Phases; and phrases.

I have often thought that all human life, all the experiences of a varied, full, sometimes too exciting life: can be explained or catalogued within phrases and sentences which are self-explanatory:-

• Your application has been approved, can you join the vessel Pacific Reliance in Liverpool?
• ‘Play the drums? Me? Of course I can play the drums; Hic!’
• ‘For better, for worse, in sickness and in health……’
• ‘You have a healthy son’
• ‘Your new son and your wife are both fine.’
• ‘We shall call her ‘Alice.’
• ‘You need to accept that your wife is very, very ill…’
• ‘Your wife can go home with you today.’
• “its just a short trip into Zambia, then on into the Congo; some friends of a mate of mine need some expert advice on High Voltage Switching. Its perfectly safe, there aren’t any problems where you are headed.’
• ‘All you have to do is visit the Hwange Power Station in Zimbabwe for the mandatory Tender Site Visit.’
• ‘and here is my Weapons Licence, and the balance payable so I may purchase and carry the legally-authorised revolver so chosen. I guarantee that I shall only use the weapon either in target practice at a registered gun range; or in defence of myself and my family’
• ‘Your grandson Marco was born ten weeks prematurely.
• ‘No worries, Marco is fine; he’s the noisy one in the corner.’
• ‘Your wife needs treatment, as was shown by her dissappearance, and you need to agree to commit her immediately!’
• ‘Well, Mr. Cunningham; we removed all the mass of the sarcoma; and we are delighted to state that it was found not to be malignant. Sorry about the two-foot long scar across and down the front of your body!’
• ‘Cystic fibrosis is a life-threatening disorder that causes severe damage to the lungs and digestive system. Your brother has about a week to live.’
• ‘Your MRI was carried out this morning; your Doctor will know the results in about ten days.’

Cheers!

‘containers must hold no more than 100ml’

I travelled down to Stansted to meet up with my eldest grandson, who had travelled up from the South-east segment of London with his Dad and Mum so I could catch up with how much I had missed since last seeing him at Christmas. The journeys back and forth were routine, and of course short; my time with my son and my grandson was limited because of the need to return to the airport early: but it was a magic time for a thoroughly-chuffed Grandad.

The magic time was diluted by the ritual humiliation doled out in generous quantities by the Dept. Transport’s Airport Security Gestapo, all of whose employees have been taught to ignore the common English words such as ‘Please’, instead relying on a imperious beckoning of a bent hand to signify that the culprit should walk through the ceremonial  punishment arch (metal detector); after which you are subjected to a pat-down search which came pretty close, in my case anyway, to being a classic case of common assault. If the prospective traveller says anything at all to respond to this gross invasion of privacy and personal space, you are immediately accused of ‘interfering with a lawful search’ and in danger of not only missing your flight, but of actually being detained by this bunch of out-of-uniform Nazi stormtroopers.

A level of security is necessary, when it is known that the murderous fanatics would have murdered their own families as a ‘price worth paying’ to smuggle their explosives on board the target aircraft; but one does have to ask the simple question, ‘How many 74-year-old white Geordie-born bearded Grandfathers have actually been discovered making plans to murder a plane-load of strangers’?

It wasn’t considered appropriate!

As I was busy looking at other things on the busy days of May 6^th, 7^th & 8th; some news items apart from the General Election, more important than others, got missed. So, going back over the acres of newsprint as I looked back just over a fortnight ago, I spotted this item with specific reference to the travails of the forgotten 1400 white girls who were targeted by Muslim rape gangs in Rotherham, and of course who were also so badly served by those who were supposed to protect them.

It may surprise some who read blogs such as this, that the criminally-lax procedures by Rotherham social services alongside the politically-correct Rotherham Police, were not only foreseen but forewarned at least eight years ago. But the man who spoke those prophetic words was not being thanked for raising the profile of those young girls who were so badly betrayed by both the police as well as Social Services, he was being hauled into court on charges that he incited racial hatred. The Party which this man represented was the BNP, a bunch of maverick racists by some accounts, and by others as the inheritors of the Nazi Party of Hitler’s Germany. But what may have happened if, instead of concentrating upon the colour of a man’s skin, the BNP had concentrated upon what was actually occurring as a direct result of the massive influx of Muslims into our Society? Did the speaker state anything which was not true? Did he state anything which has not come to pass? The answer to both those questions is, of course, ‘No he did not!’

When the SNP heavies were flexing their muscles in the Referendum, they found that they could attack their opponents physically, and get away with it. The General Election in Scotland was plagued with reports similar to that which occurred during the Referendum, with Scottish Labour being drowned out by SNP muscle and noise, in a nasty, bullying manner which departs from the usual calm of a British election; mainly because the police stayed well away from any confrontation; probably because the Police Scotland upper echelon has a great deal of sympathy for the SNP.  We saw similar attacks on Democracy in Tower Hamlets, but fortunately four brave men stood up, and Lutfur Rahman was brought down.

I would end this small diatribe by recalling a Hustings meeting in Durham City some five-odd years ago before the 2010 Elections. I wrote about it at the time, and one small sentence has stayed in my memory. When I asked why the BNP candidate had not received an invitation, and had therefore been excluded from the proceedings, I was rewarded with an even thinner smile, and the answer, “It wasn’t considered appropriate.”.

Please note that I am not attempting to ‘whitewash’ (Pun fully intended) the BNP; but I would like our badly-battered Political system to accept that, as they are a legal Party, and that they have as much right as any to place their point of view before an audience; notwithstanding the fascist Left’s attempts to muzzle them.

