Marmite

To celebrate my recent birthday – my +39th, to be exact – Hubby drove me and a couple of friends, one of the canine variety, to Sunday lunch in a village pub. My (human) friend asked Hubby if he’d remembered to tell the pub we had a dog with us. He replied that they were more concerned about his request to accommodate two noisy right-wing ladies. We thought that was funny.

On the whole, I’ve enjoyed this hot summer. So has Richard Tice (Reform UK MP), but when he said so, he got it in the neck from the snowflakes: not the pretty, wintry ones that you’d expect to melt in this summer’s heat, but the left-leaning, humourless, miserable, pain-in-the-rear, perpetually offended snowflakes whom the late great Ann Widdicombe belittled with aplomb during her legendary appearance at the Oxford Union.

Growing up, if you loved Bambi , Watership Down , Daktari , Skippy , Old Yeller , Animal Magic or Dr Dolittle , then prepare to be possessed by the green-eyed monster. A couple of weeks ago, Hubby and I ‘enjoyed’ (such an inadequate word sometimes) an afternoon at Tiggywinkles, “the world’s leading wildlife hospital.”

I’ll get the really topical one out of the way first: the FIFA World Cup and memories of Maradona’s infamous cheating that put England out of the 1986 competition. Not only did he cheat, he blamed it on God. No wonder he suffered in mid-life and died prematurely. Let’s hope his hands can handle all those hot coals he’ll be stoking.

Northumberland. The final frontier. Where Hubby and I boldly went where few from the south dare to go. God’s own country, second runner-up behind Yorkshire and Cumberland. It’s so far up north that there’s a bridge over the river Tweed to Scotland, where there’s a sign that says “Welcome to Scotland”. On the English side it says, “England”. No ‘Welcome’. Welcomes are officially rationed in favour of those whom most English don’t want to welcome because said welcomees are undeserving of them.

Having nothing better to do on a Wednesday evening, I drove 90 minutes for a talk (and a free dinner) and 90 minutes back again the same evening, late at that. The talk was about the future development of ‘Greater Cambridge’ presented by the Chairman of the Cambridge Development Corporation.

Saturday arrived with mixed emotions. What I mean is, I had mixed emotions about this particular Saturday, and not ‘Saturday was smiling one minute and throwing its toys around the next’. Then again, it was a funny old day.

Last week, I was up and down to London more times than a pogo-stick warrior on a sugar high. I went from a debate about should we abolish our monarchy (‘Mexit’), to whether we should back or bin net zero (‘Nexit’), and a reassessment of all things Brexit (‘Brexit’) almost ten years after the Glorious Revolution ... I mean 'Referendum'. (Or do I?) The following highlights aren’t what I’d anticipated I’d blog about. Just goes to show that a week of politics makes strange unintended consequences (I cannot so much mix as mash my clichés).

It was Star Trek (Wars?) Day earlier this week (May 4th). It usually passes me by, partly because I’m not into sci-fi. The last sci-fi film I watched was The Martian (2015) with Matt Damon playing an astronaut stranded on Mars. I bitched the whole way through it, criticising all the stupid stuff happening because it was scientifically impossible. Mind you, Albert Einstein once said that the likelihood of transforming mass into energy, by bombarding atomic nuclei, was akin to shooting birds at night in a country where there are few birds. The swift-brick Twitterati are traumatised by that thought.

There’s nothing like a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan to brighten your day. Their beloved operettas make light of various moral dilemmas faced by their characters. Similarly, the satire of Blackadder humorously explores historical social issues, many of them unpleasant. Plato was also a bit like that. He posed questions about morality through Socrates, his Republic protagonist, in a conversational rather than a didactic style, partly because he struggled to perfect any answers. I feel inspired to pose a morality question of my own, but I shall eschew operettas and aim for something between Blackadder and Plato … Now there’s a thought – Rowan Atkinson taking off Plato. If he ever does, I want royalties for the idea!

Premature perhaps. We’ve only just had Easter, when Christ rose from the dead. Alleluia or Bah Humbug, depending on your inclination.

Stewkley Singers rise to a challenge. We enjoy it. We must do, because we’re still here after 20 years of being stretched to the limit, stamina- and talent-wise, by Our Jen, our delightfully demanding Musical Director.

Unless you’ve been impersonating Rip Van Winkle, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White or Rachel from accounts, you’ll know that Trump is waging war on Iran. This has prompted the usual keffiyeh-wearing klowns to object to a regime getting its komeuppance for torturing and murdering women and gays simply for being women and gays. The klowns’ rationale is that if Netanyahu doesn’t like the Ayatollahs, they must be the good guys even though they murder women and gays for simply being women and gays. Ah, the Hope-not-Hate brigade has been exposed for what they are: Hateful no-Hopers. Meanwhile Greta Thundabunga, the Scandinavian and female (at a stretch) clone of Chris Packham, is bleating about Cuba, thus sending the message that the war with Iran is of little consequence, and there’s no longer a climate crisis. By careering from cause to cause, just like Packham, she’s trying desperately and failing comically to be relevant and to achieve something. Anything.

I was expecting ‘it’ but not the detail of it. I certainly wasn’t expecting my reaction to it, which was sang-froid with a dollop of chocolate ice cream.

It was St Valentine's Day recently, and the Great British Courts gave a smacking great kiss to Palestine Action (PA) by decreeing that their proscription as a terrorist organisation was unlawful. For every force or action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, and the inferred opposite of the mwah-mwah to PA is a poke in the eye to the law abiders and enforcers that make up the bulk of the population, especially our Jewish friends and neighbours.

I can’t put off blogging about Plato any longer. Why? In a nutshell, Plato was all about morality, and everyone these days is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein, who was all about living a most immoral life, as was Peter Mandelson, the aptly dubbed Prince of Darkness. Once UK Deputy PM, UK Ambassador to the US and (still) a peer of the realm, Mandelson was successively promoted and protected by Blair, Brown and Starmer, who are tainted by association. Yet Boris ate cake, and I can’t find many Boris-critics venting the same level of rage against the Labour hierarchy as they vested on him. For eating cake. I ask you. Get a grip. This madness even stretched in my direction when I voiced support for the blond bombshell for pragmatic, proportionate purposes. On the other hand, for partisan, prejudiced purposes, Private Eye and other red media are still trying to deflect flack, or at least dilute it, away from the lewd Left and towards Nigel Farage, the left’s (and remoaners’) post-Boris nemesis...

This blog title is in German. It means ‘trigger warnings’. I initially thought that if I blogged about something as inconsequential and uncontroversial as our recent trip to Austria, I wouldn’t traumatise anyone. Is that naïve of me? Should I anticipate that some malcontents have nothing better to do than waste their time looking to be traumatised? Should I forewarn them of anything that might take them out of their safe spaces and echo chambers in a froth of ire and retribution? Should I, mischievously, satirise the concept of trigger warnings to raise a laugh here and a temper there? Oh, if you insist.

I’m taking a break from blogging about Plato – yes, that Plato – to rise to a challenge set by a blog fan. Responding to ‘ 2026 and all that ’, he remarked: “You almost had me feeling sorry for Hinton [CEO, South East Water]. Given what’s happened since, I bet you can’t carry on being nice to him.” A bet? How much? Game on!

The New Year seems to have got off to a catholic start. I was going to say ‘eclectic start’ but the word ‘catholic’, which is a synonym of ‘eclectic’, has a less inclusive feel to it. I like that.