Some scally has been up and down our road and nicked all the metal grills that cover the storm drains, leaving great chasms helpfully covered up with traffic cones.
You can't win. Too much lighting and a road starts to look like the front at Blackpool and everyone complains about light pollution. Not enough and you step out one morning into fall into a black hole.
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Which reminds me - have you seen My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding? It's fabulous TV and I reckon it will be the cult show of the year. Even more than that one about the Kardashians.
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I have discovered a fantastic new place to go people watching. The grading examinations for Tae Kwon Do in your region. My two had to go and do some kind of martial arts line dancing and answer questions like 'name the five tenets of Tae Kwon Do' which, of course, is something like 'determination, pride, a lack of self awareness, nice shiny white suits, clean fingernails' I think.
Most of the people there are normal. Lots of earnest kids and put upon parents who have just seen the cost of the accessories.
But among them are a few oddballs. There's a few 'types'. There's the aggressive martial artist who, despite all the teaching about peace and love and meditation, just wants to learn a few moves they can use to smash someone's face in.
Then there are whole families who do it. Mum, dad, brother and sister. All lining up to practise their moves in unison, shouting 'hurgh' at the end of each move, like the Dooleys clearing their throat. In all honesty it's slightly creepy in a kind of Brady Bunch synchronised way rather than in a Woody Allen/Stepdaugther thing but creepy nonetheless. He is something in financial accounting, she is a housewife with a part-time job as a teaching assistant and the kids have been taught how to keep their clothes lined up in a colour co-ordinated order in the wardrobe.
And then there's the socially inept loner. The kid who was bullied at school but has seen The Karate Kid and has taken up self defence classes so that one day he can either a) meet his nemesis in the final of a televised tournament where he breaks his leg but still wins or b) be confronted by his bullies, many years later, in a New York alleyway where they decide to teach him a lesson once and for all not realising he is now Jackie Chan and proceeds to beat them all up, before leaving with some smartarse oneliner like 'see you in assembly tomorrow suckers.'
Of course that doesn't happen. His main bully goes into petty crime before ending up pulling off a really big bank job and retiring to the Costa del Crime on the proceeds and becomes a TV personality on a reality show while the bullied goes to martial arts classes but finds he's useless at it. His job gives him a meagre income for a decade or so until he gets made redundant and, just when he hits rock bottom he turns on the TV and spots his bully smoking a cigar and lying on a lilo in a pool in Spain a la Ray Winstone.
Amazing what you can pick up sitting round a draughty school hall in Watford waiting for your kids to finish their grading.
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Karen Brady is one of the few women in football. So she is one of the few people who, when making a complete cock-up of running a football club, can turn round and blame blatant sexism in a newspaper column that she has been given because she is one of the few women in football.
This is a woman whose taste in entrepreneurial companion is David Sullivan, David Gold and Alan Sugar. If I was Avram Grant I'd have a suitcase packed just in case.
I used to work for Sullivan. I'll share some anecdotes about him when there's more time.
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Rules of journalism continued: Columns written by presenters of the popular children's programme Top Gear are not meant to be taken seriously so don't base economic/environmental or any other argument based on what they say.
And on that bombshell goodnight...Solly
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