grumpyf1

Britain’s oldest person, Gladys Hooper, celebrated her 112th birthday this week, and that got me thinking. Born the year the Wright Brothers looked at their newly finished aeroplane and said “If we run really fast and jump, we might not die”, she has outlived her younger siblings, and been both a concert pianist and built her own car hire business whilst Flappers were still shocking the Roaring Twenties. Cue wibbly-wobbly lines to indicate we’re whirling through time... Good Evening. Here is the MindNews for January 23rd 2115, beamed into your brain by Coca-Cola and the Brit Braincasting Corporation. It’s 10’o’Bieber. Our top story tonight: Britain’s oldest person, Peter Grenville, has died. He was 147. Grenville, who spent the last 28 years of his life in a cupboard after going through the wrong door and stubbornly refusing to admit he was wrong, had a long and patchy career as a columnist, writing thousands of articles before being forced to retire as no-one had heard of EL...

I spotted a bit of a novelty in the Met Office forecast for today – it doesn’t have a Weather Warning attached to it. 2015 has certainly got itself off to an eventful start, weather-wise. Impressively, the five day forecast for our most north-westerly part of England has recently featured four warnings in place covering the whole lot, featuring rain, wind, ice and snow (not to be confused with 1970s funksters Earth, Wind, Fire and Unseasonably Warm For The Time Of Year.) There’s been no mention of the “Weathebomb” effect for a bit, but judging by the state of the back yard, it looks like someone might have let one off. Apparently, this run of jolly unreasonable weather has something to do with Millibars, which is confusing – I was convinced they were the sort of drinking establishments favoured by the current leader of the Labour Party. An intrusively unpleasant side effect of the recent high winds has seen me shivering in the shower during my morning ablutions. Whoever cunni...

Worrying news so soon into the new year – my local bakery/coffee shop has closed. Now what am I meant to do? When I moved to Cumbria I left behind a lifetime of knowing where everything was. I’d successfully navigated over 35 years of living within a stone’s throw of where I grew up, so there was virtually nothing I didn’t know about my patch. I could pretty much walk around the area with my eyes shut and still arrive at the exact spot in the pub I was aiming for. But they said I shouldn’t do that, as I was scaring people, so I stopped. Arriving on a dark and rainy December evening to my new locale I suffered an unexpected, and altogether uncomfortable, feeling of not knowing a damn thing about it. Sure, we’d driven up to look at the house and liked the village, but that was months before and I struggle to remember what order to put clothes on in the morning at the best of times. I sort of knew how to get to the nearest big town (but not how to navigate the one way system)...

Welcome to 2015! Don’t worry – no-one can legally make you eat a sprout again for another 11 and a half months. I hope you had a lovely Christmas and New Year and that those you love managed to stay the right side of a lethal dose of chocolate. Ours was up and down; The microwave blew up (if ‘microwave years’ are like ‘dog years’ it was 168) and the curtains fell down, taking the pole out of the wall in the process; possibly due to the metric ton of cold-insulating lining. As you’ll have probably had enough of repeats on the TV, followed by repeats of the Christmas Specials before 2014 had staggered to it’s end, here’s the other part of the compilation of entirely new bits, left out of columns last year, to keep you entertained until something better comes along. No, thank me later – I accept all forms of credit card, but I prefer cash. July: I’ve seen photos used on new identity cards by vain colleagues that are clearly so old, I half expect to see a TV in the backgrou...