Looking back over the news from the last few weeks it was hard not to see a common thread.

-       the NHS being used as of right by visitors to the UK – free of charge because no checks are applied, naturally.

-       E111 cards being obtained by European nationals for use in their home countries – paid for by the NHS, naturally.

-       foreign students owing millions in cash loans, wrongly allocated due to inadequate checks, naturally.

-       Kids Company receiving millions of government handouts with no adequate controls on the way they spent it, naturally. 

-       legal aid support for illegal immigrants in their fight to remain in the UK, naturally.

Perhaps it is our natural cynicism but all these examples suggest a lack of government. Clearly questions should be asked of our civil service, but they report to ministers. What is very clear is that those tasked with spending our taxes have little concern for the way that they do it. They probably don’t even see it as real money. No surprises really, but when you link these items rather than looking at them in isolation, the extent of our wasted taxes causes more than a degree of pain. Will there ever come a day when a minister attempts to manage his/her department, sets simple clear objectives and tasks individuals to meet them, and be accountable for successes or failures? What a silly question.

    We were talking about the recent trend for parents to use double-barreled Christian names on their newborn. It seems a natural step forward from the manufactured names that have appeared in recent years. Let’s hope Fanny, popular in Victorian times, doesn’t have a resurgence of popularity. The possible additions to make it double-barreled could have a child on anti-depressants within days of starting junior school! (By sheer chance I went into Tesco a day after I wrote this and heard a woman call to her daughter. Her shout of Adora and the potential combination with the old name I mentioned earlier, cracked me up. Other shoppers probably felt sorry for an old git that suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter for no apparent reason.) Who let him out without a carer they were probably asking?

    A windy lane (3 miles long) near where a couple of us live has received some sort of designation as a cycling route. Clearly the Lycra fraternity have heard about it and reacted with alacrity.  It’s now unusual to transit the lane without coming across cyclists. It’s almost impossible to pass them as well. The twists and turns are constant and you take their life in your hands if you try to overtake. Imagine the frustration of finding yourself behind a convoy of thirteen of them. That’s the record so far.  And they built a convoy of 22 cars behind them. (I’m not suffering from OCD, I just had to know). There are spots in the lane where the cyclists could have pulled in to let the cars through – another pigs might fly thought. Needless to say, they didn’t. But I’m just another inconsiderate motorist I suppose.

    It’s hard to keep Kids Company out of the news at the moment, a superb piece in Tuesday’s Newsnight programme. They shared the contents of an email that came from Kids Company to The Cabinet Office as the organization faced collapse. It gave an apocalyptic picture of the chaos that would result from the collapse. Arson attacks on government buildings, increases in knife and gun crime, starvation and modern day slavery were quoted as potential risks. The email appeared to have come from Alan Yentob, though we can’t believe it did. Whoever wrote it is of no importance really. It simply reinforces the fact that the organization run by ‘fruit salad lady' was totally out of control. Nuts and fruit salad sounds like a vegetarian picnic so maybe that’s what they were running.

    Silence will now reign for a couple of weeks due to a previous commitment.    

    Many of the conversations we have in the pub regard public service initiatives that don’t make much sense. This week’s ‘what sort of pillock came up with this’ discussion was about banning smoking outside pubs. Outside no less! The Royal Society for Public Health came up with this one. They want exclusion zones outside the pub. The well accepted inside ban, plus alcohol breath testing, has led to the demise of thousands of pubs in recent years. Most of the establishments still in operation have a small roofed enclosure outside for the smokers who need a drag to supplement their food or drink. In cold weather the tobacco requirement makes them pay for the pleasure with discomfort at the very least. Not to mention having to repeat all the conversational gems they missed while being outside. No complaints about that, but to make smokers move a distance away from the pub seems brainless.  The society suggests that making the habit more inconvenient will encourage people to give up. Rubbish. All it will do is reduce the number of customers using the pubs. A better initiative would be to ban all vegetarians and curry eaters from pubs. Both groups have internal organs with the ability to produce evil smelling gas, some of it prone to creep quietly out, generally accompanied by a sly grin, and a glance around to try to place blame elsewhere. We can think of many occasions when a decent cigar, drawing well, would have enhanced the aroma in the pub. Surely the Royal Society should protect us from that.

    Clarkson and his merry band are advertising for producers for their new show on Amazon Prime. Anyone with what boxing calls a glass jaw should not apply! The best line in the ad says ‘we live or die depending on the quality of our ideas’. We have to assume that JC has raised the stakes for anyone who can’t produce a steak or two for a late night sitting. It seems likely that a punch in the mouth has become a minor reprimand.

