TEED OFF

Football,
Not at all.
Rugger’s
A bugger.
Tennis
Is a menace.
Cricket’s
A sticky wicket.
Athletics
Makes you sick.
Riding a horse
Is worse.
You can’t drive far
In a racing car.

All we can do is talk
Or go for a nice long walk
Unspoiled
And call it golf.

The Wuhan Clan

The Chinese sneeze
Is such a tease.

You don’t know if it’s just a cold in the head
Maybe until you’re dead.

Panic-buying’s a necessary reaction.
At least we’re taking action

While Boris and co look panic-stricken
And several of their advisers sicken.

There is some refinement
To solitary confinement,

We’ve got whatsapp and such
To keep in touch

And from the cities to the sticks
There’s always Netflix.

Even so
There’s nowhere to go,

The Government says it’s best you
Stay at home or they’ll arrest you.

We have to eke out the days as a matter of course;
Unhappy couples contemplate divorce

And nasty germs spread and spiral
Like a Twitter tweet that’s going viral.

The Chinese sneeze
Has brought us to our knees.

Lying, cheating, money-grubbing bastards #9 Talktalk

Years ago it was decided that, to improve competition between broadband providers, customers would be able to keep their email addresses even if they switched to a new company.

It turns out you are subject to blackmail. We were originally with Tiscali, who became Talktalk. We were happy with Tiscali, increasingly unhappy with its new owners.

We switched to BT and later to Sky as getting decent broadband seems to be hard to achieve. But kept our original Tiscali email addresses rather than going through the rigmarole of changing them whenever we switched broadband provider.

Now Talktalk have held us to ransom and any saving we may have made moving to Sky is lost because we have to pay these Talktalk bastards £5 a month for the privilege of retaining our email addresses. And we can’t use Sky instead because they no longer apply email addresses (why? Who knows?).

The following exchange with what I assume is a person, not a machine, called Nobule brings you up to date:

Why are you still sending me threatening blackmail emails warning my email account will be axed if I don’t pay your ransom money when I am already paying and I have already complained once and received an assurance it won’t happen again?

Good Afternoon Nigel You are through to the Customer services and billing team , I do understand however please be advised that these emails are automated , please kindly disregard emails that do not apply to you .

Why can’t you turn off the automation? How can you justify this maltreatment?

Unfortunately I am unable to do so , Please advised if these emails are regarding the TalkTalk mail plus ?

They are although where the plus bit comes from I can’t imagine. Though you cannot be unable to turn off the automation, I do not believe you entire organisation is incapable of doing so and, if it is incapable, that is another good reason why I switched broadband provider some time ago though that decision was made because your service was so terrible.

Some time later....

I was talking to someone called Nobule about a complaint but she seems to have cut me off.

No reply.

See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51571275

 

I dreamt last night I listened to 'Today'

Top Royal Shakespeare luvvie Greg Doran claims young actors need to learn about the iambic pentameter, the basis of most Shakespeare plays, because it is now so alien to them.

I dare say he’s right to claim young people have ‘less experience with classic texts’ but this prompted BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme to ask if that meant the iambic pentameter in particular was in decline.

In reality, we all use it every day. It is the natural rhythm of our speech. To demonstrate it, here is a list of lines from popular music all in iambic pentameter (you could argue these are all old songs, and they are, but I bet more recent examples would not be hard to find).

I saw her today at the reception – The Rolling Stones

Please allow me to introduce myself – The Rolling Stones

Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields – The Rolling Stones

I met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Jackson – The Rolling Stones

I was born in a cross-fire hurricane – The Rolling Stones

If you start me up, if you start me up – The Rolling Stones

Everywhere I hear the sound of marching – The Rolling Stones

Childhood living is easy to do – The Rolling Stones

It’s only rock and roll but I like it – The Rolling Stones

Sup up your beer and collect your fags – The Jam

I’m down in the tube station at midnight – The Jam

A police car and a screaming siren – The Jam

A freezing cold flat and damp on the walls – The Jam

Struggle after struggle, year after year. – The Jam

And the public gets what the public wants – The Jam

But I want nothing that society wants. 

