No Problem

Are restaurant staff becoming too familiar or am I turning into my Grandfather? It is almost certainly the latter, as I have already turned into my father (which is a good thing, in my opinion – although he can probably still beat me at table tennis). But my Grandfather is a different matter.

He was hugely offended once when the local council wrote to him, addressing him as “Dear Mr Hawker”. This was in the mid-1970s, which in itself is not particularly relevant. What was relevant was that he regarded “Mr Hawker” to be far too familiar. “Grandad, the person writing to you probably thought he was being very polite”. (The acceptable form of address should have been “Dear Sir”).

(All this reminds that that at my school, KCS Wimbledon, we schoolboys used to address each other by our surnames. It seems quite bizarre now. I don’t know if this custom still persists).

Anyway this whole piece of reminiscing came about as a result of a visit to a gastro pub in Guildford and being greeting by “Hi Guys”. I thought this unusual and put it down to having been away from England for too long. (Soon they’ll be saying “Hi Col”). Our hosts on the other hand, who have not been away from England for 12 years, thought that this was far too familiar.

I have decided that I am an alien here, as I am probably the only person in the country who does not qualify for free medical treatment here. Therefore, as such, I am unqualified to judge (as well as having to pay for my own medical treatment).

Ordering the meals also proved fertile ground for the use of now commonly used expressions. “I’ll have the mushroom soup, please”, receives the not impolite response of “No problem”. “No problem – kein Problem” is commonly used in Switzerland, but normally not by waiters or waitresses in restaurants taking orders. Having said that I am not sure that I have really made a proper survey of this and will be sure to rectify this on our return to Switzerland.

Our host made the observation that the statement obviously indicates that there might potentially have been a problem or indeed that perhaps having a problem was the normal state of affairs. Therefore the response “No problem” indicated that this was an exception and the mushroom soup was not only on the menu, but was also available for our gastronomic pleasure.

All this means that I had better be prepared for a shock if I return more often to the U.K. Cool or what.

Beware of courtesy extended by the car in front.

The second theme of this long awaited blog (2013 has been a lean year so far for the Grumpy Blog) is that it does not take long to realise that you are back in England. You will realise from this statement that you are in for a heavy dose of sarcasm.

My father is under the mistaken impression that it is a good thing to show courtesy to other drivers. Such foolish notions include letting cars out into stream of traffic instead of making them wait there for the next 30 minutes.

Another frequent example of his motoring madness is to allow in a car coming from the other direction who wishes to cross the traffic. This is easily achieved by taking the foot off the accelerator and a flash of the lights should have the oncoming motorist on his way.

I had forgotten that normal traffic etiquette (normally involving acceleration) is to the stop other motorists pulling out turning right etc.

It makes no difference if the traffic is almost stationary. The space in front should be filled up immediately and the car coming out the side road taught the virtue of patience.

Furthermore if the car in front tries to carry out any of acts of courtesy, the proper response is to hoot the horn for two seconds to show the correct measure of disapproval. I must confess that this latter response and use of the horn is a new one to me. It is a further sign that I have been away from England for too long and should stay away.

(I reserve the horn for hooting at Swiss drivers who do not indicate when going around a roundabout, for kids ambling across Thalwil High Street with their headphones on, for cars in front who look as if they have forgotten how to do a hill start and want to rearrange the front of my car…and oh yes ….etc).

I think that this hooting has real further potential. Why not hoot when the car in front is driving at the speed limit, instead of the normal 10 mph above. Hoot at pedestrians on Zebra crossings when they walk over too slowly, especially if they are pushing a buggy.

Hoot if the car in front does not drive over traffic lights, just after they have turned red and certainly hoot if the car in front does not move off at the aforesaid traffic lights 0.1 seconds after the lights have gone amber.

Learners should be hooted just for being there.

And so on. Welcome back to England.