   Whenever we talk about JC it is invariably Clarkson on our lips, but suddenly he has a serious challenger. We’re nor sure how Jeremy Corbyn would fair in an average family saloon, but the way he is pulling in the crowds suggest he could be the next Stig. Nothing seems to faze him or derail his bandwagon. The Labour so called ‘Big Guns’ are lining up to attack him but he refuses to respond, simply going on his merry way, delivering his views to cheering audiences. And as a sign Corbyn is winning, Andy Burnham is now sidling up to him, saying they could work well together in government. That should tell you all you need to know about ‘anything to give me a chance’ Burnham. And finally the clunking fist of Gordon Brown has been lured out of hiding. He spoke his piece, getting the television audience he must be missing, but no more than a handful in the live audience. In his normal decisive manner he never mentioned Corbyn by name, simply savaging everything his Labour colleague believes in. So Blair, Campbell, and now Brown have all come out against the third JC.  Interestingly, only Corbyn of those mentioned voted against war in Iraq. Maybe that is why he has believers. RIP Chilcot.

    Interesting news has come from Ohio State University. They have managed to grow a human brain in a laboratory dish. The brain is comparable to that of a few week old foetus. Clearly more work is required before these brains can be transplanted but already they could offer improved thought processes to many of our elected politicians.

    Had an interesting discussion with Adrian yesterday. Dignitas gets fairly mixed coverage in the media and we were pondering a better way to take that final journey. Our chat drifted onto the idea of Dignitas Cruises. Live the high life for your last couple of weeks before taking your final barbiturate laced champagne in the comfort of four-star facilities with a sea view. This could be followed by burial at sea. What a classy way to go. We shall begin our pitches to cruise companies in the near future. Our wives keep mumbling something about sick minds but what do they know.

    The bulls are getting fed up with the runs they still have to make in Spain. They’ve raised the ante by killing three runners in the last 24 hours. Their message to the runners couldn’t be clearer.     

Find another way to annoy livestock!

    Recent news caused me to take a look at the Statement of Common Purpose and Values for the police force. I particularly like,

        to pursue and bring to justice those who break the law; to protect, help   

        and reassure the community with common sense and sound judgement.

Sara Thornton, leader of the country’s chief constables, appears to be working to a different brief. Her suggestion that victims of burglary could speed police response by uploading crime pictures and emailing them to the local station made us laugh. She seems to assume that IT kit like laptops and tablets won’t be stolen. Maybe she wants burglars to take ‘selfies’ and email them direct to any police station that is still open. And if the burglary is in the Leicestershire Police area, only houses with even numbers need to send the emails. Odd numbers don’t count as a crime. And if you live in a house with a name rather than a number, send a pigeon! Police stations that are being closed down will shortly be converted to pigeon lofts. An officer will visit each loft daily to feed the pigeons and collect messages.  He will transfer any messages to a specially designed on line form and transmit it to his nearest station, where it will join the queue to await response. For an immediate response to a burglary we recommend the words racially motivated, homophobic and Savile be included in the conversation when you telephone 999.  Even if the burglary occurred in the Sixties, this terminology will guarantee an overwhelming response with no budget or time restriction on the investigation.

    It has been hard to turn on radio or television for the last few days without hearing the dulcet tones of Camila Batmanghelidjh – pronounce it at your own risk. A colourful character, she brings to mind visually those tins of fruit salad we used to get – multi-coloured chunks of fruit with no discernable taste.  The collapse of Kids Company appears to have been the result of misleading allegations, mainly from the media, to hear Camila talk. No fault lies with the lady herself, though she led the organization. She has an answer of sorts for every point put to her. The one I enjoyed most was her comment that the latest funds, the ones that never happened, would have helped them to begin to build reserves. To start thinking about reserves almost twenty years after you started the organisation sounds naïve at best. Clearly, Camila has no head for business and that poses questions for the trustees. What was their role, since Camila’s business knowledge was somewhere between limited and non-existent. Mind you, chairman Alan Yentob, draws his salary from a charity called the BBC, so draw your own conclusions.  Unfortunately, the idea behind Kids Company was sound. There are significant numbers of emotionally challenged children in the country who don’t fit the norms. They need the sort of nurturing support that Kids Company delivered. Hopefully, Kids Company will be resurrected, but with proper controls and accountability, freeing Camila to move on to her next project. She’d make a great replacement for Sepp Blatter and find the FIFA brown envelope accounting fairly straightforward.

