The dogs bark, but the caravan has moved on

IT’S THE first day of the school holidays and a pall of black smoke hangs over the fields as the amateur arsonists get to work on the newly-built haystacks.

Inside the house, I am shouting at the wireless. You see, I listen to The Archers Omnibus on a Sunday morning. It’s a simple pleasure, and one which keeps me away from the Chardonnay bottle until at least 11.15am.

But some idiot at Radio 4 (and there must be plenty to go at) has decided that what this mainstay of British broadcasting really needs is some of those television-type trailers which reveal upcoming storylines. Hence, six full days before I’ll actually listen to it, I already know that the runaway Ed Archer, whose disappearance has sustained the plot for many weeks, has turned up in Borchester General Hospital.

This simply isn’t good enough. At the time of writing, I still don’t know who’s won the Ambridge Vegetable Olympics, and I won’t until about 10.15 on Sunday morning. Now that keen anticipation has been ruined, leapfrogged even, by the actions of a thoughtless minion at Broadcasting House. I would write to my MP if he hadn’t just started his 78-day holiday.

SPEAKING OF which, if you’re driving towards the Channel ports next week and you find yourself held up by a 23ft Bailey Pageant Champagne caravan driven by an 80-year-old man wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and a Russian fur hat, be warned.

Do what you usually do and overtake on a blind bend while hurling abuse and empty Red Bull cans at the vehicle and you could find yourself looking down the barrel of a Heckler and Koch MP5 machine gun. Because Margaret Beckett is going on holiday and she’s taking the Special Branch with her.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a dafter story. While the world burns, the Foreign Secretary and her resolutely Old Labour husband Leo are refusing to forego their traditional holiday and are heading off on a caravan tour of France. Given the current political tensions, I think we have to agree that Mrs Beckett may well be a terrorist target. We also then have to agree that she requires some degree of protection.

This means the ludicrous situation whereby at least four armed spooks will have to go with her, presumably tagging along in a caravan of their own. With gun turrets on the roof and those special wheels with spikes on that James Bond had on his car.

And that’s just what you need when you’re staggering bleary-eyed across a damp field alongside the N10 on the way to your morning ablutions – a man in a black balaclava laying trip wires across the entrance to the toilet block.

TWO VALLEYS away from my palatial estate is a windfarm. Well, not so much a windfarm as a single wind turbine. It is often turned off because the wind is too strong (no, really), and when it is operating it emits a high-pitched whine, much like the weird-bearded, sacking-clad lentil-eaters who campaigned for its erection.

As with many things environmental, it’s a complete charade. Stuck on a hillside towering over a pretty little village, it doesn’t actually produce enough electricity to power the light in my fridge, but it serves to assuage the middle class Lefty consciences of the kind of people who can afford to live there. It’s gesture politics of the worst possible kind.

Which brings me to Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, who waited until the start of the school holidays to blithely announce that “flying abroad for a foreign holiday is a sin against the planet”.

The Bish refers, of course, to the damage caused to the environment by the massive increase in cheap flights. Now I’m not an expert in ecumenical events, but isn’t this the same bloke who accepted a freebie cruise around the Med last Easter? When, presumably, he flew there and back?

So where does blatant hypocrisy come on the tariff of mortal sins then?

NOW THIS may seem a little harsh, but why is every pilot who crashes their plane – often fatally - automatically accorded hero status?

“He steered it away from the primary school”, goes the mantra. “Without his bravery, hundreds could have died.”

Well, to a point. Have you ever been up in a light aircraft? Or a balloon? Look down and you will see green fields – hundreds and hundreds of square miles of them. In fact, spotting a primary school amid this green and pleasant landscape and then successfully crashing a plane into it would be a feat of flying prowess worthy of a space shuttle pilot.

Still, I suppose it gives them something to talk about at the funeral.

I’M NOT sure that Vauxhall have got their advertising strategy right when it comes their latest ubiquitous television commercial.