If I never ever see you again. – The Jam

Really don’t mind if you sit this one out – Jethro Tull

It's been a long time since I rock and rolled – Led Zeppelin

There must be some kind of way out of here – Bob Dylan

One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock rock – Bill Hailey

I bet that you look good on the dance floor – Arctic Monkeys

We’re Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – Beatles

When I find myself in times of trouble – Simon and Garfunkel

Hey Jude, don’t make it bad. Take a sad song – Beatles

Dirty old river got to keep rolling – Kinks

When you’re weary, feeling small, when tears… – Simon and Garfunkel

Hey Mr Dream-Seller where have you been – Lindisfarne

We come from the land of the ice and snow – Led Zeppelin

It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled – Led Zeppelin

Well I dreamed I saw the knights in armour – Neil Young

Of all the love I have won or have lost – Beatles

I can see clearly now the rain has gone – Johnny Nash

Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night – Fleetwood Mac

What crumbs of joy can I steal from this day? – Squeeze

Love is a stranger in an open car – Eurythmics

In the day we sweat it out on the streets – Bruce Sptingsteen

Of the runaway American dream

 Let me take you down ‘cos I’m going to – Beatles

I’m not in love, it’s just a silly phase – 10CC

Well good morning judge, how are you today? – 10CC

I was sick and tired of everything – Abba

Ridicule is nothing to be scared of – Adam Ant

I’m your top prime cut of meat, I’m your choice – Alice Cooper

We’ve come a long way since we last shook hands – Loudon Wainwright III

Set the controls for the heart of the sun – Pink Floyd

Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash – Pink Floyd

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brexit at last

Brum's barmy Bolsheviks plan a no-go zone

Bonkers Birmingham’s barmy Bolsheviks plan to ban cars from the city centre. They think we’ll all commute by tram or cycle down the Bristol Road on their toytown cycle lanes which at the moment are largely unused.

Admittedly they have been deliberately turning the entire centre of Britain’s second city into a giant car park already, with roadworks more or less everywhere.

That’s why it takes twice as long to get into the city centre as it used to only a decade ago.

It’s nothing to do with the volume of traffic or a growth in prosperity; it’s all about the measures taken to make life as awkward, time-consuming, inconvenient and even dangerous for the average motorist as possible.

This is because the city’s burgers, aided and abetted by the supposedly-Conservative elected Mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, want to reduce air pollution, greenhouse gases and all the noxious fumes which they presumably blame for their own delusions.

The best way to reduce emissions from cars is to keep them moving. The worst source of air pollution from vehicles is when they are waiting with their engines idling in long queues.

Birmingham has made pollution far worse than necessary by deliberately setting out to make driving in and out as tedious and slow as possible.

There are queues caused by traffic lights, fatuous 20 mph speed limits and bus lanes everywhere. They are closing down some of the main routes in and out of town. Broad Street is to become a tram-road. They are demolishing the Perry Barr flyover. Now they want through traffic to stick to the ring-road which is clogged and dogged with traffic lights.

They say there will be a public consultation. This is nothing but a sham. Whatever the public thinks, the council’s ‘experts’ have already decided what will happen and no amount of public opinion will change their minds.

After all, they are squandering millions on their cross-city metro system which, far from making Birmingham the ‘modern European city’ of their hype, is calculated to thwart and deny motorists any access to the centre.

Fine if you happen to live there. Fine if you usually take the bus, train, bicycle or even walk into the centre of Birmingham.

But public transport is overcrowded, unreliable and slow. The vast majority of Birmingham commuters - 62 per cent or 222,000 people - travel by car every day.

The anti-car enthusiasts want to force people out of their cars and onto trams, buses or trains. They claim these will be so dramatically improved and it will be such a wonderful new experience we won’t want to go back to our cars even if we could.

Does anybody really believe that? It is far more likely motorists will simply go elsewhere if they possibly can, especially with ‘clean-air charges’ and workplace parking taxes on the way.