It truly is amazing what….

…..Twenty-odd Million dollars will buy. You can buy a Sunseeker cruising yacht; you can hire a private island in the Seychelles for three years; you are able to make a substantial downpayment on a private Lear jet: or you can influence the voting of an entire country by funding a huge advert campaign to persuade an entire nation that allowing homosexuals to ‘marry‘ is a ‘good thing’

Tell it like it is.

You will feel sorry if a complete stranger commits suicide by stepping in front of a seven-hundred ton train moving at 95 m.p.h., even if his self-serving death impacts on your life only through a delay to your travel plans.

You are not allowed to state your mind, if you are of the belief that the suicide didn’t want to live any more, to voice this opinion, in public, as this statement may well offend others.

If a complete stranger does commit suicide, you are not allowed to voice any opinion contrary to the majority ‘progressive’ view, which is that we all must instantly ‘understand’ the pressures which forced this person into ending his or her own life; even if this suicidal death was purely selfish, and would have been, if the law had not been altered, a criminal act!

Signed

Gruppenfuhrer Harman

Reichsleiter Sturgeon

ReichsChancellor Cameron

Repeated? True; but worth the read!

One of the foremost pivotal points in the history of Great Britain was the semi-miraculous recovery of 338,226 British and Free French soldiers from the beaches, moles and bombed and smoking piers of Dunkirk harbour in late May and early June 1940 . The leaders of a stricken Britain had attempted, hopelessly they thought; to rescue the shattered remnants of a beaten British Expeditionary Force  before they were either killed or made prisoner of the Nazi Wehrmacht. Under orders, two French Divisions remained behind to cover the evacuation, they were all either taken prisoner or killed. The hundreds of small ships, cabin cruisers, skiffs, launches, even a lumbering Thames barge, they were all marshalled by the Royal Navy; some came crewed by owners, many had volunteers at their helms. They came from all over, they motored across the Channel, guided by the larger vessels.

The soldiers, those tens of thousands of desperate men of a beaten B.E.F., saw a strange sight as they climbed over the Dunkirk dunes. They saw long lines of patient soldiers which stretched out over the shallow waters, ending at a point which was established by the simple measurement of how deep a man’s body could be immersed in water before he lost his footing and floated away. There the small ships sailed in, loaded their human cargo, most of whom still carried their weaponry, which was then ferried out to the larger ships which stood in deeper water. When they were loaded, the larger ships headed for Dover and freedom, the ‘Small Ships’ returned to find more and ever more from those long, wet, patient lines of soldiers. Destroyers came to moor at the harbour piers to rescue even more of those men who thought that they had been forgotten, some of those same destroyers were sunk by German bombs, but more survived and made that perilous trip. The ‘Small Ships’ made history in those nine days; nine days which transformed a defeat into the strangest of victories. Some of those same ‘Small Ships’ were themselves destroyed, but most made it back to England’s shores, the same as those soldiers;  to fight again and eventually to hear the solemn words of victory after the signing of the Surrender documents at Luneberg Heath.

Operation Dynamo was not a victory; a nation does not and cannot celebrate the total retreat and transfer of a vanquished Army; but it can be represented as the point in our Nation’s history when, through a combination of luck, diligence, sheer guts and bravery; over three hundred thousand beaten, but strangely enough not demoralised, soldiers were rescued from what should have been a ‘killing ground’ by the ‘small ships’, the yachts, cabin cruisers, pleasure steamers who ferried the sodden remnants of the British Expeditionary Force either to the decks of the destroyers, or to the quaysides and dry land of Dover. Some believe that Hitler stayed his Panzers from the final attacks which surely would have bulldozed the beaten British Army into either annihilation or mass surrender; but I believe that the little-remembered Battle of Arras, where the stubborn resistance of British bayonets and a few tanks worried the junior Wehrmacht commanders so much that the attack was slowed until reinforcements arrived. Whichever the truth, the Army survived, the experienced soldiery formed the basis of the new Regiments; and we went forwards with our Empire allies and later the Americans and the Russians, to final victory.

I am not, these days, a religious man; but it is quite acceptable to believe that a ‘Higher Power’ either governed or intervened in the thinking of a few very senior officers of the Royal Navy, which gave them  impetus to state to Winston Churchill that the rescue was not only possible, but vital to the survival of the Nation!

Fairs fair!

‘Troubled’ footballer wins equivalent of 2009 X 10kg kegs of Stella.

States, “I deserved it, my Piracy, sorry my Priority; no, that should have been Privacy was  disturbed, and I feel rectified, or summat similar; like, Hawaaay the Lads: have another one; Man! .”

Band-wagon scramblers, dozens of whom have never been heard of before, tell how devastated they were not to be included in phone-hacking stories.

The Labour Party, vociferous in their condemnation of Murcoch’s News of the World’s hacking exploits, remain strangely silent on the Mirror’s exploits.

Disinfectant container found empty, Palace denies Prince washed hands seventy-five times.

My Sovereign Lady Elizabeth 2nd., Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a Constitutional Monarch. She has met many, many unsavoury figures in the sixty-odd years in her post, and has welcomed them on behalf of Her Governments. Meeting and greeting these vicious murderous demagogues is part of her job description; and unfortunately for her, she cannot discriminate between a Ceaucescu in 1978, the Bahreini King, fresh from washing all the F1 demonstrators’ blood off his shoes, and a McGuiness in 2012.

However, her son and heir, Charles, does not have the same need to greet, welcome, or indeed shake hands with acknowledged scum as a demonstration of anything, whether it is ‘good-will’, forgiveness, political expediency, or indeed absentminded good manners.

