by
Frank Hatton

Now that the Christmas and New Year holidays are over, I have come to realise how the length of this vacation has increased since the days of my youth. Many moons ago, the only time we had off work were Christmas day and Boxing day (the following day). We then returned to work, and although the New Year was celebrated, it was still required that we went back to work on January 1st, (unless of course this was on a Sunday, and therefore a natural holiday), and in reflecting on this, I well remember the many times I finished the New Year celebrations at around 3.00 a.m. on January 1st.... went to bed, and had to awake in a semi- stupor at 7.00 a.m. to stagger off to work. Nowadays, life is a lot more civilised, and most folk finish work on Christmas Eve, and do not have to worry about going back to work until January 2nd, or January 3rd if you are lucky enough to live in Scotland. Hence, by comparison, the holiday lasts for so much longer, which has mixed blessings, in that while it lasts longer, one needs much more stamina to last the course. I think it is Parkinson’s Law which states that work will expand to fill the time available, and I would like to suggest that the same law may be applied to the holidays, in that the celebrations will expand to fill the time available in which to celebrate, and it is at times like these that I quietly and gratefully acknowledge the benefits of getting older, when most folk accept that you are no longer expected to prance around making whoopee and drinking vast quantities of alcohol. Change of subject! and I’m willing to bet that most of us have done this at some time or other in our lives. It is a freezing cold morning, and the car has been left out all night. The ice is completely covering the car, and it involves quite a bit of work scraping away at the windows in order to see through them. To speed the job up, we start the engine to get the heat flowing and get the blowers into action, and having got the windows clear enough to see through, we pop back into the house to say goodbye to the family, while the engine is running to keep the car warm. This guy in the county of Gloucestershire, did just that, and when he went back to the car, there was a policeman standing beside it. The cop asked the guy if he knew that it was an offence to leave a vehicle unattended with the engine running, the chap said no, he did not know, and that he was very sorry, and would not do it again. This did not satisfy the officer, and he issued an ‘on the spot’ ticket for a sum of $50.00. Now this is a perfectly respectable citizen, living in a nice house, the car is a $50,000 Volvo C70, and the car was outside of his home. I find it unbelievable that muggers, murderers, rapists, burglars, and hosts of other offenders are given all sorts of leniency and chances, and this poor guy gets the full treatment. Some of you may recall that I have, in this column written several times on the change of our law in this country whereby the possession of handguns by any private citizen is forbidden. This law was in response to the shooting in Dunbane of 16 children by a Thomas Hamilton in 1996. This presumably was because Thomas Hamilton was a member of a licensed gun club, and whilst it was obvious to any half wit that Hamilton was insane at the time, all of the responsible gun club members throughout the country were deprived of their hobby. Just this week I have been reading in my newspaper that handgun offences have risen each year since that ban was applied, and in the year 1999-2000 there were 3,625 crimes involving handguns, and that was 37% higher than in the previous year. One can therefore justifiably ask what the devil has been the good of passing this stupid law??? Criminals will always have access to guns, so why make the decent law abiding citizen suffer? The next award for stupidity goes to our government for their blind and blundering methods of forcing the wishes of the European Community on the folks of this country. We have for as far back as records show, always used the imperial system of measurement for weight, lengths, and liquids, but now, a greengrocer from Sunderland is to appear in court because he refuses to sell his products by the metric system. His attitude is that all of his customers want to be able to understand the quantities that they are buying, and for his own part, he would rather go to jail than force them to buy in kilos and grams. I feel sure that at least 90% of the folk in this country would agree with him, and it would appear that he has the backing of the British Weights and Measures Association along with many other prominent people. One of these supporters, an actor said, “We live in a crazy society where a man can be fined a few hundred pounds for killing a child when he is drunk while driving a car, and another is fined thousands of pounds for selling bananas by the imperial weight system.” Good luck to the guy, and I really hope he wins his case. Although the news will probably be old hat by the time you get to reading this article, I would like to comment on the case of the American twin babies who were bought over the Internet by a couple from the UK. It does not matter at all about which countries were involved, the truly frightening thing about this episode, is that human lives were traded, and it is only now that folk are realising just how dangerous this type of use of computer technology is. We have had quite a lot of publicity also over here about the use of this form of communication by paedophiles and the obscene and sadistic pictures they send to each other. Now please don’t misread my views on the Internet,.... it is a very useful tool, and it opens up whole new vistas for us folk who use it. However, now that society is opening it’s eyes to the potential dangers of the thing, I would suggest that news laws are created to govern the type of usage. ‘til the next time, Frank Hatton

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