Mural on Roundwood Park bandstand

"For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream" Vincent Van Gogh

Quote of the Week. Yes, you guessed -

The tests say I have leukaemia... hang on a mo, that can’t be right: "But how these things are distributed is a mystery. Why does the angel of death fly over some houses but not others? There is no rhyme or reason."

It's Boris again. It's always Boris and always will be, unless Van Rompuy comes up with a new haiku.

Richard Littlejohn's racist rants etc.

Happened to be in the barbers today and nothing else to read but the Daily Mail rag. To be fair, this housepaper-in-waiting for the genocidal BNP dictatorship had one good double page memoir about sexual mores in France, which was worth reading - an eye opener as they say. However it also contained a pageful of brutal and racist rants by a big Jeremy Clarkson-like buffoon called Richard Littlejohn. Like Clarkson this blatherer Littlejohn has made a living out of being an arse in the media for years.

He criticizes the police in a strange backhanded way, for example he complains that a guy was Tasered three times while spreadeagled on the ground while also describing him as "a piece of lard who probably deserved a good kicking". He gets some things sort of half right, probably by accident, including pointing out the stupidity of Tasering a sheep that was blocking a road. He then goes on in another strange backhanded sort of way about police swimming lessons being cancelled in Wales because it would put Muslim women off joining.

What I really didn't like was how he then went on via a tenuous link to say (and I quote) that "the Warwickshire police are holding a pikey's picnic this weekend, inviting all members of 'the travelling community' to a day of festivities at the force's Leek Wootton headquarters. The manicured lawns of the country house HQ will play host to a traditional Roma band, story-telling and even 'a graffiti project'. I hope they remember to lock up their lawn-mowers." [My emphasis]

It's not just the word "pikey" - which is offensive enough, I think, but that remark about locking up their lawn-mowers. I don't think you need me to draw the historical parallels of vilification that little jibe evokes. Have people like him learned nothing from history? As long as this country thinks he and people like him are, in the American term, "good old boys" we are headed for the horrors.

Remember today, remember everything you see around you: the communities, the arts, the hospitals and hospices, the schools and special schools, the languages you hear everywhere, the public transport passes for pensioners, welfare for people in hardship, benefits, pensions, freedom, rights. All these things will be violently and wilfully destroyed and disappear forever if people like him have their way, if they ever gain power. All that will be left is a feudal system of mansions, with unrepaired roads between them and surrounded by hovels, the Brazil of Europe, a banana republic with no bananas and no republic, run on the divine right of inherited privilege.

We can start the fight by binning the Daily Mail. Let's also oppose the Tories 10% cuts proposals and their alliance with the far right parties of Europe. New Labour sucks, and Gordon's expenses fiasco (yes, let him own it all) sucks majorly but look around, there is regeneration everywhere: new sports centre, rebuilt secondary school, rebuilt community hospital all within five minutes walk of where I live. When you go to a hospital appointment, you don't have to wait as long to be seen. There are new tests that are pro-actively promulgated for preventive medicine. There is a minimum wage. These are just some of the things one could list.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, let's purge lazy and concupiscent MP's but let us not install Lord Snooty and his friends to try to turn the clock back. Don't let them dismantle and sell off the investment that has been made. At the very worst, a Lib-Lab pact can survive. It is by no means over till it's over. Cameron is "measuring the curtains for 10 Downing Street" and therein lies his party's Achilles' heel: they think they have it in the bag, they have seen the winning post too soon.

Feargal

Quote of the...er...day

Boris Johnson To Play For England

'I'm like a greased panther, a coiled spring, all that suppressed kinetic energy. My metatarsals are OK and I'm looking forward to the game.' (Skynews)

He just couldn't bear for anyone else to win the WH quote of the week, having won all of the previous ones.

Telegraph quote of the week

The war in Iraq was based on a lie - and policing Basra is an illusion (Boris Johnson)

You don't have to be a genius, like Boris, to figure that out.

Telegraph quote of the week - No. 4

In its recent final exams more than 105 per cent of entrants achieved honours degrees mostly in such subjects as skateboarding studies and Belgian pastry studies. (Peter Simple)

Malignant critics have suggested that there is something "phoney" about these striking results. To them the vice-chancellor, Dr Harry Goth-Jones, replies: "On the contrary, it is the result of hard work all round and devotion to the ideals of democratic education. Next year, if all goes well, as it will, we expect to reach 120 per cent."

Peter Simple just pipped Kenneth Clarke at the post. Otherwise Telegraph quote of the week would have been "We have been chasing votes up the age ladder, down the socio-economic scale and into the South-east of England."

Telegraph quote of the week*

"The woman who keeps doves needs a heart of stone."

The vet's time was wasted and a dove put through hell, all because I lacked the resolution to kill a thing I loved.

Ms Greer** is wonderful on domestic animals. [Is that politically correct? Ed] If only she'd been a man, there would've been no problem because "All men kill the thing they love" (Oscar Wilde, "Quote of the Week", every week from 1864 to 1900).

*Yes, might as well rename this feature "Telegraph quote of the week" because they keep winning. Funniest stand-up routines in town.

**Planning to have GiGi as the centrefold for the first WH Sunday Supplement magazine. We'll get that picture somewhere; ah yes, it's on Google Images. Get your own link, you filthy perverts. Ed

Quote of the week - 2 not out for Boris

"You're a snob," he insisted, "and you want to hit me."

On the contrary, I said, I had no desire whatever to hit him. "Yes, you do," he said, coming closer. "I can tell by the way you flexed your shoulder muscles. You're getting all psyched up."

I said that any shoulder-flexing had been entirely involuntary, and that, even if I had flexed my shoulders, it did not mean that I wanted to hit him. He thought about this a bit, and then said that perhaps it would be easier all round if he hit me' (Boris Johnson)

He goes on to describe street scenes worthy of Hieronymus Bosch with pasty-faced, bottom-dwelling creatures looming out of the gloom, shouting incomprehensible oaths and invitations. BJ's Wodehousian verbal googlies diverted stupid cupid's dart mid-flight from this:

"It is, quite frankly, a scandal that we have failed to come up with a solution to the problem of the sliding slice of tomato."

"Research has shown that an important part of sandwich satisfaction lies in opening it up and peering at the filling before eating it. This is why I am urging RHM, the creators of the crustless loaf, to take up my idea of the edible hinge." (Oliver Pritchett)

OP's learned article is in the tradition of the redoubtable Myles naGopaleen, who invented trains with tracks on top to allow overtaking, and pop-up theatre seats to deliver latecomers direct to their places.

Quote of the week - Boris Johnson

The British dream: we must all speak the same language

"We've all got to be as British as Carry On films and scotch eggs and falling over on the beach while trying to change into your swimming trunks with a towel on."

Update (12/8/05)

Okay, the rest of the article is not so jolly. Lenin's Tomb finds it full of sugar-coated menace.

'We will not introduce "top-up" fees

and have legislated to prevent them.'

That is a direct quote from the manifesto of the Labour Party for the 2001 General Election. (Full text.)

In the Queen's Speech this week announcing their program of legislation for the next parliamentary year, they included a measure to bring in... top-up fees. But don't worry - it won't come into effect unless they're re-elected! That will be their excuse, but that is also our opportunity.

This is another ill-thought-out initiative by the 10 Downing Street team that proposed instant fines collected by frogmarching miscreants to a cashpoint. That idea was quietly binned. This time it's future generations of students they want to frogmarch to a cashpoint.

Feargal Mooney