Stuart’s Friends

Another kick in the arse for the British motorist.

nobody@vox.com(Vicola) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:24:50 +0100

This morning I was sent this link to an article in the Telegraph, detailing the latest plans for road pricing.

The Telegraph can disclose that the Government is pushing ahead with plans for a national road-pricing scheme, including testing "spy in the sky" technology.

Eight areas of the country have been selected by ministers for secret pay-per-mile trials which will begin in 2010 and are expected to pave the way for tolls on motorways.

Motorists face paying up to £1.30 a mile during peak periods on the busiest roads.

Gordon Brown was thought to be against national road pricing, a flagship policy of the Blair administration.

But the detailed level of planning now underway indicates the issue it set to become a key battleground in the next general election – which is likely to coincide with the trials beginning.

It will leave Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary, particularly vulnerable as she defends her marginal Bolton West constituency.

The Daily Telegraph has learnt that eight areas - Leeds, North Yorkshire, Milton Keynes and Buckinghamshire, south west London, Suffolk and Essex – have been selected for the trials.

Initially, in January 2010, one hundred cars in each area will trial the new technology – in many cases entailing placing black boxes to allow their movements to be tracked - but members of the public will be invited to join the pilots in June 2010.

Ok, well let's start at the beginning shall we? Firstly, their 'secret pay per mile trials' are not looking quite so secret are they? Because I didn't find this link myself, I was sent it by someone working for a protest group, 'People Against the Bastard Government Shafting the Motorist' or something like that and someone I know working in transport already knew about the ideas before they hit the press. So secret it most certainly isn't.

And what is this 'members of the public will be invited to join the pilots' crap? Oh yes, I can just see that catching on can't you? They'll be lining up round the block to volunteer to pay up to £1.30 per mile to get to work, somewhere they probably don't want to be going in the first place.

What it doesn't say is whether this half assed road charge is going to be on top of the half assed congestion charge that they are so determined to introduce in Manchester. That would then mean that to use a car you pay VAT on the car, fuel duty on the fuel, road tax to legally have it on the road, congestion charge to drive it anywhere in the city and pay-per-mile charge to go anywhere at all because you can oyur bottom dollar that it won't stay restricted to just charging on motorways. But hey, apparently this is all for our own good, to reduce congestion because according to government thinking everyone is sat in the 7 mile tailback on the M60 at 7.30am because they think it's funny to cause traffic chaos. It's not really in order to go to work and pay the tax that funds these ridiculous fucking ideas that drain our pay packets even further. At least Dick Turpin had the decency to wear a mask, Gordon Brown and that useless little tart Ruth Kelly (Transport Monkey in Charge for anyone outside of the UK) are quite happy to blatantly lift your wallet and expect you to say thanks afterwards. It doesn't so much leave Ruth Kelly vulnerable to losing her seat as vulnerable to losing her head courtesy of a Bolton resident who is sick of having to pay through the nose to get anywhere.

The other issue is the technology. Leaving aside the fact that thanks to the government's policy of giving IT contracts to their mates rather than a company that is qualified to do the work there is more chance of me growing wings and circling the Empire State Building than them actually managing to get the scheme up and running, the technology that they are proposing is appallingly intrusive. A box in your car that will allow it to be tracked anywhere in the country and you to be charged accordingly. I don't fucking think so sunshine, not in my car, not now, not ever and I don't suppose I'm the only person who objects to this idea. Also, a fiver says that MPs cars are made exempt from this tracking nightmare, the self centred bastards.

All in all I'd say this is a triumphant fuck-up from a government that seems hell bent on political suicide. Fingers crossed that they get the task of achieving a vote of no confidence in themselves completed soon then we can all go back to living normally without this constant, obsessive monitoring nonsense. They are the Crown Princes of Fuckwittery - fact.

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Russia - A little bit mental.

nobody@vox.com(Vicola) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:25:42 +0100

I've been trying to work out what the chuff is going on in Russia and why they are bombing the crap out of Georgia over some pisspot territory with fewer inhabitants than Milton Keynes and guess what? I still don't get it. So maybe it's down to the Russian leader. Russia has traditionally been run by barmpots, the kind of men that in this country would have been sitting around in a haze of Prozac and harmlessly weaving baskets in an institution somewhere, not stomping round Moscow with the big red nuclear button in one hand and their nuts in the other. Let's have a look at some of the ones I can remember as being interesting......

