After 14 days of continual rain, it finally stopped and the sun appeared last Friday resulting in the hottest day of the year so far. The weather has been absolutely glorious and at long last some serious grass cutting has been performed by me and my two neighbours, Roger Moor and Ogri. The wet weather has played havoc with gardening schedules and as a by product there has been a bumper crop of mosquitoes and caterpillars. The mosquitoes made a right meal out of me on Sunday evening as i sat outside watching the stars and the said caterpillars have munched their way through a complete red berry bush and all I have left on display is a twig! I hate to say it but I am going for the chemical fix.
The long running saga of MP’s expenses continues to rumble on with some members of the cabinet announcing that they will stand down at the next election. This is simply not good enough. If an MP stands down at an election then they receive a “parachute payment” that could be as much as 50K sterling plus a “winding down allowance” of almost as much again. If they stand down at any other time of year apart from an election year they get nothing. They are still milking the system and announcing that they are following the rules. They should resign today and get in line on the dole queue. For us mere mortals who get caught with our hands in the till it is the sack, a possible criminal conviction and years on unemployment benefit with nothing. I said in an earlier post that I had never seen British politics sink so low and to be at a lower point of esteem at any other time in my life. I was wrong; it is lower today but not as low as it will be tomorrow. The politicians will only have themselves to blame if a minority extreme party such as the BNP take up a lot of seats.
This brings me to another worrying point, I mentioned again in a previous post, a comparison with the earlier depressions of the early 1900’s and the 1930’s and the consequences that followed. It would seem that a whole lot of countries are in the re-armament business today. China has announced an expansion of its fleet to cope with the size of the South Pacific fleet of the US and North Korea has ended its 53 year truce with South Korea. At the moment it sounds like a lot of sabre rattling but then again so did Hitler’s military build up and invasion of the low lands prior to his invasion of Poland.
At least when we see the many vapour trails across the sky followed by a few mushroom clouds we will at least know that those cheating thieving scum who used to represent us will not be in government bomb proof shelters but stuck out here with the rest of us.