I can barely see the keyboard for watery eyes and my touch typing is non-existent, so please excuse any typos. The cause of my tearful peepers is a combination of events over the last hour. Firstly I listened to our much vaunted Chancellor give his Spring Statement. At first glance it sounded ok, but then the faults start to appear. It didn’t need the Governor of the Bank of England though for me to realise that he hadn’t mentioned defence; nothing, not a little tickle to catch the salmon. A few times he talked about ‘National Security’ but then linked it to a ‘strong economy’; the lifelong money man applying linear thinking when the situation so desperately calls for lateral thought. When will our heroic Western leaders realise that Putin, for now, and China very soon will recognise only one thing; strength. Strength of mind and purpose, backed up by armed forces that will dissuade them both from pursuing courses of action that could only lead to World War III. Then I started to write whilst watching and listening to Celtic Woman perform You Raise Me Up; five beautiful ladies performing a beautiful, uplifting song. Earlier we had walked Callie in our local entrancing forest on a sun-soaked, glorious Spring day. I never tire of watching the seemingly inexhaustible whippet racing hither and thither through the beech trees, where no squirrel is safe! Surrounded by so much beauty, but all the while, the vision and images of the appalling suffering of those poor people in Ukraine are hauntingly present. Increasingly I find myself desperately wanting to do something. If I was a bit younger and didn’t have family responsibilities I honestly think I would head East to join the fight. I’ve been to the Kremlin and would dearly love to go back there; with a phial of Novichok! But that would be too good for Putin. He deserves an interminably long, grindingly slow and excruciatingly painful death and even that would be too good for him.

My somewhat depressed mood is probably not helped by having suffered the recurrence of an old injury. When I was twenty four I dislocated my right shoulder really badly Downhill ski racing. It’s caused me problems on and off ever since, but has been pretty good for the last few years. Until Saturday that is. I was doing my bit for the College by umpiring the Under 14 A’s in a hockey match; an occupation that is normally devoid of physical incident. But on this occasion I was slightly out of position and was trying to get out of the way when a strapping youth ran into me rather hard from behind. Unluckily it caught my should at just the wrong angle and I felt an excruciating pain shoot through the area, with which I am sadly all too familiar. Sleeping is a transitory experience and golf and tennis and on the back burner for the foreseeable future I fear.

I am sad to report that nothing very funny or noteworthy has happened that I can regale you with. We break up in a couple of days for the three weeks of Easter holidays and hopefully there will be enough entertainment then to raise spirits and joie de vivre. I, like many of my friends, am feeling the way that I suspect our parents did in 1939; although nowadays of course we have many more graphic images of what is happening abroad, which leaves little doubt about the truly cataclysmic nature of life in 2022.

The aim of this blog is to amuse and entertain, and occasionally inform and educate. Sometimes that means being deadly serious, which doesn’t come naturally to me. However, today is one of those days. If you read No 224 you will know about my Ukrainian friend who works locally. I visited Hudson’s again today, as I do most days and she was looking tragically sad. Her daughter and family have decided to leave Ukraine but it is a hazardous and daunting journey that they face and who knows where they may end up. It seems even train journeys are dangerous, with the Russians quite prepared to attack innocent women and children. I wondered how Russian soldiers could possibly carry out such wicked acts against fellow russian speakers? She told me this story. “I have heard of a family of grandparents, with their daughter and grandchildren cowering in a basement when the Russians found them and dragged them outside. The officer in charge ordered his men to shoot them. In cold blood. The men refused, so the officer shot one soldier dead and wounded the other. The family were then shot dead. If you listen to the captured Russian soldiers” she explained, “they will tell you, if they disobey, they will be shot by their own officers”. Those who fail to learn the lessons of history, will merely watch history repeat itself. You hear so many people saying “how could this be happening in the 21st Century, in this modern, enlightened era”. What makes the 21st Century so special?! Henry VIII lived in a “modern era”. So did Gengis Khan, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein. While the West enjoyed the so-called Peace Dividend and ran our armed forces down, Russia, China, North Korea and others have been spending our money on huge re-armament and expansion of their military might. To what purpose? Just to make them feel good? The comparisons with 1938/39 are obvious. For Germany, Italy and Japan read Russia, China and North Korea. The huge difference now is that all sides have massive nuclear capabilities. Regardless, can we any longer stand aside and let the barbarians do their horrific work? It now feels almost certain that we are staring down the gun barrel at a Third World War, incomprehensible as it may seem. Would it not be better to strike back now, before the bloodied killing fields of Ukraine are but the first step of further Russian expansionism? I genuinely believe that now is the time that NATO must act.

