The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, to my youngest. Every night she enjoys the grand finale.

Just watched He Who Dares (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2740538/) so that you don’t have to, unless you want to watch a dire work of fantasy and waste 82mins of your life, of course.

To give you a little bit of a clue as to why you should avoid it just think of the complete plot ripped off from the original Die Hard but filmed in a deep underground car park (15 floors?) next to a bank in London, where the SAS is called in because the PMs teenage daughter is kidnapped by a loony with his own private army who is actually trying to drain the PMs bank account (£6,310,329.50, if you’re interested; things must be tough when you move out of investment banking and into ruling class politics!). It even cribs a Christmas Eve party or two from the Bruce Willis actioner!
The SAS act like they’ve never heard of ambushes, with their tactics pulled from some X-Box game, and as a result keep getting picked off until just the boss is left alive – but that doesn’t matter because you won’t have remembered who any of them were anyway. The bad guys are nearly all dressed in hoodies and what looks like motocross masks, acting like dim street thugs yet able to defeat the SAS, so you needn’t bother investing too much time in keeping up with them either; the head loony has a few good lines – but then he was one of the writers and probably saved the best for himself – but the SAS leader and the police detective (the good guys) are just this side of anonymous whilst the rest of the cast might be hoping to be noticed in this catastrophe for the chance of a background appearance in Eastenders.
Bodycount: huge, and pointless to the plot for the most part. Maybe they could only buy the fake blood by the barrel?
Swearing: lots and *&^@%$£ lots.
Sex/nudity: none (an exposed ankle, a little kissing and a near rape) so if that is your perversion you’ll have to look somewhere else.

And they’ve made a sequel too!

Is there anyone on this Forum – apart from the resident agitators…

“Is there anyone on this forum who agrees with me about what I say, because I don’t wish to hear from anyone who doesn’t…” Seriously, John, why not just come out and say it and be done with it.

Surely ’empire building’ can only be empire building if it is successful; as the EU expands eastward it must encompass countries that are somewhat lesser developed and where the standard of living are considerably less.

Whether that is totally true or not is debatable. The fact remains that, for some trades anyway, eastern Europeans appear much more focused on the work, getting the skills, and being the best that they can.

My eldest has been taken on as an apprentice with a man (Tom) who appears to be a ‘hobby’ joiner, making bespoke window and door frames and anything that anyone would care to pay for out of wood; his own previous company was bought out by a carpentry group from Poland, who had no trouble getting finance to update their machinery and whose staff have been trained on use of the various techniques in school and on the machines in college, whereas his current machinery is mainly over 60 years old and woodwork classes in the local secondary schools doesn’t even bring school leavers to a point to be able to use even those machines safely, whilst the banks insist that they don’t believe he could stay in business long enough to repay any loan they give him – according to Tom, anyway.
In addition this same Polish company apparently bought up another (British) competitor in the hope of gaining a foothold in the UK: but the staff were regarded as bolshie, and the machines and premises were deemed antiquated so the whole lot would need modernisation if they were to stay in business. Tom said the staff didn’t help themselves by making fun of the Polish team who came to inspect the works, but the last straw was when one Pole was given orange juice laced with gin or vodka one evening in a pub get together, and the management decided to take just the web name and customer base and sell the site for housing.
When I said Tom was a ‘hobby’ joiner what I meant was he is doing it as something to pass the time while spending his millions – he has a home in Spain, where he and his family live for one week and most weekends a month, another in Japan (where he is studying their joinery – they build houses where the basic house is made from wood, no nails or other metalwork and even the hinges were originally grown!), has a 60ft cabin cruiser here, another of similar size in Spain and is negotiating for yet another in Japan. When I met him (dropping kiddo off for the first time) he was quite forthright in that he’d rather be working in Japan (where the trains are ‘fantastic’, the health service is ‘fantastic’, the mindset is ‘fantastic’ – you get the picture) but he has to stay in Britain because his mother won’t move to either Spain or Japan. On the subject of Europeans Tom said he’d had little problem with any of them; whilst British kids moaned about pushing a broom around the workshop Europeans never complained and soaked up all the training he could give them. He’d had a Bulgarian apprentice who’d also worked wonders on his boat engines (Gardners) and an Albanian who he felt compelled to slip a quiet £500 into his hand – on top of his apprentice wages – when the boy completed a bespoke furniture set job scheduled to take a month in just over a week, including the high gloss finish varnish which was down to take a week in itself. British apprentices, Tom said (and in front of my kid!), generally moan about the money, are lazy and not bothered about accuracy, don’t listen and talk back, frequently present safety problems in the workplace and were usually a threat to the well being of his business; yet (apparently for his sins) he still keeps taking on kids as apprentices.
He said he’d give me five minutes because he was ‘busy’ then moaned on for nearly three quarters of an hour without me being able to get a word in and extract myself, and forced the info above on me without the need for me to ask a single question (although the questions I did have I forgot…). I rather disliked the man.

