Saturday 24 March 2007

A Post Box Post.


In 1965, John's Dad made and installed our old post box, ( background left.)
Today, some 42 years later, his son has erected it's replacement.
The old box has lasted well, but now leaks and the legs have given way - much like yours truly in fact!

Monday 19 March 2007

A Well Reasoned Warning.

The Daily Telegraph - 19 March 2007.
University scheme undermines family values and freedom

Sir -The allocation of higher education opportunities on the basis of class is exactly the policy which obtained under Soviet communism (Comment, March 17). It is a spite-filled measure which strikes at the very heart of the family and at the individual's desire to do the best they can for themselves and their own.
It transfers enormous power from the family and individuals to the state, since it is the state rather than individual achievement which will be the arbiter of who should get a university place.
It also supports the case made by the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky that the European Union - and Britain within it - is in many important respects a version of the Soviet Union.
In Britain, the removal of effective political power from Parliament to a faceless and unelected bureaucracy in Brussels; the vast and continuing increase in the scope and intrusiveness of the state in the minutiae of our lives from the earliest age; the proliferation of laws calculated to gag freedom of speech; the witch-hunts against dissenting political voices in public life and the universities and the use of the state broadcasting system, the BBC, as a means to further these developments, make this proposition ever harder to deny.
Slowly but surely, measure by measure, we are losing our right to call ourselves free people.
Colin Broughton, Epping, Essex

Thursday 15 March 2007

Nostalgia

Nostalgia made me buy a bottle of "Bay Rum" hair tonic recently. Not nostalgia for hair, (as my wife cruelly hinted,) but for the spicy fragrance of the traditional Indian barbers saloon in Jalan Kayu - Singapore, many moons ago.
I was surprised to note that the bottle had an expiry date printed on it. You would have to be pretty far gone to drink that stuff.