1206 days ago
It was January 5 and a notice came up on Facebook. And so I remembered. It would have been the 20th Birthday of my morbidly obese three-legged cat Oakley. His Facebook page where devotees could watch him in action is still live even if he is not.
1827 days ago
Since the sad demise of my once morbidly obese three legged cat Oakley late last summer, my two year old son Joshua has not stopped talking about his friend who used to sleep by his cot, keeping watch every night. Our old house in Bristol is “Oakley’s House” and while you and I know that the old boy lies at rest next to the body of Kitosh and across the yard from that of his long time companion Tara who is under the rhubarb, Joshua and his mother and I have agreed that the three legged one has “gone to the jungle” where he is happy. But there is a gap in all of our lives anmd so yesterday we told Joshua we had a treat.
2416 days ago
My late grandfather was, inter alia, Director General of the National Trust after his retirement from the Civil Service. He saw its mission as very simple: to preserve fine old buildings and outstanding areas of countryside. For the Trust nothing else mattered and that single mission is why so many of us have supported it over the years. These days the NT has my grandfather spinning in his grave about once a week.
2502 days ago
I guess that in England the owner of this dog and this truck would have been locked up by the Health & Safety Executive or prosecuted by the PC nazis at the RSPCA. The poor hound is not muzzled and not on a leash and travels in the back of the truck everywhere. FFS he is not wearing a seat-belt, call the old bill now!
2712 days ago
I start with behaviour by the Mrs which is surely grounds for divorce or at least enough to see her lead off in chains by the RSPCA. Then it is back to the seven stages of grief and how it relates to shares. Then I look at the most shorted stocks on AIM as per Steve's article earlier - but also those that should be most shorted but why they are not, i.e. Cloudtag (CTAG), African Potash (AFPO) and the slam dunk zero IGAS.
3285 days ago
I finally struggled back home to Bristol at 11 PM last night – 38 hours after leaving for London. I was greeted by two wailing cats, Tata and Oakley who guided me to where there food should have been. Cripes – the auto cat feeder had not worked.
Tara is think as a rake but eats like a horse. Oakley has three legs, is morbidly obese but is less greedy than his companion. He is just lazy. But both clearly felt aggrieved. I
3596 days ago
The Mrs and I were wondering back from lunch by the Avon and came upon a car park at the edge of the woods where three boys cried out “help there is an escaped parrot, can you help us?” To misquote my father (a Greats Man) “A PPE man can turn his hand to anything” although catching rather confused and slightly injured escaped parrots in Bristol car parks is not my normal line of expertise.
As I got down on my front and peered under whichever car the parrot opted to hide under the Mrs called the Royal Society for Protection of Birds (RSPB). “Sorry madam that is not the sort of thing we deal with.” Hmmm, I guess the RSPB is too busy campaigning against global warning to do anything like actually protect a bird in need.
So what about the RSPCA I suggested? Again no luck. They said that we should try the Old Bill. FS we know that the Filth will be far too busy arresting folk for calling a Police Horse gay or for tweeting out comments t folks in Liverpool about how all scousers are sympathy milking, workshy, welfare addicts ( which they are) to assist.
And so as I scrabbled underneath another car and the parrot eluded me again, the Mrs tried another RSPCA number. Eventually she was told “it will probably find its way home but if you do catch it we will come and collect but we are massively under-resourced”
The first comment is a lie.
3720 days ago
I look out of my window and next to my newly built herb garden there is a frog or is it a toad? How on earth did it get there? The garden has five foot high walls and we are a good 100 yards above and half a mile away from the nearest wetlands. And what to do?
I have locked the cats away so they cannot get into the garden. I know that Tara would enjoy “playing” with the poor creature. I am worried that my garden is now drying out at a rate of knots as the sun is shining. And I’d rather that the poor little thing did not perish. So call the RSPCA in Bristol?
That I do and am sent on a maze of key #1 or key #2 options none of which seem to complete and leave me none the wiser. I really do not have all day for this and the useless not fit for purpose RSPCA is probably too busy prosecuting a fox hunter or campaigning against global warming to actually care about a poor animal.
Reluctantly I think I must try to scoop the poor fellow up and put him on the grassy lane at the back of the garage and let him take his chances. If he perishes, I blame the RSPCA. But that he has managed to make it this far shows he is a bit of a fighter.
