Wingeing Brits

So, we now have a new Prime Minister in Boris Johnson. What really annoys me is that there are people 'out there' protesting that he's Not Their Prime Minister. If that's the case, I'm ashamed of being British. I wish I didn't have to write  this. It's been over three years since the EU Referendum. The legislation to bring about Brexit (hate the word.) has been rejected three times by the House of Commons and as a result lead to the downfall of Theresa May. I have to say I feel sorry for her, as she tried her best. Handed a poisoned chalice when David Cameron resigned after the Referendum result didn't go in his favour and had to have a hissy fit and walk away. After all, he was responsible for calling the Referendum. The result was pretty feeble. Remain: 48.1%; Leave 51.9%. (Sauce: The Electoral Commission.) And what makes me really annoyed, 25,359 rejected ballots. What on earth do people have to mess up their ballot papers, what sort of idiot does such a thing? It could have swung the result  in either direction. What a waste!Why on earth are we leaving the E.U. on such a narrow majority? And what on earth were those 25,359 people thinking by those 'rejected ballots,'? (Meaning 'spoilt, void, null, invalid, and not included in the vote count.') Why waste your vote? It's a disgrace. Think how long it took to gain 'Universal Suffrage,' and even put their lives on the line? Those who don't vote in any election General, Local or Referendum, annoy me because of that effort to allow them to vote.

Come on, we British don't just lie down and and roll over like a stupid puppy! That's not the British way of doing things. We don't give in that easily. We're going to be better off outside the EU, we can manage without being bullied and bothered by a load of bureaucrats, most of them having no democratic power. Just look at the buildings they work from in wherever it is in Brussels or Strausberg, have no windows, soulless places, faceless people, with nothing better to do than come up with stupid directives about bent bananas, cucumbers and, dare I say it, condoms! Making a mockery over such crazy things! I'm neither for or against the EU, it took me a while to decide whether to vote Remain or Leave (voting Remain after a lot of internal wrestling over the subject.) But that's not the point. Let's make the best of this whole affair and hold our heads high. Where's the Dunkirk spirit? But all this wingeing and whining is not a British thing. It comes from the 'Dependency Culture,' the, 'I want it, because I'm owed it!" which is not a British thing either. Stand up for yourself and don't be dependent, be self-reliant wherever possible.

Who was the stupid politician who allowed us to sign up to some half-baked treaty, was it at Maastrich that they imposed goodness knows what on us? The 'Single Currency,' the Euro which, thank goodness we had the sense not to sign up to? Was it John Major or Tony Blair? Creep-fest himself, a real creepy individual, always smiling inanely and as sincere  and slimy as a bucket full of eels. Making loads of dosh going around giving lectures and being paid endless amounts of cash on the side.

On top of this the EU has said they won't alter the agreement for Britain to leave the EU. They are going to have to. I don't think Boris Johnson will let them get away with this. They have to be more flexible. This is the problem with the EU, it's too large and cumbersome. It wouldn't surprise me, once we do eventually leave, than it will fragment, slowly, over time. Us leaving is like removing a brick from a wall or one of those games with tiles or bricks in, Jenga, once it's removed, the wall collapses.

A lot of the problems around all this lie with social media, Facebook, Twitter and the like. People can spend a lot of their time wingeing and moaning on there to their hearts content. It's easy to post this sort of stuff on the internet, without having to face another human face-to-face. This sort of person can do his without having to face the consequences. You can be mean and nasty without actual physical contact. Hence all the cyber bullying and meanness that that entails. End of rant. I don't very often mention politics on here, but at the moment I can't resist putting out my opinions on this, which you will have noticed if you read any of my earlier blog posts.

Bored Silly With Brexit?

