World-class UMT*

I was hesitant about writing this post, because unless I choose my words quite carefully I could risk leaving you with one or both of two impressions: that I take the medical trauma I’ve been through this past week or two less than seriously; or, worse, that have anything less than the highest regard, respect and gratitude towards the many amazing NHS staff who have been so brilliantly supportive and effective.  Neither of those is the case.  It’s not over yet, but it’s getting better.  And a big thank you to the NHS!

As part of my treatment, I’ve been put on a course of Warfarin.  As I’m sure you know, in addition to killing off any rats that might be lurking in my bloodstream, this reduces the rate at which blood clots, and hence the risk of recurrences of the original problem.  Frequent tests determine how well the drug is doing this, by measuring something called the INR.  Briefly, an INR of 1.0 is normal, 2.0 means clotting takes twice as long, and so forth.  My target is 2.5.  

So, you’ll be wondering, what does ‘INR’ stand for?  Here’s where the fun starts.  You won’t guess, so I’ll tell you.  It stands for ‘International Normalized Ratio’.  (Also the Russian Institute for Nuclear Research, McKinley National Park Airport and Indian Rupee, but let’s stick to the point.)  So if you want to know how fast your blood is clotting, just have your international normalized ratio checked, okay?

I’m not totally against jargon – it can be a useful form of shorthand – but I do prefer that it bears at least a smidgeon of connection to the concept it represents.  The roots of this particular item are lost in the mists of the early 1960s, the mystery perhaps being how it’s persisted for so long in the face of its patent meaninglessness.  It’s not even a ratio, for God’s sake!  Couldn’t someone, over the decades, have thought to give it a more helpful label?  ‘BCR’ (Blood Clotting Rate), for instance.  

* Utterly Meaningless TLA**

** Three Letter Acronym

Not quite the weekend I’d planned

Right, let’s see.  Can I type?  I know I can’t handwrite; you can’t grip a pen properly with a numb, rigid forefinger and thumb.  Tying shoelaces is a problem too.  And shirt buttons.  My sartorial preferences are going to have to change, temporarily.  But this seems to be working, more or less.  And it must be good occupational therapy.

 

I’d better explain, hadn’t I?  I woke up in the middle of one night last week to find that my right hand had frozen.  Literally  - I couldn’t move a finger, and it was numb and COLD.  I remember thinking ‘that’s strange’, and going back to sleep.  In the morning, the hand was kind of back to normal, but my arm ached every time I moved it.  After a day or so, I thought ‘can’t be doing with this’, so I went to the doctor.  This was 9.10 a.m. on Friday.

At 11.00, I was in an ambulance being whisked off to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, the nearest place where they do vascular surgery.  They used to do it at the Royal Berks in Reading, but the other sort of cuts have put paid to that.  “So they can bloody well run to an ambulance,” said my doctor.  “This is critical.”  I had to agree; there was no detectable pulse anywhere in my right arm.

By 3.00 p.m. I was undergoing a right brachial embolectomy.  I didn’t know this at the time, of course – all I knew was that it was something like what used in car maintenance circles to be called a decoke, with arteries playing the role of cylinders and a scalpel that of a socket wrench.  It was quite complicated, taking nearly two hours as opposed to the expected forty minutes or so.  Apparently my arteries aren’t in the right places.  “Next time,” said the surgeon during a subsequent ultrasound scan, “can you please make sure you read the textbook first.”

I came home on Monday, scarred and knackered but at least (let’s hope) clog-free.  The hand dysfunction I mentioned at the start is, I’m assured, a temporary by-product and will right itself in time.  (They didn’t say how much time, though.)

I’ll report on the actual hospital experience next time.  A cross between ‘The Prisoner’ and a Tony Hancock sketch.

Christmas Card Audit 2013

Executive Summary:

The most significant trends this year have been:

·         An alarming fall in the Animals and Birds count.  Robins in particular have been cut by a staggering 600%.

