grumpyf1

DJ Mike Read once declared Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s song “Relax” obscene. I’m happy to return that favour by stating that I think his “UKIP Calypso” is ear-meltingly hideous. In the 1970s and 80s, DJs were a fun bunch. Cheery, bouncy, larger than life characters, with a permanently sunny demeanour, appalling fashion sense and a non-stop supply of top tunes. Roll forward in time to the present day, and a truly worrying percentage of them have turned out to be utterly appalling individuals, who have wrecked lives. Taking that into account, Mike Read’s “UKIP Calypso”, in which he gets all fan-boy about Nigel Farage, is a fairly mild misdemeanour, unless you consider a cringingly awful satirical song, sung in a fake Caribbean accent, devoid of any amusement, and featuring a repetitive delivery that may induce vomiting, to be a crime. In which case he may be spending the next couple of centuries at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Following Twitter complaints that the song (credited ...

89% of 15 to 18-year-olds are on Facebook. Really? That sounds low. What are the other 11% doing? When I was but a callow yoof, in a strange time that fashion bypassed called the 80s, I was busy doing “social”. This often involved pretending I was already 18 in local pubs in order to get cider with my mates, sitting around at their houses listening to the latest groovy tuneage on cassettes recorded off the radio, or generally hanging around somewhere annoying grown-ups by the simple (but jolly effective) act of existing and looking vaguely surly at the same time. Happy days indeed. Absent from all this was even the slightest idea of an “Inter Net”, only the vaguest of concepts that computers were useful for anything other than playing primitive games, or that being in touch with your mates 24/7 via teensy screen was one day going to be the biggest thing since Debbie Harry wore a very short dress on Top Of The Pops. The BBC’s “Newsbeat” (which I believe is a news service aime...

Autumn: The season of mists, mellow fruitfulness, and idiots using their car’s lights inappropriately again. Pretty much as soon as the cold weather descended, and the evenings started to draw in alarmingly fast, we had the delight that is drivers on our roads with a selfish streak, or possibly just a complete lack of brains. On a splendid run along the A591 on Monday (you remember Monday – it was the one with all the wind and rain) before daylight had bothered to show up, I found myself squinting blearily at the dazzling lights ahead of me. Had I taken a wrong turning in my pre-cappuccino befuddlement, and arrived on the front at Blackpool at lighting up time? Had the sun gone into supernova, leaving me with just minutes before the end of the universe (and ready access to a cappuccino)? Can I please just have a cappuccino? No. Despite the fact that the sky was depositing an inch of rain in the space of a couple of hours (so that’s where it all went!), the person in front ...

Feel that sudden chill in the air? It’s winter, heading this way. Or you’ve left the fridge door open. One of those, definitely. According to people with the word ‘meteorologist’ somewhere in their job title, it has been the driest September since records began. Hardly surprising, really – the wettest winter on record immediately beforehand almost certainly used up all the available rain in the sky early (Note to self: check the sciencey stuff, it doesn’t sound quite right). With just 20% of the normal rainfall of the most Septembery of months, 2014 trounced the previous record holder, good old 1959. Whilst this may have led to less plump courgettes, and parched blue tits mugging you for your bottle of mineral water, it does have a beneficial side-effect: Your granddad will finally have to stop saying “Dry? You don’t know what dry is! When I were but a lad...” Clearly disappointing for grandpops, especially so soon after the “Wet winter? Pah! When I were but a lad...” sto...