Geese, Chocolate, and Vinegar

A short scribble today, as I’m busy building a snowman to see if it will frighten the wild geese off my estate. I still haven’t used my newly acquired shotgun, as I want my neighbours to feel safe while they amble about outside their back doors. Having said that, someone else must have had a Sunday lunch for the price of a bullet last weekend, as I had seven geese visiting me last Saturday, but on Monday there were only six.

Tony Blair has come and gone from the Iraq inquiry, acting exactly as I thought he would be – smug, arrogant, and bullish. Not a hint of regret for the invasion; insisting, instead, that the world was a safer place since the removal of Saddam Hussein. Certainly not for our military, or for innocent civilians across the globe whose lives are being snuffed out by roadside explosive devices and by suicide bombers. Liberal Democrat MP Sir Menzies Campbell summed up the man rather neatly when he commented, “Mr Blair does not do contrition.”

I now turn to this country of ours, Britain, that could in the past be rightly prefixed by the ‘Great’. In the latter part of my lifetime, it has lost its shipbuilding, steel, car, and fishing industries, along with others, too numerous to mention. The loss of those was bad enough, but I was even more saddened a couple of weeks ago when I learned that those masters of the chocolate world, Cadburys, were to be taken over by Krafts. Ah, the number of female hearts that melted over the years after I’d continually assaulted them with products from the afore mentioned company. I don’t think I’ll be doing much of that in the future, as giving her something made by Krafts will probably make us both visualize salad cream or cheese. Not the same, I’m afraid!

Glancing through a local paper this week, I noticed an advert with an inflatable dingy (I assume it was meant to be ‘dinghy’) for sale. Amongst its selling points was the fact that it had no leaks. Certainly reassuring for any would-be buyers. The same paper had a snippet of information concerning jewels – that pearls melt in vinegar. Luckily I was aware of that fact from an early age – it’s why, when I took any female acquaintance out for a posh meal, I never allowed her to sprinkle any of the stuff on her fish supper.