Balls! And Wheels!

England manager Fabio Capello reckons "(he doesn't) have to speak about a lot of different things. Maximum 100 words" when talking tactics with the England squad so in his view he need not improve his sometimes impenetrable English. That's 92 more words than Kevin "Run around a lot lads, I feel lucky" Keegan ever used then, so Fabio is probably right in his assumption!

Capello bashing has become a large participant sport in recent times, and amongst various misdemeanours our Fabio is being slated for is failing to remind Wayne Rooney that he was already on one yellow card before his needless booking on Saturday, which now means Wazza will be suspended for the Switzerland qualifier. What, is Rooney incapable of remembering simple things like that for himself?......Ah, stupid question!

Exactly what is the point of a friendly international being played three days after a competitive game? Answers on a postcard to Lancaster Gate. Speaking of which, insanely over-priced £35 million pound lummox Andy Carroll will start the game. Capello has told Carroll he should drink less beer and that he needs to improve. Improve? Just a touch, say by about 1000% then he might be worth about half what he was bought for.
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Predictably enough, the England cricket team lost (ahem...alright, they were utterly Murali'd) to Sri Lanka in their quarter final at the World Cup, thus ending a ludicrous five months on the road. What do the ECB expect when they, and let's be fair here, all other worldwide cricket authorities, insist on daft amounts of cricket being played? What in my opinion did for England, mounting injuries aside, was the seven game ODI series with the Aussies immediately after the Ashes where we played so well. Firstly the ODI series was at least two games too long and secondly it should have been played before the Ashes to maintain both spectator, and, more importantly, player motivation. When we arrived on the sub continent for the World Cup we were already jaded, and never really got going. The ECB should at the very least ensure that this length of overseas tour must never happen again.
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Those of you who follow the well heeled circus that is F1 may be worried, like me, that with the increasing dominance of Red Bull and Sebastian Vettel that we are in for a period of Ferrari & Schumacher style boredom, sorry, dominance for the next few seasons. Sunday's race was so dominated by Vettel he won it without really trying, and Vettel has all the charisma of an oil sump, so he's well up there in the Schumacher snooze inducing stakes. All the signs are there, then.

Warm Leatherette

Strike Like An Egyptian..

..was the wording on a banner at Trafalgar Square on Saturday's march against the cuts, made me laugh that did.

Firstly, despite the impression you may have got from the news the main march was entirely peaceful, as even the police have admitted. The lowlife scum who caused all the trouble were less than 0.05 of a percent of the nearly 500000 marchers, and all the trouble caused was away from the official route. I suppose it's inevitable that these wasters tag on to any large scale protest, mistakenly assuming it legitimises their thuggery. (I now reckon I'm wrong on this - See this for a more likely explanation)

Anyways, back to the theme. Boarding a Unison coach organised by the redoubtable Wilkie in Shoesville at 9am, me being probably the only non-union traveller, although I'm sure there were many more of the non-affiliated on the march itself who disagree with the speed and depth of the Tory (forget the Liberals, as they have disappeared without so much as whimper) cuts, we arrive at the coach park in the East End of London at around 10:45.

A while later, emerging above ground at Southwark tube station, on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge, we met up with Martin, a Londoner friend who it is always good to see on rare sojourns to the capital. Now six strong, Phill, his workmates Mandy & Cheryl, Martin and his mate, and yours truly joined the back of the march on the north side of Blackfriars Bridge. We found out later that the march was being added to at a rate of over a thousand an hour, and when you consider that Hyde Park was filling by 2pm, and the entire two and half mile route was still full of marchers, there must have been around 500000 in total. Not bad! In fact in the four and a half hours we were marching we only covered about a mile and half, having to tube it back to Docklands so as not to miss the coach home. Admittedly that included a detour to a pub for sustenance, food as well as beer, I hasten to add!

I'm a veteran of countless demos in my time, and this one had one of the most peaceful atmospheres of any I've been on. The marches that had the feeling they would kick off at any moment were the numerous Anti Nazi League confrontations with various groups of brain dead skinheads waving MY flag as if they had some prior claim, way back in 70s & 80s. Ironically some of the CND marches I've been on also had an air of menace, but yesterday's march was a stroll in the park (or street), not that it detracted from the seriousness of the cause.

