Since the budget today I haven't heard a squeak out of ASH or Alcohol Concern.
Not only is minimum pricing not coming in. But shock, horror. NO tax rises on fags and booze.
This may be the quiet before the storm. I expect a whining like the sound of a 1000 vuvulesas in the coming days.
On that note I'm off for a drink and a fag*
*If you are a citizen of the USA. In the Uk, a fag, is slang for a cigarette.
Sure enough it was from the eldest daughter. Just yesterday we had been trawling around for wedding venues. So I presumed it was about that.
Oh no.
(I won't bore you with the one asking how to bake a potato)
She and her prospective husband have put in an offer for a flat in St Albans. Fair enough you think. Good on them.
However.
I expect the next call will be asking me to help out with the deposit.
What should I do, as a pensioner living near the poverty line. (Ok, not quite).
1. Tell her to F off?
2. Lend her everything she asks for?
3. Haggle?
4. Tell her to walk the streets?
5. Sell her cats?
6. Borrow from a lone shark?
5. None of the above?
Answers on an E card.
I spent it driving to prospective wedding venues for my daughter. Again.
Apart from the price, the two we visited today were wildly different. One was a Tudor manor and the other was a large palladian style mansion.
The tudor style manor house although being smaller was breathtaking in it's simplicity and olde world charm and had a certain warmth with vast amounts of timbered beams.
The mansion although very grand in manner with fluted columns in the hallway and fountains in the drive, was let down by health and safety laws. Where there would have been arches allowing the reception areas to flow together, these had been replaced with hideously modern fire doors. Everywhere you went, you felt compartmentalised into boxes.
All in all, I think the tudor manor will be the choice of venue.
Then of course I don't get a say in the decision. I'm just the mug father of the Bride. I'm just expected to pay for the damn thing. Oh and make a speech.
My family are most definitely Middle class. However over the years they have all been conditioned to accept what the MSM puts out.
My Wife, when she watches the Beeb, believes all the Lies and spin. She's a highly paid Business analyst, though why she can't analyse real life is beyond me.
The eldest Daughter works in the City, and also believes the crap we are fed.
Second daughter fills me with hope as she does question what she reads in the MSM.
I give up with the boy. He's got a Masters in Chemistry and believes in global warming.
Should I care?
My eldest daughter recently became engaged. All well and good you might think, The Filthy Engineer is getting rid of another millstone. It's bloody hard work and potentially expensive. She is looking to buy rather than rent and therefore I've been dragged halfway round southern England looking at properties. Apart from that, I'm also driving around half the country looking at expensive wedding venues.
From the asides I hear from my wife to the daughter, I have a feeling that i'm going to be poorer in the near future. I.e deposit on flat, and a large contribution to the wedding.
ADVERT
One daughter that can be sold into slavery. Apply now at FE towers. Credit card payments accepted
P.S There are a load of alcoholics in my family. The last daughter's wedding cost me £ 2000 in drinks for the evening do.
You know how the righteous use this phrase to try and ban everything.
Firstly, I'd like to know who this one child is that keeps getting its life saved. It's either enormously lucky, or a stupid little toe-rag. Probably the latter – it does keep getting into these scrapes that it has to be rescued from. If someone can let me know the little bastard's name and address, I'll undertake to go round and put it permanently out of our misery.
Job done.
A grandmother has been jailed for five years for possessing a "family heirloom" World War II pistol.
Gail Cochrane, 53, had kept the gun for 29 years following the death of her father, who had been in the Royal Navy.
Police found the weapon, a Browning self-loading pistol, during a search of her home in Dundee while looking for her son.
She admitted illegal possession of the firearm, an offence with a minimum five-year jail term under Scots law.
Cases like these beggar belief. How on earth is this "Justice".
And as for Judge Lady stupid Smith. Can she not see how see how the ordinary man in the street will percieve this?
The judge said she was unable to find herself satisfied that this was one of the rare cases in which exceptional circumstances existed.
She said: "The result is I have no alternative but to sentence Mrs Cochrane to a period of five years."
Technically she is right. But oh so morally wrong.
I'm going to lie down in a darkened room
