The Young have never had it so Bad

Not the Brightest

A policeman pulls a man over for speeding and asks him to get out of the car. After looking closely at the man, he says, "Sir, I notice your eyes are bloodshot. Have you been drinking?" 

The man gets really indignant and says, "Officer, I notice your eyes are glazed. Have you been eating doughnuts?"

Rough News

The headline that caught my eye and ear this morning was 'Generation Theft'. I do feel genuinely sorry for today's young people, 

• Houses prices are too high
• University leaves you crippled with debt
• There are more unemployed than there are jobs
• The gap between the have and the have nots is getting wider
• They are brainwashed into believing that they 'need' the things that they 'want'.

I will expand on these points

A house should be a home and not an investment. Peoples thinking has been twisted by greed. When they see a house, they see '££££' or '$$$$' not HOME. Once we have this different view, then we create competition, which creates demand, which pushes the price up.

There should be no stamp duty on a FIRST house, up to a prescribed value, lets say 100,000 just to illustrate a point.

If a person or company buys a second or third house then they should pay stamp duty on all of them. After all, they can only live in one house at a time,so any other house is a luxury or a business!

As for council tax, whoever had the crazy idea that second homes should only pay half?

If they can afford to buy a second home, they can afford to pay it all! PLUS- House occupants buy things from the local community, and that puts money into the local community. By purchasing a second home and living somewhere else, the house is empty, so that deprives the community of some spending, so money is taken out of the local economy. For that, they should be taxed, say 1.5 times the normal rate of Council tax.


The gap between the have and have nots is very very common in third world countries, I have seen it in many times on my travels. And now I am seeing it more and more here in the UK. Are we slowly sliding into 3rd world status, with our eyes shut?

Finally, the difference between NEED and WANT. We have recently cancelled our subscription TV packages. Why? Because although we sometimes want to watch an occasional programme, we don't NEED, to watch it, plus the time we spend in front of the TV is getting less and less. The children prefer their on line computer games to TV, I am spending more and more time Blogging, answering emails, and writing courses, and my wife does, whatever she does, on her computer

This got me thinking of the crazy things we have been persuaded to do.

Take out insurance for our TV packages in case we are out of a job! - What does this mean? It means we pay money each month to the insurance company, so that, if we become unemployed, the insurance company will pay the subscription for us. In other words we are paying to guarantee the TV companies continue to be paid. What a con!

Buy Newspapers. Have you really looked at a newspaper. More than 50% of the space is adverts. So we are paying for people to try and sell us stuff, and we get a bit of news thrown in, that will be on the TV and internet anyway.

Watch Football.OK it's fun to watch, but it is no longer a game, it's now a business. It is a way of selling us shirts, and scarves, and magazines and a whole range of memorabilia. I have never understood why people that complain they are poor or underpaid will happily give £30/40 each week to people who are multi millionaires.

If we all acted together, instead of only thinking of ourselves, and refused to pay these prices, I bet it would not be long before prices tumbled.

Trainer Talk

In preparation for some work, I was reading all about tea bags! I remember the old days when my grandmother would warm the teapot, and spoon in the loose tea, one spoon per person, and one for the pot. Then fill it up with boiling water and pop on the home made knitted tea cosy. After a while, she would give it a stir, and pour it out via the inevitable tea strainer.We drink a lot of loose Chinese tea's in our house, Jasmine, Oolong, Chrysanthemum etc.,  as well as the traditional tea bags which seem to have insidiously crept into our lives. Clearly they are a neat way of packaging a single dose of tea, but I had really never thought of how they got started.Thomas Sullivan, a New York based Tea Merchant used to send out tea samples in traditional wooden boxes. One day, he had an idea to send them out in hand sewn silk bags, as a novelty. He imagined his customers would simply open the bags and use the tea as normal. But the customers found it easier just to put the bag of tea, as it was, into hot water, and let it brew. They first appeared commercially in 1904

 Thomas Sullivan