April 1 2017
There are many interesting creatures in Australia but I wanted to tell you all, today, about one I heard of during my time in the country some 10 years ago. The creature is the wallibat. It is a cross between the wallaby and the wombat. Like many of Australia’s indigenous wildlife, it is a marsupial. It carries its young in a small purse that it wears around its waist. The young grow very quickly and as they do they will slightly alter their position in the purse. When they have moved they never go back to the same position again. The purses are, therefore, known as somewhere for your small changes. The adults are very intelligent often writing letters to their young, telling them what will happen next. However, the young tend to throw these out of the purses, as they believe this is not a place for notes. If they don’t throw the notes away, they will eat them. Early pioneers who came across these animals, the young is called a wall (it rhymes with doll), would collect these notes and try to understand them. You could often hear them cry out, “Have you got the dinkum notes”, to which the reply was usually “No, the wall ate them”. Over time, these pioneers would call any place you put your notes, a wallet. The young walls can move surprisingly quickly. In fact, if you go into the archives at your local library, you may be able to read about a serious accident which happened when two of them collided in the middle of an Australian town early one evening. They had both been sent to buy some frozen milk, known as wall’s Ice Cream, before the shop shut at 7.30pm. Both had been playing on the way and then had to rush into town. It was 7.29pm and they were both approaching the shop which was on a cross roads. One came from the north, the other from the east and neither was looking where they were going. It is thought they were each travelling at about 75mph when they hit and the resultant impact was enormous and actually felt all around the world. Both walls were tossed high into the air before crashing down again. One landed in a field, still wet from heavy rain the previous day, and started a fearful moan. The field was not unlike those of Flanders and according to the swan that was floating nearby, you could hear the wall ohing in the mud for hours and hours. The other landed back in the middle of the road leaving a large dent in the ground. The depression was still around some three years later. If you want to read more, try googling 1929 Wall Street Crash, where you will find much written about the crash and the subsequent depression.
This picture shows the cover of one such book written by a man called Galbraith. He apparently studied the wallibats quite a lot. He was also particularly interested in their unique methods of disposing of their own waste and another of his books, called The Effluent Society, related his findings.
He also designed, or at least championed, a method to avoid such crashes in the future. He felt that there was a danger area on one side of every wallibat and if contact could be avoided in that area, such crashes might not happen in the future. He called this their MPC or marginal propensity to crash.
This was defined as 
, where dC is the distance covered by the running wallibat and dY is the distance away from the other speeding wombat before they yelled. He actually rounded up all the wallibats he could find and drew a blue line down their left hand side to represent this margin.
The female of the species are known as wallies, while the males, not surprisingly, are known as bats. Strangely, over time, although they are not in any way human, these two sexes have been known as walliewomen and batsmen. The male frightens off any rivals by producing a very strong and unpleasant smell from its tail. However, during the short mating season, the smell is given off from the stomach or centre portion of the animal. At this time of year the male is said to be promoted from a tail odour batsmen to a middle odour batsman.
The main source of food is any discarded tins which people have thrown away. Certain of the male wallibats have distinctive, little claws, which allow them to get the food out of these tins and those that have these claws are known as the opening batsmen. Once the animals store their food in their “pitch”, the name given to the place where they make their homes, some of the males stand guard over the food during the night. These are, of course, the night watchmen batsmen who, in normal life, are the infertile, tail odour batsmen. If a predator approaches they can then turn suddenly and let off this unpleasant smell which among other things can cause severe and almost immediate diarrhoea. This is where we get the phrase turn tail and runs.
Australia is also a leader in many things. Australians were surfing long before the internet came along; to them www stood for wonderful wet water. Their surfing is a strange pastime where you swim out to sea carrying a shaped plank of wood, looking not unlike a dolphin or similar shark food, wait for a big wave, jump on your plank and wait again until you fall off. By then, the wave has carried you back to where you were some time ago. Finding this out, you immediately swim back to where you were before you came back to where you’d been and then aim to return to where you’d been before you had to go to where you were before you’d been to where you’d been before you were there. They will do this for hours on end.
