Mes: diciembre 2018

This would appear to be the last contribution this year. We don’t do retrospectives here. That is left to the «newspapers» who are not offering anything other than lists.
No lists here.
Let’s start with the Orange Shit Gibbon and all his nonsensical pouting. You have seen the facial expression, with his mouth taking a weird shape, You can’t immitate it, can you? Between the mouth and the hair, it is difficult to see the true human being underneath. However, the guy is about 73 years old and his hair and face do not fit. I saw a comment by an American journalist and followed it up on the internet. Then, I fortuitously met an ex-colleague (now retired) with his wife. She was a plastic surgeon. I asked about the procedure. Bingo!!!
the reason for the hair is that the Shit Gibbon got a scalp reduction;
Huh?
This is done for men who are losing their hair on top. The bald part is removed.
Wha’?
A rugby ball shaped part of the scalp is cut out on top of the head and the sides are sewn up so that the hair growing on each side is brought closer, thus reducing the bald area. This can be done up to three times per head. This has consequences a little similar to a face lift, but doesn’t pull from the same place.
The result is that the hair does not grow in the same direction as the original hair that grew in that geographical place initially. If uncontroled, the owner looks like he just stepped out of a wind tunnel. Or looks as if he is wearing a scrawney dead bird on his head.
Subsequently, it is difficult to force the hair to go in the «right» direction in the right places, i.e. in a direction that looks normal on a human head. The required severe control is enabled by huge quantities of rigidifying hair spray. That is why the Shit Gibbon’s hair is combed in the strangest of directions. The hair spray is of industrial strength and if sprayed on the male member would have an effect similar to viagra.
The other collateral effect of scalp reduction therapy is on the face. In a face lift, it is best to pull from the back. When pulled from the top, it is the mouth that is mainly unaffected. Imaging pulling the skin of your face from the back… your mouth gets wider and the wrinkles disappear. When the skin is pulled from above, the eyes and nose take the stretch. This leaves the Shit Gibbon with a high face with the hair line moved further back. He compensates by brushing the hair like a cantilever over his forehead. Now you know about the hair: it is real but in an unnatural position, and the mouth, all small and wrinkley.
Please tell me that you knew none of this. Apparently no American journalist will report on it. But now you all know the truth, the secret truth.

Brexit is going from being a theory to a terrifying reality and the Conservatives are engaged in a vicious feud amongst themselves. And they have all taken two weeks holiday for Christmas. I mean what could possibly be wrong with that?
Nothing! This is the plan all along: the hardest of hard Brexits. The thorn in their side is the international agreement they signed about no border in Ireland. If only they could get rid of that….
But they can’t, so fuck ‘em! (That’s a quote from Richard Nixon)
The thing to remember is that the hard Brexit proponents are the multi-millionaires who want no regulation on their monetary affairs. The more reasonable ones are those who want to avoid a hard brexit. Guess who is winning. And rumours that the sterile husband of the sterile Teresa May is an investment banker whose company stands to make milti-millions out of a hard brexit are completely true.
Why do you think that she is outrageously ignoring what the now majority of people are screaming? 60% want to stay.

And before you say anything… what the fuck do you think is any different in Catalunia?
As the Americans say…. «Follow the money»…. and you find out all the reasons.

Stamps! You would think we need fewer and fewer of those. Well, the British produce commemorative stamps quite a lot. This being a war anniversary year, they have come up with more war stamps. Unfortunately, the image of American troops landing in Normandy was quickly spotted as not being American troops landing in Normandy. It was American troops landing in Indonesia.
Of course, we would all be likely to confuse the coast of Normandy with the coast of Indonesia. Entirely understandable, right?
Anyway, I include the link because of the response of the public to getting it wrong. The alternative versions of the stamp down the article made me laugh.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/28/royal-mail-in-stamp-blunder-after-confusing-d-day-beaches-with-indonesia

In a move that has made the French, Belgians and Dutch laugh out loud, the ministry for Transport in the UK have been making new plans for Brexit. You remember the Brexit, right? Get rid of Europe and let’s do things ourselves. Well, to ease the inevitable problems at the port of Dover, they have had to prepare other ports. But to go with the use of other ports, they need ships. They don’t have any more ships. So they have spent more than £100 million (that’s one hundred million pounds) to rent ships for a Britain that is independent of Europe.
The ministry has signed contracts with the French firm Brittany Ferries (£46 million), the Danish company DFDS (£47 million) and the UK’s Seaborne Freight (a mere £18 million)
It would be impossible to make this shit up.
But it is just like the passports. They, the Conservatives and the foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Europe brexit fans, didn’t want the burgundy coloured European passport any more, they wanted their old colour of dark blue. In their blind ignorance, they could have had that anyway in Europe as there is no rule at all as to the colour of passports. So, they have contracted a company to produce the new not-European dark blue passports for Great Britain. Of course the company in question is French, based in France, and the British government will pay in Euros.
And the minister in question still has his job. I suppose that calamity doesn’t discriminate when it comes to making mistakes and you have to ask if the minister in question had simply won a competition to be a minister.
Incompetence meters exploding everywhere.
Why so bad?
British universities can offer an explanation. They are all suffering from grade inflation, and have been accused of doing it by officials. When I was at university studying for a degree, only about 3% got first class honours. They were exceptions. At the same time it was fairly similar in the UK. I couldn’t find any stastics for Spain. However, now that people have to pay a lot for their university studies in the UK, all the universities have to fight for more students to increase income. And how do you entice more students to come to your university? Yes, you guessed it. In 2000, the number of firsts was typically 10%, a serious rise on the past. In 2011 it was 16%. Last year it was at 26%. Are they are all fucking geniuses in the UK.  Hilariously, employers are strongly complaining that graduates (including the «best») do not have «any ability to do basic maths» and only have «a vague notion of English grammar». They find that foreign graduates know more of both.