What are they saying? Buy a Zafira and your kids will grow up fat and Northern? Unless you want your child to carve out a career touring working men’s clubs telling jokes, is that really a good selling point? Oh, and suicide bombers will move in next door and scatter broken china on your lawn ...

O The views of Mr Beelzebub are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor or staff of this website, of anyone moaning that their runner beans haven't set, of anyone bothering to water the lawn with bath water when Mr Blah's gardener has been caught red-handed with a hosepipe, or of anyone who rushed out and bought an air conditioning unit in the mistaken belief that this is the Ballearics, not Britain.

Two world wars and one World Cup ...

A FOOTBALL chant popular with the Neanderthal branch of the Ingerland Supporters’ Club, to be sung at Johnny Foreigner once the Channel has been safely negotiated, goes: “If it wasn’t for the English you’d be Krauts …”

While the ditty certainly lacks historical accuracy, evidence was brought this week to render it even more nonsensical. You see, we English, we proud patriots, are probably “Krauts” ourselves.

According to scientists (who for once have stopped playing internet poker and looking at online pornography to do some real work), the Anglo-Saxon invasion of this sceptred isle 1,600 years ago was so successful that the genetic characteristics of the native Brit were wiped out, leaving us with a population with mainly Germanic genes. As they say, you can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family.

Now while this news will undoubtedly come as a shock to Mr Piers Morgan and anyone else who studied history at the university of the Victor comic (Achtung, Tommy! For you ze war is over”), there is some sense to it. After all, our Royal family is German, our cultural arrogance is German and our appetite for beer and fighting is certainly German.

And it’s not a bad time to be German. The marvellous organization of the World Cup and the wonderful welcome received by everyone who went has definitely changed our perception of the country. And they’ve got a woman Prime Minister, which is a bonus.

Perhaps Noel Coward had it right in his 1943 composition (probably introduced by Sir Jimmy Savile on that week’s Top of the Pops):

“Don't let's be beastly to the Germans, when our victory is ultimately won,It was just those nasty Nazis who persuaded them to fight, and their Beethoven and Bach are really far worse than their bite …”

SO IF we’re now all Germans, it is entirely appropriate that the word of the day should be schadenfreude, defined by my dictionary as “a malicious satisfaction obtained from the misfortunes of others”.

The cause of this malevolent glee is the thought of a certain Omar Bakri sitting sweating on the quayside in Beirut while Israeli missiles rain down all about him. Bakri, of course, is the race-hate “preacher” who spent 20 years on the dole in this country while hailing terrorists as “magnificent martyrs” and praising those behind the 9/11 atrocities.

When he nipped off to Beirut to snap up a £150,000 luxury apartment (and where did that money come from?) the jug-eared and muddle-brained Charles Clarke had a moment of unusual sanity and banned him from ever returning. Bakri did a “not bovvered” and replied that he “never wanted to see the place again”.

Strange, then, that he should turn up amongst 2,000 British evacuees in the port on Thursday, trying to blag a place on board HMS Bulwark. Top marks to the embassy official who spotted him and promptly told him to clear off. Schadenfreude indeed.

THE THEME continues, this time with a nod to Gabriel Fahrenheit, the German physicist who devised the temperature guide with which we are all familiar.

Did you notice how many television weather forecasts reverted to Fahrenheit this week, ditching the ridiculous and nonsensical scale invented by Swedish astronomer Anders Celcius? (You’re getting value for money on the trivia front this week, folks.) There’s a very good reason for that.

Fahrenheit is eminently sensible. In simple terms it starts at 0 degrees and goes up to 100 degrees. You therefore know exactly where on the scale you are between freezing and boiling. Celcius is a Euro-nonsense imposed on us by the traitors and quislings of the BBC. They can waffle on all day and I still haven’t got a clue whether to don a T-shirt or a jumper. I end up sweating like a Brazilian on the Underground.

It’s telling that when the weather becomes the big story, the so-called modernisers quickly revert to a scale we all understand.