Wannenstrasse Building Site and other tittle tattle

I have been reminded that it is time to write another blog. No shortage of ideas, but there is a danger of rehashing old themes. My powers of observation of absurd or ironic situations seem to have diminished, if not entirely eliminated…. And perhaps Grumpy was getting too political (or perhaps not enough).

Perhaps today, I will stick to some mostly personal anecdotes.

---------------------------------------------------
A NEW KAT

So before I go further, I should introduce you to our new cat, named Kellogg. I was slightly uncertain whether “Kellogg the Kat” would be a breach of some patent or name protection law. He is a new addition to our household, having been discovered at the local garden centre, and is made out of recycled oil cans, at least according to the blurb that came with him. Ed, my son, says that if I persevere, he will eventually answer to his name.

------------------------------------------------
DUPLICATE PIECE

I have had something new come up in the jigsaw line, using my grand piano as the “table”, as usual (http://colinhawker.blogspot.ch/2012/12/the-various-uses-for-grand-piano.html.  

I had a duplicate edge piece. Not so sensational, you may think, especially if you were expecting something more exciting from Grumpy. However, very unusual, in fact, a unique experience for me.

 

This might seem a small thing to you, but it plays havoc when trying to fit the edges together. Some of you might have guessed the next thing. At the end, we found that we had a piece missing. What are things coming to?  Just the end of the world as we know it, like the Swiss railways not running on time.

----------------------------------------------
MULTI-TASKING

Hazel and I continue to work on the “Watch the Whole of 24 Series” project. (The Black Adder series has had to go on hold.) We are now on series 4 (out of 8). The great thing about “24” is that you can multi-task. The whole thing rambles forward at such a slow pace that you can do a number of useful things at the same time, like do a jigsaw, read a book, reply to emails, check your bridge notes, go on the cycling machine or even write a blog.

Included in this series is the free “Spot the most annoying woman” competition. Fortunately these mostly get killed off one by one.

One interesting point is that having watched three series, you can understand how U.S. troops behaved the way they did towards Iraqi prisoners. Jack Bauer is quite a poor role model for impressionable, but poorly educated young soldiers. He is made out to be a hero. The soldiers were sent to prison. (At the moment in 24, the “good guys” are torturing the son of the Secretary of Defence, without his lawyer being present.)

-----------------------------------------------------
WANNENSTRASSE BUILDING SITE

If watching 24 is an evening activity, then listening to the noise from the “Wannenstrasse Building Site” has become one of the main daytime activities. The Swiss inclination to renovate, maintain and rebuild is one of the characteristics that makes Switzerland the country that it is.

We have three work projects going on at the moment within 100 metres of us, with a fourth due to come on line in 3 weeks, within 200 metres.

The house, two doors away, is being knocked down and six apartments are going to be built. Although the mandatory crane has not yet arrived, the comings and goings of the digger have managed to cause some minor inconvenience. Not nearly enough noise coming from here yet.

The local Gemeinde (council) has decided to dig up the road again, the whole road this time, although not all at the same time. They say that they are laying down new water pipes, but I think that they are installing bugs so that they can watch me plan my blogs and check the number of pieces in my jigsaws.

The owners of one of the apartments in our block have found the cause of some problems with damp. The remedial action includes drilling the outside wall at 07.01, causing the entire building to shake. (Swiss building work starts at 7.00 am until they stop for their 11s at 9.00 am, therefore known locally as 9s)

Also due to start in about three weeks is some (i.e. considerable amount of) maintenance work on the railway line, which runs 200 metres from us. The best bit is that much of this will take place at night and will go on for six weeks. The circular from the SBB, the railway company, concludes with the usual “We thank you for your understanding”. Great, isn’t it.

As good Swiss people, we think that this is all very admirable and don’t mind at all. All right.

(Remember: In England, the water companies have a program to replace broken water pipes. In Switzerland, there is a program to replace them before they’re broken. Why do the English love the expression “If it isn’t broken, then don’t fix it” and then complain, when it breaks)

-------------------------------------------------
DO TELEVISION PROGRAMMES BREED?

