Etiquette for the dead.

My father passed away recently, a harrowing experience that fortunately I will only have to go through once. Although I am close to my father in law too, so maybe not. It is of course part of life's normal order that we should, at some point bury our parents. I buried my Dad many years ago on Withernsea beach, but of course he wasn't dead then.
It is perhaps part of the healing process that I can find some humour in the darkness. Dad always had a grin on his face, and the wrinkles around his eyes were not from the weariness of age, but from the laughter that filled his life, whatever the hardships thrown at him, so it is natural I suppose that I inherited some of that humour and attitude. So whilst the last two weeks or so have been awful, there have been moments to reminisce and remember the good times too.
Dad loved a joke, so he would have found it funny that on greeting the assembled congregation of friends and family Father Dominic, the Catholic priest conducting the requiem mass for Dad welcomed everyone to Martins' funeral - I am Martin, my Dad was Dennis, but he would have laughed out loud at the mistake. More than I did. I had to check my pulse to make sure I was still here. In his defence Father Dominic had dealt almost exclusively with me for the funeral arrangements, and I had just thrown in a few last minute changes, so he probably had me in mind instead of Dad. And he did have the decency to apologize for his gaffe.
Anyhow, having given that little introduction the matter of funeral etiquette is the topic of today's blog.  
I have acted as pall bearer once before - one of the hardest jobs in the world if it is one of your own, but something that in my mind simply MUST be done. We look after our own ought to be our family motto. (It isn't, Ultra Pergere is the family motto - meaning "To advance further") But we do look after our own. I carried the coffin of my nephew Kai Dennis who died in infancy, sharing that emotional burden with his Dad , my brother David. Carrying a featherweight coffin, knowing that a life has been snubbed out within two weeks was a heavy burden. Carrying your Dad is no easier, but the emotions are different I suppose. David who is serving in the RAF has service values, so it was natural he would want to shoulder the burden too, but what threw me was the rest of the family. My older brother Andrew stepped in, along with my nephews, Roger and Richard, but what raised a few eyebrows was when my sister Sheila also took a handle. The churchyard almost emptied of air as older relatives sharply inhaled. A woman, carrying a coffin? Well, why not? Tradition has it's place of course, but I was proud of my sister for having the guts to do it, Dad would have been proud too. It would have meant a lot to him. I'm not sure where in the book of decent etiquette we stand on that one, but it was right for us, and that's what counts.
I picked up Dads ashes today from the funeral directors. This raises another set of questions as to etiquette. Should the ashes go in the car boot? That seemed disrespectful and wrong to me, so I sat him on the back seat, and put the seat belt around him. Then there was the question of where to take him. My youngest sister asked why I had left the ashes in the car when I visited mum, but mum gave the impression she didn't want he ashes in the house. So he came home with me. But then comes the question of where to keep him? I know he wanted his ashes scattering on the River Humber where in life he loved to go fishing, but until then he has to stay somewhere. What does etiquette and convention dictate? Leaving him in the garage or shed seems disrespectful and tasteless, but setting up a shrine in the house seems excessive. I settled for placing him in the front room alongside the fireplace, but my wife is uneasy even with that. He looks quite smart in a red velvet bag, covering a black plastic container. He's certainly lost a few pounds since last Thursday too.
In a few days time of course it wont be a problem, I'll get the family together and we'll scatter the ashes in accordance with his wishes on the river. But until then I hope I'm doing the right thing, because nowhere is there any guide to what to do with the ashes of a dead parent.

God recalls all humans manufactured dawn of time to present day for modification.