At school they didn’t receive the perverted attention of oversexed teachers.

Au contraire! They did, just as the clergy did with choirboys, but it was rarely reported to the police and generally ignored when it was. Of course, the historic reports and arrests taking place in the last few years illustrate the lie to that statement…

Richard Doll had made plain the association between smoking and lung cancer. Smokers were quitting.

Really? I believe there were still one or two advertising campaigns from the 1960s that should lead surviving elderly smokers to go and chat with lawyers on a no-win-no-fee basis due to the connection endemic in those ads connecting a healthy and successful lifestyle with smoking. They are doing just that in America…

We had few problems with immigrants because there weren’t many of them.

But they were here, being ridiculed in radio and TV comedies and in the newspapers too.

Those we had were Christians, if they were anything. None of them had acquired the habit of hacking infidels heads off on the public highway.

Ah, the next best immigrants if they aren’t white, eh?

Lee Rigby’s murderers are British, of Nigerian descent; very Christian, Nigeria. At least one of them was born a Christian and later converted. And I believe if you were to do a little more research you could find examples of all sorts of religious followers who have hacked followers of other religions to death in all sorts of places, not just on roads.
What religion was that cage fighter who hacked off that pensioners head at the beginning of September?

People weren’t allowed to stand outside the mosques that hardly existed or, anywhere else for that matter and preach religeous and racial hatred.

Were they specifically forbidden from doing that, or are you speculating again? I know that there were instances of the clergy preaching what might be described as hatred outside strip clubs in Soho, some nightclubs when they stayed open into Sunday mornings, and a few pubs in Wales when they opened on Sundays (although that might have been an ongoing thing).

Swearing in public was unknown

Indeed. Teddy boys never swore in the street, nor did the odd drunken soldier in a garrison town or sailor on his way back the dockyard, and as for the dockies themselves… How these myths get perpetuated is beyond me.

Eating or drinking in public was just as bad as swearing.

Rubbish. Whilst the majority would never normally eat in public on the street, WWII and the rise of the fish and chip shop allowed those leaving the pub or cinema the chance to have a nibble when waiting for the bus. Chinese takeaways (you don’t want to upset the Chinese – they were happy to chop off heads as seen in several pictures from the time of the Boxer rebellion) also allowed for the chance of having something to eat late – reports can be found about the amount of rubbish generated (comparatively little compared to today, but we are talking 60+ years ago) by discarded wrappings.

I realise that I might be writing about life on another planet.

Don’t know, John. Where are you from?

How you know that the religious and cultural problems we are experiencing are present in ALL societies is beyond me.

Maybe Bruce reads the newspapers?
Ok, maybe they are not present in all societies, but do places like North Korea really count?

And now an umpire in Israel has been killed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-30260842

…mainly Eastern European…

It can’t expand any further west, or north, and to the south it is full of people trying to go north.

From a Socialist Shadow Minister who will doubtless achieve real ministerial status, when Milliband gains power by default.

They’ve allowed Socialists in the Labour party again? Wonders will never cease…