Only an MP, a supposed representative of the people, could publicly show the contempt in which she holds the average voter.  Emily Thornberry, Shadow Attorney General until she tweeted, had never seen a house draped with Cross of Saint George flags. She should get out more seems the obvious comment, but that might mean coming into contact with working class folk, so maybe not then.   We note she has only resigned as a shadow minister.  The lower salary as an MP must still be sufficiently attractive for her to hang on and keep taking from the public purse. The election is only a few months away so we can only hope memories of this tweet don’t dim.  Sadly, she seems a typical member of the so-called elite, many of whom inhabit parliament.  I’m sure she knows what is best for us ordinary mortals, though she has no concept of the lives we lead.  We’re beginning to think we need protection from this ilk.  To try to repair the damage, Ed Miliband has come out fighting, insisting Labour is the party of working people.  We’re not sure how he knows what a working person is since he’s never been one!

    Jeremy Vine, the cyclists Jeremy Clarkson it appears, has been clocked at over three times the speed limit in Hyde Park.  A similar level of excess in your car could easily result in a ban, but cyclists don’t need a licence.  Perhaps it’s time for a change, visible number plates for bikes, licences for their users. City centre CCTV records numerous incidences of cyclists on pavements, cycling through red lights, etc. but with no way of identifying the rider, they do so unscathed.  It’s not unusual to see eight or ten lycra terrorists riding two abreast, line astern, around our Hampshire villages.  Getting past them is equivalent to overtaking an eight-wheel truck, impossible for long stretches.  And woe betide if you try to squeeze past.  I’m thinking about keeping a picture of my father in the car. I can hold it against the passenger window as proof of parenthood when I pass the cycling equivalent of a rioting mob, essential to offset the abuse that pours forth.  It’s apparent that consideration is all one way if you ride a bike.  Surely it’s time to legislate to have visible ID on bikes so we have a level playing field.   

    A legendary great white shark, 11m long, and seen off Stewart Island is almost certainly female according to Clinton Duffy, New Zealand shark expert.  He added that they have evidence that male sharks risk their lives if they pick the wrong girl with whom to trifle.  François Hollande should have studied sharks!  Not satisfied with destroying his reputation in France, (650,000 books sold to date) Valérie Trierweiller has had her book translated into English and spent the weekend being interviewed by the media, including television, in the UK. Yesterday France, tomorrow the entire EU springs to mind.  At this rate she’ll make enough money to buy The Élysée Palace and evict Hollande before the voters do.  The Great whites could probably learn a thing or two from Valérie.

    Ladybird publishers have decided to drop gender specific children’s books after discussions with campaigners.  How on earth do these minor details become issues for discussion?  We can only assume that another fringe pressure group has nothing important on which to focus.  It seems that public toilets remain out of step, still defined in a gender specific terms.  Perhaps a pressure group will set their sights on equality, after all a toilet is a toilet.  Ladies would quickly get used to lowering seats that had been left in the upright position and a hanging door sign, blank on one side, the message ‘I’d give it a minute’ on the other, should resolve the other issue.  Come on you pressure groups let’s have equality in all things. 

    We’ve heard a lot about Black Friday and Cyber Monday this week.  Both days named after manic purchasing of Christmas presents on line.  They lead to a syndrome called Panic Wednesday in the middle of January as credit card bills arrive in the post.  Old gits are fortunate in the sense that we don’t buy many presents, certainly not for each other.  What the hell can you buy for mates in their seventies that they haven’t already got?  Most of us have clothes older than our grandchildren.  Mind you, I was tempted this week.  My wife received a mailshot offering tablets that will give her a longer lasting erection.  On that basis, I might send her for my next prostate examination!                     

    Jean-Claude Juncker now says he knew nothing about the deals that made Luxembourg rich by picking the pockets of his European Union allies.  Who would have thought that?  It happened on his watch but it was only billions of Euros, easily unnoticed, especially for a Brussels Eurocrat.  No wonder their accounts are never signed off.  At least our politicians only fiddle their expenses.  As far as we know, anyway!

    It has taken an ex-Prime Minister to put immigration in perspective.  John Major, in his speech to a foreign affairs think tank in Berlin, put it in very simple, but finally accurate terms.  We are a small island and simply cannot absorb the present, let alone projected numbers, of immigrants at the present speed of arrival.  It is not physically, or politically acceptable to the existing population.  We’re not racist or xenophobic, simply aware of the space and services implications of the sheer numbers that are coming. Lord Kelvin put numbers in perspective many years ago.

    “When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in

    numbers, you know something about it.  When you cannot express it in

    numbers, your  knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.”

Like most aspects of the EU, the average citizen craves real information.  Show us reality and we’ll probably make a sensible judgment about membership. What a shame a man like Kelvin isn’t a minister.  On reflection, I doubt he could have lived with the spin ridden crowd he would have had to join.