The political bunch who engineered this unsavoury ‘meet-and-greet’ must be congratulating themselves on a job well done. I only wish that Charles had asserted his right to throw his tea over the man who had gloated over the murder of Earl Mountbatten, his godfather; his uncle, a naval hero, Problem is, he is probably too well-mannered to do anything which may have rocked the leaky boat christened the ‘Peace Process’.

Writing as an Englishman, and as one who firmly believes that the only place for murderers and terrorists is being the main component in a pile of cremated ashes, I know what greeting I would make to one who may not have pressed the remote which triggered the explosion, but who certainly knew and approved of that murderous act! I don’t believe in  a watered-down Justice, I believe in retribution, in revenge, and in the decimation of my country’s enemies; wherever they may be found.

An Honourable Man?

As I am first and foremost an Englishman, and after that British, I shall not link to the Trident document issued by William McNeillly. But this document’s appearance online should not be dismissed by the Royal Navy as the ‘meanderings of a very junior rating’, and “subjective and unsubstantiated personal views”.

I was able to access this document with two clicks of a mouse, and our enemies, of which there are many, will be able to read it exactly as I have done. The claims in this document are valid, and a Weapons System trainee should be listened to, and worries and stated concerns acted upon with alacrity.

Rating McNeilly has acted honourably, and if he acts as he states, and surrenders himself to the police, he might face a Court Martial, but should not be judged and dismissed out of hand!

Chill-out, its Goddard time-out

We are told by various leaks, rumours and op-ed pieces in the newspapers, that the much-vaunted and eagerly-awaited Independent Enquiry into Child Sexual Abuse would not, nor could not, begin for another six months, due to the disappearance of rubber bands, pencils and many of the Home Office ‘Friends of Lord Janner’ files (OoooPS!) and it would probably last about eight years. Which is about par for the course. If readers can remember, in those dim and distant days long ago, when the Chilcott Enquiry began taking evidence in 2009 about happenings, letters and details of ‘ who promised what to whom, and for what, and when’ of a lunatic war which accomplished little apart from 179 British military deaths and defeat, alongside many more American dead, and vast amounts of British and American treasure which neither country could afford.

The Iraq war indeed was directly responsible for the rise of ISIS, after the total lunacy of a Shia Iraqi Prime Minister given power, which he promptly used to vilify and murder his Sunni opponents; who eventually banded together, set themselves up in a lawless Syria, got mobile under the ISIS flag and promptly beat seven sorts of shit out of a badly-trained, underpaid and cowardly bunch of Iraqi Army regiments, who all entered the race to get the hell out of the Iraqi bases equipped and paid for by American cash. That same ‘Chilcott enquiry’ which, nearly eight-odd years after commencing, is still not ready to publish, and probably never will, because the dynamite which should be revealed, but will never, ever, get to see the light of day!

So, folks, I have come up with a solution which should please the survivors of these predatory perverts, even if it pleases no-one else! The Police and the Home Office should gather all the allegations listed by the survivors, and arrest, with a great deal of publicity, every named person. Every person, named as a suspect in these horrendous allegations should be promptly arrested, with the same degree of publicity, and the process of justice allowed to take its course. If the allegations are proven, justice will be done, and if nothing is shown to be factual, the suspects should be released. True, the attending publicity will probably ruin, or at least greatly damage, such members of the Establishment who have been named, but since we can safely state that there is definitely ‘no smoke without fire’; Justice will have taken is toll, and it will have served them right!

Then the Enquiry can roll along, giving employment to many wasters who otherwise would be unemployed, and of course unemployable!

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving case.

A week, a month, a year, a decade; whatever!

Not long now, Dzhokhar; enjoy your dinner!

Recquiescat in Pace; Olive!

Foreword:-

I don’t care if those little black kids are blind, or uneducated, or are allegedly exhausted from walking miles to get water. It is their Governments’ responsibility to teach, clothe, or cure them, all of them. I don’t want to know if the backward clowns in Bangladesh are starving, or the sons and daughters of the religious fanatics in Pakistan have been washed out of their mud huts by the floods; I really get fed up by the constant calls for £3.00 a month here, or £13.00 monthly (by direct debit, of course) there, or ‘make a covenant in your will for ‘Charity X or ‘DoGooders Anonymous’; or any of the hundreds of so-called charities who leach off the goodwill of the British people.

Does the condition of donkeys in some cess-pit of a country really need a charity based in England to get cash to do, what exactly? Lighten their load? If you believe that; you’ll believe anything! Ever wondered about the cost of half- or full-page adverts in daily newspapers? It is truly expensive. Has the cost of advertising on t.v. or the radio ever crossed your mind? If you have ever given to charity, for whatever reason or cause, the advertising industry rakes it in, and you are paying the bill. You are also paying the wages bill for outfits like the RSPCA, whose chief executive, whose salary ‘is within the parameters of the going rate for major UK charities’, and is set at £160.000.00. Thats more than the bloody Prime Minister gets, and he is supposed to be running the country.

Charity? The whole industry should be renamed as the ‘Cheaters Charter’; or ‘Simpletons; sign here.’ I wouldn’t give them the sweat from my socks; bunch of thieving shysters, just about the whole bunch. A very, very few should survive, but the ones who feed off of taxpayers cash via Government ‘donations’: I’d close ‘em all down, send the entire teams of high-paid ‘executives’ off for an all-expenses-paid holiday on Gruinard Island: that should sort them out!

