Boss Radio

Just outside the front of our house there's a testament to the losing of night vision due to over-use of electric light.

A few months ago they switched on another streetlight outside our house. It's on the corner of the road leading up to the new estate. 15 yards up the road from it there's an existing light, almost directly opposite it outside our next-door neighbours there's another light, and on the other side of the wall from it there's a 10 slot car park with two more lights in it. Just down the road into the new estate there's another light.

That's 6 street lights visible from our front window.

Our ancestors used to transcribe the Bible by the light of a candle, eat by burning torchlight, see whatever they were doing by the light coming in from a slot in the wall. Now they need 6 street lights just to get around a corner.

The weekend before last was the weekend after fireworks night and we knew that there were several fireworks displays scheduled for Saturday night, so we drove out to a viewpoint and settled down with a flask of coffee to watch them all. Whilst we waited my mother became convinced that the North Star must be the moon. The only way to dissuade her was for me to locate the real moon. I opened the car door and looked up.

About 5 minutes later my mother complained about me letting the cold in.

There was no moon that night. All I could see was stars. Dozens of them, thousands of them, millions of them, some twinkling, others so solid I could almost see the little green men looking back at me from the planets around them.

I can't see stars from our house, it's too light.

I'd forgotten the night sky looked like that.

On the radio today they were dissecting all the contradictory information that we're being flooded with about the state of the economy. Meanwhile the Euro Zone is preparing itself to dive back into recession with us. Figures in the USA show them as having very similar problems, and now China and India are suffering from problems caused by our problems.

So let me explain the problem to them.

The world is only worth so much, so as the rich get richer the poor get poorer. But eventually you reach the point where the poor can't get any poorer without either dying or launching a revolution.

We're almost there.

There's no more money to be made, the rich have got too much of it and there's not enough left to go 'round. It's simple maths really. I learnt it in school. First you take a finite number of monkeys...

Judge-led enquiries? Please, pause whilst I scoff. Who needs judges when we have MPs?

There'll be Conservatives asking questions, they'll be the ones who are always bearing in mind that the banks fund 55% of their party. There'll be Labourites in full probe mode, always remembering in the back of their minds that these are the b@$#@£ds who sabotaged them right before an election. There will probably also be the odd Liberal or two trying to be incisive without upsetting anyone and always carrying the nagging knowledge that these are the guys who never gave them any money. And finally there may be a real minority candidate if they can find one, who will feel that they have something to prove and nothing to lose, and who will in any any case firmly believe that all bankers should be shot.

I can hardly wait.
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Not that judges would be any kind of guarantee of quality. For example, Crown v Levitt. Levitt was a 'businessman' arrested by the serious fraud office on charges of deception amounting to £65m. It also cost almost one and a half million quid to bring him to trial. Levitt cunningly agreed to plead guilty on a "Specimen charge", and was sentenced to, wait for it, 180 hours community service.

Two thugs, in an unprovoked attack, beat a young man senseless with an iron bar. For reasons known only to himself the judge decided not to send them to jail, the boy's father then swore at the judge and hit one of the men. The judge immediately sentenced the father to 3 months in prison. He might have gone harder on him were it not for the fact that he had less than a year to live due to terminal cancer.

The former owner of Walsall Football Club was found guilty of fraudulently acquiring £90m of the money investors had put into his company. The judge decided against prison because he said he'd received "Moving" letters from the man's friends and colleagues.

Ernest Saunders, former head of the Guinness liquid refreshment empire, was found guilty of theft, conspiracy, and false accounting. The trial set we-the-people back to the tune of £20m, in return for which we got him put away for two and a half years. Except that after 10 months he was released on the grounds of 'pre-senile dementia'. He suffered an instant recovery, trousered £150,000 tax-free from Guinness and jetted off to work as a consultant in Switzerland.

Roger Seelig, also a part of the Guinness scandal, didn't wait that long to get taken not well. We-the-people funded his defence, to the tune of $400,000. The judge then abandoned the trial because Seelig was apparently "Bewildered" and "Unable to think straight". So bewildered was he that he promptly landed a job as director of Norman Hay Ltd.

It's amazing what you pick up if you watch Have I Got News For You for long enough.

Osborne said in an interview on the radio that he was surprised to be told that rich people are fernagling their accounts to avoid paying tax.

Osborne is chancellor of the exchequer.

Why do those two facts really worry me when placed in conjunction?

"The toilet's backed up."

