Finally, I called their bluff, all those firms sending me Meet single 50s in your area spam.
Scanning my available, er, peer group, I realised that anyone doing this for real will need a standard email template on hand if he is not to be driven to the edges of madness:
Dear ……,
Thank you for your application.
Fifty-… my backside. Goodbye.
Yours,
AndImBradPitt, Cambridgeshire
Your place is lovely. Really.
My bed may be even more comfortable than the one at home, your food is excellent and I have all I desire.
However, your practice of serving my breakfast and then sitting on a sofa across the room to watch me eat it, while I’m the only other person there, is straight out of the Bates motel.
Please stop.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It is something for which I have braced myself for years, the squalid joy that would follow the death of Margaret Thatcher.
That’s not to say, however, that I am not stung by the scenes that have soiled British streets these last few days.
Sad ghouls who probably think decorum is a nightclub. Gormless teenagers who weren’t even alive when Thatcher was in no. 10, holding up posters suggesting that we rejoice at her passing. Fools with champagne bottles, oblivious to the fact that there is such a thing as trying too hard.
This isn’t to say I expect hypocrisy at the passing of a controversial figure. I have no problem with Labour MPs who were unwilling to subject themselves to the recall of Parliament to mark the former Prime Minister’s death. That’s not rudeness, it’s consistency.
Nor did I have any problem with Gerry Adams’ comments on his old adversary. Whether you agree with them or not, they were, again, consistent and, while bitingly critical, they were civilly expressed. If Adams subsequently spent the evening quaffing champers and discharging party poppers, he was at least sufficiently considerate to do so in private.
Yet, as tasteless as the street celebrations were, my abiding reaction is bewilderment. Does the Left have any idea how bad and indeed ridiculous it now looks?
Margaret Thatcher has been out of the political arena for 20 years. Seizing on her death in this way is as pitiful as seizing on 1966 as a bellwether of the current state of English football.
Had they really wanted to make a hard-hitting response to the death of Margaret Thatcher, the smart play for the Socialist Worker brigade would have been to ignore it completely. To meet any request for comment with something along the lines of, “She wasn’t a nice lady, she’s been irrelevant for two decades and we have more important things to be getting on with.”
Alas, you only have to look at some of the photos at the first link above to realise that subtlety probably doesn’t come easily to people like these.
And what a spectacular own goal it all is – the so-called caring, compassionate, inclusive end of the political spectrum, exposed as a hotbed of callous bile. Remember this, floating voter, next time you are toying with the idea of voting for a Labour Party that is in thrall to this rent-a-mob.
I was never totally wowed by Margaret Thatcher. She got some things very right and others equally wrong. What has become of whole swathes of her former electorate, though, when you find yourself looking at them and wishing they could be a bit more like Gerry Adams?
It was like being at a dinner party where two of the guests start having a heated argument. That slow progression of unease, denial and embarrassment at what’s developing in front of you.
It’s meant to be fun, Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, yet the growing concern at what you learn about the British public as the show unfolds reached a level on Saturday where my family looked at each other and wondered out loud, “Is it just us?”
Part of the show’s format involves surprising audience members with minor skeletons in their closet – past indiscretions, deceptions or weaknesses, following tip-offs from friends and family. Only this time – and maybe it is just us – we seemed to move beyond foible and into the realms of stuff that’s just plain wrong.
One person in the audience apparently sold her partner’s suit on eBay without telling him and kept the proceeds for herself. Then there was the woman who dented a friend’s boyfriend’s car bonnet by sitting on it and never let on. Wonder if she’ll offer to pick up the tab now she’s a star?
And then there was the bus driver, whom we learnt is prone to skipping the last stop on his route if he is late for a tanning appointment. If you’ve ever had to wait half-an-hour longer than expected at a freezing, wet bus stop, you’ll have howled at this bit, I’m sure.
“He could be sacked for that,” said Younger Son. We live in hope.
To listen to the rest of the audience, mind, you’d think the guy had pulled four children from a burning double-decker. They hooped and hollered in acclamation. He’d just secured his 15 seconds of fame (that’s inflation for you, Andy Warhol) and that apparently trumped all.
So it was no surprise when the lady who turned out to be star turn in this roll of dishonour was lauded like Audrey Hepburn at the Oscars. Notwithstanding that she once took flowers from a roundabout opposite a florist to use at a funeral, or had taken dentures from several patients in her care as a nurse to clean them, forgotten to whom each set belonged and then just returned them in any old order, hoping for the best.
I found myself staring open-mouthed at this celebration of woefulness. Led up onto the stage into front of the adoring crowd for a mock award ceremony, she was rewarded with a free holiday in the Maldives.
I have no doubt Saturday Night Takeaway will scoop a gong or two for light entertainment next time the real awards ceremonies come around. I wonder, however, if the show’s producers will be sufficiently savvy to enter it in the ‘documentary’ category as well. Because, as an expose of where this country and its people are right now, it is increasingly in a class of its own.
Population map of Cyprus, showing not the density but the number of population in the government-controlled areas of Cyprus (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When your politics and perspective lean towards the capitalist right, you become resigned to the fact that, in between all the stuff you side with, you will occasionally hear some things that sound like thinly-veiled dingbattery at its worst.
So there has been some stuff these last ten years or so that I have read or heard from libertarians and economists alike, which I have mentally filed away in a drawer marked ‘overreaction’.
