The Diary of a Country Bumpkin

God, how I hate being old, I’ve come to the point now where I spend all my time being angry, which I’m sure is probably not good for my blood pressure, the only saving grace is, my anger will shorten my life and eventually I will be put out of my misery. If I were an animal, they probably would have put me to sleep years ago.

Todays anger stems from the ridiculous way the doctors surgery is run. I try to be as modern as I can and order my prescription on line but as I recently had a hernia operation I had used the NHS website to receive messages about any appointments and I was just checking to see when my follow up appointment was when I noticed you can order your medication there as well.

While I’m here, I thought, I might as well order my pills but no, it appears I need to have a review before I can order them again. I hadn’t realised I needed the review as it usually says on the prescription form they enclose with your medication but this month there was no form, I will have to phone up in the morning and book an appointment. As a back up I went online to check if I needed the review and there was no mention of it on the systemonline site where I usually order my medication.

I would like to say I woke the next day as bright as a button but mornings are not my favourite time of day, especially the early ones but I pushed on through and having had a forifying cup of tea I braced myself to phone the doctors. They have an automatic answering system, press number 1 for appointments, press number 2 for prescriptions, I plumped for number 2 initially as I wanted to check whether I actually needed the review. Unfortunately, the prescription line is only open from 10am to 2pm on Tuesday and Thursday, so I reverted to option number 1 where I was informed that once again I would have to call back later, or if it was urgent I should phone back tomorrow before 8am.

By this time, as you may imagine I was getting a little stressed and sat down to write this to both, calm my ragged nerves and to pass the time until I could phone back. As I’m quite busy today, let us asume I phoned back, got an appointment and all was well with the world. I may have to amend this at a later date but I’m trying to put a more optimistic frame of mind into the equation.

Oh, how I long for the old days, the days when you could visit the doctors in the morning and wait your turn in the smoke filled waiting room, or be greeted by a receptionist who could answer any query you could throw at them at the drop of a hat. Well, it’s nearly time to phone back when at least I will be spoken to by a human being, unlike last week where I spent some 45 minutes typing to an AI thing to sort out a problem whereby I had been sent two new credit cards from the same company both with different numbers, one would have thought, ‘which one do I throw away’ was a fairly simple question. Not only do I resent spending so long messing about with an AI chatbot but it’s the bloody cheek of the thing, who when questioned kept insisting it was a real person.

I’m just not cut out for modern life!

Just a quick update, I phoned the doctors and the receptionist put me through to prescriptions who having ascertained that I did need a review and this will now be done by telephone in five weeks time, luckily she will make up my prescrition in the meantime so I don’t keel over whilst waiting. Obviously, I’m glad that’s sorted but I always have to wonder why you need a review every year, for they always ask the same questions, ‘ how are you Mr Wells?’ To which I usually reply, ‘I’m fine, if I were feeling unwell I would have made an appointment to see you!’

Onward and upward, I have some heavy things to lift in the garden for my wife, but more of that anon.

I haven’t had time to watch much of Sir Ollie Robbins giving evidence to MP’s on the foreign affairs committee but some things struck me as quite odd, firstly it appears that it was annonced that Mandelson had the job of ambassador to the USA before he had security clearance and then Downing Street was pushing for him to have his clearance done on the hurry up, so much so there seems to have been a message from Dowing Street once again which apparently said, ‘get the fxxking thing done.’

There seemed to be quite a lot of jiggery-pokery going on from Downing Street and I personally found Sir Ollie a very creditable witness, we will have to wait to see the outcome but it all seemed to be somewhat underhand to say the least.

I expect I can’t be the only one who sometimes meet people and takes an instant dislike to them, you have no idea why, it’s just that gut feeling that they are a wron’un and I have to say Keir Starmer strikes me like that. He has his image of a human rights lawyer and left wing defender of the poor, although I seem to have seen very little action from this government to help anyone, let alone the poor. As I say, it’s just that gut feeling that the man is an absolute swine and would be happy to push anyone under the bus as long as it wasn’t himself.

We shall have to wait and see but invariably people like this always show their true colours eventually.

Let me know what you think, I’d be interested to know?

I came accross a photo on a local website with a photograph of some rubbish dumped in the street, the person who wrote the post was rightly annoyed and was wondering why, or who would do a thing like this.

Whilst the pile of rubbish is not very large it is extremely annoying if this happens to be outside your house or on the pavement where you are walking and even though I can do nothing to remove the rubbish, I may at least be able to assist with the answer as to how and why?

It is a sad reflection on modern life that there are individals who are so brainless or arrogant as to do this sort of thing but sadly there are and there are clues in the photograph as to why this happened.

