Category Archives: Rant

The BP Disaster

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I’ve got no doubt that when they get down to the investigation of the horrendous accident in the Gulf of Mexico, they will discover, as ever that it was caused by the oil companies’ penny-pinching ways.

I’ve lost count of the number of oil rig accidents which have occurred in the North Sea. The companies are completely uncaring of their employees’ welfare and people die because of the sheer greed of the companies.

Even although the profits which the oil industries make are eye wateringly enormous, they can’t bring themselves to spend paltry sums of money on maintenance. I’ve seen photographs of pipelines which look like badly patched quilts and obviously the only safe thing to do is to replace the broken pipe. It must be terrifying to work on an oil rig under such conditions.

The first disaster which I can remember which concerned oil was when the oil tanker Torrey Canyon ran aground on rocks between Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly in 1967 when I was 8 years old. You can read about it in an article which was published in The Guardian yesterday.

I can’t see how the oil is ever going to be cleaned from the sort of coastal grasslands which I have been seeing on TV.

FIFA World Cup

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My husband has been pining for the FIFA World Cup to begin. He doesn’t have long to wait now as it starts on Friday, and he’s going to be watching as many of the matches as he possibly can.

This is the Association Football world cup – the biggest sporting event on the planet bar possibly the Olympic Games – played with a round ball as opposed to the game that men play with funny shaped balls and lots of padding.

As I would generally rather watch paint dry than view a football match, I’m going to be a bit of a ‘football widow’ for the next month or so. Somehow I think I’m going to get a lot of reading done then.

Unfortunately, Scotland didn’t qualify to take part this time. My husband says that the good thing about that is he can watch the whole thing and just enjoy it with no pressure and stress. I bet the hospitals are looking at it that way too as there should be fewer men admitted with heart attacks.

As ever, England are in the easiest group. (Scotland are always grouped with Brazil, Germany, Holland and the like.) According to the pundits on the radio though, they are all terrified of their first match, which happens to be against the U.S.A. on Saturday June 12th.

Those are the very same commentators who drive us (Scots) round the bend with their arrogance and assumptions that England somehow have a right to be the winners at everything, just because they aren’t ‘Johnny Foreigner’. I bet with the first touch of the ball they’ll claim they’re going to go all the way.

So, not that I’m racist or anything – but just for that day, I’ll be supporting the U.S.A. – for the sake of my sanity as much as anything else.

It’s Too Hot

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It’s official. I’m just never happy. After moaning and chittering all through that seemingly never ending winter, I’m complaining about the heat now.

Today it was 65 Fahrenheit in our house, that’s 18.3 Celsius, downstairs, which was fine really. Upstairs, even with all the windows open it was 75 F, that’s 23.9 Celsius. I nearly melted, it really saps your energy, and I’ve got a headache from the sun – must remember to wear a hat.

It’s been four years since we’ve had a day this hot here and apparently it’s going to be even hotter tomorrow. We had hoped to get up a hill this weekend but I don’t know now.

I suppose it would be cooler higher up and there should be a nice breeze. On the other hand, the hill climb might be purgatory.

The photographs would be good though.

The Election

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I’ve spent my time this week plodding around the place with Liberal Democrat leaflets – a lot of those letterboxes are lethal but amazingly I do still have all of my fingers and thumbs.

I didn’t expect the Lib Dems to win in Kirkcaldy, I doubt if it will ever be anything other than Labour and of course it is Gordon Brown’s constituency, but you’ve got to give it a try.

I’m disappointed beyond belief at the outcome of the Dunfermline and West Fife vote though. Duncan was an intern for the Lib Dem M.P. Willie Rennie there before getting his job at St Andrews. But he continued to help out at the constituency office in his spare time. What with Willie being a really great M.P. plus the surge in Lib Dem support recently, we really thought that Willie would be re-elected. They all worked their socks off too, but to no avail.

Apparently, on the day before the election it was noticeable that people who had been supporters were taking fright, mainly because of the tabloid newspapers reporting that it would be an outright win for the Conservatives.

Why they thought that they then had to ditch the Lib Dems and vote for Labour is a mystery to me. I hope they are all feeling thoroughly ashamed of themselves for voting in a complete stranger to the area, whose only interest is getting into the House of Commons.

So I’m feeling very fed up with the whole thing and the only thing that is cheering me up is that I know that some time in the near future they will regret voting him in. Hell mend them – as we say!

Too late for poor Willie Rennie though, and the workers in his constituency office who are now unemployed.

If I weren’t a bit of a lady – I’d spit.

And another thing. We had helicopters circling around our house for hours during the night, because we live near where the count was taking place. They were tracking Gordon Brown’s car as he left his house for the count. On T.V. all you could see was a black screen and a teeny wee dot of light, it was completely unnecessary, a terrible waste of fuel, and it must have woken people up. Not everyone feels the need to watch the election programmes.

Latin in schools

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I went to an ordinary comprehensive school and in the first year the classes were all mixed ability. However, in second year the classes were streamed according to how well you did in the exams.