Going back to television and films, have you ever wondered how it is still possible for a Midsomer Murder program to come on television that you have not seen before. Do these programmes breed? Exactly how many villages are there within a 10 mile radius of Cawston?

Perhaps when they were filming, they made two per day for a year. Do they have actors, villages and houses lined up? By the way, it is admirable the way Mrs Barnaby takes part in the village fair at every one of these 1,000+ villages. It all makes a change from watching repeats of Morse.

I reckon that we will have completed the 24 series before we see all the Midsomer Murder series. Perhaps they are still making them in secret.

By the way, I can’t believe that neither “Midsomer” nor “Cawston” are in the Microsoft spellchecker and that I have to put these in myself.

Kickstarting the German Economy

TALKING OVER SONGS

I haven’t ever had a moan about local radio, as far as I can remember. That’s probably because I do not listen to it very much, even though it is available via the internet and a clever little iPad app.

Actually I tell a lie. Last summer, I listened a great deal to English local radio stations, including one (a digital channel called “Gold”) which plays songs from the 1960s and 70s. These songs are to be listened to and accompanied by a great deal of humming and joining in and conversation along the lines “Do you remember that one?” and “I remember where I was when this was being played.” Some caution needed here of course before opening mouth.

One of the competitions that goes on amongst broadcasters is the “Let’s see if we can talk over the whole of this song”. Radio Jackie did well on this last year, managing to talk over the first 45 seconds and the last 55 seconds of a 2 minutes 30 second song “Airport" by “Motors" (1978), a song, which if you know it, you definitely sing along to.

And talking over the music at the end of Morse is a good reason for bringing back capital punishment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liH-uW2iymk

------------------------------------------------------------
KICKSTARTING THE GERMAN ECONOMY

Have you noticed that it is frequently stated in business and political circles that this or that initiative is going to “Kick-start” the British economy? I have often wondered how a half-dead donkey could somehow be “kick-started” into life. For an economy where the dips are so indistinguishable from each other that it looks like a flat line, I was not sure what the appropriate verb might be.

Is it possible for the economy to shuffle back into life? Perhaps wriggle upwards might be a realistic expression. Stagger into life might be better, like someone with a hangover, staggering into the realms of consciousness. I had thought of lurch, but this is a bit too dynamic in the circumstances.

If we slide along the bottom, then we might be able to say that we are going into a gentle rise, but then saying that the £35 billion High Speed Rail link is going to cause a gentle rise out of our more general slide along the bottom, doesn’t make for winning votes or good interviews on the news.

Actually even this statement is not true. In the case of the High Speed Rail project, the Germans will win all the tenders under the EU Open Tender rules and all the grunt stuff will be sub-contracted to British firms with Central European subsidiaries.

So headlines should read “British Government to Spend £35 billion on High Speed Rail line to kick start German and Polish economies.” 

After all, as the Siemens / Bombardier case from two years ago showed, we don’t have anyone who makes this stuff properly anymore or at least that is the opinion of the British Civil Servants who award these contracts.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/16/bombardier-at-risk-after-loss-of-thameslink-deal

Is Grumpy getting too political? Don’t answer this question. I am enjoying myself too much.

---------------------------------------------------------
EXCITING OPPORTUNITIES

There is space in this blog for a further overused or redundant adjective. Normally these are the domain of the newsreader or newspaper article, but the job advertisement market has its own list of mandatory adjectives.

In this respect, all job opportunities are exciting. I don’t like exciting opportunities, not just because of the endless repetition in job advertisements of the word itself, but because I like boring. Exciting is for the ski slopes, some difficult run giving an adrenalin rush or hooting at a group of pedestrians meandering across the road (very immature, I know.)

I am not sure that I “do exciting” generally or even ever. But I am an expert at boring. I like lists, dates and things that have their place. The key to operations and accounting work is making it routine and boring, even though career advancement lies in presenting it as “exciting”.