I write a small eulogy for a true British lady, not that she was treated as such in the final years and months of this doughty lady’s life. Olive Cooke was 92 when she fell, or more likely jumped to her death in the Avon Gorge, near Bristol; where she had lived. She collected every year for the Royal British Legion selling poppies, in memory of her sailor husband, who died in action in 1943. She, unfortunately, also gave from what she had to every sob-story under the sun, every fake charity, every bunch of legal thieves operating under the shelter of the Charities Commission. She gave and she gave, until she decided to give no more, and closed down the direct debits; and then the cabal of bloodsuckers commenced their campaigns of phone calls and begging letters to get ever more cash out of the bank accounts of this weak, elderly lady who had given so much already. She closed the accounts down because she was recovering from cancer, and worried she would be unable to go to her bank to replenish the accounts; and finally, she felt she could take no more, and ‘went forwards toward the wind’.

Farewell Olive, you can rest easy, you have done your best, the ‘charities’ will just have to find another ‘sucker’ to bleed dry, as there was, literally, nothing left at the end for this small, seemingly-indomitable lady.

Dog-gone!

Amongst writers, there is a long-acknowledged truth that fiction cannot compare with the truly fascinating truths of reality. I mean, where in the whole world of fiction would you get a plot where an American film star imports two scrappy, undocumented, unquarantined dogs when he arrives on his private jet to act in a movie in Australia. Australia, where they have television series detailing the efforts of Customs people to stop Chinks, Muslims and other clowns importing rat bodies for comfort food!

Then, in true ‘Big Brother’ fashion, the Immigration Minister states that the actor has fifty-odd hours to remove the two dogs, as in ‘Countdown to Depp dog death deadline’ or else its ‘The Big Sleep’ for ‘Pistol and Boo’ (that is what the bloody animals are named; I didn’t make this bit up either).

So the Opposition then climbs onto its electronic soapbox, and states that the real reason the bloody dogs are in Australia in the first place is becoz of all the austerity cuts in the bloody biosecurity Border Force, mate!

But the best is yet to be told.

An online petition calling on the minister to save the dogs was signed by more than 600 people in its first hour.

The author of the petition, 27-year old Sydney woman Namita Sopal, told Guardian Australia she hoped it would start an online movement to put pressure on the government to withdraw its “cruel” threat.

“I love dogs and I thought it was crazy, so that was my motivation,” she said.

as well as :-

Earlier this month, animal welfare groups called on the environment minister, Greg Hunt, to deny film-makers permits for two capuchin monkeys who were due to perform in the new Depp movie, which is in production on the Gold Coast.

The activists said importing the animals from the US to Australia would cause them significant physical and psychological distress.

I’ve sussed the plot out. Johnny Depp was planning to use Pistol and Boo as ‘stand-ins’ for the two banned capuchin monkeys, and worst of all, he wasn’t going to pay them anything at all!

and the winner is…..definitely not you; mate!

Normally, news of the winners of the BAFTA television awards pass me by like a cloud in the sky, ephemeral and unsubstantial; show business has never concerned me, and the personalities, unless connected with classical music, concern me less. But I would highlight one actor, one mini-series; and through those two examples, perhaps an indictment and even possibly an understanding of why the Press had, speedily, to institute their own Independent Regulator, even though they still have not complied with the demands of that Regulator.

The actor was Jason Watkins, and the mini-series named was ‘The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies’ . If the reader recalls, a young woman named Joanna Yeates, living in a Bristol flat owned by Jefferies was officially listed as ‘missing’, and a huge search was undertaken by both police and volunteers. The police interviewed Jefferies, a semi-retired lecturer and well-known eccentric, but leave, seemingly satisfied with his replies to their questions. Unfortunately, the very image of Chris Jefferies, grey hair askew, waving his hands in the air as he stated that he did not wish to speak to the media, together with a large number of unsupported and slanderous rumours about his character, set the majority of the national and local press into virtual ‘witch-hunt ‘ mode. The bold headlines stated he was a ‘peeping tom’, a full face photo of Jefferies was surrounded by headlines asking if the dead body was hidden next to his flat?

Chris Jefferies was in custody for three days, questioned by detectives, and ultimately released as the police had absolutely no evidence against him, but he was dissected extensively in the newspapers and on television, with the following results:-

He was weird……….Guilty

He swept his long hair in an overcomb, and through a mistaken choice of shampoo, had dyed it blue….Guilty

He was pedantic in the extreme, correcting himself as well as others, just to prove that his knowledge of the English language was better than that of his audience …………..Definitely Guilty.

He had never married……………..therefore probably homosexual and …Guilty

The way he pronounced words and said his sentences was also weird.”….Why bother with a trial; Hang him!

His love of the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti and idiosyncratic pronunciation of place names was almost unworldly……need I say more?

Shortly after the arrest and subsequent release of Chris Jefferies, I wrote a small post surmising that if Mr. Jefferies had any sense, he would be in conversations with solicitors regarding the substantial defamations to which he had been subjected, and I am so glad that he literally took them to the proverbial cleaners, but, and unfortunately it is a big ‘but’; Mr’.Jefferies, that mild, unassuming man, of a typical ‘absent-minded professor’ image, will never, ever be able to walk down a Bristol street whilst being anonymous, ever again.

Jason Watkins did a marvellous job of depicting that ‘professor’ image in that remarkable drama, and both his award, as well as that given the television drama itself were well deserved, but the problem remains; the Press is reluctant these days to burst into black headlines because of the memories of the phone hacking trials, as well as the Leveson Inquiry and their Independent Complaints Organisation; but just give them time, and another nice juicy sex-drenched murder, and then watch what they print about any suspect!

