Johnny Depp is apparently going to receive 10 million pounds for his latest film even though he has been released from the project and only shot one scene.
I imagine he was no longer required after making a complete arse of himself in his recent court case suing the Sun newspaper.
All I can say is should I ever manage to get back into acting again I would like Depp’s agent to negotiate all my contracts for me.
Jon Rahm skims a golf ball across a lake and straight into the hole, the world wonders how can he make a ball skim across the lake.
I suggest asking Barnes Wallace, the inventor of the famous bouncing bomb used in the Dam Busters raid in WW2, or Nelson who used to skim his cannon balls across the sea to make them travel further.
The clever bit however was getting it in the hole when it got to the other side of the lake!
Donald Trump was seen today rehearsing for his latest farce, “Oops there go my trousers.”
Apparently he said to his assistant; “So I’m coming out of the French doors, stage left, I utter my line, anyone for tennis, then pause for the audience reaction.”
“I shall then walk slowly to centre stage where I have my next line, accompanied by silly grin.”
“Trust me, I can keep this farce going for months, I’m not booked to appear at the Glasgow Empire until June of next year!”
“I shall then exit, stage right to the sound of my own footsteps and that’s only scene one!”
It seems once in the wings he was heard to question how long The Mousetrap had been running suggesting he could do better, although a review in this weeks Stage newspaper said; “More Trump, oh no, God forbid.”
A friend of mine recently sent me a link to an article concerning VW and their intention to make Bentley a subsidiary of Audi.
I didn’t think this was a major problem, for Bentley was a subsidiary of Rolls Royce for many years, then VW and now Audi, that doesn’t seem too bad.
The part of the article that worried me is the ever closer forced introduction of electric cars and the banning of petrol cars from city centres.
I have no intention of buying an exceedingly expensive electric car, powered by a coal fired power station, as to continue to use the cars I have is a far is far better for the environment than the continued manufacture of new ones.
I was hoping the petrol ones I have would be good enough to see me out as they are more than capable of doing but as the Government keep bringing forward the date for the banning of petrol cars I can see no answer to the problem.
The only solution I have come up with and one I have to say I’m not looking forward to, is to bring forward the date of my death to coincide with the banning of petrol cars although I don’t relish the thought of dying young, I must say.
Lewis Hamilton has broken the Formula 1 World record today with his 92nd win, more than any other driver before. Well done Lewis.
I’m not sure whether I’m stating the bleeding obvious as they say, but track and trace will never be any good in the UK, it is fatally flawed.
There are a considerable number of self employed people who get no help or support whatsoever when they are unemployed so as a group I suspect they have not downloaded the app, I imagine they view getting caught as rather like turkeys voting for Christmas.
Another large group who are not going to sign up are the young students who are out raving and would obviously not want their activities curtailed by track and trace.
One more section of society who are never going to join in the fun are those families who spend a considerable amount of time flitting from household to household as it is the cultural norm for them to do so.
Lastly I come to another group, myself included which I would term technophobes or Luddites who have never downloaded an app in their lives and have no idea either how to do it, nor what to do with it had they achieved the download.
I experienced this a week or so ago when I met two of my friends for a socially distanced lunch meeting where we were faced with the option of scanning the app or writing our name and phone number on a sheet of paper.
As I have never knowingly used an app I plumped for the paper version straight away but was mildly amused by my friends who were waving their phones at the strange QR code thing, neither of them with the faintest idea of what to do with it.
This leaves a small section of society who downloaded the app the minute it was available, however this too is not of much use either as these people are so scared of Covid-19 that they very rarely leave the sanctuary of their own homes anyway.
All I can say is please do not blame the Government for the failure of track and trace, for I suspect it is probably quite a good system, the only flaw being the considerable numbers of people who for one reason or another are not using it!
One again I have to thank the Sun newspaper for this story of anti mask protesters in London, there is really vary little to add except, WE’RE ALL DOOMED!
I just came across footage from the Sun newspaper of young people celebrating and dancing in the streets of Liverpool last night.
The first thought when viewing the footage, one has to wonder how this awful virus can spread so rapidly and then when you have viewed the footage there is one of the answers, the other being people mixing in others homes against the regulations.
At first sight I thought this was rather worrying behaviour but then with any luck it will just be natures way of culling the feeble minded, let’s hope they don’t take any of the rest of us with them.
I went to Bolton at the weekend as my wife went to do a course in thread vein removal, we stayed in the Macdonald Kilhey Court Hotel which was in Standish and seemed to be deserted except for ourselves and one other couple which meant that socially distancing was somewhat easier than going to the supermarket in that we saw the others briefly in the bar and had the restaurant entirely to ourselves in the evening and for breakfast the following day.
Having dropped my wife at her course I set about amusing myself for the day, starting with a visit to Bolton to see the statue of the famous Bolton steeplejack Fred Dibnah and then on to the house where he used to live.
I believe it is a listed building now and quite strange in that the vast majority of the house is not visible from street level and needs to be viewed from the rear where the great man used to have his steam workshop which was housed in the back garden.
The house has had two owners since Fred died and is now for sale again, looking rather sad and neglected it is on the market for £325,000 which locals seemed to think was £50,000 overpriced hence the property not being sold.
As someone more used to prices down south, where you have trouble buying a garden shed for that sort of money, I thought it looked very good value for money.
I was surprised that the house was in such a residential area as Fred must have made some considerable noise when making parts for his steam tractors and other machinery when using his steam powered hammer and other tools.
As you can see I took a couple of photos before departing to pick up my wife and was reminded of Fred as I left as I thought of one of his catch phrases, “did ya like that,” well Fred I must say, yes I did.
I received a letter from HMRC saying that I will have to submit an online Tax Return this year which I was not happy about as I had tried before and there were tears before bedtime as I couldn’t make the damn thing work so continued with the old fashioned paper version.
Having phoned HMRC it seems there is no option this year so I attempted yet again to open an online account but it seems I have to open a Gateway account first which I could do merely by putting in the details of my passport and it would magically recognise me.
Unfortunately this was where I found out my passport had expired a couple of months ago, so I had to renew it which was surprisingly easy, how unusual to utter that phrase in these days.
I went to my normal photographer and had my photo taken which came with a code which I uploaded and the photo did indeed appear as if by magic and it made a jolly fine effort at cropping the photo to fit.
It seems as if it was only a couple of weeks later and my new passport has arrived and what joy, I now have a shinny new black passport (although it is allegedly very dark blue) but has no mention of the European Union on the cover and to all intents and purposes has the look of a proper British passport.
Barring the fact that all these things were so easy and so joined up, proving that big brother really is watching us now, I am at least delighted with the new passport.
The Diary of a Country Bumpkin 