·         A disturbing new category, which I have felt it necessary to incorporate, is Cute Children.  The card-count (4) does not reflect the actual number (inevitably, double counting tends to occur here).  It is at least twice that, all doing nauseatingly cute things involving puppies, sleds, snowballs, etc.

·         Also, there are a few (3) of which I can’t make any sense at all, so have counted as ‘totally abstract’.  I like this trend very much.

·         Glued-on glitter has tripled, from one to three.  I’d make more of this were it not for the fact that (I belatedly notice) all the cards I sent had at least some glued-on glitter. (It’s hell to hoover up, isn’t it?)

 

The full figures (last year’s in brackets):

 

Snow/Snowmen/Snowflakes:               6 (2)

Santas/Reindeer:                                  4 (3)

Animals/Birds:                                     4 (17)

 (of which Robins:                               1 (6))

Landscapes:                                         7 (6)

Boats:                                                  0 (0)*

Nativities/Wise Men/Angels:                4 (4)
Christmas trees/Baubles:                      5 (5)

Comical:                                              1 (1)

Puddings:                                             0 (0)*

Cute Children                                      4 (0)

Totally Abstract:                                  3 (0)

*These will be eliminated from the next count, unless there’s a resurgence of boats and puddings.  I have no strong feelings about this.

 

Special categories:

 Homemade/designed:                          4 (5)

Cards with glued-on glitter:                  3 (1)

Ecards:                                                 1 (1)

Wonderfully weird:                             3 (1)

 There is no Card of the Year award this year.  The overall quality of cards is so much higher that it’s impossible to choose any single one.  All have done well, and all shall have prizes (purely metaphorical ones, you understand).

 

The best-laid plans…

New Year’s Eve is a time for looking back and forward; or, in this case, neither.

We were supposed to cross the triangular village Green to N’s house, for nibbles and vodka shots, at about half-six.  I’d then go back to the rented cottage to peel potatoes and turnips and heat up two or three haggises (haggi?) in time for a late supper, for somewhere between five and fifteen people.  I’d thought ahead, even brought my own masher for the tatties’n’neeps just in case the cottage didn’t have one (it did).

Around eight-thirty, it became evident that this wasn’t a plan any more.  The nibbles were running out, so we dashed back over the Green for an extra pork pie and a few more bottles.  At this point, the plan swerved into a visit to Kate and John’s house round the corner, where their son was running a tiny disco in his bedroom: only room for about five people to dance, let alone fifteen.  So fifteen of us danced.  The haggi were receding into the future.  I think it might have been around this time that I uttered my first profundity of the evening: “The Best Plan Is Not To Have One.”  Or something like that.

I got into a deep musical conversation with John, leading up to the crucial question: “So, what’s your favourite album, Tim?”  I was about to explain solemnly that it was Petra Haden’s a capella version of ‘The Who Sell Out’, and why, when he looked at his watch.  “Ah.  Excuse me.”

I think I heard a distant shout of “Kate!  Get your fiddle!  Now!”, but I can’t be sure because the next thing I knew I was about four places back in a Pied Piper’s procession across the Green towards our cottage.  John was strumming to Kate’s exuberant fiddle-playing, and everyone was doing that side-to-side splay-legged arm-flapping walk-dance that you can only do when intoxication and euphoria exactly coincide and merge into a perfect moment, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Just as we reached the space in front of the cottage, the church bells started ringing the Year in, riotously, joyously blending with our music (I think there was singing by then), and twelve struck – a momentary reflective pause – before Auld Lang Syne was sung and someone suggested we nip across to the pub for “Just the one.”

The haggi have been frozen, puir wee sonsie beasties, possibly to be regenerated around 25^th January.

 

 

 

 

Festive Greetings!

I probably won't be on here again until the New Year, so just to say Happy Festivities to all my blog pals, and anyone else who might happen to pass by.

Oh, and I receive this cheering message from Blogger every time I access it ...