About 30 years ago I went loking for a key ring of the Spanish Republic in Madrid. The girl I was with at the time there was horrified and when I went to ask a street vendor at the entrance to the metro, she ran away thinking that I would be beaten up or murdered. The stand was full of images of Franco and the Falange. The vendor, of course, just opened a drawer and sold me the key ring.
Now the Doctor cum Fraude and his sidekick with the big villa and the stupid hair want to remove the body of Franco to somewhere, anywhere else. They are missing out on a sales opportunity. Look at what is happening in Italy.
For 10€ you can go to most places and buy Mussolini calendars, key rings, framed pictures.
You can find the calendar images on the internet fairly easily and I looked. A flick through from January to December reveals various images of the fat bastard addressing a crowd bare-chested; punching the air in triumph after signing Italy’s 1939 pact with Germany and striding through Rome in military garb. You can buy them on Amazon. I had one of those quizzical looks on my face as I read this.
Then I remembered Putin. He does it too.
For the Spanish state to gain money, they should also be selling calendars of Franco, bare chested on a horse, sitting in the bath, walking along the beach, winking at the camera from behind a tree. Make up your own poses. Who wouldn’t want to buy one?

While I was on Amazon, I couldn’t help but notice some new useful gadgets. The most impressive one that will save me in my old age when I forget some things is the alarm that goes off if I don’t zip up my trousers. Finished will be the days when old men walk out of the public toilets with their manhood lolling down in front of them. Now they will also have an alarm to warn everyone.

Who are the tourists in Spain?
A few years ago (2012?) some pious woman went at a faded image of the Christ in the Santuario de Misericordia near Borja in the Sierra de Moncayo up in the north east and «restored» it to the amusement of the whole world. The final image resembled more a simian than a human. You all remember this, don’t you?
You can get bottles with the image on the label, thimbles, bookmarks, teddy bears, pens, mugs, T-shirts, mousepads, badges, fridge magnets and keyrings all with this work of art. (see the mayor’s website)
Anyway, since the ridiculous effort of the old woman went viral, the number of tourists to the place has multiplied by 4.
Seriously?
Who are these people and why don’t they have a life? Are there no interesting places in Spain to visit?

And speaking of life… or a version of it, I see that some bishop has been to the press to talk about his visits to Michael Schumacher. Oh how the family are doing all they can to ensure that he has no intrusion and only complete tranquility, he said. The truth of the matter is not quite in his words. Poor Michael is a vegetable and will remain so until someone unplugs him. The 5 million euro machine is kept running until the whole inheritance is fully in the hands of his associates and family members long enough so that they don’t have to pay any taxes whatsoever. That date is soon and I expect that Michael will be unplugged sometime in 2020. And yes, I know some of the hospital staff in the general hospital in Grenoble where he was (not treated, only) kept alive for several months. They all signed confidentiality agreements to not divulge any information whatsoever on his vegetative state.
Cynical?
Just follow the money, and he had a lot of it… several hundred million.

So, no lists or retrospectives of the year…. just a strange form of reality. But I will make one prediction: the return of hats. I mean the 1940s and 1950s style. No man will be seen outside without a hat. It will be the «must have» fashion item of 2019.
I want one.

What do you all want?

I am stopping here as the whole trawl through the papers this week was cold and uninviting and well… miserable. I can only reflect that.

Will a hot whiskey cheer me up, I wonder.
I’ll try.

Blessings of the season on you all and may the next weeks bring me something funny to recount!
f

And as you can see, I survived the football.

From an article in tomorrow’s Guardian…
LOL

«One of the companies contracted by the UK government to charter ferries in the event of a no-deal Brexit does not own any ships, has not previously operated a ferry service and is not planning to do so until close to the UK’s scheduled departure date from the European Union, it has emerged.»

Okay, this can only be true. In no one’s imagination could that be invented.

«Concerns have been raised about Seaborne Freight, which was awarded a £13.8m contract to operate freight ferries from Ramsgate to the Belgian port of Ostend»

Okay, now can I follow the money?

(Anti-brexit).. Paul Messenger, a Conservative county councillor in Ramsgate, questioned whether the government had carried out sufficient checks on the firm, telling the BBC: “It has no ships and no trading history so how can due diligence be done?
“Why choose a company that never moved a single truck in their entire history and give them £14m? I don’t understand the logic of that.”

Nor would anyone…. unless you follow the money.
The company, the only British one in the list, is owned by three brexit financiers who only founded the company after the brexit vote in 2016.
What could possibly be wrong with that?
A parody of a parody.

You do realise that the Brits consider the Spanish to be both incompetent and corrupt, don’t you?

Gibralter should be fun.

f

Good morning and may the panic of the season be on all of you with a vengeance!
It is with me.
I must reassure you that despite playing abysmal football this morning (with son Axel who was still drunk) I am fine and uninjured in any evident way.

This being a sort of morning thing, usually, I cannot but start with the droning sound of Gatwick airport. It is my habit to read and then digest, sometimes distill, and then scribble a resumé of the news, but for once, I will simply reproduce this section of an article on said Gatwick problems printed in the Guardian here. Can you spot the strange bit?
And really, you’ve got to love this guy.
«Some more tales of woe now from Gatwick. David Sowter, 79, set off on his journey to visit his daughter in Jersey for Christmas at 5am on Wednesday morning, driving first to Jacksonville in Florida and flying to Fort Lauderdale in order to catch a connection to Gatwick.
But following the drone sightings his flight was unable to land in London and so was diverted to Paris. After sitting on the runway for four hours, he was put on a bus to Calais and a ferry to Dover. He arrived at Gatwick at 5am on Friday morning. His flight to Jersey is now scheduled to leave at 7pm.
He doesn’t have a smart phone and so has been unable to follow the unfolding situation with drone sightings. “I’ve got a flip phone. My daughter in Jersey doesn’t even know where I am,” he said. His plans for the rest of the day at Gatwick mainly involve drinking beer. “I already had two at breakfast this morning,” he said. “I had a proper English breakfast with two pints of Guinness.”»
At 79? For breakfast? My kind of man!
And can you guess what I am having for breakfast? (Hint: it might become more noticeable as I type.)