Our “leaders”, for want of a better word, had better understand quickly that we need to re-arm very rapidly indeed. That means spending perhaps 10% of GDP on defence; an emergency expansion of the army, navy and air force with huge expenditure on new armaments, weapons systems, aircraft and ships, not to mention personnel. It may already be too late but if we don’t act NOW, we are faced with a very bleak future.

To give you an idea of the uphill battle we face, this was the banner headline on the front page of The Sun newspaper yesterday, a tabloid rag with a large national readership:

Drunk Putin Drag Queen Banned from Bingo

With every other national newspaper showing ghastly pictures with stories of the unfolding horror in Ukraine, some genius at The Sun thought that was appropriate.

If we as a nation don’t wake up and smell the coffee right now, life as we have known it might be gone forever.

I did go down to the woods today and what a surprise I got. I expected to see the odd tree in a re-arranged state but the extent of the damage caused by Dudley, Eunice and Franklyn quite took my breath away. As a Londoner, you could call it DEF and Destruction mate. But now that the ill winds from the west have had their say a much more menacing storm is brewing from the east. In those halcyon days when we used to play at war games in the certain knowledge that we would never actually have to go into battle, we would spend five days on exercise wearing hideously uncomfortable NBC suits (nuclear, biological and chemical), going through all sorts of decontamination procedures, with respirators (gas masks in old money) that made us look like escapees from a Star Trek movie set, while “the enemy” (red forces) attacked us with everything they’d got; except that is real gas, germs or nukes. We somehow convinced ourselves that we would survive and go on to overwhelm the Reds with our superior morals, wit and general joie de vivre. Back in the “good old days” of the Cold War when I was flying anti-tank helicopters, our wartime role was to deploy to a Schloss close to the East German border, where we’d park our choppers in the Count’s orchard and avail ourselves of his most generous hospitality. Our aim was to slow down the Soviet assault. Their aim, we were always told, was to drive their legions of T60 and T72 tanks to the Channel in ten days, demolishing all before them. The great thing is that those were MAD times, (Mutually Assured Destruction) so although East/West relations were extremely frosty, for the most part we all felt very safe. In fact the World has been a lot less stable place since the Iron Curtain got so rusty and corroded they had to take it down.

I’ve been mulling over the correct pronunciation of Vlad the Mad. Generally those of us to the east of the Atlantic tend to call him Pewtin; pew as in one of those back-graunchingly uncomfortable wooden benches that devoted church-goers must endure to demonstrate their love for the Almighty, or pew as in the mediaeval drinking mugs that still lurk at the back of my drinks cabinet as fond reminders of a bygone age. (English pewter was always the best!). Americans however, in their ignorance, call him Pootn; poo as in a pile of canine excrement left steaming in the middle of the pavement ready for some unwary traveller to sully their handsome buckskins, or perhaps Pooh, as in a bear of very little brain who has a penchant for honey. Knowing that we were right, I nonetheless consulted the Oracle (Google), only to discover to my horror that Russians say Pootin. It makes him sound like a poor man’s version of a chamber pot (which might be quite appropriate) or something a squaddie might take on manoeuvres when there are no thunder boxes available. (Also quite appropriate).

There’s a splendid emporium nearby called Hudson’s that’s run by Jonathan, an Old Eastbournian and Kate is Polish wife. They employ a delightful Ukrainian lady whose daughter and family are still in Ukraine. Her first language is Russian. She understands every evil word that emanates from Pootin’s mouth. With terrible sadness in her eyes, she was telling me today how the tactics have changed; how the Russians are now shooting at ambulances and schools, with reckless bombing of residential areas and hospitals; how tank commanders are grabbing women and children and putting them on their tanks, inviting the Ukrainian soldiers to “see what good shots you are now?”. One thing is certain. Pootin will end up dead. The horrific question is how many will have to go first before he is despatched to Hell. I was a soldier once and I used to consider myself reasonably tough when it came to these things, but I confess I have openly wept today hearing her story and seeing the terrible scenes unfolding in Ukraine. Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170, allegedly died on the altar steps of Canterbury Cathedral when four knights took literally, King Henry II’s outburst, “will nobody rid me of this turbulent priest”. Good and honest citizens of Russia please hear a similar cry from billions of people around the world, but especially from the forty four million Ukrainians whose lives have become a living hell thanks to your chamber pot of a President.

