Category Archives: General

The Tricolore Still Flies Proudly

This afternoon I sat down at my computer and scrolled through the news feed on Facebook. I was met with a stream of blue, white and red. So many of my friends showing horror at what has happened in Paris and solidarity for a city once again in mourning.

It is just a little over 40 years since I first saw at close quarters the effects of terrorism. I was privileged to meet several of the survivors of the IRA’s cowardly attack on the Caterham Arms.  On this side of the channel we had decades to get used to indiscriminate and cowardly attacks by extremists. We refused to allow it to change our lives. We still went to work, we still went out to the cinema or down the pub. In the end the “armed struggle” achieved nothing beyond robbing thousands of families of their loved ones and entrenching hatred.

Sadly, yet another bunch of the crazed and the self-obsessed fails to learn and understand an important lesson of history – terrorism doesn’t work – it cannot work if the target refuses to be terrorised.

To those who support or harbour these evil people – you will fail. No matter how many times you attack us we will not scurry away and hide. We will not give in to you.

To the people of Paris, once again nursing their wounded and burying their dead – we feel your pain. We weep with you. We stand by you.

Vive La France.

Dear Tossers …

My poor old website has been off air for a while.

Turns out that some scrote had down what’s called a code injection, which puts a load of shit into the files to redirect people to sites selling porn, or viagra, or mail order pigs for the discerning prime minister.

Well, well done, arsehole. You failed. Now stop wasting everyone’s time and get a proper job.

An Old Queen Writes to One’s Loyal Subjects

One is pleased that, today, one becomes the longest serving queen on this website. I am aware that my long years of being driven around in posh cars from one palace to another has been an honour and a privilege for you. I put my extreme longevity down to never having had to do a hard days work and lots of nice dinners.

To celebrate this auspicious occasion I have formally opened the new coffee tuk-tuk at Salfords Station, the Third South Park Sea Scouts sailed their inflatable all the way across Earlswood Lower Lake and the Parish Council held a special session to do loads of sycophantic bum-kissing.

May Gord Bliss You Awl.

Scottish Power

We’ve had an account with Scottish Power since we moved here. It was one of those tariffs where you spread the cost over the year so that you don’t get any nasty surprises.

In March they dropped my payments by thirty quid a month. Naively, I trusted that they knew what they were doing. Clearly they didn’t, because three months later they whacked them back up by sixty quid a month. Exactly the sort of crap I wanted to avoid.

I was given a change over date of 13 July, so when I saw that they’d taken a slab of money at the beginning of July and then at the end I sort of reasonably assumed that they had taken their final payment and closed the direct debit. I was wrong to trust them there as well. Turns out that they had got the meter reading from my new supplier on 12 July and took 16 days to apply only the gas reading to the account and take the money. The electricity reading apparently takes an excruciating 25 days for them to process.

So then the phone calls chasing payment start. First thing on Wednesday morning when I’m at work. I politely tell them that I can’t deal with things when I’m at work and follow this up with an email to the same effect. Doesn’t stop them calling me twice more that day. That night I fired off another email, this time to their chief executive. Thursday is a doozy – no less than five calls, on my mobile, during working hours, despite them having been expressly told that this was not acceptable.

It wasn’t until Friday afternoon that they finally stopped calling me.

And the response from the CEO’s office? A rather half-hearted apology which fails to answer a LOT of the questions and a “goodwill” gesture of a measly thirty quid.

Do NOT deal with these people.

Walter Palmer & Cecil, The Lion

Oh, what a pain it must be – overnight you become the most hated man on the planet – well, the bits of the planet that have access to 24/7 news.

Wanker Palmer must be ruing the day he took a high power bow and arrow, shot a beautiful and majestic creature, tracked it while it slowly died and then skinned it and cut its head off. He now says that he regrets it and blames the fact that he shot a protected animal on his guides. It would be more accurate to say that he regrets being caught out and the effect it is now having.

This is far from the first time that this odious fuckwit has killed for “sport”, and there is a certain joy in watching public opinion systematically destroy him and his livelihood. For Wanker I have no sympathy, but adding to the sadness is the fact that some innocent people working with or employed by this arsehole are going to lose their jobs as a result of the public outrage over his sick and twisted idea of fun.

Coffee at Dawn

It’s so nice, now and then, to see the British public stick two fingers up at the big corporations and support the little fella!

I travel to work every day from a small(ish) station – out of the rush hour it has about two trains an hour. Several years ago an enterprising young man set up a little coffee stall there. He pays a ground rent and runs it out of the back of a converted Tuc-Tuc. He has a steady stream of customers in the early morning.

