cornered hat and red cloaks with feather and fur flying, very impressive our mayor was, so impressive that a little girl behind me screamed out "look, a pirate" - and being that he was a local politician she may have been correct.
Finally a popular beat combo by the name of McFly appeared and mimed to four of their songs, I had never heard of them but they assured the crowd that they had had six number one hit singles, well I'm sorry boys, but I haven't paid much attention to the hit parade in these past thirty years and judging by last night I haven't missed much either.
And as I stood there with ten thousand screaming voices thankfully drowning out the delightful sound of McFly who were jumping all over the stage to their backing tracks, I was reminded of a similar night, many, many years ago, a warm summers night in a village somewhere in France...
...a village somewhere in France, somewhere so random that I can't even hazard a guess as to whether it was in Brittany or le Cote d'Atlantique, we were there on our three week summer holiday, circa 1970, and had found ourself in this random village where our dad spotted a poster for a free concert that was taking place in the market place that very evening - starring Sacha Distell.
Sacha Who ? You may well ask. Sacha Distell was a French heartthrob of the 1960's who had found fame on the many British TV variety programmes of the time, the likes of "Sunday Night at the London Palladium" and "The Generation Game" were forever being haunted by Sacha Distells heavy French accent pouring out his felicitations of "lurve" to all the ladies - they loved him and he had a big hit with "Raindrerps are farleeng on ma heed" in 1968.
He was the big star at the free concert and so that evening we all trooped into the little French village square and took up our place with thousands of French people, all eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sacha the sex symbol.
The event was a national tour of France sponsored by a toothpaste company eager to get French people to start using toothpaste and we were treated for several hours to the sight of giant tubes of McLeans dancing on stage with giant toothbrushes, interspersed with juggling acts, fire eaters, and lots and lots of announcements and advertisements, none of which we understood.
Four hours later we were still stood rooted to the spot and our dad was not best pleased, Sacha still had to make his appearance and it was now well past midnight, we were hungry and tired and our legs ached and our dad had missed a whole night of beer drinking to watch a four hour toothpaste advertisement, it was not funny.
And then finally Sacha Distell appeared on stage, although by this time we had been shoved so far to the back of the market place that it could have been anyone in the light blue blazer on stage.
He sang one song then buggered off.
It was not a very happy car ride home.
At least last night was all over in one hour, the lights were switched on , a big firwork display, then we buggered off to The Fox - two pints of Taylors Landlord later and I was ready to pronounce the evening a success.
And on yet another music inspired topic...
I am apparently going to see McFly perform tonight as they switch on the Leeds Christmas Lights, or at least thats what my youngest daughter tells me, she insists that I stay and watch the popular beat combo after I've taxi'ed her into town.
Has anyone got the faintest idea of who McFly are ?
Sticking with the musical theme this morning I have a plea, a warning to all of you record buyers out there - Cliff is back in town.
And this time he's got Brian and Tony with him...
And they want a christmas chart topping, pick of the hits, number one.
Please, please do not encourage them, not even with one single single purchase, please, it will only get worse if you do.
They were featured on GMTV this morning singing a truly awful reworking of Cliffy's first hit from 1872, "Move It", Cliff and Brian May and Tony Meehan (The Shadows drummer), three old gits who really should know better than to have yet one more go at the "hit parade".
Your time has passed gentlemen, it passed you by several decades ago and you didn't notice, your friends should really have told you not to go on making fools of yourselves but then that asumes that you have friends, or that your friends aren't cruel enough to let you press on and have everyone laugh at you - you are not what 12 year old girls buy into when they sit around in coffee bars called "Le Cafe Bongo" or "Cafe a-go-go" talking of the latest heartthrob to hit the hit parade - its gone gentlemen, its all gone, and so should you.
Cliff danced this morning on GMTV, he danced to Brian May's bog-standard guitar break, (circa "Radio Ga-Ga" days), he danced and looked like your drunk grandad dancing at a wedding and we all cringed and curled up in embarassment and hoped that the video tape would break soon, now.
And then they interviewed Brian May and he spoke of his thrill at working with Cliff, and how he had always wanted to work with Cliff, and how he and Cliff had reinvented the song that Cliff had last recorded with Mr Edison back in 1883, and the bit where he explained that he was only doing this because his agent had been on a bit of a losing streak recently and he needed a favour doing quickly before the boys in suits came to see him, was mysteriously cut from the interview.
I have watched them, and I did it so that you would not have to, heed my words, watching this will spoil your appetite, avoid at all costs.
