At the End of the Day

 There comes a moment in every intelligent blogger’s life when the realisation dawns that it is time to broaden the content themes, as one is in danger of becoming a One Issue Website. I am sick of writing about how and why Brexit is being homoaeopathically diluted by long-disgraced liars whose main devotees are LeftLib Little Englanders unable to discern what the European Union really is, because they rarely get away from Leeds, Walsall, Burnley and Hamilton. For the time being, I propose to restrict the pointing out of this to the social media. The Slog will do its best (until things come to a head) to focus here on things that are more important, more amusing and more interesting than our pathetic cultural fear of contemplating a fresh Sovereign strategy.

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Arch virtue-signallers in the Conservative Party lack the balls to remove the Whip from Boris Johnson as their means of protecting Mother Theresa, so they are probably going to “make him” go into diversity training. I wish them good luck with that one. The excuse for such a daft suggestion is that he was racist about a religion which (a) he wasn’t because (b) such is impossible….especially as he concluded that banning the Burqa might well be pointless.

Isn’t it hysterically funny to watch Corbynistas cringing awkwardly as the Nasty Party goes out of its way to out-pc the pc nutters?

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I read with some alarm last weekend that, worldwide, there has been a 70% reduction in many species of flying insect. Birds, reptiles and spiders (among others) eat insects, and that’s perilously far up the food chain for my liking. This stuff really matters.

If only I saw all that reflected on a personal micro scale here in southern France. Sadly, we seem to be going against the trend. Not only are flies mutating faster than most fly-sprays can invent new formulations to kill them, this year has seen an even larger infestation than in 2017….which was itself a record year for flies that bite your ankles, sit on your nose, peer up your nose, go walkabout on your laptop screen and poo on your food.

To add to all this fun, we are in turn witnessing a prolific growth in migrating Indian mosquitoes that are twice the size of the locals that go weeeeeiiiing at night. These new invaders go woooorrrrrraaaanggg in the wee small hours, and pack a powerful itch-inducing puncture of the skin. For the moment, they too fall down dead if one plugs in the liquid dispensers from early evening onwards. Part of me feels worryingly certain that they too will transmute into something nastier before too long.

And don’t get me started on wasps. This year so far I have shelled out €60 on wasp-nest destruction, including one earlier this week that required two doses and then a cement/plaster mix to entomb them given that the dying swarms remained to buzz around and sting my guests with a bitter vengeance reminiscent of Brussels carpet-baggers in full flow. One of my sons-in-law fell victim to this syndrome, and the following day, his arm resembled a prize marrow. I’d never seen anything like it, and immediately fell to wondering if les gueppes are also about to evolve into something the size, colour and nastiness of a zebra.

(The new Raid formulation does seem too work quite well, by the way, against flies and bluebottles)

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Some of the wrinklies out there might well remember the memorable Budget promise made by the late Chancellor Georgi Nobsoravitch in 2015, in which he vowed to save the taxpayer money by making a bank’s creditors cough up rather than being bailed out. Although Alzheimers takes its daily toll of our memory bytes, I’m sure you too realised that the people coughing up were, um, exactly the same people whose tax monies were to be saved. Georgi’s “idea” was to cut out the HMRC middle-man and simply steal the loot directly from us.

Mr “Dilated Pupils” Squeakyvitch said all these things, of course, at the same time as asserting that every UK bank was cast-iron solid…..so there was no need to worry. And it seems like he was as good as his word, for now we read that RBS is at last going to give its long-suffering shareholders a profits, share-price and dividend boost. It is, said one City analyst to me yesterday “rolling in liquidity”.

There’s just one puzzling element in all this. The, er, main shareholders, roit, is like us an’ shit innit? In fact – let’s not beat about the bush here – it was our money that saved Fred Goodwin’s personal kazi from going completely up the pictures.

So I was just wondering – the way you do – when’s my tax rebate going to arrive?

And on this subject into which I’ve meandered – that is, the one-way street that tax always is – I am about to be stung for tax on the princely 0.1% interest I’ve been “gaining” haha from my two current accounts. However, there is never any sign (is there?) that the humungous account charges I’ve suffered during that time – none of which had anything to do with borrowing – might be the subject of a tax rebate.

I do not see why this is so daft an idea: I am being taxed on my current account earnings, which amount to a substantial loss for me. Why am I being taxed on a loss?

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And finally, the pension deficit of the UK’s top 350 companies has halved from £62bn to £35bn, and now accounts for 17% of total profits declared by the lucky 350.

Trebles all round…but it’s still thirty-five billion quid. Why on Earth are they allowed to make any profits while pensioners are being short-changed?