SO, HERE'S ANOTHER THING ... (two rants on the same night ...? The old duffer must be on the way out) Possibly so, possibly so, but the more I think about the language Nazis, the worse it gets. They are more despicable than the work-shy retards who strip our rail network and beautiful churches of precious copper and lead. In fact the language thieves are worse. Too lazy too create their own vocabulary, they steal someone else's, and with the gross bulk of political correctness leaning in their favour, they render our language ever more barren and inoperable. 

WHICH IDIOT (who probably got a 2:2 in Social Interaction Strategies at The University of South Lincolnshire) decided that it would be a good idea to label the practice of flattering and deceiving vulnerable children so that they would be compliant with terrible and obscene sexual acts at a later date? Now, call me a pedant, an ideologue, a right-wing bastard - in fact any kind of bastard - and I will be left with a warm glow in my heart, and a solitary tear of joy trickling down my weathered cheek. But tell me that one child's innocence has been defended by this lazy corruption of a perfectly decent and valid English word, and I will call you a knave, a fool and a liar.
IF SOMEONE GROOMS A DOG OR A HORSE .... or any other kind of species, they do it to make the animal look beautiful, clean, happy and healthy. I have to say that since I reached puberty, I have never understood the allure of animals and pets, but that's for another day. But, you can't say that the groomee has come to any harm. But here we go - a thirteen year old girl meets (either in person, or on-line) an older man. She is flattered, cuddled and made to think that she is a special human being, and after being given alcohol and/or drugs, she is sexually violated. For crying out loud, is this the same thing as some Middle-England, Middle-Class, Middle-Income couple brushing up their Collie for the local dog show?
I HAVE TO ADD that no dogs, horses, guinea pigs or child sex-abusers died during the writing of this blog.

 "Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

SORRY FOR SUBVERTING THE WORDS OF THE WORLD'S MOST CELEBRATED DRUNKEN WELSHMAN, but for several years a sense of frustration and irritation has been building, and now it has reached genuine rage. Against what? The dying - not of the light - but of the English Language. It is the death of a thousand cuts, the knives being wielded by those who think playing around with the meanings of words is a substitute for social change.

Lets start with education. It gave me a good living for forty years, but I was never so glad to leave anything or anywhere when retirement beckoned. One of the main irritants was the incessant playing around with language. For example, almost overnight some years ago pupil became verboten, and was replaced with student. Hardly the end of the world, you might say, but it blurred the rather important distinction between children in school and young adults at college or university. We would have regular visits by real students, finishing their teaching qualifications at university, and they would take classes of children, who were also called students. Meaning becomes blurred, and has to be defined by context - a chancy business. And don't get me started on the awful word learners which, thankfully, seems not to have survived.
Some of the worse verbal tangling and twisting used to go on in and around the Special Educational Needs Department. Oh, Goodness, is it still safe to call it that? One had to be so careful. We had everything from differently abled, through alternatively skilled to differing emotional perceptions. Did all this linguistic claptrap make one iota of difference to the educational and emotional development of these children? What do you think, seriously?

Away from schools, and into the real world for a while. Race and ethnicity is always good for a laugh. Or not. It is to the gulags for you if use the phrase coloured, but perfectly fine to talk about a person of colour. Well, that should be color, strictly speaking, as most of this nonsense originates from the USA. I love how the police sometimes say that are looking for someone of Asian appearance. Well, that narrows it down then. Police wish to interview someone who may be from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Iran, Japan, North Korea, Lebanon, The Maldives, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikstan or Yemen. To name but a few. You get my drift. Is black OK this month? I fully accept that if such, erm, people wish to use the 'N' word about themselves, that does not constitute an invitation for me to use it.

It is with the deepest sigh of all that I move on to gender and sexual politics. I would go to my eco-friendly, woodland, non-polluting grave a happy man - sorry - person, if I could just reclaim the innocent little word gay. Happy, carefree, bright, optimistic - it had so many uses, but now the word doesn't know where it is. After being kidnapped by the homosexual community (what IS that, by the way, has anyone ever been there?) it has now been snatched by naughty teenagers who use it as a term of abuse. Particularly in the public services here in Britain, we now fall over each other in our efforts to give every form of sexual adventure its proper vocabulary. Amazingly, I once had an invitation to seek out LGBT help and advice groups if I was feeling uncomfortable at work. Where was this intriguing message? Inside my payslip from Norfolk County Council. I love LGBT - it sounds like a kind of sandwich.

