Didn't she realise...

Whenever Scrobs does a little retail therapy in Waitrose, which is a rather pleasant small grocer nearby, there is an added benefit attached to the commercial exchange of money for comestibles - a free newspaper.

Now, we gave up reading the Daily Telegraph years ago, as it cost more than the output was worth, and we rather like trees to be alive and waving their branches, rather than being squashed and sent to people with some sort of writing on them as pulp, so we cancelled that and spend the money on important things like a leg of lamb, or some nice bread.

But the deal in Waitrose is that if you spend more than ten splonders, you get a free paper, and so I get one for all to see at home. I hardly ever read it, but yesterday, while the fragrant Senora O'Blene was fussing about in the kitchen, waiting for several things to place on the plates, I skimmed the pages - tincture at hand! (You are a gross sexist brute, Scrobs, and deserve to have your nuts taken off with a blunt sickle)...

After near terminal boredom at the woke tittle-tattle about two ex-royals now living in a 75million pound drum in Los Angeles, and some idiot kneeling down for some stupid reason, I came across a full spread of saddening stories about saddish people going on sad holidays in a rather sad place - Andalusia...

I've only ever been there once; on business, and found it just about OK, but - 'sad'.

So here was this large girl, shrieking about very little on 'holiday', and suddenly realising that she would have to go into quarantine for two weeks when she returned. This has been advertised millions of times, even by the awful BBC, which gets its news from the third form of a small junior school in The Appalachian Mountains, where they prepare stuff for the Democrat Party.

Now, is it beyond the mentality of the stupidest person in the universe to just maybe consider that there may be consequences to dashing off for a couple of weeks of sangria, shags and sin, in a place where she might just get an awful disease after 'dancing' the night away with some oik from a sink estate somewhere unholy?

But the headline was 'Who's going to pay my £2,000 mortgage now'!

I despair, I really do.

Penalty shoot-out...

As anyone here knows, I don't follow football, preferring rugby, but this little clip is just so good, it needs an airing here...

He's a trier, isn't he...

PLM - Pensioners Lives Matter...

In another place, not far from here, on Biased BBC, certain stalwarts of Great British standing, and supporters of standards long-forgotten by virtue of a dire, increasingly irrelevant BBC, which is undermining all the edicts and values which were fought for by our parents and grandparents (and also in my case, a Bantam Soldier in WW1 as well), have decided enough is enough!

Pensioners Lives Matter, and the proposed taxing of such people, who have paid the 'licence fee' (tax) for all these years, will put even more of a strain on budgets from pensions - again, paid for and 'costed' by various - often useless governments, and it has to stop NOW!

Over the years, (nearly seventy-three golden ones, especially nearly forty-eight of those with the fragrant Senora O'Blene in my case), there have been various Pensioners Revolts, and as MPs eventually understand the plight of the great and good like us, who have funded the profligate lifestyle in Westminster for so long, and these MPs agree that these good people really need some financial respite from propaganda from such a failing broadcasting crowd -funded on pain of jail, it is a good time to start hammering a few nails in the coffin of a once great organisation, and send it second-class post to whatever subscription bunch will want to bother to pay for it.

Every three months, Senora O'Blene and I pay the TV tax - around £40.00, at about half a minute past midnight on the first of the month. They make sure the dosh gets into their grubby hands, very quickly, even before our pensions and poll tax is paid, and then they can spend it just as they like, with toothless Ofcom servants farting around in the background, and flunkies kow-towing to every 'politician', blue or red, (or even orange, if there are any), and the result isn't good.

Lots of people are leaving the BBC in droves, we haven't watched a single thing on the box since the Covid break-out, and we wanted to know more, rather than read the dead-tree press, but all they did was edit 'Gotcha' questions, and sneer at whatever realities Boris was facing. Since then, Senora O'Blene has read more books than in The British Library, and I have watched DVDs (now on Minder - sorry BBC, but that was when it was half-decent)...

PLM!

You know it makes sense!

Ears being lowered at 12.00 noon...

Today's the day!

Seventeen and a half weeks ago was my last trip to get a haircut, so, even after a couple of self-administered trims, I'll be so glad to be able to get back to some sort of normality...

I spent a happy half-hour trimming Senora O'Blene's flowing locks a few weeks ago, and funnily enough, she was so delighted, that she has forgone her appointment at the same hairdressers for the time being!

I also learned all about her garden, her family, what she was having for supper and where she went for her holidays!

Jimmy's Old Kentucky aire...

Last year, in a warehouse on The Kentucky River, the Jim Beam distillery lost about 45,000 barrels of young whiskey in a fire!

A standard US barrel contains approximately 175 bottles, which retail at around $18 each, so a hefty total of around $145m went up in rather pleasant smoke! The decision was made to allow the fire to burn itself out naturally, and not use hoses or dampening chemicals, which would eventually cause a run-off into the nearby water courses, and damage wildlife; which was nice!

Mr Drew Chandler, a Chief Firefighter explained that it was probably a lightning strike which started the damage, but he added that 'It was the best-smelling fire he'd ever been at', which is not a bad way to take a tincture I suppose...

Bit of truth...

I know this has been doing the rounds, but a local chum said he hadn't seen it, so here it is in full view for the world to see...