Apart from some of the seriously deluded far left, I'm sure that the majority of the marchers do not deny that cuts have to be made, it's simply the speed and depth of Osborne's slash'n'burn that aggravates the man or woman in the street, and again, sometimes news bulletins give the impression that the marchers are against any form of belt tightening. Not so.

I must admit however that I'm glad we never made it as far as Hyde Park as having watched some of Labour leader Ed Millibrand's speech later on TV I despair of Labour's chances at the next election. The man has all the gravitas of a damp cloth. The kind of voter Labour need to win back at the next election are people like my next door neighbour, an ambivalent man where politics are concerned. Steve, who comes from a solid working class background, gives the impression that he would consider voting Labour again, but says that Ed Millibrand is his main stumbling block simply because of his perceived lack of clout. He also told me a tale of how the unions shoot themselves, and by association Labour, in the foot. A friend of his, along with a train load of late commuters coming home to Northampton from London were told at Milton Keynes that as the driver had worked his allotted hours and as the RMT was on a work to rule, the train would not be going any further, leaving most of the passengers stranded 30 miles from home. As if that wasn't bad enough, some passengers standing within earshot of a guard heard the driver tell his colleague on his walkie talkie that once the train was empty, he'd be driving it to the depot in, you've guessed it, Northampton. A mini riot ensued.

It's stupid logic-defying behaviour like this, rooted in bullet headed 1960s & 1970s politics, that wins the unions and Labour no friends at all, and rightly so. Mind you, this is the RMT we're talking about and their leader Bob Crow is a particularly frightening example of dinosaur throwback! Although the likes of Unison may have a reserve of public sympathy, it's only a thin veneer. If strikes happen, particularly over their generous pension rights, that support would evaporate quickly. If we are to get a Labour victory at the next election, the unions have to be very careful how they tread.

That rambled a bit, I know. Here's some pics of the march...

He does!

A load of balloons

As far as the eye can see



A big clock...

And a video....

Some telly

Anyone watching that Caroline Quentin: A Passage Through India prog on ITV? Probably the worst travelogue programme ever. It seems to be the trend now to send a celeb who really does not like travelling much at all to the hottest most crowded places on the planet. Channel 5 actually did this quite well with Paul Merton in China & Paul Merton in India, and although Merton, ironically enough Quentin's former hubby, was uncomfortable most of the time he's very much a people person so he managed to overcome his environmental discomfort to produce some decent entertainment.

Quentin on the other hand looks permanently slightly ill so perhaps they should re-title the programme India: A Passage Through Caroline Quentin. She also looks constantly overheated and flustered. Her two reactions to the sights sounds and smells of the sub-continent are either blubbing or hysterical laughter, and her self-conscious presentation style is somewhat forced to say the least. She makes the jolly hockey sticks patronising of Kate Humble in Spice Trail seem a welcome relief. Yep, I'm not that keen on it!
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Spoiler Alert - If any of you plan to but have yet to watch any of the new and final series of Waking The Dead, or The Killing then read no further....

We've arrived at the final series of the once wonderful Waking The Dead, and boy is this a tired old nag of a series. Once brilliant, if only for the utterly bonkers Peter Boyd, it is now a mere shadow of its former self. Four episodes and two stories into the final series sees Boyd with a new and equally ranked team member Detective Superintendent Sarah Cavendish, ex of the anti terrorist squad, who because of recent misdemeanours as yet not fully explained has found herself decamped to the dark basement that houses the Cold Case Unit. We know she's probably an alcoholic, and something happened in her previous posting that makes her baulk at entering suspected crime scenes. So far so formulaic. The other characters continue where they left off. I've always liked Dr Eve's leaps of imagination to come up with bizarre connections that Boyd dismisses with a raised eyebrow or an impatient demand for translation into English. I can see his point.

It used to be the case that the glaring plot holes were more than made up for by Boyd's various skirmishes with mental collapse, but so far, a few impatient asides apart, he has not really been the centre of attention which leads one to concentrate on the barely believable storylines. Not a good idea.