So what is it that all that all these jobs have got that makes them exciting? Presumably, there will be plenty of opportunity to work extra hours to prove your enthusiasm for the job to your boss. Of course, decisive action will be a constant feature, even if today’s action is the opposite of yesterday’s.

I guess that dynamic must come into this job somewhere, although this might be similar to being decisive. “Exciting Opportunity” means plenty of action. I recollect that IBM did a corporate advert some years back showing themselves as “dynamic”. It was obvious to the watcher that they and their clients were merely chaotic. “IBM – Specialist consultants to the truly chaotic” – Confusing the two is an easy mistake to make.

An “Exciting Opportunity” must include plenty of change. We are told that we live in a changing environment, so in the new position, you must be constantly on the look-out for opportunities for change.  In fact, if you fail to come up with at least 10 new ideas per month, then you are in trouble.  This philosophy has a good pedigree. The Queen in Alice in Wonderland said that she’d sometimes believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. She could run courses in Change Management at £1,000 per day or apply for one of these “exciting opportunities”.

Does saying a job is an “Exciting Opportunity” attract a different type of candidate from one that doesn’t? “Boring steady position in established function” might attract boring steady people, which would seem an ideal match. So why don’t I see job adverts like this?

If I do see this advert, I might apply for it.

Be a Football Player for one day

I want to be a Premier League player or manager for one day. I do not want to be paid for it (although it would be nice). However, I would insist on taking part in one of those match day interviews that now form part of the mandatory diet for sporting events.

Are sportsmen and women trained especially for these questions? Is there a website where they can go, so that they give the correct answers to the four or five questions that are the standard fare of lazy sports interviewers?

“What does this win mean to you?” – Grumpy answer: “Did we win? Is that good? I wasn’t really paying attention. I don’t think that we deserved it, but a couple of fluky goals always come in handy.”

“Are you disappointed after today’s result?” (after a 0 – 2 home defeat). Grumpy answer: “No not really. Taking part and doing your best are much important than winning.”

“What would it mean to you if you were to win the F.A. Cup?” (Yes -. They really do still ask this type of question.) Grumpy answer: “Not a lot really. No-one serious really cares that much about the F.A. Cup these days; there is no money in it, so we will just play our second team and give second division teams a chance.”

“What impact do you think the new manager will have?” Grumpy answer: “None whatsoever. He was a failure at his old club, and he probably won’t be much better here.”

“Is the fact that you have just left your top striker out of the team significant?” Grumpy: “You bet. He is overpaid, plays like a prima donna, is generally lazy and I wouldn’t have chosen him for the club).

“How do you feel about joining your new club, Uxchester Utd?” Grumpy answer: “I don’t really care who I play for, providing they pay me plenty of money.”

Interesting and truthful information in interviews in Sport – Dream on.

-----------------------------------------------------
Have you ever had one of those long voice-mail messages, concluding with “…and give me a call back on my home number, XXX XX XXX XXXX.” Of course, the numbers are garbled and unless you already knew the phone number, you will have to listen to the whole message again, just to get at the phone number.

As I can never remember the right number to press to replay the message, I also have to listen to the date and time of the message and menu of options that tell me how to save the message, delete the message or replay the message (Hurrah).

People do the same with airline flight numbers. Leave a long message and then race through the crucial information at the end, leaving the listener floundering. Is this a conspiracy of the telecoms companies or is this a game that people play, just to be annoying?  If so it sounds like a good wheeze.

The last thing, I guess, that the telecoms companies want is for us to start with “This is Grumpy on 079 123 4567. Do you want to subscribe to my blog? If so, please call me back.”

So remember, please leave me a really long message and give an unintelligible phone number at the end.

--------------------------------------------------------
I have a great new way to save money. Go on the “Drei-Länder” slow-up cycle ride, around Basel, invite your good friends to join you on this 50 km cycle ride.

http://www.basel-dreiland.ch/

You do this with 65,000 other people, all going about 7 mph, cross over into Germany after 10 k and get excited in anticipation of the first coffee stop, offer to get the coffee and bratwurst and then realise that you do not have any euros.

