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So Where Are those Ruddy Horseman ? Not on Our Patch.

Ahhh.

The sounds of British conversation, weather, weather, moan Ruddy Icelandics, coming over here, nicking our cash, exporting their air………..

Volcanic ash then, what’s that all about ?

Coldest may night in forty years.

Now there’s ANOTHER breakdown in the Channel Tunnel.

Can’t get any consignments there on time.

All we need then is a hurricane and dear old blighty can say the four men in black are riding their trusty steeds across the UK (common misconception that, they actually had a colour scheme more Viv Westwood than Alvin Stardust).

Take a look.

I don’t want to get biblical on your backsides but look at the facts:

Pestilence, (that’s the geezer on the white horse) fires his arrows into the crowd. What could that be then, swine flu? SARS? MRSA?

Pick a bug, any bug, let’s face it the biggest problem for most caused by the recent flu outbreak (considering it didn’t happen) was that the dear old Labour Government had spent millions upon millions buying in a vaccine which didn’t work and wasn’t necessary.

OK, OK. The Captain is a closet conspiracy theorist, but consider that, a few months before this stuff reached its sell by date they spread the vaccine amongst every GP in the country with instructions to “save the old and vulnerable” (and I don’t think they meant the government).

Every “Health Trust” (now there’s a contradiction in terms) in the country was coerced into spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on what seemingly was a useless, or near as dammit, preventative.

Now doesn’t that make you think maybe someone needed to save face?

Approach an election when you have to admit you’ve just slung millions of pounds worth of pharmaceuticals down the pan?

War, you don’t need me to figure that one out. Type in Wooton Basset or Helmand Province into your News browser.

Famine, (how come no grub equals the black horse, I’d have thought Death would have put up more of a fight for that one, maybe Famine used the old putrefaction argument, no, hang on, Death’s mount is pale green???).

Anyway, famine. Now the UK argument begins to run out of steam around here.

When the Captain’s hungry, he goes to the fridge just like most of his countrymen. None of us starve.

Consider that statement for five seconds.

None of us starve.

So maybe we should widen out this complaint into the ether to a global scenario and suddenly it all starts to make a lot more sense.

Pestilence, War, Famine and Death (you didn’t need assembly instructions for the Death argument).

When JC opened the fourth seal at the right hand of God (I can’t believe I’m going along with this) he released these four agents of evil upon the World, with me so far?

The World.

Not Folkestone, London Heathrow or Leamington Spa, but the lot of us.

As I don’t go much for the big beardy man (either ecumenically or sexually) I’m going to give Saint John the Evangelist who “revealed” all this stuff the benefit, and allow for the fact that this whole four blokes on gee gees is in fact a metaphor, although why he had to slander the son of God for releasing it on us when he came up with the tale goes right over my bonce.

We in the UK live in a wonderful world, the nature of which we fail to notice on an everyday basis.

When a drifting cloud of debris prevents us coming back from a short Spanish trip (don’t ask, 10 hours drive to Bilbao, hire car, hotel, ferry……), or a train gets stuck in the tunnel we seem to feel we have a hard life.

Not so.

The election dust having settled we know we’re in for a hard time, most of us look to the future with more than a little trepidation. Many will lose jobs, many more see living standards plummet, aspirations will need to be reined in.

Just don’t tell me it’s hard before you look at the wider picture.

They say a child dies every 17 seconds for lack of water on a planet where it covers most of the surface.

Next time I whinge in this column feel free to criticise.

.....(now come on be fair, I don’t care how devout you are, Death? Pale Green? What’s that all about?).

NEWS from the Home Front (or a touch of Politics)

UK - So, at last, we are out of recession! Wednesday saw street parties and tickertape parades all around the country as the Prime Minister came good on his word and we stormed back into the black.

I strongly suggest overseas readers stop reading here and return to consider a mist inducing set of false memories. Small boys bowling hoops down a country road, gents in bowler hats reading the (proper sized) London Times and giving up seats for ladies, brownies helping old dears across the road and carrying their shopping.

What follows is strictly for home consumption only.

0.1% !!! 0.1%. Who are you kidding Gordon, are you actually serious?

The unelected PM with his unelected Dark Lord scanner controller says he thinks the worst is over. What that tiny, miniscule, ridiculous percentage means is that, in the month we all went mad for Christmas and spent every penny we could, we appeared to stop the plunge into a black financial abyss we have been falling toward for the past two years or more.