Nicholas - an unfortunate ending

Nicholas II, last of the rather unfortunate Romanovs, a family mainly known for having huge palaces and getting themselves killed, 2 traditions that Nicholas managed to uphold. He appears to have been a fairly inoffensive bloke, if a little ineffectual but the interesting thing about him is that his wife was obsessed by Rasputin a big, grubby religious bloke who drank too much and classed bonking rich women as a vocation rather than a hobby. Quite how she thought haemophilia could be cured by allowing this alcoholic lunatic to take the piss and and annoy the Russian public is anyone's guess but she did.

Lenin - Not a fan of dissidents

Lenin, started off quietly with some fine ideals about everyone being equal and living in a blissful communist world. Went a bit tits up when Communism began to unravel and he became infected with the Russian obsession for control. The instigator of the Russian secret police Lenin continued in fine mental-case fashion by bumping off the tsar and starting up 'terrors', a short little term for 'the mass extermination of anyone I think doesn't agree with me'.In short, started disappointingly but clearly got more impressively mad as he went along.

Stalin - Not a fan of anyone at all

The mighty Stalin - a man who will forever be known not for the good things that he did for Russia (of which there were couple) but for the fact that he was a Grade A, double deluxe, king sized fruitbat. Truly mental. Stalin didn't just bump off those he thought didn't agree with him, he bumped off virtually everyone. Gays, gypsies, dissidents, the disabled, the mentally ill (ironic eh?), all were fair game. The creator of the world famous 'Labour Gulags' from which virtually no one emerged alive and that includes staff. Those that weren't killed off by the administration were more than likely to get carried off by disease or malnutrition as Russia was, to use a technical term, a piss poor shithole. Estimates for the number who died as a direct result of execution and a result of poor administration leading to appalling social conditions range from 3 million to 60 million. Which I'm sure you'll agree is a triumph for statisticians, "Either the population of Manchester died or the population of the UK, we're not too sure which".

Yeltsin - Russia's answer to the village idiot

Ah Yeltsin. In days gone by he wouldn't have been leading the country, he'd have been dancing round the court in a harlequin costume, wearing a silly hat and getting kicked in the arse by the king. As long as Yeltsin was sitting in the Kremlin there was a Russian village somewhere missing it's idiot. Yeltsin's fondness for vodka led to some truly entertaining behaviour, who could forget the charming tv clip of him pinching the arse of a diplomat's wife then giggling like an errant schoolboy while she stood there, utterly thunderstruck? Or the clip of him dancing? Or indeed any of the clips of him as pissed as a newt doing something that presidents don't usually do? The good thing about Yeltsin being as pissed as he was is that he could never have started a nuclear war for the simple reason that he would never have been able to press the 'start' button. He did apparently order the invasion of Chechnya but I'm inclined to think that isn't what he was asking for, he was just slurring his words and someone misheard him. He was like your alcoholic great uncle that everyone in the family is slightly embarrassed by and is a shining example to lunatic alcoholic heads of state across the world.

Putin - human or android...nobody knows

Putin. He wasn't born, he was created in a workshop somewhere out of bits of scrap metal and some rather dodgy old circuitboards. A man with less discernable sense of humour than a boiled cabbage, Putin made his early career in the KGB, which to be fair is not noted for its award winning stand up comedy team. Russia had obviously decided that the 'comedy president' experiment hadn't been a huge success so went right down the other end of the scale by appointing Putin. Putin's Russia was not a good time to be a journalist, as they kept getting shot but according to Putin this was a coincidence and nothing at all to do with him. In another burst of coincidence anyone who disagreed with this view or tried to prove otherwise also ended up getting shot. What are the chances eh?

Medvedev - also available in beige

Russia's current president Dmitry Medvedev is the political equivilant of beige. Nondescript, boring and utterly devoid of anything noteworthy and this is for one very good reason - he isn't actually a person, he's a giant sock puppet being operated from behind by Putin who wasn't allowed another term because of the pesky rules. To be fair, he has engaged in a crazy fight with Georgia but this is only because Putin told him to. I suspect that poor old Dmitry still has to put his hand up in class and ask Putin if he go for a pee.

