Boss Radio

I'm not imagining it. The newpenny is now worth so little that some (Not a lot, but a few, and they're gaining ground) 'assistants' object to having to give you your 1p change when you pay for something that is priced at £X.99, whereas I, being the curmudgeon that I am, think that if they're going to charge something ending in 99 (Or 95, and I've noticed 98 creeping in there on auction sites of late....) then they should be prepared to give you the odd p even if it's not worth anything.

Of course I blame decimalisation. An old penny had a value, you could buy a really nice car for under a thousand quid, but to buy it you'd have to save up every penny you were paid for two years, £10 a week was considered pretty good wages, so you can work out for yourself that a lonesome penny, or even ha'penny, was actually worth something, and no one would would knock a penny off the price to tempt to you buy it if the real price was a round pound. I saw an old ad for a car the other day, it was seven hundred and something pounds, I don't remember exactly. What I do remember is that after the pounds came 17/6d. No one would bother being that exact these days, it would cost more to work out the exact price than it was worth knowing and would require the employment of people who understood that kind of stuff, which would cost more money and require the price of the car to be put up by a few more pence. Why bother when you can ask a computer the value of the materials, triple it to allow for the labour costs, then add a few thousands profit and round it up to the nearest £100, and finally knock a pound off? It's small wonder that you can haggle over the price of a car nowadays. It's become your civic duty. Just remember the slogan 'Don't let the bastards grind you down.'

You know it makes sense.

To me this rounding down by a penny/5p makes no sense. No one, but no one believes that by sheer coincidence every single product in the world costs something plus just-under-a-pound to produce, ship, and sell, therefore they think we're stupid. They think we look at the pounds and think the item is a pound cheaper than it would be if they hadn't knocked that odd bit off the top. Now I don't know about you, but I automatically add the odd coin back on. To me £29.95 and £29.99 are 30 quid.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to let them keep the change.

So, as usual Oscar fever is upon us, awards are going to be handed out, people are going to cry in front of thousands of other people while millions more watch them on TV.

And I find myself with a question.

Since the ancestors of the present day citizens of the USA went to so much trouble to rid themselves of the yolk of British rule, why are they so danged fascinated by our royal family? They come over here and queue up to watch the changing of the guard, wait in line for a quick glimpse at the crown jewels, go and stand in front of Buckingham Palace, take the tour of Windsor, and then go home and give out awards to people who play British royalty in the movies.

Look, there's pretty much no one in England who can't do an impression of either the queen, the prince of Wales, or that gangly Greek guy that the queen's married to. The odds on Helen Mirren winning an Oscar for her portrayal of the queen have just got so rubbish that bookies are refusing to take any more bets on her. Why? She's playing the queen, it's not that difficult.

We've got a couple of guys over here who can do almost perfect renditions of Dubya, but we're not giving them awards for it.

I was going to call this 'Sport. It's not just cricket', which I thought was dead clever, but it was also meaningless. Even more meaningless than the title I have used. At one point I even considered leaving my mispell 'Sprot' up there because I think that's funny. Does anyone else have problems coming up with titles for their little works of art?

I did think of putting the date in there, but since that info is saved with every post it seemed a bit redundant. Now where was I?...

Oh yes. Everyone's feeling really proud that the English cricket team's won something after its previous disasterous debacles. Now me, as anyone who's studied my 'About me' page will know (Does anyone do that?), I'm not to bothered with sport. It seems pointless. Someone wins therefore someone else loses, so half the supporters feel good and the other half feel bad, and occasionally you get a draw and all the supporters feel bad, but not as bad as they would have if they'd lost.

What is the point? Why would anyone want to take the (Roughly) 50/50 chance that they're going to go home miserable? They could stay at home an toss a coin. Back when I was at school apparently I was a little whizzer at the 100 yards, I could pretty much hold my own at 220 yards, but as the distances got longer, the further back I lagged. No staying power, me. So people said I should specialise in the shorter distances and I couldn't understand why. If I was so danged good at the shorter distances that means I'd beat them, why would anyone urge me to beat them?

Really the way I looked at it was that everyone is different. I was crap at history, and football, and English Lit. So what? I was hot at music, short distance running, and English... well, one English language teacher said I was incredibly inventive, and the other said my grammar was the worst he'd ever seen. They were both right, they just thought different things were important. So why does it matter if someone's better at something than you are? It's going to happen. If everyone was Robbie Williams who'd build the cars?

So I've never supported any sporting endevours. If someone asks me who my favourite team is and I can't get out of it I answer "Stockport County" and that shuts them up. Well, except for the little kid who stepped back, eyes wide open, and shouted "Are you MAD???"

The thing is, I've had this theory about why the English cricket team did so bad in the Ashes, but being so out of it where sport is concerned I decided that I was in no position to express it. Beside, I might get laughed at.

When the number one team plays the number two team at anything, you expect it to be a close call in favour of the number one team. what you don't expect is the first total whitewash in a gazzilion years. And then it came to pass that England's plan of attack was published in the Oz press. If it's in the press, I figured, then what are the odds that it was in the Australian team's hands first? That might even explain why we occasionally got off to a cracking start, then after the next break we promptly lost it again. You've got to give the mole his chance to pinch the latest secret plan.

I was happy with this theory, especially when, as soon as the Aussies had got the ashes back the English team got their mojo back, but now I suddenly find myself with another theory...