... so can do no more than reciprocate their sentiments.

The Right Way Up

Here’s a pyramid.

 

 

 

The base is when you were born, the apex is when you’ll die.  You have no choice but to climb the pyramid, through inexorable time.

The substance of the pyramid is your potential – what remains for you to achieve?  As you climb, your potential will inevitably diminish; that’s the way pyramids work.

* 

So think outside the pyramid.  The higher you climb, the more you see.  And maybe by breaking off chunks of rock and throwing them, you’ll be able to change what you see.  (Sometimes they will bounce off other pyramids and come back.)

Of course, the worth of the climb will depend on how you do it.  You can go up the craggy, rough-clad outside, which will be hard but will increase your field of vision and focus your choice of chunks to throw; or you can crawl up the narrow inside tunnels, which may be easier but you won’t see so much, except through the occasional passageway that might lead to the outside.  Difficult to aim accurately through those though.

If you’ve chosen the outside path you can probably duck round a corner to a different route up (pyramids have four facets).  And of course there are many forks and turns in those tunnels too. 

Like the Pyramids of Giza, this metaphor is starting to crumble, so I’ll stop.  For now.

Can I be forgiven...

... for misreading the last word of this local paper headline?

Marx was right(ish)!

Bee said to me this morning: “I think I ought to stop buying from Amazon.” 

I agreed, which was easy for me as I hardly ever do.  (I only go there once all other avenues have been explored, usually for obscure stuff that it’d be hard to find anywhere else.)  But that wasn’t her point.

Later in the day, I read Carole Cadwalladr’s exposė in the Observer of the near-slavery working conditions in their Swansea warehouse (which I already more or less knew about).  That was Bee’s point.

I accept that, obviously.  But my extra point is concealed in an opinion lurking early in Cadwalladr’s article.  “Amazon is successful for a reason.  It is brilliant at what it does.”  This is where I part company.  Amazon is actually rubbish at what it does.  Let me explain.

A capitalist system, theory tells us, exists for only one purpose: to produce (duh) goods and services which can be sold in the market, thereby enriching the owners of the system (capitalists) whilst rewarding the producers of the goods and services (workers).  Marx’s argument was that the inherent bias of the system (because power leeches upwards towards ownership and away from labour) contains the seeds of its own destruction, via revolution. 

Well, he’s been proved wrong on that one – so far.  But what he couldn’t have foreseen, of course, was consumerism, household debt, and the internet. The new capitalism is based on the belief that the present isn’t a problem, because you can just push it forward into the future.  My* old metaphor of the inverted pyramid of piss still holds up. 

So that’s why I say that your Amazons are bad at what they do – they just don’t get it.  They don’t get true capitalism, which requires a balance of contribution from each direction.  Henry Ford got it when he worked out that he could use people to make his cars, but he needed to pay them money, so that they could buy his cars. 

*Kingsley Amis’s, actually, but I’ve adopted it as a fond mindchild

(9, 3)

Shed the end of a vigorous song - and a tear.  Monkeys may puzzle no more.

Lockout

We were running a bit late, for reasons I won’t go into.  The curry house was booked for quarter to nine, and it was twenty to, with a ten minute drive in between.  At this point, she performed one of her party tricks.

“Have you seen my keys?”

Several minutes later, “Doesn’t matter,” she said, “I’ll take one of the spares.”  It was a blue one.

(I should explain that Bee’s spare keys are colour-coded – blue for front door, red for back, yellow for patio.)

The curries were quite nice.  As were the Cobras and the entertainment.  (There was a football team in).  Indian restaurants do seem to be quite loud on a Saturday night, don’t they?  We had one of those inaudible conversations, paid the bill, motored back up to the house and unlocked the front door.  Except we didn’t.

I’ve never been locked out of my own house (except that one time I was), even less someone else’s.  The blue key didn’t fit the blue door.  Or the yellow door or the red door or even the green door.  (The Green Door doesn’t exist, despite what Frankie Vaughan might tell you.)

