by
Frank Hatton

Couple of weeks back, I had to drive up to London to visit some old friends,.... normally, it works the other way around, in that as we live on the coast, and are quite close to several seaside resorts, plus the New Forest, the wild ponies, and other tourist areas, most of the folk we know usually find reasons to come down to visit us. However, poor old Harry has got the dreaded ‘Big C’, and is too ill to travel these days, so, as I said, we went up to see him. Now, both my wife and I were born and raised in London, and when we were first married, we carried on living there for another seven years, but after our son was born, we moved to greener pastures, where we lived for the next 32 years. About eight years back, we moved down to our present location, and have not had reason to go near the London area for a long time, and while accepting that most places change over the years, I was truly amazed at the degree of change that had taken place. Nobody in their right mind could claim that London was ever a clean place, the years of smoke and grime, plus the old thick ‘peasouper’ fogs have all taken their toll on the appearance of the buildings, so inevitably, the city always had a sort of unkempt look. Probably, the folk that live there would not have realised the changes were taking place, but, to my mind, the place is now really dirty and untidy. Gone are all the lovely little corner shops like grocers, bakers, dairies, tobacconists, chemists, and many others. Like so many other places, these have all been replaced by the supermarkets, and the little shops are all boarded up and neglected. Traffic was ever a problem in London, even in the days of horse drawn vehicles. In fact, near the closing of the last century, it was forecast by some bright soul, that with the greatly increased growth of horse drawn traffic, London would soon be buried under the volume of horse manure being generated. Thank the Lord for the invention of the automobile!!! However, if we substitute horse manure for motor vehicles, then that old forecaster could be near the truth, the amount of traffic in the streets is slowly but surely bringing the city to a grinding halt. I would estimate the average speed of London traffic to be around 8mph, and in fact in some instances it would be quicker to get out of the car and walk. The other factor which was evident, was the change in the population,.... so many different nationalities walking around the streets, and in some areas, the majority of the houses have been taken over by an ethnic group. Funnily enough, I was reading in the newspaper quite recently, that there are now 307 different languages being spoken by the pupils of the London schools. The greatest number being some 40,000 of one language, going down to just 2 spoken by the lowest number. These statistics also gave the total number of children who had English as their mother tongue, and these numbered 360,000., however, if we take the total number of pupils with English as their second language, we reach a figure of 240,000, hence we are looking at 40% of the London school pupils who have to learn by way of a second language. Among the reasons for these strange statistics is another newspaper item, stating that the number of asylum seekers to our country has risen by 55% over the last year. This of course is over and above the vast flood of illegal immigrants that are smuggled in each and every year...... , and the reason we are so popular??? Quite simple really. We are the softest touch in the world!!! All of these folk can claim social security benefits, by way of firstly, having accommodation found for them, and the rent will be paid by the government, they also get free medical treatment, free medicine, a weekly allowance of money, plus financial grants to pay for any equipment they need, like cooking, laundry, furniture, clothing,.... it goes on and on. Then comes the final indignity when we read that many of these folk are finding ways to claim for far more than they are entitled to, by using false names, inventing large families to support, etc., etc.,..... it costs the legitimate taxpayer billions of £’s to meet these costs!!!! Next item!!! A couple of years back, we had a very sad case where a guy went berserk and walked into a school in a town called Dunblane, which is just to the north of Stirling in Scotland, carrying a pistol and spare ammunition. He selected a class of very young children aged around five years old, and randomly started to shoot them. I am ashamed to say that I cannot remember how many were killed, but it was a considerable number of them, and in addition to that he also wounded a lot more, plus the teacher, who was doing her best to protect the poor little souls. He then shot himself dead. As a result of this episode, the government decided that no person, other than police, and special forces, would be allowed to possess a hand gun of any sort. Now, bearing in mind that we have had, for many years a law, which prohibited hand guns to the whole civilian population, and have no shops, such as in the USA, where one can walk in and just buy a gun over the counter. The only legitimate owners of handguns were authorised gun club members, who had to firstly show and prove, that they were fit and proper persons to be granted a licence to own a gun, and secondly show and prove, that the gun was securely locked away when not in use on the firing range. Hence the only other guns were those held and bought illegally, by criminals, and the like. However, as a direct result of the Dunblane incident, every single hand gun held by the licensed and authorised gun club members was confiscated, and all pistol shooting was prohibited by law. As some wise soul pointed out, would the same action have been taken if a maniac had killed a number of folk with a cricket bat? Would every cricket club in the country have been disbanded, and all cricket bats destroyed? We now have the recent story, of a doctor in general practice, who has just been jailed for life because he has murdered 15 women patients by injecting them with a lethal dose of cocaine, and is suspected of possibly killing off around 100 to 150 others, over the years he has been in practice. The guy obviously has a defect in his mental capabilities, but was able to conceal this pretty well. Although it must be said that he was reported on a couple of occasions to both the medical authorities and a coroner, for various aspects of his behaviour, but, nothing of import was done to restrict him in any way. Once again, our retrospectively wise government has decided to act!!!! They cannot ban all doctors from practicing their profession, but they are going to bring in a number of new laws which will tighten up the relationship between doctor and patient, and generally make the life of the family doctor more difficult. Why oh why is it, that to my simple mind, the authorities cannot accept that we are going to get these lunatics running riot in our society every now and again, and if some nut wants to run amok with a handgun, he will get one from somewhere, and satisfy his/her desire to kill someone...... After all, our criminals have no problem at all in buying a gun, .... they are on sale throughout the underworld at the right price. Likewise, we are also going to get the odd, doctor, lawyer, cricketer, footballer, actor, member of parliament, policeman, maybe even a priest, anyone in fact, who will flip his/her lid, and do something which will outrage the rest of society. Is it sensible to extract a form of revenge on perfectly normal innocent people who happen to either legitimately own a handgun, or belong to a similar profession as the miscreant? I really must stop reading these newspapers!!!! They’re getting far too depressing. Now for goodness sake let’s move on to more cheerful things. Firstly, a lovely story in the newspaper today, (although I will not vouch for its authenticity) about the lady driving the brand new family car, when she was caught in a really bad hailstorm. Which was so bad, the car was covered in small indentations. She stopped at a garage for help, and the mechanic decided to have some fun. He told her that when she got home, she should blow up the exhaust pipe as hard as she could, and all the dents would pop out again. Back home, she followed the mechanic’s instructions, and began huffing and puffing up the pipe, but without much success...... Her husband came out to see what all the noise was about, and the wife told him what had happened, and the remedy suggested by the mechanic. Shaking his head sadly, the husband told her, “you’ll never do it that way, you have to wind the windows up first!!!” To be honest with you, I feel I have lowered my standards a little this month, by moaning and groaning too much, so, to compensate, I will leave you with another little item, about a monastery perched high up a mountain, and the only way to get in or out was by way of a basket fixed to a pulley wheel, which was manually hauled up by the monks themselves. One visiting tourist became extremely nervous when about halfway up the steep cliff, he noticed the straining rope being tugged by the monks was very badly frayed. With a trembling voice he asked the monk riding with him in the basket, how often they changed the rope. The monk thought for a moment, then answered brusquely: “Whenever it breaks of course.” 'til next time, Frank Hatton

I would love to hear from you so email me.

You can find more articles in the archive under From Over the Pond