It may seem desirable to force motorists to by-pass Brum. If drivers avoid it altogether it would reduce pollution and reduce traffic jams.

But it would be economically disastrous. If motorists avoid the centre if Birmingham it will mean less money is spent in shops, restaurants and theatres.

Worse still, it will force some of the city’s big employers to move out. After all, if their employees can’t, or won’t, travel into the centre any more, they will struggle to recruit and retain staff.

They will move to cities where they are welcome.

We are told everything will be fine thanks to HS2, the high-speed railway line. But a car-ban will make it almost impossible for many people from the Black Country and elsewhere to the West of Birmingham to get any benefit at all from this grossly expensive white elephant.

And, in any case, there is still a chance Boris Johnson’s Government will finally see sense and scrap the whole thing because it will never pay for itself, it will be a railway for the rich only and the place which would benefit most from its development is London.

This is the opposite of what the new Government says it wants to achieve, which is the revival of the ‘left-behind’ Midlands and the North of England.

You could argue that banning traffic from Birmingham will benefit the rest of the region. But closing down the West Midlands’ capital city is a short-sighted, panic-stricken, badly thought-out policy being imposed as an experiment by politically-correct planners.

They clearly dislike cars and the people in them. They think we should all conform to their vision of a car-free city. In their la-la land, loads of smiling people skip in and out of quiet trams onto their bicycles and the sun is always shining.

Reality is not like that. This car-crash policy will destroy Birmingham and take the rest of the West Midlands down with it.

It’s particularly disastrous given that, in 20 years’ time, we’ll all be driving in non-polluting electric cars anyway.

How many serious cities deliberately, methodically, and with malice aforethought go out of their way to destroy their own economies? Only in bankrupt Birmingham could they dream up such nonsense.

Regendering engenders panic at the disco

The RSC having refused to give me my money back when I asked for it on the grounds that the play ‘King John’ should feature a man in the title role, I forced myself to go and see it for myself.
It stars Rosie Sheehy in the title role but, having sat through the whole thing unlike five people around me, I could find no answer to the overwhelming question: What was the point casting a woman as the king?
Short, fat little Rosie has a good voice and played the part well. But it was frequently confusing. Was this a woman pretending to be a man? Or a woman pretending to be a man who wanted to be a woman? Or a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman in order to pretend to be a man?
Was s/he flirting with the King of France or was that just pretend? Was none of it ambiguous and should the audience simply take it at face value that King John was simply a man played by a woman as if it made no difference?
The confusion was not confined to the King. The Cardinal is played by a woman as well. A woman with a handbag.
To make matters worse, it is all set in the 1960s and involves a certain amount of bizarre dancing which must be hideously embarrassing to perform. I felt very sorry for the poor cast.
We must conclude the director, Eleanor Rhode, has so little faith in William Shakespeare the only way she could bring herself to stage the play at all was by ripping it up and starting again.
In fairness, most Shakespeare plays are so well-known it is the director’s interpretation, or the actors’ skill, which reveal something new. But a play as obscure and rarely-performed as ‘King John’ has no need of gimmicks and trickery. There is, or should be, pleasure and interest merely in seeing it reasonably faithfully performed.
That hope was dashed the moment Rhode decided to give the lead role to a woman.
If we pretend this has nothing at all to do with Shakespeare then the production is reasonably entertaining aside from the cringe-making dance-moves which would have been embarrassing in any setting.
Without the £15 million of taxpayers’ money the RSC gets every year, they wouldn’t be able to deliver productions like this.
And the reaction of audiences can be seen by the fact that even on a Friday night close to Christmas, there were still plenty of empty seats (the three people beside us left at the interval, two more stumbled out mid-way through the second half).
The poet John Dryden adopted the Thatcherite view of the theatre: ‘The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please must please to live.’
In the RSC’s politically-correct socialist utopia, it’s more a question of: ‘The drama’s laws the drama’s luvvies give, for we do what we please thanks to fat subsidies.’