Women's football - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

Bing Crosby’s White Christmas Symphony No. 9 in Morris Minor

20 December 2023 ~ 2023 UK Woke Hits an All Time High!

It was cold in April. It was cold in May. Come to think of it, it was cold in the UK, not to mention wet, from April to September. I was staying with a friend for some of this time, where I only had the gas heating on for two hours a day. Even so, the gas bill, together with electricity, ie one light bulb ~ my friend is a tight old sod ~ clocked up about 200 quid per month! I know, I know, it’s all ‘a certain president’s fault’.

We were in Aldi’s supermarket, the only place we dare shop nowadays without taking out a mortgage, when we heard a woman (I think ‘it’ was a woman. You never can tell these days.) behind us at the checkout complaining bitterly about the hike in food costs. Suddenly, my brother Joss, who never takes with him or buys a carrier bag at the supermarket (he’s saving his pocket, not the planet) but always transports his groceries in one of those open-ended, partially broken, sad and saggy inadequate boxes kicking around in supermarkets, on hearing the woman’s complaints, slaps the box upon his head and proceeds to vituperate: “I know! It’s all so terrible in this country. I’m going to hide in this cardboard box. Maybe they’ll go away.” He did actually say, ‘they’ll all go away’. I looked around the supermarket, and I think I know what he meant. However, we don’t know for certain what he meant, because with a cardboard box upon his head, he could have said virtually anything and could have been almost anybody. He could have rowed up the village brook in an inflatable rubber thingy with a Royal Navy escort, declared he came from the land of Cardboard Bongo and, consulting his list of rights and benefits, demanded of the police that they chauffeur him to the nearest hotel. None of your bed and breakfast, mind; anything less than 5-star treatment would degrade the red-carpet welcome.

Anyway, as the box in question had an open end, I twizzled it around on Joss’s head, an action which would have certainly turned his toupee back to front had it not been stuck down with UHU. Now the box was a TV set, so Joss decided to read the news. “Here is the news from the BBC. Whatever it is, it’s all P….’s fault!”

Before leaving the supermarket, I apologised to the people gathered at the checkout for having mentioned Mr Ps name numerous times in the space of two minutes, but, showing them the roubles in my wallet, went on to explain that we have an arrangement with him, viz every time we mention his name in Britain, he pays us a hundred roubles.

I’m not one for confessions or for making and signing statements, but I must confess and state simultaneously that I cannot remember the last time I had so much fun in a supermarket, certainly not recently and possibly not since a childhood friend and I were nabbed in one by a store detective. I can see him now, this stocky, cocky, store detective, striding up behind us, just as we were about to clear checkout, his face wreathed in triumph. He thought he had caught a couple of shoplifters, but we were nothing of the sort. So, he had to let us go, never knowing how close he had come to revealing the identity of the notorious local stock shifters.

Before adopting a moral stance, you must make allowance for the fact that in those days, before the advent of Play Station and when enslavement to the smartphone was just a twinkle in Bill Gates’ eyes, we had, as the expression goes, to make our own entertainment, and how we used to do this in the supermarket was to amble around from shelf to shelf surreptitiously shifting things from one place to another. It was, indeed, a rewarding sight to behold jars of Marmite amongst the saucepans and a tin of baked beans or two sitting next to the Brillo pads. Just think what fun could be had today, now supermarkets sell condoms. The possibilities are endless (I’m sure there’s a Freudian reference here?).

But don’t you talk about supermarkets! Shocked, I was, and I said so to Mavis. Didn’t I Mavis? Didn’t I say I was shocked! And it is shocking, not to mention inexcusable (But, of course, it’s all that ‘certain president’s’ fault!) — Britain’s escalation in food prices: Weetabix £4 a packet! A bottle of brown sauce £3.30! A packet of crisps £1.50 … Well, you know for certain you’re a hopeless old fart when you carry on like this. But what about the price of beer! If I carry on like this, I’ll wear out my exclamation key! There, did you see that! There it goes again!

2023 UK Woke Hits an All Time High!

My brother Joss won’t drink in certain pubs and in certain pubs he can’t because he’s barred. He won’t drink in pubs where he knows that the beer is priced at over a fiver a pint and in pubs where he doesn’t know and is taken unawares, he always complains. He also complains about the quality of the beer, ergo poor quality, and always rather loudly.

“It’s alright,” I said in a resigned voice, when the offended look on the barmaid’s face caught my eye and her eye mine (Were we wearing eye patches?), “I’m used to being ashamed of him”.

Summer in the UK

Since summer in the UK was such an abysmal washout, it enabled me to get down to some serious … beer drinking? That too, but I was going to say stuff shifting. In order to accomplish this gargantuan feat, I had to resort to eBay. I hadn’t used the eBay platform for quite some time, but I soon got back into the swing of things, once I had complained my way through their two-step verification system.