What, one wonders, would Dick Turpin have thought of the new Highway Code? The only thing it doesn’t cover is Robbery. What genius in the Ministry of Blunders and Wonders decided that pedestrians should have priority at junctions? This means, if I understand it correctly, that a car turning off a major road onto a minor road must stop to give way to a pedestrian waiting to cross the minor road. So the traffic closing rapidly on the turning car must suddenly brake hard as the turning car has to stop on the main road to allow the walkers to wander across. No recipe for accidents there then! I thought Smart motorways were the idea of an alien, infiltrated into the aforementioned ministry with the strict brief to induce as much carnage as possible but the little green man seems to have excelled himself with this one. No doubt the generals at alien HQ on Planet Zug are rubbing their hands in glee.

Meanwhile, the very good news is that Eastbourne’s pillar boxes have all been given a fresh coat of bright red paint, which really does look very nice. Whether you can remain upright on the broken pavements and successfully weave your way down the road between the multifarious potholes to reach the newly renovated boxes is another matter.

I am writing this from a friend’s house a little way out of Eastbourne, to whence I have debunked as the rest of the family have all been struck down by covid. We know not whether it is Omicron, Delta, the Mumbai variant or some combination of the lot as there has been no official testing, which does slightly raise the question as to the validity of the daily figures that the media loves to pump out. With no PCR testing one would imagine that the bulk of sufferers go unrecorded in the official stats? No sympathy is required for me. Our very kind friends have given me free run of their palace while they explore the wilder off-piste runs of Tignes in the French Alps. I’ve just enjoyed wallowing in their hot tub under a grey ski, remembering what it’s like to wallow in a hot tub under a moonlit mountain sky after a day of flying through the virgin champagne powder. It hasn’t happened for awhile, but thankfully the memory isn’t completely shot. Their beautiful new kitchen boasts a Quooker. Lest you are unfamiliar with this devious device, it’s an integrated tap unit that has a ‘plunge, twist, plunge’ ring that produces instant boiling water from the single tap through which hot, cold and luke warm water also flows. It’s a great idea in theory, but can only be a matter of time before a wayward digit gets caught in a boiling deluge. There’s also a Thermomix which is a sort of computerised Mary Berry Dalek. You just throw all the ingredients into a bowl, wait a few minutes and out comes a three course meal. It’s a somewhat lonely existence out here, but I’m just about coping…..

I should like to apologise for my apparent flagrant breaking of the rules when we had ten people in the garden at the same time during lockdown in 2020. I honestly didn’t know they were coming and when I saw them out there with bottles of wine that they had obviously brought themselves, I immediately went outside to ask them what on earth they thought they were doing. After twenty five minutes of in-depth (but socially distanced) discussion, I realised that Alison had invited them to come and do some work in the garden as it was a beautiful day and she wanted to thank them for all the hard work that they had put in, helping her to run the Girls’ House. As the garden is part of Alison’s workplace, (as well as being our private garden) I had no problem in deducing that they really were there for work purposes and therefore they were well within the Covid rules, as laid down at the time. With the benefit of hindsight and following innumerable recent complaints from offended neighbours (who’ve just remembered what happened two years ago) and passers by who must have heard something, I now realise I was naive in accepting things at face value and I really should have asked them to leave. The fact that I didn’t, doesn’t make me a bad person; does it? I concede I did omit to mention it on numerous occasions in the past when quizzed by the fun police, but that’s just my ageing forgetfulness. It certainly wasn’t an attempt to deliberately obfuscate.

If you believe that hogwash you probably believe BoJo. What a pretty pass we have reached when countless Tory MPs appear on our screens and radios vehemently denying that BoJo has done anything wrong and begging us to await the outcome of the ‘Inquiry’. The man has patently misled the House, which should mean a quick trip down the Thames to Traitors’ Gate and incarceration in the White Tower until the axe man has had time to sharpen his blade. It will take me a few minutes to complete this edition and it’s quite possible that he will already have resigned by the time I publish this. On the other hand, he is “Slippery Sid” who typically has been able to talk his way out of a corner surrounded by three crocodiles, two hippos and a black mamba in a thorn tree. However, the disarmingly named 1922 Committee have been in session this evening and you can bet your bottom dollar that the names of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were on most peoples’ minds, if not their lips.

