grumpyf1

The legendary Sir Stirling Moss The word ‘legend’ tends to get somewhat over-used. In the world of motorsport, it’s usually reserved for drivers who have won multiple titles. Despite never managing to win the Formula 1 World Championship, Sir Stirling Moss is a man eminently worthy of legend status. Even in coming close to the title in ’58, he lost out simply because he vouched for a fellow Brit accused of breaking the rules, even though it lost him the coveted ultimate reward. So, not only a legend, but a gentleman. At 88 years of age, Moss has had a remarkable life in motorsport – across a variety of categories, he won 212 of the 529 events he entered, and survived accidents that regularly cost his contemporaries their lives. His career ending shunt in ’62 left him in a coma and partially paralysed, but he recovered after six months. Even a fall down the lift-shaft of his home in his later years didn’t stop him. Well over 50 years since he retired from top-level motorspor

NB: This is much nicer than anything I ever got served at school... When I was a smaller version of myself, school dinners were an exciting opportunity to play a great game with my friends – ‘Guess what this is?’ The problem was, we usually couldn’t figure it out – sometimes even if we’d been told, it was still hard to identify what it was you were eating. This wasn’t helped by your dinner and pudding being served on one of those all-in-one plastic plates, providing a simple method of getting half of one over the ridge into the other. Not that it made a lot of difference to the taste. Times have changed though, and school lunchtime food is now a delicious, nutritious and healthy delight, prepared by chefs keen to prove the school dinners of old are an (unidentifiable) thing to be forgotten. Good luck to Carlisle’s Kerry Weir, who is up for the title of LCA North West Chef of the Year, for her high quality efforts at the Newlaiths School. Her menu for the Manchester final on

A pint of milk, and a lifelong sense of paranoia, please... Supermarket shopping. It’s hard to describe it as fun. Whilst your trolley etiquette may be top notch, everybody else seems to park theirs at a rakish angle, stop where you can’t get past them or generally make a nuisance of themselves in a myriad of depressing ways. The supermarket always seems to have moved things around, forcing you to tour the whole store only to have to go back to the start to find your favourite baked beans that used to live at the other end. Once you’ve queued interminably behind the elderly couple who put their corned beef and spam tins on the conveyor one at a time, you then face the checkout assistants. Despite the risk of offending them all so much I can never set foot in a shop again, I’ll offer my opinion that they fall broadly into the categories: Insanely cheerful and chatty. What do they know that we don’t? Why do they think this is fun? Proficient but they’d gladly strangle you w

Never forget... How quickly we forget. This week, we’re all vexed about the amount of plastic packaging we use, and applauding Iceland for saying they’re going to phase out the use of it on their own-brand products by 2023. I was delighted to see some of my Tesco fruit and veg arrive loose in a brown paper bag when our delivery arrived at the weekend. First time ever, mind. But it was only a couple of weeks ago that disposable coffee cups were the enemy of the environment, and column inches were filled discussing the potential effectiveness of a ‘Latte Levy’ of 25p per cup for these single-use villains. I’ve got another suggestion to put forward, which you can ponder whilst you enjoy your next Taxachino. How about a priority queue? You bring your own re-useable cup along, and by waving it in the air (and maybe in the increasingly angry faces of the cup-less) you get to move up the queue until you are behind other ever-so-slightly-smug cup claspers. Apart from the warming dr

What kind of sorcery is this..?! Comedian Sarah Millican is on a 100-date tour of the UK at the moment, and recently dropped in to deliver her Control Enthusiast show to an appreciative audience at The Forum, in Barrow. One of them had even “missed my regular bingo session” to attend. What higher praise is there? You know you’ve made it when that happens. Sarah clearly enjoyed herself too, taking to Twitter after the show to say “What a glorious crowd” the Barrovians were. She also included a picture of her “lovely dinner” – a couple of fried eggs, with a pile of chips and beans. Fair enough – it looked delicious. In fact, it’s making me hungry just thinking about it. I do have one perplexing problem with this gig/food-based scenario though; the eggs and chips are in half of one of those polystyrene boxes, whilst the beans are in the other half. The two half are hinged together. There’s no cross-contamination. Eggs and chips are bean-free. The beans are devoid of egginess and

