La Belle France

While the West Wing is being renovated we have left the staff looking after the workmen and decided to migrate south, just about to partake of foie gras and a nice bottle of Monbazillac in Blois. Our final destination, due there tomorrow in time for a hearty lunch, is Bergerac.

What has struck us on our slow meander down France is that the schoolgirls look like schoolgirls rather than apprentice slappers like so many English schoolgirls. We had also forgotten how delicious the French bread is and what good service you get in cafes, hotels and restaurants. Not forgetting the glorious sunshine, duck, wine and armagnac. Might even catch a day or two of Le Tour.

So blogging will be rare these next couple of weeks as we will be guzzling top class food and wine, paying little attention to the world outside.

Au revoir!

Bastard State

I got a letter this morning from the DVLA telling me that my photo on my licence is about to expire, just as many of us will physically expire soon under the weight of red tape and bureaucracy.

So I have a form D798 to complete, a passport type photo to get and a £20 fee to pay. Thieving bastards!

Why can't they just look at my photo, nod sagely and conclude that yes, that photo was me at 40 and they can see that I am now fatter, balder and carrying a few more lines as a result of a combination of 10 years high living and state induced stress? Too simple I suppose.

The Good Old Days

Just found the following ad that was in cinemas before the new puritan era, late 70s or early 80s I think:



The ads are still better than many of the programmes on TV or films in the cinema.

Wayne Rooney, England and the World Cup

Wayne Rooney was spot on having a go at the jeering England 'fans'. Yet again the fans of the national team have proved themselves to have no class. Real football fans don't jeer their own team after a game as the players leave the pitch. Criticise them in the bars after the game yes, but don't boo your own players.

A lot of real football fans don't bother with England games because of the poor support. If you are a United fan you will have to listen to your own players, in England shirts, being abused by the jealous fans of other clubs and you may even cop for personal abuse or even physical violence yourself if a United fan.

So they spent a load of money going to South Africa. If they did that expecting England to win then they must be clueless about football and stupid too. Spending a wad of cash does't mean your team will win. That's the difference between supporters and fans, fans are fanatical which is illogical, supporters are going for the entertainment and, if they don't get the entertainment they want, they react the way England's supporters did last night.

I used to travel all over Europe watching United before the Glazers took over and yes we would criticise a poor display on the plane home, but cheer the lads off the field after the game. England supporters have no class.

To put it in perspective you have a shit day at work. How would you feel about all your colleagues booing and jeering you as you leave the office? Then how would you feel about going back to work the next day?

Good on you Wayne, bollocks to the jeering fans!

RBS and the European Union

I'm no financial wizard, ask my bank manager, but I did get an Economics 'O' level. Having said that I've about as much idea how to run a country's economy as Gordon Brown, in other words zilch. For example when the banks were going tits up why didn't we just let them go and just leave the healthy ones to survive?

Now we have the European Union bossing us about, never a good thing. They have told the government, meaning us as it is the taxpayers who own RBS, that we must sell off over 300 branches to be fair to our competitors.

What next? When Manchester United next play in Europe will they have to sell half their squad to the opposition to give them a fair chance? It doesn't make sense to me.

Bloody Sunday-The Saville Report

The Saville Report has proved two things, that the IRA have won and that Cameron, with his grovelling apology, is every bit as big a shit as Brown, Blair and the rest.

The squaddies fight back.

Pamplona Bull Run

We were out to dinner on Sunday and got talking about our trip to Pamplona a few years ago. If you are off to Pamplona next month good luck, you'll need it. But never relax thinking you've done it, learn from this video and don't relax until you're in a bar at about lunchtime!



And not a vuvuzela to be heard!

Health and Safety

So the government has announced a review of health and safety legislation, no doubt wasting millions of pounds in the process. Tell you what, I'll save them a fortune, for £1m I'll do it for them. Here's the result:

Scrap it all and tell people to use their commonsense. Then, if they have a mishap, tell them it's down to experience, that's life.

Belgium Mirroring the EU?

Belgium is often cited as the model for the European Union, which it increasingly seems to be. Just as the EU is unloved and largely unwanted so is the Belgian state to many in that country. At the time of the World Cup it is worth bearing in mind that there is little passion in Belgium for the national football team, a sign of a lack of national identity.