Iris Dement, singing "Our Town" with Emmylou Harris, sheer bliss.
Its here on YouTube on one of those annoying slow loading connections but well, well worth the wait,
if only I could embed the YouTube video in here then I would but this logon of mine doesn't seem to like it.
I love Iris Dement's music, my wife hates Iris Dement's voice, its a perfect marriage made in heaven is ours, we've disagreed on everything for the last 23 years - she has no taste and couldn't recognise musical genius if it kicked her hard up the arse - she bought a Brother Beyond CD in the 80's, need I say more ?
And while we're at it, an old video of Emmylou singing "Boulder to Birmingham".
Sheer bliss, sheer unadulterated bliss.
Sit back, breath deep, close eyes and let it waft all over you.
This is well worth a mention.
A few years ago I found a brand new web site which was sponsored by lottery funding and which gave public access to the massive database that is the British Pathe Film News Company.
For those who are still of tender young years, or maybe a damn foreigner, in the days before a TV set inhabited at least one room in every house in the country, the only way to see the News in moving images was at your local cinema and before each and every showing of each and every film in each and every cinema in the country, a 15 or so minute clip of British Pathe news films was shown, covering any event wherever it happened in the world, and the best thing about the company was that they filmed on real film, not video tape, and so kept a huge archive of material.
Some years ago this incredibly valuable 100 or so year archive of material, with the aid of a lottery fund, was copied into a digital format and made available on the web, you have to register your name and address but downloading the clips is now much simpler than it was originally (it used to be a bit hit and miss) and there is some fascinating stuff on there.
One of the better uses of the National Lottery Fund money.
Link to home page British Pathe News
Once again the British National Party are in the headlines at the retrial of two of their leaders for the charges of "inciting racial hatred".
We have to go through the whole legality of the trial because it woul dbe playing straight into their hands to simply find them guilty of the bleedin obvious - that their whole political party is based on a premise of inciting racial hatred.
Link to the current news story
Link to the BNP web site if you need further evidence of their strange and twisted mentalities.
I almost hesitate there to provide a link to the BNP web site in fear that it gives them some sort of credibility instead of the view that they are a bunch of crazy racist nutters, but the fact is that they are established in certain sections of the British community as a credible political party, and indeed have won seats in local council elections, and received not unsubstantial numbers of votes in general elections.
Reading their viewpoints and manefestos are the only way to expose them for what they are and destroy any of that credibility at the ballot box.
There are thousands of links to news items on the BNP floating around the web but the one above to the latest news story is fairly representative of most of the stuff written, and while I always try to be even handed with news stories, always try and see both sides of an argument and can often be swayed in my viewpoint by convincing arguments, there aren't many sane people who would read that news story and believe that the speech in question was not made to incite racial hatred - and the excuse that "they couldn't be incited as they already agreed with me" is probably the weakest argument in favour of breaking a law that I have ever heard, its like saying "I didn't stab him to death, I just stabbed him and he died a bit later"
The only sad thing is that in the areas in which they are represented politically, they have substantial number of supporters.
7pm and its Bonfire Night proper outside.
It sounds like downtown Baghdad out there tonight, just like last night.
The fireworks started at around 5pm as soon as it got dark last night and will continue unabated until at least 10pm tonight, its hard to believe that there are that many fireworks in the world let alone in this small part of Leeds.
And still today in Costco people were wheeling out hundreds of pounds worth of aerial display fireworks, some of them costing dozens of pounds each and resembling an early Soyez space mission, light one and for fifteen seconds your guests will be well impressed as your £30 goes bang all over the neighborhood.
Unfortunately Jake the Golden Retriever does not like loud bangs which was rather unfortunate for him as a puppy because he was bred by a gamekeeper to be a gundog. He's eight years old now and still won't go out into the garden on a sunday morning as a nearby farm has a clay pigeon shoot so you can only imagine what a two night barrage of night time explosions does for his nerves.
We've all stayed in with him for both nights, I even tempted him to the back door last night with two Jaffa Cakes in an attempt to show him that the bangs were harmless, he accepted one Jaffa cake but scooted away when another rocket went up - have you ever heard of a Retriever refusing a Jaffa Cake ?
He's now curled up under the table I'm sitting at, panting in panic, drooling at the mouth and frequently pacing the room up and down tring to find a place where he won't be able to hear the bangs, truth is there is no respite from them, its really awful to watch his distress.
Last night he spent the night in Mandy's bedroom, its the only night of the year when we allow him upstairs, normally you can't even force him to go upstairs as he knows its not allowed, last night he was the first one under the bed.