Meanwhile, I should like to congratulate Eastbourne Town Council on an absolute masterstroke of planning. Most of the pavements around town are in a shoddy state (rather like the roads) so when confronted by private ventures that wanted to lay hyper-speedy broadband cables they must have rubbed their hands and thought “here is our opportunity to carry out some much needed repair work, underwritten by private enterprise”. Well you would wouldn’t you if you were the Council Chief Exec? I was quite impressed when Lightning Fibre passed our way achieving the desired result in minimal time and slavishly returning the walkways to EXACTLY the state that they found them in. If this meant re-creating cracks and potholes, they did. It was inconvenient, but not terribly so and the thought did cross one’s mind that we might end up with unimaginable download speeds in a few months time; quite exciting really. But then came City Fibre. Where Lightning were fencing off their work with yellow plastic barriers, City use a delicate shade of light blue. Stupidly I had assumed that they must have reached an agreement whereby the Town was divided up so that they would have roughly equal shares. My naivety is again on full display. In fact, City are now coming round to dig up all the pavements again so that they can lay their cables ALONGSIDE Lightning’s. The nice foreman from City explained that Lightning had refused to agree to sharing the ducts and the Council weren’t interested in repairing the pavements (no money!). In fact, there is a clause in their contracts saying that if any of their work is found to be sub-standard they will be fined by the cash-strapped Council. So they too are slavishly putting everything back exactly as they found it. The really good news is that apparently Virgin now also want to get in on the act, although it’s possible they might reach an agreement with either Lightning or City to use their cables; or they might just come and dig it all up again. I well remember how my parents used to laugh at how the Electricity Board would lay some cables, followed a few weeks later by the Gas Board digging up the road again to insert some pipes, closely followed by the GPO (General Post Office and forerunner to BT for those too young to know) again digging holes to upgrade their wiring. How come the Romans were so efficient, yet 1,800 years later we still can’t organise the proverbial party in a brewery. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so pathetically mis-managed. Welcome to Global Britain.

Happy New Year. I have just successfully written 2022 for the first time. I find it’s normally about the 7th January when I write 2021 or whatever the previous year is, usually on an important cheque, in the days when people still wrote cheques. The fact that this is edition number 221 could easily have caused a slip of the pen, but it seems the ageing grey matter hasn’t entirely given up; yet.

Surveying the New Year lists of new knights, dames, CBE’s etc is normally a gently pleasurable and interesting exercise, without causing the blood pressure to rise too dramatically. However, this year you could have knocked me down with a feather when the nice man on BBC Radio 4 informed us that former Prime Minister Tony Blair was to be knighted, but not just knighted; he is to be a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the oldest and most senior order of chivalry in Britain, dating back to 1348, when King Edward III instituted it. Appointments are at the sole discretion of the Sovereign and beside the Monarch and Prince Charles there can only be twenty four living Companions. Appointees are supposed to be Knights already, but TB has just jumped straight in there. Seemingly it’s protocol that all former PM’s are eventually appointed to the Order. So next in line it’ll be Brown, Cameron, May and BoJo. Edward III will be turning in his grave. There’s a Parliamentary Petition flashing around on social media calling for signatures so that his appointment can be debated in Parliament. Already there are well over 300,000 and rising fast. I’m not sure that Parliament has any power or authority to overrule the Monarch, but it will make for interesting viewing! Blair has blood on his hands and a massive stain on his reputation. It’s hugely insulting to all current and former Garter members that he should be allowed to join their ranks. Watch this space.

Meanwhile, the Spring-like weather is causing much head-scratching. I mowed our two lawns in early December before putting the John Deere to bed for the winter. That already seemed pretty late in the year and I was fondly hoping that it wouldn’t be required again before mid-February at the earliest. But with temperatures in the mid teens nature is seriously confused. Our camellia has so many buds/nascent flowers on it that it’s in danger of keeling over, while the grass is visibly growing. I have lovingly tended many a handsome greensward over the years, but never have I cut the grass in January, let alone just after New Year. What to do? It’s a dilemma. I’m sure that BoJo and the gang don’t have to retire to bed with such weighty problems furrowing their troubled brows…..do they?

