Badgerstoke on Secret Societies

In my frequent strolls through random pages on the Web I occasionally saw mention of the NWO. I had never taken much notice before assuming it was a 1970s rock band like ELO or REM or possibly a fringe Gaelic political part like the SNP. However on further examination one day, I was shocked to discover that it is in fact an evil Secret Society called the New World Order bent on enslaving the World. Now I must admit that name still sounds a bit like a pop group and I expect they chose it so it wouldn’t be obvious they were a secret society or in any way evil.

I decided to see if there were other secret societies out there either masquerading as pop groups or other innocent organisations. Using the best resources of the internet and Hollywood I have undertaken some extensive research and what I have discovered is frightening. There may be hundreds of secret organisation both private and government run, including the Illuminati, Masons and Women’s Institute. Each one seems bent on World domination by a variety of means ranging from mind control to putting Fluoride in our water. A friend of mine suggested that what I was doing was dangerous as secret societies don’t like their activities to be examined to closely. He told me that it was rumoured that both Lord Lucan and a chap called Shergar were doing research on secret organisations when they suddenly disappeared. Also there was a chap called David Icke (name after his relative David "Icke" Eisenhower who I think was a US President) that had been warning people about these secret organisation and the NWO sent him mad. However I think this topic is important enough for me to risk being kidnapped and I think it is clear that my mind should be capable of resisting any attempts to send me insane.

The New World Order does seem to be the main one of these secret societies and possibly has control over all the others. So here is what I’ve discovered about it.

It has existed for thousands of years and has the goal of creating a single World Government. I have to say they seem very inefficient if it has taken them this long and they’re still nowhere near achieving their original aim. Mind you I always find that large organisations are very inefficient and I expect the “World Domination” subcommittee doesn’t meet that often.

They have a secondary aim of creating a single World religion. I hope it isn’t Islam as I’m not sure that Mrs Badgerstoke would be able to get on the floor and pray to Mecca five times a day and I’m not sure my knees are up to it either.

They have managed to convince the US Government to put their motto and their symbol of a pyramid and all-seeing eye on the one dollar bill. Being a secret society and having your symbol on millions of dollar bills does seem to be a little incompetent; maybe that gives a good indication of their lack of progress towards a World Government. Also there will come a time that even the Americans will phase out their one dollar bill in favour of a coin and so surely a more efficient evil secret society would have gone for the ten or twenty dollar bill. I’m sure that they could benefit from the management skills I acquired while running a medium sized retail outlet before I retired.

In spite of their lack of success over thousands of years a number of influential people do seem to have become involved with them. It appears they are now run by members of the Rothschild family who are rich family that became bored with just being wealthy and decided that World domination might be a fun thing to do. I guess I’d prefer to just lounge about on my yacht or sip a dry martini rather that have all the bother of being evil if I had their money.

Another set of people that seem to be associated with the NWO were that well known comedy double act from 1930s Hollywood, Coudenhove and Kalergi. They were not as famous as the similar act of Laurel and Hardy due to having more unpronounceable names.

They came up with the Coudenhove-Kalergi plan which the NWO adopted. This involved getting people of different races to breed thereby ensuring that there would be no more white people left in a few years time. I must say this seems much more likely to succeed than other plans of the NWO as people don’t normally need much encouragement to breed and with the introduction of foreign holidays in the 1970s the opportunity the breed with people of difference races was taken up with great enthusiasm by many people.
 

However, how the Coudenhove-Kalergi plan contributed towards World Domination it is difficult to say. Probably this is another indication of the lack of coordination within a large organisation.

Finally there is one worrying thought. Maybe the New World Order has already succeeded and we are already under the control of a small elite of wealthy people like Rupert Murdoch, Mike Zuckerberg and Vladimir Putin. Maybe Donald Trump is just an android worked remotely from NWO headquarters which is likely to be inside a volcano somewhere remote like the middle of Switzerland. I have noticed an increase in the number of CCTV camera in our town recently and occasionally I get phone calls from people with foreign accents telling me my computer has been compromised. So quite possibly we are all under close observation. And maybe they are using evil tactics like solving Global Poverty, Conquering diseases, improving education, etc. to keep us from becoming too curious about their activities.  

If you are unable to read this article then it is probable that the NWO have removed it and if I post no further articles then they may also have removed me.

Badgerstoke Tip: However bizarre your fears there will always be someone more paranoid than you.

Badgerstoke on Polling

With the upcoming vote on the 24^th June my many readers have asked me to run my eyes over the many polls that are being published on an almost hourly basis. I’m glad to say that the latest polls show the “leave” vote pulling slightly ahead and this has caused a great deal of excitement on the internet although, sad to say, not much everywhere else. 

Firstly I need to make it clear that the process of polling no longer involves the use of a physical poll (or pole) and is also not connected with the country of Poland. The word is though to derive from the 18^th Century Practice where landowners would beat their tenants with the said pole until they voted the way they wanted. Thankfully voting is now secret and so the practice has died out in all but the most remote rural constituencies in the Highlands of Scotland.