So, if you were in the top 20% or so, you had to take Latin in second year. At that time you needed your Latin Higher if you wanted to study medicine, pharmacy or law.

It soon became clear that Latin was quite handy for all sorts of reasons though. I’ve always been keen on gardening, even as a youngster and botanical names hold no terrors for you if you just learn a wee bit of Latin.

If you come across a new word, you can often work out what it means without looking it up as so many of our words are Latin based. And that goes for other foreign languages too.

For example: the word window is –
fenetre in French
Fenster in German
finestra in Italian and
fenestra in Latin

Of course English being awkward just has to buck the trend and do its own thing, so the word window comes from the old Norse word vindauga meaning wind-eye.

We do use fenestration meaning the arrangement of windows in a building, and defenestration which is the action of throwing out of a window – usually a person. I remember that a council planning officer was particularly narked at me because I knew what fenestration meant and he thought he was going off into technical speak to bamboozle me.

Anyway, I ended up doing Latin for three years and I can’t say that I’ve regretted it even although the days are long gone when I could translate The Rape of the Sabine Women from English into Latin. Actually, when I think about it, my teacher might say that I never could.

I discovered recently that Latin has been dropped from the curriculum altogether, in the East of Scotland anyway. In fact the last Latin teacher, who has recently retired, had been used to fill in for absent teachers of any subject. Which I think is a horrible way for anyone to have to end their career.

Apparently, lawyers do a crash course of legal Latin terms in their first year at university and that is deemed to be enough. So what has Latin been replaced with. I’ve got a horrible feeling that it is something like media studies or drama.

Winter weather

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I hate the cold weather and it has been below freezing all day today. Tomorrow it is going to be -6c and it’s getting beyond a joke. The snow is just piled up everywhere and each morning we just wake up to even more of the horrible stuff.

We haven’t been able to get to our relatives to give them their Christmas presents either so Christmas is going to be delayed this year, until the roads are safe to drive on again.

Winter has come, the snow has fell,
Wee Josie’s nose is froze as well,
Wee Josie’s nose is frozen skintit,
Winter’s diabolic – intit!

I thought that I would inflict a terrible piece of Scottish doggerel poetry on you, just in case you weren’t feeling bad enough!

Haworth at Christmas

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I’ve been finding it difficult to get into the Christmas spirit this year, partly I think because there isn’t anything going on around here in the way of traditional celebrations. It’s all about parting everyone from their cash really, which is a shame.

Although I can’t say that I’m in any way religious (quite the opposite really), I still think that the mad commercialisation of Christmas is a complete pain in the neck. Let’s face it, the shops are full of tat at the moment, and expensive tat at that! And people feel the need to spend and spend and spoil their children rotten, even when they know that the kids get more fun out of simple things, like big boxes they can sit in and pretend that it is a car, bus, train or whatever.

Some people are still paying for Christmas by the time the next one comes along. I wish we could get back to the time when people just made something for their friends and relatives, if they feel the need to give something.

I must admit that we have never exchanged presents amongst our brothers and sisters as there are just too many of us and it is much simpler to give to the young people only, and our parents of course, (when they were alive).

So what has all this moaning got to do with Haworth in Yorkshire? We visited Haworth for the first time in the summer and we really enjoyed it, although we didn’t have enough time there. So we thought we would definitely go again and I did a bit of research and discovered that the good people of Haworth are up to all sorts throughout the year. The place really seems to be jumping and if we lived a bit closer I would definitely be visiting the Christmas market and going to see exactly what holly scroggling is. Singing carols at Haworth would just be perfect, I’m sure that you couldn’t stay ‘bah humbugish’ for long there.

I really fancy going to the vintage fair which they have later in the year, well it’s all recycling isn’t it, and wouldn’t it be great
to dress up in a 1940s tea dress for the 40s weekend that they have every year.

Have a look at the Haworth Village site to find out more.

Early Christmas – a bit of a rant

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Christmas just seems to get earlier and earlier every year, but I was absolutely amazed to see that someone quite close to where I stay has already got their Christmas tree up.

What on earth are they thinking of? Children can often drive you up the wall by constantly asking you when they can put the tree up, it’s almost as bad as the ubiquitous – Are we nearly there yet? – when you go on a journey. However, I happen to know that the offending house has no children in it, only one woman inhabitant. So she has absolutely no excuse and she must just have something mentally wrong with her.

By the time we get to Christmas the tree will be swathed with dust; lovely.

It’s bad enough having it all kicking off in the shops in August, it goes on for so long that by the time we get to the middle of December I am heartily sick of the whole thing, in fact I am completely scunnered.

Then we have the god botherers who don’t seem to realise that the good old pagans got there long before them and the Christians just hi-jacked the pagan festival which was designed to get us all through the long, dark winter days without cutting our throats.

So this blog is having nothing to do with the C word for at least another month. It is a Christmas free zone.

Long live grumpiness.