Firstly, when examining the rubbish I would imagine this is just the contents of someones car or van as very few people nowadays have any respect for their vehicles and many do indeed treat them like a dustbin and just chucked everything out on the street while they had stopped to devour their lunch which I sugest is clearly what has happened here. We can also see a broken broom which using my powers of deduction would sugest, the individule may have cosidered taking his pile of shit home and swept it up and put it in his dustbin but was unable to as his broom was broken.

Whilst, I always like to give people the element of doubt, I think I may be erring a little to leniently in this case and therefore only have this comment to make about this situation.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, TAKE YOUR RUBBISH HOME AND PUT IT IN YOUR OWN BIN, DO NOT DUMP IT IN THE STREET, YOU VILE IGNORANT, ARROGANT, BRAINLESS MORON!

In these current rather cash strapped times in which we live I have been looking to ways of increasing my rather meagre income and am reminded of Mr Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield who pontificated that the way to happiness was to have an annual income of £20 0s 0d but to have an expenditure of £19 0s 6d, however if one were to earn similar but to spend £20.0s 6d the end result would be utter misery. Without doubt, never was a truer word spoken.

One option to increase my earning was to connect my blog to Goodle AdSense where with the addition of a small piece of code on the site, they would have place thereupon a multitude of different advertisements which one might hope would amuse and enlighten my readers together with receiving a small remuneration for my trouble. I cannot tell you what a fuff it was to place said code between the head and head and even now I am reluctant to add the < sign as it appears to be altering the text I am typing. But, not one to give in easily and with the goal of vast wealth as an incentive I persevered and found that with the small outlaw to an online app thingy, it would give me a link which I could click to get the job done for me, which I’m fairly certain is the case as the next step was to be checked by Google for suitability. This being the case I prepared myself for some sort of test the like of a preparatory school entrance examination, but no.

A couple of days had gone by and I had forgotten completely about it when I received an email to say, my site had been examined and had been found wanting, which after all the fuffing about with interweb technical thingys was a little of a disappointment, especially as it had failed due to, low value content. This was like a knife to my heart as I obviously have a far higher opinion of my efforts to educate and entertain than they do and to make matters worse there was a handy video to watch to find out the error of my ways which I did my best to watch, but either I have a short attention span or it was an exceedinly boring information film which seemed to repeat itself on numerous occasions.

Having done my best, I was still unsure as to whether low value content refered to the quality or the quantity as I had always assumed that my blogs, although short on quantity were never short on quality, even a post about Barnie and the cone of shame has merit in its humorous content. Now, if you haven’t by now stopped reading, I have to apologise as this has been in an attempt to increase the quantity and also retain the quality hopefully without the aid of AI where it is simply done by just copying and pasting every other paragraph.

Another of the helpful suggestions in the video from Google was to persevere as Google may retest the site and to avoid sex as a topic and never to copy and paste, hence my chosen topic for today, Two massive jugs and a Fanny.

It would have made sense for me to just go the the website where I found these two massive jugs and to copy and paste the information, but as it is ‘verbotten’ I shall give a much shorter description of these splendid objects. They are two large stoneware Bartmann jugs from the Vander Sande collection and sold at the Brunk auction house in March 2025 for $1000.

Now, on to my next subject, the rather wonderful Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey or as she was ontherwise known Fanny Cradock. She was born in Leytonstone Essex and must have come from a monied family once, although her parents did not manage money well, her mother Bjou spent extravagantly and her father, Archibald Thomas Peachey had sizable gambling debts apparently run up in Nice and where else would any gambler worth his salt run up debts?

In an attempt to keep thier creditors at bay they moved on numerous occasions, from Herne Bay to Swanage, then Bournmouth and finally to Wroxham where his creditors finally caught up with him and in 1930 her father was in Norfolk bankruptcy court with debts of £3500, a considerable sum of money in those days. Fanny was then destined to spend the next ten years in destitution in London working selling cleaning products door to door and also woking in a dressmaking shop.

She was married twice legally and twice bigamously, the last of whom was Major Johnnie Whitby Cradock who left his wife and children to be with her, he was by accounts the love of her life and they began writing a column in the Daily Telegraph called Bon Viveur from 1950 to 1955 which then led to a theatre career and finally to television for the BBC a career which lasted until 1975.

Fanny would cook and Johnnie would be in charge of the wine, a very good double act, he the slightly drunk hen pecked husband and she the domineering wife but their career ended in tears when Fanny savagely criticised the menu of a female guest on the programme. What a fabulous couple, what a fabulous tale and I hope a tale both long enough and full of quality content enough to impress the Google AdSense people.