Even the relatively neutral term single parent has now attracted the attentions of the language nazis. Apparently lone carer is so, much more inclusive. How is that? And how about the size agenda? Not for me the demeaning fat, or the worth-challenging obese. A person of size works every time, don't you think? I'm also delighted that deeply offensive term English As A Foreign Language has been rendered much more inclusive. It is now English As A Second Language. Phew!

There's a much overused expression, you just could not make it up. I've cut and pasted the idiocy below, not from Private Eye, but from a UK government website. Don't believe me? The full link is here.

1.The word 'disabled' is a description not a group of people. Use 'disabled people' not 'the disabled' as the collective term.
2. Avoid medical labels, which say little about people as individuals and tend to reinforce stereotypes of disabled people as 'patients' or unwell.
3. Don’t refer solely to 'disabled people' in all government communications - many people who need disability benefits and services do not identify with this term. ‘People with health conditions or impairments’ is another common descriptor.
4. Avoid phrases like 'suffers from' which evoke discomfort or pity and suggest constant pain and a sense of hopelessness.5. Wheelchair users may not view themselves as 'confined to' a wheelchair. Try thinking of it as a mobility aid instead.6. Common phrases that may associate impairments with negative things should be avoided, for example 'deaf to our pleas' or 'blind drunk'.

AS A CHILD I was an avid reader of the great Billy Bunter books, by Frank Richards. Bunter was a cad, a scrounger, a liar, a cheat, and above all FAT. When my oldest boy began reading, I was delighted to find that King's Lynn library still had Bunter books on its shelves. I took one out and hurried home so the No 1 son could share my boyhood laughter. It was not to be. The modern Bunter had been 'retold' my some milksop children's author, and all references to Bunter's gross faults and character defects. had been removed. That's pathetic. Because that was the joke.

BUT NOW IS CHRIST RISEN FROM THE DEAD, AND BECOME THE FIRST FRUITS OF THEM THAT SLEPT. I'm not entirely sure what that quote has to do with cider making, but it's from Corinthians, and if  St Paul didn't know much about cider, he certainly knew how to turn a memorable phrase. So, my First Fruits endeavours have almost come full circle. From picking up the Bramley fallers from the vast orchards of the wonderful Mrs Liz Manning, of Barton Farm, through strenuous hours of chopping, pulping, pressing and squeezing, to the anxiety when the fermentation doesn't start, to the joy when it starts to clear, and the ecstasy when it tastes divine - it's been an incredible journey, as they might say on a trash TV reality show. The first few bottles have been filled and corked, and the labels have been printed. I have to confess that the clear glass bottles have been acquired by the distinctly lowlife method of raiding the Somers Road bottle bank - but future drinkers fret ye not - the bottles have all been scrubbed, cleaned and sterilised.






The cider is clear, pure, and tastes of autumn. I'm not sure what the alcohol content is - my guess is somewhere between 5% and 7%. The proof will be in the drinking. I will release it to the family over Christmas and observe the effects.

AM AT A LOSS TO KNOW why here in Fenland, and more specifically, around Wisbech, we have not capitalised on one of our major assets. No. Sunlit uplands? Certainly not, we have neither. Enlightened and progressive local government? Do you have  PhD in irony? Fracking, perhaps? Nope - unless you can create energy out of mud. Oil reserves? Maybe, if you could distill the Brylcreem from the barnets of our town councillors. OK, I give up. What? Forget Zummerset - if you drew a ten mile radius around Wisbech, you would include one of the most intensive apple growing areas on the planet. So why not market a Fenland cider? On a small scale, here's what you do.
(1) Core some apples. You need a heavy blade, ideally a Chinese chopper (racist bastard, send for the UAF)

(2) Slice the apples in 1cm bits(3)Pulp them up - you can use a food processor, or a blade attachment on an electric drill

(3)Here is your major investment - a fruit press

(4)Put pulp inside mesh bag
(5) Turn the screw of the press
(6) Transfer juice to demijohns/barrels

(7) Throw in Camden tablets to kill wild yeasts
(8) Add sugar, if you prefer
(9) Make yeast starter
(10) Chuck yeast into juice
(11) Wait for fermentation to finish
(12) Bottle. leave to mature and drink.