Meanwhile, tax returns are due. Perhaps I’ll just wander down to the beach and bury my head in the sand.

As a former RAF Officer, I was intrigued to read that because the Air Force now has a considerable number of women in its ranks (it always did, they were known as WRAFS, pronounced WAAFS) the appellation ‘airmen’ is considered inappropriate. The argument goes that the Army has soldiers and the Navy has sailors, both of which terms can apply equally to either sex, so the RAF should have a similarly gender neutral rank. I understand that, but unfortunately they have come up with the term ‘aviators’. An aviator, very specifically, is somebody who takes to the air in a flying machine. Almost all soldiers are likely to be called upon to fight at some point, even if its only in self-defence. The majority of sailors go to sea at some point, albeit most of the Royal Navy’s ships seem to spend more time in dry dock than at sea these days. But the vast majority of personnel in the Royal Air Force simply don’t fly. It is only a very small percentage of the total who are lucky enough to ‘pull max welly and punch up into the puffies’ as my fighter pilot friends used to say. So to call all those engineers, technicians, mechanics, administrators, cooks, bottle washers and blanket stackers, ‘aviators’ is a criminal abuse of the English language. It ill becomes the critic not to offer an alternative so…… …… ….. I’ve just sat here for thirty minutes staring at a blank screen, devoid of inspiration. The best I could do was airsoul but that’s somewhat open to abuse! If you can put ‘or’ on the end of sail how about airer or airor. Air Trooper maybe, after all we were the Cavalry of the Air? (But the Army Air Corps already has those).The sad fact is that they’ve been airmen and women since the whole shooting match took to the skies and there really isn’t anything better. I’ll bet ‘aviator’ has gone down like a lead balloon with most of the boys in blue. (and girls of course)

How many things in daily life annoy you? I confess that I get mildly irritated by the superfluous use of words; the shop assistant who adds ‘at all’ to the end of every sentence. I’m always tempted to say “nothing thank you, at all” but my genteel upbringing prevents such rudeness. Or the commentator who says “he’s got a great future ahead of him”. Where else is his future going to be? I also get unreasonably cross at drivers who are too polite and bring traffic to a grinding halt by being nice in letting you go, but against the rules of the road. Then there’s the person who takes FOREVER to pack their shopping at the checkout and then stops to natter about inconsequentialities when there’s a fast-growing queue behind them. The road hog who sits in the outside lane of a three lane motorway at 65 mph when the two inside lanes are clear…..or the “really interesting” person who’s got so much to say that you can never get a word in edgeways……or the golf bore who insists on replaying his “brilliant” round, shot by shot, or telling you in minute detail about his brand new Gary Player 58 degree sand wedge, with square grooves, ten degrees of bounce, slightly offset and with an extra stiff shaft. Yawn.

I wonder how many really irritating things I am guilty of? Plenty I have no doubt. Jealousy is definitely one of them. A friend (I nearly wrote “of mine” until I realised it is superfluous!) has just gone skiing to Les Trois Vallees, one of my favourite haunts in the good old days. To rub salt in the wound she sent me a fabulous photo of a glorious snow-soaked alpine panorama, glistening in the bright sunshine without another body in sight. Grrrr! I wanted to say “break a leg” but that would’ve been too unkind. I made do with “enjoy”….through gritted teeth.

It’s hard to believe, but winter hasn’t officially started yet; not until 21st December. Walking along the frosty forest floor, ankle deep in light tan beech leaves that have left their twisted array of twigs and branches naked and vulnerable to the incoming storms, it’s hard to think that we aren’t already in the chilly bit that comes between Autumn and Spring. Friston Forest, where Callie and I get our different speeds of exercise on a regular basis, is a glorious rolling beech wood that stretches as far as the eye can see. The trees surround a large acreage of meadow (I suspect at least 100 acres, but I need Christopher Robin’s help in measuring it) that was previously used by a local racing stud for exercising the thoroughbreds. That is long since defunct and it has become a wonderful playground for a medley of wildlife and our four legged friends. Up until now. The Forestry Commission, which owns the land, has decided to fence in the whole pasture and hand it over to a local dairy farmer, whose cows will now desecrate the land with a surfeit of pats and the air with noxious, climate changing fumes. Is nothing safe?