There is a rumour that everything in Australia is upside down. This isn’t true, which to me anyway, proves the world is flat, but, a bit like a roll of material, it continues in a never-ending pattern, repeating itself over and over again. This is how you can fly from New Zealand, on the right hand side of my flat world, to Chile, on the left. It is in fact a repeat of the earlier Chile. This is well-known in England where a common form of greeting is “Chile again isn’t it?”. There are some experts who study the mountains and tors which appear over and over again and these people are known as tortologists.
In fact most things in Australia are the right way up, although they have a lot of rain at the top of country and droughts at the bottom. Of course if the world was round all the water at the top would run down to the bottom, which further proves my theory. It is very difficult to say what is the best thing from Australia. Many people have said Kylie Minogue’s bottom. I would agree but what is top and the best.
April 7 2017
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Cadburys have dared to have an egg hunt, using their confectionery eggs, and they omitted the word Easter. Now my view was that Easter, in the Christian world, happened once a year, perhaps spread over five days, but just once. Those little eggs are on sale all year so why should they be known as Easter eggs and, more importantly, what have they to do with the Christian story of Easter. The first chocolate Easter egg came about in 1873, a pretty long time after the Christian Easter was first celebrated. The word Easter, preceding these little chocolate treats, is far more to do with the time of year they are most consumed than to do with the celebration of a new life, fertility and rebirth that the old traditions, using real eggs was about. Funnily enough these traditions date from well before the Christian Easter and were probably more about the celebration of spring and the rebirth and fertility associated with that. My family will be having an egg hunt at Easter time because we have done so for very many years. I would quite happily call it an egg hunt using chocolate eggs which are sold at Easter if the Christian church so wishes. Christianity was not the first religion and many of its traditions are borrowed from earlier ones. Please bishops, archbishops and any other clergymen or women, don't get your cassocks in a twist. Easter eggs, as we traditionally call them, are sold all year round and many are surplus to Easter. Your religious festival, for those who share your beliefs, should steer clear of fancy sweets and concentrate on celebrating the life of someone you believe died to save us all. Let Cadburys call their egg hunt whatever they like.April 14 2017
I read this week, with my usual amount of total disgust, that The Sun newspaper (their words not mine) have suspended a journalist and former editor for an article he wrote about an Everton footballer. Not ever having been so low in the gutter as to know how Rupert Muckdoch's newspapers operate, I was a trifle surprised. How can a journalist write an article which is published in a newspaper or even on their website without the editor or head of some department knowing about it? I thought editors oversaw the whole of a newspaper or at least appointed people, head of news, head of sport, head of phone tapping, who controlled these things. Then I remembered the story about Rebekah Brooks not knowing anything at all that was going on at the newspaper she was paid a lot of money to edit. Then I realised that George Osborne can edit a newspaper and hold down, like an old fashioned pillow, at least 3 other jobs. Of course, an editor is only an editor in name, there is no work to do. Last time the Muckdoch press had a problem with the bahaviour of staff at a paper, he simply closed the paper down taking a considerable loss of income.............until about 7 months later he launched the Sun on Sunday, employing many of the staff who had worked at the closed News of the World and probably regaining all of that lost income. Any transgression an employee of Muckdoch may make is soon forgotten. Don't forget that the same Rebekah Brooks who presided over, though knew nothing about, all the disgusting phone tapping at the Sun has now returned as chief executive of News UK, a Muckdoch company. Luckily for her that is all that returned as she was able to keep the alleged £16 million she received when she resigned in 2011. Of course, Mr Muckdoch apologised for anything that he didn't know was being done illegally at his company as soon as he learned that it might have happened and the Sun has apologised for the article one of their journalists has written so that makes it alright, doesn't it? No it doesn't and this is sometimes where I feel modern parents bring their children up very badly. A child is too often told to say sorry for something for which an apology is totally out of place. Saying sorry neither puts things right nor, if the incident could have been avoided with thought, makes things better. An apology should be for an accident. If I bump into somebody by mistake, I apologise. If my deliberate action causes an incident of some sort I should not apologise, I should not say sorry, but I should say how