Apparently the Australian team had a magician called Shanewarne who weaved majik for them during the Ashes, but he has now departed to Middle Earth or somewhere, leaving them to their own devices. They tried to fool us by fielding a guy called Shane Watson, but the magic had gone. England weren't defeated by Australia in the battle for the Ashes, they were defeated by the sorcerous Shanewarne.

You know it makes sense.

One of them is fish.

There was a news item about the decline in river fishing today. They interviewed a few anglers, and they asked their very first victim what it was that attracted him to the sport. He replied that it was the excitement of pitting himself against the fish.

I laughed. I couldn't help it. I knew the guy was completely serious, and I understood the point he was trying to make, but all I could see was this guy, maybe 5 or 6 feet tall with a muscle system as sophisticated as a really sophisticated thing at a gathering of debs in Buckingham palace on Really Sophisticated Day, and a brain this big, taking on a fish about twelve inches long, with a muscle system devoted entirely to propelling it though water and a brain about _this big.

That's gotta be so galling when one of the little bugglers gets away...

Of course I have to be different. Not only does fishing not really qualify as a sport by my definition, and yes, I'll grant you that it does by almost everybody else's, but to me it gets in the way of a perfectly good lounge about by the riverside.

I could undertand it if they actually wanted to eat their catch, but most of them seem to just plop the poor old fish into a tiny little net until they get a chance to weigh them, then chuck them back into the river for someone else to catch while they go to the pub to lie about the size of the day's catch. Why bother with the catching part? Why not just go to the pub and lie about it? It cuts out all that unnecessary waking up and doing something that spoils an otherwise perfectly nice day out.

In that respect, at least, it's remarkably similar to another 'sport' that only just qualifies for inclusion under that over subscribed noun. I refer, of course, to golf. Golf courses take up great swathes of countryside and only allow members to walk over them. Fair enough. So the rich can pay for the right to walk over nice countryside that's kept neat and tidy and is guaranteed lion and python free. Why spoil it by stopping to hit a tiny litte white pill every few hundred yards, a distraction that seems to detract considerably from most people's enjoyment of the walk while drastically increasing their blood pressure?

I guess this is what they mean by 'The British take their pleasures seriously'. OK, that's our excuse, now what about the rest of the world?

Now here's your homework for today.

What are the other two things that smell like fish?

Here's a clue. I swear I saw one of them on 'Today in parliament'.

After billowing in from the South for months now, the wind changed its mind today and blew across the back of our gardens from West to East, at which point I realised that I had blundered.

The roof on the shed at the bottom of the garden had caved in after one too many oiks from the houses on the other side tried to walk across it, so we replaced it with corrugated plastic. No one, we reasoned, would be dim enough to try and walk across that, and we were right. Well, one out of two ain't bad.

When it came to overlapping the corrugations we decided it didn't matter which way the overlap went. We'd started from over there so the overlap would naturally fall over there. Bad move. If I'd thought about it for more than half a nanosecond I'd have realised that when the wind blows across the backs of the gardens it always goes thataway. There's a hill in the way to prevent it from coming from the opposite direction. And as you've guessed I'd put the overlaps facing into the wind.

I first realised this when I saw one of the mid sections of the roof rising up into the wind, I charged out and put a couple of bricks on it. 'That'll hold it until I can get out and do a proper job' I thought, meaning 'That'll hold it until that damn wind goes down a bit and it's a little less goolie-shredding out there'. I went back in and realised that I'd rushed out leaving the toast toasting under the grill. It was now charcoal. I ate it anyway, just to teach myself a lesson. Oh well. One out of three ain't bad.

As I ate I glanced out of the window, just in time to see the mid section rearing up again. Back out like a bolt of lightning (Slow lightning, you may have heard of it) and before I knew it there I was wrestling with a furshlugginer chunk of corrugated plastic which was by now only held on by one stuborn screw, and seemed determinded to learn the shimmy in one easy lesson. At least it had stopped raining, or to be more precise the wind was blowing so hard that the rain couldn't reach ground.

Finally the wind died down a bit and I managed to tear up a little of the adjoining roof and slip the recalcitrant piece under it so that it was now overlapping the right way.

It was about this time that I noticed that the aforementioned neighbouring peice of roof was also only held on by a couple of screws. Down the ladder once more, where's that piece of wood I had lying around? I found it resting against the shed where I would swear on a stack of Bibles I hadn't left it and hoisted it onto the roof to hold the lot down, but still it kept defiantly trying to rear up, so - I'm back down the ladder again and collecting some more bricks to lay them across the plank. That did it, but the far end of the roof was now starting to flap a little where it overlapped the shed, and I knew it wasn't going to hold much longer if my past record was anything to go by. Down the ladder again, find another plank, more bricks... And finally it held out until the wind dropped.

Meanwhile I suddenly remembered that I'd put the binbags out the night before and rushed out to the front expecting them to be blown all over the road. But they weren't, the only thing missing was the paper, glass, and tin recycling box. There was one resting against a car about 50 yards up the hill on the wrong side of the road, I went to look, yup, that's the one, so there I was carrying it back down the road and I noticed a light flashing. It was a street light. The protective cover had blown off and was swinging crazily about in the breeze. 'Whoops,' I thought. 'Better get inside and 'phone the council before that thing does some damage or hurts someone'. I'd reached the house when I suddenly realised that it was my vehicle parked under that light. I turned to look back up the road just in time to see the cover break free with a final grand pirouette and land on my roofrack, bounce off it, hit my wingmirror, and finally let the pavement break its fall.

Oh well. One out of four ain't bad.