We’re not ones to panic.  In this kind of situation, I almost wonder whether failure to panic is the most sensible reaction.  But we didn’t.  All sorts of options were considered, culminating in ‘Get a locksmith’.  Ever tried that in a semi-rural location at half-eleven p.m. on a Saturday night?  The solution is ‘Ask a policeman.’

The local police station was closed, of course, but there was a phone by the door, through which we got a couple of numbers.  About forty-five minutes later the super lock man turned up.  He had a magic device which opened the door without doing any damage (I won’t give details just in case any burglars read this blog – but “just as well you didn’t double-lock it”, he said).  Apparently, some locksmiths will smash the lock even if they don’t need to, for the extra revenue.  Not this one.

So then we spent the rest of the night filling in the insurance claim form.

(The keys were behind the radio.  The blue spare key was a red one.)

(There is a lie concealed within this post.  See if you can spot it.)

 

Best laid plans

It’s been an unusual couple of days, which has to be good.  Unusual is good.  About eleven o’clock Wednesday, as I was finishing my cold coffee and mapping out the plan, which entailed all sorts of domesticity, the phone rang.  Well, there’s an event!

Sam, who’s between jobs and delivering cars around the country to scrape a living, was stuck at Reading station, having missed the train to Newbury by four minutes.  (I was subsequently told that the timetables have been shifted forward by four minutes due to the absence of the scheduled leaves on the lines; I’m not sure I believe this.)  Could I help?  Course I could.  Pick you up at Reading station in about fifteen.

If you’ve been to Reading station recently, you probably need counselling.  There’s been a huge cosmetic makeover, which as far as I can work out has halved the number of platforms whilst doubling the time needed to get between any two locations.  (I’m probably being unfair; after all, they’ve only been at it for three years, hardly enough time to break something which was working fine, let alone repair it.)

I go there rarely nowadays, and he even less, so neither of us was particularly aware of the various  ‘pick-up’ or ‘drop-off’ points.  We had a hilarious series of phone conversations – “What can you see?”  “Cars in a car park.”  “I can see a pub called, um –“  “You’re in the wrong place…” “So are you!” – before we finally hooked up and set off for Greenham Common.  We had a really good chat, which wouldn’t otherwise have happened. 

Next day, Bee phoned me to let me know that someone had done a bit of road rage and seemed to want to reverse into her as she was parking, so she’d switched on her hazard lights, seen the aggressor off and caught the train to London.  When she got back six hours later, the hazards were still on, but the car battery  wasn’t.  She called the rescue people and spent some time wandering round Waitrose until they called back to suggest that she’d best be getting a taxi home. 

The taxi driver, on learning of her predicament, suggested that, instead of taking her home, he used his jump leads to start her car.  Naturally, she snapped this offer up.  He then thought he’d better follow her, just to make sure she didn’t break down on the way.  I don’t know yet whether he made any charge, I’ll find out; I suspect not.  Aren’t people decent?

The other good news is that Waitrose now do ossobuco cuts of veal, so that’s Saturday’s dinner sorted.  It does mean that I’ve had to buy a pack of the despised saffron, but hey! One in ten years is pardonable, innit?  Not even I would put turmeric in a risotto alla Milanese.

Who knows?

Yes thank you, I’ve had a nice blogbreak, and flushed out a few self-inflicted misconceptions, such as that there were categories – rants, raves and trivia – into which each post had to exclusively fall.  Hence the changed headline.  So here goes.  Put this into a category of your own choice, if you like; though I’d rather you didn’t.

I was going to spend a lot of time and effort in researching some answers, but it’s too late (in every sense), so instead here are ten questions.