thoughtless I was not to realise my actions would result in that incident. These days, I find, older children believe that if they do something wrong, if they disobey an instruction, then saying sorry makes it OK. And they do this because when they were younger they were always taught to say “sorry”. If you deliberately do something you have been told not to do, then saying sorry when you are found out does not remove your guilt, your disobedience, your disregard for authority. “Sorry” is not a panacea for all poor judgement, disgusting behaviour, wrong doing. And that is why every apology by a Muckdoch employee is meaningless. With thought, and some slight understanding of other human's feelings, they wouldn't have done what they did. Sadly, many of you out there will continue to line the pockets not only of the old mucker that runs the thing but also of all his unsavoury underlings. If you had real concern, real feelings, you would all cease buying, reading and watching any Muckdoch media outlet. I cancelled my SKY subscription last year when he announced his intention to take control of the company in full and I will never return. Think about it. It's not as if they aren't other papers and broadcasters who can serve you. Had to write this quickly to make it topical so I'll say sorry in advance for any spelling mistakes.April 21 2017
Well, what do you know, which is of course rhetorical because I really don't care what you know. It was May 2015 when I started this blog and my first words to the nation were as follows-:“Yes, it’s true. I can now confirm that I have accepted David Cameron’s unspoken offer to take on the portfolio for Grumpy Old Granddads in his new administration. I understand, from our leader, that if I can get 3.8 million followers I may be offered a seat in the commons but, at the moment, I am quite happy sitting out in the posh seats in the open. I was told that if I had 56 seats I would need to find 55 other stupid arses to sit on them so declined this idea too. I intend to remain in situ for the full 5-year term and will start work almost immediately. My prime role, as I see it, is to complain, vociferously and continually, about anything and everything. My lifetime experiences mean I am fully qualified to take up this position.” Well, that was nearly two years ago and it seems that, following the loss of my then leader, the replacement has decided that we don't need to call a snap election, so she's called one. Her government also decided to increase NI contributions for some self-employed people, so they didn't. She was also absolutely certain that she didn't need a vote in Parliament to trigger article 50, so she held one. Many people in this country did not want the POTUS to come over on a state visit, so she asked him, she told Scottish MP's that there would be a consensus before she went ahead with article 50 so she ignored them completely and she told young Nicola Sturgeon that another vote in a referendum would be a distraction at a time when we are getting ready for the Brexit negotiations, so she called an election instead. There seems to be a bit of a pattern here and yet, amazingly, many pundits and members of the conservative party are saying what a strong leader she is. Opportunistic, wavering, uncertain I would agree but certainly not strong. Obviously you don't have to agree with everything a leader says to think they are strong but it is quite important that the leader does agree with themselves for slightly longer than a few months. According to most of the press, the opposition party is being led by a weak leader. In my mind someone who refuses to leave their post under superhuman pressure because he believes that the party members want him, who is then proved right when a vote comes along and who struggles at Prime Minister's question time to get any sort of answer from the turning lady but continues to follow the brand of politics he believes in, is the man of strength. Just because some in his party don't like him and ex-leaders known for their lack of consideration of the truth and facts over a fancy whim, castigate him, doesn't make him weak. Au contriare mes petites braves, it shows an incredible inner strength and a man who sticks to his long-held beliefs. And now, despite that hope that I would hold my portfolio for the full five years, I will now have to submit to re-elections just like everybody else, excluding Douglas Carswell who has achieved all he wanted in politics and is now looking elsewhere. My personal view is that he could, therefore, probably have quit shortly after giving his maiden speech if a parliamentary career is to be measured by achievement. I am sincerely hoping that after this new election we will again see some kilt, hat or some other article of clothing eating, although I think young Ashdown must have been telling porkie pies rather than eating one as I never saw coverage of his meal. I can, however, assure you my next six blogs will see even more grumpy old moans than before, quite simply because it is at election times that the idiots we elect each time, say and do such stupid things. I might even have to blog more often than weekly. Can you wait? That's rhetorical too because whether you can or can't will make no difference at all to whether I do or don't.