I WAS going to write about how “the Health and Safety Nazis march on …” In light of the above, I’d better re-phrase that.

So, the Health and Safety stormtroopers march on, this week being handed the golden opportunity of prosecuting the Metropolitan Police for shooting a suspected terrorist on a tube train. What fantastic publicity that will be. Beats writing legislation outlining the correct procedure for pouring a cup of tea.

Meanwhile Lily the cat has become the latest victim of the red-tape warriors. Stranded up a tree near her home in Carlisle, she had every right to expect the local fire brigade to turn up and rescue her. Well, that’s what they do, isn’t it? (When they’re not eating fry-ups or watching porn films, that is.)

Unfortunately, Lily reckoned without health and safety regulations, which decreed that the tree was “the wrong shape” for the firemen to put their ladders up against. It wasn’t until five days later that she was rescued by a passing tree surgeon.

I fully expect Lily to now call Claims Direct and sue for compensation, and so the merry-go-round of modern life continues to spin.

O The views of Mr Beelzebub are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor or staff of this website, of anyone who hasn't already bought their can of Magicool, of anyone who answered the door to the postman yesterday forgetting that they were stark bollock naked, or of anyone who didn't spend Wednesday night with their feet in the fridge and with a bag of frozen peas strapped to their head.

Why it would have been kosher in Cowes

THE MOST argumentative nation on Earth isn’t the drunken Scotch, or even those arrogant, Gallic, cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but those damned Israelis.

Have you been there? I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve done my time on Bury New Road in Manchester where starting an argument with a passing pedestrian, the man in the paper shop or the shmuck behind the counter in the deli who’s cut the salt beef too thick is a daily pastime. But get the buggers on their home territory and they’re totally meshugene.

Suggest in a hotel that a couple of dodgy oranges might not be a complete breakfast and they’re at your throat like a rabid Rottweiler. Offer to pay for a meal in shekels rather than US dollars and the waiter will look at as if you’ve just taken a dump on his mother’s doorstep. Suggest that there might be two sides to every political argument in a Tel Aviv bar – where the clientele are all legally toting automatic rifles – and you’ll be happy just to make the first plane out next morning. (I was.)

These guys could truly start a fight in an empty room. OK, I hear you say, as a race they’ve got every reason to be a bit tetchy, but for how long are they going to be at war with the world, literally and figuratively?

I blame that nice Clement Atlee, who as Prime Minister in 1948 was party to the madcap decision to dump the Jewish nation down in the middle of a bunch of Arabs. I mean, who really thought that was a good idea? It’s like taking The Pope to an Orange Parade.

I’ve said it before: we should have just let them have the Isle of Wight - after sinking the ferry. They’d have been happy enough picking fights amongst themselves to start worrying about Hezbollah, and if they still fancied a bit of afters, well, France is just across the way.

WHILE WE’RE mining this rich seam of what will undoubtedly be seen by some as blatant anti-Semitism, we should deal with Lord Levy, Mr Blah’s cashpoint king and tennis partner.

Is it only me who thinks it’s a shame we can’t get the Yanks interested in the cash-for-honours case? He’d have been on the 9.38 Continental flight from Gatwick to Houston before you could blink, looking forward to two years in a Texas nick without bail before his case even came to court.

And isn’t it perverse that a hard-line extradition treaty aimed at packing suspected terrorists off to Guantanamo Bay with minimum fuss is first used to bang up a trio of possibly-dodgy businessmen? I mean, it’s the NatWest Three. They’re hardly the Guilford Four or the Birmingham Six, whatever the FBI says. In fact, the Houston Chronicle managed to print just two paragraphs on the arrival of these desperados, tucked away in the business section.

At the time of writing, I don’t know if they’ve yet been bailed or are wearing orange boiler suits on the chain gang, but it does stick in the craw that the nation that gave the world the principle of open and democratic justice (i.e. us) should now be sending its citizens off to be tried in a foreign court without a single shred of evidence being put before a British judge.

