zaph8000.com

It’s fairly easy to garden normally, you wander outside & see what needs doing then you either do it or else find a reason why you don’t have to do it right now. You plant stuff, you water it, get rid of the weeds & then it either grows or it doesn’t, it’s not rocket science & is a pleasant way to pass a nice afternoon, however when faced with a blank sheet so to speak things are different. It’s okay at first, or at least it is if you live on my estate since whilst the house is empty all the neighbouring houses seize the chance to dump all their awkward rubbish into the garden so that by the time a new tenant shows up it resembles a landfill site. Once the clearing of mattresses, abandoned wheelie bins & assorted household appliances has been completed though you’re left with a kind of crappy gap between a fence & a hedge & not a clue as to what to do with it. You immediately cut the grass but whilst in a tended garden this immediately lifts the scene positively in a neglected scrap of waste ground all you really achieve is flatter, although it’s something to be able to strim away in the certain knowledge that no damage will be done to any plant worth keeping. (continue reading…)

There are a few things that get a bad press time & time again but drinking is by & far the winner, there’s hardly anyone in the newspaper or magazine business that wants to do anything except explore the dark side of drink. Okay so it causes untold misery to millions & is responsible for countless accidents & early deaths but aside from that is it really all that bad? The statistics seem to be painting a fairly grim picture of cause & effect & there does appear to be some circumstantial link between consuming large volumes of alcohol & bad things happening but is drink to blame? Even if it is are we only examining the evidence from one side? Hasn’t our addiction for intoxicating beverages brought us anything worthwhile at all or have we been fooling ourselves all along? Could drinking or not drinking make a difference to our lives? Well, if you’re about to fly a plane or perform an operation then nipping out for a few pints is probably not a great idea, then again if you’re a referee you might as well, it might help a bit & you’d resent the booing less. (continue reading…)

Remember your teenage years? The hormones, the first tentative forays into the mysterious world of girls that you still haven’t really got the hang of? The knowledge that it didn’t matter what you wanted to do or whenever you wanted to do it there was no way of doing it? & the discovery that any attempt to do anything wondrously grown-up whether it was drink or sex related came with its’ own embarrassment potential? Of course you do, we all do as we now laugh & wince our way across the adult landscape that’s now somewhat less wondrous but at least free to be explored, well I bring news, if you’ve had kids then your teenage years are coming back. This is not to say that they’re coming back in a good way, just that they’re coming back & with a special twist in the tail to boot, you may think you suffered enough at the hands of your parents to be entitled to occupy their exalted position in your own home bit it’s not going to happen. We aren’t the same as our parents & far more to the point the teens today aren’t anything like the teens we were, we didn’t have expectations without limits & although we were just as selfish & lazy we never expected anyone to approve of it, you might have had it bad growing up but it’s worse when they do. (continue reading…)

So the pension age is set to rise? It’s hardly a shock & will be repeated across Europe over the coming years, it mostly makes sense as well, a lot of people are finding it hard to take that a birthday ends their employment. It may be a good way for businesses to do away with less productive staff & bear no guilt for it but it ought to be up to employees as well as employers so long as they can still do the job. This is where it gets tricky though, just as all of us have varying degrees of fitness at age 20 by the time a few decades have passed the degrees of fitness have warped somewhat. This makes sticking an absolute age limit a trifle dodgy, to the unfortunate man of 50 it’s a lifetime away yet to the spry 70 year old it’s a lifetime wasted, inflexibility will always bring casualties. How many of us know of people who’ve looked fit as fiddles at their retirement do yet are dead a short while after? There are those who live to be active & valued & for those folks an unending succession of empty days can be a nightmare that bingo cannot wake them from. Yes there are things for the retired to do but these things do seem to become an elaborate way of whiling away the days until the bloke with the grin shows up, coffee mornings may be good for the soul but beer nights are always better. (continue reading…)

I read recently that a few of the big players of the grocery world are claiming to be all for a regulated unit price for alcohol & an end to the all out price war that leaves them giving it away. Considering that the World Cup was coming up along with the normal UK delusions about how Summer could turn out this was a worry but it appears to be an unfounded one. So far they all seem to be pulling the usual trick of encouraging us all to buy more for less & vying with each other to have the cheapest offers. The range would also appear to be wider this year although that could just be my not noticing before that cider has always been included. It’s coming to something though when you fancy a four pack but end up buying three crates because it’s just so worth it, that’s not a complaint by the way, I’m all for beer being on sale. It’s just that if the supermarkets are really in favour of charging more then it has to be legislation they’re waiting for since whoever goes it alone is going to have the emptiest shop in Britain. (continue reading…)