Thank goodness that someone, in form of Jim Barrington, comes prepared with almost every currency that one might need in Europe. But recompense comes later in the afternoon back in Basel, where Swiss Francs are accepted in exchange for Coca Cola.

So no real money saving wheeze here after all. Sorry folks.

UpsideDown Photos

I like facts. I like facts more than I like opinions or speculation. Speculating can be more fun, and expressing opinions may make me feel good and self-righteous, but nothing can beat a good verified fact.

In particular, I like numbers. “In the year 2012, there were 101 accidents involving pedestrians on Zebra crossings in the Kanton (County) of Zurich, excluding Zurich City and Winterthur”.

Can you beat that for precision and usefulness? Yes - the Kanton of Zurich has problems with its Zebra crossings and before it does anything, it wants some facts. A Kanton after my own heart. If liking data and facts is a characteristic of being Swiss, then I was Swiss before I arrived here. (Do I hear “b….y right and all”? – the cheek of it).

My theory is that the English do not like precise facts or rather they are indifferent to them. Too much precision is seen as fussy. “Billions of EU money spent on Polish Motorways”. How many billions? Two? Ten? Fifty? There is a fair old difference, you know. But of course, I am missing the point, aren’t I. The article is not designed to inform us, but to further irritate and annoy us, either against the EU institutions (not difficult) or against recipients of such largesse. In Poland’s case, this is misdirected, but I am prejudiced, having been treated to two months of Polish hospitality in Wroclaw (Look it up on the map yourself).

The latest scandal involving lack of data (and also lack of horsemeat, thank goodness) is the publication that there are hospitals in England where the number of deaths is above the national average. Talk about an article needing some hard facts. What is the national average (probably a national secret), what was the rate in the hospitals in question (and for six-sigma black belts, what is the standard deviation?).

But again, I have missed the point. We are not trying to have an intelligent discussion here, but to have a good story that gets us all excited and angry with someone. More relevantly, it gets the journalist noticed by the newspaper’s main editor.

Silly me.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Most of you know that Hazel and I went to Seefeld in Austria three weeks ago for four nights to celebrate Hazel’s 60^th birthday. Here is a photo of our champagne breakfast. Whoops.

I feel compelled to carry my newly acquired iPad everywhere, take random photos (or ask others to do so for me) and send them to people. This photo demonstrates a particular Apple feature where photos sent to non-apple devices are turned upside down (and those sent to Apple devices are not). This less than obviously fine and useful function was further enhanced by the new the Photo “app”, which crashed every second time.

More useful is the Apple “Messages”on the Ipad. At the moment, we know of only four people who are registered. One of our friends in England, one in Spain, plus Hazel and myself. Hazel and I spend many a happy evening sending instant messages to each other, while watching episodes of 24. (No, I am not telling you the content of these messages. This is private, known only to us, Apple and the U.S. security services)

-------------------------------------------------------------------
I was asked by a friend what I was going to say about the Horsemeat Scandal. This is a tricky one, as there isn’t really a Grumpy or Clumsy angle. I would only observe that last week Hazel and I had a very good 850 gr (Beef of Horsemeat, I care which) Lasagne for only Chf 4.25, which is cheap for Switzerland.

So as Horsemeat hysteria enters its third week (is that right?), still no one has been killed, admitted to hospital or been made ill. But it is still possible and the news people are on the look out and have their fingers crossed for the next development with eager anticipation.

Why has no one yet marketed a “Do-it-Yourself” Horsemeat testing kit? Perhaps someone could develop an App and we could download it on to our Ipads. The French would no doubt make it compulsory to have one in your car, next to the breathalyser kit.

Can we keep this scandal / hysteria running until Christmas?

--------------------------------------------------------
By the way, we are up to the last episode of the first series of 24. Mrs Teri Bauer is definitely not someone you would want to have around you in a crisis. (“Oh no, Jack, I don’t know what to do”, at least once per episode. Together with “What’s going on?” Scriptwriters have a pretty easy job with her.)