Some readers may be aware that, apart from playing football and cricket when a youngster, I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in any sport. None; nada; zilch interest. As that makes me somewhat unique in my own wider family and local area, I am looked upon as always being a little ‘weird’ myself. Heaven help me if a footballer gets himself killed within five miles of my home! I have also written a novel in which a right-wing politician gains high office in Great Britain. I am truly doomed!

As I wrote at the time on my blog:-

All I would ever say about Chris Jefferies’ life is that I do hope he hasn’t got a copy of ‘Mein Kampf’ on his bookshelf; hasn’t visited the BNP website regularly on his computer, or worst of all been reading the collected speeches of Margaret Thatcher, because he really would be condemned out of hand!

note to politician…..get a sense of humour

There are few illnesses, problems or worries which abound in this small Island Nation of ours, that cannot be treated, or at least made bearable by laughter, by employing our innate sense of the ridiculous. We British know how to make the pompous appear truly sad, the pontificating exposed as charlatans; the duplicitous, the self-righteous shown as they truly are, which is both silly, pretentious and self-serving. But the basics of humour, of what truly makes us laugh, is, unfortunately; undefinable. My eldest brother, dead now some three years, was watching some comedy show on the telly, I  cannot remember which one; and was rocking with laughter; but glancing at me as I sat, stone-faced; “Didn’t you catch that last bit? It was so funny!” My reply was simple; “I don’t get it. To me, that’s just not funny.” And that, folks, is what it is all about. If a comedian’s routine, if he successfully ‘delivers’ to enough people at the same time to make them laugh together; that’s it, he has found the Holy Grail.

Sometimes, it is just the way in which the comic delivers a scripted set written by others, for example the genius of a Tony Hancock in the ‘Blood Donor’ sketch, happy after he has had the routine test pin-prick on his finger; but incredulous when told he has to give a pint of his blood: “A pint! Thats nearly an armful!” With that single phrase,, at around 14.20 into the sketch; the broadcast audience fell apart all over Britain when those words were spoken.

Many, too many in my own humble opinion rely on the rather strange trait of dressing up in women’s clothing, or as the term goes ‘in drag’ to deliver their routines and lines, Apart from meaningful side-glances and speaking in presumably exaggerated terms whilst  delivering their louche, double-meaning and allegedly-comic routines, I presume that the audience is supposed to ‘get’ how ‘edgy, how daring’ their words, gestures and jokes really are, and applaud accordingly. One example of this strange ‘edgy’ comedy strain is the comedian Eddie Izzard. I have seen him doing a straighforward comedy monologue, and laughed almost continuously. His routine impersonating Lord Vader in the Death Star canteen is simple genius, and deserves all the applause he garners.

But when this man adopts the cross-dressing act, he leaves me not only stone-cold but puzzled. I am continually asking myself what is he trying to prove? One of the top comedians of the last century, Frankie Howerd, was quoted as saying, ‘once you know what makes your audience smile, or laugh; you have them’. Which is why I am still trying to figure out why Izzard was accompanying Jim Murphy in a campaign walk-around in Glasgow’s St. Enoch’s Square whilst dressed in a fetching black jacket and SKIRT, set off by a red and blue choker scaf. Never mind the neanderthals from Scottish Resistance, what about the ordinary Glasgie’ man, What do you think he would be thinking, in a city where, in a Scottish football match just a few years ago, one of the players ran out on to the field wearing gloves, and was promptly laughed off because he was suspected of being a homosexual?

and on the Seventh Day, He rested.

My fans (all three of them) will testify to the fact that I am no great admirer of Unions, apart, of course, from my own marriage.  The Unions to which I refer are of course the Labour Unions, still going strong in the areas which protect them, such as Transport, Civil and Council Service, some of the Utility providers, such as Gas, Water & Electricity, have a fair Union representation. Apart from the Public Services, which are still strong supporters of the ‘Union’ philosophy and way of thinking, Unions hardly impact the vast majority of British workers. I detest the ‘uniformity’ demanded of Unionised staff, and it is, without doubt, the nearest thing to the Orwellian ‘Groupthink’ yet discovered. If you can’t speak up for yourself, if you cannot decide whether to negotiate your rate of pay before you commence working, or if you, as an Individual, are unhappy with some aspect of your working life, and cannot sort it by yourself; you may wish to shelter under the Union ‘umbrella’, but I believe that that is an abdication of personal responsibility.

However, not everything espoused by Unions are bad, or destructive. Unions have supported the stance that Sunday should be a day of rest for everyone for many years, and, although I myself have been divorced from any sort of organised religion for a number of years, I applaud the stance which states ‘Keep the Sabbath holy’, for every worker needs at least one day away from the grind, a day to rest, to unwind, to meet, know and grow with their families. When I needed a crew, or a whole project, to work on a Sunday, because of emergency or urgent need, I always ensured that the workforce received double time for all Sunday work. because I was asking them to leave their families, or their leisure, on a day when they should have been resting, and an increase in pay was the least I could do.

So when I read of the giant UK Retailer Next stating that Sunday was regarded as ‘just another day’, or otherwise a ‘normal working day’, I believe that British people should boycott indefinitely this moronic bunch of petty bullying pirates, who think they can treat their staff anyway they can, primarily because jobs are scarce, and anyone who states that they will not work on a Sunday can consider themselves redundant. True, the Sunday Trading Act does not refer in any way to a premium pay because of Sunday itself, but there is a silent duty upon employers which states, in no uncertain terms, “You know what is right, so do it!”