For some years now the motor industry has had a system in place where if a car or component on a car develops a safety issue they can recall the model or batch concerned for replacement or modification of the affected part. This has saved many lives. It is a good thing.
I wonder however if God the creator has a similar system in place. Recent events cause me to believe this may now be necessary. I am not talking about things like heart or brains, which are no longer fit for purpose as they wear out before the rest of us does these days with our advances in modern medicine. We can hardly blame God for extending our life span beyond the warantee period.
No the problem lies in a malfunction I discovered on my 1968 male model body. It is of average mileage and in reasonable condition, but probably in need of a tune up, however I suspect the fault I experienced could be replicated in other models of any age or sex.
Those of a nervous disposition may chose to stop reading now. But then you'll be at risk if this happens to you. It would seem that due to a design flaw, under certain conditions, such as eating salad dressed in hot chilli pepper sauce (Yes, I know, I have unusual tastes) it is possible to sneeze and hiccup at the same time. This involuntarily forces small pieces of red hot chilli coated lettuce into the nasal membrane, where the result is somewhat spectacularly painful.
Over the years I have been sprayed with CS gas, Pava Spray and various other noxious irritants. Believe me this is worse. Unable to see due to the gallons of water gushing from my eyes, and struggling to breathe because of further sneezing triggered by the irritant and more hiccups every time I tried to draw breath I genuinely thought my number was up. And the burning pain was beyond description in a family Blog. At one point I paid serious consideration to taking my nose off with a blunt axe to try and relieve it. Trying to douse the fire by snorting water up my nose throw a straw didn't help matters, if anything it just spread the flames further. My wife returned home from work to find me apparently having some sort of religious seizure whilst waterboarding myself in the kitchen sink. The words "God help me," bubbling through the suds of fairy liquid must have come as a shock . With drinking straws on the worktop and me flushed, sweaty and foaming at the mouth she probably thought I'd downed a kilo of heroin. Perhaps I should have emptied the washing up bowl first, but it was an emergency.
What are the odds of such a hiccup/sneeze backfire I wonder? Whatever they are it is too high a risk. God should recall all humans and fit them with some sort of blowback control valve. Perhaps hiccups could be diverted via the backside. A few uncontrollable farts must be less embarrassing than drowning in your own washing up, and definitely less painful.

I want to beleive

UFO's don't exist. Or rather they do, but only in the sense that hey are Unidentified Flying Objects rather than little green men visiting from outer space. UFO's obvioulsy do exist, but only because we can't identify them. Once we do they are simple aircraft weather balloons or chinese lanterns, or whatever we identify them as. Stand on a motorway bridge and try to identify the cars going by. In the sea of Nissans, Toyotas, Fords, Vauxhalls and Citroens there will undoubtedly be something you can't identify. The latest Kia, or a Chrysler. This of course does not mean that Kias don't exist, of course they do, it just means you can't identify it. You can describe it as some strange car, but only someone in the know can tell you which car it is.  But just because you can't identify it doesn't mean you doubt the existence of cars, right? Same with UFO's. And when you see something really odd like a Bristol, an Alvis or a Bugatti, it blows you mind. But it's still only a car.

Whilst I would like to believe that aliens from other solar systems are visiting, evidence strongly suggests otherwise, as proven by recent events. As I type, cosmonauts are attempting to fix a leak in the ammonia filled cooling system that protects the solar electric supply on the space station. This we are being told is damage caused by a meteor strike. We are not talking about  huge ball of flaming rock either, the damage could have been caused by something as small as a pin head. A minute piece of space debris travelling at speed could, at any time, pierce the shell of the space station damaging it and potentially killing all those on board. This of course means that interstellar travel would be highly dangerous, and arguably impossible. The space station orbits the earth at just a few hundred miles up. Cosmically speaking this is just outside the front door. And stepping out the door has been enough to take major damage. So, if we were to travel across our own solar system, the equivalent of strolling around our front garden, the odds of being hit increase dramatically. And consider this - we are simply strolling. Or possibly, because we are mere infants in this space exploration lark, merely crawling on all fours. Any aliens visiting from other galaxies would have to be travelling at tremendous speeds to cross the interstellar distances involved within their own lifespans, so their craft must surely be like pepperpots within a few streets on the cosmic scale. It just couldn't be done.

Consider the situation with the volcanic ash cloud a year or so back. They reckoned that an aircraft entering the ash cloud at cruise speed of around 300 mph would be stripped of it's paintwork in no time, and the engines would fail as ash glassified in the inlets. Travelling through the depths of space with all manner of flotsam, jetsam and detritus surely the same applies? And no self respecting alien is going to turn up on a strange new planet with tarnished paintwork and a knackered engine when the nearest starship repair centre is several thousand light years away. They wouldn't be seen dead in it - although naturally they would if it had been struck by meteors.

I have been having doubts about whether we ever even landed on Mars ever since I saw a documentary that pointed out several inconsistencies in the film footage, but now this new understanding convinces me. No spacecraft we can conceive could make the journey without risk of being bombarded by tiny little meteorites that would destroy it. Another factor that convinces me is that we are told that Apollo rockets used less computing power than a pocket calculator. Well my home PC is far more advanced than the 1960's computer technology, but it crashes with monotonous frequency, and to be honest I wouldn't trust it to speak my weight, never mind navigate to the moon and back. The Americans must have faked the whole thing to convince the Russians they had superior technology, thus securing world peace - of a sort.