I don't try to discuss politics on this blog. But Brexit seems to be taking up so much time and energy and column inches in the press and endless arguments from both sides on television that I thought I'd throw my few pennyworth into the ring. The whole thing is crazy, particularly the fact that no-one has any idea how to break the stalemate that has happened in the House of Commons. It's a bit like a really poorly-written episode of the  BBC sitcom 'Yes, Minister.' Except none of the episodes were poorly written.  Even Sir Humphrey Appleby, brilliantly portrayed by Nigel Hawthorne, would have been stumped for words. The following dialogue from this series, written in the early 1980's. It seems that times (and much else) hasn't changed, regarding our thoughts on the subject of the E.U.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now when it's worked so well?
Jim Hacker: That's all ancient history, surely.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Yes, and current policy. We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that didn't work. Now that we're inside, we can make a complete pig's breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased, it's just like old times.
Jim Hacker: But if that's true, why is the Foreign Office pushing for higher membership?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: I'd have thought that was obvious. The more members an organisation has, the more arguments it can stir up. The more futile and impotent it becomes.
Jim Hacker: What appalling cynicism.
Sir Humphrey Appleby: We call it diplomacy, Minister.

Virtually every time I turn on the television news, amongst all the other gloom and doom, we have to hear about stupid politicians who can't agree with anything unless it's what they want to agree with. I feel sorry for Teresa May. Whatever she does is bound to be wrong, not form the point of view of the opposition parties, but when it's her own MPs it must be very discouraging. We don't hear anything fresh from Jeremy Corbyn who is only interested in the possibility of their  being a General Election and the slim chance of him becoming prime minister. He just rants, but we never seem to hear anything positive which might possibly sort out the sorry mess. Well, at least the various factions and parties are 'sort of' meeting to discuss possible solutions, but why couldn't they join forces earlier? The best thing to do when Brexit pops it's ugly head over the parapet when I turn on the news is to either turn over to another channel or just turn the television set off.

In general there seemed a certain sort of apathy about the E.U. before the In/Out referendum. Most people were more interested in celebrities, reality television, sports personalities and any inanity you can mention, rather than the goings-on of a load of bureaucrats in the middle of Europe or even whether we were to 'remain' or 'leave' the juggernaut of the European Community. This could be said of the first referendum in 1975. Looking back, I don't have any memories of it, or even whether I even voted at the time. I don't know whether I was really that interested in it at the time. It didn't even come over my horizon. Who can blame me? Would I have been interested in the goings-on of a load of faceless pen-pushers in an office just off Whitehall? I doubt it. 

Let's be honest, we were taken into the 'Common Market' as it was referred to in the early 1970's by Edward Heath, the then-Prime Minister, without consulting the country and then we had a referendum  in 1975 when a Labour government came to power. I don't remember voting one way or the other at that time, but the result was that we remained in the bloc. (I don't know precisely when they changed it to the E.E.C. (European Economic Community) or then to E.C. (European Community), which, admittedly rolls off the tongue so much easier. From what I've been reading about the referendum in the 1970's, there was a certain amount of apathy amongst the public. I think generally people have no real interest in the E.U. and when it came to the 2016 'in/out' referendum the same could be said again. In general most people aren't interested in something which is distant from their everyday lives. It's run behind closed door, or so it seems. If you see footage on television of the E.U. buildings they look faceless and the same can be said about those that run it, the bureaucrats and the like. Did anyone really and truly think the British people were going to take to being told what to do by a bunch of faceless bureaucrats based hundreds of miles away in a bland, faceless building? Having rules and regulations foisted on us by Brussels or wherever the E.U. is based? I think not. Most of those 'laws' over-ride those made by the Whitehall parliament. Then there's the fact that we're an island. How many times have we been invaded? Once by the Romans and unsuccessfully by Napoleon and the Nazis didn't bother, basically because they knew they wouldn't wind if they'd attempted to invade.

The E.U. doesn't want us to leave. Well, who can blame them? They get a hefty payment from us. How many Billions per year? And they want us to pay something like £39 billion as part of the 'Divorce settlement'? Nobody mentioned anything about this sort of payment during the Referendum campaign. Oh, we were told that we gave them something like £35 million a week, or was it month? And that could have gone to spend on keeping the N.H.S. going. Or payment for new hospitals, schools, mending roads and the infra structure in general. Who came up with that figure? Once we've gone there's going to be a huge hole in the E.U. budget. In other words the United Kingdom seems to have kept the whole thing going with our payments. With the Euro in meltdown, what with the Greek economy needing fixing, and then the Portuguese and the Italian, all expecting to get handouts to pay their debts, without our money coming in to prop things up, no wonder they expect us to pay a hefty price.