As announced, it is play sports day for me this morning and there has to be a valid reason to do it. Everyone who says that running is the way to burn up calories is talking bollocks. I have looked at the rate of use of energy while running (I am a professor of thermodynamics, you know) and it comes nowhere near burning off any extra weight.  Basically, sport gives you some cardio vascular exercise and indirectly reduces your appetite for eating fast food and sugars. To get the message through to the general populace (also known as the usual idiots) one newspaper has translated a simple sport (running) into the equivalent of eating Christmas crap. One slice of cake or a small sweet pie will require 35 minutes of running to burn off all the energy. Run for an hour and you can eat two.  That is one miserable return, you reasonably say, and the clear idea was to incite people to eat less by looking for a balance between energy intake and energy use. Except that it has worked in the opposite direction. The newspaper blog under the article is full of comments about how it is now obvious that running or sport isn’t worth it at all if you are overweight. It does nothing except make you tired, so we may as well keep eating and damn the consequences. Obesity crisis? And on we go with that one.
French doctors (among others) keep saying that it is better to go for a fast walk after eating a lot (and eating a little too) and this is far more healthy than not burning off any calories at all.
However, and this is for those of you with a dog, not only does a good walk burn some (small number of) calories and exercise the dog but allows accompaying guests the chance to  practise digestive amelioration by discretely allowing gross flatulence, for which the poor dog has been taking the blame while inside the house.
Dog lovers! Yeah! Now you know why they have dogs.

Some ancient Greek offered better advice but as I can’t remember the exact quote, I have to paraphrase: «Eat, drink, copulate with a willing partner of choice, work as much as necessary and as little as possible, for tomorrow you may be dead or something else unpleasant might happen.»

That’s us all eating and drinking, then.

Have you seen the official White House Christmas photograph this year? Lines of Christmas trees with the Orange Shit Gibbon in a black dress suit beside Melanoma (isn’t that her name?) in a white dress standing in the middle. The smiles are stark reminders that vampires do exist and are flourishing. This has to be the most child-frightening Christmas image ever. It is devoid of all life as we know it. 

To the hilarious embarassment of the Brexit voting usual idiots (them again) it was wonderful to see that beacon of democracy and openness Tsar Vladimir the first and last give his opinion to Teresa May (a vagina drier than the dust on Mars) on a second referendum. Fulfil the will of the people, he intoned in a planned hypnotic message (The Manchurian Candidate, anyone?). In Russia, of course, he gets 93% of the vote because it’s not the people who vote that counts, it’s the people who count the votes.
Besides, he has a strong financial interest in Brexit and he doesn’t want a second referendum. After all, he paid enough for the first one.
He also has some serious interests in Catalunia. And I reckon he has compromised your Doktor Sanchez cum fraude.

Much comment has been made over the English speaking world concerning a recent article in the British Medical Journal, the premier medical publication in the world. There is an interesting article concerning the use of parachutes in aviation. A group of medical researchers have done a study of the effectiveness of jumping out of an aircraft with or without a parachute. Here is the reference:
https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094
The outcomes of the experiments are somewhat conclusion-limited by the aircraft being on the ground.
Complaints were being urged by journalists who are being «responsible about the spending of public money». I laughed.
Why?
Because some of those commenting haven’t realised that the BMJ Christmas issue is a parody issue full of joke studies written by actual medical researchers. They even put the articles on their CVs. 
I mean, how could a study on whether parachute use reduces death rates for people jumping out of aircraft be taken in any way seriously?

The next bit of certifiable madness comes from the Great Brexit… eh… Britain.
Adam Thomas, 22, and Claudia Patatas, 38 (originally from Portugal), are a neo-Nazi couple who named their baby son after Adolf Hitler.
Family picture showed Thomas holding his son while wearing the hooded robes of the Ku Klux Klan. They were put in front of a judge for belonging to an illegal racist organisation. No! Not the Conservative party.
At the trial in Birmingham the court heard that the father had also taught their daughter to do a Nazi salute, and then sent a message to Patatas saying: “Finally got her to do it.”
They gave their male child the middle name “Adolf”, which Thomas said was in “admiration” of Hitler, and the couple had swastika cushions in their home.
These caring and reasonable parents cried and held hands in the dock as they were jailed for six years and six months, and five years respectively.
It took the authorities over five years to react. The couple should have stayed in the Conservative party.

Despite the cringing awkwardness of Theresa May dancing on stage at the Conservative Party conference and also in South Africa, (choreographer Ray Harryhausen), she still has more credibility than the fool leading the Labour party, who just announced that no matter what happens, he will vote for Brexit.
Then he will get a better deal than May.
Where does stupidity end and delusion start?

There is also news from both Spain and the UK that the 15 Saudi murderers of that journalist some weeks ago have been banned from entering either country.
This must be quite surreal for the Saudis with their public beheadings and hand «removing», let alone their unhidden illegal military actions in Yemen. The idea that they would be vilified all over the world for killing a fully grown man in private with no witnesses must seem ridiculous to them by now. Spain and the UK apparently “share values” with the Saudis. After they behead someone (48 in the first four months of the year), they sometimes crucify the body in the public square for three days. The average Saudi then has the good sense to behorrified by women driving cars. What is the world coming to?
Given teh continuing arms sales, it appears that both governments were so angry about the murder that they sent a strongly worded arms invoice to the Saudi government.

Christmas presents are as always difficult for me since my kids now ask for branded goods and it is no longer possible to buy the no-label equivalent while telling them that it is just the same. The advertising seriously upsets me. All of these multi-nationals are pushing themselves as moral arbiters for young people and now the adults in the room. Look at the publicity! Are we suddenly expected to look for moral guidance to corporations like McDonalds, Nike etc? In fact, speaking of Nike and their brand message of “Just do it”. I have it from a reliable source that this started out as a looped PA announcement in their Vietnamese trainer factory to the children making the produce… «just do it, just do it, just do it…». ad nauseum.

I saw one strange comment in an American publication, related to the anti-women supreme court judge Brett Kavanaugh (I love beer, weep! Do you love beer? sniff! ). A rather macho ex-colleague of said judge claimed that after drinking plenty of beer (I love beer, sniffle) during his student days, he would complain loudly about not having a woman nearby when he would wake up in the morning feeling arousal. Well, the only positive I can see for his case is that his erection would probably have stopped him from rolling out of bed.

The world is depressing me. Have you read the newspapers from different countries?

