Dear BBC

I wish to complain about the unsuitable footage being transmitted on your channels which is causing my entire family, and especially my grand daughter, to have nightmares.

I refer of course to your coverage of our government’s feeble and incompetent handling of our economy and thus their complete inability to take effective remedial action in the face of their own self-created disaster. Interspersed with footage of scary dribbling bogeypersons like Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Harriet Harperson it is enough to send us to bed trembling with the thought that our wallets and purses will be raided during the night and will be empty in the morning. My grand daughter [3] is especially concerned that she will grow up and have to work 25 hours a day down pit to pay off the debts these imbeciles have racked up on our behalf.

Most of your channels are now banned in our household and we only watch CBeeBies and Cerrie Burnell. I seek a pro-rata reduction in my licence fee.

Yours etc

Have Pass Will Travel

Yes I’ve got one of these, a Freedom Pass. No longer am I classified by the authorities as “economically inactive”, whatever that means and frankly I am at a loss considering the contribution I make to the exchequer via duty on beer and cigarettes. I am now officially an “old” man. Later this year I will also get, I am told, a Winter Fuel Allowance too! But it’s another 10 years before I can get my loft lagged for free. Surely they’ve got that the wrong way round? Is it any wonder that I am Grumpy?

Grump one. The pass is now advertised as a 24 hour pass, every day. Except that it ain’t. London Transport does not function 24 hours a day!

Grump two. Depending upon which Borough you live in you either apply for the pass direct to that Council or apply at a Post Office. I am wondering if the Boroughs of Barking & Dagenham, Sutton, Wandsworth and Havering have been particularly affected by Post Office closures, more so than we here in Redbridge?

Grump three. You need two forms of identification one from each of two lists. That’s fine. No problem, I took my passport and it was the first time it has been used. What I object to is being told that I MUST use my passport. This has happened to me on a few occasions recently when opening various bank accounts and on the invite to the London Assembly count at the Excel centre. The thing is, it is not obligatory to have a passport, so I tell them I don’t have one. And no, I really don’t have a photo driving licence. It’s when you have to push to find out what the real rules are that makes me grumpy.

A couple of years back Miss and Mrs Weggis took an internal flight from City Airport to Edinburgh. Yes, I know we are supposed to be an eco-family but in their defence I must point out that neither of them had flown before and have not done so since. They had to present their passports, so they tell me. I wonder what would have happened if I had tagged along?

Serendipity?

A Mr. Abdul Sahid from Burkina faso has emailed me with an offer to transfer $22.3million into my bank account. He is not alone. Over the past weeks/months I have had similar offers from others. Possibly amounting to the UK’s national debt. I have not bothered to add it all up.

The thing is that I don’t need such vast sums of money, but I suspect a certain chap with initials GB and his Darling mate does.

Does anyone know his, or Darlings, email address so I can forward these emails on to them?

The Death “Penalty”

Thursday Briefing posts on the Death Penalty. Specifically the Mexican Greens coming out in favour of it and how they are out of step with the fundamental ideas of the Green political movement.

The post refers to the "fundamental respect for human life".

But who are we, Europeans, to judge?

When we casually accept the deaths of pedestrians and cyclists on our roads due to, for e.g. the use of a mobile phone whilst driving. When the penalty for NOT respecting human life is a slap on the wrist and a 6 month ban from driving?

We Europeans have questions to answer too.

Plenty examples on Freewheelers blog.

Hey Freewheeler, please open up to accept comments.

Listening

When my Dad died in 1999 my brother and I asked that instead of flowers we would like donations to our Dad’s favoured charity – NSPCC. I sent off a fat cheque to them explaining that it was a one-off and not to bother me. They sent a thank you/acknowlegement letter and I have not heard from them since.

Last Christmas we decided not to do the gift thing. We sent off CAF cheques to 5 charities, with a Christmas card explicitly stating "No mail please".

I have now received mail from the British Legion and the Salvation Army. The other three were, NSPCC, DEC Congo and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

It’s taken a long while but I now understand what my Dad meant when he said to us kids "Those who ask, don’t get".

The Right Green

I have to admit that my reading list is not the same as the list of links in the side bar. I like to get a cross section of opinion, you can’t read everything, so I am choosy about which sites I have on my RSS feed. They have to be well-written, concise and offer some insight into the issues of the day. Sometimes though, these principles are waived when I want to know what certain people are writing or thinking. I also have pet interests; Green issues are one as you would expect. Another is the Conservative Party. As things stand the Labour Party are in meltdown and the Conservatives are likely to be the next government. So, I want to know what they’ve got infamy [as Kenneth Williams would say].

So, I have to admit that I read [well, not all of it] Iain Dale’s diary. There you are, I’m out of the closet. A Dolly Dale’s reader. Now, Iain has this long term "relationship" with another blogger by the name of Dolly Draper and recently I was unfairly tempted to increment his stats count by one as a result of this post by Iain. The reason being that I am a bit short [like Nil] on decent Labour Party sites, but this one was even more disappointing; just the usual spouting of NuLab bullshit with serious psychological problems thrown in for good measure..

Anyway to the point – the Good News. Iain reckons that the Greens are going to do well in the Euro elections, getting into double figure percentages. Now, when you consider that the vote is likely to be unevenly spread and localised it means that there is an optimistic chance that we might get 4 or 5 MEPs.

Now, wouldn’t that be a lovely platform going into the next General Election.

Today I feel optimistic .

The Wrong Green

Poetry seems to be cropping up on the blogs I read, so I thought I'd publish one of mine - must be about early nineties.

Out on the Golf Course,
Mobile in hand,
Calling the boss,
Stuck in a Jam.

Swinging the lead,
an iron or wood,
out on the fairway,
feeling so good.

Worries and stress,
all forgotten,
a ball in the lake,
sinks to the bottom.

Bogies or birdies
it doesn’t much matter,
out of the office
having a chatter

Neglecting the job,
putting for the match,
on the last green,
there must be a catch.

On to the bar,
For a large G and T,
Oh hell, here’s the boss,
Has he seen me?