1200th Blog post

I can't believe I've reached the 1200th blog post. I wasn't sure I could even keep this blog going for half a dozen posts, let alone more than one thousand. So, here we are, and what on earth am I going to talk about in this post?

It's 8.30 on a Monday morning, and already the sun is shining and it's hot. Really difficult to sleep, so our bedroom windows have been open as well as an electric fan on. But I'm not sure it really cools the room, just stirring up the air a bit. On Ward 22 Carol has been given a couple of fans, a large floor-standing modern and a smaller one which sits on the bedside cabinet. Along the corridor on Ward 22 they have installed air conditioning machines, with a sort of coiled pipe stuck out of the windows. They are more effective than fans as they cool the air rather than just pushing it around. But at least the fans provide some sort of relief from the heat.  The weather forecast is for even warmer weather, reaching as much as 33c in some parts of the country. Which translates to 91F. I was brought up on Fahrenheit, so anything in Celsius is rather foreign to me. Sorry to say, metric weighs and measures leave me a bit stumped, unfortunately. I can never see why we have to have both systems in operation. Surely, as members of the E.U., we should have gone fully over to metric. Why are we still stuck in a sort of vacuum? Which politicians allowed this mess? I think I prefer imperial measures, after all, who has a vague idea what a pint or a gallon is? You can visualise these measurements. Do we have to buy fuel, either diesel or petrol, in metric measures? Gallons or litres? It's rather confusing.

Alfie was following me around the house. Wherever I went, even to the toilet, he was like a shadow. He was waiting for his early-morning walk around Eaglestone Park. We've seen a man walking his dog, a whippet. He was out with his dog the other morning.Unfortunately Alfie has to rush up to every dog he comes across and runs around in circles, wagging his tail frantically. He is just trying to be friendly, but I think some dogs, the more nervous and scared, are not too keen for this sort of excitement. I don't think the man was over-keen as he said his son was in hospital and the dog had been attacked by another dog. Carol told me that, before she knew me, she'd taken Poppy, our westie/shitsu cross, had been attacked by a large dog which rushed up to Poppy when she had been taken for a walk, and this dog had got hold of Poppy and began to shake her. It must have been frightening and it's a wonder that Poppy didn't get hurt. I think it really scared both of them. On another occasion, when we'd taken both dogs out for a walk, we'd only just left the house, when a small dog rushed up to us, I think a Jack Russell Terrier, and tried to bight Alfie. I managed to grab Alfie and picked him up, and we were able to get the dog away from our dogs. Goodness knows where it came from, possibly from one of the houses across the road from us in one of the closes.

I'm currently continuing to clean the house as best I can. I came back from seeing Carol in hospital and immediately took a load of cardboard boxes to the tidy-tip in Bleak Hall. These were the packaging for stuff which should have gone months ago, the packaging for the IKEA unit in the lounge, the box the television came in and goodness knows what else. I was determined it would all go in the car and make just one trip. Not as difficult as it could have been, but it made room in the small bedroom which has become something of a dumping ground for various items.

More Reading and Watching-1

I'm currently reading Dominic Sandbrook's book 'State of Emergency,' the third of his series of books on the history of Britain since the Suez Crisis of 1956. It's covering the Heath government of the early 1970's and his negotiations for Britain to enter the Common Market, or E.E.C. (European Economic Community) and how he had to get the general public on side and then to get the required support of Parliament. It's interesting, in light of the 2016 referendum on whether Britain should leave what has now become the European Union (E.U.) and how indifferent the people of Britain were at the time. There was a referendum later in the 1970's, when Labour returned to power, which lead eventually to more integration with Europe, the Maastricht Treaty and the eventual creation of the single currency, the Euro (which Britain didn't join, for better or worse.) It's an extremely detailed account of the whole process and well worth reading. I have one more book, 'Days In The Sun' to read once I've completed this volume, and each volume is a think door-topper, each around 600-700 pages. 'State of Emergency' covers the years 1970-74, whilst 'Days In The Sun' covers the years 1974-1979, the year that Margaret Thatcher came to power. I'm hoping that Sandbrook will eventually release a book which covers the Thatcher years of the 1980's and, eventually, one on the 1990's.