The first story featured a labyrinth plot featuring Munchausen's by proxy, missing bankers, a young boy who collects back issues of Readers Digest, and an old couple who might or might not be spooks.  Wantonly barking, and actually it wasn't too bad.

The second story however was an absolute stinker that tried to play it straight and vacuumed any sense of believability out of the viewer like a thundering great black hole. Set around a care home it was as if the the writers sat down with a list of all the most horrible nasty things you could imagine would happen to kids in care and ticked off the clichés one by one. Oh, and let's add incest with the foster mother as icing on the cake. This kind of thing is so typical of many run of the mill Brit cop shows, and waaay below what you would expect Waking The Dead to come up with. Hopefully this final series will improve or it should be renamed Bury The Dead About Twenty Feet Down And Pour Concrete On The Top.
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Here in Burwood Towers we have become big fans of Scandinavian crime drama. This started with the Swedish original versions of Wallander, which were far better than the still good but predictably hammy UK version starring Kenneth Brannagh, and continues with the compelling Danish offering, The Killing.

This Saturday sees the tenth and final two hour helping of intricate understated and completely cliché free storytelling that the Scandinavians seem to do so well, set to a backdrop of dimly lit offices, and lots of wintery gloom in the outdoor scenes. The whole twenty hours of the show is focussed on solving the killing of one late teen girl, and interspersed with the machinations of Danish town hall politics. Particularly heart tugging is how the victim's parents cope with the loss of their daughter and how their relationship breaks, rebuilds, and breaks again under the unrelenting strain. One can only hope for a happy ending for these two.

Superbly well written, it is hard to imagine a UK TV exec taking the risk to do something similar as it assumes the audience have an attention span of greater than half an hour, and also assumes them to be intelligent enough to appreciate the intricacies of a very slowly evolving plot. Utterly marvellous.

The Danish crew have just finished filming a third series and the second series starts on BBC4 (probably the best UK channel in my opinion) later this year. If you missed this first series, do yourself a favour and catch the repeats if they come up, but definitely do not miss the second series.
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Gold!

With the Olly Impics not far below the horizon, it's time to suggest some hitherto neglected sports for inclusion, purely in the interests of boosting Team GB's medal haul...


Womens' Bigg Market Double Heptathlon
Team GB lead the world in this exciting new sport. The aim is for each team member to consume 14 bizarrely named cocktails in a pre-allotted time span of choice, the shorter the time span the more points gained, and then attempt to have sex with as many passing policemen as possible in the following half hour without actually getting arrested. Points are deducted for passing out, clothes akimbo, but bonus points can be gained for fighting. Throwing up results in instant disqualification, unless it's on a copper while attempting to have sex. Our five strong team are recruited almost entirely from Newcastle, the one exception being Britney Slosh from Barking.

Just A Minute
Mixed teams of four chavs compete against each other over four rounds of a minute a time wherein they have to cram as much street argot as possible, like, including the phrases "it was like", "I was like" and "you were like" and just "like" at least twice each. The winner is the team that can pull off this grammatical spew without any hesitations or including any fully formed sentences. The French are crap at this, like. Most of our team, like, come from Watford, like.

Blatant Hypocrisy
One for the middle-aged this one. You do not have to be a politician in order to compete, but it certainly helps. The aim of the contest is to justify something completely untenable while maintaining a totally sincere visage at all times. Bonus points awarded if the proposition being justified goes against your perceived core principals, or is simply a barefaced lie. Team GB's main rivals for gold in this stupefyingly predictable sport are the USA, but we have been catching up fast over the past 30 years. Expect a nail biting finish. All our team went to Eton, including the girls.

Squash
A ludicrous name for sport I know, but bear with me. Lock two contestants dressed in tennis attire in a small room and get them to hit a bullet hard piece of galvanized rubber at one another using undersized tennis rackets and hitting the pellet as hard as they can against any of the walls or indeed, the ceiling or the floor. Last man or woman standing wins, or somesuch. Apparently used to be an Olympic sport, but was delisted because of its sheer preposterousness. I'm told we're quite good at this, but not as good as the Indians....oh well, nice try.

