We imagine there will be a flood of EU driving instructors heading for Holland in the New Year. The Dutch Government has just introduced a new law called ‘Ride for a Ride’. The law allows driving instructors to accept sex as payment for lessons. The learners must be over eighteen and there is no indication if payment has to be made immediately after the lesson. We can imagine traffic jams all over the place if instructors demand payment as the lesson ends.  It will make ‘dogging’ (ask a friend to explain the term if you don’t know it) - into a major spectator sport. The alternative will be to bank the payments, saving up for a rainy day perhaps. We expect the death rate among Dutch driving instructors to trend upwards during the next few years as they spend their savings too quickly and overstretch themselves, so to speak!  

    We were looking at some notes left on car windscreens by third parties and one caught our eye.

‘My name is Jack and by accident touched your car when parking. Someone saw me do it so I’m pretending to leave my details. Sorry.’

This one rang a bell with a couple of the Old Gits but they didn’t leave a note – just moved their car to a distant parking bay. Come on, admit it, we’ve all done it or would do so if we thought we could get away with it!

    Katie Hopkins, our female version of Donald Trump, has had her television chat show binned after one episode.  It drew an audience of just 69,000 viewers. Clearly, giving offence doesn’t always generate followers! She can consider herself Trumped.

    Another note on a car windscreen in Liverpool caught our eye. The car had been left overnight and seemed certain to be booked the following morning when parking restrictions came into force again. But at least the driver tried.

  Dear Mr/s Traffic Warden,

I will be at my car by 10.30 AM – promise!

Please do not book me, I had a Christmas pint with the lads and didn’t want to drink and drive, here is a packet of crisps on me!!

Happy Christmas.

He left two other comments under arrows to make certain whom they applied to. One pointed to the crisps under his windscreen wiper with the words Traffic Warden. A second arrow pointed to another message.

 If you are not the traffic warden please don’t rob the crisps..… don’t be that guy ….nobody likes that guy.

Sadly we’ll never know the result of his efforts, but free crisps in Liverpool – we are not hopeful!

    Listeners to Austria’s Antennae Carinthia radio station got an earful of Wham’s Last Christmas. Host, Joe Kohlhofer, was determined to get Christmas off with a bang and played the song 24 times on repeat during his 8 a.m drive time show, after first locking the door to the studio, to make sure nobody could stop him. Calls from listeners begging him to stop were ignored. Joe lacks taste. If he’d played Noddy Holder’s Merry Christmas for his entire show he would have received plaudits!

    There’s a website of which book lovers need to be aware. BookBub delivers a daily email alert about free and deeply discounted ebooks that are available for a limited time. It’s well worth looking at. The Iron Duke Share Club, a parable of our times, will be available free on Kindle on the run up to Christmas. Well worth a read for anybody who thinks the ‘bankers’ make too much bonus.

     President Obama has accused Donald Trump of exploiting working class fears with his outspoken campaign for nomination. He may have a point but Trump’s rhetoric is registering loud and clear with voters. Right now, the voters believe Trump rather than Obama. As The President defends his administrations efforts against ISIS, voters look on from a distance and what do they perceive? Probably that Putin is taking the battle to the terrorists while NATO plays a supporting role at best. We’re not sure words will convince the masses Mr President.

    Only a couple of days to go so all that remains is to wish a Happy Christmas and a Healthy New Year to all our readers.  Back in 2016.

    We have recently been introduced to Vargic’s Miscellany of Curious Maps. It offers great statistics in map form. We’ve found it interesting to look at several statistics to see if we can find relativities.

e.g. The ladies with the largest boobs tend to come from Russia, with the southern states of the USA a close second. It seemed logical to check if the big boobs attracted well-endowed men. They didn’t.  In fact, both areas came well down the list in terms of size, fourth place in the world to be exact, and a similar size in inches! It seems logical to assume that Russia and the southern states of the USA have some unhappy ladies and some of the most embarrassed men. ‘Show me yours and I’ll show you mine’ can only end in disaster for both parties. It comes as no surprise that both geographical areas have the highest divorce rates. As we expected, the UK is middle of the road, with C cup women and 5.5inch men. Never has half an inch seemed so important! Seeing the world in cartographical terms is quirky but great fun. It also helps when you’re choosing holiday venues. For its interesting history and architecture we’re considering St Petersburg again this year. Honestly, we love antiquities.

    We’ve never cruised with AIDA, but any that have and sought medical help will be asking questions now. A doctor who has been treating passengers and crew for five years has been exposed as a fake. The names of the ships he worked on are being kept under wraps, but any ladies who had to strip when they saw the doctor with seasickness might now understand why!

    The Welsh Government has proposed a law that makes people go through a ‘cooling off’ period before having a tattoo; it could become a criminal offence to tattoo somebody who was drunk. Sad really, since shopping has become more interesting as crop tops and hipster jeans reveal memorable tattoos. Many of them challenge your creativity as you try to work out where they begin and end, let alone what they represent. Our winner to date is a large young woman who appeared to have a grape vine emerging from between the cheeks of her bottom. We can only guess where the grapes are at present. We estimate that with normal ‘southwards aging’ we should be able to identify the grape variety within ten years.