1.      What proportion of current cabinet ministers are Old Etonians?

2.      Of these, how many are women?

3.      What proportion of the population are Old Etonians?

4.      What proportion of the population are women?

5.      How many current cabinet ministers inherited their wealth?

6.      Of these, how many are women?

7.      How many current cabinet ministers have worked for their living?

8.      Of these, how many worked outside the fields of public relations, law, or media?

9.      Please rate the following qualifications for a politician: rhetoric; forcefulness; logicality; consistency; empathy.

10.  Why can’t a woman be more like a man?

Farewell to a good old friend

Graham Livermore, who died last week, was the trombonist in Dave Anthony’s Moods throughout their existence.  He was also, I think, my closest friend within the band.  All 1960s groups had their internal frictions and ours was no exception: it’s unlikely that eight randomly selected personalities are going to get on, all the time, all together.  So alliances would form, shift, split and realign.  But Graham and I, I like to believe, stuck together.

He was a talented musician; nobody who heard him would question that.  He could play anything you put in front of him, reproduce by ear a tune someone might hum or play to him, and (dare I say) improvise more thoughtfully than anyone else in the band.  His solos on ‘Summertime’, which became his showcase number, were always melodies in their own right – sung from the soul, as it were – and I don’t think I ever heard the same one twice.

These qualities were, I suspect, not fully appreciated, by either his audiences or his colleagues, because Graham was the antithesis of a showman.  The one time he had a crack at ‘mak show’, somewhere in the bleak Midlands, a stupid girl grabbed the end of his slide and did some damage to his trombone.  Typically, he laughed it off, forgave her, got it fixed and carried on.  I don’t think I ever saw him angry.

In Italy, we’d share rooms at whatever pensione we fetched up in.  At our base camp in Milan, we evolved a system whereby the speakers were either side of the two beds, so each of us got his fair share of the stereo.   We listened to one another’s music: I brought ‘Smiley Smile’, he brought Ornette Coleman.  Later (once we’d been told to shut down the noise), he would use a set of coloured crayons to draw exquisite abstract visions, which he’d then screw up and throw away.

I haven’t caught the best thing about Graham, which was his dry, sometimes almost undetectable humour.  Once, after listening to Coleman’s ‘Double Quartet’, he looked across at me and, with a straight face, enquired “Why do they play like that?”  Another time, he pointed out that you could catch Coltrane, Davis and the rest repeating, recycling, the same licks in their solos.  “I do wish I knew what they were,” he remarked.  

When I was between marriages in the late eighties, we briefly became close again.  He hadn’t changed in the intervening twenty years.  He’d grown a lot of hair and beard, and was living in his parents’ house in what some might consider squalor.  It didn’t matter to me.

I spoke to Graham once, on the phone, about three years ago.  We had a nice little chat about music.  He was, he confessed, “a bit stoned.”  He spent his time, he said, making sculptures out of waste materials, which he hung from the ceiling. 

“They’re all different,” he told me.  I believed him.

That’s enough, for now

When I started blogging, five years ago, it was from two motives.  Firstly, I’d recently lost my wife, and although the support from family and friends couldn’t have been stronger, I felt a need to reach out in new directions.  Secondly, I saw it – blogging – as an opportunity to exercise what I know to be one of my skills, writing.

Both of these aims have been more than achieved.  Through blogging, I’ve met many delightful people with whom I would never otherwise have had contact.  I’ve even met several of them face to face.  And, modesty aside, I know that I’ve been able to write, occasionally, some pretty good stuff – which would otherwise have been confined to the fading pages of a notebook to be read only by me.

So it’s been a good experience.  But I’m moving forward in my life.  So I’m going to take a break from blogging.  My ambitions are moving elsewhere.  Writing will certainly figure, but not here.  So will music, which I’ve shamefully neglected for too long.

I’m not disappearing in any sense – continue to expect comments!  In fact, I might become a comment pest…

Oh, and me being me, I’ll probably change my mind tomorrow. 

A warning re some nasty malware

I've been away, in several dimensions, about some of which I'll update you later, but in the meantime I need to share the following with everybody.

