Despite Help From Ed Milliband, Aquascutum Goes Bust!
Aquascutum has entered administration, as is reported here on the BBC today.
This is despite the publicity of Ed Milliband wearing one of their suits at his wedding last year. It must have been the colour!
The Case of Anders Breivik
In my view, whether Anders Breivik is sane or not is irrelevant. And the British courts generally take that view as multiple murderers are either declared criminally insane and sent to places like Broadmoor or just sentenced to spent the rest of their lives in jail.
I suppose that in many ways Broadmoor might be preferable from the murderer’s point of view, but in truth the result is the same.
But still the Norwegians persist in a trial, that gives Breivik the ability to expound his views.
Political Correctness Runs Amok
Not my words but a headline in the Daily Mail for this article. It’s all about New York City banning the use of a list of fifty words in tests. One was dinosaur because it might upset creationists.
Who cares upsetting them, as they are a ragbag collection of religious idiots who deny the truth and logic of science.
Read David Attenborough on the subject of creationism here.
Now We Know What Freemasons Get Up To
In both The Times and the Metro this morning, there is a similar article about the sale of a rather extreme convertible Rolls-Royce nicknamed the Honeymoon Express. Here’s the piece from the Metro. I particularly like this paragraph.
It was originally delivered as a chassis to the coachbuilders who adapted it for a high-ranking Manchester freemason.
Now we know what freemasons get up to in their spare time!
The car is coming up for auction next month! I shall not be going!
France’s Public Finances are as Precariously Balanced as a Drunk on a Tightrope
This phrase was used in the second leader of The Times today. I like it.
The leader also goes on to use that wonderful English word; pootle.
My Concise Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have the word. I think it must be a London word, as C often used it.
But it is in the online version of the OED and is defined as.
move or travel in a leisurely manner
It was a strange word though for a serious piece in a serious newspaper.
Wot No Fountains!
It is always reckoned that if you want it to rain on your event, you ask the Queen, as she is renowned for bringing the rain.
But the current drought has even stopped the fountains in Trafalgar Square, as this article in the Telegraph outlines. Here’s two pictures I took today.
The visitors don’t seem too bothered. The Queen’s bad luck doesn’t seem to be having any effect. It will of course bucket down at the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics
Climbing The Shard
It would appear that a group of intrepid climbers have climbed the Shard by London Bridge station. Read the story here in the Belfast Telegraph.
People and especially students have always been doing this.
At Liverpool in the 1960s, I was in a year with Alvin John Slasser, who was usually known as Sean.
One night he climbed the crane of the Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool, which was being built at the time. I suspect that the Shard was taller, although the crane was several metres taller than the cathedral and Sean did claim to have gone right out to the driver’s cabin.
Sadly, Sean is no longer with us. In the first year of the course he died in a freak climbing accident in I think North Wales.
If there is something tall there, someone will climb it!
It must have affected me greatly, as when C named our second son, he had a middle-name of Shaun. She got the spelling wrong.
Santorum Gives Up
I think this is good for the world, as he would have made one of the worst US Presidents ever.
With all the religiously-driven troubles around the world, the one thing we don’t need is an extreme right-wing Catholic, totally out of kilter on womens’ issues and humanity in the White House.
He should crawl back with the dinosaurs and reeducate himself about the real world, where contraception and abortion are commonplace and legal, women work and guns and the death penalty are something you read about in history books.
London Is The World’s Divorce Capital
I’ve read this story in a couple of places today, but the Evening Standard has a long piece.
If C was still alive, she’d be disappointed, that the celebs and mega-millionaires never seemed to come to her chambers in Cambridge.
But who knows what might happen in the future or even be happening now, as there quite a few Cambridge companies, who’ve created a few billionaires and some men will always move on to pastures new.
Divorce may be a messy business, but someone has got to do it!
Abu Hamza Can Be Extradited
I’m not going to comment on the legal reasons, as it does seem to me, that the verdict of the European Court to allow the extradition of Abu Hamza may create more problems than it solves.
After all, it’s unlikely he’ll get a slap on the wrists in a United States court, so what will be the reaction of his apologists here in the UK, when they realise he’s not going to come back? I think it might be better for everyone here if he was kept in a nice warm cell and released when his time is up.
But then I don’t have to get elected in a few years time.
The EU could put a whole cap on it, by passing a law that says that no-one could be extradited to a country with the death penalty on the statute book.
The Anonymous Widower 