The third  series of 'Humans' has finished. It is a co-production between Channel Four and the American network A.M.C., and is based, however loosely, on the Swedish television series 'Real Humans.' I have watched all the series up until now. It has been an enthralling series. If you don't know what it's about, it's set in a parallel world to our own, where synths (robotic humanoids) have been developed to aid humans in many tasks, from caring for the home to working in a range of jobs, such as in factories and warehouses. It's what science fiction should be, it should ask questions about such things as modern life, automation, A.I., computers etc etc. In another respect it can comment on such things which modern society discusses, issues which we are concerned with at present, such as immigration, genocide, integration, the introduction of automation, and how these things effect the world we live in.  As yet there has been no news as to weather a fourth season will be commissioned, but it certainly deserves to be decommissioned as there are so many plot threads which could lead to a fourth season.

I'm watching some of the classic television comedy which is shown on channels such as Gold, Yesterday and W. I've been revisiting sitcoms such as 'One Foot In The Grave.' The one where Victor and Margaret get trapped in their garden shed by a swarm of bees and then Victor has to go to get his eyes tested and has drops put in his eyes and, because he can't see, doesn't realise that everyone has gone home in the optician's. It's as funny as I remember it from first seeing it back in the 1990's. A comudgenly pensioner with a grumpy disposition, the bane of the people he meets, and a wife who often dispares when he is being moody. A gloriously understated performance from Annette Crosbie. Strange to think she played Queen Victoria in the ITV series 'Edward VII.' My mother always made mention the fact, when this actress was on television in anything, that she didn't have all her teeth, for  some strange reason. I hadn't noticed, but it was possibly true. She had all her front teeth, but for some reason or other, had none at the back. Why or how I have no idea. This would be before video recorders were invented, and you could record something off the television and then freeze frame. What an odd thing to remember? And how did my mother know? It must have been a gift to notice such things. Never mind. I digress, as ever. Just saying, it was a long way from Queen Victoria to Margaret Meldrew. She played another queen in the 1970's series on BBC1, 'The Six Wives of Henry VIII,' as Catherine of Aragon, opposite Keith Michell as Henry VIII. It must have been one of the first big colour drama series.

Another episode, from, I think, the second series has Victor attending a life-drawing class and when he gets home he shows the drawing of the naked female model to his wife Margaret, who becomes suspicious when Victor takes a job at the woman's home. Further complicating ensue, as they invariably do in a lot of sitcom, when Margaret has a male neighbour in to help with some jobs around the house and they go out together and one thing leads to another. Misunderstandings and the like, the basis of so much comedy, from Shakespeare right up to date with not only 'One Foot In The Grave' to many other shows, in the theatre and on television.

I recently bought the box set of 'Allo, 'Allo. I absolutely love this series, but I have never seen the earlier episodes. In 1985 I worked on the show as a Supporting Artiste, when it was being filmed on location in and around Lynford Hall, near Thetford, Norfolk. The stable yard was the location of the village square immediately outside Rene café, which is the centre of activities. I was amongst quite a few other S.A.s who played German soldiers and we were supposed to hang around in the square. Some other scenes were shot in the West Tofts Military Training area, not usually open to the public. I also filmed there for a drama/documentary series called 'Soldiers.' We were supposed to be the dead and dying at various battles all round Europe, including the Battle of Waterloo (details of which are mentioned in an earlier blog post on here.)

