The upshot is that the BBC is having to pay Rupert Murdoch £10 million a year to have the privilege of BBC programmes being shown on Sky. I feel as if I’ve wandered into an alternative universe again. I thought that we lived in a Capitalist society which is very simple to follow. If you have something which someone else wants then they have to pay you for it, if you want them to have it. So why isn’t Murdoch paying the BBC £squillions to be allowed to broadcast BBC programmes?

I have always prided myself that I haven’t knowingly added any money to the Murdoch coffers. I’ve never bought one of his newspapers and I don’t have Sky, so I’m more than a wee bit peeved – actually I’m incandescent – that my licence fee money is going to Murdoch.

I’ve always thought that the TV licence is just about one of the best bargains around. I would even be quite happy if Auntie Beeb didn’t block the internet viewing so that people in other countries could look in. That would stop Murdoch in his tracks, which could only be a good thing.

Please BBC, stop giving money to Rupert Murdoch et al!

Square up to politicians. Nothing is perfect but the BBC has a place in the hearts of most Brits which is second only to the NHS.

Why am I not surprised that this whole situation came about through Maggie Thatcher’s sucking up to Murdoch. Cakes and ale anyone?!

I could go on at length but I can already see that 2012 is going to be a year of grumping and groaning. Now, does anybody know how I go about setting up an online petition to support the BBC?

Boris Johnson said that David Cameron ‘played a blinder’ at the summit yesterday and Tories seem to be queuing up to agree with him.

Have I wandered into some sort of hospital for the mentally infirm?!

David Cameron has poked himself and the whole of Britain in the eye with a pointed stick. Definitely a blinder!

I don’t see that it’s necessary for them to have a meal at all, and certainly not a big fancy beanfeast which they seem to be setting the scene for. The most they should be having is tap water, beans on toast then some instant coffee and a digestive biscuit. It’s more than some poor souls will be able to afford.

You would think that given the circumstances they would be embarrassed to be spending any money on this summit. I’m sure they could communicate with each other just as well via the internet.

Of course we are the people who will be paying for it all through taxes, it’s about time they realised that things are too serious to be spending anything on expensive fripperies – it dawned on the rest of us ages ago.

I must say that I’m not one of those nutcases who think we should not be in the European Union, it would cost us more to be outside it anyway but that doesn’t mean that I think it’s perfect, there’s an awful lot of room for improvement.

I’ve always been a Monty Python fan and The Meaning of Life is on at the moment. Unfortunately it’s on a channel with adverts, which I hate, so between the adverts I switched over to BBC News 24 and what did I see shooting across the bottom of the screen?

The Education Secretary Michael Gove has warned teachers that if they go on strike on Thursday they risk damaging their reputations.

At this rate I’ll have to stop watching the news because I’m just about apoplectic. How can a man (and I use that word very loosely) who behaved as he has in the past even think of warning anybody about their reputation. Being an absolute swine seems to have done him no harm in life, maybe the rest of us have just been too damn decent for our own good!

Speaking of dodgy characters, in my opinion Michael Gove should be sitting in a prison cell at the moment as he was one of the worst MPs involved in the expenses scandal. He flipped his home and was gleefully getting the tax payer to pay for things which he had no right to do. Very interestingly he was keen to give our Prime Minister’s mother-in-law’s shop the business. Also he was quite happy to take his family off to a high class spa and chalked the whole thing up on expenses to be paid by the tax payer. How he can sit and pontificate on the rights of people who work so much harder than he does for so little pay is just beyond me. The man has no shame obviously.

The government seems to think that all teachers and local government workers, including people on very low pay, should quite happily agree to having to work a lot longer for much less of a pension. Apparently, it’s our fault because we are all living longer and the pensions are no longer affordable. That just makes me scream, I don’t know about you but I know absolutely loads of people who have died recently and most of them weren’t lucky enough even to reach pension age as it is now. It may be that people living in the affluent south of England are living longer but in the north things are very different. It’s because of a combination of genetics, poverty and the cold, damp climate.

Would it not be sensible to concentrate on the unemployment problem. If there were more people in work and paying tax and fewer people on unemployment benefit then that would go a long way to solving the problem of a black hole in the pension budget. At the moment, people are being educated only to end up in a dole queue, no matter how many degrees they have.

Better still, the government should tell the banks, who let’s not forget started this whole problem with their stupidity and greed, to stump up money to plug the hole instead of awarding themselves massive tax-free bonuses.

Please take a look at this link, from the Daily Telegraph, but be warned, you may need a sick bag/high blood pressure tablets!

Wootton Bassett came to a standstill today for a soldier who was born in the same hospital as my two boys. In fact he was born just a few months before my eldest son, but he moved away to another part of Fife in his childhood. I suppose they’ll still add his name to the local war memorial though.

The ashes of Theo, his 22 month old sniffer dog were flown home on the same aeroplane. Theo died of a seizure shortly after his handler died.

I blame Tony Blair.

I caught the back end of one of the Narnia episodes which were on TV during the Christmas holidays, it was the wicked queen doing her stuff. We used to be steeped in Narnia here as Gordon my youngest son was obsessed with the books and videos at one point. It always reminded me of the winters of 1979/80/81 which were terribly cold, worse than anything that I had ever experienced before.

When we moved down to Essex the diesel in the removal lorry’s tank froze and the men had to light a fire underneath it to thaw it out, scary stuff. This all coincided with the Conservative party getting into power – in the shape of the dreaded and evil Maggie Thatcher. So you can see why she reminds me of the wicked witch – and vice versa. Evil was stalking the land and so freezing cold winters came along to torment us, just as in Narnia when evil had the upper-hand.

