Crisp blue sky, a beautiful sunny Sunday morning and so much to be done - cars to be washed, grass to be mown, excursions to be made (and that’s before one even starts to think about golf). And so what do I do? I spend the whole damned day feeling sorry for myself as I sweat through “the last of the summer colds”. The excursion is to Petersfield to buy Kleenex tissues, Benylin Day & Night and LemSip powders (Max Strength). The grass gets neglected, the cars get neglected, and I feel lousy.
It’s time to rant about Ken Clarke. Obviously he’s the best qualified candidate to lead the Tories – that is if you judge these things on experience and the well-tested law of “Buggins’s turn, next”. Well, it would be a calamity for the Conservative Party, probably a near-terminal calamity if he were to be elected. Watching him on TV this morning he carries all the scars and baggage of the last Conservative government (all those years ago), and is palpably the wrong man for the job. He just doesn’t have the charisma (or youth) to stand any chance of winning an election. The Tories must produce a new Disraeli, a top-class statesman to bring a sense of vibrancy to Parliament and put an end to the stagnancy and cynicism of the “New Labour” epoch in British politics.
Who else to rant about? Kate Moss and Wayne Rooney are way outside my league. If I made as much money as them at their respective ages, and was as good doing what I do as they are doing what they do (wow, that’s a bit convoluted), then I might be qualified to comment. They’ll both end up with peerages for distinguished service to British football/fashion and people will laugh at their youthful misdemeanours.
I’ll end on a cautionary note – on the dangers of auto-response. You know, you’re sitting watching TV or trying to do a Sudoku puzzle and the wife fires a series of questions at you – mostly trivial and unimportant. Lulled by a sense of false security you switch on auto-response and reply “yes, dear” to every question while paying more attention to other matters. Suddenly (as happened last night) I found that I had agreed to go on a research project “boot camp” to lose weight. Oh, strewth. I know that I have a Pickwickian problem holding my trousers up nowadays (Humpty Dumpty wore bracers), but this is ridiculous.