4091 days ago
Me first. How is this for restraint? I shall be giving up:
1. Reading the Guardian
2. Writing nice articles about Call Me Dave, New Labour and Chris Huhne
3. Giving money to the RSPCA
4. Thinking about stopping smoking or drinking less
5. Believing in global warming
6. Agreeing with the spin put out by the BBC News team
7. Cheering when Millwall or Spurs win at football
8. Campaigning for Britain to join the Euro
9. Tipping shares in Sefton Resources
10. Listening to new music produced by David Bowie
Ten Things Chris Huhne will be giving up for lent
1-7 – living in one of his houses
8. Having sex with bisexuals (well, female bisexuals anyway)
9.Using the Trouser Press he claimed on MP’s expenses
10. Driving any of his cars at any speed
4119 days ago
And so it emerges that cheap Tesco burgers contain horsemeat (up to 29% in some cases), the company grovels and withdraws the product line and everyone is horrified. What is the fuss? It is not as if the hundreds of thousands of customers who have already munched their way through grilled Shergar have actually noticed or complained.
The highly processed junk food that most Britons buy in supermarkets bears so little relation in taste to what it is meant to be thanks to the addition of vast amounts of chemicals, flavourings and preservatives that you could probably serve up dog, cat, horse, or fox as part of the end product and no-one would be any the wiser. By the time folks have added vast amounts of equally artificial sauces you could probably chuck in a bit of cardboard as well and it would make no difference. I am almost surprised at the idea that a cheap burger priced for chavs in a supermarket contains any beef at all. I had assumed it was all off cuts, innards and chemicals and frankly it makes no odds what animal they come from.
Horse meat tastes fine as a dish. It is not that different from beef. In the same way that guinea pig meat tastes, when prepared normally, pretty much like chicken but just a bit better. But most of our fellow citizens have not actually ever seen an animal killed for food. And so they have a vague notion that somewhere along the line cows or sheep are bumped off and end up in Tesco’s and this is okay but the idea of eating my sweet little pony, a fluffy guinea pig or what the RSPCA terms one of Britain’s favourite mammals, cute little foxy woxy, is seen as a sort of crime against society.
Britain’s urban mass consumers of junk food want a cheap product that tastes like “meat” – had the company branded its product “meat burgers” no-one would have noticed and it could have carried on flogging the line for years with the customers gorging happily and not having to associate eating meat with the idea of killing animals. If folks want something that tastes really good they need to venture along the food chain and a bit closer to the abattoir’s knife and accept that what they were eating was not that long ago a living breathing creature.
The more I think about it the more I have a desire to eat guinea pig once again. Perhaps I could buy some Tesco chicken nuggets and just hope that I get lucky or maybe a visit to the pet shop is in order. I imagine that the RSPCA would try to prosecute me but it really is a very tasty dish indeed.
4137 days ago
I am a great animal lover and, historically, a supporter of the RSPCA (and its IOM equivalent the MSPCA from where my cats Oakley and Tara came). It provided my cats and I think of it doing good works rehousing poets and stopping domestic cruelty. And that is what it used to do back in its 1970s heyday. It was a fluffy charity everyone loved. But then it sought a wider brief moving away from family pets to wider issues of animal welfare. These days it is a deeply political organisation obsessed with foxy woxy.
4142 days ago
Well I have started. I shall have to do a bit of real work in a second but for now, pronounce RSPCA quickly the first time and here is a Carol for the organisation that thinks that foxy woxy is one of Britain’s most popular mammals.
Noting that the North Wiltshire RSPCA is now following me on twitter, this is especially for you folks and any other deluded lefties out there…
The RSPCA Christmas Carol
Away in a manger, the livestock were dead
From TB from badgers, or killed while in bed
By a cute little fox, that the RSPCA
had protected from toffs. hunting that day
Back in North London, where the TB disease
Means warmongering Prime Ministers, not badgers that sneeze
We love cute foxy, and his friendly way
He’s veggie like us, and very pro gay
Hands in the pocket, RSPCA
Welfare for foxes, its right that we pay
Kill all rich farmers, they are all to blame
They are Tory scum, with no bloody shame
4147 days ago
Just a reminder that my Tomograph Newsletter goes out bi-weekly with its Wednesday shares edition complementing the longer more general weekend edition.
And of course the Wednesday edition is the only way to get an alert to my free share tip of the week.
Want that free share tip plus an Editor’s Choice of the best of the past week plus a more general investment piece? There won’t be a link on the site!
The only way to get all of that is to
REGISTER HERE
Planned delivery time on Wednesday is 3 PM.
This week’s issue also contains a piece on the deluded lefties at the RSPCA plus notes on a chat with the legendary Mark Slater.
Tom