It may seem an odd time to bring this up what with the continuing lack of progress on climate change & BP trying yet again to plug up the hole they so patiently drilled in the sea floor but there you go. All the encouragement to be part of nature & the whole circle of life thing is quite sweet but mostly meaningless in the general scheme of our lives. Even after years of arguments & rabid tales of ecological doom there’s hardly anybody who’s really prepared to alter their lives to the grim prospect of a carbon neutral future. There are of course many reasons for this, firstly we all see little point in living in an age of technological miracles if we’re then supposed to deny ourselves the advantages of these miracles. Secondly there’s nothing all that shiny & attractive about sprouts & this counts a great deal more than the Green brigade are giving allowance for, there’s a reason that Apple makes a profit. I’m not saying that it can’t be done, just that it can’t be done in the ways so far being suggested, to succeed it would have to be cool & Green may be many things but cool isn’t & never will be one of them. (continue reading…)

Is the UK still a class driven society or have we loosened up enough that it no longer bothers us? Have the lines blurred or at least moved about a bit or are we all still set in our rigid boxes too scared to wander freely all the highways & byways of life? Looking at the election results & the government in general it has to be said that a top school or university doesn’t do much harm, there’s the few who’ve made it through the ranks I suppose but all in all it’s a pretty well to do set-up they’ve got there. This is a bit disappointing given all the work done on equality over the last few decades, we should all feel that we’re just as good as anyone else & in the main we do, the difference is seemingly strange though, we appear to regard the class system as somehow traditional. Maybe it’s us, maybe we just don’t get it that we don’t have to kowtow to anybody or perhaps we secretly believe that there’s something in it for us somehow & by accepting our place in society we are somehow putting one over the toffs? If this is true then it’s bloody stupid & we ought to be a little shameful over the whole subject, I don’t believe that this is the case but I do believe that the truth is just as dumb. (continue reading…)

Aside from a strange Puritan element that continues to run throughout the UK & is apparently obsessed about whether anyone who has had sex has had a better time than we have & whether it was allowed sex or immoral sex the only other topic with staying power is immigration. It’s going to be an even bigger topic as we hit the election proper as no-one in any government can draft legislation that fits with the odd ideas we seem to have about sex, immigration however is another story. No-one even wants to bring up the subject properly or discuss it with any vigour unless we’re talking about the ranting fools who believe that immigration causes cancer, it only came up in the leadership debates because it really had to since the harder times get the more society seeks a scapegoat. If all the immigrants were bankers I’d be standing with them but I don’t actually believe that a group of plumbers, cleaners & factory workers ruined the economy, it was more that our economy wasn’t, in a very particular sense, real. It may be that deporting all the immigrants in the UK will free up services & allow more social housing to become vacant & this will be great news since we’ll need all of them to repatriate all our emigrants that get sent home in retaliation. (continue reading…)

Nick Clegg, the new man of the people? It’s taking some getting used to, I know he did okay in a debate but really? I mean, there’s a reason we put up with the other lame parties, the Lib-Dems are there for a bit of light relief but we don’t expect to actually listen to them. I know that a change is as good as a rest but this would be a truly huge change, the Liberals haven’t been a major force for decades mainly because they’re so keen to not offend anyone that their policies are ridiculous. Admittedly a lot of the evidence for such a surge is coming from the Internet but it is getting to be slightly more reliable these days, the polls are understandable but even at full peak it’s not enough to say that the Lib-Dems are about to become a credible force. In any case after being ignored by the main parties as they savaged each other they’ve now stuck their heads above the parapet & things are different now. (continue reading…)

It may be that the snow  brought out the shyer inhabitants of the woodlands or maybe it just makes them easier to spot & they were there all the time, whichever it is there does seem to be a lot more life around here these days, the trend is continuing as Spring takes hold but sadly the evidence, whilst plentiful is reliant on deceased individuals. Squirrels are a happy exception to this rule & there seems to be more of them about than ever, rabbits seem to be in good numbers also although unlike the squirrels they don’t appear to have grasped road sense with any degree of success as yet. It is perhaps inevitable that as humanity spreads out & takes up almost all the available room that our choice is to either get used to living in close proximity to nature or else that there will be much less nature. We should possibly be slightly grateful that there’s any nature left to live close to but this is another story, living in an urban setting means that the balance between us & the wildlife is generally tipped generously in our favour but with perks to be had for those animals that have learnt to adapt. This system is undergoing some adjustments at present oddly due to our becoming more environmentally friendly, the generations of foxes that have grown used to the bounty of our bins may have to learn new tricks as we throw less away & do it more securely, they may yet have to resort to KFC leavings. (continue reading…)