Now ask yourself, would you let him look after your kids?

Let alone run a country.

I have to stop now, I need the blood pressure tablets (or I would if I had such things).

.......

Enough, let us lighten the mood and fiddle whilst Rome (or Blighty) burns.

So what else is new?

The despised Blair appeared before the Beak like a nervous, skinny version of the Fat Owl of the Remove.

What’s with the shaking and sweating Tone?     And Lord did he shake and sweat.

How many weeks has he kept the wide mouth frog up reciting his answers to the inevitable awkward questions. What a sight that would be, fly on wall etc. Two lawyers cross questioning and answering across the flowery duvet.

“No Tony you idiot you didn’t agree anything on Georges ranch! Do try and pay attention.”

I don’t trust the man but watching him I was minded about the scene from the film of “Clear and Present danger” the Tom Clancy classic when Harrison Ford says to the President in reference to an old colleague murdered whilst drug smuggling “Just tell them he WAS my Friend”.

I was not disappointed, Blair used, I thought, exactly the right tactics (at the enquiry that is , not the war).

Saddam did take part in a war with a million deaths, he did gas thousands of his own people, he did murder 100,000 Kurds.

If he had any WMD’s tucked under the settee believe me, the son of a bitch would have used them given the chance. He didn’t have any BECAUSE he’d used them.

He ignored twelve UN sanctions (so what bloody use are they) so why wouldn’t he just carry on regardless.

So all in all Mr B that’s the very first time I thought you took the right line. So. Why so nervous?

The boss tells me it’s a conspiracy, and she IS normally right.

Get her indoors started about the mysterious death of Dr Kelly and the loathsome A. Campbell, former literary pornographer, and she’ll go off like Old Faithfull with a dose of Montezuma’s Revenge.

So what can we take from this.

Well, politicians are usually a waste of space. Something inherent in our current system is not working. As I remember my History, Britain started, as far back as is worth talking about, with a King as head of state, feudal Lords under him and the “commons” at the bottom.

Move forward a few centuries and we’d demoted the royal blood to the bottom (head to the bottom of an executioners basket in one case) politically, Lords still in the middle, but only with a limited power of veto, and what is laughably known now as the House of Commons actually making the laws. Now, that’s fine and dandy when you have a basis of honest well intentioned do-gooders in the aforementioned Commons.

We however, have a chamber mostly manned, or at least run by, a bunch of self serving professional politicians. They have whips (they call them whips for Gods sake) to control their “parties” and have their cake and eat it.

Now I’m sorry these are not the common people, half of them wouldn't want to sit at the same table as a "commoner", these guys don’t inhabit the same planet Earth.

In all the “common” places I’ve ever worked a bloke coming up using a combination of promises and blackmail to get you to agree with something you didn’t would normally end the conversation with a degree of embarrassment or possibly a fat lip. I know it’s a cliché to harp on about the expenses scandal but I think it’s worthwhile “lest we forget” as they say.

These people are thieves. Now I have known many villains in my long and some might say colourful career, but at least, when confronted with the facts, they admitted they were somewhat less than perfect.

This lot can’t even do that, if they can use the “within the rules” defence they will, even when to any observer it was good old fiddling the expenses. Rory says it better than me.............

Now, I understand, prospective dads are to receive equal rights in paternity leave as their spouses do. If the wife returns to work early, the new dad can have the time off instead.

Don’t get me wrong, if you work for a big group company then fair enough. We do not however all work for big companies. Having heard a (female) spokesman (oops person) for womens rights admit in an interview she would never employ a woman of childbearing age in her small business for obvious reasons, it seems this Government is oblivious once again to reality.

Those of us who have run small businesses with three or four employees know that to lose one to a Government regulation could cripple the firm. Small businesses need separate legislation for all these matters, not a Government so inexperienced in real world commerce that they make up such stupid regulations.

We could be in France!

So that’s the Captains view of the current state of British Politics.

To sum up a disliked and , in many eyes, disgraced former PM, the current incumbent with a lower popularity rating than any of his predecessors (and that’s saying something) being overseen by a pretend aristocrat who has been disgraced three times after a fashion that, in any other age would have seen him banished from public life forever.