And yet..... I still want to believe that life exists outside our little blue and green globe. If it doesn't then the rest of the universe makes no sense - what is it there for? Aliens must have superior technology to protect their spacecraft with some sort of anti gravity meteor proof shield  to allow them to travel cross the universe freely. And when we, a supposedly intelligent life form, still buries it's rubbish in a hole in the ground, makes TV documentaries about the most inadequate members of society for it's own entertainment and burns oil in little explosions to make chariots go around there is no hope at all for the future, unless we gain outside help, or evolve into something better quickly.

So, here's my theory. Life does exist on other planets, they have visited here and they are guiding us and ready to save us from ourselves. They may have already made contact, and that is why the familiar face of the alien grey is slowly being drip fed into popular sci-fi culture, to prepare us for the official announcement. They are almost certainly pointing us towards technological advancements. Lets' face it, we have had thousands of years of evolution in which we have achieved the wheel and fire, and very little else - agriculture and rudimentary medicine and music perhaps. Then within just a couple of centuries we come up with the steam engine, internal combustion, electricity, computers, microwave ovens, X rays, chips, DVD players space travel, Ryan Air, telephone, television, rock and roll and the internet. And lets be honest we just don't have the intellect for any of that. Take away electricity and within a month we would all be on the same level as monkeys again, or at best plunged back into the dark ages. Most of the Jeremy Kyle audience are still there, proof if need be that man has not evolved to the point of flying to the moon. No, there is more going on than we are aware of, and I for one will be watching the night skies more closely from now on.

I want to believe.

Greenpeace needs recycling.

I like to think of myself as a normal sort of person (despite my warped sense of humour) I recycle as much stuff as I reasonably can, and like most parents I run around the house after the rest of the family closing doors and turning lights off. I hate seeing food go to waste and will happily eat stuff well past it's best before date rather than throw it in the bin. As long as it is roughly the same colour as it's meant to be, doesn't smell too bad and isn't growing larger than it ought to be with a fur coat then it's edible. I save old bits of scrap wood and metal, in case they come in handy. I have solar panels on my roof to make my own electric and I have a water butt in the garden to collect rainwater for the garden. I think I do my bit.

I refuse therefore to be bullied into caring for the planet. So far as I can tell it's much bigger and older than me, and it has survived pretty well on it's own.

Charities however think differently. Greenpeace keep sending me emails begging for money. According to Greenpeace evil corporations are exploiting our planet drilling for oil in the polar regions and doing massive environmental damage. This is killing polar bears and melting the ice caps. Apparently.
Greenpeace beleive they can save the polar caps from melting if I pay them enough money. They will save the lives of many cute polar bears.

Well let's just think about this shall we. I don't buy the cute polar bear image - they are vicious bastards who kill for fun. And they are all left handed, which is just sinister. Had they said penguins they might have been in with a chance. Any animal that evolves to such a degree that it can only survive in a specialist environment just wasn't thinking about survival when it evolved. So polar bears have what's coming to them. Or do they? By my reckoning, they have 50,000 years in which to evolve into something that likes it warmer and with less snow. And then they'll have to evolve back again.

Secondly, if I pay Greenpeace money, they will drive in cars to an airport, then fly out to somewhere near the polar regions before getting on diesel burning boats to go and disrupt oil drilling operations which they say are responsible for the melting ice caps. But surely their flights will contribute to the global warming they say man is causing, thus further weakening the fragile planet? And I hardly think that setting up a protest camp outside the doors of BP, Shell and Mobil will have any real effect. The oilmen will go fully prepared for the elements, knowing they have a tough job to do. The sandal wearing hippy hypocrites will have to do the same, burning lots of fossil fuel to keep themselves warm. And they won't be able to do what the Inuits do and wear seal skin and polar bear fur, because that's cruel to the nice animals. 

Thirdly,let's look at the science of it all. The earth has a wobble in it's axis, this is what gives us winter and summer. We now know that the earth is on a tilting elliptical spiralling orbit, gravitational pulls from other orbiting bodies affect our orbit to a greater or lesser degree each time we meet. This maximizes, or minimizes the wobbling tilt of the earth, and when these forces are multiplied as two or more of the orbiting masses co-incide we get an ice age. That ice will then gradually melt until weather cycles, and the above forces shove us into another cycle of ice age. Global warming is not caused by mankind, it is a naturally occurring event, and nothing Greenpeace or anyone else can do will avert it.  We are due another ice age in around 50,000 years time. Greenpeace really need to start thinking about how we are going to survive that, and start working with the global corporations and scientists  not thwarting them as they try to make the best of the limited resources our planet has.