And meanwhile we can find time within the judicial system to fine a woman who chucked a green chip out of a car window. Sometimes the law truly is an ass.

I KNOW we’re all desperately worried about global warning (yeah, right), and the appalling inefficiency of our money-grabbing water companies means that we’re constantly threatened with drought, but the last time I glanced out of the window I couldn’t see any palm trees or camels lurking in the neighbourhood.

So why is it necessary for every young woman under the age of 30 to carry a bottle of water around with them? Are they frightened that they’ll get stranded somewhere between New Look and Top Shop and die of dehydration like an abandoned Foreign Legionnaire in the Sahara?

And why are they drinking so much of the stuff anyway? A couple of glasses a day used to do the trick when I was a kid; now it’s a swallow of ridiculously expensive bottled muck every five minutes. I spoke to a fat woman last week who said she was drinking eight litres a day in an attempt to lose weight. She was like a human sponge. No wonder there’s a shortage of the damn stuff.

ANYWAY, I’VE come out in this weird rash that looks a bit like chicken pox. I haven’t been near a doctor in 15 years so I phoned up that NHS Direct service to ask what to do about it.

After answering a list of questions, I was suddenly asked what my ethnic origin was. I was momentarily flummoxed. “Err … English and … err … white” I said, almost apologetically.

“White British, then,” said the very nice lady at the other end of the phone. I thought of all my Scotch and Welsh admirers and said “No, English actually.”

Dear reader, it would have been easier to claim to have been a Klingon. No box was available to tick and the computer said no. Being English simply wasn’t allowed. So there you go, my Celtic friends. I’m officially one of you lot now. And I’ve got shingles. I honestly don’t know what’s worse.

O The views of Mr Beelzebub are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor or staff of this website, of anyone who didn't sleep a wink on Tuesday night after watching Big Cat Diaries because they were worrying about Toto the baby cheetah getting eaten by baboons, of anyone who was deterred from taking up a career as an Italian lip-reader because there was no demand for the service, or of anyone who can't see the black humour in putting a chronic asthmatic on the cigarette counter at my local Sainsbury's. Every time she leant across for a packet of 20, the poor girl had to have a whizz on her inhaler. It was so entertaining that I bought 200. In tens.

So, in memory of two world wars, we'll have a 17 hour silence ...

SO WHOSE idea was it to have a two minute silence in memory of the victims of the 7/7 London bombings? Who advanced the argument? Who handed down the decree?

I ask because, to be frank, I’m sick and tired of the sentimental mawkishness with which this country greets disaster. Yes, it was a terrible crime that 52 people were killed by terrorist bombs, but that happens every day in downtown Baghdad, and no-one even blinks.

And why two minutes? More people died at Hillsborough, yet they only have a minute’s silence for them. (Although because they’re Scousers, they hold it every week.) Are these things incremental? Are we now saying that the 7/7 victims are the equivalent of all the dead of two world wars? And Korea, the Falklands and Iraq?

I raised the issue with several people, but mostly met with blank looks. Since the Dianafication of Britain, conspicuous mourning is apparently what we do. So I just snuck off and had a fag instead while the grief junkies were wringing their hands in public.

THE SON of a friend of mine is a Para out in Afghanistan. To quote his Dad, he effing loves it. He gets to do what he’s been trained to do - to kill bad guys who come out to fight fair, rather than use dynamite-strapped kids or cowardly roadside bombs to do their killing for them. And it’s not the long-distance, superior firepower, computer game fighting that the Yanks like. It’s down and dirty and eye to eye.

He also said it was just like a Flashman book. I wonder if he knows his history. The Brits have fought and died in the mountains of Afghanistan for hundreds of years. We still are, with six dead in the last month. And we’ve never, ever won. And we won’t this time.

Mr Blah and his feckless pals have tried to give us the impression that we sent troops out there to help in the reconstruction of the county. Unfortunately, like so many NuLabour promises, this is a complete and utter lie. Our boys are there to try to re-take the country from the Taliban and, along the way, to persuade poor farmers to grow pomegranates rather than opium poppies.