A cabinet of ill found jumped up wannabes without the courage to step up, a handful of other disgraced colleagues, the main opposition viewed by many as a schoolboy gang of braying toffs, a second opposition who has one MP who anyone knows and a House of Commons packed to the gills with a plethora of very ‘umble Uriah Heep characters who you wouldn’t sleep in the same room as.

So, out of recession?

That’s good then.

Copenhagen ---And Beyond!!!

Gordon "Buzz" Brown heads for the Climate Conference.

Last time out I was banging on about the tenuous nature of existence.

Well folks get ready for some more homespun philosophy,

The Captain is about to leap up and grasp at the coat-tails of ecoism (pat pending on the ism there). Anyone who reads the news on the Handy Shipping Guide main page regularly may have noticed today that our game was, well, to be frank, a tad off form. The reasons for our lamentable performance, was due to several factors:

1) It’s Friday, nobody ever works as hard as they might on Friday

2) There was a distinct lack of News. This was in part due to the fact that, you’ve guessed it, nobody, including PR companies, media departments in shipping companies etc., works as hard as they might on Friday.

3) We lost all our power.

By this I don’t mean that the staff all fell to the floor limbs twitching, nor that the normal super heroic feats we perform here every day suddenly were beyond our grasp. This was much simpler. The electricity failed.

Then it started up again, just long enough for us to start work again and then bang.

The lights went out, literally.

Unfortunately the fault was more than a little elusive and, whilst all about went around to discover if we were in the middle of a general or specific power failure I was transported back to the heady 70’s, three day weeks, transport workers strikes and all that (sighs of pathetic nostalgia from all readers over 50).

Finally the fault turned out to be office specific. A tired piece of wiring was discovered and electricity board seals tampered with by expert hands that had been using and abusing customs seals for decades (allegedly), repairs made, and the twenty or so times the lights had literally gone out in a few hours were almost forgotten.

Not quite. For in the long moments of darkness and confusion it became obvious how dependant we have become on all the trappings of modern life in a civilised country.

Flick a switch you have light, turn a knob – heat, a tap –water and so on. There is always food in the shops and money to buy it, transport is easy, we complain about the tiniest things, not the right kind of biscuit or crisps available, the train is half an hour late, you know the sort of thing, you are likely as guilty as the rest.

And that’s when it came home to me how important this Copenhagen deal really is. Sometimes when you watch a football match and one side attacks incessantly with no luck you instinctively know they won’t score that elusive goal. They could play on for another half an hour but you just know that it isn’t written, it’s not their day. You know it and the teams out on the pitch feel it too.

For me that’s how Copenhagen feels, or rather the situation we are in. We have to do something concrete to reverse the effects of the problems we are causing ourselves and our fellow man. The problem we have is that we are these days led by little men. Somehow we have to ensure that everybody is on the same page on this one, and, unfortunately I don’t think it’s going to happen. Promises and speeches will be made but I can’t see the generation of PR savvy wasters, shysters and swindlers that pass for many of the strictly average politicians we are now cursed with can grasp the nettle and organise a night of celebration in the place the beer comes from.

The thing which may save the day is the overwhelming feeling I have that the man (and of course woman) in the street really wants to see dramatic changes in energy use and the consequential cutting of pollution. If the will of the people prevails we may be in with a chance.

And one other factor. I watched in awe the other night as two scientists, Austrian I believe, revealed the artificial trees they have developed. Looking vaguely like a tree shaped like one of those early machines used to present an illusion of a moving object as you peered through slits in the side of a spinning drum, a zoetrope. 

These tree contraptions grab carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in huge quantities. I believe the figure quoted was 60 million “trees” could absorb all the CO2 we produce at any one time.

The special plastic which catches the CO2 is then rinsed and carries on sucking the nasty stuff out of the atmosphere. So what happens to the CO2 you ask? Technology still needs a bit of work but apparently if they sort out this big underground storage idea you simply place the trees around the dumping site, the position of the trees in relation to areas of pollution is irrelevant, they simply grab the same amount wherever in the world they are, lowering the overall amount of pollution. The recovered CO2 goes straight down into storage in whatever form they mange to convert it to.

So don’t despair just yet, but let’s be clear, no matter how clever we think we are Nature, in all her glory is waiting out there for us to screw up. And if a little thing like the power going down for a few hours can cause such confusion, what are we, and more to the point, the next generation, going to do if we screw this one up.