The thing about 'Allo, Allo' is that it has several plot lines running through it, which is unusual for a sitcom. Usually in a sitcom, you get the same characters appearing every week, and each situation, generally, ties up within each half-hour episode, but with 'Allo, 'Allo you get several of these plot lines running concurrently, the Gestapo chasing after the stolen paintings of the 'Fallen Madonna With The Big Boobies,' The Resistance ('I will tell you this once and once only' etc etc.) The British Airmen and how they will be got out of France to return to England etc etc and how all these inter-relate and run across whole series and, indeed, the entire 80-odd episodes.  It is actually a parody of an earlier BBC drama series called 'Secret Army' which starred Bernard Hepton and Angela Richards, an actress who was in the company when I was starting out in Stage Management at the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham in 1969. 

Blinking Brexit

You just can't get away from it. Britain leaving the EU. Or Brexit for short. I hate the term. I actually voted to 'Remain,' but I can't think why. I spent ages on deciding the pros and cons of voting to either Remain or Leave, but I can honestly say that, if we were to have another referendum, I think I'd vote leave. I just hate all the unnecessary bureaucracy created by a virtually faceless load of pen-pushers in Strasberg or wherever the organisation is based. Did we really know what we were voting for during that referendum in 2016? I doubt it very much. The politicians didn't know how difficult it was going to be to disassociate ourselves from this 'thing.'

We should never have had this crazy referendum in the first place. It was only because of the rise of UKIP, the party who wanted us to leave the E.U. that David Cameron ran scared and had the thing in the first place. Surely, being a member of something, such as a club or trade union, you don't always agree with everything the organisation you're a member of does. But you have the power to influence things, as Britain did as an E.U. member. You can work to change it, for good or bad. Just leaving because you don't like it isn't really the answer. The joke is, that now UKIP has virtually disappeared from the political scene. 

I really object to having laws and regulations foisted on us by an unelected body such as the EU parliament and those laws being above our parliament. We've currently got to give our consent if we want to have emails sent under something called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as from 25th May 2018. I'm getting endless emails to make sure I tick the relevant box to make sure companies which I've already signed up to, have my permission to continue to email me. It doesn't make sense when I've already made it clear I've given my sense when I signed up to these emails however long ago it was. Just another layer of bureaucracy. But what really gets me is that I bet this doesn't stop all the junk mail I get or the endless telephone calls trying to get me to claim PPI (which I've never had.) Even though I've signed up to the preference service which is supposed to prevent these calls, so I bet this new EU regulation will have about as much clout as a chocolate hammer.

So, we have to go through all this rigmarole about a Hard and a Soft Brexit (whatever they mean. Can someone explain, please? I'm totally confused.) It has never ever been explained to me how the E.U. works or what we got from being members. Where does the money we pay in go? What do we get? Do we get Nectar points?

I can see why people voted to leave. The British are a proud nation. We fought two World Wars. We got through The Blitz, Dunkirk and countless battles. We're an island. We like to make our own rules and regulations. We don't like being dominated by faceless bureaucrats.

Do we really, honestly spend £350 million a day on funding this organisation? Or was it weeks? I don't know, but the leave campaign had it emblazoned on the side of their bus, and it was going to fund the N.H.S. Was this just a reason to get people to vote leave? I think it was a week. Surely it was a week. I can't believe we'd pay that much a day. But Boris Johnson said it was an 'underestimate.'

Politicians on both sides of the referendum argument, remain and leave, made absolutely no attempt to explain what the E.U. was about. I can see that, when it was originally set up back in the 1950's, as the Common Market, and when it was just 6 nations, it was an attempt to get countries to cooperate and hopefully prevent another war in Europe. Cooperation being the operative word here. We had joined under the Harold Wilson government in the 1970s and then, for some strange reason we had a referendum, in 1975 I think it was, to ask 'The People' if they wanted us to be members. A rather back-to-front idea, putting the cart before the horse, to have a vote AFTER we joined. But the E.U., as it's now called, isn't the same organisation it was at that time. We now have a single currency, The Euro (which Britain didn't sign up to) and far more regulations and laws.