So on this issue at least, don;t give to Greenpeace, save your money, spend it on a big block Chevy and burn as much fossil fuel as you like, because you only have one lifetime to enjoy it. And 49,930 years or so after you've gone you won't need to worry about global warming, the ice caps or polar bears.

FOOTNOTE: Did I mention, by the way that just two of the fleet of four North sea Ferries operating from Hull put put out more CO2 pollution each year than every car in the UK combined? I'm still going to Amsterdam on my holidays on the ferry though. It's too wet to drive. Bloody global warming.

Difficulty making both ends meat

There has been much in the media in recent weeks about the presence of horse meat in our burgers, mince and other processed foods. This does not concern me unduly. The French have always eaten horsemeat, and other than smelling of garlic is doesn't seem to have done them any harm.
On it's heels comes the news that ASDA SmartPrice corned beef might contain vets drugs.
This doesn't concern me either, as I rarely eat corned beef, and if I do it just means I'll get a decent nights sleep for a change. Probably.
It might concern me if my children were likely to eat drug contaminated meat, although this is as likely as an honest politician. The girl child appears top have turned into a vegetarian. I don't know why, but I suppose i have to live with it. The boy child is much more frustrating. He will eat processed chicken nuggets, made from reconstituted chicken and mechanically recovered crap pressed into loose chunks with bits of pork, fat and the lips and tongues etc, then covered in breadcrumbs so it looks nice. But he resolutely refuses to eat fresh chicken breast.
Even more frustrating is his stance over sausages. These are loosely speaking made of meat, the origin of which is debatable, breadcrumbs, spices and in some cases wood shavings. He will happily eat the middle of the sausages, but will not eat the ends. I have explained that the ends are exactly the same as the middle but to no avail. I have explained that the ends are entirely arbitrary, in that up until someone (or these days a machine) twists the sausages into separate links, that part of the sausage is exactly the same as the rest of the sausage. Does he understand this? Yes. Does he agree this is the case? No. Would it matter then if the people at Walls and Richmond filled the ends with wood pulp? After all, in the current recession they must be finding it as hard of the rest of us in making both ends meat.

You couldn't make it up.

It really is beyond belief. The BBC news last night reported the story of a school which has banned it's dinner ladies from selling triangular shaped flapjack after a child had to be sent home when another child threw a slice of flapjack at his eye causing him an injury. Well actually he probably just threw it in his general direction, I doubt he would have ballistic accuracy with a slice of flapjack, whatever it's shape. I will point out at this point that the child made a full recovery. In other words he was just a bit upset.
I would consider this a freak accident, and would not rearrange the menu simply to prevent the highly unlikely event being repeated. But just look a the probabilities. A triangle has three points and three sides. The chances of being struck by a point are equal to the chances of being struck by a side. The school has been told to serve only square or rectangular pieces of flapjack. These have four corners and four sides. So whilst the chances of being hit by a corner remain the same at 50/50, the chances of being hit by a corner are 33% higher when compared with a triangle. And I would doubt the ballistic accuracy of a square of flapjack is any worse than that if a triangular piece.
Of course what the school has failed to take into account is the devious nature of school children. What will prevent them, left with their cutlery, from cutting the square of flapjack diagonally across and thus arming them with not one, but two triangular pieces of lethal flapjack? The consequences are unthinkable.
And if triangular flapjack is such a safety hazard within the school canteen, then surely wedges of quiche and slices of all sorts of pie should be outlawed too?
You really couldn't make this up. It's Health and Safety gone mad etc etc........
Of course those of a certain age will know of the real danger in school canteens - chocolate crunch with pink custard. This stuff really was dangerous. If Teflon is the slipperiest substance known to man then chocolate crunch is definitely the hardest. If the local council could only get hold of the recipe they could solve the pothole problem in an instance. Attempting to eat this stuff was nigh on impossible. An entire generation of dentists were able to retire early as a result of the inclusion of chocolate crunch onto the school meals menu. Hitting it with the sharp edge of a spoon would, when around 3 1/2 tonnes of pressure per square inch had been applied, result in the stuff shattering, with pieces flying everywhere. Many a child would go home with shrapnel wounds when chocolate crunch had been on the menu. People born in the mid sixties proudly show off their scars. Soaking the stuff in the accompanying pink custard after turning it upside down helped a little but not much. All that happened then was that the stricken child would go home with a simulated gunshot wound with unsightly creamy white stains around it, because the pink was a mere illusion, it always dried creamy white. It was a different time of course, before Yogurt and Lettuce were invented, but it was part of what out the backbone in British kids. So, let them eat triangular flapjack. Otherwise they will all grow up without the nerve to ever try a Vindaloo, or a late night Kebab. And the world will be a darker place without that.
  

