Tuppence?

I carried out the general wander around our megamarket this morning and on the list were crackers.

As I scanned the shelves, I noticed that the low fat variety were tuppence dearer than the ordinary, boring, full fat crackers.

What I know about cream crackers you can write on the back of postage stamp and still leave room for this post, but isn’t the fat cut down before these biscuits are baked?

In that case, why am I being asked to pay tuppence more for less?

This is such an outrage I may every well write to my MP, and once again I’m compelled to wonder what would happen if this practice were applied to other industries.

The Motor Industry: For the environmentally aware driver, the standard 4-cylinder, 13cc engine can be replaced by a 3-cylinder, 954cc, at a cost of £1,000.

The Restaurant: don’t worry if you suffer from high blood pressure. All our meals can be prepared with less salt. (There is a 10% surcharge for this service.)

The IVF Clinic: We specialise in twins. If you only want one baby there is a premium of £4,000 to be paid (in advance).

Low-Cost Flights: Our standard charge for hand baggage is £25 and we strongly advise you to take advantage of this because if you travel without hand baggage, we’ll charge you £30.

Hard Work

Heard the one about the MP jacking it in because of the “ludicrous” hours? Laugh? I nearly voted for the Lib Dems.

Claire Curtis-Thomas, MP for Crosby is jacking it in because of the ridiculous hours she has to work. Where any MP gets off calling the work “work” I don’t know, but I’d cordially invite any of them to spend a day with me.

I crawl out of bed at 4:30 every morning because thanks to governmental short-sightedness there are no buses early on a morning where I live so I have to take my wife to work. Well, there are buses, but the first one gets here there 45 minutes early and the second one gets here there 15 minutes late, and in both cases, she has to walk half a mile through dark streets alone.

Thanks again to government’s lack of balls when tacking big business, when I’ve dropped me wife off, I come home, I have half an hour to spare before I leave for work just after seven. I start work at 7:30. I don’t get an official break until 12:30-1245 and then it’s for three quarters of an hour. I pick up the baton for the afternoon, and I work until 6:30 in the evening. I get home most nights about seven o’clock. By the time I’ve had my dinner, and showered, it’s practically time to go to bed because I have to be up again at four thirty.

I spend my weekends catching up on odds and sods of jobs about the house that can’t be done during the week because I don’t have time. I don’t watch TV because there’s bugger all on it to watch, but even if there was, I’d have to record it and hope to find time to watch it over the weekend.

I’m almost 60, I’m working sweatshop hours, longer hours than I did when I was doing the same job at 30 and I don’t knock out £60k+ a year and I don’t have an expense account that reads like an annual lottery win.

Before they start whining about hours, our elected representatives should open their eyes, ears and nose. Look what’s happening around them, listen to real people for once and smell the bullshit coming from Westminster.

The Ig Nobel Awards

Here’s one from the Beeb (I don’t know why I refer so many people to them, they don’t publicise my books.)

The Ig Nobel awards have just been announced and there are some interesting recipients.

A couple from Newcastle University demonstrated that cows with names give more milk. The only problem I can foresee with that is when you have herd of 100 prize Friesians, you’ll run out of names like Daisy, Ermintrude and Buttercup in no time, and you’ll need a hell of a memory to remember them all.

The Ig Nobel Peace Prize went to a team from the University of Bern, Switzerland who researched the question of whether it’s better to be hit over the head with full beer bottle or an empty one. Where did they get the volunteers?

The best one of all was the Public Health Award, going to a couple from Chicago who developed a bra that, in an emergency, can double us as a gas mask (double up pun intentional). The only thing I can see is I hope she keeps herself clean.

You can see the list of awards, which includes the Japanese researchers who discovered that kitchen waste can be reduced by 90% of its mass by using panda crap, here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8285380.stm

What No Chupa Chup

I’m fairly laid back. In fact there are those times when I get so laid back I’m horizontal. Before today I always said the only people who could make me break out in a sweat were the dentist and my bank manager. Well today, I met another.

I had to go to physio for my knee troubles. Unkind souls say my knee problems are the result of begging for money. I say they have more to do with early girlfriends and the damp grass behind the Thorpe Hotel in Leeds.

Whatever their cause, they give me humpty these days and I went along to see what could be done about them. X-rays had proven that there was nothing wrong with the bone structure. I have the most photogenic knees imaginable, so perfect that I could model for socks and shorts.

We (and I’m using the royal we as in me and the medical profession) have decided that the problem lies with the tissues inside the knee.

“Do you mean I should have been buying Andrex instead Tesco cheapo?” I asked.

“It’s not that kind of tissue,” said Cheryl, my physiotherapist.

She decided and I concurred because I daren’t do otherwise, to try a cortico-steroid injection in my left knee.

“This won’t hurt,” she said, which called to mind a doctor taking a liver biopsy about 20 years ago. He, too, said, “This won’t hurt,” whereupon I asked, “then why have you got a nurse pinning me down at the feet and shoulders.

