August 2009 Archives

I see our bankers (not a misprint) are threatening that if we stop allowing them to pay themselves whatever fabulous figure comes into their heads they will all leave the country in a fit of pique.

Bye!

Anyone else despair about the state of the poor old Royal Mail? There seems to be a concerted Government and management policy of destroying it and flogging off the carcass to German or Dutch carpetbaggers.

Someone sent me a tiny brass tube by post, the weight was negligible, it was in a standard DL envelope and had a first class stamp but was fractionally - and we are talking 2mm here, too wide.

So despite being well within the length, width and weight it was reclassified as second class and classed as a large letter - remember we are talking 2mm here - which meant it was still 8p light on postage.

Now if you are going to lumber the public with a system which seems to have been designed to confuse pensioners by an accountant with no friends you would have thought someone with a working brain might have worked out that if the first class small letter postage cost was the same as the minmum second class large letter postage cost - and so on up the scale, first the same as second on the next level up - it would save a lot of problems.

It would just mean a marginal oversize item would drop from first to second class but no that is far too simple. So I am charged 8p but not only that, because the Royal Mail management will not insure postmen to carry money, they cannot collect the 8p so they have to pop a card through your letterbox to tell you they can't deliver an item because you owe postage.

So you have to collect from the sorting office where you are also fined £1 - they call it an admin charge - for collecting a letter someone had actually paid to have delivered.

The people taking the flak for that at the sorting office of course are the postmen , who are also blamed for all the other ills of the creaking service. No wonder they are also going on strike at regular intervals which rather than militant posties in this case tends to point to incompetent management with an agenda to sell the whole shooting match off. Tradition and history mean nothing when there is a few bob to be made and a few palms to be greased.

I am old enough to remember a postcard posted in the morning being delivered in the afternoon in the days when there was no first and second class post just a pride in delivering as fast as possible.

The current management, who decided people don't want an early morning delivery, hardly seemed worried whether mail is delivered at all just as long as their political masters are happy and the seven figure salaries keep rolling in.

Regular readers will know that one of my missions in life is to find bacon as it used to be, bacon which gives us a fry-up in its own fat rather than a boil-up in the watery white plegm inflicted on us by supermarkets.

I complained once to one of our leading supermarkets and was told that that they had regular surveys and that was how customers preferred it. They hadn't surveyed me or anyone with taste buds mind.

The real clue, I suspect, is not customer surveys but the cost of water and the amount supermarkets can squeeze into bacon and sell at £3-£4 a pound.

Bacon was part of our history, the great British fry-up, start with the bacon, then fry the egg in the bacon fat, then tomatoes followed by a slice of bread - oh and don't forget the sausages, which is what today's missive is really all about.

The great British banger is another casualty of modern life. There used to be a few award winning butchers, one in Knowle I recall, and there are still specialists, such as The Sausage Shop in Bath - do call in if you are ever down that way - but they are few and far between and the sausages not readily available. Click here for The Sausage Shop in Bath by the way.
If you are on a PC right click and open new tab or new window so you don't lose this page.

Meanwhile many of the sausages on offer in supermarkets, often quite expensive ones, can have an insipid filling or don't have the taste or texture you expect with the amount of meat they claim and often produce vast amounts of fat as they cook.

All right, for the health conscious, it is better the fat comes out rather than you end up eating it but it would be better still if it were not in there in the first place - which brings me to Debbie & Andrew's sausages. you can find their website by clicking here. Right click again to open a new window or page.

I bought a pack of their Harrogate 97 per cent pork jobs and they are bril - like sausages we remember as kids. They are probably nothing like the sausages we had as kids mind but they are what we like to remember we think we had. Real meaty bangers.

There is very little shrinkage in cooking and hardly any fat comes out because there is very little in there. The sausages are starting to appear in supermarkets - I found mine in Sainsbury's and according to Debbie & Andrew's website Morrison's also stock them - or they are available over the internet.

If you see them then give them a try.They are the best I have tried for a while so I reckon they are up around the top two or three of the supermarket sausages which is enough to give you half the great British breakfast.

Anyone spot that the Citizens' Advice Service has banned the word blacklist because it might be seen as offensive. Offensive to who they don't say but I suspect that someone with more time on their hands than is good for them is sticking their politically correct oar in to defend the sensibilities of people who have never wasted time thinking about blacklist, or Blackpool, or blackcurrant or blackberry or anything else containing the dreaded B word.

