The Sunday Ramble: challenging

Christmas is nearly here and it looks like being ‘challenging’. Challenging is the word the politicians and other politically correct people say when they don’t have a bloody clue. There are people with greater life challenges.

I mentioned the homeless and relying on food banks this Christmas in my post yesterday. Most of us have problems and challenges, my car went into the garage and so I had a large bill for that. This morning it’s my washing machine that needs some attention. I couldn’t fix my car, but I have a better chance with the washing machine. Getting it out from under the work top is the really challenging bit, it feels like it has a lump of concrete inside it. Actually it does have a lump of concrete inside it! I think I will have to delegate to one of my family or friends for the heavy pulling.

Our major problems at Christmas, coping with emergencies, queuing in the supermarket are nothing compared to the misery some people will have. While Band Aid made another Christmas single to raise money to fight Ebola, other people called on overseas aid to be cut. I think we can afford to help our neighbours in the world in time of crisis, but we should also help our own. If any overseas stuff needs to be cut, it’s supplying arms to dodgy dealers.

It seems we are all buying for Christmas online and the people who deliver the packages and parcels can’t cope with the deluge. At least all this spending will increase GDP and make it look like we’re out of the recession. Osborne will collect in a bit of Christmas VAT, that will cheer him up about as much as Tiny Tim asking for new shoes….

I think it’s going to be one of those days today. Even the program I’m using to write this is doing strange things. The size of the text went so small I couldn’t read it! That’s challenging!

I went photographing a festive event yesterday in Darlaston, That was challenging. Just walking straight was challenging, they had dug up the pedestrianized precinct and then patched it up with tarmac. The sun was low in the sky so the light was bad and all shadows. It was freezing too! I’ll still try to go to another event and take photos today.

Isn’t it annoying when people take the names of famous characters from English literature as their own. My mention of Tiny Tim was an analogy relating to Timothy Cratchit of Dickens’s  Christmas Story; not the ukulele playing ‘pop’ singer who sang ‘Tiptoe through the tulips’. While I’m on the subject Anne Hathaway was Shakespeare’s wife. Yodel used to be something the Swiss did on top of mountains; now they deliver your Christmas parcels…

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have released Christmas pictures of Prince George. Do we care? Do we want to see them? They probably have him all signed up for Eton and a course in survival with the marines; poor kid will probably need the latter to survive the former.

I think private schools like Eton turn kids into sociopaths, unless they are actually breeding psychopaths in secret laboratories. Lots of stuff goes on in secret like the CIA torturing people with water boarding and other obnoxious tortuous techniques. We have psychopaths torturing sociopaths now…  I know what sleep deprivation is like, I’ve been a patient in an NHS hospital.

That’s it for today. You can also flick through my other posts and there are some more on A Zillion Ideas. Why not subscribe and have emails every time I post? You can also follow me on Twitter for updates.

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