Britain Saved

The Coalition has announced an exciting new initiative to save Britain from its £4Trillion debt inherited from the discredited and rightfully maligned former Labour Junta.

Speaking from No 10, Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg jointly announced.
"As is well known the world has benefitted for centuries from one of Britains greatest exports, the English Language and it is only fair and reasonable that the rest of the world now repays its debt.
From 2014 use of the English Language will be leased to overseas Nations and Entities on a sliding scale based on the length of use, size of population and proportion of overseas populations using our language.
Discounts will be offered to those who offer prompt payment while punitive compliance fines will be imposed on those Nations and Entities who attempt to avoid payment or are deemed to have corrupted our English Language in clear breach of implied contract.

Income from this remarkable project will initially be ring-fenced for the renewal of the Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile programme which can then be used to encourage recalcitrant English speaking Nations and Entities to pay their dues so the whole thing will be entirely self-financing, in the long run.

Obviously our close frinds in Australia, Canada amd New Zealand will be only too keen to contribute both in gratitude and unwillingmess to commit themselves to an immediate conversion to Mandarin Chinese though we might expect trouble from the Americans on the basis that they are pretty well Spanish bilingual by now and so might just as well go the whole way. States like France and Spain which cling to the vestiges of their native language can expect increasing charges over the years as Frenglish and Spanglish increasingly take hold

Those international bodies of which Britain is a member, UN, WHO, EU &etc might expect a free ride but Britain expect being let off subs.
As a gesture of goodwill the administration of The Commonwealth will be exempt; thank you, any questions?"

Big Society

I spent today travelling to a family reunion to celebrate my recently deceased mum. We gathered at a playing field in the small village where she and her brothers grew up. That playing field was established by their generation in the years before WW2 alongside at least 470 others throughout Britain known as the 'King George V* Fields'.



It forms the heart of the village, together with the remaining pub, railway halt and Post Office; the adjacent Victorian primary school uses it as its sports field; the village football team has its changing room/pavillion in a corner and the village hall is in the car park. It is used to hold all manner of local festivities from the Queens Jubilee to birthday parties and weddings; no doubt several generations of young lovers have benefited from the now mature oak trees that surround it.
Point being that this important local feature was not created by "The Council" but by the locals, my mum and uncles who raised the cash to buy a farmers field for the purpose, with a bit of State aid by way of the short lived "King George's Fields Foundation", half a million quid nationwide. It is now 'owned' by the village, in the trusteeship of the Parish Council, not the Local Authority who would, no doubt, love to flog it off for commuter housing.

I think DaveNick might have a point with their "Big Society".

The apparatus in the playpark would give the Righteous a fit btw, proper old fashioned swings, seesaw, big slide and cast-iron rocking horse!

* For American readers 'V' = Fifth.

Update, entirely unrelated. H/T http://manwiddicombe.blogspot.com/2010/04/smoking-signs.html

VHS

How to survive a week with no Telly and no Computer; no blogger, no proper news, no games, no internet, no movies, documentaries, drama or comedy.

Got out my old TV/VHS combo that used to be in the kitchen, hooked it up to the widescreen TV (used as a monitor only) with a scart lead.




Good result, I was quite happy spending my spare time with many top movies (in their day) and some recorded documentaries (Simon Sharmas Britain, Melvyn Bragg on the English language, full series) from my brief daliance with Sky TV some few years back. I could have 'survived' probably another two to three weeks.
The most annoying part was reading bollox in the papers and not having access to contrariness.
Thanks to those who offered advice below, good to be back.

hard drive woes, from an internet cafe.

Immediatly after posting the previous post my comp crashed.
I rebooted but was then unable to log in on the windows start up screen.

Re-booting again brought up the BIOS screen with options to re-start in safe mode...( 3 other options) or 'restart windows normally'. All of which I am familiar with from problems over the years. Could not manipulate the curser so it chose the latter, re-startng normally after a 28 second countdown, started rebooting process until it recrashed halfway through (blue screen with scary message) and continued into a recuring cycle of the same.

Thought about it for a while and decide to uninstall and reinstall windows. ie reformat the drive and lose all data but hey ho. Bastard would not even let me do that (done it twice before with no problems)

Friday I took it to a small local computer company to see if they could reinstall windows for me. On Saturday they told me that "Your hard drive is fucked mate".
Fine, what do I need to do? Buy another one £45 (+£40 labour incl. inspection). but its Sat so it won't arrive till Tues, might be ready Weds.
Not complaining, I've had my monies worth with the old drive but it wasn't experiencing ANY problems until visiting that Govt website (that kept crashing, just a coincidence? Yeah, right.

Amend the smoking ban

http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/restoring-civil-liberties/amend-the-health-act-2006

http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/restoring-civil-liberties/an-amendment-to-the-smoking-ban

http://yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk/repealing-unnecessary-laws/cut-all-public-funding-to-action-on-smoking-and-health-ash