Western nations running out of fuel, setting up glorified police states and forcing me to arm myself to the teeth to defend a house stocked to the rafters with tinned food and the fragment of bullion bar that represents my hurriedly-withdrawn life savings – I just thought that we would somehow manage to be better than this; that the First World, for all its flaws, would be rational enough to hold back most varieties of man-made apocalypse.
Reading about the travesty unfolding in Cyprus, however, I am not as sure as I was. At the very least, the spectre of politicians ransacking people’s savings to shore up holes in the national economy is an almighty blow to idealists who still like to think of State and citizenry working together towards some common good.
While the people who got the planet into this economic mess are allowed to go their own sweet way with barely a sanction worthy of the name placed in front of them, the ordinary citizen finds his savings plundered to levels as high as 60%. The Cypriot government reminds me of those comedians who endlessly lampoon Christianity while skirting around Islam as if it wasn’t even there: go for the soft target, the ones without lobbyists, PR armies or financial clout. The ones who won’t fight back. How very brave.
And is there a Cypriot politician out there, I wonder, who feels a scrap of shame that, on his or her watch, the people of Cyprus are told with despotic arrogance exactly how slowly and minutely they may retrieve their own money. It is as if King John has popped up in exile on a Mediterranean island. It is a 21st century scandal.
And what should worry the rest of us is the prospect that politicians across Europe are watching this wretched episode unfold and seeing not so much a disgrace as a useful precedent. I hope I’m wrong but I am starting to believe that in one respect at least, the fear mongers of the right are spot-on. There is no partnership with government, no common goal. We are simply useful idiots whom politicians use to cover their lame behinds.
Dingbattery? Let’s just see if this nonsense stops with Cyprus, shall we?
Sunday (Photo credit: ex.libris)
It was a calamity waiting to happen. Align an Easter weekend falling in late March with snow showers more akin to February and I may not be the only one who forgets all about switching to British Summer Time.
So it was that on the biggest Sunday in the Christian calendar, I am running my shower at the very time I should be heading down the aisle with the rest of the choir. Were I Catholic, the guilt would probably last until Advent.
It’s not the most convincing stab at atonement, watching the televised Easter service from Paisley Abbey while sat in my underpants, munching disgruntedly at a bowl of cereal but needs must. At least this Sunday the family can comment openly about the odd-bods in the congregation, instead of keeping our own counsel until lunchtime.
But really – if I might paraphrase from Fiddler on the Roof…
Lord who made the lion and the lamb
You decreed I should be what I am
But would it spoil some vast, eternal plan
If Easter were always on the second Sunday in April…?
A friend is ecstatic and rightly so.
Bucking the trend of graduate unemployment with some style, her daughter has secured a position that is hers the moment she graduates this summer.
Amid the congratulations, however, there is one slightly jarring note. She was apparently interviewed by a group of no fewer than five people.
For a teaching job at a primary school.
Interview panel or ego trip?
You decide…
Memories of a more brutal age (Photo: Wikipedia)
“I was saddened to read in your Readers’ View page recently of the decision to cancel this year’s Elm Fete on the grounds of onerous Health & Safety paperwork and escalating insurance premiums.
Sadly, this is no one-off. More and more, these days, I hear of people forced to ditch plans to organise a public event or club because the toll taken in terms of paperwork and money is simply too high. I have every sympathy with the Fete organisers but a growing concern about the way in which social life in this country is being stifled by an unholy trinity of insurance firms, Health & Safety mandarins and litigation lawyers who have sadly dropped all pretence of being a cut above their sue-happy American counterparts.
If the H&S people could produce evidence of the carnage caused by summer fetes down the years of course, this would go some way towards allaying my misgivings. It may be that they have filing cabinets full to bursting of tales of slipped discs caused by frantic apple-bobbing, or of innocent people mown down by friendly fire at the coconut shy. Somehow, I doubt it.
What on earth would our ancestors make of us? At a time when our society is less and less about community and more and more about the individual, we cannot even put a village fete on without our plans being effectively thwarted by an alliance of lawyers, paranoid insurers and salaried busybodies.
Am I the only one to see the irony of a country that strives to be healthier and safer, only to die of boredom?“
I’m not oblivious to the fact that it tells us something very damning about our education system but I wonder if, amid all the lying and cheating that parents are now doing to get their kids into good schools, the irony of their position ever occurs to them.
“Data obtained using freedom of information requests showed they were being caught using false addresses, pretending to be Roman Catholic, lying about siblings and even impersonating family members in an attempt to secure places.”
So there you are, pulling any stunt going to secure the best possible education for your children and in doing so, you teach them a lesson that is as bad for them as it is for the Society in which they will grow up – that rules are for other people. Or should they ever ask how they ended up at that particular school, do you just lie to them as well?
Seen around Peterborough recently:
“Bus passes that expire on 31st March will not be valid for concessionary travel after that date”
Your pass runs out – you can no longer use your pass. Even the patently obvious must now be spelt out. Coming soon on footpaths near you, in bright yellow letters – “Right foot forward…Now left…Now right…Now left…”
“Cavell Blue Car Park is closed for a makeover”
Not sure I’m getting the connection between a car park and a 44-year-old with bags under her eyes. What on earth was wrong with “renovation”?
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