So there we go, some of Russia's finest basket-cases of the last century. Given their fine history of oddballs things could go one fo two ways - either much hilarity and entertainment as we watch another Russian premier go spectacularly insane or world annihaliation as one of their ruling nutjobs finally hits the red button. Either way I think we can all agree that when it comes to picking mentally questionable leaders Russia is definitely setting the gold standard.

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World of Fun

nobody@vox.com(Vicola) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:02:56 +0100

And so the search for alternative employment rumbles on.

The possible job that had come up has now been put back as the manager is going off on maternity leave in a month or so and they don’t think they can get someone up to speed before she goes, so that one won’t be an option until April or May of next year, by which time I will quite possibly have gone entirely insane with boredom.

My job wasn’t too bad for a while, while the usual advisor for this area was posted indefinately to a site down on the south coast. I got to look after sites, go trundling round the countryside for brews in site cabins and generally do interesting jobs. People spoke to me like I had more than 3 functioning brain cells and might actually have some knowledge about something. But he’s back now so it’s a return to being regarded as the girl who does the filing and spending all day scanning in training documents and faffing about on the internet because it’s more interesting than dealing with the mind-wreckingly tedious shit that I should be doing. I am also back to spending a lot of time answering stupid questions from Mr Useless, usually questions that I have answered twice a week for the last 3 years and that the gormless halfwit still hasn’t managed to absorb. He’s rung 3 times so far this morning and it’s only 10am. If I have to explain to him one more time the system for applying for a trade card I’m going to get my arse up to Newcastle and tattoo it onto his damned forehead. What REALLY grinds my gears in a huge way is that this useless sack of shit earns several grand more than I do per year, despite the fact that he is less use to a civil engineering company than a truckful of rubber chickens.

So I am once again entering the soul-destroying process of job hunting. There’s nothing confirms your utter worthlessness like a good bout of seeking employment. In the year I have had precisely 1 interview, which I thought went well but evidently didn’t as I didn’t get the job. I’ve filled in about 6 forms for support jobs for the police, which includes having to write a fucking essay demonstrating ‘how you have respect for diversity’, all of which have come to nothing because, as I found out the other day from a policewoman that I know, all the sodding jobs are recruited internally. They only advertise because the law says they have to. Marvellous, those are hours of my life I spent writing about respect for bastarding diversity that I will never get back. I mean how much can you really say? “I’m not a racist and I don’t give a toss if my colleagues like to sleep with members of their own sex”? Why does it require a full essay? So bollocks to the police, I am turning my attention elsewhere. I’m looking at ‘executive assistant’ jobs in the NHS. With any luck I too can become a public servant, get a cracking pension at 60, all public holidays and several strike days a year and it can’t possibly be any less successful than my attempts to join the police support staff. Fingers crossed people, fingers crossed!

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Waste of bloody time

nobody@vox.com(Bobbie) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:32:47 +0100

We went to my little girl's nursery last night for a parents evening to meet up and have an opportunity to chat with her teacher. I was really looking forward to it - sad hey?

Now, I thought the point of the meeting would be for her to tell us about how baby girl's doing, what she's been up to, how she's progressing, the types of things she gets up to at nursery, seeing as the little lady doesn't really impart too much information when asked about it all.

Well, I don't think I've ever been in such a bloody awkward meeting in my life. My husband and I sat there like lemons for 10 minutes talking to fill the awkward silences about how we thought baby bird was doing and what she gets up to at home. We weren't sure whether we were just supposed to be asking questions but we had expected some sort of feed back from her for fuck's sake.

I've always been a bit iffy about this teacher since she started in December. I think she's done great things with the classroom (major changes have been made throughout the whole nursery since they received a totally cack rating from OFSTED (the education inspectors) a few months ago). But I just can't warm to the woman and from observing her with the kids, I see no connection between her and the kids either.

She's much older than the other nursery teachers (some of who both look and act like teenagers) and so has obviously done other things with her life. Well, I found out yesterday exactly what that was - she was in the hospitality industry - she owned her own restaurant!!

How on earth someone with seemingly so little personality about them could've been involved with dealing with other people on a daily basis as their JOB is beyond me.

Majorly disappointing.

