The World Goes White

 

Here's something I thought I might never see again. It's been years since there was an appreciable amount of snow in sunny Ruislip. But we are not in Ruislip any more. This is the view from my new home in Warwickshire. 

It's been a strangely patchy blast of arctic air. Across the West Midlands and southern Pennines, plenty of snow. In northern England and the south, just rain. It will probably clear up by midmorning and start thawing later on so there is just a brief window in which to admire the view. We still have a cold few days ahead but are promised temperatures creeping back into double figures by the weekend.

This time last year prolonged rain brought flooding. This year we had loads of rain in the spring and summer, but very little since. And foreigners wonder we are obsessed with the weather.

Twenty Years On

In November 2014 I was somewhat bothered, if not bemused, to find that I had been writing bits and pieces for this blog for ten years. I am bewildered and befuddled [Enough of words indicating confusion beginning with B: Ed] as I note that a further decade has elapsed and yet this blog still refuses to die. I pen these words from the rural heart of beautiful Warwickshire, and neither Ruislip nor commuting feature heavily (or at all) in my thoughts, except for a sigh of pure schadenfreude at this sort of news report.

We do have the odd travelling problem. Last year our village was cut off by floods on the roads both in and leading to it; fortunately there was no lasting damage and the waters receded within a day. Sometimes the A46, the main road between Stratford (to our east) and Alcester (to the west) is clogged with traffic or has been closed due to accidents. As I rarely use it, and can always find an alternative given a bit of warning, this doesn't matter. The biggest frustration is being stuck behind a slow-moving tractor or held at road works.

Anyway, I think I am legally covered by calling myself an ex-Ruislip commuter.

The main event within this column was the ground-breaking series, 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die, published between September 2019 and May 2020. I had more time to complete it than I had expected because the Covid epidemic began in the UK in early March and we were in lockdown by the end of the month. We also covered, albeit with cunning camouflage, the strange Presidential career of The Most Popular Man in the World, thanks to our unnamed correspondent in Karakorum, who was there when the mighty Mongol Empire gave under the sway of one G. Khan. And a large number of businesses came under heavy fire for stupid or misleading advertising and risible PR Claims, including Aberdeen Standard Life who changed their name to Abrdn (to get down with the kids and be more cool), Coca-Cola who tried to get us to believe that Kate Moss personally chose some trashy prizes they were trying to foist on an uncaring public and, quite recently, the bare-faced cheek of Vodaphone and Three who claimed that competition in the mobile phone/broadband market would be increased if they merged.  We shall continue to scrutinise all such enterprises and to hold them to account.

Where will we be in another ten years? The signs are not encouraging. Wars in Europe and in the Middle East, the growing polarisation of liberal democracies versus dictatorships and the short-termism of politicians everywhere mean that climate choice, species extinction and the destruction of the natural biosphere on land and, especially, in the oceans, will not be addressed adequately. There is another factor that rarely gets discussed - world population. I worried about this as a student, a long time ago. Since then the population has more than doubled and is still growing. The idea that the finite resources of the planet can continue to provide improving lifestyles for so many more consumers was never discussed at all when I studied economics back then, and is rarely mentioned today in political debate. But the outcome is going to be migration from hot, poor countries to anywhere else on a scale unparallelled in human history; the small boats bringing migrants over the English Channel are just a foretaste.

Anyway, you don't come here for serious stuff. We shall go on trying to find humour wherever it may be lurking, be it behind the news headlines, in advertisements, in popular culture or, if sufficiently chortle-worthy, in unpopular culture.  We shall probe politicians, antagonise admen, petrify pundits and, er, you know, the other lot [I'll get the thesauraus: Ed]. Terms and Conditions will continue to apply wherever we can shoehorn them in. Exclamation marks will be deployed and, somewhat regrettably but there is nothing I can do about it, stupid bloody interventions in italics from the Editor will continue to be injected. 

We are Ramblings!

Sen. Cassius Takes Over

News has reached us of important changes in the Republic of Rome. After a short, but bitter, election campaign involving many cloaks, some fairly sharp daggers and a considerable amount of speech-making,  Senator M. Bucinum Cassius has been acclaimed as Imperator and will now head up the Republic. The Senator was Consul some years back and his administration ended amid much confusion and contumely. However, with vigorous support from many plebs disillusioned with the current administration, he was able to present himself as the only man who could save Rome from the chaos that he had so carefully nutured in the interim.

Speaking to a rally of supporters in the Forum, Cassius is reported to have said

"This is where we start making Rome great again. We're gonna bring back total freedom and liberty. Top of the agenda - more slavery. Slaves mean more production and more production means more money, right? Next, anyone who bad-mouthed us during the assass, er, election, can expect a visit from my lictors, you know, the big guys with the axes. Now I'm totally for the constitution and the guarantee of impartial justice from our magistrates, so I'll be replacing most of them with guys who understand just what impartial really means..." 

It is believed that at this point one of the Senator's aides whispered a few words and Sen. Cassius continued "Well, anyway, I'll be replacing them. Period."
 

Turning to foreign policy the Senator is understood to have focussed on the threat from Carthage. "We're gonna put big tariffs on imports and boost home-grown farming and manufactures. And if they don't like it, then ..."

Another aide is said to have mentioned something and the Senator resumed "As I was saying, if the Carthagians try to start doing imports into Rome, then we'll hit them with tariffs from here all the way to Carthage City."

The Senator then introduced his key backer, the richest man in the Empire, M. Croesus Muscus. "This is a truly great man. He's going to build a fleet of huge ships, sail them way out beyond the Pillars of Hercules and find new lands. And when we find them, we're gonna introduce them to the way of Roman civilisation, and if that means slaughtering most of them and enslaving the survivors while our men loot everything they can carry and burn the rest, hell, you gotta expect a bit of adjustment when you join the worlds greatest nation. Am I right?"