I'm going to sit with him in the TV room now, volume up full, packet of Jaffa Cakes, see if he'll calm down any.
Just for those foreign people who may not understand this "Bonfire Night" that we speak of this weekend, here is the JerryChicken Guide to The Gunpowder Plot.
More English history lessons for those who didn't pay attention at school to follow
Yes its that time of year again when we Brits celebrate the fact that in 1605 a bunch of anarchist catholics were caught red-handed in the act of blowing up the parliament of King James I, caught by a valiant counter terrorist squad of highly alert Kings security guards - despite the fact that the conspiritors had , for several days, being wheel-barrowing enough gunpowder to blow a big hole across most of London into the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, maybe giving the highly alert Kings security guards a cheeky wave each morning with a "Phew ! More of this gunpowder eh ? What does he want with it all ?"
And so in those enlightened days of criminal psychology and rehabilitation we hung each of the conspiritors until they were almost dead, then disemboweled them until they were almost dead, and then dragged them through the streets until they were almost dead and then chopped them up and stuck various bits of their body on spikes all around London - I always liked that bit of the story as a child, "hung, drawn and quartered" the teacher would say, and we'd make her describe exactly what it meant, correcting her if she tried to use the recommended and sanitised version for five year olds.
Full and sanitised version here.
And in celebration of the fact that we succesfully quashed the catholic uprising, the bas'tads, we joyfully burn efigies of ringleader Guy Fawkes every 5th November, and have done ever since an act of parliament in 1605 made it compulsory for us all to do so, even now in England you can be hanged by the neck until almost dead for not celebrating Bonfire Night with at least a sparkler or two - except in Scotland where it is not compulsory as Guy Fawkes had also expressed a desire "to blow the Scots back to Scotland" and except at a public school in York where Guy Fawkes was an old boy and they don't burn efigies of old boys.
And thats where the story should end, but I haven't moaned about anything yet, haven't done the grumpy old git thing, pray tarry a little longer kind sir, and read on ...
Last night daughter Mk2 went to her friends house from whence they then travelled to Roundhay Park to watch a public bonfire - Roundhay Park is the biggest expanse of open parkland in the city of Leeds and as it has a natural amphitheatre its where all the big public events are held.
The authorities are not to keen on letting us citizens legally loose with fireworks and gunpowder at this time of year, let alone allowing us to build huge bonfires in our streets and gardens where we inevitably and accidently usually set fire to someones property, and so they try and encourage us all to attend public bonfires and public firework displays - the one at Roundhay Park is usually very spectacular I'm told although I've never been because the idea of queueing in traffic whilst 50,000 people try and get away at the end does not light one bit of enthusiasm in my mind.
But wait I hear you say, last night was only the 3rd of November, Sunday night is the 5th, Bonfire Night is the 5th, on the 3rd November Guy Fawkes was still wheel-barrowing kegs of gunpowder past the noses of the ever vigilant Kings security guards, why have a bonfire on the 3rd November ?
I don't fekking know is my reply, ask the fekking council is my reply.
For most of the month of October reckless shopkeepers start stocking fireworks, some of which cost £10's each, some of which could probably make lunar orbit if you tied two of them together, and young children of four or five years of age are allowed to buy such explosives and hide them in their nurseries, sneaking them past nanny and mummy each night to explode them inthe streets outside, to their friends great amusement - and every year grumpy old bas'tads complain about the sale of fireworks in the news media and demand a ban to Bonfire Night and fireworks and anything else that gets on their tits.
The grumpy old sods would see an end to private celebrations of Bonfire Night and the compulsory attendance of all citizens to public displays the likes of the one at Roundhay Park, and in a small way the Leeds City Council support this point of view with exhaltations in the local news for citizens to gather at several public places to enjoy a properly organised, health and safety executive approved, bonfire and firework display - ie you have to stand half a mile away and upwind of the smoke lest someone makes a claim for a lost eye or toxic impregnated lungs.
Police and Fire Service officials warn of dire consequences if anyone is caught letting off fireworks or burning bonfires before the 5th November, because of course its illegal, and naughty.
So on the 5th November this year I will gather myself at Roundhay Park to watch the grand Leeds City Council Public Display of celebration of the crushing of a disparate act of religious fervour 401 years ago - and I'll be stood there all on my own because the fekkin council had their fekking celebration last fekkin night - two fekkin days early - the bas'tads.
Jodie said it was good though.
PS - you can colour in the picture at the top of this article.