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Tit of the Week

nobody@vox.com(Vicola) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:41:39 +0100

The modern day Marie Antoinette

This week has so far given us a proliferation of tits but special mention must be given to the man above, one "Mr Jake Ulrich". Recognise him? No? He does just look like one more terminally dull city trader or accountant doesn't he? Actually he is the managing director of Centrica, a company who are quite literally raking in the cash hand over fist. This morning, Centrica anonunced 6 monthly profits of £1billion and increased share prices, an impressive achievement in a market where the wholesale cost of gas is currently high. Or at least that's what I'd normally think but Centrica owns British Gas and on Monday British Gas announced a rise of 35% on gas bills. And no, for anyone reading this in the US I didn't miss out a decimal point, it is supposed to read thirty five percent. So, a company that has made a billion pounds PROFIT in 6 months (and for anyone who's interested that works out at £5million profit per day) has just hiked the cost of gas to hard pressed families who are already struggling to pay high mortgage costs, huge food bills, massive petrol costs and high taxes. Kind of like a reverse Robin hood, robbing the poor blind in order to give to the rich. How very public spirited of them. I suppose that those on the board of Centrica have enough in the bank to ensure that their grandparents don't freeze to death this winter because they can't afford to put the heating on. This is of course assuming that the money-hungry, consciousless sacks of shit haven't already sold their grandparents, an assumption that I'm not at all convinced we should make given their current behavioural trends.

So why am I singling out Mr Ulrich, a man whose salary last year was £1.1 million with a half a million pound bonus, for a verbal kicking? The reason is that when asked how he thought those who were already struggling were going to get through winter with such massive costs for heating his advice was this: WEAR TWO JUMPERS. What? Frail pensioners aren't going to be able to heat the house or use the cooker because you want to continue to make obscene profits and your advice is to put on another fucking jumper? Are you insane man? Are you utterly, completely and totally deranged? When Marie Antoinette reputedly said something similarly stupid and out of touch the French cut her head off, all I can say is that Jake the Jackass should be eternally grateful we aren't living in those times because if we were he'd be well advised to put his hat collection on Ebay.

So there we have it, Mr Jake Ulrich wins Tit of the Week for his complete inability to grasp any of the fundamentals of reality and for living in a ivory tower so fucking high that there are clouds round the top of it. If there is any such thing as karma his heating will pack in during a big freeze, causing his pipes to burst and flood his umpteen million pound mansion. Having said that it wouldn't make any difference to him because he's one of the few people in the country who can afford to call an out of hours plumber. The wanker.

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You can't chose your family......

nobody@vox.com(Vicola) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:13:21 +0100

My mum's family is quite large and they are capable of some moments of oddity. One of them is going deaf so has a voice that cuts through a room like a foghorn and an uncanny ability to find the most tactless thing to say in any given situation, it's a rare and spectacular talent. When my grandmother's dementia developed she began to say the things that we all thought but no one had the spuds to voice "Well I'll tell you straight, we didn't think your boy knew the difference between boys and girls", "Angel? What sort of a silly name is that? With a name that she's going to grow up to be a prostitute" and other such memorable gems. I guess my brother and I have our moments too.

My dad's family, now they are something else entirely. When his mother was alive she was capable of starting an argument in an empty room on her own, the woman would start world war three over some perceived insult. Her sister is a 17 stone geriatric lesbian (or so family gossip has it) with the biggest mono-bosum in history, it arrives 20 minutes before she does. She's almost entirely deaf and so phones up, bellows some news at you then promptly hangs up without any notice whatsoever. There are two brothers, I believe they are my second cousins or something, who had they been born a century or so ago would have had a fantastic and lucrative career in a Victorian freak show. They are know as Little and Large and they are exactly as the description suggests, one is approx 4ft tall, the other 6 and half foot tall and they are exceedingly lopsided. To make matters worse 'the midget' as he's affectionately known, has grown a lump on his head and now looks odder than ever. These people all look a bit weird and have some bizarre characteristics but they pale into insignificance beside........

My dad's sister.

She is a genuine, card carrying, lunatic. A fantasist who lives in a parallel world somewhere where reality can't touch her. This isn't a recent thing, according to my father she's been like this all her life (although heavy drug use from the early 70s to mid 80s won't have helped any).

