This morning I received more news which made yesterday’s pale into insignificance.

I may write about it sometime.

But not now.

It’s strange how 24 hours can change everything you take for granted?

A heron used to come and rob all the fish in the lake.  Cheeky bastard.

I christened him Bertie Aheron as there was a certain similarity in the beady eyes and the sneaky approach to life.

I haven’t seen him in a very long time and I sometimes wonder what happened to the thieving duplicitous little cunt.  I also wonder what happened to the heron.

I was up at the crack of dawn this morning [it may even have been as early as ten thirty] and the first thing I saw out the window was Bertie [Aheron, not the other little shit].  He was standing there in the middle of the grass looking somewhat frustrated.  And well he might, as I got tired of restocking the lake ages ago, so the only thing he’ll find in it now are some snails and an old supermarket trolley.  A lake isn’t a proper lake without a supermarket trolley.

I presume he was a descendent of the original Bertie, as I believe they have a lifespan of only five years. 

I managed to shoot him.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the rifle to hand [why can you never find a rifle when you most need it?] so I shot him with a camera instead.

That is a magnificent specimen of Ardea cinerea?

What the camera failed to capture was another magnificent specimen – Canis Sandii – who was at that moment travelling in the direction of the heron at about 150 miles per hour.

It was the fastest fucking take-off I have ever seen.

Anyone want some heron feathers?

No?

I thought not…

“The elephant in the room.”

Now I don’t know who coined this irritating cliché, but he [or she] should be shot, preferably with an elephant gun.

But why do I mention it now, you ask?  Well, probably you don’t but I like to think I give rise to intelligent debate and discourse.  Leastwise, I do have a reason.

Sir Fartzalott arrives here occasionally.  For those of you who maybe haven’t bothered reading this in recent times, Sir Fartzalott is the youngest of the grandkids.

He is a lovely kid with a solemn face and a strange sense of humour.  He has a couple of activities that he indulges in when he comes here.  One is to press every button and switch every switch he can lay his hands on which leads to some interesting surprises, such as music suddenly blaring out at around a hundred watts.

His other activity is picking things up and transporting them.  He loves playing with my old collection of Dinky and Matchbox toys which are all well over fifty years old. I have grown used to seeing little cars in the strangest of places  I would find an old Ford truck on the toilet cistern or a Massy Fergusson tractor in the coal scuttle and know exactly how they got there.

He was here a couple of days ago, and found our elephants.  They are two little hand carved and highly polished African elephants and I have had them for donkey’s years [or elephant’s years?].  One of them ended up on the table in the kitchen, but the other is nowhere to be seen.  For once, Sir Fartzalott has me baffled.

So if you do happen to find an elephant in the room, could you let me know?

I miss him.

Jayzus but you’d swear they were written by a different bloke.

Some of them are long and rambling, and some have a quaint sort of humour about them.  Leastwise once or twice I almost found myself smiling, but fortunately I copped on in time.

So what the fuck happened in the last five and a bit years?  I know Dubya is gone [he used to provide tons of material] and the current incumbent – Obama – is a colourless substitute, if you’ll forgive the expression [hah!].  At home, Bertie the Bollox has retreated to the kitchen cupboard and Cowen has disappeared into an alcoholic haze.  Politics just isn’t fun any more.

So what the fuck happened to turn me from a mildly humorous old fart into a cynical humourless old fart?  Can it be the recession?  Can it be that I’m getting old?  Are they putting something in the tap water?

It’s worrying.

If this trend continues, I’m going to become a right cantankerous old bollix.

I had one a few minutes ago – “where is Cavan”.

There are two things that are strange about this query.  The first is why they ended up here.  Presumably in a moment of pure insanity I must have written about the place but I can’t think why.

The other strange thing is that anyone would want to know where Cavan is in the first place.

One of the few lessons I remember from my schooldays is that Cavan in on the Drumlin Belt.  For those of you who don’t know what the Drumlin Belt is, it’s a glacial thing where the landscape is covered in little hills.  Because there are so many of these hills, water can’t flow out of the place to you end up with hundreds of little lakes.  As a result, Cavan is somewhat waterlogged and bumpy.

Finding Cavan is a reasonably simple exercise.  All you have to do is to start in Dublin and drive North.  Don’t drive too far because you’ll end up on the Giant’s Causeway.  Though on second thoughts, the Giants Causeway is an interesting spot so you are probably better off forgetting Cavan and heading there instead.

If you are so determined to find Cavan though, you stop driving north when you reach the border with Norn Iron.  Now it can be tricky finding the actual border, but a fairly simple rule is that the speed signs suddenly change from metric into real money.  Leastwise, at that point change direction and head due west.

