Bulletin on the railings

After a routine visit to his consultant his majesty has asked me to make the following statement. There are some blood abnormalities with his condition at the moment. These are being addressed by the introduction of a new drug which the medical team have a lot of confidence with. It is not expected that the change in his condition will affect his public duties in anyway. He thanks you for your good wishes.
The reality. Blood numbers go belly up. New drug has a good track record in dealing with similar situations to mine but no guarantees. Next month is critical and another treatment option is exhausted. The alternate option if this is not successful is not very pleasant having been there before I’d rather not go there again.

PS off the air. I will be off the air so speak for a few days. I have a project I wish to complete which will keep me fully occupied for about a week. Please take care. I will try to publish any comments you may wish to make.

Dizzy blond or the big sh** and the really Twirly

Early on Friday morning (early for me to be airing the streets is 8ish) I had to go into West Brom. The wife asked me to take her to the bus terminal on the way. After the debate on having to pay etc she decided it was imperative that she went at that time. Apparently on Diamond buses the fare into brum is 50p. I duly delivered her safely to the terminus and stopped a little way behind a bus. She jumps out and starts to walk towards the bus about 20yds, when the driver promptly pulls out with the wife waving at him. The next bus which is queuing a little way down the road is ten mins at that time of day.
I proceed on my way, only to be interrupted a couple of mins into my journey by my mobile phone. Because I’m driving I have to find a safe place to park up to answer it. “I’ve left my bag in the car which I want to return to M&S”. I suppose this is good enough reason for me to do a detour. I finally get her happily onto her bus. I’m a little late but peace and harmony reign in the BBCB household.
It got me thinking though about the bus service into brum. This is the second time an incident like this has occurred recently. Perhaps the bus companies are not interested in passenger numbers or perhaps this was the same driver. I wonder if any of my local readers have witnessed similar problems.

The West Brom

I don’t know what to make of the current goings on at West Bromwich Building Society these days. The previous management got into a mess and had to be bailed out by a complex range of measures involving some of its lesser partners.
The new management team seem determined to not only re-name the Society involving Birmingham but we now hear they are considering moving the HQ to Birmingham. To better reflect their expansion plans. These guys don’t come from these parts do they?
The West Brom was always a bedrock of financial stability. Your money was safe in a West Brom account. They always believed in prudent financial management and over it’s 100 plus years had become well respected and trusted. Members of the Society have in the main accepted the measures used to get it out of short term problems it had but the new proposals will not go down well. Moving to Birmingham will be the last straw for me. My albeit small savings account will be closed. The problem here though is which other building society to use?
The West Brom moving from West Brom is almost unthinkable and the knock on effect for the town will be immense. I do hope our civic leaders will be as outraged at this proposal as I feel the society members will be.
**“Keep the West Brom in West Brom”**

Pensioners manifesto

The NPC has about 500,000 members mostly ex trade unionist who subscribe through union membership of one form or other. These are mostly long term labour supporters who feel let down by present governments handling of their needs. I'm a private member very supportive of their demands. The above document is the NPC manifesto for pensioners. I was at conference when this was debated and although there is much I agree with I don't think it goes far enough. But I'll be happy if we get half of what they are asking for. About three years ago I lobbied one of Sandwell's MPs on the terrace at Westminster while I was on a visit with a local group. The MP told me (I wont name him/her because it would embarrass her/him) but I was told the standard how proud they were at having lifted 2million pensioners out of poverty and for anything else we would have to be patient. Now telling a pensioner to be patient is like asking a turkey to vote for Christmas. I was less than impressed. But for the arrival of another group the discussion would have turned awkward. I have since had little time for this MP. I will be asking mine if he will be supporting the "Pensioners Manifesto" as soon as possible. In the meantime I ask you all to take this document seriously. In fact I'll email him a copy of it today.

We politically active pensioners don’t want to make it difficult for our MPs/candidates at the next election, we want to make it bloody hard.

Perhaps I should have labelled this post under "barking mad" instead of politics and such. Becasue if past performance is anything to go by that's exactly what they will think we are.

