Put up your crutches

Hello again everybody. Did you miss me?

I was going to write about so many things this week: first, our government manages to lose all of that data and Alastair Darling still somehow keeps his job. Then I got a letter from Tower Hamlets council rejecting my appeal against a parking ticket and have decided to take the lousy shits to tribunal. Then, Steve McClaren refuses to resign after making his job untenable.

To top it all off, there was going to be something today to follow on from a news item on TV this morning about some people who bought houses on a cliff-top. The cliff is subsiding and their houses are falling into the sea 30 years early, so they want the government to pay to rehouse them. No, no, no, no, no. They had plenty of warnings about this, the first of which came two thousand years ago when Jesus warned of the dangers of building your house on anything but rock. Why can't people pay more attention to the clever things that Jesus said about construction, catering or taxation?

Then, everything changed. Another topic presented itself for your amusement this morning. I got started on, again, in London Bridge station this time. By a disabled man.

I was travelling with Mrs Gripe who he walked behind and trod on. He then shouted at Mrs Gripe that she might like to look where she was going, except he used more floral language than that. I stared at him, and he started to protest. I told him to watch his mouth and he reminded me that he was disabled (he was walking with a crutch). "That doesn't give you the right to shout insults at my wife", I replied. To which he suggested that he would fetch the police. As usual, I suggested that he was welcome to do so, and turned away to say goodbye to Mrs Gripe (for our onward journeys lay apart from then). It was at that point that he issued his coup de grace. "Come back here and fight me, you coward", he shouted - in a scene somewhat reminiscent of the anonymous knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

So there you have it - another anecdote for the Gripe Annual. You can rest assured that whatever is happening in world events, your Major will continue almost getting into ill-advised fights and reporting back to you about it. Have a happy and passive weekend everyone.