I will take this opportunity to wish you all, and your families, a fairly Happy Christmas. Can we expect more?
Also, with mornings now without the obligation of work for the next two weeks, I might well find the cynical inspiration to write more often but shorter messages.

love to all
f

Good morning to you all.
There is, with the season that is in it, a strong chance that demands from every side will prevent me from the preparation of this weekly (though sometimes more often) deluge of drivel, albeit actual real life drivel.
So, this morning, let’s talk about Christmas.
And sex.
We haven’t touched on sex yet, if you forgive the unfortunate pun. But that will be down the line.
I have never learned how you all play Christmas, but I can’t see any more than two ways to approach the whole thing. You either relax into a period of unstressed down time (my first americanism of the day) or you go aaaarrrggghhhh!!!! at the slightest sign of something not being exactly as you want to imagine. To paraphrase, you are looking to get stressed out of your skull. This is panic just under the surface… Felix!! Donde estan los chocolates de mi primo? Me has dicho que ibas a cojerlos. No lo has hecho, y con todo que yo (ho ho) tengo que hacer… todo esta aruinado!!
You can feel the impending doom now imposed on your plans to actually relax for a few hours and think happy thoughts about the world.
Despite the meaning of the season (the innocence of a baby being born in the equivalent of a shanty town and the soon to be announced murder of all children under 2… ah here, Frank, hang on! That’s not it!) half the people we know appear to be determined to stress out everyone else. 
This is now part of the tradition of Christmas. Also, lots of people want and like to be under pressure and stress.
My mother was a perfect example of a Christmas-stresser. No problem was too small to prevent alarm calls that would have emptied the Titanic. What was it? A sense of obligation to make sure the dinner was perfect, the presents were the best ever? Deep down, I think she enjoyed playing her role.
Don’t we all?
A time for the kids? Yeah, right!
If you are lucky, everyone will want to contribute to the food preparations, except that everyone is also secretly (ha!) ultra competitive. That is the straight line between relaxing and duel fighting at dawn the next day.
Thinking back, I remember one occasion when I took the task of preparing part of the dinner. It was fine, and as good as my mother’s usual efforts. All good until she produced «one that she had prepared… just in case».
In case of what? A disaster? I think she hoped rather than expected a disaster on my part.
Ah here, for eff sake, Ma!
My father was in the middle of all this looking rather unsettled and knowing that he had two possibly warring personalities in the room with him.
On Christmas Day too.
So he would (over-)eat both, while I would eat mine and my mother would eat hers, grumbling.
But really, despite the dangers of confrontation, it was fun. Roles to play.
Irritants abound of course, but they should be unimportant. There is (or should be) plenty to enjoy.
Again, I don’t know enough about your day, but I notice that I have assumed a number of habits(?.. wrong word, really) that remind me of the best times and that I hold onto fiercely now that my parents are no longer around.
And that’s the thing – the older we get, the more opportunity we have to drop the stuff we never enjoyed and to keep the things we did.
I would love to know how you go through your Christmas day(s) but I am far away and only I find the time for nonsense like this.

So, let’s get to the real thing, the news…
What’s happening in Spain? We are not fascists, shout the new party in Andalucia, as they struggle to control their right arms in a similar way to Dr Strangelove.
LOL
Meanwhile, in the north east… Kim Torra (also now known as «you must be Jouchim»… go on, look for the pun!) is sending out his radical supporters to cause damage while he hides from doing what he wants others to do.
What a man!!! Leading from the back again.

There aren’t enough problems in the world so let’s get outraged!!!
The professional outragers are back again this week. In New York.
Prada had to apologise after some of its toys displayed at a store in New York which appeared to contain blackface imagery.
What?
Like the actors in early American films? The white ones who used to have their faces blacked so that they could play ‘negros»?
Yes, now you have it.
The «Pradamalia» toys  were immediately removed and destroyed after they caused yet more outrage and accusations that they depicted racist caricatures of black people.
I mean, come on! How bad can it be?
Prada said in a statement that it had «not intended the products – some of which seemed to resemble black monkeys with outsized red lips – to have any reference to the real world or blackface imagery».
Oh yes, we all say, it can be that bad and there is a picture below to prove it.
What on Earth could they be complaining about?
You decide!
Again, for my sins, I laughed.

Okay, that is astonishingly racist.
Once more, the management meeting must have been fun but unfortunately they didn’t sell tickets for it.

France now, and the Gilets Jaunes.. and the Emperor.
Ex-banker and man of the rich finally decided to appear on television in very late response to four weeks of brutal protests in the streets by mainly ordinary people. This should have been considered by his advisors to be the most important TV appearance by the fucker. He is permanently being accused of being the “president of the rich” and this was his chance to show that he understood ordinary French people’s struggle to make ends meet. You know, the usual «I feel your pain» type of speech on social inequality, austerity, etc. Where is the speech from? There he is, sitting in one of the most opulent and golden rooms in the luxurious, 365-room Élysée Palace, sitting behind a gold-inlaid desk. Yes, he feels our pain.
The protests have continued.

In the UK, and Brexit panic is only hitting the streets now. The Brexit plan vote in parliament was cancelled 24 hours before it was due to be convulsively rejected. No way were they going to stay in any agreement with that bunch of authoritarian madmen who are in total control of everyone else and want to keep things that way. However, with the cancellation of the vote, the British House of Commons was thus denied a vote on their own future.
What did the German parliament do?
They decided to have a free vote on renegotiating the withdrawal agreement that the British were just denied.
That’s Germany, the country in complete control of the “undemocratic EUSSR” having a free vote whilst the British parliament isn’t allowed to vote!
Irony meters exploded everywhere.

And on now to the Orange Shit Gibbon…
Last year he gave us “covfefe” in one of his midnight tweets. This year – and just in time for Christmas –he gives us another literary gift: the “Smocking Gun”.
He even wrote it twice.
“Democrats can’t find a Smocking Gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia after James Comey’s testimony. No Smocking Gun… No Collusion,”
Some people are claiming that he wanted to write «smoking gun» but I don’t believe them.
There is no upside with this bastard. This being Christmas I can only imagine a slightly different game to the usual one. I’ll call it Snakes and Snakes.

Two South African men accused of cannibalism were given life sentences for murder last week.
One of them, Nino Mbatha, 33, was arrested after handing himself in at a police station. He was carrying a bag containing a human leg and a hand. He told officers he was “tired of eating human flesh”.
Now how can one get tired of eating human flesh? The variations are vast and it tastes just like pork, so they say.
Quite incredibly, South Africa has no direct law against cannibalism, but mutilating a corpse and being in possession of human tissue are criminal offences. Thus, they went to jail, not for canibalism, but for chopping up a dead body.
It is quite the opposite in Europe, fortunately.