It is a foolish, thankless and ultimately impossible task. The clues come amid the bravado in those brief phone calls home. Yes, they “slotted” the 20 or so Taliban who ambushed them, but within minutes attacks were coming in from two other sides. They were pinned down, outnumbered, and despite calls for help were told that no air, artillery or ground support was available as all resources were tied up elsewhere.

This is no coincidence. The Taliban, fighting instincts honed by centuries of resistance, know our numbers and know that if they can co-ordinate a timed series of ambushes or attacks, those lethal Apache helicopter gunships will only be able to turn up to one battle at a time. Elsewhere, it’s going to get a bit nasty.

The truth of the matter is that if we have to be out there, then we must be there in sufficient numbers to defend ourselves. That is patently not the case at the moment but given that the Army is woefully overstretched, where does Mr Blah look for reinforcements? The Sea Scouts? The local grammar school cadet force? The 3rd Armoured Brigade of Traffic Wardens?

I dearly hope my mate’s lad comes home safe. I don’t even mind if he enjoys his war; it’s what we’re good at, after all. But I also hope that people in power who sent him out there managed to find time off from fomenting revolution at their universities to read a bit of Kipling: “When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, and go to your gawd like a soldier.”

PAEDO UPDATE: Peter Wilson, 59, was released from prison last week after serving half of a 10-year sentence for sex attacks on young boys.

Unable to find him a place in a bail hostel, the leather-elbowed geniuses from social services promptly booked him into the £53-a-night Premier Travel Inn in East Sussex … an hotel boasting a “child-friendly restaurant” and conveniently located next door to a children’s home. They also neglected to mention their client’s previous at the check-in desk.

Marvellous stuff.

THE NANNY State ninnies on. This week we’ve had an official “Level 3 Heatwave Alert” warning the bovine population that if they staked themselves out in the midday sun, they might get a bit of a headache and perhaps feel a bit sore about the shoulders. The following day, local radio gravely announced a “Met Office Flood Warning”, as torrential thunderstorms followed days of high temperatures.

Has it really come to this? Are people so thick these days that they can’t work out to handle a bit of sun and a bit of rain? The mind boggles. The next thing you know, they’ll be running television commercials telling us how to barbecue a sausage. Oh … hang on …

O The views of Mr Beelzebub are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor or staff of this website, of any 17-year-old who thinks he can accompany his Dad's mates to the cricket, keep up with the big lads when it comes to drinking, but then has to be taken home by his mother after the unfortunate reappearance of a chicken sarnie; of anyone moaning about the heat while surreptitiously eyeing up the T-shirted totty parading down the street; or of anyone who tore out and pinned up that Sun picture of Ronaldo's face on a dartboard. You were never on the terraces at Anfield in the 70s, were you? Forza Italia!

It's time to put the social workers in the dock

NOW I’VE nothing against poofs. I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that as long as they keep their deviant practices private, and don’t do it in the street and scare the horses, then it’s up to them.

Indeed, one of my oldest friends Drops Anchor In Poo Harbour, and when his obituary is eventually published in the Daily Telegraph, it will have those wonderful words “He never married” as the last sentence.

I’m also one of those tolerant people who doesn’t automatically assume that all homosexuals are predatory perverts. At a push, I’ll even accept that gay “marriages” fulfil a need in law, namely to safeguard both sides of a partnership.

But let’s get this straight – homosexuality is not normal. God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And while the insistence of the Loony Left that gay couples must be accorded every right available to normal couples is usually just irritating, we should not ignore the tragic consequences that can occur when this pink bandwagon gets out of control.

We must head north, to Pontefract, West Yorkshire, where some Guardian-reading, leather-elbowed, right-on social worker decided that it was perfectly OK for gay couple Ian Wathey and Craig Faunch to become foster parents. No, really.

