grumpyf1

Wasn’t Kate Middleton/Windsor pregnant at some point? Shouldn’t she be due about now? Why haven’t we heard anything? I’m pretty sure it was around nine months ago that we were given the news that the Heir to the throne and his Mrs were expecting the Heir’s Heir. I was naturally assuming that we would see something on the news when the Heir’s Heir’s here. But there’s hasn’t been a peep. Nothing in the papers, nothing on TV. It’s really very disappointing. I would have thought that the press would have exhausted the nation’s supply of step ladders by now, so that they could hang around for weeks outside a hospital, in the hope of being able to take a picture of some minor Royalty, or a nurse. Or even a slightly annoyed Corgi, having a fag outside the back door, by the bins. Seems I was wrong. As for the TV coverage I was expecting – hah! Nothing there either. Let’s face it, we all badly need the BBC’s Nicholas Witchell on our TV screens much more, telling us that there’s prec...

Brace yourselves. Tourists are starting to appear in increasing numbers, bringing with them lovely tourist cash, and a pile of irritations. On the off-chance that any of them take the slightest bit of interest in what’s happening within the local area they are parking badly in, I thought I’d offer a selection of handy advice, to help them have a pleasant stay in our beautiful area, without any of us having to kill them and bury them under the patio. Again. 1) Seriously – your phone is OK. I know you haven’t got a signal, but tear your eyes away from it for a minute, and take a look at what’s here, right now. You might get a signal if you go somewhere large. I’m sure I got a signal in Kendal once. 2) Talking of phones, try just enjoying the majestic natural beauty of Cumbria, rather than taking a tiny photo of it, which you then filter to death so it looks like something from my parents’ photo album circa 1973. You won’t be able to tweet it anyway. 3) Just because there is...

The sunny weather has triggered a terrifying creature to surface for the first time in a while – the unpleasantly underdressed human has risen. Be afraid. I truly cannot fault nature’s ability to amaze. Just when we’d all started thinking we would never again experience sun, warmth, blue skies, and all those other nearly-forgotten things, along come high temperatures and the unmistakable smell of several fields-worth of meat being inadequately cooked on a barbeque. Whilst there are many good things about this... shall we call it ‘Summer’..? one of it’s more unsavoury side-effects is causing otherwise rational people to forget they live in the middle of a town, not the middle of a beach, and suddenly shed clothing like it’s on fire. The subsequent exposure of acres of white skin, quite a bit of which seems to be attempting to spill over the top of the remaining items (which were already having a tough time stretching themselves out sufficiently to prevent embarrassment), is enoug...

My recent adventure of being awoken at 3.45 by two fire engines was well and truly trumped by Smethwick this week, which had 200 fire personnel tackling a blaze at a recycling centre. And what triggered the inferno, which saw 100,000 tonnes of plastics ablaze? A Chinese lantern. A little while earlier, someone had set it on it’s catastrophic journey, watched is gently float away, and probably thought “Ah. How beautiful.” Maybe they were mourning the passing of a loved one, or celebrating a wedding, or were at a party. After it had drifted out of sight, they probably thought no more of it. I sincerely hope they watched the news on Monday with a sense of horror and guilt that it might have been their little lantern that triggered this massive blaze. Ah well – it’s just some old plastic eh? No real harm done, right? No? On the very same day, 19 firefighters died in Arizona, doing their jobs. Any blaze puts a fire crew at risk, not to mention the lives of members of the public. Eve...

Some people would probably be quite pleased to be woken up in bed by strapping men in uniforms. I wish to state, for the record M’lud, that I’m not one of them. After my poor-quality cappuccinos and Health & Safety blighted weekend in Wales, I was looking forward to a nice lie-in on Saturday morning. After the trials and tribulations of yet another week of wearing outlandish shirts and pretending to know about marketing, I thought I’d earned it. Life firmly declared that I hadn’t at 3.45am, just as the first hint of dawn crept into my room (That’s ‘dawn’ with a small ‘d’. I have to be very careful with capital letters, as my Sister-in-law is called Dawn. It could get quite awkward). The loud sound of an engine, and flickering lights, saw me clambering to the window as fast as my old bones would carry me. Had there been an arthritic tortoise present, he might well have got there first. As there wasn’t, I tentatively peeked through the gap in the curtains, just in case it w...

I was in Wales last weekend. For a number of reasons I will now recount, I’m lucky to have made it out alive. The one thing that will stick in my mind from my visit to Welshland is a rather odd, but comfortably stereotypical one. I saw a sheep on a road. Not just a minor road next to a field. A road in a town. And the sheep used a pedestrian crossing. As I only came upon the road-traversing woolly one as it was completing it’s adventure, I’m not sure if it had actually waited for the lights to change. There wasn’t much traffic around, so maybe it didn’t bother pressing the button. Part of my weekend of fun, excitement and adventure involved clambering up a really rather large hill, which I was told had been Snowed-On, but I didn’t see any. Mind you, there was a railway line and a cafe at the top, so some frozen precipitation didn’t seem that unlikely. Regrettably, I forgot the fact that if you’re really knackered somewhere near the top, you’re in jumbo helpings of trouble ...

Miniaturised, covert, surveillance devices. But it seems we don’t need them any more – we just need to ask our Uncle Sam. This last week has seems some interesting political manoeuvring, whilst our Government squirms uncomfortably in it’s chair like a cornered naughty boy, pointing at their cousin on the other side of the pond and saying “it wasn’t ME! It was HIM!” If the stories are to be believed, it’s actually both. Whilst there have been strenuous denials on the subject of the UK illegally monitoring it’s own people, the clever Matrix-themed twist is that we’ve actually just let our American chums do it, then looked over their shoulder at the results. Is it true? Could that really have happened? Do you think anyone would actually tell us if it had? And even if someone did discover the truth, a quick Spooks-style surreptitious look at their internet history, who they’ve texted, the holiday snaps on Facebook and that ill-advised credit card purchase from that ‘specialist c...