It’s Christmasssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In Brexitland, Cambridgeshire specifically, a Santa Clause charged angrily out of his grotto during a fire alarm evacuation to shout and swear at everyone while tearing off his hat and beard.
The fire alarm went off and he ran about shouting “get the fuck out, get the fuck out!!!”.
Clearly, he was taking the incident seriously, as one would, with lots of children about with slow-moving parents.
Organisers of the event apologised for “any offence or distress” caused by his behaviour.
They were apparently less concerned about the panicked children and the spectre of having another Herodian disaster.
Said one outraged parent…  “The guy dressed as Santa at the Corn Exchange is an absolute disgrace. He came charging in, ripped his hat and beard off in front of 50 odd kids and started shouting and swearing at people to leave.”
Another outraged woman said children became extremely distressed when “Santa told them to get the fuck out”.
Please tell me that I am an extremist because I would have punched the slow parents.

And it’s Christmas in New Zealand too…
A Māori Santa Clause was subject to racist boos and jeers after appearing in a parade dressed in a traditional Korowai cloak of bright red feathers. The man, Herewini was referred to as Hana Koko, or Māori Santa.
But this outraged many people, with some Nelson residents accusing parade organisers of “ruining Christmas” for their children, and said efforts to reflect New Zealand’s bicultural and multicultural makeup had gone overboard.
“Santa is not, has never been and will never be a bloody Māori!” said one man with a slurred Crocodile Dundee accent, who threw an empty can of beer on the ground and promptly opened another one. And belched while thumping his kid on the side of the head for not standing still.

Christmas toys, anyone? A robot?
A “hi-tech robot” named Boris, shown on Russian state television, was able to walk, and dance and actually jump, something exceptionally difficult to make happen and something impossible for Teresa May to do at all. After the music stopped a very robotic voice rang out. “I know mathematics well but I also want to learn to draw,”
On Wednesday morning, the television report briefly disappeared from Russia-24’s YouTube channel but by early afternoon it was accessible again.
It had turned out that Boris was really a man in a suit and not a robot at all.
The state-run Channel One was forced to apologise for the fake report
Young Russian nerds were outraged while watching the «robot» move and dance. Where were Boris’s external sensors? Why did the robot make so many “unnecessary movements” while dancing?
And why did the robot look like a person would fit perfectly inside of it?
Later, photographs of the “robot” posted on social media showed the very visible neckline of the person in the suit.
«Ah fuck!» President Putin was heard sayng.

And just as the Brits manage to make a bad situation even worse… there comes this book about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table…

King Arthur’s name continues to resonate with us today, some 1,500 years after he was supposed to have lived. John Steinbeck was given Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) as a nine-year-old and it became his “magic book”, sparking a life-long love of Arthurian literature and of storytelling. Raymond Chandler tipped his hat to the Arthurian age of valiant knights by naming Philip Marlowe’s forerunner Mallory. A week after her husband’s assassination in 1963, Jackie Kennedy used Camelot as a metaphor for the White House under JFK. The knights of the Round Table, as well as Guinevere, Merlin and the sword in the stone have all become cultural memes deeply rooted not just in the British consciousness but around the world, generating new books, films, operas and computer games in which the stories are constantly renewed.

Despite his fame, Arthur is “something of a nightmare from the historian’s perspective”. As Nicholas Higham shows, practically everything about him is disputed, even down to “when and where he belongs”. In this fascinating, authoritative analysis of the many Arthurian texts and theories, Higham asks: “Was he a fiction, right from the start?”

Practically everything about King Arthur is disputed, even down to when and where he belongs

Since the 19th century, Arthur has been viewed as a historical figure who lived around AD500. But the lack of reliable contemporary accounts of his life poses a problem. His name does not appear until some 300 years later, in the Historia Brittonum. But despite its title, this is not history in the modern sense. “Britain’s foremost Dark Age hero” was, Higham concludes, “made up by one imaginative clerk”, who was anxious to please his master, a Welsh kinglet, by creating a historical tradition of resistance to foreign invaders.

Higham weighs the evidence and ultimately finds it all wanting, from mythological explanations (“clutching at straws”), and apparent references to Arthur in Old Welsh texts that predate the Historia (“no evidence”), to the intriguing theory that he was a Roman soldier, L Artorius Castus, who served in Britain and is buried in modern-day Croatia (“entirely unconvincing”). He even casts doubt on the existence of Camelot, which is first mentioned in “a highly imaginative” 12th-century French romance. Higham remains sceptical All we are left with are poems and stories in which the life and exploits of King Arthur have been written and rewritten. They are testament to his enduring mythic power. Perhaps the true value of this elusive leader lies in what he can tell us about ourselves rather than the long forgotten past.
While cannibals might get tired of eating human meat, it isn’t the same for all creatures..
A Buddhist monk was killed by a leopard while meditating in a protected forest for the big cats, the fifth such attack in the area this month according to Indian police.
Some people never learn.
Two other meditating monks who were with him at the time escaped unscathed to alert police, who started a search for his body.
The monks had ignored warnings from police about venturing too far into the forest.
The moral to the story is easy to see.
When in serious difficulty, you don’t have to run faster than a leopard. You just have to run faster than at least one of the people with you.
Okay, and now for the sex…
There are literary prizes every year for best books, prizes for actors, films, etc.
However, teh English do get some things right, and in an equivalent to the Razzies in Hollywood (awards for the worst films and actors), there is a literary «bad sex» award in the UK for the wost description of sex in a book.

Ah come on!!  You didn’t expect serious sex from me here, did you?

The judges at the Literary Review chose the winner which included sex encounters in a car park and in the back of a taxi, but were especially convinced by an extended scene in a Paris bathroom. They have to give the specific examples of their decisions and the exerpts are given here…
And please, do not read unless you are over 18 and have had several awful sex experiences yourself.

This is from the winner, as I said…
“Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her my cock throbbing we’re both moaning eyes hearts souls bodies one,”

The writer, a Mr Frey, must have had either no sex ever, or else is the worst participant in the UK. All the participants in the awards this year were male, incidentally. In the past there were some female writers. The next example is almost vomit inducing…

 “One. White. God. Cum. Cum. Cum. I close my eyes let out my breath. Cum. I lean against her both breathing hard I’m still inside her smiling. She takes my hands lifts them and places them around her body, she puts her arms around me, we stay still and breathe, hard inside her, tight and warm and wet around me, we breathe. She gently pushes me away, we look into each other’s eyes, she smiles.”

