Whilst travelling through Vermont, USA on Friday I stopped to visit the grave of the great Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Robert Frost. As I read his epitaph, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world”, I recalled another one of his many profound quotations –
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on”.
Says it all really.
It’s been a great summer so far. We’ve actually had and are still having proper sunny summer weather. The national mood has been at an almost all-time high, we’ve had a Royal baby, a Wimbledon winner, an English winner of the US Open Golf, an emphatic Ashes cricket victory and economically, so we’re told, the dark clouds are beginning to clear.
Yes, things are going well at the moment. Such a shame that it’s all going to be tarnished by the return of the Sky TV – sorry, Premier – League football tomorrow. Overpaid prima-donnas behaving like spoilt children on and off the pitch whilst the tabloids greedily lap up and report every excess, as though we (or at least most of us) really give a damn. Oh well, at least there’s still some cricket left!
This dispute with Spain over Gibraltar seems to be getting a little out of hand, what with the Spanish threatening to charge car owners 50 euros (approx £43) each time their vehicles exit or enter Gibraltar from Spain and our Prime Minister holding late night talks with his Spanish counterpart. The trouble started when the Gibraltarian authorities started dumping materials in the Mediterranean to construct, so they said, an artificial reef. The Spanish took offence and say that it’s just a clumsy attempt to thwart their fishermen and prevent them from carrying out their God-given right to remove the last remaining fish from the world’s oceans.
Whatever the reasons for the current spat, it is only one in a long series dating back to when the British gave the Spanish a spanking in the War of the Spanish Succession and were rewarded with ownership of Gibraltar by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. So we British have been there for two hundred years and during that time the Rock (as it is affectionately known) has served us well, acting as an invaluable base to control the mouth of the Mediterranean and allowing us to safeguard our various commercial and military interests.
Times have changed however, we no longer have an empire and we certainly have no need of a naval base in Gibraltar, or anywhere else for that matter. To need a naval base you presumably need a navy and we’ve barely got one these days, so stringent have government cutbacks been since the end of the last war. So let’s do a deal.
Let’s sit down with our Spanish colleagues and try to come to an agreement. After all, we are both a part of the European Union – at least for the time being. Let’s be sympathetic and say, that after 200 years of British ownership, we recognise their hurt and we now want to try and make things better. Many British people spend large amounts of time holidaying in the Canary Islands, which of course belong to Spain. So popular are those sun-kissed islands with rain-soaked Britons that there are in fact far more of us living there than in Gibraltar. How about a swap? We give Gibraltar back to Spain and in exchange we get the Canaries! Simple.
So, the horse for beef scandal continues to grow apace as more and more questions are asked about how and where our food is sourced. Our national supermarkets, in their continuing quest for ever greater profits, have done everything they can to ensure that they dominate the market. Their avaricious buyers have long screwed suppliers into the ground and decent, hard-working farmers up and down the country have been driven to the wall because they cannot sell at the prices demanded by the supermarket giants.
Those buyers have searched home and abroad for even cheaper sources and in their eagerness and greed appear to have either ignored or failed to take into account the quality of the foods they have been buying. The news that supermarkets have been dealing with sellers even more unscrupulous than themselves and have been buying horse (and goodness knows what else) instead of beef should come as a surprise to no one.
However, they say it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good and the dreadful publicity for the big chains has evidently resulted in a huge upturn in business for local high street butchers. Good, how satisfying it is to see the underdog prosper for a change.
Turning now to the consumer, can anybody purchasing a ready-made Lasagne meal for two for £1.50 really be surprised that the meat is dodgy? What did they expect, fillet steak? You get what you pay for and, to quote another wise saying, if you pay peanuts you get monkeys…………. Oh dear, I hope I haven’t just written the next news headline. Chimp and ale pie anybody?
In all seriousness though, I have a feeling that there are quite a few more nasty surprises in store before this sorry tale dies a death.
It got me thinking. I fly a lot and much of that is long haul and, as anybody who regularly takes flights of six or more hours knows only too well, comfort is not always easy to find particularly if, like me, you fly cattle class, there I go again, sorry, economy! If you are lucky enough to have nobody or somebody of slim build sat in the seat next to you then, in the absence of screaming infants (another scourge!), the journey will probably pass pleasantly enough with no harm done.
On occasion however, I have sat next to somebody of a larger build and have spent most of the time pushed up against the wall of the cabin or the person on my other side, consuming my meal and refreshments at a 60 degree angle and, once the ordeal has ended, have emerged from the aircraft with my head resting limply against my shoulder.
Airlines need to do something about this, particularly since obesity is quite clearly a worldwide problem (at least in the West) with this country apparently leading the fatty charts. Two things stand out to me. Firstly, nobody should be denied the right to board an aircraft on account of their body shape or size but if they are clearly too big to sit on a normal seat (without crushing the poor b***er next to them) they should have to pay for two seats or alternatively a special large seat should be available at double the cost of a single seat.
Secondly, all airlines, but particularly budget airlines, are now getting very keen to whittle down the weight of hand luggage and if you are carrying a bag weighing 11kg instead of 10kg you will be compelled to check it in as hold luggage usually for an extra £30 or so. This really does irritate me, particularly when I see someone twice my size taking on their 9kg bag without a problem. Clearly, in the interests of safety, airlines have to carefully monitor the weight of the load carried by their aircraft but wouldn’t it be fairer to base their charges on the combined weight of each passenger and his or her luggage? Of course it would but there’s fat chance of it happening!
A woman driver in Cleveland was recently filmed driving her vehicle on a sidewalk (pavement) in order to get past a school bus that was offloading children. She was ordered by a judge to stand at a road junction wearing a sign stating “Only an idiot drives on the sidewalk to avoid a school bus”. Well, it’s difficult to argue with the sentiment and many would say that the punishment ( ritual humiliation in front of her local community) fits the crime.
Of course, it’s no more than a journey back in time to when petty criminals in Middle Ages England were put in stocks and had rotten fruit and vegetables (and worse!) hurled at them by their peers or, when women suspected of witchcraft were placed on ducking stools before being immersed in the stagnant waters of the village pond.
The European Court of Human Rights would have a thing or two to say about it now but wouldn’t it be great, for example, if local louts were made to stand in town centres with signs proclaiming “Only a cowardly thug would steal a handbag from an elderly lady” or “Only a drunken low-life would hurl abuse at innocent people trying to enjoy their Friday night out”.
Better still, erect some stocks outside the Houses of Parliament for errant MPs, a notice hanging from their necks stating “Only a grubby little parasite regarding himself as being above the law of the land would fraudulently claim thousands of pounds a year in expenses in the arrogant belief that his crimes would not be detected”. It won’t happen, of course, though more’s the pity!
Halloween, another celebration of consumerism, excess and bad taste far removed from the pagan festival of All Hallows Eve established, incidentally, about two thousand years before America even existed as a nation! Still, it doesn’t matter, we’re all Americans now, totally enraptured and in love with everything they put on our television and cinema screens. Penny for the Guy? You must be joking!
Common Sense 