MarkW

One of my friends is a rabid Corbyn supporter. Over the course of a couple of hours on FB last night I let her gradually convince me to vote Labour today. She was very happy. I'll leave it a bit before telling her I voted by post five days ago...

And on the same subject, I hear that Camelot are thinking of using Diane Abbott as their random number generator for the National Lottery.

At least they'll be on better wages than the £30 a year Diane Abbott planned to pay Labour's 10,000 new recruits...

I imagine the less of it they see in the media the happier they'll be.

Precisely. As a kid in the 1970s and 80s I spent every Saturday in Manchester visiting my gran, and lost count of the number of bomb scares we endured - let alone the couple of real ones we had. That said, I do remember fervently hoping for a bomb scare every time my mother dragged my round Marks & Spencer's...

And that's all well and good, but we also need to stop the obscene media circus that as good as immortalises every terrorist. Andy Warhol badly miscalculated when he said everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes: Carry out even the most inept terrorist attack and you'll be famous for a damn site longer than that. I can't help thinking that if we restricted media coverage to "Earlier today another brainwashed f*ckwit went bang. Now here's the weather..." they'd be rather less inclined to give it a go.

What about them?

To take them out of circulation you must first know who they are, and that's precisely the problem with this sort of attack - it can be carried out by any internet-radicalised halfwit with a kitchen knife and a set of car keys long before they ever appear on the intelligence service radar. We've completely lost our heads about jihadists (if you'll pardon the expression). I mean really - two SAS helicopters on London Bridge FFS? I remember when they were reserved for embassy sieges!

We do need to be tough with them, but we also need to get a grip. If they maintain their present success rate then by the end of the year we'll end up with considerably fewer deaths from terrorism than from swine flu or falling out of windows. Five people got wiped out on the M6 the other day when a lorry driver accidentally turned their car into a convertible, and it was barely a footnote on the news. But as soon as a bearded man kills five people whilst shouting about Allah it will consume every available inch of newsprint and be dissected ad infinitum for weeks on end. We'll have interviews with family, friends, ex-colleagues, people who sat next to him on the bus or saw him in the supermarket, social media will be overrun with meaningless messages of solidarity, and then there'll be the inevitable benefit concert. In short, we spend half our time wallowing in synthetic grief and the other half banging on endlessly about the indomitable British spirit, and the media must take its share of the blame for pandering to our pornographic obsessions. If we take as our starting point the fact that the people who carry out these attacks are invariably frustrated and socially inadequate losers ardent for some twisted glory, we have to ask ourselves how likely this kind of response is to discourage future attacks.

I came up with the solution years ago when I was doing some work with a company that had developed 'sniffer bee' technology. A bees sense of smell is thousands of times more sensitive than a dogs, and they can be trained to stick their tongues out in the presence of almost any chemical cue. For example, blow Semtex fumes over their antennae and feed them sugar water a few times and then every time they smell Semtex they'll stick their tongues out in anticipation of being fed. Add some motion analysis software to measure the extent of the extension reflex and you've got yourself a mobile detection unit that is not only dirt cheap compared to the cost of training a dog, but can be completely re-trained to detect something else in about half an hour, and is massively more sensitive. That's as far as their thinking took them. It took a genius of my standing to suggest using African killer bees instead and releasing them in London, thereby integrating threat detection and elimination in one neat package. They weren't keen. No vision, these people...

Years ago I caught a bloke syphoning the petrol out of my car in the middle of the night and did much the same as you, except I didn't bother phoning the police afterwards - just left him lying in the road. It took me ages to pull the head-shaped dent out of the rear panel. My wife used to work for the police, and some of the old boys would often reminisce about the good old days when prisoners 'accidentally' fell down the stairs.

Yup - you have to be very careful about defending your property, and under Comrade Corbyn it will be an offence not to help the pikeys carry your gear out to the transit van and give a cheery wave as they drive it away. No offence to any forum members, but the police are so ineffectual nowadays that they may as well not exist at all. This, coupled with the unwillingness of our legal system to adopt any sort of vertebrate position when it comes to homeowners using force to defend themselves and their property means we end up with a pestilence of antisocial vermin who are as good as untouchable, and know it. We get these turds at the business estate where we work every so often, and we're on our own - we just have to shut the security gates and stand there listening to their moronic and barely-intelligible threats. A couple of years ago they cut the chain off the gate to the neighbouring estate and broke into one of the offices. The police turned up (eventually) and did nothing - just stood and watched as they smashed the place up and - as they later discovered - used every room as a toilet. They eventually did over £30,000 of damage in less than 12 hours, with the owner tearing his hair out as the police just stood there like a bunch of f*cking traffic wardens and let it happen. However, it's not all bad news in North Yorkshire: The police do spend a great deal of time writing to motorists to warn them of the dangers of leaving their satnav on view on the dashboard, and the chances of getting away with doing 41 in a 40 zone must be the lowest in the country.