Two-step verification, indeed! I told that globalist, that pseudo-leftist Gaters. “Gaters,” I said, I call him that, you know, “Gaters, what’s it all about then, ay, this two-step verification? If you ask me, it’s more globalist quick step than two step: the swiftness of the feet deceives the arse you’re kicking and whilst we are feeling the pain, you’ve snatched our mobile phone numbers and locked your global trackers onto our locations. It’s all grist to the surveillance mill, the keeping tabs on us all, the inverted 1984, where it’s not the fascists we have to watch out for, at least not in the traditional sense, but the fascistic sanctimonious, pseudo-liberal lefties led by the usual suspects (those well-known US rich families (really my boy, my boy) and their friends in the Davos set).

Of course, I could have gone on saying this until the proverbial sheep came home (‘Merrr, I’ve had my jab!’), but as you, me and the gateposts know, the gateposts we have in parliament, it would not have made a ha’peth, or rather billions of quid’s worth, of difference, because already the globalist mob is no doubt plotting their next Plandemic and rubbing their hands in anticipation of the monstrous profits to come. However, I would have said something to that effect had I not been deplatformed first, labelled a far-right extremist, been banned from tweeting on Twatter and suffered the near misfortune of having my bank account nobbled, as they tried to do with Nigel Farage. Now that wasn’t two-step verification, it was a step in the wrong direction! The goons who pulled that stunt were soon up on their feet doing the shithouse shuffle, as good old Nigel proved again, he is just too strong and too astute for the pseudo-libs to take on.

WOKE WATCH UK!

You know, being a conspiracy theorist and a far-right extremist is not as easy as might be imagined. It would be a lot less difficult to go with the flow, go down to Dover harbour with a bog roll in my hand and beg the third world and its wife (don’t want to be labelled sexist), please can I wipe your arses before the taxpayer-funded police chauffeur you to your waiting hotels and shower you with benefits. What a terribly ‘wacist’ thing to say!

I thought it a bit racist, although not entirely unapplicable, when I heard a bloke down Wetherspoons say … I think he was bloke? (Once you could tell a bloke from a gal by the tattoos that he was sporting, but now that women have taken to tats and to shrapnel shoved in their lips and snouts, it’s difficult to determine who has and who hasn’t the meat and two veg. (By the way, how’s your memory? Do you remember Ena Shrapnel? Give me the hairnet any day (Corrr!) rather than tats and bolts.) Anyway, getting back to the point, which is? Well, I heard this manly man, who may or may not have been a man, say: “Turn that telly off! If I wanted to watch the coonmercials, I would have stayed at home!”

Ah! there goes the theme tune to Love Thy Neighbour.

Britain’s social engineering programme has advanced quite spectacularly over the past five years. The Tories have excelled themselves. They have stolen a march on the Liebour party, beating them at their own game, and flushed with their success are leading with the initiative in sexual engineering. The adverts are a case in point. The next time you go to the pub, presuming that you still go to the pub with beer the price it is, see how many men you can spot who look as though together they have recently won the lottery.

Where’s Frankie Howard and Larry Grayson when you need them most? Now it’s no longer a Catholic sin, let’s hope that they are having fun bumming around in heaven.

They’ve won the lottery!!

My particular favourite sexual engineering advert is the one where the les goes into the shop, says something to the girl behind the counter, the girl behind the counter replies, and the les, who misunderstands her, says, “I’m sorry, I already have a girlfriend!” And the nice black man behind her, who doesn’t look like a mugger at all and besides is a British citizen, titters away as though he knows that the advert he will star in next will see him relishing Sunday lunch around the family’s middle-class dining table.

And what is it about British TV, I hear you ask? If Billy Cotton was still around he would not be shouting ‘Wakey! Wakey’ so much as ‘Wokey! Wokey!’

I threw away my telly many years ago, long before British broadcasting sank beneath the surface of degradation. Did you Mike? You do surprise me. And it wasn’t because of the BBC licence fee, as so much joy can be had from receiving their threatening letters. But this summer, probably because it was so inhospitable that we spent more time inside, the telly at somebody else’s house could not always be avoided. I saw, for example, a segment or two (and that was quite enough) of the Ukraine Vision Song Contest, some of The King’s Coronation on the Royalty Abolitionist Channel and couldn’t really miss the seeming perpetuality of big butch pony-tailed ladies charging around the football pitch, who seem to have no qualms at all about muscling in on what little remains of Britain’s emasculated working-class males’ last bastion of blokeyness.

