Salvation

Fortuitous happenstance: I tidy and what should turn up but the letter from the council inducting me into the club of Green Waste Collection subscribers.

I admitted some time ago to having lost track of this letter and being unable to remember when exactly we shall switch from weekly to fortnightly collection. Happily I've got the small print of the terms and conditions to read at my leisure and lose once again: against the chance of that latter eventuality I posting herein the key terms and conditions:

Garden waste bins will be collected weekly from the first week in April to the last week in November and during March and fortnightly during December, January and February.

I've read that sentence and I cannot construct any valid interpretation other than that the council will run a weekly collection service from the start of March to the end of November and then a fortnightly service across the winter months of December, January and February.

But why, oh why couldn't they just say so? This document by the way, has been 'updated' so some one has had a chance to re-write the bits that required an overhaul.

Not everything bad is bad

The entire page three is given over to the paper's latest attempt to whip Englishmen up into that much sought after lather of moral indignation and outrage.

Usually dastardly Johnny Foreigner (you can tell him readily enough, he 'talks foreign') looms large ... and it is frequently the case that Jonny Foreigner is a Frog or a Hun, a fat Belgian with a preposterous moustache, a Dutch Pot-Fiend or some form of greasy Mediterranean layabout. If I've left any one's pet national stereotype out, I apologise.

Any ho, Johnny Foreigner cannot be entirely relied upon and so the debate requires a fall back position: I give you the Health and Safety Inspector.

Christmas hasn't yet been cancelled (this isn't entirely a good news story) but those dreadful 'illuminations' are being put to the sword across the country. A small if inadvertent victory for good taste. Don't kid your self that common sense was sacrificed in the heat of battle - she died long ago.

Another thing that annoys me, today

The house two doors away was bought by a young woman on the make under a buy-to-lease type arrangement which she probably expected to put her securely on the path to financial security.

By my reckoning the place has been let for no more than six months of the three years she's owned the place and the reason is simple. She bought a dump that had undergone a very superficial smartening up. Beneath the coat of cheap paint there's mould just busting to come through; all because the leaking roof was patched up rather than properly repaired. That's just one reason of many for potential occupants running a mile.

And she can't sell the place without doing major repairs or accepting a pittance for a place in need of those repairs.

She's there occasionally to air the place out, which we now know is forewarning of an visit by a prospective tenant.

This week, on Tuesday as I went to work I saw a bit of a plastic supermarket carrier bag sticking out of the top of my garden waste bin (subsidised, but partly funded by me and provided by the district council on the strict understanding that garden waste and garden waste only will go into it on pain of having the bloody thing taken away without a refund of any proportion the annual rent I've paid in advance).

Needless to say I took the damned thing out. Domestic rubbish of the junk mail and cereal box variety. Happily the junk mail had a house number (incidentally does this dumb bitch known nowt about identity theft?). I left it in the domestic rubbish collection point and there it has sat.

And this morning when I returned from the school run the door of the house in question was open so I knocked. A frightfully, frightfully skinny bint bounded the stairs under the mistaken impression I wanted to make friends.

When I explained in words of very few syllables that she mustn't put her domestic rubbish into MY garden waste bin she came over all 'gosh, frightfully sorry!" and then ruined the whole effect by blaming her 'partner' who she gave me to understand is a bloke and therefore not to be relied upon to do the right thing with anything at all.

What annoyed me? Well this silly cow and I should have nothing in common, should we, but as the last sentence indicates - we do. How bloody annoying is that?

What is wrong with these people

The chief honcho at the Returning Wallah's Federation has warned that a large number of Brits might find they've inadvertently been disenfranchised if the PM should call an early election for this autumn.

The electoral rolls are not maintained on an, er, um rolling basis. The local Return Wallah sends or oversees or directs the sending out to all addresses of a registration card annually. Householders are required to return the card identifying eligible voters resident at the address.

Failure to comply is a heinous offence punishable by slow death involving suspension by the thumbs, racking, attaching of electrodes to delicate parts etc, etc. This is useful as it provides a civilian occupation for defrocked soldiers returning to civilian life.

And if that fails then the Returning Wallah will write to the delinquent householder again ... and again and again and again... Eventually one of two things happens : either the householder relents and replies or the householder drowns under this tidal wave of little white cards that identify wholly accurately everyone living under the roof who is eligible to vote as already entered on the roll, with no omissions and no erroneous extraneous additions.

The capacity of the British to over-engineer anything is both bewildering and fascinating. How simple it all could be. You turn 18, you register to vote, you remain registered to vote for the rest of your life.

Financial services organisations rely heavily if not wholly on the electoral rolls for the purpose of establishing identity, and the British population depend on such organisations for their limitless consumer credit. So it seems to me that it is now absolutely in the interests of The Great Unwashed to maintain their voting registration. It follows that there is no longer any need for the annual survey of households for the purpose of updating the voting registers. Furthermore any new law-based compulsion must be superfluous when access to that next store card is already under threat.

The kind of people who don't crave store cards tend to be the sort of people who take the trouble to interest themselves in and inform themselves about matters of public policy and therefore would take the trouble to register (and vote) anyway.

And guess what? That million and a half disenfranchised voters (who probably won't vote anyway) would vanish if it simply became a matter of 'keeping yourself registered'.

Ah, but it might put a few over paid local government functionaries with the poncy job title of Electoral Wallah out of a job. Oh dear. And it was such a good idea.

No Bull

In the furore over alcohol and is deleterious social and health effects, on nicotine and its impact on health and the NHS budget the debate has from time to time shifted to the unfairness of circumscribing access of fundamentally law abiding British subjects to these substances when neither of these is the most ubiquitous, nefarious, subtly addictive product on the shelves of British supermarkets.

Those who are more concerned for consistency than traditional values of freedom of choice will be delighted therefore to learn that the first tentative steps towards a level playing field are being taken; sale of a certain product containing caffeine is now to be controlled. The number of cans of this drink that can be purchased at one time will be limited and restricted to those aged 16 or more. This isn't a development in law but in the policy of one retailer. Where one goes others will follow.

Be prepared to produce your driving licence (or National Identity Card) before you purchase that skinny latte.

Nanny knows what?

If you go down to the pool today, your sure of a big surprise
If you go down to the pool today, you'd better bring your own inflatable life preservers

The requirement to train staff in proper inflation/deflation technique and puncture monitoring, together with the danger of germ transfer has resulted in a number of British leisure centres deeming the cost and risk of providing rings and armbands too great.

Much better to have the little dears drown.