I suspect the number of complaints must have been running well into zero figures but that hardly matters to the politically correct.

Its rather like adolescent boys sniggering in class whenever something such as Cockfosters or Blue Tit comes up except its not juvenile sexual innuendo but a much more sinister manipulation and perversion of language by not just the Citizens' Advice branch of the thought police but just about every other half-baked official and semi-official bunch who seem to think they are the keepers of the Queen's English.

On second thoughts think of the offence that could cause! That had better be changed to Reigning Monarch's English - can't be too careful.

Meanwhile in the Citizens' Advice Service HQ - nearest bridge over the Thames Blackfriars so that will have to be changed - I suspect that whichever soul came up with the idea to blacklist blacklist didn't bother to discover the origins of the word which have nothing to do with race or colour but are part of our history whatever colour you happen to be.

It seems Charles II had his own version of a little black book with a list of those responsible or implicated in the death of his father - the black list. If you were on it then you were out of favour in a big way.

So as a bit of advice to the advisors stick to what you are good at, helping people who need it, and leave language to its own devices. There are enough wrongs in the world without finding imaginary and rather fatuous ones to champion.

Well done Alan Duncan for telling it how it is. Not that MPs live on rations of course or that they are treated like the old proverbial, its not that how it is we ought to thank him for but giving us some indication of the way many MPs still think about being caught with their snouts deep in the trough.

The only thing many of them think they did wrong was getting caught. We can guarantee that the next list the Government publishes of MP's expenses will have more black lines than a herd of zebras with the only coherent information in many cases being the name and constituency of the member concerned.

We have already seen their reaction to expenses without receipts. New speaker John Bercow has proved himself not only more articulate than Michael Martin but just as adept at sleight of hand and picking the public pocket.

Under Martin MPs could wangle £4,800 a year, and many did, without receipts. Under new broom Bercow the rules have been changed to stamp out such unsavoury practices so that now they can only claim a mere £9,120 a year - almost double.

You might also remember that only last year it was revealed that the refurbishment of Speaker's House, Michael Martin's then official pile, had cost the taxpayer £1.7m over seven years. That is a lot of refurbishment.

So why, you might ask, does Bercow, the new improved Martin, need another £20,000 refurb. OK, with three young children you might need some child security but the place is rent free and they are his kids. No one else expects the state to pay to keep their kids alive in their own home.

You might just be able to argue for assistance, no more than that, towards the cost of child security in a listed building but claiming nearly seven grand on a sofa suite? And £760 for cushions? Don't these people ever put their hands in their pockets to buy anything? They probably even claim for the pen, paper and postage to send their expenses in.

I have met a fair number of MPs over the years and, with a few notable exceptions, serving their fellow man and making the world a more decent and better place did not come on the first page of their why I want to be an MP list.

Alan Duncan has apologised but it really was not necessary, in fact it is quite refreshing to hear an MP telling us what he really thinks without following the party line or adding the obligatory spin. MPs, who are well versed in making noises they think the public want to hear, will condemn and tut-tut but secretly many will agree with the sentiments and are just waiting for the public to lose interest so that the Westminster gravy train can start running again.

I had to pick up a prescription for my wife yesterday - £7.20 - which would not be so bad if it were not for the fact she is one of the remarkable small number who actually pay prescription charges.

According to the Government's own figures 88 per cent of prescriptions in England are free which means just 12 per cent are paid for and as those poor saps who make up the 12 per cent are no doubt paying a national insurance contribution as well it seems they are having to cough up twice.

The charge is expected to raise £435 million a year. That might seem a lot but in 2008 the NHS in England dispenesed 842.5 million items at a cost of £8,325.5 million which makes the pathetic £435 million it is screwing out of people who are actually working and paying tax and national insurance look pretty sick itself. It is almost a fine for working, as much a tax as PAYE.

Once upon a time we had selective education which gave kids from poor areas as much chance of going to grammar school as anyone else. I should know - I was that soldier.

That was knocked on the head in favour o comprehensives which was one of those great ideas in theory but a different animal in practice. It made everyone equal.

For the past few years the main effort in education seems to have been directed towards fudging exams so that even the caretaker's cat gets five A levels at A grade as the results get better and better.

It might give ministers something to puff out their chests about as they roll out the usual world class, policies working, new initiative cobblers and platitudes as soundbites but the rolling 24-hours TV news stations but it is an Emperor's clothes job, the figures do not stack up.