Teenagers too fat to join the army
Screams the headline as Army recruiters wring their hands in despair at the increasingly difficult task of persuading young adults to join up and become cannon (or rather grenade or mortar fodder) in Afghanistan or Iraq and wherever is next on our leader George's list - we Brits just bypass Blair now and look to Bush for the next trip to oblivion.
So theres a suprise then - "Join the Army and be a man" is all that was required when ah wor nobbut a lad, it didn't persuade me because I didn't really like the look of the sort of man that they had in mind for me, but still, it worked for some.
Later on it was videos of 17 year old Army recruits enjoying ski-ing holidays in Austria, hang gliding and water ski-ing in some carribean outpost that encouraged young lads to sign up and then find themselves confined to a large tank regiment barracks in the middle of Nowhere, Germany in what had once been the East/West Germany border but was now dullsville personified.
But now the entreaties of "Join the Army and go straight to a place where foreigners hate you so much that they'll kill themselves just to kill you" doesn't seem to work as well.
Neither will raising the body mass index qualification level - all it will do is convince fat kids that they can sign up now and provide bigger targets for Iraqi snipers - not that the Army will let the fat kids stay fat kids for long, within hours of their joining up to the new fat Army they'll have been shipped off to Deepcut Barracks where they'll be "persuaded" in that unique Army style to shed several stones through fear and intimidation with the alternative of sleeping next to a loaded rifle which may or may not accidently go off in your face through the night, sometimes twice, as an alternative.
First frosty morning of the winter today, well ok not that frosty, but the little bright yellow Peugeot that sits at the top of the drive like a small blob of custard needed the windscreen scraping before I could shift it to get my Nissan out.
Sat in the Nissan, seat warmers on, heater blowing hot air on the windscreen - that car has the fastest heater I have ever seen inside a car - I could gaze at the outside temperature display and laugh at the "1c" information during my two minute commute to the office, I'm doing my bit for global warming in driving the distance every day, the car is screaming out for more deisel with all sorts of flashing lights and warning messages showing "0 miles left in the tank" - its been doing this for a week now but still I squeeze another commute out of it.
I arrive at the office and dash inside to be met with a nice warm blast of dry electric heat and then I sit here and remember how it used to be when I first joined the company...
Our office then was two downstairs rooms in a very old stone built house, a very old stone built house that was so old that 200 years ago the builders hadn't bothered with a damp proof course and the solution from the landlord was not to pay for one doing but instead to line the inside of the building with a one inch thick cladding of polystyrene over which he had then wallpapered - it was an interesting feeling leaning against a wall and sinking softly into it but it did nothing to stop the damp creeping through although the landlord insisted that it was much better than it used to be.
Each of the two rooms had an ancient gas fire, when I say ancient I mean pre-20th century and when I say ancient I also mean that neither of them had ever seen so much as a glance at a service engineer. The one in the front office actually made the room colder when you lit it and its single remaining burner would emit a weak blue flame which spluttered all day long, often dying away completely leaving just pure gas hissing out until someone noticed, relighting it at those times was a hazardous experience as you were never sure just how long it had been unlit and just how much gas was hanging and drifting around the burner for you to introduce a naked flame to it, it was probably the only time that you were ever warmed by that gas fire.
The fire in the workshop was fractionally better and half an hour after lighting it you could stand right in front of it and hold your hands within one inch of the burner to feel a gentle warmth wafting forth, only to dissipate within the next inch of frigid airspace, it too spluttered and spurted all day long and I doubt very much whether any combustion fumes ever made their way up the chimney as we sat there at our benches all day with streaming eyes and light heads.
My dad owned the business then and it never once crossed his mind to have the two fires replaced or at the very least serviced and if I had even mentioned bringing an electric heater into the office he would have had a fit.
His business partner Michael had no kidneys and his constant dialysis robbed his blood of any minerals needed for any sort of comfort factor in cold weather, so he'd arrive at the office clad in several layers of winter coats and scarves then push us all out of the way of the one inch source of heat in the workshop and pull up a small deckchair (it was a very cosmopolitan office) right up to the fireplace and sit there for at least an hour, rubbing his hands together and complaining about how cold it was - it never crossed his mind either to introduce another method of heating the office.
So we'd all stand around this poisonous source of meagre heat for an hour or more until my dad started gently hinting that we should all be out on the road earning our corn so that he could sit closer to the fire and answer the phones all day, gently prodding us with phrases such as "Go on bugger off out the lot of you" or "Michael, get away from that bloody fire and piss off out will you" ...
Happy days.