Missing, nine million bodies, reward offered!

The photograph below, taken from The Guardian, shows a portion of the St. Petersburg crowd which remembered the ‘Immortal Regiment’; those soldiers who died whilst fighting the Nazi invasion of the then Soviet Russia in WW2. Those placards do not exaggerate, if anything they tend to simplify the facts that Russian soldiers died in their thousands, and their tens of thousands, as the Nazi divisions methodically made war upon an Army whose officer corps had been savagely mutilated by Stalin’s purges, the fruit of a paranoia which nearly sank Soviet Russia. Yes, they recovered, and yes, they returned to wreak vengeance upon the invader, but there is no denying the multitude of Russian soldiers who died during the deadly advance of the Nazis during the ‘Great Patriotic War’.

It is a pity that there is no photograph of the massed crowds viewing a memorial to the estimated nine-odd million Russians who died in Stalin’s purges, pogroms and plain genocides in the late twenties and thirties, when young Josef was just getting started.

As I wrote before, despite Ukraine, the Crimea and Georgia, we should have been in Red Square. But there again, it was, after all, in another far away country!

The working class can **** my *****

A few of the many sets of buzz-words or –phrases popular within Party-political circles is “Are we message-good? Are we on track? Are we reaching our base; our core?” The Party faithful, or ‘the core’, are known to respond to command phrases which fit their belief profiles; but what happens when the Party changes, or alters, and the core doesn’t?

My son, a micro-electronics engineer, works in the automotive industry in the North-East, and a great many of his mainly male work-colleagues give their loyalty to the Labour Party; the “Party of the working Man”. My late eldest brother, my late father, were also life-long Labour supporters, On the map of voting intentions, where I live, County Durham is part of a Labour red block which goes against the vast spaces of Tory blue throughout the rest of England, We are, in reality, a rural area with the vast open moors of Northumberland and of Durham; with the inherited memories of an industrial heritage; of shipbuilding, armaments, coal-mining and steel: but with the emphasis on the ‘heritage’; because the ship-slips and cranes have all fallen silent, the Chieftain & Challenger tank factory is shuttered, the mines have disappeared, and the steel is hanging on by it’s veritable fingertips. But the Labour Party counts its support up here by the bucket-full; the ‘red’ seats are safe from Blyth to Newcastle, from Sunderland south to Durham.

But I do wonder why this ‘tribal loyalty’ still exists,

Make my Day!

It seems as though the attempt to gun down Americans who were simply stating that they preferred that the First Amendment be upheld,  was brought to an abrupt end by one brave sixty-year-old Policeman, who advanced on the threat, killing one terrorist, wounded the second; then, as the wounded clown attempted to reach for a backpack, shot him twice more for being ‘really, really, stupid’!

But there are deeper questions here, which is when and will we see this brave American saluted by President Obama on the steps of the White House; or will this failed attempt to bring the deadly salute to a deadly religion not be the same say, as the salute to a deserter’s parents, or will it be downplayed to a ‘Domestic disturbance’ which somehow doesn’t qualify for a visit by senior Cabinet members such as the Attorney General, who probably would be visiting just to make sure that the two gunmen hadn’t been deprived of their civil rights and liberties without due cause.

And before anyone asks, I really do not believe that Pamela Gellar is a ‘Bigoted Blogger’!

A typical Left-Wing Salute.

One of the many themes engendered by the Labour Leadership during the late Election campaign was that of ‘Respect’. I reckon that they forgot to mention that the ‘Respect’ they were promoting was  a different ‘Respect’ to that understood by the vast majority of Hard-Left agitators and their supporters yesterday in Whitehall

The memorial, unveiled by Her Majesty some two days after that Muslim-inspired bombing carnage struck across the transport systems of London, missed the British Public’s notice mainly because the six-inch high headlines of that carnage obliterated the decency of that Memorial’s existence, but I do think we should see what the ‘Protesters’ actually think of both Decency and the Tory majority!

Taking Liberties?

One of the true differences between our Nation and just about every other nation on this planet is that we have a sense of humour about those in power, those whom we have set above us, and those whom we have selected to govern us.

What other County on this planet has a Queen, a constitutional monarch who has conducted herself with decorum, with dignity, with true honour, who has seen twelve Prime Ministers in the sixty years of Her Reign; and who can also expect to have a cartoon literally ‘taking liberties’ with the Royal Person on the morning of a General Election?

Truly a wonderful country, despite the drawbacks of its political and voting systems; but most of all for the sheer luck of having Elizabeth 2nd as our Monarch!

h/t to The Times for the cartoon

and for Germany, General Jodl signs!

Some seventy years ago, come midnight, the second War to end all Wars came to an end, in Europe at least; the Far East portion lasted a little longer until the Japs saw sense with aces represented by two nuclear weapons back to back. The evil genius which had been Hitler was dead, the Russians were in the suburbs of Berlin; the armoured columns of the Americans, the British and the Canadians were racing towards the Elbe. Most of the German Army was trying to go west, in order to surrender to the Americans or the British; anything to get away from the avenging ferocity which was the artillery and tank columns of the Russian Marshal Zhukov. The war was ending, and it was almost as though Wagner’s Gotterdammerung was coming to reality. The promised Thousand Year Reich was slowly being pounded into the rubble which was all Germany’s cities had become; the adoring crowds at the Nazi ceremonies had somehow dissipated, the cheering was silenced long ago; and all that was left was the signing of the Surrender documents . Our Navies had vanquished the submarines which nearly starved us into surrender; our aircraft had swept the skies clear of the formidable Luftwaffe. The death camps were being discovered and liberated. Our forefathers, nearly all now dead, had vanquished the best trained, the most formidable War Machine on the planet, and it was time to celebrate.