We used to think she was thrilling when we were young. She was stinking rich and would arrive at our house with her super-tall husband and bags full of presents. She smoked too much, drank too much, swore like a navvy and wore designer clothes. We knew that when she was younger she'd slept with loads of men and never had a proper job. She'd been sectioned twice. When you're under ten years old this sort of thing is hopelessly glamorous and I was endlessly impressed by the fact that she always wore makeup (and plenty of it), owned more than one house, had a yacht and 2 pedigree dogs. We looked after the dogs one christmas, they arrived at the house in cashmere scarves, one was wearing pearls and she delievered them in a brand new estate car that had been bought specially for transporting them. We were skint at the time and it was a damn sight posher car that the crapwagon we were currently getting by with while my folks raised money to start their business. Visits from my aunt were wildly exciting and unpredictable.

However as you get older things change, circumstances change and you begin to see things differently. When I was about ten there was a huge argument within my family, centred around an accusation made by our branch against one of my grandparents. My aunt took their side, as did her husband, and from then my immediate family didn't exist. Or at least they didn't until 13 years later when a cousin backed up the allegation and suddenly we were back in the fold but by then things had changed. Not only circumstances (the husband had left her and she'd blown the settlement, she was now broke and living in a run down farmhouse) but people. At 20 odd you can see things in people that you didn't notice before, you see the games they play that you didn't notice when you were ten and I noticed things about my glamorous, exciting aunt that I hadn't seen before.

She's feckless. She pissed her very generous divorce settlement up the wall and blew it on pointless crap that she didn't need and couldn't afford. She continued to play Lady Bountiful to the parasitic hangers on who had always flocked towards her generosity because she wanted them to still believe she was rich, hell maybe she was trying to fool herself into believing she was still rich, who knows, the upshot is that the money poured out of the account like water from a drain and nothing went back in. Now she's properly skint and having pissed a divorce settlement, her inheritence form my grandmother's death and her father's portion of the inheritence from my grandmother's death up the wall while steadfastly refusing to contemplate employment my dad and his brother have decided they don't the responsibility of funding her.

She plays games. If you tell her something it gets twisted and turned into something else and is passed on to another person in order to cause trouble. The hours of fun I had trying to convince my mother that my brother and I DID NOT tell the damn woman that she was a shit mother and had brought us up badly don't even warrant description. And I did NOT tell her that my cousin lied to the police (something which I had to explain to the cousin I supposedly maligned). She's bored and out of things where she is, living in a rented shithole with the mentally deficient trainwreck that was once my grandfather so she makes life more exciting by stirring things up. My father has always said she did this but I always stuck up for her and said she was ok and he was overeacting until recently when she started dragging me into her lies. I'd always been left out of it before and frankly I now feel like a bit of a twat for defending her. More fool me eh?

There's a truckload more I could write about her but frankly, I can no longer be arsed. She pissed me off and I've had my rant but she needs to be careful. When my dad and his brother are gone there is only my generation left. As far as I know at least one of us won't have anything to do with her at all and she's seriously ground my gears too. She's become a sad, lonely, aging woman with a drink problem, a smoker's cough, no money and a borderline personality disorder. If she continues to alienate people at the current rate in a few years time the police are going to go round to investigate complaints about the smell from the house and find her dead on the floor, half devoured by cats and undisturbed by humankind for months because no one noticed or bothered that she was incommunicado. Still, she's never given a moment's thought to future consequences before, why break the habit of a lifetime?

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Brats

nobody@vox.com(Vicola) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 09:11:35 +0100

Yesterday I did the shopping at the supermarket and happened to notice a woman trailing two kids round the supermarket with her. Dressed in head to toe Nike they whined their round the supermarket putting whatever they felt like in the trolley and screeching like banshees every time the mother dared to question anything they added. I think I spotted some apples in the trolley but the rest of it was pizza, crisps, chocolate, fizzy drinks and various other crap. They'd have got more nutrition chewing on their own shoes than eating the weekly shop. Then they arrived at the electronics department and found the computer games. The eldest, who must have been about 8, decided he wanted a computer game but it was an 18. Mum objected on both price and age limit. This didn't go down well, the resulting tantrum drew shoppers from around the building to witness the splendid and awe inspiring wobbly that this child was chucking. He was on the floor, arms and legs going like pistons, screaming and throwing anything he could get his hands on. Eventually the mother gave in, the game was in the trolley and in an instant the child was back next to the trolley adding a bag of mini Kit-Kats like nothing had ever happened.