So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the same thing has happened again as we now have the self-confessed ‘sons of Margaret Thatcher’ at the helm. As before, the freezing winter came just before the Tories got into power, when evil was gaining strength. I predict that as we are in the middle of our second freezing winter on the trot, we’ll probably have another one next year too. I blame all those Old Etonian millionaires. But I’m also reminded of Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. Prime Minister Cameron and all his Old Etonian pals in the Cabinet are just exactly like the dastardly Flashman and his chums, except that was set at Rugby. I suppose one English public school bunch is much the same as another.

When J.M. Barrie decided to make his Peter Pan character Captain Hook an evil Old Etonian he obviously knew exactly what he was doing. But I cheer myself up by remembering what was in store for Captain Hook!

TICK TOCK TICK TOCK TICK TOCK

These savage cuts will have no effect whatsoever on the fat cats who caused all the mayhem and as usual it’s the small people who will hurt more than anybody.

What did Tory voters think was going to happen when they gave power to a bunch of old Etonian millionaires? And that includes the Lib-Dems too. Sorry Nick, was it Westminster School?

I thought that we had it bad when we were young. We bought our first house just before Maggie Thatcher got into power and by the time the house was finished and we had moved in a few months later, the mortgage interest rate had shot up, which doubled our monthly mortgage payments.

But the youngsters nowadays can’t even dream of buying a house. They are drowning in their student debt and most of them can’t get a job after university. Unfortunately it is still a society where it isn’t what you know, but who you know which is important. And we can’t all have contacts at Buckingham Palace like Cameron had when he was looking for a job after he graduated. I feel heart sore for young people nowadays, their future seems so miserable at the moment.

So, all these cuts are going to mean loads more unemployed people and there are places in Scotland, such as Fife, which still hadn’t recovered from the last recession.

I’ve always avoided the ‘big dipper’ because I don’t have the stomach for that sort of thing, but it looks like there’s another BIG DIP coming. So hold on to your hats folks!

Tony Blair came to my notice some time before he stood for the Labour leadership contest. I had given him the nickname of ‘The double-glazing salesman’, which I now think is a slur on all such people but at the time it seemed appropriate.

So you’ll have gathered that he was never my favourite person and I remember standing in the school-playground at the time telling my friend Molly just what I thought of Blair. Molly rather liked him, thought he was a good guy. I just couldn’t stop myself from pointing out to Molly that she was already divorced twice, so maybe she wasn’t the best judge of character. I can be a bit of a bitch at times.

He turned out to be even worse than I could possibly have imagined and it just amazes me that people are still taken in by him. I’ve been trying to ignore all the hoo-ha about his book because just thinking about him isn’t good for my blood pressure I’m sure. But I’ve heard along the grapevine that people in shops and libraries have been moving his book to the horror/crime sections, and that really cheered me up.

Originally I thought that whenever anyone buys a copy of the book, it should be put into an extra strong bag, something that could double up as a sick bag in fact, as I’m sure it would make me feel quite ill. But having heard that there are quite a few sex scenes in it, I’ve amended that idea and I think that every purchase should have a free bucket given out with it. I don’t think a sick bag would be adequate for me anyway.

I can’t tell you how angry I was when he said that he was nearly in tears when he met a young war widow, but he is still talking up a war with Iran. He hadn’t been in power long at all when you could see that mad look in his eyes. Just to be even-handed here, I must say that it was the very same look which Thatcher developed too.

I’m not at all impressed by the fact that he is giving the money from the sales of his book to charity. As conscience money, it won’t go very far and no matter what he does in the future, despite his conversion to Catholicism, there’s only one place for him to go when his time comes and that’s straight to HELL, or as my mum would have put it, THE BAD FIRE!

In the same week J.K.Rowling announced that she was giving 10 million pounds to Edinburgh University to set up a clinic to carry out research into Multiple Sclerosis, in memory of her mother Ann Rowling who died of M.S. at the age of 45, which is the age that J.K. is now. She has always been incredibly generous to charities and an all round ‘good egg’. She’s brought joy to millions of children of all ages and encouraged a lot of young people to read books for pleasure, when they might never have done so.

Conversely, Blair has brought grief to countless numbers of people, and I mean countless because nobody bothered to count the Iraqis

The turnout wasn’t bad really, probably about 300 people. I’m sure there would have been far more people if we had had more notice of the thing, but that couldn’t be helped, I’m sure. I know folks who couldn’t make it but would have liked to have taken part.

Eventually the purple flag holders moved to the front and we set off up the Royal Mile and round into The Mound and along to New College. I wouldn’t call it a march, more of an amiable amble really.

We were a motley mob, aged from babes in arms to elderly gents in kilts. Nearly everyone was wearing or holding something purple to signify justice/equality.

So it wasn’t a long amble and when we reached our destination there was some speechifying from about five different people, including one Edinburgh M.P.

The organiser seemed to be pleased with the turnout. But we can only hope that the whole thing will gather momentum, we were asked to try to get five people that we know to join in the campaign. I’m not a fan of chain letter type things but in this case it’s the only way to go forward.

So if anyone reading this post is, like me, fed up with my vote never counting and completely scunnered with the terrible system of voting that we have in Britain – please sign up to Take Back Parliament. Oak trees from little acorns grow and all that!

Fair Votes Now.