Why is there such a problem with refugees and immigrants in this country? We've always had immigrants and been tolerant of refugees. Just look at our history, going back centuries. We've welcomed people from different ethnic groups, such as the Huguenots  who fled persecution and then set up the silk weaving industry in London. The idea of having 'open borders,' meaning you can cross into the other E.U. countries without having to bother with endless paperwork, passports, making trading easier because you all have the same structures for such things as health and safety or weights and measures and even (heaven forbid) currency makes a lot of sense. If we could all agree on how to deal with refugees, then that problem might have been resolved, and not put pressure on one or two nations within the E.U. (ie: France and Britain, with all the problems caused by refugees at the Channel ports between France and Britain.) then the E.U. might have been a worthwhile organisation to be a member of. But it seems the different countries with the E.U. can't even agree on that. A shame. It would really make being a member worthwhile.

Why on earth, when they were setting up the 2016 EU Referendum, didn't they set a target, a sort of percentage of one way or other, to remain or leave, of, say 10% or even 20%, to which would be agreed as the winning amount of votes and then decide whether Britain remained or left the E.U. As it trend out, the result was 51.89% to leave and 48.11% to remain, a really tiny percentage to leave. Hardly enough to decide to leave. Surely it should have been a higher percentage to leave. A crazy mistake on the part of our politicians who put the country through this incredibly messy situation as regards the negotiations to extricate ourselves from the E.U. Then you learn that there were25,359 blank or invalid votes. What were those people who wasted their votes thinking? Just wasted. Either way, if they had used their votes sensibly then the results might have been completely different. 

A Few More Niggles

Who's idea was it at Marks and Spencer to put stupid stickers on the soles of their slippers which are very difficult to remove? And, after some real effort, there is a really nasty sticky residue left which is even more difficult to remove. This seems to be a problem with quite a few items we've bought. You get similar stickers in books, for example, in Waterstone's when they have their 'Buy one get one half price' or 'buy one and get one free' offers. They insist on having stickers on the covers of the books which are difficult enough to remove and once removed, leave a nasty sticky residue which is even more difficult to remove. Why wants their books covered in the stickers in the first place? The same with books in The Works, the bargain book shop. Just as difficult to get the sticky goo off the cover of the books you have just purchased from them.

While I'm on the subject of labels, not particularly stickers, but those of a different type. Why does IKEA insist on having such ridiculously large labels on their products? I know they have to warn people of the dangers of the risk of fire (but, come on, who in their right mind is going to put a match to such items as curtains, carpets etc etc, or put them too close to an open flame or 'source of ignition.'? Although, thinking about it, I suppose there is always someone who would.) What I'm thinking about are the horrible long bits of material stuck to some items they sell, giving such details as materials and where the item is made, which just look ugly and out of place. We always cut them off, on some items, such as throws and soft toys we've bought for our dogs. I suppose it's to adhere to Health and Safety regulations or something. No doubt to do with the E.U. so something we won't have to contend with once Britain has left. Then, why, on hot drinks cups, for example, when you buy a coffee in Costa, Starbucks or any other outlet that sells take-away drinks, do they have to state the patently obvious on the cups, with the words 'Take care. Contents may be hot.' So, what do you expect with a hot drink? Are people do dumb they need to be reminded that the contents are hot? Doh! The same when you have a microwavable meal, they insist on telling you that the contents of the little plastic container you have which has a lasagne in it or other meal, will be very hot when it comes out of the microwave or oven? 'Open carefully because hot steam will escape.' There's a surprise. I have a real dislike of these cardboard cups anyway. How on earth are you expected to drink from them, with the lid on, out of such a tiny hole? You get such a tiny mouthful, it's hardly worth bothering. I don't know why anyone would want to buy these cups of coffee, usually from vending machines, and why do people have to walk around drinking hot coffee in the first place? A decent cup of coffee needs drinking from a proper china cup, not something made of nasty plastic or cardboard, which, incidentally, most likely not be recycled. It needs drinking fairly quickly before it gets cold and is totally unpleasant.