The difficulty of beating up my son!

After a hard days work at sea, or a month or two of trying to teach supposedly qualified engineers the purpose of a spanner there is nothing better than a good old fight! I used to come home, strip off and find my son; he was during his younger years an excellent punchbag - although he did tend curl up in a ball and cry too much!

Recently though he has resorted to clever evasive tactics - which I am not at all impressed with as it tends to diminish the enjoyment of the event!

My wife took some photographs of his recent ability to outwit me!

Where is that boy...........


Ah, there you are - square up lad and take it like a man!


I'm gonna get you boy!


Ha, got you.........I am the champion yet again!


Hey, what are you doing you little scallywag?


Where's he Gone?

Hey Mate, Have you see a copper around here?

To Write Positively; no more shock tactics!

Tis very easy to write about bad things, far easier anyway than to write something good! Recently I have found all the bad things in the world to comment on, the British attraction to copious amounts of alcohol, the ability of the British public to successfully show tourists how to completely blanket a country in garbage and understandably how my house was burgled by a scruffy midget with trainers on!

Newspapers the world over relish in negative side of life! Take for example the recent oil hikes:

"rising prices shock the world", "recession imminent as oil prices rocket", stagnation the next step", etc.

Then, the situation rapidly changed and oil prices unexpectedly dropped within a week!

"plummeting oil prices start price wars at the pumps", oil companies suffer as prices fall through the roof", shock hits as oil prices drops create havoc on the trading floor (as if anybody really cared), etc.

It is rare to see "good news" liberally pasted on a front page of a newspaper! Singapore once issued news in this manner. I remember picking up a newspaper a few years ago, the Straits Times, the largest daily of Singapore and the headlines read "train driver saves the day"! If this headline had been say in the UK Times newspaper it may have read "havoc created as train brakes fail". If it had been in say the daily Mirror it might have read "Train Driver faces sack after train runs amock through crowded station" and some other lesser rag like perhaps the Sun may have created some news by pulling apart the drivers family "killer drivers mother is a slag". The whole article in the Straits Times played up the heroic efforts of the driver to produce a hero; in Britain we want scapegoats, fools and victims and if they are not readily available we will create them!

And I have fallen victim to that style of cheap journalism myself! I must stop, I need to write about things that are interesting and in a very positive light, to find the goodness in the subject matter and not the gory or the depressed side of it all!

And for starters I must write about the wonderful park that the local council have built on the Links in Musselburgh, East Lothian! It is wonderful and classy and far exceeds those playgrounds that I used to play on, those with solid concrete at the bottom so that should one fall off the swing the hospital would be the next step! This playground is styled around a pirate ship, it has many different things to do and children can be kept occupied all day long!

I could have said "It is a crying shame that it continually rains every day, that the council do not see fit to finish it off properly, that adults have generally taken over the park so that the children have to sit and cry and that the park is used as a drunken retreat after the pubs have closed by drug-doped louts and girls with high squeaky voices", but I will resist the urge to find the negative. It is a wonderful park and already my son has had some cast-in-stone fun, although it did take me two days to get the second-hand chewing gum off his trouser legs!

Hmm, maybe I will have to try harder!

Britain - the Worlds Capital for Alcohol Consumption!

Drink and be Merry

I have a job! I think I have a life! Not many people can say that with utmost honesty! Looking around me this fine day I cannot see many people that are secure within their own environment; I fully appreciate that it is raining cats and dogs, that summer holidays and the ongoing sales are causing overdrafts to turn purple and for credit cards to get heavier but then this is all of ones own making!

You make your bed - you lie in it!

Britain is not a good place to live anymore and this is not the 'speak' of an old git with a cob on, this is the tired voice of one who would move away to warmer climes if he could afford to do so.

I know very well that what I write in this post, and probably in all my future postings will be a complete repeat of what has been said thousands of times before but then I can only hope that if it is said enough a change might be forthcoming! I doubt it, but I feel better just thinking about it.

A newspaper article in Taiwan informed the Taiwanese public that out of all the countries in the world the British will be the most drunk over the summer period! Wow, what a claim to fame! It wasn't 'Britain will have the most parties', 'will eat the most cake', 'will scoff the most marzipan', no the Brits will consume more alcohol per head than any other nation in the world! It is apparent, not only from this article, that most Brits feel inclined to get steaming, to be totally out of their tree during most days of the year and this in-turn can only effect our output as a nation, are overall health and our attitude to life.

Britain is going downhill and unless we pull our necks out of the bottle then it can only get worse from this point forward.