Rugby
Oh hang on, we're not very good at this are we?

That's enough storp for now, I'm going for a jog.

Not In Our Name

If I hadn't woken up with a thick head this morning I would already have rattled off a rant along the lines of my good mate Phill's missive. We're invading Libya! Woop-de-dee! £10m per day this will cost us. £10m per day they can't find for the NHS, public sector jobs, council grants, etc fucking etc. Everybody reading this should come to London on 26th for the march - let the sods know we are not happy. When are our rulers going to realise that this is not the 19th century and we are no longer, and indeed have not been since 1945, a world power. Vast amounts of money are wasted by successive Governments showing the world how macho we are are, while the likes of Germany and usually France (who would be doing their usual Gallic shrug were it not for past and still strong colonial connections to the region) and the rest of Western Europe are rightly laughing at us. God I wish I was Swedish or Danish sometimes!

Afghanistan, where our soldiers regularly fall for reasons that may at first glance seem to be becoming more obfuscated by the day has potentially vast reserves of oil under its inhospitable terrain, which explains our continued involvement in a country that no Old World power (or powers) has ever manged to tame. Until it's discovered that extracting oil from this country is economically unviable we, or at least the good ol' US of A will be there, in our case at best making the soldiers redundant by email and at worse sending home fathers, husbands, sons in wooden boxes.

As for the staggering hypocrisy this current "moral" crusade labours under - surely you'd have to be as thick as an elephant's leg not to notice the black gold connection. What about Mugabe, Yemen, oppression in Palestine, North Korea? All places where the rulers have treated their subjects far worse than Gaddafi ever treated his? The argument's so obvious it's not worth continuing with. In a few years expect Cameron's biography to be full of half baked self-justification à la Blair.

Lest we forget, where is Clegg with his Liberal conscience on this one.......sorry, stupid question.

My head still hurts...

Gazpacho Soup - Part Five - Well, Stap Me!

He had the hump, did our Dave, for he was an ungulate of the dromedary variety and not a bachtrian. Having abandoned his master in the car park of the Doon Bingo & Social Club the previous evening in search of the finest quality golden brown, unfortunately for him he had been unable to score. Now hunched in the doorway of a 24 hour convenience store, the sweat poured from him like mealy mouthed platitudes from a politician, for it too was indigestible.

Meanwhile back at Burwood Towers, the weather forecast was not promising. A warm front of hot fetid breath bubbling up from the south, a spectacle of tumescence worthy of the burgeoning ego of Colonel Gaddafi, was about to collide with a cold front of wet libdem wobbles from the west. Scorchio it was not, and indeed, all Hell could break loose at any moment. The Lord Of The Manor and famous interstellar explorer The Hon. Rogers Wintington-Smythe MP, DSO & BOC awoke asleepily from his torpid slumbers, overflowed out of bed and, be-trousered, shambling stumbled to the water closet. "Phrrrrrrmmph" went the exhuming of last night's Octopi Vindaloo, falling away like a tropical mudslide, followed, but luckily for him not followed through with, a mighty "Blooooooooooooooooorch". "Feck, for I needed that" said Rogers. Now four pounds lighter, our hero lurched back across the upper landing, staggered down the stairs and walked on down the hall. He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he....paid a visit to his brother, and then he...He walked on down the hall, and...oh no, hang on a minute, let me turn that cd off.

After watching blearily and soon after leerily the ample heaving bosom of Mrs Shreeves displacing many litres of air while she toiled over M'lud's breakfast of six mugs of disgustingly sweet tea to chase down three Smoked Kippers with a side of order of "I'll be back by Tuesday". followed by seven slices of toast topped with crushed beetle and marmite marmalade, Rogers plucked betwixt his fagstained fingers enough wiry hair from his ear lobes to knit one and two fifths mittens. They don't wash too well though.

