Simon Jenkins, at the Guardian, has written an encomium for Nick Clegg that is so absurdly at odds with the reality of the self-serving oik that it beggars belief. Only a man isolated, by money and circumstance, from Cameron’s depredations, enabled by Clegg and the LimpDems, could have written such egregious tripe which, among much else that was detached from reality, included this garbage:-
“Tolstoy was right about Nick Clegg. After Continue reading
There’s a recent trend for chronically sick and disabled people to describe their lives online, in an effort to make the public, the DWP, and Atos, understand what life is like with a chronic, incurable condition – or conditions, quite often. In no particular order, the biggies are ME/CFS, COPD, O-A, FMS, heart failure and aortic valve calcification/stenosis, tachycardia, hypertension, plus a raft of less serious crap.
So, this is a look at what my average day entails, always assuming I’m not well enough to be able to get out to the pub (increasingly rare), or able to break the monotony by being well enough to cook for the freezer, because Continue reading
The following letter has been faxed to Three, in Maidenhead, a few minutes ago. No more chances for these incompetent pricks.
***
Dear Sirs,
I am in receipt of your letter of September 14 to which I replied on September 20, by fax.
I would remind you of the following facts:- Continue reading
David Leigh, the Guardian’s investigations executive editor, has put forward a rather contentious proposal – newspapers are losing business, it’s all the Internet’s fault, so there should be a £2 per month levy on broadband connections to support the industry.
As you can imagine, some comments were a tad terse and pretty much all were negative – there are a couple of mine, including a shorter and, sadly, rather ill-written, version of this.
It is, whichever way you look at it, a Continue reading
There is something terribly wrong with green split peas these days. Not very long ago – months, not years – making pea soup took about 45 minutes, by which time the peas had collapsed into the stock to give a thick and creamy soup.
Now, no matter how long you cook them, they steadfastly refuse to change more than minimally, and blitzing them with a stick blender results in a thin and gritty soup.
I speculated that the peas had been sprayed with oil after drying, though there’s no visible trace of this, but the buggerdly things just won’t cook – they simply Continue reading
Re-trying this drug has ended in disaster.
Starting at 1.25mg, the lowest dose for heart failure, confirmed that prescribing the lowest dose for hypertension, 5mg, and utterly ignoring my heart failure was grossly irresponsible. I.25mg caused no problems. Sadly, its effects on my tachycardia were so variable as to be inconclusive, so after a week I increased to 2.5mg, which brought my heart rate down to the low 60s.
Mostly, though, it settled in the low 70s depending on what I’m doing – I’ve just been into the kitchen (I wrote this bit about 6 hours ago), to stir a pan of soup, hardly arduous, but Continue reading
Oh dear – “Guardian hack gets her knickers in a twist over nothing,” is what the headline should say. Instead it says “Many ‘low fat’ foods have similar calorie count to standard products, study finds”.
This is a fundamental error that often find its way into the pages of Which? magazine and, in fact, they are responsible for the Guardian’s pointless drivel. The fact is, low fat is not, and never has been, synonymous with low calorie. Unless someone is wrongly claiming otherwise, there is no story here. And they’re not. This whole farrago of nonsense is based on Continue reading
A predicted 14% hike in food prices prompted me to tinker with seeing how much food I could get for an outlay of not very much, as a way of countering the increase.
The crisis is apparently in the US meat market, where herds are being slaughtered early because of a record-breaking drought. Why this will affect prices so much here I have no idea, but it seems it will. I’m not sure how much we import from the US in terms of meat – I’ve certainly never seen it offered for sale – but I suppose we import grain and maybe vegetable produce (I stocked up on bread flour when this crisis first made the news). Of course, the 14% increase isn’t caused purely by the drought, it’s an artificial construct of the commodities speculators who, as a species, should be exterminated in the public interest.
Anyway, a rummage in the bottom of the fridge turned up a Continue reading
I’ve just had a letter from Three. In it they refer repeatedly to “my modem” – I didn’t order a modem, I ordered an iPad 3 with a mobile broadband account – no modems were involved (it uses a SIM card, like a mobile phone).
It appears, now, that their courier, DPD, delivered it not to me, but to some bastard called Murray who has apparently stolen it. Whether he lives in this building I have no idea – there are a lot of new people I don’t know. Here’s the DPD website:- Continue reading
“Freezing benefits would mean an all-out assault on poor families,” thus Alison Garnham (CEO Child Poverty Action Group), in the Guardian.
My comment in response:- Continue reading
Ron's Rants... 