Teaching the Austrians to Swear

Grumpy records are being well and truly broken now. If it is not enough to reverse into a skip, and 4 weeks later to be on the receiving end of the discipline of the St. Gallen traffic police, I have now succumbed and started to watch “24”.

For those if you unfamiliar with this, this is a series of eight dramas, each played out in real time (including adverts), where Jack Bauer has 24 hours (hence the name) to complete the mission. So that’s 24 hours times 8, less the editing out of the adverts, which  make up about 25% of the time. So this is 144 hours of viewing time. No time to write blogs. I need to get watching.

Quite a lot of “I do love you Jack, but we only have 24 hours to save the world” (with apologies to Flash Gordon).

Nigel Rogers challenged me once to see if I get through “The Killing” in one week, which is a mere 20 hours. He had completed this himself over a Christmas period, as a good way of digesting all that turkey.

Initial thoughts after only sixteen hours viewing is that Jack “you’ve got to trust me on this one” Bauer is definitely a man you don’t want on your side.

Target for completion of this project is somewhere around the same time as the completion of the High-Speed Rail Link.

-------------------------------------------------
I know that it was only in the last blog that I continued the theme of “Safety in the Kitchen”. Our recent trip to Seefeld, in Austria, has provided me with further proof of the dangers of kitchens, lounges and even restaurants, all of which are obviously designed by midgets.

Some sadist decided to put a chandelier in our hotel room immediately above the point where I stood up, after a busy and intense 75 seconds of blog-writing. Is it compulsory to wear a crash helmet for writing?
As for this, I am almost speechless. In the time that it took to order and drink a hot chocolate, I succeeded in hitting my head twice. Perhaps I really shouldn’t be allowed out without a crash helmet. More to the point, second time around caused an explosion of frustration, a torrent of English expletives and references to sadistic dwarves, that had the locals reaching for their dictionaries.

It’s good to know that I am are contributing to the improved knowledge of my beloved mother tongue.

------------------------------------------------------------
It is at least a couple of weeks since I have criticised the BBC news, so it must be time again.

Meaningless puns must rank pretty high in the league table of persistent irritations of the media. I guess that the journalists think that it is amusing, so in a post-Leveson world, we need to keep them sweet or they might write nasty things about us, in the public interest of course.

Also high up this newly founded league table (open for sponsorship deals) is the meaningless and redundant adjective. There is obviously a list of nouns that journalists learn at journalist school, which may not be used without the correct prescribed adjective.

Thus “Red-heads” are always fiery. I don’t know whether this is actually true or not, having not known many red-heads in my life, with the exception of my son-in-law and my grandson. At 3 1/2 , Bradley has not had much of a chance to display these characteristics and his mum wouldn’t let either of them, if they tried.

And “Devastation” is always terrible. I tried to conceive of “mild devastation” or “low-levels of devastation”, but failed. How about “The Devastation was not as bad as expected.” This actually has some meaning, but unfortunately lacks news impact.

It could be my own feeble imagination. I can understand “Scattered showers”. How about “scattered devastation”? “The Devastation moved in from the west, turning south-east towards Norwich…..etc”. Doesn’t quite fit, does it.

17 years old is apparently a “Tender Age.”   The words “…..at the tender of age of 17” were reported only a couple of pages away from a report of a 14 year old girl doing things that I didn’t know went on in the world or were even possible. I think that I am at the tender age of 60 and my dad is at the tender age of (nearly) 90. There is nothing tender about the age of 17 these days at all. You ask any teacher.

The final piece of journalistic nonsense came at Christmas where a death was reported as “Being doubly tragic, as it was during the Christmas period”. Try telling that to the mother of a child who died earlier in the month, that her tragedy was only half that had it occurred later in the month.

This is not only nonsense. It is offensive. Just occasionally journalists should learn to use their brains.