Some time later, after a little snooze and much farting, Rogers took his morning constitutional on the Upper Lawn, the scene of many a daydream, some still sticky. On the horizon our hero could vaguely discern the ensuing battle between the hot fetid breath and the cold wet wobbles. It did not look at all pleasant. "Therebe strange portents I wouldn't wonder" he muttered to himself through a still lingering smog of stale beer and curry. "Blooorch", a scratchit gassy man he was that morn.

At that moment, Clegg, the fawning obsequious retainer appeared in the distance on the Lower Lawn, a shotgun casually slung over his round wimpy shoulders. Shoulders that looked like they could bear no responsibility at all. "Ah, m'lud" he hollered, although it would be hard to differentiate his shouting from his usual weedy tones, "Therebe some sort of monster trying to get into the grounds." "What sort of monster? If it's edible I'll 'ave it fur me tea!" Bellowed His Lardship. "I dunno" wimpered Clegg "...but judging from it's shifty look and the track marks on its legs, I'd say it was no good for the eating." "Better off it then Cleggy, ya fuckwit, but don't lay a finger on it 'til I get there." Now his gander was goosed by the imminent pleasures of filling something, anything, with plentiful piles of lead shot, Rogers charged back to the house and pulled out a huge blunderbuss of a shotgun from the pile of small arms under the kitchen table. "You can never be too careful these days" he used to say, for "...you never know what useless bunch of workshy gross so-called relatives might be visiting next hoping to get in the will."

Eyes aflame with bloodlust, the twenty three stones of His Lardship thundered across the Upper Lawn, down the many steps to the Lower Lawn and was soon beside his loathed retainer Clegg, a man as thick in the head as an elephant's leg. "Clegg" Rogers wheezed, coagulating greasy sweat dripping lumpily off the end of his garrulous nose "..where's the prey then, ya sack'o'shit?" "Over there m'lud" whined the sap, pointing to a clearly distressed dromedary. "Dave, is that you?" said Rogers, recognising the heroin addled mess that was his steed of choice back in those heady days of exploration and exploitation....mmmm the exploitation, oh the joy.....


Next...a camel in rehab is not a pretty sight, the England cricket team astound the nation with a routine and very dull victory, seven beans make five, Chili Paneer and Kadai Aloo Baingan is a dinner from heaven.

In memory of that marvellous English eccentric Viv Stanshall

Bring Me Sunshine

This was the wraparound cover on our local freebie newspaper last week:

A bit of background for those unfamiliar with Shoesville. For as long as I've lived here, and that's over 30 years, our town council has been led by some of the worst kind of self serving and self important stuffed shirts (and blouses) it's possible to imagine. Mired in a culture of rampant cronyism coupled with an innate ability by our civic leaders to bury their heads in the sand, or up their own backsides, our town has steadily declined over the years from being a pleasant, if somewhat sleepy, market town to a situation where we now find that pound shops, mobile phone shops, fast food outlets and chain pubs dominate the centre of what is supposed to be a county town with (laughable) ambitions of city status.

Whatever colour of political party at the helm, and we've had all three, the good ship NBC has always been akin to a badly piloted vast oil tanker that takes forever and a day to change course, by which time it's often too late. I'm sure this is true for a lot of places up and down our sceptred isle, but I can only speak for my town.

If you think that was a rant, I've not even begun. Anyway, back to the Tory party's local election "manifesto" such as it is. The 5 pledges made by the Tories as advertised on the front of our freesheet paper are some of the vaguest all-things-to-all-men, wishwashy trite load of old bollocks I've seen from a political party, and I've seen a few. Let's see what they are promising:

Put Northampton back on track
Regenerate Northampton and protect the interests of the whole borough

An admirable pledge, but exactly how do they think they are going to achieve this when all past administrations have failed miserably, and their same party paymasters have applied their draconian cuts to the central grant? As an example, over 10 years ago it was rightly suggested that our upturned skip of a bus station, which was once voted the second worst piece of architecture in the UK (we can't even win that!), be demolished so that the town centre could be re-developed in order to attract shoppers back from the likes of Leicester and Milton Keynes.

Gorgeous...

Nothing has happened, and these have been "good times" economically. How are they going to realise this lofty ambition? They won't.