I have a shocking confession to make. Prior to Covid unleashing its latest mutation on a tired world, I had never heard of Omicron. The closest I came to a classical education was very occasionally beating Mr Relle, our Classics master, at tiddlywinks. He was an England international, or so he claimed. Was he pulling our legs? I don’t recall ever seeing the results in the Telegraph sports section…..

To hide my embarrassment at such ignorance, I decided to invest in some new disposable face masks. The somewhat ‘wet behind the ears’ new assistant in Day Lewis, our local pharmacy, informed me that they were 50p each. “Do they come in packets” I inquired. Unsure, she consulted a senior colleague. Sure enough a box of fifty was produced from the inner sanctum. “Would you like a box?” says she. Thinking that £25 was rather more than I wanted to spend I politely asked “How much?”. Again she consulted the pharmacist. “That’ll be £7.99p please”. You could have knocked me down with a feather. What a bargain! 50p for one or 16p each if I bulk bought. Was it really a bargain, or the most outrageous, scandalous piece of profiteering you’ve ever heard of! Be ashamed Day Lewis, be very ashamed. I snapped her hand off for the box before she changed her mind.

Practically every expert not directly involved in selecting the England cricket team for the first Ashes test in Brisbane has been heavily critical of the decision to play Jack Leach, a left arm spinner, in favour of Stuart Broad one half of England’s most successful opening bowling partnership ever. His partner James Anderson’s fitness was in doubt so the management decided to hold him back for the second day/night test in Adelaide, where the lights and a pink ball would suit his talents to a tee. But Broad is fit, raring to go and has the sign of Zorro over at least three of Australia’s top order batsmen. The unfolding events appear to support these multifarious experts’ astonishment; but they don’t realise that Joe Root and Chris Silverwood (Captain and Manager respectively) have a Baldrick-esque cunning plan. Earlier in the year Broad was again mysteriously left out for the first match of the series. He was so incensed that he came back for the second test like a whirling dervish on steroids and helped to rout the opposition. Clearly the England management are just trying to lull Australia into a false sense of security by suffering a humiliating defeat before unleashing a rampant Broad. You can almost see the Aussie wimps cowering in the corner when the realise the brilliance of Baldrick’s plan. For the record, Leach went at over 8 runs an over in his eleven over spell. Over and out.

When I was a mere slip of a lad, growing up in the semi-suburban Home Counties of North London, I knew what a cow looked like but rarely got close enough to one to smell it’s breath. That was until I went away to school in East Anglia, where a number of my mates were farmers’ sons and I spent many happy days, mucking out, driving tractors and helping to deliver calves. It must have been about 1968 that I first heard the term “AI”. I’ve no idea how long it had been around for, but I think the process of Artificial Insemination was a relatively new concept for fertilising cows. Of course since then it’s become a common practise for humans as well as our bovine herds. I believe it’s quite a common practice for lesbian couples amongst others, although I have somewhat limited first hand experience of that.

There is, however, a totally new interpretation of AI; Artificial Intelligence. These innocent sounding words have much more sinister implications than just a bit of tampering with nature. In between listening to “experts” pontificating on the dangers of Covid and how we will probably have to live with it for the rest of our lives, (what, like flu?) I have also been intrigued by other “experts” warning how we have been so brilliant at inventing robots with brains that they might actually become cleverer than us and…….

It’s the stuff of Hollywood science fiction. The good guys dressed in white help us to do wonderful things, then somehow one goes bad and we have regiments of bad guys in black taking over the world. The trouble is, it seems it’s no longer fiction. The boffins are becoming seriously worried that the artificial brains they are building might prove to be far too clever for us and in an Animal Farm like takeover they will become the masters and we the slaves; that’s if we’re lucky/unlucky enough to be allowed to live. How ironic it would be, if after all this breast-beating and history incinerating over slavery, we end up as slaves ourselves. I take some comfort in the knowledge that unless workable cryogenics arrive somewhat earlier than predicted, I won’t have to worry about it too much, but I do fear for my children.