Those watching applauded, but Cassius seemed unimpressed. At his signal the Praetorian Guard touched their hands to the scabbards of their swords, and the Senator put the question again. This time there was no doubt about the fervour and sincerity of the crowd. 

We shall continue to follow the career of Senator Cassius and may consider sending a special correspondent to cover the story on the spot. By good fortune, there happens to be one available.

TV Shock Sensation - Show Goes Entirely To Plan

 I have commented recently about crap clickbait headlines in local online "newspapers", such as this one about a non-existent Big Cat Peril. We have come to expect this sort of lazy, regurgitated journalism on such sites. But surely the national press have higher standards? Perhaps not the tabloids but the heavyweights that pride themselves on their ethics and principles? 

Wrong again. Here is a story in The Independent about a certain well-known TV show. For those who have recently immigrated from Tharg,  the Great British Bake-Off is a sequence of knockout competitions in which 12 amateur bakers are eliminated, one a week, until three remain to contest the final. Let me repeat this simple format. They are regularly eliminated. Now look at the press snippet

I glanced over the body of the story. I thought, yes, well, maybe out of the five million or so who watched, perhaps a goodly portion - say one million, had swamped the Channel 4 switchboard to register their contumely and demand the reinstatement of the wronged cake maestro. Of course, that the show was filmed several months ago, and the outcome long since determined, does not need to be brought into account.  Alas, the hoped-for images of crowds thronging the streets around the studios, holding flaming torches, waving pitchforks and demanding the exile of the Head of Creativity (yes, her again) were strangely absent. So too were any details of the numbers of these stunned viewers. In fact, it seems reasonable to infer that absolutely nobody at all was "stunned" that a TV show based on weekly eliminations eliminated a contestant. Upset at the premature departure of a favourite, certainly. Perhaps irritated at the show's format which bases the ejections on the performance of the week and does not take into account past successes. But this has been how it has worked since the first series. Nobody, except our Thargian friends, could possibly be left aghast, struggling for breath, weeping with frustration and shock, rushing to social media to set up a support group and begin crowd-funding a legal campaign.

Had the Independent gone with "GBBO - some viewers unhappy with this week's elimination but most shrugged it off", I would have had no quibble at the accuracy of their reporting. As it is, I feel cheated because I took the time ( a few moments out of my busy lifestyle, as one might say who knew nothing about me) to glance down the article before realising the vapidity of the content and then reaching for my trusty keyboard to hammer out this piece. And that is as far as I wish to take it.

The winner of October's Do It Like Prescott award ...

... is Labour MP Mike Amesbury. I found out about this pugilist politician from a feature on my Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet. On the home screen of this handy device, it displays the icons of the main apps I have chosen to put there. Swiping to the right brings up additional screens that I have created. Swiping to the left, however, brings up a page curated by Google in which they display various snippets culled from newspapers, websites, YouTube etc of topics which they think might interest me. They have never actually bothered to ask me what I would like to see but it is mostly relevant so I tolerate it.

 

This is a bit from tonight's offering and my attention was immediately drawn, not to the story of the fisticuffs but those dangling dots, the ellipsis, at the end of the unfinished strapline. Google does this because it wants to jam in as much content as it can onto the screen.  As a result, the most fascinating part of the story has been cropped. 

I could, I suppose, click on the picture and read the details. Sky News would undoubtedly fill in the gaps in a moment.  I could search online for additional information. But that is not the Ramblings way. We work with what we are given. Mr Amesbury punched a man in... in what? This, gentle reader, is what we shall ponder.

This is like one of those smug Radio 4 panel games where the jovial host invites his guests to finish the sentence in the most risible fashion they can concoct, with ensuing hilarity all round. But I need no guests. Here are a few of my suggestions

Mike Amesbury punched a man in ....

• A fit of jealousy
• The saloon bar of the Dog and Duck, Runcorn (his constituency, if you didn't know)
• his dressing gown [Mr Amesbury's or that of his antagonist? Ed]
• the early hours of Saturday morning,
• spite of them having just enjoyed a man-hug and a bag of crisps on the pier at Blackpool
• lieu of accepting the rent on the allotment of which Mr Amesbury is the owner
• order to prove to some doubters that he "still had it in him"
• time to the fast movement of Elgar's Cello Concerto
• a senseless act of violence to draw attention to the lack of police on the streets

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Readers! Can you do better in our "What did Mike Amesbury punch a man in?" competition. Send in your entries to the usual address enclosing a stamped but not addressed envelope²  The winners of the funniest comments will be given the chance to meet Stephen Fry!³   The Editor's decision, should he ever get around to making one, which, quite frankly, is a bit of a long shot given one thing and another, is about as final as it is likely to get unless anyone else wants to step in.

Terms and Conditions apply, although the only one that matters is our disclaimer for being responsible for anything.

Footnotes:

1. John Prescott won undying fame for his duel with an egg-throwing voter in the 2001 General Election.
2. Don't bother writing your address on it, we won't be sending it back , but any stamps that can be steamed off will go to the "Pay the Ramblings Editor a living wage "appeal.
3. We will notify you of the country, and if possible, the city, that Mr Fry is believed to be staying in and supply a weblink to a travel agency from which you may obtain tickets for travel. We are, sadly, not able to assist in the financing of any arrangements you may make, nor can we guarantee that Mr Fry will be there, or that he will consent to meeting you if you should happen to be in his immediate vicinity, nor that his bodyguard will not "do an Amesbury" on you if you do rush up saying "I won the Ramblings contest".