September 10 2017

I'm back. Grumpy as ever even after my long recess during the summer.

Now, where shall I start? Will it be with the story about the school who sent pupils home if they had the wrong shade of grey trousers. No, silly me, how could that be true? We all know that the DfE, or whatever they are called now, are absolutely positive that even one day missed of a child's education can do great harm. I've quoted them on that in one of my earlier blogs. No, that must be fake news. Just in case I'm wrong, here is a link to the story in The Guardian. Click here

Could it be the one about Virgin Media sticking some incredibly ugly boxes right outside the windows of an old age pensioner couple's house, blocking their view. Silly me, that would be ridiculous for a caring person like Sir Richard Branson. Even on his holiday island, he wouldn't want his view blocked, would he? More fake news but, just in case I'm wrong, here is the story on the BBC site. Click here

You know maybe that Donald Turnip chap is right, about one thing. There is fake news about. Not that it's new. Piltdown Man in 1912, the Loch Ness Monster photos of 1934, current news that Tony Blair has changed his mind when it's never been proved he has one, all are hoaxes.

The reason I am having a grump about this is that I learned last week that complete cretins have been posting videos and photos on their websites pertaining to come from the current devastation caused by Hurricane Irma. Worse than that, millions of dumbos have watched it and believed it to be true. Yet many have been shown to be false and come from previous hurricanes elsewhere in the world

I guess the posters were looking for their one moment of fame, or 15 minutes if Andy Warhol is to be believed. Well, continuing the Warhol theme, the flesh is trash. These humans, if we can use that word are happy to distort the truth. They are liars. They haven't seen the hurricane, they aren't showing you the live pictures taken from their window at great peril, there are no weapons of mass destruction (sorry I had Tony on my mind), it is all a great con.

So why, oh gullible lemmings, do you believe it? In the old days, many of us thought everything in the media, small though that media was, was true and accurate. Today, in this wonderful world where everyone can be a reporter, it is far safer to expect that everything in the media, especially that wonderful social media, is actually false, a hoax, a lie, an attempt by some person to feel that everyone likes them, that they are special. I would rather go through life, as I have, not caring whether anybody likes me but knowing I have always spoken the truth to the best of my knowledge.

September 17 2017

We all need targets, don't we? The NHS, schools, universities, governments, where would we be without targets. Obviously there is a problem when we fail to meet our targets but without that target where would we be? Of course in business, or the NHS, you have to pay someone to sit down and work out what those targets should be, then pay someone to monitor those targets and then pay someone to make the excuses when you fail to meet them.

Personally I've always found it easy to work without setting a target. If, for example, I was the NHS, I would know pretty quickly if I was being efficient and coping with the patients by the length of the queue in the waiting room or the number of names on my waiting list. I don't need some official in an office somewhere to look at the stats, or maybe spin a dice, and set me a target.

You can always blame the weather, the financial markets or even the type of snow or leaves for why you didn't hit your target. This week Ryanair had a really good idea. Their punctuality target had fallen below 80% in the first half of this month. Their aim is an annual figure of 90%. With hardly any notice to its passengers, who cares about them we worry about targets, they have decided to cut between 40 to 50 flights every day for the next six weeks. This will help them reach their target.

Apparently it will not help almost 300,000 passengers reach their destinations but who cares about them we worry about targets. Ryanair made a profit of €1.32bn (£1.16bn) last year after it carried 120 million passengers. It didn't carry any targets. So, with 120 million, what does it matter to upset 300,000 so you can meet your targets.

Why don't they just cancel all but one flight, concentrate on that, get it where its going on time and they could have a 100% punctuality target. Yippee. Remind me never to fly Ryanair in case, after I've booked, they discover a new target that having me on a flight could destroy. It also turns out that by changing their holiday year, which currently runs from April to March, to run from January to December instead, they have to allocate annual leave to pilots in September and October. If, instead of setting targets, they planned things a bit better, maybe they could have averted this disaster. After all you know well in advance when you change the holiday year so perhaps you could target these holidays earlier in the year..

September 24 2017

Sometimes I almost lose the will to live. Usually this happens when politicians speak and this week was no exception. Let's ignore those two beacons of intellectual communication, rocket man and the dotard, and look closer to home. Our Prime Minister stood up in Florence and for about forty minutes said …........................ nothing. Apparently she had given her cabinet colleagues 30 minutes to read the speech before their last cabinet meeting so, unless they read quicker than she speaks, they only knew three quarters of what she was going to say.

I mean yes she said something but it was all about what she didn't want, not how she was going to get what she did want. All that came out of it was that instead of leaving in two years, we MIGHT leave in four. Possibly. Perhaps. Maybe.

Actually, if I digress a moment here, this got me thinking about Conservative politician's names. The dictionary definition of “may” is expressing a possibility and she certainly lived up to her name. Nothing certain just a load of possibilities. Liam Fox, the Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade since 2016 and the man responsible for negotiating all these new trade deals that we can put in place once we leave the EU, was next on my list. I suppose, if it all goes wrong, we know why the Tories thought about re-introducing fox hunting again and did his mother know that his first name, when reversed is mail, so he really has very little chance of delivering anything on time or even to the correct place.

Boris Johnson reminds me of the powder that you rub into babies arses to stop them getting sore while, unless I am sadly mistaken, I used to play on the chancellor's organ when I was younger, mainly because it was nice and small and easy to carry around. You can see the problems I have when I hear their names mentioned.

Anyhow, returning to my loss of the will to live, we all voted in a referendum in 2016. We voted, collectively, to leave the EU. We were told we had to leave in 2 years because it says so in the rule book. We are now told that after two years we will need to have a transitional period to bring everything in to place. Then we are told that during this “time-limited” period, isn't every period of time time-limited, everything will be the same. Now to little old, simple me, that means after four years we will then need a transitional period to bring everything into place because nothing will have changed over the previous four years. We are just taking more time.

Our final bill to the EU, never mentioned by Mrs Possibility, will probably be even more by then than it would be now as we will be, essentially, continuing as members. By the way don't get confused, which you are supposed to do, into believing the figure of £20 billion pounds banded about in Florence is our exit bill. That's just to stay in for two more years. The exit bill will probably be at least twice that, Maybe three times.

Oh well negotiations begin again on Monday and I'm sure they will be constructive, of which one definition is "not obvious or stated explicitly; derived by inference". Sums it up for me.

February 2017
March 2017
April 2017
May 2017
June 2017
September 2017
October 2017
November 2017
December 2017