Reduce waste to protect public services
Cut senior managers, waste and consultants and cut increases in councillor allowances

Hahahaha! By the time the May elections are over the council staff, managers included will already be suffering the first wave of redundancies, essential and supposedly protected frontline services will have been slashed, there will be fewer police officers on the streets, social services will have had its budgets slashed, etc, bloody etc. Are they seriously suggesting more of the same? Madness. Will probably appeal to the uninformed and the wilfully ignorant with its emotional phrasing, which is no doubt the intention.

Invest in safer and cleaner neighbourhoods
Ensure Northampton is an attractive, clean and safe place where people feel welcome

Cleaning up some street rubbish is not going to regenerate the town, and well they know it. Sounds nice though. The only way you're going to make the town safer is by having more police on the street. Can't see that happening either, quite the reverse in fact.

Demand better homes for the future
Be honest about our housing needs and protect the vulnerable in Sheltered Housing

"Demand"?....."Is that Wimpey Construction?"..."Yes"..."We are the town council, and we demand that you build more "affordable" homes that folk won't buy because they cannot raise the 30% deposit needed before they can get a mortgage." As for sheltered housing, how about using the numerous brownfield sites within the town boundary that currently lie unused, or worse. A bugbear of mine is the former St Edmunds Hospital site, for a considerable time now privately owned, which has been an eyesore on the main thoroughfare into town for years.



Lovely......(and this is only a small part of the site)

The private owners of the site have never delivered on numerous schemes to redevelop the land, probably because of lack of funds. As a result it's fallen prey to extensive vandalism and is a real blot on the landscape. It's high time this whole area was compulsorily purchased and some proper use put to it, for instance the Sheltered Housing referred to in the Tories' 5 Pledges. Again, this will never happen due to a lack of funding, and more importantly, political will.

Empower communities with pride in Northampton
Support our communities so people feel proud of Northampton and our heritage

Think about that headline, what does it actually mean? Nothing, or anything you want it to, that's what. Empty political waffle, and this from the same party that expects people they make redundant from social provision jobs, and the charities from whom they cut funding to do the same work voluntarily all in the name of the "Big Society". If Northampton Tories really want to make us "proud of our heritage" how about reopening Abington Park museum all year round for starters? Again, never going to happen.

Just to balance this out, I'm sure the Lib Dem and Labour manifestos are just as vacuous, but in Labour's case maybe not quite so blatantly hypocritical, and as I've said before, all three parties have contrived to sell my town down the river over the years. None of them will get my vote, and indeed, I have not voted for one of the major parties in local elections for years. If there's an independent along the lines of the venerable Tony Clarke in my ward I'll vote for them, or the Greens at a pinch.
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Our hearts go out to the people of eastern & northeastern Japan who have suffered nigh on unimaginable natural catastrophe in the last few days. I have to ask though - what government in their right minds builds a nuclear power station 80 miles from the most unstable geographical fault line in the world? Even the ConDems wouldn't do that.....hmmm.
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Virgin on the competent - a word of warning

If any of you poor saps are using Virgin for your interwebby experience, you might want to check the password on your Virgin installed wireless router. When I joined the lovely Indian firm I asked the installation guy, who I recall had terrible b.o. btw, to change the default password to one of my choosing. He either forgot or didn't bother. Yesterday, while installing B's new birthday prezzie laptop on our network, I discovered that the default settings were still there. After wondering why I couldn't log on to my network on the laptop with my password, I spent half an hour trawling forums to find out how to re-set the modem, when by chance I found out that Virgin's default settings are User Name "virgin", Password "password", so I tried those to log on to 198.68.1.1 and bingo - it worked.

My password has now been changed, but it means that any unscrupulous type in our street who is aware of Virgin's default password (and that could be any Virgin subscriber who's tried to install a laptop or other device on their home network, so a fair few I'd guess) could have been using my network for the past 18 months without my realising it.

If it had not been for the fact that I was installing a new piece of hardware on my network, this security lapse would have remained undiscovered. It wouldn't surprise me if this "oversight" applies to other ISPs too, so. if I were you I'd check your wireless router password now!

