Footballer Titus Bramble is to face charges of sexual assault and possession of drugs. I don't want to prejudice the case but let's just hope he doesn't defend himself. Have you ever seen him defend?
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Yet another advert using a classic song to get its dubious message across. Last week it was the Halifax - this time, British Gas backed by Rescue Me by Fontella Bass.
They want to let you know that if your boiler breaks down or the pipes burst or some other domestic tragedy affects you, their nice men (and in real life they are always men) will come round and, yes that's right, 'rescue' you.
It's wonderful. It's like they're the fourth emergency service, coming round to help us poor householders out of the goodness of their hearts.
Perhaps they should dress them up like Virgil and Scott from Thunderbirds just to drive home the message that these are heroes, just in case anyone mistakenly thought they were just blokes doing the job they are paid to do.
And how do you get them to help? Do you beam a British Gas logo from a floodlight into the night sky? Do you leave a message in a personal newspaper ad in the hope that they come round in a black van led by a bloke who was once in Breakfast at Tiffany's? Or do women have to stand in the street waving a handkerchief and wailing loudly until they spot you?
Or do you sign up to an expensive service contract that means you end up paying through the nose whether or not you actually ever require any help and then find there's quite a lot of small print which means that they may not be quite the 24 hour emergency service you thought you signed up for?
By the way it's around £327 a year for the full service and it doesn't include appliances and if you've added an extra radiator yourself, then be careful.
Oh and they eat all your bloody biscuits and will probably have a pony in your downstairs loo.
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There are two kinds of idiot, those who don't take action because they have received a threat and those who think they are taking action because they have issued a threat - Paulo Coelho.
No there are not, you Brazilian tosser - Solly.
Actually there are several other kinds of idiot. There's the kind who thinks he is clever because he writes cod philosphy that wouldn't look out of place in Clintons Cards.
There's the kind who women - possibly hormonal and sometimes lonely but not always! - think of as a kind of mystic guru because he can blind them with crap dressed as pearls of wisdom.
Then there's the kind who has his silver hair in a pony tail and writes the most vainglorious piece of puffery disguised as a novel for middle aged, lonely people to adopt as a kind of bible when it's really just an old man trying to prove he can still shag like he used to.
I'm indebted to my old mentor Allan Hall for reminding me that Suzanne Klatten, the lonely BMW heiress who was conned out of her millions by the Swiss conman Helg Sgarbi, was reading some shite by Coelho when he targeted her. Well, seeing what she was reading made her an obvious target for someone preying on the vulnerable I guess.
If you want to read philosphy then read someone intelligent with something interesting and insightful to say about the world around us, someone who can challenge conventional thought and someone you may enjoy even if you don't agree with them.
Anyone can write the kind of bogus pisspoor pretend polemic of Paulo. Don't be fooled. There are genuinely intelligent people out there who are worth reading. He's not one of them. I tried once. I read The Alchemist. It was rubbish but a lot of people fall for it.
Life is like a jellyfish, it has hundreds of strands going in different directions but eventually they all come back to the heart and soul from where they started.
You see how easy it is?
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Shana Tova by the way - that's happy new year to all my Jewish friends. Although I no longer do the religious bit (Fast? For a whole day? You've got to be joking) I do have fond memories of the high holy days back in the 70s and 80s in Gants Hill at a time when it was estimated that the area had the biggest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel and New York.
The day was pretty fixed for us teenagers. We'd take the day off school, lie in then put on our best clothes (suits and ties no less). We'd meet up late morning outside the Odeon cinema which had been converted into a synagogue because none of the local ones was big enough to handle the crowds.
We'd say hi to parents of friends, go in for a quick prayer then come out again and go round the corner for a cigarette where our folks couldn't see us.
Then there were options. We'd go back to someone's house, or maybe to the snooker hall for a couple of hours until eventually we'd all gather outside the cafeteria in Valentines Park.
There would be, literally, hundreds of us between the ages of 14 and 18 mainly. Standing round, chatting (and chatting up quite often), before going back for evening prayers or getting changed and going down one of the local pubs.
I may be anti-religion as a philosphy but it doesn't mean I don't miss some of the more pleasant by-products of those times.
The Odeon's gone now - it's a block of flats that looks like a dodgy cut-price version of the Flat Iron building in New York. The park's still there but most of the local Jewish population have long gone.
Ilford's synagogues are still there but all the occupants of the houses around them are Muslim.
Still, there is a one place where thousands of those original Jews will congregate this weekend - Spurs are playing Arsenal at the Lane on Sunday.
Then we'll see if there's a God or not.
Shana nana - hey hey - goodbye....Solly
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