Purely by chance, as I write this, I have the headphones on listening to the fantastic Mormon Tabernacle Choir with the angelic voice of Scandinavian singing sensation Sissel. (More precisely she’s Norwegian, but I liked the alliteration!). She is performing that beautiful salutation to the Almighty, “How Great Thou Art”. The Saviour of which they sing might well be needed rather sooner than he’d planned on. Although come to think of it, if he/she/it/they really is omnipotent then they would have anticipated all this anyway. I think I’m in danger of disappearing up my own backside here. (Avoiding the coffee grains hopefully!)

Harking back to those halcyon days of my youth, the revered establishments of learning almost universally put the ‘place’ before University; i.e. you went to Cambridge University, or Oxford or Durham or London or, heaven forbid, Nottingham University. However, there’s always been that occasional intellectual snobbishness that inverts the appellation; The University of Cambridge. It was quite effective when used occasionally to emphasise that this is truly a stalwart of academe, a noble institution where the elite gathered to further the cause of mankind. It’s a shame, but now it seems to have become the norm for every two bit former polytechnic to be “The University of….”.

How long I wonder before the Dons are all robots with heads the size of giant pumpkins?

If you are of a queasy disposition please look away now. In a bid to improve my healthspan and not just my lifespan, I have, over the past year or two, been undergoing various tests and “procedures”. The result of this is that apparently I have various Lyme disease tick-borne co-infections (bartonella and borrelia, should that mean a row of beans to you) and an overdose of lead, mercury and mould. It’s quite conceivable that you may be suffering with similar afflictions and not know it. The tests required to unearth this information are specific and expensive. However, the low grade ailments (headaches, fatigue and brain fog to name but three) that many people suffer from can certainly be explained by things like mould and metals in the body. The London Clinic of Nutrition, with whom I have been exchanging cash for diagnostics and repair, have given me a whole range of methods to detox and eliminate the unwanted intruders. One of these is a coffee enema. If you had suggested to me as a young pilot in the Army Air Corps that one day I would willingly be injecting coffee up my backside, I suspect you would have got short shrift! But that is exactly what I am now doing. A rapid delivery from Amazon of a sort of siliconey/rubbery sort of hot water bottle, with a long tube, a tap and various nozzles, plus a supply of very special, finely ground, organic, hand-picked, “grown on southern slopes only”, limited edition Peruvian coffee and I was ready to put it all to the test. I will spare you the intimate details of all that is required to end up with intestines full of lukewarm coffee, but suffice it to say it’s actually rather a pleasurable experience and the feeling of cleanliness afterwards is well worth the effort. Only time will tell if the desired effect is being achieved. Allegedly the infusion of coffee refreshes parts other liquids cannot reach (with apologies to Heineken) and enables the body to safely eject all those unwanted invaders. No doubt Gwyneth Paltrow would be proud of me.

Did you ever see that brilliant film Trading Places starring Eddie Murphy? I was reminded of it yesterday listening to a group of schoolgirls chatting in the street. One of them I have known for a few years through hockey. From humble beginnings she has bloomed and blossomed within the cultured portals of one of England’s finer public schools. Starting out with a voice that the market girl Eliza Doolittle would have been proud of, she could now pass as an aristocratic daughter of Cholmondley Hall, so sweet were the plums that she was sucking. It did make me wonder if the old boys/girls network is still alive and well? Are people still judged by the way they look and speak when it comes to getting high flying jobs? I suspect the answer is yes, in some spheres. However, it’s now very apparent that such a privileged education can even be a handicap when it comes to getting into Oxbridge.

No doubt our super/hypermarkets will soon be echoing to the sound of “The Holly and the Ivy” and other such seasonal renditions. I am totally unfamiliar with its origins, but the carol proclaims that “of all the trees in the wood the Holly bears the crown”. It has a blossom as white as the lily flower, a berry as red as any blood (except members of the Royal family of course), a prickle as sharp as any thorn and a bark as bitter as any gall. Why all that should confer Royal status is beyond me. As for ivy…….I have spent the last two years trying to rid our borrowed domain from generations of growth of the wretched stuff. Our many elegant trees, not to mention the walls and brickwork, are extremely grateful for my efforts. In fairness, our neighbour’s holly is a fine specimen, with richly variegated leaves and currently a display of blood red berries that would keep Waitrose in stock for a month, should they be any use for jam making….which of course they’re not. The local bird population is extremely excited and grateful though. No doubt new holly trees will be popping up all over the South Downs.

Time for a coffee, methinks….