There is only one way to end a story properly if one can and that is with an ‘and finally.’

And finally, a comment from Johnnie never to be forgotten when he said, ‘May all your doughnuts turn out like Fanny’s.’

Well here’s some very good news, it seems ‘Marmalade’ will not have to be renamed ‘Citrus Marmalade’ to fit in with the current Government of this country getting closer to the EU.

Whether this was a serious attempt to cosy up with the EU or a very poor April Fool joke, I have no idea but I have to say, I’m delighted with the outcome.

MARMALADE! If it ain’t broke it don’t need fixing. I thank you!

I’m sure my views on this subject will be influenced by my age, upbringing and to a certain extent, the fact that my grandfather fought in the First World War and my father fought in the Second World War, together with a decent smattering of black and white films such as ‘The Dam Busters’ and ‘In which we serve.’

Apparently, historians estimate that in the past 3500 years only a few hundred years were completely free of major conflicts and a total absence of war is virtually non existant in history, so this recent outbreak in Iran is merely a blip in history. This being the case, I suppose one has to accept it as being the norm. The previous statements were my justifcation for taking up what might in this day and age be considered the stance of a war mongering bastard.

It’s no wonder we have not been visited by other civilisations from outer space, for surely they may have come and had a look and thought, ‘I’m not going to land there, they’re all killing each other, it’s safer with the Klingons!’ To qualify that comment, I have to say, I was never a big Star Trek fan so I may be doing the Klingons an injustace as they could be kind peacful people but I’m really basing it on the wonderful tune where the Klingons are to be found on the starboard bow.

Getting back to Iran, I’m old enough to remember when it appeared to be a fairy modern, progressive and free society with young girls in mini skirts with all the freedoms offered by a society like that. Although I have to admit whilst I remember the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in the 1979 Islamic Revolution I hadn’t remembered why, but with the help of a google search it seems it was due to widespread discontent with his autocratic rule, intense corruption, and rapid, forced Westernization, but comparing that to what replaced it, I can’t for the life of me see why anyone would have thought this current regime was an improvement.

Call me naieve if you like but I take a very simple view of the war in that, here is a regime ruled by nutters who are attempting to make a nuclear bomb with the avowed intent of obliterating most of the free world and yes, I am aware that there are plenty of other nutters in the free world who currently have nuclear weapons but we assume they are not quite nutty enough to use them. Let’s hope so!

I notice I have digressed somewhat from the title of this post, so back to the subject in hand, the rather weak Prime Minister, Mr Starmer who I have to say couldn’t organise a cocktail party in an off licence. Dithering about sending a boat to help the Americans and yet he manages to send a constant supply of boats to pick up the illegal migrants on a daily basis. Dithering as to whether to allow the Americans to use our bases and then finally changing his mind to allow them to fly from them whilst pretending we are not in the war.

With the price of petrol through the roof the government must be making a fortune for they have not altered the tax on petrol and in fact seem to have every intent to put it up in the near future and with the VAT still at the same level with these inflated prices Mr Starmer is coining it in while we suffer whilst he pretends to be a friend of the poor and less well off. In Australia they have already reduced the level of VAT and what does Mr Starmer do, yes you’re right, more dithering!

Mr Trump has criticised Starmer for his lack of help from another NATO country and quite rightly, although I believe he muddled his facts suggesting we were late into World War Two whereas in fact it was the Americans who finally joined in some two years and three months late on the 8th December 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour the previous day. Credit where credit is due though, if it weren’t for the Americans ability to mass produce weapons, we would have lost, although we might have had a little more help when it came to paying for them, as with the interest added we only finally paid off the debt in December 2006.

I fear there will come a time in the future where the tardiness of Mr Starmer and the rest of Europe with regard to their lateness and lack of help for America will cost us dear, but who knows. Certainly, should we be requiring assistance whislt Mr Trump is still in power, I feel we will be in deep doodoo for Mr Trump does not forget these things and hell hath no fury like a ‘Trump’ scorned.

The National Portrait Gallery has given Lawrence of Arabia’s portraits trigger warnings for the cultural appropriation of Arab clothing.

The portraits have been flagged as sensitive artworks depicting the First World War hero in tribal dress and now come with a warning stating that the images may clash with today’s attitudes.

Lawrence of Arabia’s portraits have been given trigger warnings for the cultural appropriation of Arab clothing.

I could be wrong, but this seems to be utter nonsense to me, but I’m curious to hear other opinions, especially those which may make some sense of this decision!