Anyone who questions them though is immediately pounced on - the usual New Labour response to a hint of criticism - being accused of demeaning the efforts of thousands of hard working children and dedicated teachers.

The fact many leave school barely literate or numerate is ignored. The truth is hat we are letting youngsters down. They can only take the courses and exams put in front of them and making them less challenging for political gain is hardly education.

The meddling continues though as does New Labour's mission to punish the middle classes. Latest scheme is to give those from poor areas - for poor read predominantly Labour - a head start in applying for courses such as medicine. They call it positive discrimination which is a term that is both nonsense and offensive.

There is no such thing as positive discrimination. Discrimination by its very nature means that someone or some group is being disadvantaged in favour of another. And if you are one of the poor souls being kicked on the ground then there is nothing very positive about it at all.

Now don't get me wrong, I have nothing against children born in the most abject poverty and deprivation becoming doctors - if they are up to it.

But when I am putting my life into the hands of some surgeon I want to know he - or she - is there because they were good enough and are not just a token medic to fulfil quotas and targets.

I see there is another pop at drinking going on with more calls for a minimum price for alcohol.

The pub chains want it because it will put up the cost of drinking at home and they hope that will encourage some people back to pubs where the price for everything is already well above any possible minimum.

No one has yet said where the extra money from this minimum price will go but I suspect the treasury, supermarkets and brewers will carve it all up between them and the vast majority of the population who drink sensibly and responsibly will end up paying a hefty chunk more for one of the few pleasures left while the ale and cider heads will continue to get trolleyed and pebbledash pavements with carrot tarmac as if nothing had happened.

A survey by the charity Drinkaware has found a significant proportion of youngsters drink because they are bored and they fear the school holidays will make it worse because there is nothing for them to do. The fact youngsters go off binge drinking for want of something to do is more a reflection on us rather than them. Somewhere, somehow we have failed them.

For those of us brought up on a diet of the likes of William and The Outlaws the idea of being bored in school holidays is barely credible. The days were hardly long enough to cram everything in.

We seem to have produced a generation who need everything provided for them on a plate including interests and activities. They seem to have no imagination or be able to show any initiative. I have no idea where it all went wrong although discouraging marriage and families has certainly not helped but I am sure that putting up the price of booze is more likely to increase levels of petty crime and shoplifting than levels of sobriety.

Booze is much cheaper in most parts of Europe than here yet we have the drink problem, which means the answer is much more complex than the call to stick yet another extra tax on drinking - which is all a minimum price really represents. The problem is social not fiscal.

If anyone has any thoughts about changing the drinking habits of those who only think they have had a good time if they can't remember or how to ensure the next generation of youngsters have more to fill their young lives than a bottle then chuck them in the pot.

I have been to a friend's funeral today and it just struck me that you reach an age when you suddenly realise that although journey's end is not yet in sight - at least you hope not - there is a lot less road ahead then behind. Not quite over the hill but you have a pretty good view of the other side.

The point is driven home when you realise that the good suit is coming out of the wardrobe more for funerals than for going out for a good time and that the funerals more and more are for contemporaries rather than those who have racked up their allotted three score years and ten and often more.

Anthing over 70 meant you had had a few years belonging to someone else according to my father and someone must have taken quite a few which belonged to my friend as he finally lost his long and remarkably cheerful battle against a dibilitating illness.

I am not making any point, or moaning, just making an observation. When you are young you are going to live for ever. As you get older forever starts to become less of a concept and more of an appointment.

If ever you wanted to explain to a non-sporty type the difference between a Premiership footballer and Premiership rugby players this week might be one place to start.

Way back in 2003 Manchester United's Rio Ferdinand ended up being banned for eight months after he missed a drugs test.

In May this year three rugby players, Michael Lipman, Alex Crockett and Andrew Higgins, failed to take a drugs test and this week the now former Bath trio were banned for nine months.

Ferdinand, the footballer, forgot to turn up for the test after morning training and left to go shopping.

The rugby players refused to take the tests after an end-of-season party because, according to the RFU disciplinary tribunal, the players believed there was a risk of positive results.

According to His Honour Judge Jeff Blackett,"This was either because they knew they had ingested drugs or they had drunk so much alcohol that they could not remember whether or not they had ingested drugs."

In other words it seems the trio, who are considering an appeal, were so blathered that their recollection of the party was . . . should we say . . . less than complete.

I am not making light of drugs in sport and missed tests but you must admit the reasons for missed tests does nicely sum up the two games.