Starring:
Tony Blair as Larry
David Cameron as Moe
Gordon Brown as Curly

Rather than describing the effing eejits who drive up your ass leaving only enough room between your cars to swipe a credit card, or those who literally take aim at you with their car if you dare dart out onto the roundabout, or those who get too close in a supermarket queue, or park in a handicapped space, or those who are just plain rude and ignorant, I will pass over to Walt Whitman who sums it all up in Leaves of Grass on one of those days you're glad to get home and uncork a bottle of red....

"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained;
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition; They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
Not one is dissatisfied - not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth."

Up to £29.5m of tax payers money is to be used to pay the salaries of undercover council officers to police the smoking ban when it is introduced in July . The Officers are empowered to covertly photograph and film those who light up in public. They can also issue on the spot fines of £50.  Up to 1,200 officers are expected to be trained in the coming months. 

and once upon a time Vulgaria was a fictional land.............. 

Eight temporary road signs have been put up by Cheshire County Council to advise drivers of diversions while roadworks are carried out on the A49. The publicly funded signs, which are only in Polish, have been defended by the Council, who claim the police have been repeatedly called by polish drivers baffled by English road signs around the Cheshire-Shropshire border. The local Polish population is said to number approximately 4%, not all of which will be drivers. The council's highway engineer remarked "It is a practical and common sense approach".

I will never buy an Apple product because I refuse to be so transparently manipulated by a marketing company. I do not agree with reinforcing or exaggerating negative stereotypes of people based upon their appearance, particularly as we the consumers are unwittingly supporting and paying for it when we buy Apple. Our society has enough people with eating disorders and negative self images without public companies using these weaknesses to sell more products. This current Apple advertising campaign really puts everything down to "looks". I don't know about you but I buy a computer on the basis of what it can do rather than wanting to be "cool".

6:30am and I set the car alarm off four to five times. I forget the exact count. The first time it went off as I put the key in the door and it scared the bejesus out of me. I was still half asleep.

Shaken, I opened the door and popped the hood. The radiator seems to have sprung a leak and I had a cocktail of water and anti-freeze to pour in. 

When I went around to lift the hood the alarm went off yet again. Shite! The keys are on the car seat. 

As I try and jump to the car door I slip in the snow. Car alarm still wailing. I struggle like the proverbial upturned beetle before I eventually lunge at the keys, press the button and cut the alarm.

Two lights have now been turned on in neighbouring houses, but the alarm goes off another two to three times before I eventually close the car door and skulk off  in the dark.