In fact, it probably wasn’t a conscious decision in favour of the idea; more likely a politically-correct, panic-stricken paranoia about the consequences of saying “No”.

So Messrs Wathey and Faunch became foster parents, and were subsequently fed a steady supply of vulnerable children, many of whom they went on to sexually abuse. They even specifically requested boys aged five to 12 years old, and still no-one twigged that something was amiss.

Last week the pair were sentenced to a total of 11 years in prison, meaning that they’ll be out in a fortnight or so. But there was someone missing from the dock at Leeds Crown Court - the idiot who thought it was perfectly alright for two gay men to become foster parents in the first place.

Let’s think about this logically. Vulnerable, damaged children need stability and normality. To me, that means a surrogate Father and Mother, and possibly some siblings as well. A normal family environment; one we could all recognise.

What they don’t need is to be abandoned to a life of sexual abuse just so some dimwit at Wakefield District Council can stand up at the next equality seminar and boast about how inclusive their policies are.

It’s not just me, is it? This absolutely stinks. Heads should roll, but don’t hold your breath. These brain dead drones tend to look after each other.

FROM YORKSHIRE to Ipswich, where convicted murderer David Lant (61) is prescribed Viagra by prison doctors before being let out on day release, where he allegedly attempted to rape a 16-year-old girl during a five-hour ordeal.

Lant, who was nearing the end of a 25-year sentence, had been given the drug after a prostate operation. We hear much from Mr Blah about the rights of victims being more important than the rights of criminals. This would seem to prove the point.

WE SHOULD note the efforts of animal rights protesters who bravely cut through wire fences to release wild deer from a compound in Wiltshire.

The fact that the bunny-huggers had raided a wildlife sanctuary, and that the released deer were promptly run over on a nearby road, somehow makes it all the more amusing.

A PARTICULAR irritant at the moment is women who think they can talk with authority about football. Everyone’s wife is expert at matters metatarsal; everyone’s girlfriend can discourse at length on the need for a holding midfielder. Some women can even explain the offside rule without resorting to shuffling the salt and pepper cruets which, it must be admitted, is more than most of the shambolic referees out there in Germany.

It’s not so bad in the privacy of your own home, but when you take them to the pub it’s downright embarrassing. Shouting “Shoot!” when a player is about to take a corner, for instance. Or blatantly not realising that the teams have changed round at half-time. Or discussing David’s hair when we’re running out of time against a team of South American no-hopers. Or saying: “Never mind, it’s only a game”.

I don’t talk to you about shopping. Kindly desist from talking to me about football. Especially when it’s on.

WE MUST have been innocent souls not to snigger at the names Fanny and Dick when we were first handed a copy of one of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books in the school classroom. Modern teachers need no longer worry about that, as the PC brigade have been tampering with these childhood classics and have changed the names to Frannie and Rick.

For some perplexing reason, “biscuits” have also been changed to “cookies”, the boys must now do household chores along with the girls and the dangerous elements of any adventure have been eliminated so as not to show a bad example.

What next? A revised edition of The Railway Children in which Bobbie, Phyllis and Peter are fined £50 and ASBOed for playing on the tracks? A Christmas Carol in which the Cratchit family and Tiny Tim have their festive season funded by a consolidated loan from Carol Vorderman? An Oliver Twist in which the hero is taken into care by social services before being sent to stay with a pair of gay foster parents in Pontefract?

It’s enough to make a cat laugh.

O The views of Mr Beelzebub are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor or staff of this website, of anyone trying to work out who to support in the World Cup (Portugal? No chance. Germany? Well, they're Germans, aren't they? France? Cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Italy? Well I suppose it'll have to be Italy, home of Lambrettas and decent coffee), of anyone who can understand how FIFA can't find 20 decent referees in the entire world, or of anyone who's blaming Wayne Rooney for our World Cup exit. If he'd followed the example of those cheating Portugese bastards, he'd have hurled himself writhing to the ground long before he ever accidentally stood on someone's knackers.