This made me think back to my childhood in the early 80s. When we were young my mum and dad were broke, really broke. My dad was doing his nurse training and my mum was supporting us on one wage. My little brother and me used to go shopping with mum, she'd have a list of things in her head that she needed for the week and that is what we'd be going home with, no more and no less. My brother and I would run round the aisles collecting things that she wanted and putting them in the trolley. We didn't have sugary things, in fact we didn't have anything with E numbers in it either because my brother was allergic to one of the common ones, it sent him up the wall. If we'd have thrown a strop like that in a supermarket not only would we not be getting what we wanted, we not be getting anything at all, probably for the next ten years. I remember having a throw myself on the floor tantrum once at home, my mum stepped over me and carried on doing what she was doing, ignoring me entirely. I never bothered doing it again, it seemed pointless.

We didn't have expensive toys when I was small. I remember playing with a farm set that my parents had bought me a bit at a time and I loved it to bits. We also had hours of fun making plasticine out of flour, water and food colouring and then creating things and baking them solid. My mum made me a toy cooker out of a biscuit tin and some coloured circles of card and got me a little set of pans so then I could make 'dinner parties'. And of course there was always mud. My best friend in all the world at that time (I'm actually still good friends with her) was Louise and she lived on my street, her mum and mine had become friends when they were pregnant and we kind of lived in interchangable houses, we were always together at one house or another and we LOVED mud. There's some lovely photos of the pair of us coated in it. I used to have a t-shirt with a lion on it that squeaked when you pressed the logo, Lou used to try and make the lion squeak by making mud balls and throwing them at it. Mud in pans, mud in bowls, mud in buckets, mud in hair, eyes and fingernails. We loved mud.

The thing that all our inexpensive toys and games had in common was that although you could play them on your own they were miles better when played with someone else and so that's what we did. We were always out and about in street, playing with friends, making our own fun and making a mess. I've watched my friends children and something has changed since the time I was small. They do play out but not nearly so much as I did and the big change is computer games. All they seem to want to do is play on the X Box or the Playstation and these games aren't often designed for more than one person. So they sit in their bedrooms for hours and hours on end, absorbing brightly coloured moving images and loud, dramatic noises. Soon they've become so saturated in action that nothing else really interests them because nothing else is fast paced enough to equal the excitement, the games that we used to play together as children would bore them rigid in about ten minutes. Some of the kids you see, like the brats in the supermarket, have such appalling social skills and you can't help wondering if it isn't because they aren't going out and socialising. They can't write a story in school because they aren't reading at home, they are playing on computers and they have no idea how to utilise their imagination because all their scenes are set out clearly for them on a screen. I'm not saying all kids are like this because they aren't and I'm not saying computer games should be banned because I'm sure they have a place but brats like the supermarket kids seem to be cropping up more and more and I know that if I had kids I'd be trying to steer them towards the more sociable pastimes. I also know that if I'd done what that child did in a supermarket I'd have got the hiding of my life when I got home! And what's more, I'd hve earned it.

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Money saving solutions.

nobody@vox.com(Vicola) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:42:32 +0100

Britain is getting more and more expensive. In fact it's getting downright stupid. Today's marvellous announcement in the news comes from Centrica, some group that represent power companies, and their glad tidings report that gas bills could rise by up to 60% in the next couple of years. Happy days. Now taking into account the fact that they'll have announced a figure of 60% so that they can bring a lower rise without everyone going ballistic we can realistically expect a hike of at least 40%. Apparently it's all linked to the fact that oil is $140 dollars a barrel. Everything on earth seems to be linked to that. So, since everything is now so ridiculously pricey I'm going to have to come up with some money saving solutions. Here are my ideas:

1) Our house is new so the floor is concrete underneath the carpet. This means if I remove the carpet I can put an oil drum in there and make my own, 'urban log fire'. I prefer to think of it as an 'urban log fire' rather than 'tramp gathering point more usually found under derelict railway bridges'. The money saving potential has to be offset against the fact that I'll have to repaint the ceiling once a week and I also have to consider the fact that I may in fact asphyxiate us all since we don't have a chinmey. Perhaps we should just buy some new jumpers.