Recently the owners of the pub next to the station gave it a complete makeover. Part of the new image is that they open early in the morning to serve coffee – calling themselves the “commuter’s choice”.

About a month in and I have yet to see the pub with a customer while coffee man has a queue!

Nora Al-Daher is a silly cow

Today’s poster girl for the Somebody Else’s Fault Syndrome that has screwed this country is this pathetic spoilt childling.

She it is who managed to piss two million quid up against a wall in the Ritz Casino and is now suing them claiming that they shouldn’t have let her do it. The poor things says that she’s a gambling addict and that the nasty Ritz Casino egged her on and shouldn’t have taken her money.

I wonder if there is anyone in this country who, hearing her story, is really going to weep for her. Two million smackers to most of us is a bigger house and a retirement bond, not an evening of cards.

I speak from experience of battling addiction. I’ve successfully beaten both alcoholism and ciggies. When I was curing my liver I deliberately stayed away from pubs and off-licences. Dealing with nicotine withdrawal I was quite calculating in not standing next to the tobacco counter in Tesco and waiting for the magic doors to open just to catch a glimpse of the forbidden fruit therein.

If this rich bitch had been serious about dealing with her supposed gambling addiction then what the holy screaming fuck was the stupid mare doing in a bloody casino. Besides which she is more than sufficiently minted that she could afford to have hired a professional nagger to remind her just how bastard stupid  she was being.

She doesn’t need sympathy from the Courts – she needs a bloody good slap!

A queue to a kill

Standing waiting in Sainsburys this evening I can quite understand why people occasionally go crazy ape batshit and want to kill as many of their fellow human beings as possible.

Every now and then you really do pick the wrong till.

Tonight we had Mr Pissed-out-of-his-head, probaby on cheap cider, rumaging through his carrier bag to give back the half bottle of own-brand gutrot scotch because he hadn’t got enough money.

As if he wasn’t enough of a life-thief there was the simpering numpty and his girlfriend. He had stood there for a full five minutes fondling that box of battered cod fillets only to decide, just when the till tart has started ringing his stuff up, that he didn’t want the battered cod fillets in the blue box, he wanted the battered cod fillets in the red box!

It’s been a long day …

Merry Christmas!

It’s something of shock, checking this site, to realise that, aside from posting up the works lotto entries now and then, I’ve only made one post this year. (And that was to have another go at the Catholic Church – a habit I must keep under review as, for some strange reason, they seem to have elected a genuine Christian as Pope. Watch this space!)

My absence from the blogosphere may have something to do with it having been something of a difficult year.

In January I picked up the tab for forty years of forty a day and was diagnosed with emphysema. Basically, the message from that was that I’ve lost about a quarter of my working lung capacity, that I will spend the rest of my life using inhalers and that I needed to give up smoking if I wanted to see the other side of sixty.

In March we both gave up smoking, with all the psychological and physical problems that that can entail – I’m still *whisper* stone overweight, but at least I only get the cravings once a week or so.

On top of that, in the second week of April I fell over in Reigate, broke my arm and was off work for a month. Get back to work and there’s the most mahoosive “reorganisation” which has led all sorts of people to suffer all sorts of stress.

While this is all going on there are health problems elsewhere putting enormous strain on the family.

All in all 2013’s been a bit shit!

That said, I still remind myself on Christmas Eve how lucky I am.

  • I am lucky to have been born in an affluent country.
  • I am lucky to be fit enough to hold down a job.
  • I am lucky to be able to afford decent clothes.
  • I am lucky to have enough to eat.
  • I am lucky to have somewhere warm and dry to live.
  • I am lucky to enjoy decent healthcare.
  • I am lucky to have access to clean water!

Spare a thought tomorrow for all those who don’t get to enjoy what we sometimes take for granted as our birth-right.

Spare a thought for all those who will spend tomorrow working: the doctors, nurses, fire officers, paramedics, police – all those who make our comfortable lifestyle work.

Spare a thought for all those who don’t enjoy basic human rights.

Wherever you are tomorrow and whatever you’re doing – Merry Christmas.

A typical bank holiday?

I didn’t actually fancy going out today. It was windy and rainy this morning and a day slumped in front of the telly seemed to beckon. Very damned glad we did go, because we found an absolute gem.

I was looking for somewhere we could go that wasn’t too far and we could take some interesting pictures. After a bit of Googling I found the website of Painshill Park. It’s only about 20 miles away and I thought we might get some decent piccies of flowers.

Now, we’ve both been past this place LOADS of times and never even realised it was there. What we found was, simply, the best seven quid I’ve spent in many a year. It’s not often I go back to the ticket office to say how good a place is. Today I did. Highly recommended.