He was lying. It did hurt. So too did the injection this morning. I gritted my teeth and bore the agony of all this anaesthetic and steroid gunge pumped into my kneecap and what did I get for my pains. Nothing. When I was a kid, you got a barely sugar or a chupa-chup lollipop. Now: bugger all.

I lie. I did get something. A sick note for the next three days.

But I wanted a chupa-chup.

Where’s The Off Switch?

A Facebook comment from Danny Gillan (thanks Danny) on the amount of TV he had watched, prompted this piece of nostalgic nonsense.

I don’t watch telly unless there’s a quality football match on (by quality I mean Manchester United v any set of also-rans). Today’s TV is full of crappy reality shows which bear as much resemblance to reality as my novels, American comedies which are as funny as toothache and American detective shows which are basically all alike, followed by their British cloned counterparts.

And when either Strictly or X-Factor come on, it’s time to bring out my riveting DVD of paint drying in the hall.

Last year, Her Indoors coughed up £700+ for a new telly and I can now switch it off in hi-definition widescreen.

As a writer, however, I have dabbled with the square-eyed monster.

About 15 years ago, working with an independent production house, I dramatised one of my unpublished masterpieces for TV, turning it into a five-hour thriller.

After reading the first draft, the producer said, “It’s good but it’s all over the place. Think about the way they put these things together on telly and you’ll see what I mean.”

“Bit difficult,” I replied. “I don’t watch TV.”

“But you must,” he insisted. “How can you hope to write for TV without watching it?”

In a last ditch effort to avoid the inevitable, I asked, “can’t you tell me instead?”

“No,” he said. “I can’t do that. I never watch TV.”

As a footnote, we were eventually invited to a meeting with the commissioning editors with one of the big UK TV stations and we were assured they would go for the idea. A month later, we were rejected and they nicked the idea for an episode of a long-running drama.

Money Mad

According to a report on the Beeb’s website, schools are wasting millions of taxpayers’ money.

The report, from former WHSmith Chief Executive, Richard Handover, cites a couple of examples; the installation of three toilets in a primary school costing £50,000 and another school which spent £35,000 buying a £1,000 photocopier.

This is the kind of public spending I like. I’m thinking of offering them 1,000 copies of Twaddle from DW at the knock down price of £1,000 per copy. It should make good A Level study material.

Mr Handover proceeded to blow his cred’ out of the water by suggesting the axing of 40,000 jobs. “Useful, blue-sky thinking,” said a spokesman. Blue sky with pink polka dots in my opinion, but on the positive side, it would leave enough money in the kitty for a glut of three-day training courses … in Bermuda, and think of all the khasis they could install for the money saved. Even at sixteen grand a throw (how the hell can anyone with alleged brains spend 16k on a bog … for kids? Our entire bathroom didn’t cost that much) you’d have enough outside lavatories to keep every kid in the land crapping in luxury until they leave school and sign on the rock and roll.

Curiously enough, no one has thought about cutting back on education’s most expensive commodity, which is ... education.

Think about it. Half the kids don’t want to be in school. They’d rather be out with their mates or surfing Facebook. A good proportion of them come out of 11 years schooling just as illiterate and ignorant as they went into it, so why bother? It would leave a huge surplus of funds to educate the half that do want to be there, and still leave enough money for the politicians to fly off to Bermuda to address the training courses.

Makes sense to me.

Conkers

Here’s the story of a Poulton International Conker Competition to be held near Cirencester on October 2nd.

It seems that in the past contestants have gone extraordinary lengths to win, including strengthening their conkers (it doesn’t say how) and suspending them from elasticated string. This year, however, only conkers supplied by the organising committee will be allowed after being drilled and strung. They will be marked with a fluorescent pen and after the event, they will be strain tested in a vice to make sure they haven’t been substituted, and the string will be checked to ensure no elastic has been used.

Cheats will be disqualified.

I should think so too. I mean, we’re British, aren’t we? Never mind disqualification, I’d have them marched through the village, bearing a notice reading, “I cheated at conkers,” then have them executed by firing squad and the bodies left tied to a horse chestnut tree to decompose as a warning to wannabe miscreants.

Extreme? I don’t think so. I mean cheating is a bane on our British way of life, isn’t it? Footballers diving for free kicks and penalties, conkerers baking their nuts in a pre-heated oven, whatever can we expect next? Politicians telling porkies? Power companies telling us that price hikes are good for the environment? TV claiming to be entertainment?

I had a mate who used to cheat at Scrabble. He was well over six feet tall and he used to lean over and look at your letters when you were pouring a beer or rolling a cigarette. We were going to keelhaul him with copies of the Oxford English Dictionary strapped to his wedding tackle, but plod stopped us.

“If we let him get away with Scrabble,” I said, “ where will it end?”

“I know how you feel, lad,” agreed the copper, “but the Humber Estuary is polluted enough as it is.”

That was thirty years ago, and I was right.

Wasn’t I?