Truly awful!
Here are some more examples for the other writers…

Murakami’s Killing Commendatore (“I slipped my erect penis inside. Or, from another angle, that part of her actively swallowed my penis, immersing it in what felt like warm butter”);

Woodward’s The Paper Lovers (“Beneath them her wetness met his own wetness, and they stirred against each other, she pestled him slowly, until miraculously he found himself rigid again, as though he had risen out of his own pain, fresh and ready”);

Scoundrels by Major Victor Cornwall and Major Arthur St John Trevelyan (“Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey. Soon I was locked in, balls deep, ready to be ground down by the enamelled pepper mill within her”).

Actually, that would have been my personal choice. Absolute nonsense.

So, did you find that erotic?
To be honest, I am not sure how to describe the sex act as a literary contribution.
If any of you are bored, please feel free to offer your own contributions. There are no judges here.

That’s it, I’m going to start lunch. I have hungry sons.
I did not go to play football this Sunday.

Stay well and happy (if that’s possible) and enjoy your week.

love and blessings and the hope of experiencing something better
f

Hello, and let’s get the truly gruesome out of the way first. I really have to start with this…
The picture you see has to be the most misguided «tribute» in the history of man since the Grand Inquisition attempted to offer «tribute» to God by torturing people.
The travel company TUI refunded a couple for their holiday after hotel staff in Jamaica left an effigy of their dead son in their room as a «tribute».  Faye and Andrew Stephens, from Willesden (U.K.), made it a tradition to mark the birthday of their son. Alex Stephens, who died after falling from a balcony while on holiday in Spain in 2014 with a cake and a quiet moment of reflexion. He was 22. All very sad and normal, you say.
The dead lad’s  godmother who was on holiday with the couple, asked the hotel staff (this is at a five-star hotel!!!) to surprise them with a cake in their bedroom to mark the day.
So far, so good, what could go wrong?
Basically, everything!!
To make an even better tribute to the couple on the birthday of their dead son, the hotel workers created an Alex life size figure by stuffing the couple’s clothes with towels and arranging it on the bed. The figure had tears on its face and a can of lager in its hand and was positioned next to petals spelling out: “We miss you Alex.”
It looks like a zombie from a crap z-list film.
And a can of fucking lager??????
Now that’s the cherry on the cake, seriously.

You don’t have to use much imagination to picture the reaction of the couple as they went into the room with the dummy body on the bed,
To steal a quote from Oscar Wilde, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.
As for the travel company and hotel directors… how do you put a positive spin on this special disaster? I would have loved to be in that meeting.

Speaking of travel and travel agencies, did you kow that there is such a thing as Dark Tourism?
These are run by agencies that will take you and your group (stag parties before weddings, birthday weekends, weddings themselves and other various assemblies) to disaster zones. You can visit (up close with your Geiger counter) Chernobyl, the most radioactive place on the planet, famous (recent) battle fields (hopefully with the dead removed but maybe with dummy body tributes, see above), former prison camps where many died, you can take boat trips to gawp at the wreck of Costa Concordia off the coast of Tuscany, and tourists in New Orleans were briefly encouraged to see the districts worst hit by Hurricane Katrina up to a year or two ago. You can even get into the crowd during visits to the poorest slums in Mumbai, Rio and South Africa, However, the organisers do warn you that you might be lynched, though the possibilities are remote.
Who on Earth does that as a celebratory holiday?
God, I need a drink…
that’ll be a gin and tonic… or rather, no it won’t.
Flavoured gin, pink gin, with fruit, … is the new drink of the stupid classes… It is now all the rage. I can see in the eye of my imagination the face of Pepe upon being asked for a pink gin.. or a strawberry one… How close would he have finally come to simply punching a client? The thing I see is that none of these new gins taste like juniper.
Personally, I have always thought that the alcohol bit in gin is fine, it’s just the other 60% or so of it – a nasty medicinal-flavoured horribleness – that spoils it.
In one strange period of my life, I thought gin was good for when I was on a diet (the alcohol was only to to keep me sane), while the absence of the usual beers and wines helped me lose weight. When I saw it didn’t work as a diet strategy, I just added the beer and wine again. My doctor had strong words with me about it (thanks to my own son Maximilian explaining to the doctor how much I drank at the time. «Shut up! you little fuck!»).

Sorry, I digress… I was forgetting the actual news. George Bush senior died. My take on his life is distilled into the one Simpsons episode in which he appeared. He played it really well and you couldn’t help but laugh when he and Ned Flanders became friends. World leaders flew in from everywhere to pay tribute (that word again implies a punch line) and one news commentator was heard to say: “It’s nice to have something positive to focus on that doesn’t involve dead Iraqis, false tax promises or a broken economy. Honestly, I wonder how many people would be here if it wasn’t for George’s fantastic performance in The Simpsons.”
Why do I find that to be closer to reality than I should?

Let’s stick with the departed…
The personal possessions of Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine who died in September 2017 (you remember him, lads, eh?), went up for auction over the weekend and the item that brought the highest price was his typewriter.Two questions…
Why did this guy have a typewriter?
If this got the highest price, what sort of other crap were they selling?

In Spain, Lucio Ballesteros, an 87-year-old writer, musician and YouTuber from Montoedo, has built a flying saucer, or, comic book space craft.
This end of life work is 20m in diameter and weighs over a ton. Even more weirdly, this genuine nut job will have a documentary made about him by Xoel Méndez.
Ballesteros estimates he’s spent more than 100,000 euros building the spaceship out of aluminum and methacrylate, according to the Spanish newspaper El Pais.
Who said that El Pais doesn’t have its finger on the very pulse of world news?
I did, for a start.
In a minor set-back, the lunatic said that the craft won’t be operational until he installs some motors, and he doesn’t imagine it will be used until sometime far in the future. In an interview with yet another Spanish newspaper El Ideal Gallego (now printed with indelible ink so that it can be put to good use in every toilet in Galicia) he said that humanity will have to “evolve psychically and spiritually” before people can figure out how the technology that powers the craft works.
Have they closed all the phychiatric hospitals in Spain or what?
Someday, Ballesteros hopes the ship will be used to travel to “10/7,” a planet that comes from a series of novels written by ― you guessed it ― Ballesteros himself. He has a website and is, incredibly, mixing with the general public.

