Legal wit – and waste

I have (and I apologise) bored you with moans about my divorce a couple of times, but one story about the changing attitudes in legal circles amused me no end.

I was asking my lawyer why it seems almost impossible to get really emphatic, no-nonsense advice. I found the constant request, “Can we have your instructions” without being too firm on what they should be, rather wearing.

If someone comes to me for my advice then they get it, hot and strong. That’s what I’m paid for. What if I just said, “Well, you could do this, or you could do that and this might happen or that might – what do you want to do?”

But apparently lawyers nowadays are so frightened of doing the wrong thing and getting the pants sued off them that they have nearly all turned into frightened pussy cats.

The difference was pointed up to me by a friend who was in practice for many years, but has now chucked it in. He told me about a choice letter sent by one solicitor to another in the good old days.

It read, in total: “In reply to yours of the 22nd, kindly fuck off. P.S. Rude letter follows.”

Good stuff. The world has gone downhill.

A seasonal joke

A driver is stuck in a traffic jam going into Central London. Nothing is moving north or south.

Suddenly a man knocks on his window. The driver rolls t idown his window and asks, 'What's happened, what's the hold up?'

“Terrorists have kidnapped Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. They’re asking for a £10 million ransom.

Otherwise, they are going to douse them with petrol and set them on fire. We are going from car to car taking up a collection.”

The driver asks, “On average, how much is everyone giving?”
“About 2 litres”.

“Now just high-tail it on out of here, you pesky critter” said the Mail Marshal at Seiko Watches

One of my readers who works at Seiko often fails to get his normal helping of perceptive social comment from me because the Mail Marshal there stops it dead.

Something about unacceptable language, apparently. Amazing.

So I thought I might for once, raise the tone of this emission (that’s not rude is it?) with wise words from The Economist.

They commented recently the U.S. economy is based on private profit and social debt. When the money is made all the capitalist pigs have their snouts in the trough. When it is lost, taxpayers have to bail them out.

What adds insult to injury is that the rogues responsible all waltz away with massive pay-offs.

This is true here too, only in the U.S. everything is bigger and better. They have trillions of debt where we have billions; their crooks walk away with millions, ours with hundreds of thousands.

Nevertheless, should the creep at Northern Rock have been allowed to walk away with a fortune when people lost their jobs and we bailed out the firm? And should that ex-adman be so richly rewarded for not sorting out the Royal Mail.

For that matter, should the useless head of Network Rail, a man called Coucher, have a year end pay of £1.2 million when the organisation has done such an appalling job?

Well the answer is, he met the targets set by the “Regulator”. What kind of regulator is that? The only possible answer can be a stupid, inept useless regulator. One who is blithely unaware of the concept of competence, let alone profit and loss. One who did not rise through merit but was appointed by politicians whose only skill is in trotting out tripe and getting freebies.

But then the whole show is run in a very odd way. Take the chairman, Sir Ian McAllister. At Christmas, when thousands of passengers endured day after day of misery, that little porker was enjoying an extra long Christmas break with his family at his £1.5million home saying he'd "only get in the way" if he went into work.

Amazingly, this smug, podgy twit gets £250,000 a year for a three-day week. He said his presence in the office was unnecessary. If so, why not get rid of him? He also said: "Sometimes you have to know when to stand back and just let the experts get on with it."

What did the experts get on with? Network Rail failed to finish £415 million of engineering works by December 30 as planned. And Ian was knighted for "services to transport" on the very day they got a record £14million fine for making passengers' lives a misery over New Year. How come Hitler never got a Nobel Peace Prize?

But you can always rely on one factor: Wee Gordie Broon, the mastermind behind the stupid public-private lash-up that is Network Rail, which has neither social nor private responsibility.

And today I noticed another brilliant decision.

This country is in serious financial trouble so we’re going to give £30 million to the Palestinian Government. I wonder how much will reach the poor, betrayed masses there. One thing is for sure: it will all come from the betrayed masses here.

Wine-lovers' cartoon found in "The Oldie"

'The difference? Well Sir, the Barolo is ripe, rich and round, with lots of spicy, earth-scented black cherry and berry flavors, hinting deliciously at chocolate on the smooth finish, while The Blue Nun is more nylon underpants, skid-marks, ITV, thick crockery, hinting at being kicked all over the street by violent witless oafs for absolutely no reason.'

Caption - EJ Ruane, Dublin

Why we are all fed up with the idiots in charge

Here is a quote from Rod Liddle, the leading bottle-thrower in The Spectator.

“A charity called Help for Heroes, which raises money for wounded British soldiers, asked Portsmouth City Council for a £500 donation towards a proposed ‘fun day’. The council declined the request, saying that to have given money ‘could cause offence to ethnic minority groups living in the community who may also have experience of injury/violence due to the war’. They’re my italics, by the way, not the council’s. It’s just that it made me laugh so much that wine shot out of my nose and my girlfriend thought I was suffering a seizure or an embolism and so I felt moved to endow it with emphasis and thus grandeur.”

If this were just an exceptional example of how far the governors are removed from the governed one might ascribe it to the peculiar horrors attendant upon living in Portsmouth. But it is not.

On page 9 of the London Metro, I read that a man was fined by the brainless sub-Gestapo who run Ceridigion Council for smoking in his own van. (By the way, I suspect that Ceridigion is what we used to call Cardigan).

On page 15 I see a gardener was told to hire a truck by the morons at Leeds City Council because a tiny branch was too big to go in his rubbish bin. I guess that was their weekly contribution to the environment. (Query: how many town hall fuckwits could you cram into a garbage truck?)

On the same page I learned that a former policewoman was arrested on race charges for telling noisy students to go home, because two of the little pricks were Asian and might have been offended. This is what they call in the U.S. "playing the race card".

Who will benefit from all this? Step forward a beaming David Cameron. I well remember that this sort of bureaucratic lunacy destroyed the Labour government in the 1950’s. People just got fed up with the “we know better than you” attitude always associated with Labour, old or new.

Can you imagine how much good it did Cameron to be photographed the other day after his bike was stolen in Notting Hill? So much so I wonder if the devious sod arranged it all.

But what a revealing contrast with fat Gordie whizzing round the world telling the Israelis and the Arabs how to arrange their affairs when he can’t even decide which side his dick should hang, let alone run anything. Shaking hands with Obama won't help, by the way, dear.

And how much more appealing a man who rides a bike looks if you've just seen the £725,000 bill we all got after the great Bliar did his gala farewell how-far-am-I-up-my-own-arse tour of the gullible parts of the world.

If only we could imagine Cameron won’t change when he gets into office. Highly unlikely. He’s a politician. But how could he be worse than this lot?

Maybe that was unwise. Mark Twain said that the chief purpose of each new administration is to make the last one look good. But then again, could anyone be worse than Bush?