I have a painting as a desktop on my computer, which I lifted from an Air Battle catalogue. and I was explaining to one of my grandsons about the brave boys and young men who flew bombing missions against Germany, whilst the fighter flyers of the German Luftwaffe were trying to kill them, and he asked me a very grown-up question; “Grandad, why?” The only answer which I could give to a seven-year-old boy was simple, “You see, the men who told those flyers to fight were really nasty people, and they had to be stopped!”

Yes, our peoples sang, and yes, they danced; but the ground upon which the dancing took place was soggy with blood!

As a reality check, just see what the younger generation believes why the 8th May was so very important.

Ah well!

From now on, I’ll believe in Muhammad ….

I decided to go to the local Mosque for the first time, to see what it was all about.

I sat down and the Imam came up to me, laid his hands on my hand and said: “By the will of Allah the All Mighty, and the Prophet Muhammad, you will walk today.”

I told him I was not paralyzed.

He came back and laid his hands on me and repeated the same thing. Once again, I told him there is nothing wrong with me.

After the prayers, I stepped outside – and fuck me – my car was gone!

Now that’s a Question!

Over the past six-odd weeks of this seemingly-interminable run-up to the General Election, thousands of interviews have been completed, hundreds of thousands of statements made, simply millions of words printed, read and devoured/ignored by a bemused British populace; unused as we are to even having someone ask our opinion about anything at all.

But in all that time, with all those earnest politicians in semi-shrouded view, with hardly any direct questions asked or answered by anyone, no-one has asked the one question which maybe should have been asked on the first day, perhaps in memory of Charlie Hebdo which, in retrospect, mention of which seems to have disappeared from the headlines and pages with extreme haste..

Dear Mr./Mrs./Ms. Political Party Candidate, Does an ordinary British voter, or even newspaper publisher, have the right to draw and publish a picture of the muslim prophet, whatever he may be called; or otherwise poke fun at a religion, despite whatever anyone else’s religion states?

Vote Early; Vote Often!

I would really like a vote tomorrow. A vote which actually counts. My vote, in this ‘rotten borough’ where I live, which also goes by the unlovely title of a ‘Labour Stronghold’, is overwhelmed and dominated by a tribalistic vote, whether it is for the present Labour candidate; or a gorilla wearing a Red rosette, if that primate was adopted by the local Labour constituency party. It is a proven fact that total political nonentities, who maybe have worked ‘forCunard’ but without an original thought between the lot, have risen to great power in this, our Island Nation, whilst riding on the coat-tails of one political party or another.

We in Great Britain had a chance to swap our ‘First-past-the-Post’ system a couple of years back, in a referendum for an alternative vote system which was backed by the Lib-Dems. This vote was part of their price for joining the Coalition which has run our Government for the past five years. It was decisively rejected by the voting public, partly because the voting public dislikes change, partly because the AV system requires a preference to be stated, and Brits  really dislike someone telling them to do anything which might make them think, or choose; but mainly because, when the possible ballot papers were shown and discussed, the jokes showed how lunatic the system actually was.

Voting for our ‘Representatives’ in Europe is by Proportional Representation, or the d’Hondt system. When I tell you that Mr. d’Hondt was a Belgian lawyer and maths expert, I don’t need to expand any further, as when anyone actually tries to explain his system, they end up with a very bad headache. Biut the main distinction between British and European political systems is that the Europeans vote for Parties, and share the seats out according to the proportion of votes; the British also vote for Parties, but through People. We like to know who we vote for; we obviously vote for the Person as well as the Party. But my problem is that most people in Britain vote for a Person BECAUSE they (the candidate) are associated with a Party, a Party which they associate with the phrase ‘What does this Party offer me?’, so we end up with Government through greed. The common man and woman, through their voting power, have voted to increase their own standards of living, regardless of the long-term interests of the children, and the wider interests of the country. . True, there should always be a ‘social security’ blanket, as a fall-back if a man or woman isn’t working, but, once the rules are made, they are bent sixteen ways from Friday; and we arrive at the ludicrous headlines like this, or this.

Alllow me to give two examples. The British used to control the Iranian (Persian) oilfields through a listed public company. In one year, the shareholders got four million pounds in dividends, the Iranians (Persians) got sixteen million, and the British Government took fifty-four millions in taxation. We were robbing them blind, and distributing the proceeds of that theft in social welfare and political machinations. The Iranians revolted, Mossadeq took over and nationalised the oilfields; the CIA and the British MI5 engineered a coup, arrested Mossadeq and re-installed the Shah, who went on with his own autocratic rule until the mullahs kicked him out, and along came Khomeini and his Islamic revolution. Since that unhappy tale, it has happened over and over again. No despot, no dictator, no autocratic monarch has injured Great Britain as much as the common man.