Now, with Begium's economy being compared to Greece's, the survival of Belgium as a single state is in doubt with Flemish nationalists achieving excellent results in the Belgian elections. Who knows, the Belgian state could crumble just as the EU state crumbles, leaving behind a series of mini-states as EU regionalisation splits previous nations apart, as the fall of communism did in Eastern Europe.

Interesting times.

Vuvuzelas and Suicide Notes

Found by the body of a fat man in a replica England shirt, with a bottle of whisky in one hand an empty bottle of pills in the other:

My Dear Family

I've waited for months to watch the World Cup but I can't bear it any more. The horns, aka Vuvuzelas for some reason, are eating at my brain. I have nightmares and can't sleep. Death seems the only release.

Please forgive me but suicide is the only option.

I'd rather be Robert Green than hear another bloody horn.

Darren

Following my post on Friday about the World Cup things have got a whole lot worse. I spoke to quite a few people yesterday who are either not watching the World Cup now, or watching only the England games, others are watching games but with the sound down.

It must be some kind of post-apartheid punishment on the rest of the world.

Word Cup South Africa 2010

Am I the only person in the world who is already sick of the slobbering and drooling over South Africa?

When the World Cup is held anywhere else the host country isn't treated like the most spoilt little bastard in the neighbourhood. So South Africa suffered apartheid for years and is now a democracy, with all the associated problems, surely it's time we stopped patronising them and treated them like any other country. What is interesting is that South Africa is the first African country considered fit to host the world's biggest sporting occasion, despite its recent history.

On BBC radio this morning the oh so politically correct reporters have been drooling about how the people of Soweto are the most fanatical football supporters in the world. Are they really? And how South Africans are the best singers in the world. They haven't heard Chico's World Cup song! In fact South Africa is truly Heaven on Earth. In fact Heaven is shit by comparison.

They've been drooling about the wonderous Vuvuzelas of the South African fans. I thought these must be some ancient mystical charm that would ensure South African victory, but the really annoying horns in the background were driving me to distraction. Sorry, they weren't just annoying horns, they were the bloody Vuvezelas as modelled by the Elton John tribute artist above. If they are going to be blaring through every game I'll be watching with the sound off, they're worse than that bloody band that follows England around.

Then up pops Jeremy Hardy on Twitter to make the following statement:

"I hate the World Cup. The whole of England is decked out like a Loyalist estate".

Really Jeremy? Only if you're a brain dead Marxist bastard who should have been shot at birth. But then again, the politically correct despise ther own but worship all things foreign, like South Africa. Blind, obsessive love of any country in Africa or Asia is fine, but a show of patriotic fervour about a sporting event has you likened to a gun wielding religious bigot who is a danger to the world. What a wanker!

So, just to show a huge v-sign, in my own small way, to wankers like Jeremy Hardy, we are now proudly flying a Cross of St George outside the Schloss Beaman.

Having said all that I am sure it will be an excellent World Cup and I wish I was there.

Football Songs-Fat Les, New Order and Black Grape

Three of my favourites. Can you spot Matt Lucas in one of them?



Incredibly this one was New Order's only No 1 in the UK:



Black Grape with Joe Strummer and Lily's dad popping up again. 'My wife's lactating and I'm spectating', you don't get a line like that in your average football song:

The Queen and the World Cup

As the World Cup approaches I can't help wondering about the position of the British Royal Family in certain scenarios.

When Greece play, does Prince Philip get kebabs delivered and sink a bottle of Ouzo watching the game while smashing plates on the palace floor?

If, as seems inevitable at some stage, England play Germany is the Queen a Windsor or does she don a replica Germany shirt and revert to Frau Saxe Coburg Gotha? After all there are millions of people claiming to be Irish because they drink in a bar called O'Flaherty's and once visited Dublin, much more tenuous than Lizzie's Germanic heritage.

But if Germany should win the World Cup again, especially if they knock England out, could it trigger a constitutional crisis? Would there be calls for the Queen to abdicate in favour of a full bloodied English monarch. A man such as Prince Harry.