Carillion? Oh. Bugger... It’s shocking to hear that Carillion have gone into liquidation, and frightening to hear that their pension fund is in the red to the tune of nearly £600m. I really liked their 1985 hit “Kayleigh”. Perhaps they wouldn’t be in this situation if they hadn’t agreed to such large retirement payments for former lead singer Fish and... Marillion? Oh, right – I see what happened there. The band build monolithic brooding rock songs, and the construction giant has it’s fingers in a worryingly large number of pies, but forgot to keep an eye on the piggy bank. With 20,000 staff in the UK alone, and over twice that worldwide, their financial meltdown is a huge concern for their many employees. It’s a big worry for the rest of us too, as it looks like we’ll be “doing a banks” again, and bailing them out of the £1.5bn hole they’ve dug themselves into. As their portfolio includes contracts for services such as hospital and prison maintenance, and cleaning and dinn

Cheerio! Thank grumpy it's Friday is no more. After 291 columns (292 if you count the potentially libellous one that didn't get published), 145500 words, and 6 years, my days of writing 500 words a week for publication in The Mail have come to an end. In case you hadn't guessed, this is the big news I've been mentioning for a couple of months now. Having found myself, with increasing regularity, sat in front of a blank screen with the submission deadline screaming at me, I spent the latter part of last years worried I was drying up. This also got me questioning if I was actually any good any more. With little in the way of feedback from either the paper, or it's readers, I finally decided I'd call it a day at the end of the year, and sent an email to the paper explaining at the start of November. Column 289 would be my last outing. The reply was somewhat startling. They were just about to offer me a full page. Not just in the Mail. In the News &

Any chance you could turning the heating down a bit..? Welcome on board this 0727 service to Heatstroke, calling at Overly-Hot, Boiling, Gasping and terminating at Hypothermia Central. Despite ongoing industrial action and fare price-hikes, there is something our rail service seems particularly good at providing; trains which are either Arctic-cold, or Sahara-hot. As most of us are neither penguins nor scorpions, this really isn’t helpful. A recent journey to Leeds on one of Northern’s finest fell-out-of-a-timewarp carriages was a classic example of the former. At no point in the journey did I remove my woolly hat, de-glove, or even contemplate unzipping my coat. True, it’s possible that the carriage was put into service before heating the indoors was a thing. Or possibly they just ran out of logs for the fire. With rolling stock that came into being this side of the millennium, the problem is usually at the other extreme of the temperature range. I know Scotland has a reputa

Following on from "Crystal balls...", my copy of The Cumberland News arrived today. It appears the price of the weekly paper has just gone up a bit to £1.50, so I hope they don't blame me for that. A bold claim on the front cover too: Britain's best weekly newspaper. Me (and Lewis Hamilton) appear on Page 12. It appears I have a potentially never-ending left shoulder. Love the layout, and the excerpt text box. Considering it's the same word count, it all looks like a whole lot more than the same thing in The Mail. The "Thank grumpy it's Friday" title used in The Mail is also absent, and they tweaked the end to refer to the Cumberland News instead of The Mail. All in all - chuffed with that. Column 290 got syndicated - that's a nice start to the year. Who'd have thought..? (CD A-Z: They Might Be Giants - "They Might Be Giants vs. McSweeney's.)

Careful - I think your ball is boiling... Happy New Year. If you’re still trying to eat the last of the cheese from Christmas and are shocked that Creme Eggs are already in the shops, you have my sympathy. Using my uncanny soothsaying abilities, I’ve peered hard into the mystic tea leaves and rubbed my runes to predict, with startling accuracy, what will happen during the year some are already calling 2018. You’re welcome. January : The mists are blocking my view... looks like, possibly, someone called Eleanor will have a lot of wind early in the month? Brussels sprouts overdose, probably. Hey! It’s not my fault if this is weird – it’s just what’s going to happen, OK? February : Love is in the air! Following a leak from a chemical plant, the fumes released caused numerous fatalities following the... Death. Not love. Sorry. Easy to mix those two up, isn’t it? March : Article 50 is triggered, and we can all finally get on with our lives after a painful and draining lifetime

Er..?! It’s an easy win to pick on flamboyant Formula 1 star Lewis Hamilton. That’s probably why I enjoy it so much. He does make it ridiculously easy for me, though. Take this week, when he decided to post a video on Instagram of him with his nephew. Slightly unusual, as he usually populates it with pictures of him looking moody and urbane with some famous models. Or effortlessly suave and moody with some famous music stars. “I’m so sad right now. Look at my nephew...” says Lewis, before turning the camera on the lad, who is wearing a fetching purple and pink outfit and waving a wand. “Why are you wearing a princess dress?” asks the fashionista multi-millionaire, who often looks like he got dressed in the dark with whatever ridiculously expensive tat he had lying around, and attended the black-tie F1 prize giving in something that looked suspiciously like his pyjamas. “Boys don’t wear princess dresses!” says Lewis, who is usually seen wearing lots of jewellery. “Celebritie