I used to be employed in a consulting engineering role in the Sewage and Clean Water business. When I state that the control of sewage, and the provision of clean, safe drinking water is one of the basic foundations of our society today, I do not exaggerate. London istelf was plagued with cholera, huge numbers of people died; but once an unkown scientist named John Snow found and isolated the link between contaminated drinking water and cholera, cities began to increase in size, because the plague had been conquered. I was looking after a project to enlarge and modernise a sewage treatment works in South Wales. The expansion had been on the cards since the mid-1940’s, and the associated smell from the overflowing sewage had been making life miserable for local residents for almost as long, but the cash had been pulled from budgets for over thirty-odd years. ‘Low Priority’ was the call, and since the small village didn’t have much political sway, and there were more urgent calls for public money, the existing sewage works just plugged along, the sewage overflowed regularly, and the untreated sewage just ran into the river. Once the Water Industry was privatised, engineering works, expansion, renewal, became the watchword. The sewage works was designed, built and completed, and suddenly, the summer smells disappeared. The money for this expansion came from the same source as before, the user, but instead of taxpayers money being lavished upon projects which would make politicians look good, the cash came from the bills paid by the water user, and was used where it was needed, not where it was politically expedient. Unfortunately, most of the our water industry is now owned by foreigners, and the profits go abroad, but that is, maybe, an argument for an another day.

I hope that my argument now becomes apparent, in that we need a new system of voting, which would reward a voter who had advanced by virtue of his or her education, or by his hard work, by virtue of the fact that one man is not always equal to his neighbour, but deserves a bigger say in how his Country is governed. We need a system which would allow a breed of politician who would not be afraid to state that it would use taxpayers money to invest in Infrastructure projects without the stain of being politically useful. Being of a logical frame of mind, I would propose  a system which does not rely on mathematics, or abstruse formulae to determine who sits in our legislature, but would allocate votes according to individual knowledge and ability. One basic vote would be allocated to everyone. A second vote could be for the completion and award of a degree, but only certain degrees such as in science, or engineering, or mathematics; no silly ‘media studies’ allowed. A third vote might be awarded for foreign work and travel, excluding all holiday journeys. A fourth vote may be reserved for a person who has never travelled, but who has run and operated a successful business for more than five years. A fifth vote might be reserved for a person who has involved him- or her-self with a Charitable Organisation, with the caveat that nothing more than a small stipend had been received by the charity worker concerned, and that all administrative titles be excluded from such a vote.

I might be charged with being an ‘elitist’ and whilst that may be partly true, which of us can truthfully state that we have never, ever, made the remark or nurtured the thought; ‘and they have exactly the same voting power as I’?

all the news which fits

I have often considered the BBC’s News Department to be always three bricks short of a wall, and this morning’s offering tends to prove my point.

General Election stories and comment.……………News

Reporting the two ‘thicko’ muslims  attempting to attack a Freedom of Speech rally, shot dead by excellent police marksmen near Dallas…………..News

Italian and Greek navies helping illegal migrant journeys in Med…………….News

Rotherham child sex abuse by Paki Muslim gangs ‘known about for years…………………News

Cases heard in British Supreme Court are now available on Court website…………News?

what comes for us all

For reasons which are purely personal, I was forced to place my wife of some forty-seven years, ill now for many years, invalid herself and unable to move without assistance, into a ‘Care Facility’ about a week ago; and to leave her there in the possibly-tender clutches of others until I get my own medical priorities sorted and hopefully cleared up. I am now faced with appointments and schedules dictated by a faceless and careless NHS bureaucracy, running as we all know and have to accept as ‘the best in the world’ Health Service: which means that I have to be at a certain hospital at that time, and no other; I have to be at the surgery for more ‘tests’, I have to be a ‘free agent’, with the ability to travel or stay without having to arrange competent help for my wife.

So allow me to shed a bright light on how we treat the elderly memories of our lives, those people who gave unstintingly of their own lives so that we might relax on a Sunday, care free and without a worry in the sky. I have three tales to tell, three places which might explain my annoyance, my anger,

E4 shuts down on election day to encourage young audience to vote

When I read the above headline, I had the check the publication date twice, just to make sure that the previous day’s date was not March 31^st. But, unfortunately, not only was this decision newsworthy, it was an accurate description of the political awareness standards of millions of British people aged between 18 ~ 25.

Dan Brooke, Channel 4’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer was quoted as saying:- “Less than half of under-25s voted at the last election so we’ve engaged the most powerful weapon that we have at our disposal to try and boost that number – switching off their favourite TV channel for the day!”

Mr. Brooke, along with his cohorts in the higher echelons of Channel Four’s programming and production, with their presumably vast knowledge of their target audience, have decided that the only way to encourage the people whom normally slump or slouch in front of the flat-screens to actually accept that they live in at least a good replica of a democracy, is to switch off all the re-runs and interminable repeats of all the American garbage which is pumped into their audience’s antennae, and tell them, repeatedly, that it might be a good idea to vote!

Times without number I have heard variations on the basic theme of ‘There will never be any change’ or ‘politicians; they are all the same, and to vote only encourages them’. These lacklustre statements infuriate me beyond belief, for I am a child of the Second World War; I was born in the North-East as the Battle of Britain was being fought in the air over London and the fields of the South-East of England, when Nazi bombers were randomly bombing British cities, when a ruthless dictatorship was attempting to prove, in the prophetic words of King George Sixth, that “Might was right!” To understand my anger, try reading the matter-of-fact diaries of the War, typical of which was that of  Thursday 15^th August 1940, up here in the North-East. We were fighting for our lives in those dark days; and our descendants cannot even be bothered to go out and bloody well VOTE!

My father, along with many tens of thousands more, had volunteered for the British Armed Forces on Day two of the War; my Uncle who served in the Royal Artillery paid the ultimate sacrifice, and is remembered in a sleepy Normandy village. They volunteered, and sometimes they died, so that their grandkids might live, snug in their centrally heated homes; cocooned with their televisions, our computers, tablets, smartphones, and all the other techno-freakery which allows them to photograph someone, and send it halfway around the world in a second: and they have to be reminded to VOTE!

Give me Strength!