The FIFA World Cup Guide

Our noble army of Ingerlund fans have started arriving in foreign parts. But we really know the World Cup is approaching because the health fascists have kicked off before the games have.

It's strange this year because there haven't been dire warnings of violence in South Africa, probably because there is so much there normally anyway it'll just blend in, and the police at airports haven't been confiscating passports from people wearing football shirts on their way to Cape Town or Marbella. But paranoia is still rampant.

What is really surprising this time is that the health fascist paranoics are targetting us, the armchair fans. I've seen fascists in the media lecturing us about reducing our alcohol intake when Ingerlund play. My problem with that is if I don't get completely bladdered I remember how shit the game was the next day, that's not good, especially if you remember who missed that final penalty in the shoot out with Germany/Argentina/Portugal/Italy etc.

They've also been lecturing us about eating healthy food such as Meditteranean salad, veggie kebabs and low fat dips with your portion of two Pringles per game. Now in my humble opinion that is never going to rescue your liver from the fifteen pints of lager, two bottles of wine and half a bottle of Bacardi consumed thanks to the early kick offs. And that's before you go out to drown your sorrows, or a German tourist if they beat us.

I was brought up believing that mopping that level of alcohol up, thus avoiding cirrhosis, needs pork scratchings (x 6 packets), cheese and onion crisps (x 10 packets) and a donner kebab at half time followed by chipsticks (x 4) and a packet of Dorritos with full fat hummus for the second half. Then after the game a chicken vindaloo, Bombay potato, keema rice and a garlic nan finished off with a mango kulfi, all washed down with four pints of Kingfisher.

Just to be on the safe side you should then ideally have half a pound of stilton and an optional half bottle of port when you stagger back to the house. If indigestion is a worry have two or three large measures of Armagnac before bed. If you still remember the awful game and are worried about a sleepless night then open a decent malt such as The Glenlivet and have two or three decent measures before bo-bos.

Now that's what real football fans do with the cash they save from staying at home to watch it on the telly. That's also why you see so many fat tattoed men walking about in replica Ingerlund shirts that are so tight they look like whole body tattoos.

But the strangest warning from a nannying organisation this year is to wives and girlfriends. They are basically being told to leg it if Ingerlund lose because they are liable for a bit of domestic violence. Bollocks! The thing with multi-racial Britain is that whoever beats Ingerlund, there is always some Johnny from foreign parts to batter rather than your loved ones.

For example my neighbour is a Yank, now he'd better hope for a good Ingerlund result on Saturday night. Meanwhile Mrs B is desperately trying to find an Algerian living locally for next Wednesday, just in case.

John Cooper Clarke-Majorca

Having organised the insurance for our holiday I needed some light relief, dealing with insurance is always such a pain, and got thinking about the Salford Bard and Majorca. Here it is:



But then again, when on holiday pies are something you do miss:

Halford's Tour Series 2010-Southport

The Tour Series is back and Tuesday night is the Southport leg. If you've never seen professional cycle racing before you really must give this a look, it's really spectacular.

Lancashire Police Are Sick!

At lunchtime I popped into my local Sainsbury's. As I crossed the car park I saw a wreck of a car outside the main entrance to the supermarket. It looked like it had been dropped from the sky, it couldn't have been driven there and it was sealed off by police tape.

When I got up close there was a notice from Lancashire Police warning you that this would happen to you if you drink and drive. It was a police stunt!

What next? The body of a murder victim? Or somebody lay there battered and bleeding after a mugging because the police are crap and waste their time, and our taxes, on sick stunts instead of doing a proper job?

It's enough to drive you to drink.

Falling Down or Cracking Up?

The 1993 Michael Douglas film Falling Down was one of those films that leaves a deep impression, or at least it did on me. Modern life just ground him down until he snapped and went on the rampage.

I don't know why the man in Cumbria did what he did yesterday but I sense a lot of people getting more than a little frustrated with modern life. That is not to excuse his actions in any way, they can't be excused, and maybe he has had some particularly tragic event in his life that drove him to it, I don't know. What I do know is that people are becoming increasingly angry at the modern way of life and, eventually, something must give. Let's look at a typical day or two.