I am on a roll now and can keep this up for ever, but will save it for when I have run out other rants.

 

Plates have feelings too

It’s happened. After a career of 40 years of accident free driving and ticket free driving, at least since 1980, I have now obtained new personal achievements in both areas in the space of three months.

Look at this skip. The big evil brooding thing. Just looking for a fight. Well, it got one, and I came second.

It wasn’t my fault, even though I knew the skip was there, but reversing into it in the dark was not a good strategy (or was it just a tactical error?). Anyway a four inch wide dent would cost £1,050 to fix according to the local Norwich Skoda dealer, so I may just leave it as a Rose Valley souvenir.

As for the parking ticket, you need to be careful at the Swiss ski resorts, especially the base station for Flumserberg and look for the hidden ticket machines. Actually the ticket machine wasn’t hidden. I just wasn’t paying attention and my negligence will cost me Chf 40 (£27.50).

So much for my “Well, that has never happened to me.” What next, do you think?

----------------------------------------------------
Long-serving followers of Grumpy’s blog will remember a Red Bicycle chained for several months to a fence in Thalwil. The general consensus was that this was a piece of Swiss art, designed to brighten up our day and to challenge us in our lateral thinking on “I wonder why that Red Bicycle is chained to this fence.”

http://colinhawker.blogspot.ch/2011/06/red-bicycle.html

Not to be outdone, Rose Valley has its own “Red Bicycle”. We don’t know when this bicycle came, but it was there before we arrived in Rose Valley in mid-December. When we left on 5 January, it was still there.

Is this a piece of work by the Rose Valley branch of the Thalwil Art Society? Have the Norwich Art Society decided to follow in the footsteps of the Thalwilers? Has David Gray left yet another bike lying around, waiting for me to find it for him?

Other  theories? ….and please don’t even think about “Perhaps someone left it there and forgot it”. “Abandoned”. “Stolen”. Perish the thought. Just mundane theories cannot even begin to explain the mysteries of the Red Bicycle universe?
----------------------------------------------------
On a completely different piece of nonsense, I think that we have not had nearly enough written about what goes on in the kitchen, except possibly the hazards that are contained in it.

http://colinhawker.blogspot.ch/2010/06/self-defence-in-kitchen.html

So have you ever stopped to consider that after you have cleaned the plates, you then probably stack them on top of the others? What of the plates stuck at the bottom? They are never used. They might feel hurt and neglected. Totally unwanted for weeks and months on end.

As for the plates which are forever being recycled, they might feel abused and overworked.

You need to think about the problems that are being stored up for the future. Both sets of plates have their own grievances and could start demonstrating. Can you imagine the disruption to the watching of the next episode of “Silent Witness”, when the plates start marching around the lounge, clattering away, clamouring for more attention, less work, more money, compensation for hurt feelings and discrimination? There must be some European Court of Appeal to which they can turn (at the taxpayers’ expense, of course).

Knives, forks and spoons probably get mixed up a bit, I could go on down the same route with soup bowls and glasses, but I think that this particular piece of nonsense has run its course.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is an annoying sight for Grumpy

 

Just look at it. Glorious sunshine. Lovely snow at 8,000 feet in the middle of the Alps. The ski slopes almost entirely to ourselves.

So nothing to be grumpy about here. It’s so unfair.

--------------------------------------------------
And finally, I could not resist this. Kenneth Clark says that we will all die if we leave the EU. It’s going to be fatal. It is end of England, as we know it. The sky will fall in and all will be destroyed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-21269658

Well that’s a compelling case if ever I heard one. Definitely no referendum for me, then. I don’t want those nasty people from Brussels coming over, shooting us all and burning our houses down. (Do Brussels have an army or would they bring the French troops back from Mali to do this?)

Anyway, as the Irish have shown, in 2008 and 2009, there is no real chance of the U.K. leaving the EU. If the U.K. (with or without Scotland) vote to leave the EU, we will just be made to do it again, until we get the right answer. That’s how democracy works in Europe.