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WHAT THEY REALLY MEAN - A free guide to what politicians actually mean when they do media interviews. We are well into the season of party conferences. The broadcast media seem obsessed with the idea that the normal populations gives a s*** about these expensive and self-congratulatory junkets. Turn on any half decent radio station (Holbeach FM - that includes you out, sorry) and you will be regaled with wall-to-wall interviews with creatures who have scuttled out from under some party political stone, to blink in the daylight. They lie. They dissemble. They avoid answering questions. They use a parallel language which seems to make sense, but when analysed, signifies nothing. Next time you listen to one of these charlatans, have this handy guide ready, so you can understand what is really being said.

(1)  "Firstly, I'd like to....." If a politician begins an answer like this, then switch off immediately. It means they have been expensively coached by some PR 'expert', who may have scraped a 2:2 in Media Studies at the University of Chelmsford. It also means they have no intention of answering any questions, but have an agenda decided for them by their party special advisors.

(2)  "This is a conversation that we need to have with......" This means that one part of the party is daggers drawn with another, and rather than implying a dialogue, it translates as," I'm going to talk, and those bas****s are going to listen."

(3)  "We need to move forward..." This is a sure sign that some horrendous dirt from a few months ago has been uncovered by the press, but we have just invented a new scheme to give free incontinence pads to gay Albanian pensioners in order to deflect attention from the scandal.

(4)  This is in the same category as (4) When some official says, "Lessons have been learned since...''(30 teenage girls groomed by Pakistani rapists, 18 old people died through neglect and malnutrition in a care home, a delusional psychopath is released into the community by Health 'professionals' and then stabs to death a 32 year old father of two on an Underground platform...) What this means is, " S**t happens. The managers concerned have all been moved sideways, sent on a two-day re-evaluation course, or have been given a generous pension and been re-employed by G4S."

(5)  "I have every respect for..." This means that the person under discussion is a thieving, unscrupulous, child-abusing, moronic retard who, were they to be on fire outside the 99p shop, the interviewee would not p*ss on the flames.

(6)  "The voters have spoken, and I hope the winning candidate will continue to serve the community as I have tried to do." A nice way of saying, "So, I spend four years of my life listening to pathetic moans about dogshit on the pavement, opening bloody fetes and picking up cans of Fosters and used condoms from the village green, and they vote me out? The ungrateful,short-sighted retards deserve all they get!"

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WE SAID GOODBYE to George today. Donning my ancient shiny suit, which hadn't seen service since the last funeral, I tried to remember how to tie a Windsor knot. Retirement has many challenges, but doing the simple repetitive motions which were second nature for every day of forty years of casting artificial pearls before real swine, now has to be thought about. Tie knotted, wife dressed, perfumed and complimented we set off for Friday Bridge. For non-Wisbech folk, there is no bridge, and no-one knows where the Friday comes from, but be that as it may, it has an amazing Victorian church, which sits at an alarming angle, as it appears be sinking slowly into the Fen. Were it in Italy, it would be surrounded by Japanese tourists and the subject of a thousand postcards. Joking aside, there was a poignant symmetry, because it was in this very church that June and George were married in 1965.

The church was full of folk, mostly of 'a certain age', but there were also grateful former pupils, some now with children of their own. The sun shone through the clear glass windows, and a captive butterfly fluttered against one of the diamond panes. Then came the family, and George himself, but from the congregation there were more smiles than tears, because after the organist had worked her way through the usual funeral fare, we heard the unmistakeable strains of The Harry Lime Theme, from The Third Man. George was having a final chuckle, and made sure that at least some of our sadness was blown away by his enduring sense of humour.

We sang Crimond, and All Things Bright And Beautiful, and joined in with prayers and invocations which were lucid and full of meaning, but reassuringly traditional. To the long forgotten strains of 'You Are My Heart's Delight' George was borne away by the pall-bearers and his family, and we emerged into the mid-day sunshine to chat, gossip and catch up with old acquaintances. A fine man had passed from us, but there was an unspoken agreement his that here was a man who, by his compassion, decency and good humour, left the world in a better state than when he came into it.

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GOODBYE, AND GOD BLESS - TO A DEAR FRIEND