grumpyf1

Well played... Its been a few years since that Scottish guy was heard on YouTube shouting “Oh my God! Trampoline! Trampoline!” as his neighbour’s one sailed dramatically past his window in a gale. Since them we’ve dealt stoically with flooding, we’ve endured snow and ice like the troopers we are, and we’ve generally put on a brave face, gritted our teeth, and just jolly well got on with it as much as possible, regardless of what nature has thrown at us. Until Saturday. Saturday was a game changer. The day that will be remembered for possibly a short while as Quake Day, when unprecedented levels of almost no damage whatsoever rippled forth from deep under somewhere north-north east of Swansea. This shocking once-in-a-decade seismic event clocked in with a social media-inflaming 4.4 magnitude, with the effects felt as far as the southern edge of the Lake District, where it was easily mistaken for several excited lambs landing simultaneously after some particularly exuberant fro

Goldfish shoals nibbling at their toes not pictured It’s a remarkable three decades since science fiction comedy Red Dwarf lifted off on BBC Two. Since then, it’s four main characters have intermittently careered across the universe, and our screens, in twelve series of the show named after it’s inhabitants’ space ship. Dave Lister - the last surviving, slobby, member of the human race. Arnold Rimmer - the cowardly, irritating, hologram. Kryten – a deranged service mechanoid who really wants to be human. Cat – a vain, self-obsessed creature descended from a kitty smuggled onboard. Brilliant performances from the actors involved, and top notch comedic writing by creators Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, landed the show an International Emmy Award in 1994, along with the accolade of being crowned “Best BBC Comedy Series”. A ten year gap between 1999 and 2009 was followed by a switch to digital TV channel Dave, giving them some of the highest ratings achieved by a non-Public Service

It was a lovely day out.  We caught the train to Edinburgh, and rather than just wander round shops looking at stuff we didn’t need, we spontaneously strolled around the town, on a chilly day of exploration and a spectacular Turkish lunch. In the evening we headed to the station for the journey home. Tired, happy and foot-sore, we were looking forward to relaxing and arriving back at Oxenholme for the short hop back home by car. That was when the nightmare began. Whilst monitoring the departure board, our train came up as late by 10 minutes. Then 20. Then just ‘delayed’. Followed by the announcement that strikes fear into the heart of even the hardiest commuter. Due to a ‘person being struck by a train’, the line was closed and we would have to make our onward journey by a (imagine the next few words being read out in a distorted, slowed-down and overly loud voice) Replacement - Bus – Service. Someone was definitely having a far worse evening than us, and my sympathies to the

WARNING: Bell-end alert! It’s vacuous, self-obsessed, YouTube phenomenon-in-trouble-again time! Yes, the ‘star’ we love to hate, Logan Paul, has invoked the wrath of Google once more, and they’ve suspended advertising on the blonde berk’s channels because of his “pattern of behaviour”. Not content with uploading a video of a dead body found in a Japanese forest notorious for suicides, he’s further irked the internet’s grandees by joking on social media about eating detergent capsules and produced a video showing himself firing a taser at a dead rat. Classy. Strangely, the video blogger doesn’t seem to be in trouble for publicising the idiotic and dangerous “Tide Pod Challenge” of eating a laundry product, even if his actions do leave me metaphorically foaming at the mouth. Nor is the self-confessed “very polarising dude” being condoned for tasering a deceased rodent. No, he’s been suspended as his actions might cause “significant harm” to the reputation of YouTube, accordin

Watch out -billy-boy rabbits about... Beatrix Potter died in 1943. I may be speaking out of turn here, but I doubt she had any experience of what an EpiPen is for. Or what GCI is. Or why her fluffy bunny characters Cottontail, Flopsy and Mopsy would, in 2018, be appearing in a modern movie version of her famous book, Peter Rabbit, and attacking someone with an allergy to blackberries. In this modern take on the children’s favourite, Peter and his bunny hoodlums attack character Tom McGregor, firing the offending fruit at the human using catapults, and causing a reaction severe enough for him to have to use an EpiPen to deal with his allergic response. Ha! How cute. The kids will love it. What could be nicer to show your children? A gang picking on someone who has an allergy. Charming, and totally in the spirit of the original stories. Miss Potter may have loved the Lake District, but I suspect she’d be dismayed at this crass outing. Unsurprisingly, it’ caused a bit of a

Wow. Can’t say I’d want to be working for Oxfam’s PR department this week. The scandal-hit charity stands accused of covering up details about it’s staff hiring prostitutes in Haiti, whilst delivering aid to the country after the devastating earthquake there in 2010. Whilst Oxfam did confirm that sexual misconduct took place, and people were sacked or resigned as a result, it is now in the spotlight for allegedly failing to give all the details. There have also been claims of sexual harassment in their high street stores in the UK too, and that no volunteer staff had any criminal checks run on them. With the charity, and public confidence in them, shaken badly, on Tuesday the chairman of Oxfam International was arrested in Guatemala. Although part of an investigation into corruption relating to his time as the country’s finance minister, its another reputational hammer-blow. Their deputy chief executive in the UK, Penny Lawrence, has already resigned, saying she was “ashamed” of