The police crime prevention officer just asked me if the burglars left anything incriminating behind. I said "Like what? A baked hedgehog?"

And it gets worse... When we took out the lease on the workshop my wife phoned our house insurance company to see if their 'away from home' cover included tools left in a locked unit. She can't recall the precise details of the call, but as she increased our cover from the standard £2.5 to £7K immediately afterwards it seems reasonable to assume they confirmed that it would. Of course now we discover that it doesn't, and so the £4K of tools and fishing gear that were stolen were completely uninsured. Marvelous. When I become Prime Minister I'll pass a bill to reclassify pikeys as vermin, and allow people to deal with them accordingly.

And since I don't own a single power tool any more it turned out to be very useful practice at doing things by hand!

Ha! Thanks for the kind comments on my amateur woodworking, folks. In truth it's a very basic bit of carpentry, but I tried to use hand tools rather than power tools as much as possible. Every surface and joint is hand planed, and the dovetails in the drawer are all hand cut. Much more satisfying than using a router, if a good deal slower.

Pikeys are very much like dogshit: despite your best efforts, every now and then an unpleasant surprise encounter is unavoidable, and it takes longer than you imagined to get rid of the smell. But for my biggest little boy, his first experience of pikey has been mitigated by a trip to Halfords, very much as his first encounter with dogshit was mitigated by mummy, a toothbrush and a hosepipe. But whilst daddy hates treading in dogshit, he'd dearly love to step on a pikey, and squash it. Here endeth the lesson.

Firstly, the good news: I have finished the little table for my mother that's going to go at the top of her stairs. It replaces one I accidentally knackered about 20 years ago. Better late than never eh? Then the less good news: my workshop, along with all the others on the little farm estate we rent, was broken into last night and completely cleaned out. They've taken everything - thousands of pounds of power tools, hand tools, jigs, drill bits, router cutters - everything. They even nicked a f*cking caulking gun from me, and a bag of cable ties and a bottle of sparkling water from the guy next door! I'm slightly gutted at the moment - it took me over 20 years to accumulate that lot, and it's all gone. The worst part of it was that my 8 year old had his bike there because he would come with me in the evening and ride around as I got on with stuff, and they've taken that too. He was absolutely heartbroken. That put the whole thing into perspective for me: first priority was to get him sorted out, so I told him that he would have grown out of his old bike by the end of the year anyway, and that we may as well get him a new one now so he can have the benefit of it over the summer. We went home and got the iPad out, and found a lovely green one (his favourite colour) that's going to be smashing. So now he's happy, and that makes me happy. Or at least happier.

Partly - I've got the idiot bit sussed but I don't wear Lycra. And I don't ride on the main road either - there's an off road track from the bottom of our street all the way to the Tech Park.

A couple of weeks ago, whilst struggling to get one of the kids seats back into the car, we thought it might be time for him to move up to one of the slightly larger and lighter models. After checking a few websites we decided to weigh him to find out which one would be the most appropriate, but not having any scales - or indeed any idea what he weighed - presented us with a bit of a problem. My wife suddenly decided that 16 years of happy cohabitation without a set of bathroom scales was ridiculous, and that we must buy some at once. And not just any scales: she was certain that numerous domestic benefits would accrue from our joint ownership of a set of those fancy body-analyser ones that tell you how many hours you'd burn for if your rancid body was to be rendered down into an oversized candle. I was less enthusiastic about the whole enterprise, especially after they arrived and I hopped on, hit the 'body composition analyser' button and discovered that I appear to be a spindly skeleton supporting a body that is equal parts Chocolate Orange and Toffifee. So, deciding that the time had finally come to take the bull by the horns, I bought a mountain bike and have started cycling to work. So far it's been going great - especially for someone who hasn't ridden a bike for 10 years - and I'm loving it. Despite making the mental note that I wasn't on a motorbike each time I set off, I still instinctively grabbed an enthusiastic handful of front brake this morning in an attempt to avoid one of those moggie-runs-out-oops-I've-chopped-it-in-half moments, which came perilously close to depositing me in the river Nidd. Now my wife has bought a bike too, and in addition to cycling to work together we've also upgraded the kids bikes and started using the local cycleway at the weekends. Funny how these things start!

Wow - Labour's election manifesto says that the leader should be 'very cautious' about using nuclear weapons. I can see I'm going to have to take Corbyn much more seriously from now on...

Ha! Well I used to work for a Dutch company...

Indeed! Master Carpenter my arse - anyone can use a dovetailing jig! Still it was better than the UK offering: you may be too young to remember Richard Blizzard's Wonderful Wooden Toys...