Little green lights

Orange ones, red ones and assorted other colours. No I’ve not been drinking it’s not drugs prescribed or otherwise and it’s not an alien space ship. Men from other universes don’t make it as far as Great Barr. It’s the way my house is lit up at night. The phenomenon is more evident down stairs but the bedrooms and my office are also guilty. The only two rooms in the house not affected are the upstairs bathroom and loo. Every appliance however sophisticated seems to need a warning light to tell you “I’m here, don’t forget me”. When I wonder around my home in the wee hours of the morning I contemplate how much these mille amps of electricity consumed by my electrical equipment is actually costing me and how much could I save if I switched a few off. Extension leads for example; why do they need a warning light? Our new boiler has a warning light on the front, the old one didn’t. The big items like the tele are switched off but most of the others are to damned inconvenient to switch off because of the positions of plugs. We have two digital clocks in the kitchen one on the cooker and one on a microwave. Turning these devises off is practical but would you want to have to re-set the clocks every time you wanted to cook. Can’t see the wife warming (pardon the pun) to that. You can purchase an energy monitoring devise these days so perhaps it’s time we invested in one.
I had a little browse this morning but never came up with one any ideas on what they are called?

A full English

Breakfast that is. Regular readers will have noticed I haven’t been posting so regularly recently. Well that is because my wife and I were invited to a friends wedding down south and together with many of the other wedding guests (also friends of ours) decided to make a long week end of it, stay in a nice hotel and enjoy ourselves for a few days. I don’t often have the pleasure of a full English breakfast these days and I have to admit to fanaticising over this for some time. I usually have to make do with cereal and if I’m lucky a piece of toast and a cup of coffee. So the delights of bacon & egg and all the trimmings were drooling in my mind.
Wonderful day, great wedding, everyone had a lovely time. I get tired easily these days so I decided to turn in about 11pm sober, because I had to drive back to our hotel. Unknown to me at that time I had picked up some kind of virus which manifest itself to me in the early hours of the morning in the form of vomiting and me have to depart with copious amounts of brown smelly liquid which my body clearly did not need from the other end. This procedure continued until about sixish when I finally fell back into bed dehydrated and exhausted. My wife slept blissfully all the way through it. How dare she ever complain about my snoring again. By 9am she had coaxed me to the breakfast table and collected a very well laid out breakfast from the buffet for me because I was not in any state to get my own. I managed a piece of dry toast and I lost count of the cups of coffee but the full English was only picked at.
The misses is really good at making decisions in a crisis and for this one she packed up, bundled me into the car and came home. A bit of a risk I thought but the engagement with sink and loo did not re-start again until the early hours of the following morning. She also slept through that.
I’m pleased to say that 48hrs have passed since and I am eating normally so I guess the crisis is almost over. I can’t yet bring myself to drooling over a full English though. I need some rehab the virus and my other drugs have conspired to upset my sleep pattern which is why I am up in the early hours writing my blog.

Councillors & such II

I did a post on Monday 27th July outlining my concerns about the way we are represented locally. On Friday evening our local paper did a story about one of our Labour Councillors in a ward not far from mine. Headline: - Absent councillor is told to stand down. I know this guy and believe him to be an honest and trustworthy man. He has represented the ward in question for a long time but never lived there. About 18 months ago he and his wife who was also a councillor moved to Aberdovey in north Wales a round trip of 220 miles. His wife’s term expired and she did not stand for re-election, he also promised to resign. It now appears that he has not done so. The demand for his resignation is coming from the Tories in the adjoining ward so no surprise there. But it does raise some issues. I don’t believe that he should be allowed to continue to draw his allowance and he should be forced to resign. No one can represent their constituents well from that distance unless they have a second home in the ward and I don’t believe that to be the case here. The one other factor that has not been considered is if the councillor is ill. If this is the case then his constituents and the rest of the council need to be aware of it. It only strengthens my argument that Councillors should live in the wards they represent. If this was the rule then when he left he would have had to resign.
It will be an interesting by-election though when it does happen. I know the ward and expect the Tories to make a major effort to win it. Do Labour and the Lib Dems have candidates with the ability to win this ward?
Perhaps this is another opportunity to play bonus and banana skins. Any offers to send me the leaflets when they start to come around?