    In the first Saudi municipal elections in which women were allowed to vote the ladies have won seats, at least four. We’re not sure how voters will recognize their elected members, but that’s not much different from the UK where they don’t hide their faces.

    A suspected drink driver in Tadcaster ran from his car and tried to hide in a Nativity scene built in a large shed. We tried to work out what role he assumed. Clearly not a wise man, he may have been fooled by the message ‘Jesus Saves’. Apparently it doesn’t apply to driving licences.

    After calls for an ambulance went unanswered, a woman in South Delhi gave birth in an Uber taxi after it got stuck in traffic on the way to the hospital. The woman’s family asked the taxi driver to name the child and he did - Uber. On reflection, it sounds slightly better than Ambulance!

    Before Tim Peake blasts into space he may have to bow to the superstition surrounding the launch. Yuri Gagarin stopped the bus on the way to his launch and had a pee on the back right wheel. That impressed us since our nerves would have demanded a release from the other exit. Ever since, astronauts have continued the act as superstition demands. Whilst the superstition is associated with Gagarin, many believe it began with Laika, the stray dog that flew in Sputnik 2, but cocked her leg on the way to the launch.

    When Angela Merkel made her ‘all welcome’ speech about refugees she thought it would raise her already high profile. It did, but not in the way she expected. As her popularity plummets she has been forced to rethink her position. In a speech at the Christian Democrat conference she finally said that the time had come to ‘dramatically decrease’ the number of migrants coming to Germany. She repeated her call for a unified European response, code for quotas. That won’t happen. She took the cork out of the bottle and they never fit as well when you try to replace them.

    We hadn’t seen or heard of The Tremeloes since we shook a leg to them in the sixties. As soon as their names came up we managed an accurate but tuneless rendering of Yellow River and Here Comes my Baby. It is probably due to our age that we even remembered the words. Why did their names come up? Because two of them have been accused of indecently assaulting a girl in 1968. Not a typing error – 1968! A photograph of the two accused, Rick Westwood and Leonard Hawkes, showed two old blokes who could have been on a pensioners outing to the shops. We tried to recollect anything any one of us did in 1968. As a group, we couldn’t think of one specific event from that year – no surprise really. So what will the police use as evidence against this pair, apart from what they’re told by the accuser. The only certainty is that Westwood and Hawkes reputations will be damaged even if the case is dropped. Since the Jimmy Savile events came to light, accusers of old stars have crept out of the woodwork. Over half the accusations have held no water but the mud will stick. It’s time the accusers were made as public as the accused.

    The Siberian city of Novosibirsk had its moment of fame last week. A former soldier, whose wife was a glamorous member of the Kremlin’s United Russia Party, brought their sex in the back seat of her car to an explosive climax by pulling the pin on a grenade. The world moved for both of them, but they were in no shape for a post sex cigarette. 

    An interesting new trend has begun for users of The Underground system in London. A group called Overweight Haters Limited is handing out cards to people on the stations that they perceive as fat – only women as far as we can ascertain. The postcard has the single word FAT on one side and a lengthy message about why they hate Fatties on the other. British Transport police are investigating the handouts that have upset recipients. The company named on the cards isn’t registered at Companies House (there’s a surprise) but it raises interesting possibilities. Getting knocked from pillar to post in the rush for a tube isn’t unusual, shouting as trolleys are rammed into your ankles in supermarkets and people letting doors go to swing into you are daily events, so why not a card for that. We thought hard about the key word, INCONSIDERATE obvious but far to long for a postcard. We finally settled on WANKER, short and to the point. So think about your behavior in future or some tosser may hand you the latest card.

    Aveiro, in Portugal, must have something in the water to promote long and very active life. A 91-year-old woman appears to have suffocated during a sex game with her 49-year-old neighbour. Her death is believed to be a tragic accident, though the victim wore a broad smile. A neighbour said the 49-year-old often went to the old ladies house to do odd jobs. We couldn’t have put it better ourselves!

    Pope Francis began The 29^th Holy Year with a call to set aside ‘fear and dread’. With the Vatican airspace closed, a ban on the transport of petrol, gas, weapons, explosives and fireworks in Rome, machine guns in the streets, he clearly isn’t relying on prayer.

    Baba Vanga, a blind Bulgarian clairvoyant is said to have predicted the rise of ISIS (Daesh). The lady died 20 years ago but followers claim her predictions proved highly accurate, the Boxing Day tsunami and global warming as examples. Almost forty years ago she predicted a ‘great Muslim war’ and the establishment of a caliphate that would have Rome as its capital. Maybe the Pope is taking note of the ‘Nostradamus from the Balkans’ and has taken the first steps to protect his domicile.

    Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies is at it again. She’s now calling for flexible working hours and arrangements for menopausal women. We see it as sexist since several of us shared the menopause with our wives and suffered accordingly. But we agree with her on one thing. Apparently she likes a decent drop of wine.

    Donald Trump continues to offend as he fights for the republican nomination – or does he? A radio phone-in in Ohio about his ban Muslims from the USA received overwhelming support. It poses an interesting dilemma for his opponents. His views are extreme but are they at odds with voters?  And if he wins – what then?