Before you go to work you have to make a phone call about your utility bill being an estimated £5,000 for the last quarter. You get some ridiculous message about calls being monitored and recorded for training and quality purposes. Then you get a list of umpteen options with numbers to press for the one you need. Five options sound like they could be for you but you're not sure, so you press star and go back to the start. You press option five for the annoying message that tells you how they value your call but not enough to be arsed recruiting enough staff, so you will be in the queue until an operator becomes available. You then listen to Greensleeves for half an hour with a voice breaking in every minute to tell you you're in a queue.

Eventually you get those ridiculous security questions: What day of the week were you born? What colour underpants are you wearing? Do you prefer jam or marmalade on your toast? And finally what size hat do you take?. They then tell you that you have come through to the wrong department and you get plonked in another queue. So you decide to bugger off to work and sort the bill out another time.

On the way into the office you see the 40mph sign ahead on your deserted country road so build up your speed. In your rear mirror you see a blue light and pull into the next layby. Britain's equivalent of Chips, albeit with a Lancashire accent, struts up in his shades and patronisingly asks if you're in a hurry. Mumbling "for fuck's sake" under your breath is dangerous and gets you a twenty minute lecture on scraping bodies off motorways because of speeding motorists. So you grovel to shut him up, take your ticket and bugger off. What a day and you've not reached the office!

You park in a three hour bay because you're late thinking you must remember to move your car at 12-30. You end up with a real gasbag on the phone at 12-15 and it's actually 12-30 as you dash out of the office. You reach the car at 12-35 and the bastard has already ticketted you. You look around but the sod has well and truly scarpered. How do they do that?

You have to go to Manchester the next day and the thought of driving fills you with horror, so you phone to enquire about trains. If you go to Manchester from Lancaster on a Monday it's £30 return. But, if you wear red socks it's £28 on the 08-49. You can have a return fare after 09-00 for £12 but you have to return, via Glasgow, on the 23-59, arriving in Lancaster at 05-59 the following day. If you were born in the morning, before 1970, you get a special discount and so the complexities of the British train prices goes on, and on, and on. You decide to drive.

On the radio you hear that Manchester Airport has been closed after a security alert. It turns out a holidaymaker had tried to take a big bottle of shampoo on the plane. How dangerous! That reminds you of your friend who was driving into the airport with a van full of chemicals for cleaning out various tanks. Security checked him out and confiscated the yoghurt from his lunch box.

As you walk through Manchester from the car park you notice the CCTV cameras everywhere. They are there to protect you but only a few months ago the police put a security cordon around the city centre and searched eveybody entering for a night out. Proof that CCTV doesn't actually work? Then you remember that this is the city where a poor sod was nicked under anti-terror laws for supposedly taking a photo of a manhole cover. After having his computers checked and his film removed from his camera by the police he was released without charge.

You can't help wondering who we need protecting from.

Supporting Israel

Why is it that every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks it's open season on Israel? George Galloway and his ilk go over there stirring the pot while condemning the USA and every other western country for imperialism, now nearly 1000 interfering sods from around the world think it's OK to sail into Gaza with weapons including machetes and guns. It's sad that people lost their lives, and maybe it wasn't the IDF's best ever operation, but I applaud Israel for defending herself.

Those who took part in the attempt to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza are dangerous lunatics with an agenda. If Israel lifted the blockade then Iran would be in a position to start shipping weapons to the Palestinians, as they have done previously, surely that could only escalate the violence. While life may be difficult in Gaza people are not starving. When questions are asked about the military operation it may be a good idea to find out why Turkey allowed the boats to sail in the first place.

I just hope that those condemning Israel today aren't the same people who so often wish that our government stood up for us a bit more robustly.

David Laws and the Politics of Hypocrisy

So the new government is no better than the last one. Is anybody really surprised?

Cameron, Osborne and others creeping around fraudster David Laws made me feel nauseous this weekend. A man of integrity? He fiddled his expenses to keep quiet the fact that he is gay. That makes him a stinking hypocrite as well as a fraudster and Cameron and company are no better for defending him.

As well as all that, they look forward to welcoming him back into government when he is ready! How's that for sticking two fingers up at the electorate? I'm sure they could bump David Chaytor and his pals into the House of Lords and give them government positions in the coalition too.