It's something that happens once every couple of years. Probably something to do with the ancient plumbing here. The answer's always been pretty simple, just pour soda crystals or bleach down it, then go back downstairs and brew up a bucket of boiling hot water and pour it down the pan from a great height. This is usually followed by a slurpy sound and the backup disappears down the tube it was supposed to vanish down in the first place.

Not this time.

I think maybe I was a little impatient, a little too cocky, the plan went wrong somewhere. I did the soda crystals bit, went down and started boiling the water, but it was taking so long I just figured it was hot enough and took it upstairs. The water level hadn't gone down very much, the crystals probably hadn't had long enough to work, but I pressed on. Except, that because the water level was still pretty high I didn't pour the water with quite the same abandon, and all it did was to top up the water level a bit lot.

The crystals were all used up, but fortunately I'd just bought a two litre bottle of bleach. Ten minutes later I'd poured three quarters of it down the loo and it was frothing away like a little water demon ravaging everything in sight, including I expect, the remains of the soda crystals. We went to bed that night with the bleach still thrashing away and just a slight suspicion that we might wake up in the night needing a pee.

The night passed uneventfully but I certain woke up next morning with a desire to pass wetness, probably because I knew deep down inside that the water level wouldn't have gone down.

Actually it had. It had gone down maybe an inch. Just enough room for a carefully placed number one. The bleach was still at it, I think I may have overdone it a bit. Whatever else happened this was going to be the world's cleanest ever toilet. Mr. Crapper would have been proud.

After breakfast we went out to buy some kind of bigass flexible loobrush at the local B&Q, which we happened to know had a nice big, clean toilet facility (Just in case). After walking around for about a quarter of an hour we decided to ask someone for assistance, naturally all the smiling "Hello, how are you?" people who were walking around when we arrived had disappeared, but we eventually found ourselves someone who wanted to be doing something else who told us he didn't think they had anything, but if this would be of any use?...

'This' was a twirly thing on a flexible tube with a knob to do the twirling on top. It was for cleaning out sinks. We looked for something more suitable, I found a sweep's brush and a drain-cleaning outfit, neither of which were flexible enough to get around our S-bend. Then mum said "what's this?"

This 'this' was a 6 foot spring suitable for... something and cleaning sinks. Someone had gone right through the rack obliterating whatever the first thing it was intended for with a big black marker pen. A careful scrute of the wording revealed the words 'lavatories and' were the missing links. We bought it and the twirly thing and went off to get something to eat at a place where we knew they too had a nice big, clean toilet facility.

When we got home the bleach had finally given up trying to find things to exterminate. I pushed the twirly thing down the hole and turned the handle. The whole magilla twirled. I don't know why, but I had thought that the twirly bit ran through the cable and came out at the brush end, but no, the whole damn thing was thrashing around down there, unless I could get it down that S-bend it was useless.

So I tried the spring thing, and quickly realised why it was of no use for clearing toilets. It went into the bend then doubled back on itself, it too was useless unless I could get it right into the bend. I rolled up my sleeve...

To be honest that was probably the cleanest water you ever saw in a toilet, the bleach had annihilated everything it could lay a molecule on, the only thing even remotely brown was the froth which it couldn't get at, but it wasn't dead yet, the second I put my hand in that bowl it was after me like a sack of... those things that are even worse than piranhas.

Oh, I didn't feel it eating me away, but I knew it was, when you're sensitive like me you just know these things. I shoved the pretty little brush thing up the bend and suddenly there was a gloop and the water rushed down the pipe in such a hurry it almost took my fingernails with it. And then how would I play the guitar?

I pulled my arm out of the cleanest toilet I ever saw but that wasn't good enough for me. I scrubbed the arm from shoulder to remaining fingernails with hot water and expensive hand wash, then soap, then I went downstairs and smothered it in hand sanitizer (You know the stuff, the medicated goo that you squeeze onto your hands on the way in and out of the hospital). I am aware of the fact that hand sanitizer is aimed at killing bugs, but somewhere in my mind I had the idea that the bleach, the sanitizer, or maybe both of them, would recognise the other as an enemy and they'd leave my skin alone and fight it out between them.

A day later and I've now gotten over it and both my arms feel the same again except that my LH fingernails are just so much cleaner than my RH nails. I have been down the S-bend and survived. I feel like a slider who got home again. And best of all, I've told the whole story without a single 'Flushed with success' pun....