So there I was, perusing my morning Telegraph, when I was hit by the full force of the most colossal earthquake to hit these isles in a thousand years:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7267567.stm
Or to be strictly accurate, for there is nothing in God’s own creation that pleases me more than accuracy, I was hit by the full force of the most inane whittering about the greatest non-event to hit these isles in a thousand years.
Most of England, from the Home Counties to some awful northern place, was subjected to a minor tremor, no greater than a knee-trembler in a side-street. To read the accounts of the survivors (i.e. everybody), this was the most terrifying event of their sad benighted little lives.
My God, is this really the land of Churchill, of Haig, Kitchener and Butcher Cumberland? Of Nelson, Wellington and Rodney? Of Hawkins, Drake and Raleigh (who still makes splendid bicycles, I might add)?
Switching on my television set, after the idiot houseboy had locked himself in the coal cellar, I was assailed by photographs showing the devastation which, as far as I could gather, consisted of a bent chimney pot, some skew-whiff brickwork and two cracked teacups.
Why oh why are we so unable to display the stiff upper lip that saw us through two world wars and entry into the Common Market? Whatever happened to that Bulldog Breed, the insouciant officer class and the stolid cockney chappie, all too eager to shrug off the latest assault from the Bosche with a crude working class quip (or punch in the mouth to the nearest dachsund)?
It shames me to admit it, but our slitty eyed brethren in the shaky islands on the Pacific Rim must be chortling inscrutably at our squalid hysteria...
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
ASBO or ASBEE?
Good bloody God, is there no end to the onward march of this repellent police state?! I refer, of course, to the terrifying news that the government is now tagging bumblebees:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7258822.stm
Government ‘scientists’ attach tiny little electronic tags to these innocent, flighty little beasts, and use cowardly computerised devices to spy on the little chaps as they go about their daily activities. Can there possibly be a more flagrant abuse of our bees’ freedoms? A more intrusive intrusion into the lives of our fellow Britons?
Man’s Best Friend, the humble bumblebee, is reduced to the status of a common criminal, bracketed with the hooded young scum who infest our streets like a pimply plague. The gallant bee, defender of this sceptered isle since time immemorial, betrayed by neo-Labour gauleiters not fit to dust the pollen from their fragile little wings...
What child has not delighted at the wonderful food made possible by the modest bee, the sweet and tasty morsels conjured into existence by that monarch of insects? Who, after all, but a bee could have invented the strawberry cheesecake? Or the creme caramel, or the spotted dick? All of them, and more, harvested from the luxurious hives on our greatest country estates.
Or the contributions to medical science made possible by bees. It was, as every schoolboy knows, a bee who discovered penicillin.
And the glorious bee has made this island fastness of ours safe from the filthy, greasy, foreign sneaks who have long coveted our English freedoms. Who has never been moved by the story of King Canute (or, more properly, the stupid Cnut), that slovenly Scandiwegian usurper who, upon trying to turn back a swarm of Anglo-Saxon bees, was stung to death on a beach?
Or The Tale of St Bedevere and the Bee? It is to that inestimable holy personage that we owe our Christian heritage, and it is to that anonymous bee that we owe St Bedevere’s victory over the pagan Visigoths at the Battle of Spindle-on-the-Wold.
It is to an English, or possibly Belgian, bee that we owe our country’s eternal gratitude after the heroic arthropod stung the ghastly Corsican in his haemorrhoidal nether regions at the Battle of Waterloo, distracting him at a crucial moment. Was it not the Iron Duke himself who, upon sighting a regiment of bees, said, “I don’t know what they'll do to the enemy but, by God, they scare seven shades of shit out of me”?
And if the awful Austrian Herr Hitler had not had a mortal phobia of bees, the good Lord alone knows what would have happened at Dunkirk...
As I have said before, but it can never be said too often (especially to Blinkers 'Blinky' Blenkinsop, late of The Queen's Own Hooligans, due to encroaching senility), I didn’t fight and die in two world wars to make this sceptered isle safe for a craven crowd of neo-stalinist, backsliding, spineless, control freaks to start spying on bees!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7258822.stm
Government ‘scientists’ attach tiny little electronic tags to these innocent, flighty little beasts, and use cowardly computerised devices to spy on the little chaps as they go about their daily activities. Can there possibly be a more flagrant abuse of our bees’ freedoms? A more intrusive intrusion into the lives of our fellow Britons?
Man’s Best Friend, the humble bumblebee, is reduced to the status of a common criminal, bracketed with the hooded young scum who infest our streets like a pimply plague. The gallant bee, defender of this sceptered isle since time immemorial, betrayed by neo-Labour gauleiters not fit to dust the pollen from their fragile little wings...
What child has not delighted at the wonderful food made possible by the modest bee, the sweet and tasty morsels conjured into existence by that monarch of insects? Who, after all, but a bee could have invented the strawberry cheesecake? Or the creme caramel, or the spotted dick? All of them, and more, harvested from the luxurious hives on our greatest country estates.
Or the contributions to medical science made possible by bees. It was, as every schoolboy knows, a bee who discovered penicillin.
And the glorious bee has made this island fastness of ours safe from the filthy, greasy, foreign sneaks who have long coveted our English freedoms. Who has never been moved by the story of King Canute (or, more properly, the stupid Cnut), that slovenly Scandiwegian usurper who, upon trying to turn back a swarm of Anglo-Saxon bees, was stung to death on a beach?
Or The Tale of St Bedevere and the Bee? It is to that inestimable holy personage that we owe our Christian heritage, and it is to that anonymous bee that we owe St Bedevere’s victory over the pagan Visigoths at the Battle of Spindle-on-the-Wold.
It is to an English, or possibly Belgian, bee that we owe our country’s eternal gratitude after the heroic arthropod stung the ghastly Corsican in his haemorrhoidal nether regions at the Battle of Waterloo, distracting him at a crucial moment. Was it not the Iron Duke himself who, upon sighting a regiment of bees, said, “I don’t know what they'll do to the enemy but, by God, they scare seven shades of shit out of me”?
And if the awful Austrian Herr Hitler had not had a mortal phobia of bees, the good Lord alone knows what would have happened at Dunkirk...
As I have said before, but it can never be said too often (especially to Blinkers 'Blinky' Blenkinsop, late of The Queen's Own Hooligans, due to encroaching senility), I didn’t fight and die in two world wars to make this sceptered isle safe for a craven crowd of neo-stalinist, backsliding, spineless, control freaks to start spying on bees!
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