Now I really don't understand money - budget review.

As I admitted in my previous post, I don't understand money. And I sure as hell don't understand the budget.
We have had three years of austerity, with pay freezes in the public sector, redundancies, cost efficiency measures, pay cuts, tax rises, pension benefits reduced and we will all have to work longer. But this, we are told is for the greater good, as we will bounce out of recession in no time and be richer in wealth and experience. However despite all the savings the Government still borrowed £21 billion last year and £20 billion the year before (in rough terms - give or take a million, and when you're talking in billions what does a million here or there matter? Ask the CPS) Even with all those savings and all that money borrowed growth is at a standstill and inflation is rising.
Despite being in debt, and in a recession we continue to give away millions in foreign aid. This is so that African clan leaders and warloads can buy more guns and new Mercedes, and spend a very small percentage of what we send on buying a well, or building a school out of corrugated tin. It wouldn't be so bad if they spent the money on British guns, but they don't, they buy Chinese copies of the excellent Russian AK-47. So UK Plc doesn;t benefit at all from this, other than we get a nice warm glow from helping save ungrateful nations from their own stupidity in order that they can grow up and become terrorists to fight against us. But I digress.
We fell into this recession, if memory serves, because a bunch of greedy Americans loaned money to people to buy houses who had no hope of ever paying the money back. This caused soem American banks to collapse, which in turn, for reasons I am not able to fully grasp, caused Northern Rock, a UK bank to also collapse. And then caused lots of other financial institutions to have collywobbles of their own until suddenly it was my problem, even though I don't own a bank. I am in the happy position where whilst I have very little money, I owe very little money too, so I could manage reasonably well without a bank at all. So, in a nutshell, lending money to people who can't pay it back is not a good idea. Obviously you should only loan money to rich people, who can pay it back. But then, they don't need to borrow it because they are rich.
Anyhow, it would seem that the Chancellors plan to get the economy moving is that he will borrow £21 billion again this year. He will then use this to help people who can't afford the deposit to buy a house, to buy a house. This will be in the form of some sort of loan, which if they can't afford a mortgage, they will have no hope of paying back. Sound familiar?
Elsewhere in the budget, a political master stroke, Mr Osbourne announces he will not increase the duty in fuel that he had planned for the Autumn. We are supposed to be grateful for this. 'I am cancelling this September's fuel duty increase altogether,' said Osborne. 'Fuel is now 13p cheaper than it would have been,' he claimed. Well there's a convenient conversion back to imperial measures for a start. Yes it's 13p a gallon cheaper, but only 3p a litre which is what it is sold in. 3p doesn't sound as impressive as 13 p though does it?And don't forget that's not 3p a litre coming OFF the price, that's the removal of a 3p per litre increase he had previously threatened. So, If I threaten to punch him in the face, but then say I've changed my mind, does that make it all okay?
The only other striking bit of news in the budget was a reduction in the price of a pint of beer by 1p. Wow! With beer costing on average £3 a pint in pubs that is really something to drink to. Actually he missed a trick there, becasue had he converted it to litres it's more than twice as much at 2.1 pence per litre. So, for example, if you are a raging alcoholic and drink 10 pints of beer every day, that will save you £36.50 a year, enough to buy another 12 pints, and one for yourself darling. If on the other hand, like me, you enjoy a nice glass of red wine at home you save nothing. Or if you have the occasional pint after walking 30 miles in the beautiful rural North Yorkshire moors, at a nice country pub, assuming it hasn't closed down because of the recession, it will save you only about 5 pence a year. Which is more than the 3p a litre you'll have not saved on the reduction in the fuel duty that never was in the first place.
The final bit of budget news I caught was that we will now be able to earn £10000 before paying any tax at all. Unless you are a mulitnational company in which case it will remain as it was £100,000 million.
Of course what George should have done is gone down to "Cash for Gold" with the nations gold reserves and flogged them - but too late, seems like the preceding Labour Government already did that.