I also allowed myself the wonder of watching the news on the odd occasion, the wonder being whatever happened to the impartiality ethic? Time was when the news anchor (now re-spelt with a capital ‘W’) would simply read the news. Now they no longer report, they lead, invent and manipulate and for nebulous liberal ends. However, every unpaid licence fee has a silver lining, which is that as long as you know it’s not really the news, it can be entertaining.

For example, have you heard the one about the fire service chap who allegedly suffered a mental breakdown. He was interviewed in his home, looking all wan and lachrymose, by a young ~ I think he was male ~ reporter, who really did overdo it slightly on the ‘I’ve got to look so serious’ level. Perhaps he works for the BBC, where woke is a serious business.

Every now and again, between solemn interludes of conversation and OTT serious looks, the camera would pan, zoom in and focus on a broken mirror on the sitting-room wall, which looked, by my experience, as if someone had put their fist through it. Gritty symbolic stuff, ay! But try to remember that this is the ‘news’, or rather the news is what it professes to be, not a dramatised documentary.

Given the nature of the job, it is common knowledge that firemen suffer breakdowns (note the traditional use of the proper word ‘firemen’). Heaven knows how these men contend with their lot. In the course of duty, they are subject to unthinkable scenes of horror and human tragedy. Hardly surprising, therefore, that even the strongest men crack (Now, now, it’s not what you’re thinking!). But it was not danger or tragedy, tragedy in the accepted sense, or so we were asked to believe, that had caused this gentleman’s breakdown. According to the ‘news’, which was heavily biased in tone and format, his illness had been brought about by his having been ignored when repeatedly calling out the fire service for its alleged culture of systemic sexism.

2023 UK Woke Hits an All Time High!

WTF?! Call me old-fashioned (You Old Fart, you!), but my long-held belief has been that first, centre and foremost, the duty of the fire service is to put out fires and save lives. I certainly don’t recall anything in my primary school books, Janet and John (now Abdul and Lola), about sexist firemen running amuck with their choppers in their hands. I do remember the Village People sliding down a greasy pole not looking like chaps and in nothing but chaps, but that was the 1970s, when men were men and poofs were poofs, and never the twain would meet (so we were led to believe). But a fire service that lets off damp squibs for the sake of claiming compensation, why you’ll be asking me next to believe that public money is actually spent on funding wokist causes, for example something as unimaginably silly as black and pink police associations! It’s Monty Python’s UK Circus!

Ho!Ho!Ho! Hark! Which Santa is that who is coming down the chimney. I hope he’s wearing a condom. Sorry about that, and everything … around me … all over the UK … but as Frank Zappa once famously said, “I can outrage anybody, if they want to be outraged.”

Don’t try this at home, or if you live in Brighton!

More recently, I outraged myself ~ and bear in mind, please, that ‘outraged myself’ is not the same as ‘outed myself’. For years I have been at the forefront of the Smartphone Resistance League, so successfully I might add that my avoidance of the smartphone earnt me this saintly sobriquet: ‘The last man on Earth to own a mobile phone’.

Thus, it was with great sorrow and a distinctly uneasy sense that I was not only letting myself down but anti-technocrats everywhere, when I allowed myself to be dragged, proverbially kicking and screaming, along to the mobile phone shop, where, with a heaviness in my heart beyond the expression of indescribable, I signed myself away to that … to that, terrible, terrible mobile thing!

“Yet something else,” I grumbled, “to cart around in your pocket.” It will be difficult fitting it in [“It’s so big you’ve got to grin to get it in!” ~ do you remember the Wagon Wheels advert?], with all the street survival kit you need in Britain today ~ CS gas cannister, stun gun, beam-me-out-of-the-21^st-century flip-top radio, mugger’s alley cloak of invisibility etc etc. Thank heavens my stab- and bullet-proof vest has pockets!

“This ‘aint very Christmasy is it?! Let’s see what’s on the other channel.”

A party-political broadcast on behalf of you can put your cross where you like, but it won’t stop mongrelisation.

Wherever you go in life, even in somebody else’s, there’s always a heckler. But what the heck, it might only be a linguistic device! Anyway, whilst you and your family are sitting around a blazing Christmas fire, with coal you’ve stolen from the next-door neighbours, wearing party hats, wondering why, and cracking your nuts. I shall be pulling my own cracker and … That’s odd? What is? Everything. I thought I just heard someone sing, “I wish it could be Christmas every day.” Those hats! Those nuts! Pulling your own cracker! For eternity! No fear. Ha! Ha! I can see the Christmas TV adverts now: More black than white and oh so extremely gay.

Right, bugger all that, I’m off to make a cup of tea. Ginger, the cat, is squinting at me, but only with his right eye. I think he wants a monachal for Christmas. This is something that’s easily fixed. It’s what Bing Crosby is dreaming of that isn’t.