    After the battles that John Major fought with Eurosceptics when in Downing Street, he is clearly pro-Europe. We can only hope his message is heard in the EU because unfettered immigration could swing a referendum the way a majority of us don’t want it to go.  A common trading agreement always made sense, and that is what we voted for.  Sadly, it’s no longer what we’ve got.

    Kim Kardashian seems determined to give everybody a look at her backside.  The pictures of her with a glass of champagne standing on her ‘bared arse’ only drew a single comment in the pub.  “You couldn’t stand a decent pint on that.”  There didn’t seem much else to say.  Its as well she didn’t join our police force.  The Home Office is working on a new design for body armour, shaped to fit an increasing number of female officers that are having breast implants. The fear is that an attack on these officers may result in the implant rupturing.  The good news is that the body armour will be unisex, simply labeled formed or unformed.  Officials say that this will allow male officers with ‘man boobs’ to select the formed armour without embarrassment.  We hope the material is waterproof so the lads concerned can wear it in the showers to avoid smirks. We can’t wait for the latest lift and spread body armour, and that’s just for the blokes.

    The old gits are a pretty irreligious group for no particular reason that we can unearth, since logic suggests we’re moving nearer to our maker at a rate of knots.  However, we’ve found a religion on the web that has sparked an interest.  Pastafarianism is a belief in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  It’s believers wear colanders as hats.  It started in the US in 2005 as a satirical protest against the teaching, in some schools, of ‘intelligent design’ (a form of creationism) rather than evolution. The central tenet of the religion is the creation of the universe by a Flying Spaghetti Monster that had been drinking heavily.  We’ll drink to that – colanders on – amen.  We’re not aware of a UK branch of the religion and landlady, Pam didn’t help the inaugural meeting by refusing to lend us her colander for some ‘selfies’.  We’ll get our own back by putting copies of the supermarket ad about a Christmas lunch for £2.66 inside her menu for the £40 Christmas feast.  The next meeting of our newly discovered church (by us anyway) will be at The Duke and we’re taking our own colanders!      

    The Sunday Sport carried a headline a couple of weeks ago,  ‘MAN HAS SEX WITH TESCO VALUE LASAGNE’.  You never get that sort of behaviour in Lidl, even though the lasagne is cheaper!       

    Arch federalist Jean-Claude Juncker is just now beginning to look an interesting choice for President of the European Union.  Leaked documents show that in excess of 300 ‘sweetheart’ deals with multinational corporations were activated during his tenure as Prime Minister of Luxembourg.  With European partners scraping the barrel for income, it seems that Jean-Claude played beggar thy neighbour by saving billions in tax for corporations that traded in Europe.  What they did pay went into the Luxembourg coffers.   To avoid the possibility of legal actions, we must keep our minds on avoidance not evasion!  So, will Jean-Claude suffer for his immoral, rather than illegal behavior?  What a silly thought.  Of course he won’t.  He will simply keep his head down for a few weeks before continuing in his post as though nothing has come to light.  It seems likely that the EU won’t be getting their accounts signed off during Jean-Claude’s tenure.         

    I’m beginning to feel sorry for Ed Miliband.  As I read this, I still can’t believe I’ve written those words.  But as the brickbats fly from every side, many of them from his supporters, a serious nail has been knocked into his coffin.  Neil Kinnock has gone public to support him.  It’s a bit like the captain of the ill-fated Concordia running classes on navigation and leadership.  Perhaps Kinnock is going to teach Ed to walk on water.  Us older brethren remember when Kinnock tried it. Sadly the water wasn’t deep enough for the optimum result, but it never fails to make us laugh.  Ed’s brother, Washington based David Miliband, is CEO of the International Rescue Company, specialists in delivering aid to displaced peoples.  Maybe it’s time for Ed to start building bridges to the brother he shafted!  Meanwhile, Cameron must be praying that Ed survives as leader.  A replacement, any replacement as leader, would almost certainly guarantee a Labour majority.

    As another jihadi born in the UK turns suicide bomber, his family blame the British Government for allowing him to leave the country to fight for ISIS.  Perhaps they should look a little nearer  to home.

    We’ve always been fond of the Australian sense of humour and a 37-year-old bloke in Pilbara, Western Australia confirmed why.  In need of a drink, his car broken down, he detached the wings of his two-seater plane and taxied it all the way to the pub.  Unfortunately, that meant driving it down the main street of Pilbara.  He’s been arrested and charged with endangering lives.  We can only hope he got bailed before closing time!