"I love scrap..." so spaketh scrap baron Arthur Foggan in the excellent Michael Palin's Ripping Yarn "Golden Gordon".
A news report on local TV last night spaketh of how thieves are targetting electricity sub stations for their copper cable and parts, despite many of the sub stations being live at 136,000 volts at the time, an alert police officer mentioned that there was a "significant risk of death" in these acts of vandalism and theft - no shit sherlock, I'll sleep in my bed safe to night knowing that such enlightened officers are out there protecting me and my loved ones.
With my background in electrical contracting I am of course not totally unaware of the market in scrap copper - our electricians used to love doing local authority rewiring schemes as when you have a whole housing estate full of soon to be ripped out electrical cables you are talking about tons and tons of copper wire - and the company didn't see one little scrap of the stuff.
Its was a common sight to visit these refurb sites to see one of your apprentice electricians walking across to some nearby wasteground with bundles and bundles of old cables, to be dumped on a bonfire so that the pvc insulation could be burned off to reveal the precious metal beneath and on most of the major sites that we worked on our electricians would actually force down the price of copper on the commodity markets with the amount of the stuff that they weighed in to nearby scrap merchants.
A few years later when I'd left the electrical industry and joined my fathers company flogging time recording instruments I discovered another scrap metal - brass.
My dad and my grandad had made a living since the 1920's selling the big wooden cased, wind-up timeclocks to industry all over Yorkshire, huge industrial timepieces made up almost entirely of brass. By the time I joined the company these relics of a bygone era were already being scrapped in their hundreds and my dad made a tidy few pounds in refurbishing them for household use - idiots who didn't mind their home lives being ruined by the constant clicking, ticking and clunking would pay him substantial amounts of money (cash) for a refurbished timeclock and after he'd put the mechanisms through our ultrasonic cleaning tanks, in his parlance they'd "shine like shit on a blanket".
But the brass inside them was worth money too, and it nearly caused big trouble for us once.
Kirkstall Forge used to be one of the city's major employer, not suprisingly it was a forge where huge industrial axles were stamped out of molten metal, there had been a forge on the site for hundreds of years and it was built alongside the River Aire for want of water power - by the time I grew aquainted with the site it was ahuge industrial complex on both banks of the river with its own private bridge to link both parts of the factory.
They had a couple of dozen of the old wood cased clocks that my grandfather had flogged them fifty years previously and when the day came to replace them we did so with a nice lucrative order for some boring anonymous metal boxes made in Germany, the wood cased cloks were all removed to a storeroom as no-one had mentioned what they wanted to do with them.
The clerks who worked in the timekeeping office knew what they wanted to do with the old clocks though and conspiring with my dads business partner Michael they kept them carefully under lock and key for a few months until they decided it was safe to start breaking them up for the scrap brass value.
Four of them were in on the scheme and they decided that a satrurday would be the best time to break up the clocks as only a few shifts worked at the weekend and more importantly none of the senior management would be on site.
All went well for a few hours until the conspiring foursome hit upon the first problem - what to do with the wooden cases when the mechanisms had been removed - twenty-odd empty cases were damning evidence of their theft and couldn't be hidden from peering management eyes forever, they could burn them but it would take time, and a huge bonfire in the factory carpark would draw attention to their scheming, it was not a viable solution.
The solution came after a few moments of deep thought and a mug of tea - the river.
They carried the huge, highly polished and distinctive glass fronted clock cases out onto the bridge and dropped them one by one into the river - problem solved, the first dozen were gone and they returned to the storeroomto continue with their subterfuge.
Suddenly there was a knock on the door of the storeroom and a loud voice demanding that they unlock it and reveal themselves - sheepishly they did so to find a security officer standing there - caught red-handed they simply explained that they were going to donate the scrap brass the the company kiddies christmas party fund, words which stuck in the craw of all of them, they were hailed as generous benefactors and received thanks from the board of directors for their initiative and thoughfulness.
And later they discovered how they had been rumbled - by the River Aire.
When they dumped the clock cases in the river no-one had bothered to watch them for a few minutes to see if they'd sink, they didn't, they floated.
And they floated gently down the wide, mucky River Aire, drifting slowly through the Kirkstall Forge complex until they passed ever so gracefully in front of the glass fronted boardroom where, unbeknown to the conspirers, there was a full meeting of the board of directors underway, Saturday being the only quiet day that they could all fully focus on the business in hand.
You can only imagine the look of puzzlement on the faces of the GKN Axles Kirkstall Forge higher enchelon management team as they gazed out of their picture windows at all of their timeclocks floating gently by...