It’s comforting to know that there is one less threat to the people of Cumbria this week, following the conviction of white supremacist, Ethan Stables. The 20 year old from Barrow had planned to attack the town’s New Empire pub in June 2017, in the midst of a gay pride event. Despite social media posts saying he was “going to war” and planning to “slaughter”, online searches about how to make bombs and chemical poisons, and expressing hatred of Muslims, Jews and gay people, he claimed his online comments were merely to impress far-right friends. Fortunately, following Facebook posts about his intentions, the police were tipped off and armed officers intercepted him as he headed towards the pub. His aim was to kill anyone he found, with a machete. In a bizarre slip-up, Stables had erroneously added an innocent woman to his neo-Nazi Facebook group. When he vented his outrage at the Furness LGBT support group’s event, the shocked woman contacted the authorities. He’ll have ple

Oi! You can't park here! It would appear that the human race has reached peak stupid.  No longer content with dumping our unwanted junk all around the planet we call home, we’re now firing it in to space and littering new parts of the solar system we haven’t previously made a gigantic mess of. Whilst many people are in awe that Elon Musk, the man behind Tesla and CEO of SpaceX, has launched a car towards Mars, you do have to wonder what sort of message we’re sending out in to the cosmos. Musk decided to fire monster rocket, Falcon Heavy, with his cherry red Tesla car as a payload, to test the capabilities of the new design. That he was only 50-50 on the chances of it working is alarming enough, when you consider the vast sums of money and energy involved. Even more disturbing for any ‘little green men’ his motor should happen to encounter on it’s whimsical journey, there’s a an astronaut dummy at the wheel, the stereo is cranking out David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” on loop

Where are you on the grid? P45. Take a peek at the news, and it won’t be long before you’re presented with the shocking news that another public figure is being accused of taking advantage of women. Harvey Weinstein. Kevin Spacey. Dustin Hoffman. Three men from the entertainment world that are just the tip of an unsavoury iceberg’s worth of famous names accused of sexual harassment. Despite causing a Twitter frenzy when she wrote a column about the Me Too movement, author Margaret Atwood has suggested men need advice on how to behave. Would an etiquette rulebook help? Just last month, a reporter from the Financial Times went undercover to investigate allegations about the same thing at The Presidents Club Charity Dinner. At the men-only, black-tie, event, she described being “groped several times”, and the club has subsequently been shut down. Attendees included Nadhim Zahwi, the newly appointed Education Minister, who admitted he was there, but told ITV News he “left early

DAMN YOU, IRONIC UNIVERSE! It’s remarkable that children born in 1997 are now at university or working, whilst simultaneously wearing trousers with lots of artificial tears and frayed bits on their legs. They were also born in the year that 62 containers went overboard from the Tokio Express after the cargo ship encountered a particularly large wave off the Cornish coast. One of the containers contained Lego kits. In a fine piece of cosmic black humour, many of the pieces were marine-themed. A recent beach clean at St Bees saw one of the 4.8 million pieces collected. 320 miles from it’s original visit to the briny depths, and 21 years later, the Lego seagrass piece washed up in Cumbria. Cute. Until you consider that all the other pieces are probably still intact and bobbing around, all these years later. There’s even a Facebook page dedicated to tracking where they wash up, which reports that a flipper may have made it all the way to Melbourne, Australia. Drift patterns als

Too much? What’s your favourite colour?  And what colour is your car? I’m confidently predicting a discrepancy. If you said black, grey, white or silver for your motor, you aren’t exactly alone. 70% of cars sold last year were one of those thoroughly-unexciting drab specials, according to the society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. More than 1.75million vehicles were unleashed onto our roads in 2017, whose proud new owners opted for one of these plain, safe, easily re-sellable blandmobiles. With just 0.4% and 0.8% going for yellow and orange respectively, it seems we’ve settled on boring, despite regularly banging on about what a vibrant, innovative, nation we are. 16% went for blue (which is still pretty reserved, unless it happens to look like the sky on a mid-summer day), whilst only 9.9% went for the colour of my current wheels, red. There’s a literal, but very faint, glimmer of hope on the horizon though, with demand for gold soaring to a mighty 0.2%. Presumably th

One of these sofa, please - do you do it in "heavily delayed"? “The customer is always right”, the saying goes.  That may well be true, but it would appear some well-known companies are unable to remember that. I’ve encountered two fine examples of big names getting it badly wrong recently, both of which left me considering switching allegiance and frothing at the mouth. First to get their logo emblazoned boldly onto this particular wall of shame is energy supplier NPower. They’ve struggled badly in the past with customer service, regularly appearing way down the rankings when it comes to keeping their punters happy. I still have decidedly un-fond memories of calling them up to change tariffs, then repeatedly having to call them months later as they still hadn’t switched my account and were charging me a higher rate. My current beef revolves around the amount I pay each month for the honour of receiving gas and electricity from them. I have an old house, which g