    The Sun newspaper’s Dream Team fantasy football competition has lost what must have been one of their top prizes.  Readers can no longer win a date with a Page 3 model.  The Advertising Standards Authority received 1036 complaints about the potential prize, which caused the withdrawal.  We assume a large proportion of the complaints came from ‘real families’ in Birmingham.  The central sperm bank will also lose a significant number of deposits as entrants in the competition cease dreaming about winning the date.

    Education isn’t a subject that gets raised when we meet up for a beer, this week an exception.  National Union of Teachers representative Julie Davies is paid as a teacher, but hasn’t taught for 14 years.  Schools across Haringey in North London, pool funds to pay her £49,500/annum teacher’s salary while she works full time for the Union.  Many head teachers don’t want to continue to fund her being, hence the strike led by Davies.  It’s pretty obvious why she doesn’t want to see any change and we actually wondered if she still gets teachers holidays.  The big sufferers are the children and their parents; the children lose a portion of their education, the parents lose salary if they have to take time off work to look after their children.  The Union meantime using weasel words to say the children are their primary consideration.  We tried to think of a constructive solution, once the swearing stopped.  Keep funding Davies but insist she does two days a week in front of a class, with Ofsted monitoring her performance as a teacher.  We think retirement would soon become attractive.  In the meantime, it would be nice to see the parents affected by the strikes getting mobilised to expose this nonsense.  If ever there was a need for people power, it must be to challenge this blatant misuse of taxpayer’s money.    

    Turner prizewinning sculptor, Gillian Wearing, has produced a statue entitled a Real Birmingham Family, to stand outside the city library in the Midlands capital.  It consists of four figures.  Two women, one heavily pregnant, are holding the hands of two small boys. It is based on the families of two sisters, presumably unmarried, who live in the area. With no man in sight, we assume that the only item missing from the sculpture is an icing syringe! It may also offer a business opportunity. Genus has built a muti-million pound business based on the artificial insemination of cows. How about a similar business to meet the needs of women who prefer insemination to men?  Suggestions for a name for the company would be welcomed.  PFD Ltd is the one we liked from regulars at the pub. Penis Free Delivery if you didn’t get it. 

    Interestingly, perhaps appropriately, the unveiling of the statue coincided with the opening of the first national sperm bank, also in Birmingham. We still believe the sperm bank should be in Newark!  As we honour with our poppies, the dead of World War 1, we can’t help wondering what they would have thought of ‘no man’s land’ as applied to modern Britain. They probably wouldn’t have understood it any more than us old gits do.

    America’s mid term elections produced the predicted result, with The Democrats receiving a shellacking.  The House of Representatives was already lost and The Senate followed suit.  The result will almost certainly be seen as a judgment on Obama’s policies. With almost two years left of his presidency, future legislation will be difficult, though Obama will still hold the power of veto.   Hopefully, it won’t interfere with Obama’s golf.  Rumours suggest he’s managed more rounds than Tiger Woods in the recent past.  In fairness, Tiger often has his hands too full to concentrate on his swing.

    Angela Merkel and David Cameron are finally taking positions on free movement across the EU, if we can believe their spokespersons.  Der Spiegel quotes government sources that suggest that Merkel thinks the UK has ‘neared the point of no return’ within the EU.  Now George Osborne says that the EU is not working for Britain.  Perhaps we’re reaching the stage where some cards might be laid on the table by the principals.  In the UK there is sufficient evidence to show that unlimited immigration is of considerable concern to the electorate; even our politicians are beginning to understand that at last.  Germany, with its low birth rate, encourages immigration.  However, Merkel can’t ignore the fact that The AfD won seats in regional parliament for the first time this year.  The AfD also look for change to the way the EU operates.  Maybe Merkel and Cameron will have more in common than they realize if voters raise their voices even higher.       

    Parisian, Josselin de Rocquemaurel, has a book to sell, but we don’t expect many sales in the UK.  After living here for 13 years he doesn’t seem to have enjoyed it very much.  His book, La Reine, la City et les Grenouilles (do your own translation) paints a picture of a person with much to criticize about the country he has chosen to live in.  His critical comments about unwelcoming people, cost of living and public services suggest dissatisfaction.  Then he calls England a French ‘border town’ due to the number of his compatriots who now live here.  Touché springs to mind!  Maybe it is French taxes and the left wing government in France that drives his compatriots across the channel for a better life.  City financier, Rocquemaurel, earns a big salary, the sort that François Hollande would be keen to decimate if Josselin returned to Paris, an unlikely event in our estimation.

    Yet another ‘no’ vote for Scotland and this one will really hurt.  Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible has named a Japanese single malt as the best in the world.  Whisky expert Murray sampled 4,700 different varieties to arrive at his conclusion.  They will have to beat his liver to death when he passes on!  Yamazaki Single Malt Sherry Cask 2013 has won the title.  I doubt Pam will stock it at the pub, and we’re not sure we could pronounce it after we’d had a couple.