Last Saturday, something calling itself  ‘Antivir*ouss Sec*urity Pro’ (I have deliberately garbled that name, you can guess the real words) appeared uninvited on my computer.  I have no idea how it got past my security filters – I suspect it somehow piggy-backed on a software update.  I’ll try and research this further.

Anyway, it immediately ran a ‘scan’, which reported 23 supposedly corrupt files which it couldn’t fix.  It then started to report apparent invasions, attacks etc. which it also couldn’t fix.  Finally, it effectively blocked my access to the internet, by advising me that the site I was trying to access was suspect and could damage my computer.  This included my home page, Wikipedia, and Google.  If I clicked the ‘continue anyway’ button, it got worse – I won’t scare you with the details.

At every step, I was told that I had to upgrade my protection, by giving them money and card details.) Naturally I declined to do this.  I tried to uninstall it, but it seemed to have craftily hidden itself away so as to make this impossible.

This thing is evil!

I called my software support service, who were aware of this Trojan.  I was advised that the only safe way to get rid of it is to reset the computer to ‘factory settings’.  You have to make sure you have a full external back-up of personal files before you do this, because you’ll have to restore them, along with everything else that didn’t come with the computer when you bought it.  (I started at 2.45 today and have just finished.)

This is obviously a seriously malicious bit of malware.  I don’t know how you can avoid it, but just thought I had to alert you to its existence.  If I find out any more about it, I’ll let you know – please do the same.

As an update, my brilliant brother has provided the following guide to how deal with it if you do get it:
http://malwaretips.com/blogs/antivirus-security-pro-removal/

 

They’re closing in on me!

Since I posted this over a year ago, the range of targeted adverts has narrowed drastically.  No more solar panels, female fashion accessories or baby buggies.  No, now they’re homing in on the fundamentals.  I am desperate for life insurance, private health insurance and payday loans.  And Amazin’ are even more convinced of my need for yet another copy of ‘The Essential Jerry Lee Lewis’.  (Can’t have too many of those, can you?*)

Isn’t it good when you see technology working as it should?

The spam is even more impressive – I now know that I need ophthalmic treatment (true), in Dallas Texas (less true), and that several effusive admirers of my blog would love to enhance certain aspects of my anatomy.**

But this morning brought a real delight.  Yesterday afternoon, I’d booked transport to Jersey, for Christmas with my relatives there, with a small, very customer-friendly airline.  They try so hard, you almost feel sorry for them, because in my inbox was an offer, as a new customer, of a discounted Christmas break, in Guernsey.

* I may just have given myself a theme there for tomorrow’s post.

** I’m not convinced.

 

You can’t beat a good cliché!

Len Deighton once put into the mouth of one of his characters the thought that the cliché was a much-maligned means of instant communication.  (‘Billion Dollar Brain’, I think it was.)  But the character was, if I remember correctly, the baddie.

The trouble with clichés is that they almost always get drained of any meaning or relevance once you look behind them.  Let’s take the current favourite, here in British politics:

“We are going to fix the roof while the sun shines!” 

This boils down to “We’re going to save some money, because another crippling economic crisis is going to happen and we need to be ready.”  There are a few things wrong here. 

First, and most obviously, fixing roofs in sunshine calls for a guaranteed spell of fine weather.  (As it happens, the roof of the house opposite me is being fixed, but it’s been raining for a couple of days, so they’ve stopped.  Luckily, they got the felt installed, otherwise water would presumably be dripping into the bedrooms by now.) 

Secondly, you need to make sure the walls can bear the weight of the new roof. 

And thirdly, using this cliché equates to admitting that ‘There Will Be Rain.’  In other words, we can’t control the economic weather, we can’t stop it raining when it chooses to.  This is such an abject confession of political failure that you have to wonder where they keep their brains.  Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!  It’ll come back to haunt them.  And bite them in the bum.  I don’t believe it!!