You had elections in Andalucia, so, after reading the next piece of news, I scream: «Quick! Vote Vox!!! This type of thing has to stop.»»For the first time in the history of the Miss Universe pageant, a transgender woman will compete for the crown.»
That’s what it says in the newspaper.
We are talking about Angela Ponce, 26, who won Spain’s Miss Universe competition last June, beating 22 other contestants.
Okay, I am a bit late with this but I only saw a reference to the article last week and decided to read more.
Ponce, who lives in Sevilla, Spain, will compete in the worldwide Miss Universe contest set in the Philippines in December.
Duterte will have him shot.
However, Sevilla? Be careful who you chat up in that town.
But let’s be reasonable for an instant… there is no such thing as a transgender woman. That is a biological impossibility. Gender is clearly and medically defined by the presence of the physionomy of reproductive organs.
Removing the penis and testicles doesn’t make a woman of a man. It makes a man into a eunuch.
With fake tits.
Or, as one would say in Dublin… «Transgender? Me bollix!!»
At this rate, the Boxer rebellion in China in 1899 would be given a new and unacceptably interesting interpretation.
It doesn’t bare thinking about.
This would never have happened under the Generalissimo.
Go on! One of you deny this!Looking back at the almost imperial Spain under the General, you had fine southern beauties, women like the duquesa de Alba and … oh!
Well, if that is what Spain has to offer as a «woman», I am leaving for Portugal. Those real hairy women need real men.I just saw that there are anti-fascist demonstrations in Cadiz… against Vox… who got lots of votes in Cadiz… It should be noted that the eunuch with fake tits above was apparently Miss Cadiz.
I am sure there is a connection.

The detachment of the fools and the ones in yellow. More news from the French front….
During the week on French television a parliamentary deputy was complaining about the cost of food. He actually said that he could barely afford pasta at the end of each month… having less than 4000€ in the bank.
I saw the repeat of this on the internet and he actually said that.
While my colleagues in the university department were outraged the next day at his detachment from real life and how dare he complain with so much money, I could only ask one question… where is he buying his pasta?
And how are they getting away with selling it at that price?

Okay, time to move to the Brexit. Let’s play a game. Here is a quote… please try to guess who said it or even who might have said it.
The answer is in a short email just after this one so you can’t cheat by looking at the end of this message.
«It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.»

In essence, the biggest and most outrageous lie will almost always be believed because people wouldn’t imagine that something so gross would be fed to them as truth.
So, Brexit…
First, the public. I heard some guy on BBC radio complaining that the British needed to get out of the EU because .. he had travelled and lived in Spain, and everything was better there, trains , roads, housing, hospitals, food etc.
I honestly thought that I had misheard him and that he wanted to remain and not leave the EU so I listened more carefully as he continued with his argument. I copied this down immediately so that I would be able to repeat his words exactly and this is what he said, quote: «Spain is obviously doing well out of the EU as a result of all the money «we» put into it.» So it is the British who have built modern Spain?
The mind numbing stupidity of some people still shocks me. And this guy is NOT in a minority.

This is summed up succinctly and clearly by a newspaper journalist who wrote:
Brexiters are the kind of people who say ‘and that’s a fact’ when it’s actually a load of absolute bollocks.
You can sense his frustration.

And now to the members of parliament… the Indian immigrant and Conservative politician, a disgraced ex-minister who was summarily fired for being a liar and corrupt, Priti Patel (how English can you get?) has seriously suggested that the British government should demand a better deal from Europe and if they don’t, then the British should starve out Ireland.
Jesus H Christ!!!!!!!!!!!
A suggested famine? In Ireland? Caused by the British?
A history book might help her, but really it wouldn’t. She is a complete racist and clearly considers that the Irish are lower than animals.
Furthermore, if you google her image, you will see that she has never had a problem personally sourcing food in large quantities and disposing of it internally. I think she is useful for reminding everyone of Gibralter, the rock. Not for political reasons, but because of the huge size of her arse.
To be fair, many people in England are outraged by her comments, but she is a part of the Tory party and was a minister until 6 months ago.
But it is very unfair to accuse Priti Patel of being intelligent.
In the embarassing rush to find new friends and make new trade deals with other markets, the Brits finally have a new one… Minister Jeremy Hunt is
«delighted to announce that UK will open new Embassy in the Maldives. Over 100,000 British people visit every year & this will help our countries to work together even more closely. Proud to continue the biggest expansion of foreign office’s diplomatic network for a generation»
This is one of the places that is specifically marked as likely to be completely submerged within 30 years due to climate change.
Can they get anything right?

That’s it, I am leaving for Portugal now.
Love and blessings on the lot of you!
And welcome to the nonsense, Ana!

f

— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X[1]

Did you guess?

Christmas is coming as winter is already here and the house is decorated since yesterday.
Now the race is on to get presents for the kids before the 24th.
I am tired of rushing around the shops (why with lots of other men?) on Christmas Eve looking desperately for last minute gifts for which I pay too much and which no one really wants anyway.
I am determined to do better this year. I aim to complete the purchases by the 23rd.
Wish me luck!
Now go and have that Christmas drink!
and think of me, here, in the cold.
f

Lies and liars. Who isn’t or doesn’t? I mean, you ask anyone if the masturbate and they lie. Then they say they don’t lie.
For the past week we have had the lies of Casado, Sanchez, Iglesias, all the mad Catalans, The Orange Shit Gibbon, May, Macron, the Saudi prince who murders, Matteo, Putin,… Basically, everyone who has direct or indirect power and influence over our lives is lying.
Constantly.
No respite.
So thank God for the Irish and the lie of the century…
When we think about ourselves, we know that lies are occasionally required for school, work, relationships … we are all of us guilty… but sometimes they’re necessary for calling off a football game because a member of the team is not available. Yes, this is about the slightly ill-thought out (he said with remarkable restraint) strategy of the village football team Ballybrack FC in looking to get their weekend game called off. And of course it is all the fault of their Spanish player Fernando Nuno La-Fuente. This is a student living temporarily in Ireland and who changed accommodation without telling everyone first.  He wasn’t at the usual address and the club «strategist» assumed he had finished his studies and gone back to Spain (in November?). Not bright people, these football types! So, to avoid playing their great rivals Arklow Town, they announced that poor Fernando was dead, as in dead, not alive any more. I mean, what could go wrong with this inventive excuse? And the game was duly cancelled. But some things have a way of back-firing spectacularly. The players of Arklow town were saddened and decided to inform the local press…. who then contacted the national press… and then the Spanish Embassy… and the British newspapers got hold of the story… The French newspapers, German, and on and on.. until, after two or three days, the student read about his own death in a newspaper. No one in his new accommodation or village would have known who he was and wouldn’t have been surprised to see him in the street. Had he appeared in his old accommodation, there would have been mass hysteria, the dead have risen again. This whole thing could have been more easily solved had they said that their team players were all too ill to play and hope for a cancellation. It would be a lie of course, but it is still better than going straight to the «he’s dead” plan.
The fun part is that the matter was brought up at this week’s FIFA meeting.
Well, that one got a bit out of hand, all right.
Fernando himself has appeared on television claiming to be alive. He had a huge smile on his face too.