Forward this to any of your friends who do not have the good fortune to read my nonsense!

Yours - a weary consumer

The View From Depression Gulch

It is with some trepidation given my team's poor form and mounting injury list that I used BBC's Premiership Predictor to come up with the following possible end of season table, and, to be honest, the way things are going for Everton right now, I'd settle for this result:

1. Man Utd 86 (If Utd win the title, they beat a certain other red team's record of titles achieved, and on that note I predict that Ol' Beetroot Face will retire, and the the new manager will be......Jose Mourinho)
2. Arsenal 81
3. Chelsea 77
4. Man City 70
5. Spurs 68 (Nearly, but not quite)
6. L****poo* 56
7. Birmingham 50
8. Newcastle 47
9. Bolton 47
10. A Villa 46
11. Fulham 45
12. Sunderland 45
13. Everton 44 (Gawd help us next season...)
14. Blackpool 43
15. W Ham 42 (Perhaps my sentimental affection for The Hammers got the better of me!)
16. Stoke 41
17. Wolves 40
18. W Brom 39 R
19. Blackburn 36 R (There's always one team who plummet like a brick in a bucket....better keep quiet on that one!)
20. Wigan 29 R (Somehow only getting 2 more points between now and season end - a total disintegration!)
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After Tuesday's godawful defeat to at home to Reading, I thought listening to England v Ireland while at work the next day could only cheer me up. How wrong can I be? Congrats to the Irish, a quite amazing display, matched only by the bromide-in-the-tea performance of England's "bowlers". By 5pm on Wednesday a black cloud could be seen hovering above the noggin of yours truly.

This weekend Everton take on Newcastle at St James' Park, while the England cricket team entertain Siff Iffrica. May as well throw myself under that bus now then!
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Some good news to finish - the Cobblers seem to have landed a decent manager in Gary Johnson, a man with a wealth of lower league experience who almost got Bristol City into the Premiership. With a very outside chance of still making the play offs, the only way is up fot the Cobblers.....that's kiboshed that then....
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Colonel Gaddafi, up for A Bit Of Bully

It is a little know fact that Jim Bowen was the original choice to conduct the recent BBC interview with Libyan loon Colonel Muammar Al-Gaddafi, as the Libyan leader is a big Bullseye fan. Unfortunately due to ill health* Jim was replaced by Jeremy Bowen at the last minute in the hope that Gaddafi would not notice the difference. The interview may have gone something like this...

Jim Bowen "Now then Colonel, I'm guessing you're up for a bit of bully?"

Gaddafi "My people do not bully. It is al qaeda, they drug my people, but my boys they put down guns when drugs wear off"

JB "Smashing. Is your wife here?"

G "No, but I bring two of my Brigade of Amazonian Virgins for your pleasures"

JB "Nothing in this game for two in a bed I'm afraid, but I'll take them anyway. I hear there's a bit of a ruckus in Libya at the moment"

G "My people all love me, there is no trouble. It is America and Great Britain and al qaeda in big conspiracy. I give them nothing but the testicles of a sheep."

JB "Well Colonel you may need to win Bully's Special Prize now that all your assets in Great Britain have been frozen by David Cameron"

G "I challenge him to find anything. If he find one million dinars, I keep half, he keep half.

JB "Ooh, so close, and all for the throw of a dart. Now, the cash you won for charity earlier... that's safe."

G "I have a tent and a camping stove. I no like money. I challenge them, I put two fingers in their eyes and up their bottoms." 

JB "Now, let's look at what you could have won......Asylum in Bolivia!"

G "Iiiiin one!"

JB "Sorry Colonel, but you win nothing but your BFH... Bus Fare Home"

G "My people are with me. I do not need bus home for we shall remain and they will fall"

JB "Super, smashing great"
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* Jim Bowen is currently in hospital recovering from two mild strokes, and we wish him a speedy recovery.
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Newsflash - Steve Davies has come out! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ no, not that one, the cricketer. Had you going though didn't it......Ian Bell says the England team are right behind him, which is probably for the best.........Must be the Jim Bowen influence....I'll get me coat..........;)
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