The Chancellor of Oxford University, was on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 yesterday on the removal of statues of people linked to slavery.   Interesting statements. The Daily Telegraph headline yesterday was "Oxford will not rewrite history". 

Patten commented "“Education is not indoctrination. Our history is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views and prejudice" 

Rhodes must fall ?

Dear students,

Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and well being of many generations of Oxford students – a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more deserving than you.

This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. 'Autres temps, autres moeurs' ! If you don’t understand what this means – and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case – then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I at Oxford?” 

Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western civilisation, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment and beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir Christopher Wren, William Penn, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Samuel Johnson, Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal Newman. We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and study here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma mater – their dear mother – and they respect and revere her accordingly. 

And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure we’ll concede you the short-lived Southern African civilisation of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilisation has been as near as damn it to zilch. 

You’ll probably say that’s “racist”. But it’s what we here at Oxford prefer to call “true.” Perhaps the rules are different at other universities. In fact, we know things are different at other universities. We’ve watched with horror at what has been happening across the pond from the University of Missouri to the University of Virginia and even to revered institutions like Harvard and Yale: the “safe spaces”; the #blacklivesmatter; the creeping cultural relativism; the stifling political correctness; what Allan Bloom rightly called “the closing of the American mind”. At Oxford however, we will always prefer facts and free, open debate to petty grievance-mongering, identity politics and empty sloganeering. The day we cease to do so is the day we lose the right to call ourselves the world’s greatest university. 

Of course, you are perfectly within your rights to squander your time at Oxford on silly, vexatious, single-issue political campaigns. (Though it does make us wonder how stringent the vetting procedure is these days for Rhodes scholarships and even more so, for Mandela Rhodes scholarships). We are well used to seeing undergraduates – or, in your case – postgraduates, making idiots of themselves. Just don’t expect us to indulge your idiocy, let alone genuflect before it. You may be black – “BME” as the grisly modern terminology has it – but we are colour blind. We have been educating gifted undergraduates from our former colonies, our Empire, our Commonwealth and beyond for many generations. We do not discriminate over sex, race, colour or creed. We do, however, discriminate according to intellect.   

That means, inter alia, that when our undergrads or postgrads come up with fatuous ideas, we don’t pat them on the back, give them a red rosette and say: “Ooh, you’re black and you come from South Africa. What a clever chap you are!”! No. We prefer to see the quality of those ideas tested in the crucible of public debate. That’s another key part of the Oxford intellectual tradition you see: you can argue any damn thing you like but you need to be able to justify it with facts and logic – otherwise your idea is worthless. 

This ludicrous notion you have that a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed from Oriel College, because it’s symbolic of “institutional racism” and “white slavery”. Well even if it is – which we dispute – so bloody what? Any undergraduate so feeble-minded that they can’t pass a bronze statue without having their “safe space” violated really does not deserve to be here. And besides, if we were to remove Rhodes’s statue on the premise that his life wasn’t blemish-free, where would we stop? As one of our alumni Dan Hannan has pointed out, Oriel’s other benefactors include two kings so awful – Edward II and Charles I – that their subjects had them killed. The college opposite – Christ Church – was built by a murderous, thieving bully who bumped off two of his wives. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves: does that invalidate the US Constitution? Winston Churchill had unenlightened views about Muslims and India: was he then the wrong man to lead Britain in the war?”  

Actually, we’ll go further than that. Your 'Rhodes Must Fall' campaign is not merely fatuous but ugly, vandalistic and dangerous. We agree with Oxford historian RW Johnson that what you are trying to do here is no different from what ISIS and the Al-Qaeda have been doing to artifacts in places like Mali and Syria. You are murdering history. 

And who are you, anyway, to be lecturing Oxford University on how it should order its affairs? Your #rhodesmustfall campaign, we

understand, originates in South Africa and was initiated by a black activist who told one of his lecturers “whites have to be killed”. One of you – Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh – is the privileged son of a rich politician and a member of a party whose slogan is “Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer”; another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for “socially conscious black students” to “dominate white universities, and do so ruthlessly and decisively!” 

Great. That’s just what Oxford University needs. Some cultural enrichment from the land of Winnie Mandela, burning tyre necklaces, an AIDS epidemic almost entirely the result of government indifference and ignorance, one of the world’s highest per capita murder rates, institutionalised corruption, tribal politics, anti-white racism and a collapsing economy. Please name which of the above items you think will enhance the lives of the 22,000 students studying here at Oxford.

And then please explain what it is that makes your attention grabbing campaign to remove a listed statue from an Oxford college more urgent, more deserving than the desire of probably at least 20,000 of those 22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the irritation of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly don’t merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life and fabric of our beloved university. 

Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you. 

Yours, 

Oriel College, Oxford 

Lophospermum...

The other day, Senora O'Blene and yours truly, vanished from 'The Turrets', for an escape.

We haven't been out to the village for ages now, and we needed some plants for a new growing area, so our local garden centre was the place to go.

As we know everyone there so well, the banter started, and Mrs O'Blene spotted a plant which had an unintelligible name, and one of the chums called it 'Brian's thing', because his wife had grown it, and as they've all been struggling a bit with this Chinese nasty onslaught, we bought it, even though we didn't have a clue what it really was...

It turns out to be one of these...

...so we're well pleased!

Sometimes, a couple of quid spent on a mystery brings huge amounts of goodwill, and a sense of great chums just being there...