You’ll know when you reach Cavan.  It’s all hills and lakes and very few people live there.

And it wouldn’t surprise me if the few locals that do exist have webbed feet.

A lot of you seem to be very keen to log into this site so you can write your own stuff.

Some of you try several times until you get locked out.  You wait until the lockout expires and then you try several more times.  Some of you have tried so many times that I think you may have an obsessional complex.  Yes.  I keep track of these things.

I could make life a little easier for you by telling you that I don’t log into this site using “admin” or “Grandad”, as I have deleted those accounts but why should I make life easier for you?

I could tell you that my password isn’t “password”, “Gandalf”, “Sandy” or “admin” but again, you’re on your own.

What I can tell you is that my password is a bitch to remember.  In fact I keep forgetting it, and if it wasn’t written on a certain part of my anatomy, nothing would ever get done here.

So if you are really that desperate to write stuff on the Interweb, I would suggest that you start your own site and fuck off out of mine.

Yours etc,

Grandad

If you have, then please tell him, because he seems to have utterly confused himself over his latest gimmick.

He claims he is abolishing the television licence and that he is replacing it with a “broadcasting charge”.

His argument is that not only are too many people avoiding paying the licence [*cough*] but that people are using things other than a television to watch television.  What the fuck?  Now I know that it is easy enough to watch television on a computer, but unless you have a fairly decent size screen, that is not normally an option for a family.  He also quotes mobile phones as a means of viewing television.  Now quite frankly if a family is going to sit down of an evening to watch their favourite film on a mobile phone propped on the mantelpiece then they want their heads [and eyes] examined. 

The only plausible way he can run this latest farcical idea is to charge every house in the land on the assumption that everyone has a television, a computer and a mobile phone. And if you don’t have any of the three how do you prove that?  Anyone knows it is extremely difficult to prove a negative.

One of the lines that has even me confused is his statement that “a huge number of the population now get their news not from sitting down and watching the nine o’clock news but accessing the arrangements that the public service broadcaster has put in place”   Now what in the name of fuck is that about?  Is he complaining that we read the RTE website instead of watching the news?  If RTE are moaning about that then why do they have a website in the first place?  That’s equivalent to complaining that we get our news from local gossip instead of the radio.

So from what I can gather, we are going to have a licence that isn’t a licence and it’s going to be levied on all households but it isn’t a household levy.

I like Pat Rabbitte.

Even on my worst days he makes me feel positively sane.

The fire brigade is going to charge €500 for a callout.

Yup.  You read that correctly.  Half a fucking grand to put out that chip pan fire or that smoking chimney.

At the moment this only applies to Dublin but how long will it be before other councils realise that there is another fat cash cow out there?

This charge raises all sorts of questions though. 

For a start, if I were a councillor I would send out a discreet memo to all my brigades ordering them to fill the water tenders with good old fashioned petrol.  After all, we are constantly being told of water shortages, and anyway at the best part of €500 an hour, we wouldn’t want them to put the fire out too quickly, now would we?

They claim the costs can easily be reclaimed through insurance, but what happens if the householder doesn’t have insurance?  There are one hell of a lot of people who don’t have it, either because of the cost or no company will insure them.  Of course even if you are insured, you’ll still pay as the insurance companies are just going to increase premiums to cover the extra claims.

So supposing your house goes on fire, and you have no insurance?  The brigade arrives and happily spends a few hours putting the fire out.  You then inform them that you are broke and can’t possibly pay the couple of grand they are demanding.  What are the brigade to do then?  Their only recourse to to reignite the blaze and leave the poor householder to it.

Of course with the way house prices have gone in the last couple of years, it would be a lot cheaper to just let the house burn.

There are times when it seems to work against the common good for the benefit of the few.  There are too many petty laws and restrictions, and frequently laws are introduced where existing laws are perfectly adequate.

On Friday however a new law came into effect that does meet with my approval.

Householders are now legally allowed to use any reasonable force to protect themselves and their property.

There are two things I like about this law.  The first is that the householder only has to perceive a threat.  Now I am a very insecure and paranoid person [for the purposes of this act] and I frequently perceive that a raised eyebrow or nod of the head is an implied deadly threat.  The second is that “reasonable force” covers the full range up to and including dispatching the intruder off to his [or her] maker. 

I had a busy day yesterday.  I have now secreted pitchforks, bill-hooks, pistols and grenades at various points around my property, ready for that intruder. 

I am now waiting for the first knock on the door.

Indeed, it is a good law.