Yorkshire Bitter

I’d always thought there was something strange in the water in Howden, going by the foul-tasting coffee from the vending machine where I worked until just recently.

I wonder if it can be blamed for two resignations on points of principle within a week in Howden. The first was my own, which of course is a sideshow compared to the spectacle of shadow cabinet minister David Dabis dramatically resigning his seat and fighting to win it back on a matter of civil liberties.

It’s not often that Howden, a tiny market town in the East Riding of Yorkshire, features prominently in the news. Normally the only time the media feature much in conversation there is when locals blame the Press Association’s northern office in the town for the lack of parking space. So I dread to think of what they’ll make of the media circus that will soon roll into town, robbing them of even more parking spaces.

As someone who has never voted Tory, it’s an odd feeling to find myself backing David Davis, but it’s not so much about him or his party, it’s about standing up for what is right.

All the rights and freedoms that we have enjoyed for centuries had to be fought for by our ancestors - Magna Carta, the Peasants’ Revolt, the English Civil War, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo Massacre, the suffragettes and so on. These brave men and women made great sacrifices - and more recent generations fought to protect those hard-earned freedoms. It completely dishonours their memory to just piss it all away for nothing.

So it’s disappointing that Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of The Sun, is threatening to stand against him, backed by the media might of Rupert Murdoch. Now Kelvin may be the anti-Christ in the folklore of the left but he’s a legend among real journalists for his sheer brilliance as a populist editor who instinctively understood his readership. I had the privilege of working briefly on a few casual sub-editing shifts there when he was still at the helm in Wapping. But you’re wrong on this one, Kelvin, sorry.

Kelvin said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

I don’t feel my civil liberties as being at risk, but I view my life as being at risk if I am on the Tube or the train and some bad guy wants to blow me up or blow my family up, so I am willing to do anything to avoid that.

Well, I can’t fault his ability to articulate exactly what many people fear about ‘do-gooders’ undermining the fight against terrorists. But come on, the IRA killed far more people and damaged far more economic targets than al-Qaeda have ever managed in this country.

The threat from the IRA was real, they were deadly and could have killed many thousands more people if their remit was to be as reckless with civilian lives as al-Qaeda wants to be. In comparison, there has only been one successful Islamist bombing in this country and many, many failures by pathetic social misfits who are all mouth and no trousers. If we could resist the IRA by carrying on our lives as normal, just as people did during the Blitz, why do we need all these new laws now?

I’d just like to introduce a new contributor to the blog, Paul Gardner, who is a fellow journalist and neighbour.

If  anyone else with a Yorkshire connection (past or present) would like to contribute to the blog, please let me know. You don’t need to be a professional writer and you certainly don’t have to agree with any other opinions on here. All I ask is that you have something to say and can say it well.

I’ll add a special “contact” button but in the meantime you could get in touch by adding a comment.

Thanks.

Ho hum, over five months since the last entry. It’s not like there hasn’t been plenty of material to talk about either, like the developments around that dreadful extended family in Dewsbury. You know the ones I mean.

But yours truly has just been too busy on other projects for a long time. Now, finally, I can get around to giving the whole site a lick of paint and making it something of actual use to Barlbarians, rather than just being a repository of random rubbish.

Watch this space.

School was never like this in my day. All this talk of “the happiest days of your lives” was a sick joke to me.

But then we didn’t have teachers like Sarah Green of Stockport. The Manchester Evening News reports: “Sarah Green was asked to stay away from Stockport Grammar after her bosses discovered that she had appeared in an advert simulating sex with a workman.”

Miss Green is the first female in this video. Her pupils will be gutted if she’s sacked, at least the male ones. How short-sighted of her bosses, anyone can see she has what it takes to make her boys stand to attention….

If the teacher jailed over the name of a teddy bear issue wasn’t so deadly serious, I’d have found it hilarious.

The sheer nonsense of her being charged in the first place, followed by the mob bussed in to wave machetes and call for her execution, is so farcical that it makes the mocking of religious stupidity in Monty Python and the Holy Grail seem very tame by comparison. But you might like to check out the “We’ve found a witch, may we burn her?” scene below, which pretty much sums up the ‘logic’ of this mob.

It’s also utterly self-defeating. Inevitably, there are teddy bears called Mohammed being sold on eBay now. This one is currently going for $3,050 at the time of writing, all proceeds going to charity.
Continue reading ‘Mohammed the Teddy Bear’

The Environment Agency says there is a massive tidal surge along the East Coast, from North Yorkshire all the way down to Kent, warning of “extreme danger to life and property”.

It’s looking like our neck of the woods is going to be OK (I bloody hope so anyway, as I don’t have any sandbags) but Whitby, Bridlington and the surrounding coast are looking dodgy.

Thank you, John Grogan and everyone else who campaigned for the improved Barlby flood defences. Fingers crossed for everyone else.

More trash through my letterbox, this time from a firm playing emotional blackmail by featuring a photo of a crying blonde child (looking not unlike poor little Madeleine McCann) and the words “Will you reject me too?”

Well, yes I will actually, since there is no sign of a registered charity number on the leaflet and no address, just a mobile phone number (0790 2213700 - tell ‘em I sent you ) and a Lithuanian website address which may not have anything to do with the collectors.

Another laughable piece of emotional blackmail is the caption “Indifference - worse than treason”. Well, this was worth expanding the EU for, eh?

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of The Darwin Awards but it’s a website dedicated to stupid people who selflessly remove themselves from the human gene pool by dying in particularly stupid ways, e.g. juggling with live hand grenades.

Selby now has its very own candidate, according to the York Press, which reports on a man who suffered a 33,000-volt electric shock when he tried to steal copper wiring from a substation:

Steven Smith, 43, of Cockret Court, Selby, was spotted earlier this month in the town’s Bawtry Road by members of the public, who said he had severe burns. Mr Smith, who police said had tried to take the wiring from a local electricity substation, was taken to Pinderfields Hospital, in Wakefield.

Continue reading ‘Thick as Thieves’