2) Baths - we are on metered water which is pricey and our water is heated by gas meaning a bath is soon going to be roughly the same price as a nigth in the royal box at the opera. The solution here is clear: Wait till I know my parents are going to be out then sneak round to theirs for a bath. They are on water rates so the extra water won't make a difference to their bill and it's heated by electricity. My mum may wonder why there's never any hot water when she gets in from work but she'll probably put it down to their crap water system which has been a bit shoddy for years. Further money can be saved by sticking my dinner in their oven while I'm in the bath and then taking it home with me when I leave. Lovely.

3) Holiday are going to be a thing of the past, what with the rising cost of living but you can make your own holiday right here at home. No need to shell out for an expensive ski trip - simply weld some little wheels to the bottom of a large tea tray and you have you own no-snow-needed snowboard. Take it along to your local golf club for all the thrills and spills of a ski holiday but for free. You might have to do it at night as the golfers are going to get pissed off after a while but tea-tray boarding by torchlight is even more exciting because you can't see the trees till you hit them. For a bit of apres-ski action, go down the pub. A marvellous sporting holiday for the price of a tea tray and some taxis to cart you around while your legs are in plaster.

4) Fake an illness or an accident. This will result in a lengthy stay in hospital which will save a small fortune in household bills. If I decide to implement the 'urban log fire' idea there is every chance that it won't even need to be faked.

5) Hire the dog out to the police. He's quite badly trained so he wouldn't be much use as a guard dog or attak dog but he's very good at barking at running people then attempting to get a mouthful of their tracksuit bottoms so he could be a very effective 'trip up criminals' dog.

6) Rent the shed out to an illegal immigrant.

That's all I can think of for now but the pile of work I have to do is REALLY dull so I'm going to spend this afternoon thinking of some more marvellous money saving plans. Any ideas gratefully received.

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The public servants are revolting.......

nobody@vox.com(Vicola) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:16:44 +0100

And once again the new is full of the news that local council workers are going out on strike. It's getting like France in this country, every time someone decides they aren't happy then they go on bloody strike. Unison, one of the biggest unions is currently advising pretty much all of it's members to strike, regardless of what they actually do and it's getting boring now. The local council lot are going on strike because they aren't happy with the 2.5% pay rise that they were offered, they want 6%. Don't we all. Their complaint is that fuel and food costs have gone up so much that they are feeling the pinch. Really? Who'd have thought? Because the rest of us are still filling our swimming pools with champagne and sleeping on mattresses made from bundles of fifty pound notes. It's the first time reality has impinged on local council workers in about a century and they aren't taking it well. Despite their good salaries, their ridiculously generous terms and conditions, extra bank holiday, gold plated, non-contributory pension and decent maternity arrangements they still believe that they should be cushioned from the realities of a world wide food crisis with tax payer's funds. And since food prices and fuel are so expensive this should apparently be done by pushing up everyone else's council tax so that they can be better off. Let's just say I am not supporting the strike.

Another problem with this strike is that the binmen have walked out. This normally wouldn't be a problem but I accidentally left some chicken breasts in the boot of my car. I only remembered they were there when they started to smell so, since I was at my mum and dad's house, I slung them in their bin, which was empty. It's still empty, apart from my chicken breasts (which since I slung them on Sunday will have matured nicely by now) and will continue to be empty until they return from Perpignon next Tuesday. Long enough for the chicken breasts to have develeloped the kind of odour that could knock out a horse at 20 paces but not long enough for the next week's bin collection to have happened. They're going to kill me. Sodding binmen.

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Worth a look.....

nobody@vox.com(Vicola) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:33:49 +0100

If anyone has a spare few minutes can I recommend that you visit Baldy's Blog ? This is the blog of Adrian Sudbury, a top bloke who is on a mission to save lives through publicising the truth about bone marrow donation. He's a funny guy who even manages to see the entertaining side of terminal leukemia which is a most impressive achievement. Even more than that, he's managed to make top politicians listen to him which in this country is not so much impressive as bloody miraculous. His mission and his musings are definately worth a look!

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