Okay, one more, which I haven’t heard recently (Ed: you will, Tim, you will):

“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

I can’t be bothered to deconstruct this one right now, just to say it boils down to “The end justifies the means.”  Hmm, heard that somewhere before.

Alien Invasion

It had been a slow morning, and I was starting to wonder how I’d fulfil my self-imposed daily blog quota.  I hadn’t even been out of the house, except down the paper shop (and there’s rarely any bloggable material in that trip).  I’d done a bit of housework, including ironing (ditto).  And though the newspaper and the radio contained several rantable idiocies as usual, my rant mojo seems to have gone a bit limp lately, and besides, I did one yesterday.

Just after lunch, I went outside to put the wheelie bin out.  When I came back, I noticed that the back door, and some of the surrounding brickwork,  was covered in ladybirds.  And I mean covered.  I didn’t do a precise headcount (carapace count?), I’m not quite that dedicated, but there must have been, ooh, sixty or seventy.

It was the first time I’d seen a ladybird all year, indeed I’d been wondering about this, especially compared to last year when they were around for days on end.  Just when you’re pondering whether the lack of a single ladybird can be worked up into an entertainingly informative blog post (Ed: prob not), seventy turn up at once, a coccinellidaeous flashmob.  I can use this, I thought, and went inside to get the camera.  I noticed that several had already made their way into the kitchen.

Just then the phone rang, as a result of which I had to do some business on the internet involving aeroplanes, so it was an hour before I could make my way out again, camera in hand.  Guess what, they’d all gone!  Well, there were about four left, to convince me I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.  Oh well, I thought, another blog idea gone carapace-up.  (Or down.  Or something.)

I remembered the ones who’d snuck into the kitchen.  Gone too.  I’m not particularly paranoid by nature; but I will confess that I went up to check the bedroom.

 

I’m a bit cross

 Now that you’ve opened this post, I can expand on that – I’m fucking fuming!  How much lower can that bunch of filth-brained scumbags lower themselves?  (Just in case you hadn’t guessed, I’m talking about the Daily Mail.)  How dare they slander a good man (read his biography) in that scurrilous way, purely in the hope that some of their lies and innuendoes will rub off on his son, twenty years after the father’s death?

Congratulations, Dacre, you have shown your true colours.  Cameron can wriggle and squirm all he likes, but this may just have lost him the election.  You have to wonder at the stupidity, don’t you?

The Mail claims, by some kind of weird osmotic process, to speak for something it sees as ‘Britain’.  If this is the case, then I have to say that I, too, hate ‘Britain’.

Wild in Wales? Not sayin’

On reflection, I don’t think I should tell you too much about that balmy summer evening in the tiny Welsh seaside village of ■■■■■■■■ back in 1993.  We were young (I was only 51) and foolish, and indiscretions were all too easy.

So, I’m not going to write about the note that was left on the cottage door (“Where are you, you bastards?  We’re THIRSTY!!!”), or the rushed curry and the leap over the wall to the pub next door, or the intense conversation, some while later, possibly concerning the disjunction between divergent views (one English, one Welsh) of contemporary Welsh art which narrowly evaded damage to both artists and artworks.  Nor am I going to write about a brief decamp by a few parties to the (closed) restaurant across the road, for music, dancing, wine from the cellar and nearly forcible separation of inappropriate pairings; nor the bemused expression on the face of the bartender back in the pub when asked, at half-one, whether they were still serving; nor about the difficulty, sometimes, to tell the difference, by sight, between whisky and brandy, and the consequences.  Especially, I’m keeping quiet about the insistence, in the face of adamant dissuasion, by one party at about three that it was perfectly all right to drive the mile back up to their caravan because “I drive best when I’m drunk; besides, I really enjoy it.”

Finally, I’d better not mention the cliff walk next morning, and how one party was unable to partake for, let’s say, annular reasons, whilst another mistook a low-flying coastguard biplane for a high-flying eagle.

No, best draw a veil over all that.  Apologies to those readers who were anticipating something salacious.  You had to be there.