The best thing is not to go straight to death as an excuse. That should be the golden rule for lying to hide something. Practised liars have to learn that particular lesson along the way (Ballybrack FC know that now, for sure).

However, in fairness, if I had to pick between pretending to be dead, or playing for Ballybrack, I’d chose the former every day of the week.

But this is not a new tactic. There was a well-known footballer playing for Manchester City 7 or 8 years ago by the name of Stephen Ireland. What else could he have been called? He was so full of himself playing for Manchester City that he no longer felt he wanted to play international football for little Ireland. But he didn’t want to harm his image in front of the fans. So, his plan for getting out of playing for the Republic of Ireland was to claim that his grandmother had died. On a number of occasions.
It was when he reached the total of 3 grandmothers that the Irish Football Association became a bit more suspicious. The two grandmothers (alive and well) were not necessarily amused either, though whether they were more annoyed at the possibility of there being a third grandmother (what skeletons were in those closets?) or being told they were dead, is unknown.

We Irish are awful at lying because we don’t get any practice due to our parents’ uncanny ability to see through every story. However, when lying on a huge scale, the Irish are masters. Emmigrant sons and daughters (or uncles, in my family’s case) would come home on holiday from England with new suits and gifts telling everyone they were fine, when they were all hired clothes that had to be returned and/or bought with expensive loans. These people were actually semi-destitute being served a half a fried egg by miserable English landladies in hideous accommodations the rest of the year.
I suppose too that the people at home wanted to believe that their own kids etc were really fine.
Even I used to lie about being fine while doing my thesis. I would spend weeks living on raw red cabbage and a baguette each evening. The women in the heavily subsidised canteen used to take pity on me and give me extra food at lunch. At weekends I had extra cabbage.

Now I end up thinking of Bill Clinton (possibly because George Bush has died) and about when he was asked in court about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
He said, and I quote,
..’there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship.’
He went on later to say
‘I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.’
However he denied committing perjury because … the legal definition of oral sex is not sex per se.
Yes, good luck with explaining that one to your husband or wife.
Hilarious, eh?

Meanwhile, in Great Brexit, the minister for new foreign trade Liam Fox suddenly realised that the EU is an important market. He has signed no new deals. This guy also denies being gay, even though he was caught claiming expenses for travel (as a minister) that included lots of costs for his friend, a mister Werrity. They shared beds in single rooms together, as one does. I mean, what two men don’t share beds when travelling in a ministerial role?
The incredibly stupid ex-brexit minister, Dominic Raab was astonished to discover that Dover is a rather important port.
Andrew Bridgen was amazed to find that being English does not actually automatically entitle you to an Irish passport. ( And why should one need one anyway, when he can have a new blue British one? ).
David Davis mumbled something about the Irish border being a non border.
Karen Bradley, the minister for northern Ireland knew nothing about Northern Irish politics, and was happy to admit it. «I was really surprised to learn that protestants only vote for protestants and Catholics only vote for Catholics. And the Catholics are Irish nationalists and the Protestants are all unionists». This was after 6 months in the job.
Do you wonder why it is all going badly for the Brits?
Oh – and was it David Lidington (the number 2 in the Conservative party) who recently claimed that Britain could just pretend to still be part of the EU and simply keep Dover open as usual, temporarily, in the event of a no deal?
Such is the calibre of the politicians representing those people.
Now Argentina are about to make a play for the Malvinas since they have seen with profound wonderment the abysmally low IQ of the British parliament. What surprises me is that the Spanish government haven’t managed to get Gibralter in exchange for a packet of cheap cigarettes and a pint of warm beer. Oh, hang on… I forgot… it is Sanchez cum fraude who is in charge.

In comparison to the British government, Sanchez and Iglesias and Torra seem almost normal…
except that they are not. They are actually worse.

Across the Atlantic, a truly heroic level of dumb was witnessed last week.
A US ‘mommy blogger’ (yup, that’s a thing these days) provoked widespread ridicule when she admitted that one of her five kids just doesn’t get the same number of Instagram ‘likes’ as the rest.
This is true. I am not making it up.
Katie Bower became this week’s «Most WTF? Woman Ever» after she complained that pictures of her six-year-old son «never got as many likes as my other children».
She then produced what is perhaps the least maternal sentence ever written in the English language: «From a statistical point of view, he wasn’t as popular with everyone out there. Maybe part of that was the pictures just never hit the algorithm right. I say all that because I want to believe that it wasn’t him, that it was on me. My insufficiency caused this statistical deficit.»
For f u c k sake!!!!!!!!!
Many families have pet names for each other, but I imagine this is probably the first time any of us have seen a mother refer to her kid as a «statistical deficit».

Women, eh?
I am going to stop there as I am weary of the state of the world.
That and the fact that I can still laugh at the above.

I will add just one joke… this one is the only invention…

An elderly man is on his deathbed. Although he can feel the end is near, his senses are suddenly aroused by a wonderful aroma. He realises his loving wife of 60 years is baking his favourite cakes.
He finds the strength to drag his tired body to the kitchen and as his frail, withered hand reaches over to the table, he suddenly feels the whack of a wooden spoon on his knuckles as his wife barks, «Feck off, they’re for the funeral».

Please stay happy and hungry for news
I bid you both well.

the ever beleagured
f

Oh, and if you get the chance of having a coffee (not this week, but the week after) please remember those of us living in the cold and miserable winter climate.

.Oh, and I will explain about the real McCoy next time