Will Monty get a horse to eat again for Christmas?
Sadie is all ready for Christmas
Monday 31st: Time for a few predictions: 1. Someone will predict a new date for the end of the world, perhaps saying the Mayan calendar has been misinterpreted. 2. A few will continue to get mega-rich from wind farm investments and wind farms will continue to disappoint in terms of being a. effective and b. eco-friendly. 3. Australia will not build a pipeline from the tropical north to provide water to the dryer southern states. 4. China will continue to face-off with its protaganists but war will not come in 2013. 5. Burnley will not be a Premiership team in 2013. 6. There will be a Krakatoa-like volcanic event in 2013, I hope not in Auckland, New Zealand. 7. The world, as we know it, will not come to an end in 2013.
Sunday 30th: When Sunday trading in England was liberalised in 1994, shopworkers were given a guarantee that working on the Sabbath would be strictly voluntary, but the guarantee did not apply to people in other sectors. A judge has now ruled that Christians have no right to decline working on Sunday as it is not a “core component” of their beliefs. This means that individual Christians do not have any protection from being fired for not working on Sundays and effectively means the judiciary are deciding what the core beliefs of Christians can be. Well Mr Justice Langstaff, it is about time your court was made to sit on Sundays and on every subsequent sunday until you see the error of your ways.
Thursday 27th: The party is over for now, another year of Christmas spirit well imbibed among family and good friends. Now for the anti-climax as the paddle boarder extraordinaire takes her gold and the olympics researcher and his wife Sadie, Sophie or Sue depart temporarily, along with the Hangover. Half-job certainly did a full job where the party spirit was concerned, and hopefully our guests who came from the Bristolian suburb in Hobart enjoyed the big day. However, even a sprinkle of fairy dust will not improve our spirits with this, ‘The Guns’s’ latest absence.
Tuesday 18th: Landscrona, the largest Zenit St Petersburg fanclub, have petitioned their club to sack black and gay players. Of all the countries I have lived and worked in I was aware of racism most in Russia. Visual clues affect so many of our instincts and initial impressions about people. Now no doubt anyone seen in a Zenit shirt will instinctively and immediately be considered a racist by many otherwise open minded rational people.
Friday 14th: I am so incensed by the nanny like warning on my Chateau cardboard that I have begun to list my loves and hates in a separate section. “It is not recommended to exceed 2 standard drinks in one day”. Bloody Oath – and I’m not even pregnant! Well I might have stopped at one or two standard drinks before I read that. I suppose more couth readers will say it serves me right for not drinking out of something requiring the extraction of a cork or even a cork substitute.
Thursday 13th: Feels like a Sunday in the TF household as Scrabble takes hold and I take a rest from DIY. This morning a cricket came a calling and made me ponder on nature’s ability to develop brilliant natural camouflage. Perhaps because they are top of the food chain, humans have not adapted to blend into the background X-file like, although perhaps given modern technology and weaponry some might wish they had. Once back on the lawn this cricket is damned difficult to pin down.
It’s just not cricket!
Wednesday 12th: It is a ‘King’ tide here this week with the water almost lapping the boards on the jetty and me hoping we wont have Southerly storms or it will likely be submerged!Why Spring tides are referred to by Taswegians as ‘king’ and not ‘queen’ tides is no doubt a remnant of sexism which feminism will eventually cleanse from the mouths of the older generation.
- A king (or queen) of a spring tide
Sunday 9th: The Australian media have shot themselves in both feet in the last few days and I have little sympathy for those who are crippled as result. Firstly a radio station’s hoax call culminates in a nurse’s suicide and then The Weekend Australian’s editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell proves he is a total and undulterated moron. Whingeing that the government have purloined the issue of invitations to access the official ceremony at Anzac Cove for the 100th anniversary of the landings, Mitchell says: “unless there is a change of heart in Canberra this shows every sign of becoming a disaster to rival the original Gallipoli landings”. Really, will thousands die and thousands more be wounded Mr Mitchell? A truly cringeworthy statement that demonstrates that some journalists simply do not inhabit planet earth.
Friday 7th: I am not green- fingered. I describe myself as a “hack, maim and kill” gardener. Recently though I had the joy of watching a small lavender hedge I planted prosper so perhaps there is some hope for me yet. Weeds make you think though. No matter what you do, when you are six feet under, the weeds will still be there in your garden, annoying your successors. For every small victory they will, in the end, conquer the pathways and flowerbeds and win the campaign. It is as inevitable as night following day. Even if you concrete your acres, eventually the concrete will crack and guess what will prosper in those tiny fissures?
Saturday 1st: I am so often humbled when I hear veterans of previous wars talk about their experiences as I mentioned last month, after meeting the nonogenarian Brian Winspear. Yesterday I was chatting not to a veteran but certainly one of the luckiest men alive. His father was a survivor of the first sinking of the submarine K13 in January 1913 after some 57 hours trapped off the Scottish shoreline. Of the eighty aboard, thirty two souls were killed but miraculously 48 survived. I say miraculously for a hundred years there was no sophisticated rescue paraphernalia and location devices. For my mate Max without the rescue of his father he would simply not have existed.