    You may remember the Lib Dems. They were a significant political party that received a serious ‘Clegging’ at the last election.  Their manifesto called for a major cull of the Lords, suggesting the numbers be reduced to 450 heads. I’m not sure how that fits with their demand for another 10 seats in the next tranche of £300/day freeloaders.

    Donald Trump has identified a new way to win votes in his charge for the Republican nomination. Any challenging question or statement is met by vitriol, no holds barred, the more personal and outrageous the better, it seems. How he gets away with it while sporting that hairstyle is beyond us. But it seems to work in the eyes of voters, or so the polls say. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn takes an opposite approach. As past and present Labour ‘Big Guns’ suggest he’d be a disaster as leader he refuses to be drawn into a slanging match, remaining calm and restating his position on government.  His manifesto seems extreme to those of us old enough to remember what a disaster nationalized industries were, but he’s gaining traction. Will either of them win? We’ll watch with interest.

    Put it down to our age but we couldn’t avoid laughing when we talked about assaults on teachers, parents and staff by children aged 5-11. If we lived under the rule of ISIS we could understand it. We’d think hard about challenging even a 5 year old with an AK47. Maybe teacher training should include sessions where they are taught to shout ‘boo’ in a very loud voice! That said, we couldn’t remember problems of this type when we went to school. I’m sure education gurus would tell us that the methods by which we were taught and disciplined restrained our creativity. Maybe that is why we are frequently shocked by the behavior – teachers would call it creativity - of some of the children we see and hear in public places. Ain’t progress wonderful! Oddly enough, five Chinese teachers who worked for a month in one of our local Hampshire schools tend to agree with us. They found many of the children disruptive and unable to concentrate. But what do they know? After all, Chinese schools are only at the top of international ratings for maths, sciences and literacy while the ratings for UK schools is mediocre. The headmaster of the school concerned said he found the lessons delivered by the Chinese teachers boring. Let’s hope their Chinese students aren’t competing for jobs with his students in the not too distant future.   

    Chaotic scenes at Calais as illegal immigrants go for broke and stampede the laughingly named barriers in their attempts to reach the UK.  I have similar fencing at the end of my garden to dissuade deer from eating the roses! Here we are in the 21^st Century and we don’t appear to have the technical competence to stop these marauding bands. We can only assume that political leaders on both sides of the channel find it impossible to differentiate ‘can’t’ from ‘don’t want to’. The technology and materials are available, only the will to take action is missing. That said, an answer lies on our own shores. These immigrants are illegal, hence the adjective. If it were made clear that all illegal immigrants would be returned immediately to their home country, the flood would stop and human rights lawyers would have to seek another way to earn their exorbitant fees. Some hotels would also need to seek holidaying customers that might demand a reasonable level of service.

    With the news that Clarkson and the lads are joining Amazon TV, there should be some decent programmes to watch next year.  Top Gear and Top Gear Light, which one will claim the number one spot. We thought we’d seen it all while JC, Hammond and May were with the BBC, but with bigger budgets and the gloves off they’ll be flying without safety nets next year. Maybe their new show should be named Extreme Gear. The BBC version got our thinking caps on. Chris Evans is on the short side so he’ll find it difficult to find a vertically challenged Hammond lookalike. Maybe he could borrow one of the disruptive kids that assault teachers. And for May we expect a tall, mini-skirted replacement – probably of the opposite gender, but who knows? Let battle commence.

    We like the advice from Jean Monnet University in France.  They say that a fifteen-minute walk five times a week would be life extending for older people. That’s our sort of advice. We worked out that parking at the far end of many of our regular pub haunts would meet the requirement. The improved fitness would probably mean we could stand an extra glass of wine with lunch.

    Scottish education has generally been applauded as high quality but under the SNP we can expect remarkable results in the future.  This year’s higher math’s exam has received flack from students who sat the test. The students took to social media – required reading for politicians – to complain that the test was too difficult when compared to past papers. Their complaints received instant attention. The Scottish Qualifications Authority decided the paper was harder than it should have been and adapted the marking to take this into account.  Their ‘adaptation’ dropped the pass mark to 34%. Students in England will note the change with glee. The lesson – social media can generate significant improvements in your exam grades. Watch next year's results.

    David Cameron is talking tough about the Chilcot report (again) saying he wants a date for publication.  We won’t be holding our breath, Dave. RIP Chilcot.