grumpyf1

BONG! Oh, right - sorry. For whom the bell tolls? Well, it’s definitely not me or thee, or anyone else wanting to hear the sonorous chiming of London’s Big Ben, counting the hours away. At least, not for the next 4 years. The iconic bongs will be absent until 2021, as the 13.7-tonne Great Bell gets a spruce-up along with the Great Clock that makes it all happen, and their instantly recognisable home, the Elizabeth Tower. Health and Safety is the main reason for the chime-drought, as the need to protect workers’ hearing will be behind the longest quiet spell in the clock’s 157 year history. It won’t be total silence though – the bell will ring out on special occasions, such as Remembrance Sunday and New Year’s Eve. I’m presuming there will be a shed-load of AA batteries on standby for those occasions, just in case they haven’t had time to put it all back together temporarily and wind it up. So far, so quiet. It needs an overhaul, and no-one has invented ridiculously efficient ...

Quick! More cushions! I’ve recently spent a couple of nights in a hotel. Obviously, it was awful. Not calamitously bad or anything, just irritatingly not quite right. Once the fundamentals had been dealt with, like; ‘Is it clean?’, ‘Are there spiders?’ and ‘Are you sure there aren’t any spiders?’ the experience was a journey into crushing disappointment and frustrated inconvenience. The plug sockets were apparently deliberately installed by a maniacal electrician with a degree in evil. They knew how to place them precisely in entirely the right place to render them either inaccessible or useless. Could I plug my phone in by the bed and use it as a clock so I could see exactly what time it was when I was awoken by another guest noisily using their loo? No. Any future visits to waterfalls will remind me of the horror. The gap under the room’s door was so wide, even a moderately competent limbo dancer would have had no problem squeezing underneath. We had to line up the copiou...

Charming... I had a really weird dream the other night. There were sentient, singing, cakes vomiting and being sliced up. Truly Nightmarish. Alarmingly, it turned out to be real, and manifested itself in the form of a trailer for Channel 4’s take-over of “nice buns” TV show The Great British Bake Off, which will be appearing on our screens again soon, apparently. Whilst the show itself features only one star from it’s time on the BBC, in the form of judge Paul Hollywood, the presence of some new big names would have seemingly provided the channel with an opportunity to fanfare their exciting line-up with aplomb. Instead of Prue Leith, Sandi Toksvig and Noel Fielding gracing our screens with an amuse bouche of the forthcoming show’s sweet and savoury delights, we were instead force fed a one minute, stop motion/speeded up/animated baking freak show. Amongst the doughy plaits, smiling cakes and gigantically-hipped bread people rising in a oven, a parade of weird floury visio...

Yes, I’ll admit it took me a long time to come up with that Bohemian Rhapsody-based headline, following two stories vying for my attention this week. First up, we have the latest victim in the greatest/strangest reality show on the planet, hosted by that zany guy with the overly-long tie, Donald “You’re Fired!” Trump. Maybe we could call it White House Big Bother? Since getting himself comfy in the Oval Office’s chair, the President has been busily increasing the unemployment level of the USofA by firing people so quickly, some of them probably hadn’t even had sufficient time to being their own mug in and figure out how many sugars everyone else had. I bet there’s hardly a day goes by without another “Sorry you’re leaving” card doing the rounds. Acting attorney general, Sally Yates, managed 10 days of employment before getting the boot – I’ve had colds that lasted longer than that. Michael Flynn was, briefly, national security adviser for a mammoth 23 days – a timeframe shor...