The polls have always been unreliable in the past. If the polls before the last election had been correct then Nigel Farage and one of the Miliband brothers (I can never remember which is which but in this case I mean the weird looking one) would be in a coalition Government. This would have been an uneasy Labour/UKIP alliance, but one can imaging that a compromise policy of “encouraging immigrants but being unpleasant to them when they arrive” could be made to work.

So why are polls so unreliable? I suspect the blame for this can be laid at the door of people like me. I have always taken the policy of keeping my views secret. This has the advantage of stopping people trying to convince me to change my mind as they have no idea what I think and also it hides that fact that I may not actually have an opinion on the particular subject. However when forced to give my opinion by a persistent researcher then I will often give the opposite view to what I actually think. I am not normally dishonest but in such cases I will make an exception.

Polling organisations have been trying to get people to be more willing to say what they think. One method of doing this is to employ attractive young women to stop men in the street in the hope that they will be less likely to express their displeasure at being delayed on their way to the pub or betting shop. However I think this will still produce unreliable results as I find it is often difficult to concentrate when in close proximity to a young lady with a large chest.

Another problem with any poll is making sure you have an accurate cross-section of the population. Internet polls have shown the leave camp being much further ahead for quite a long time now. But we should bear in mind that the people polled in this way are going to be more introverted and more obese than the average voter. Indeed many of these voters may have problem actually leaving their bedrooms to vote. I think postal voting would be the best thing for many of these people as they could send their mother to the post-box rather than braving the outside World.

The bookmaker have been showing the remain camp quite a way ahead for some time. But this of course will be biased because it will be only based on the views on men of low intelligence (after all they are people who think that giving a large slice of their benefits money to a bookmaker is a sensible thing to do). It is indeed a sad fact that about half the population of the UK has less than average intelligence. Unfortunately these people may vote in the referendum if they can work out how to make their mark on the slip and also remember which day it is on.

Another problem with sampling is where do you take the sample? If you were to poll in Scotland for example you may well get a different result to taking your poll in a more pleasant part of the country. The SNP have been telling us that the Scots are heavily in favour of "remain" for quite a while; mind you they did call the result of the Independence referendum very wrongly and so I’m not sure how much credence we can put on this prediction. On a side issue, I have always wondered why SNP politicians are named after fish: Sturgeon, Haddock & Salmon?

So I think the only conclusion we can draw is that by carefully choosing where, who and when you take your poll you can get the answer you want. And I have noticed that if either side is starting to pull ahead then we get a spate of polls pointing the other way published in the newspapers. Surely it can’t be that the media are trying to make sure it is a close contest because it sells more papers.

So it seems that you can’t take any notice of the polls as they will all have a built-in bias. However I think it is fairly obvious that if you are reading this blog then you are likely to be of greater than average intelligence and so if people would like to tell me how they will be voting then I am willing to do my own informal poll. All votes will be treated in confidence and not used to embarrass anyone later.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: If you want to know which way a poll is biased then just look at the people that paid for it to be done.

Badgerstoke on The EU Referendum

Up until now I have been reluctant to make any comment of the upcoming EU referendum due to the heated debate that has taken place in my own family as well as the rest of the country about how to vote. However my many readers have been encouraging me to make my views clear as they are looking for guidance in this tricky matter. So I have decided to give my views. 

I have mentioned my son-in-law Dean in the past; he is on a Government scheme which has been preparing him for work for almost two year now. He is very much in favour of leaving the EU and will certainly vote that way if it isn't raining on the day. His argument is that millions of Romanians are just waiting on the other side of the channel for when our borders are opened and will flood over and take all the jobs that he might be interested in if he ever does becomes ready for work. 

My son Brian who is in his final year at University doing a degree in Modern Art with Media Studies is in favour of remaining in the EU. Although he had told me his degree would ensure him of a well paid job when he graduates he is now considering taking a Masters Degree in Philosophy with Pottery somewhere in Europe as this will ensure an even better job. He was hoping to get a grant from the EU for this. However I believe he has also been influenced by a Portuguese Girl he met at University who seems to have been resisting his charms. He did spend some time during his last trip home learning to say “would you like to come to a restaurant with me, we can split the bill” in Portuguese.  However he later told me that he found she speaks perfect English and had just been ignoring him.

My wife is undecided on the matter of the EU and she has been watching a number of soap operas on the TV to see which way her favourite characters might vote.

So as you can see the Badgerstoke family is split on the way to vote.

I did decide to do a poll around our neighbours and found that there was: 2 Remains, 1 Leave, 25 Don't Knows, 1 Whatever (this was a teenager) and one set the dog on me as he thought I was selling something.

So having explained the turmoil in the Badgerstoke family I will now give you my opinion.

I think there has been an unfortunate creeping Europeanisation of our country since we joined the EU. You can see it in the media and politics where good solid British names like Smith, Jones and Singh are slowly being displaced by foreign sounding names like Portillo, Farage and Sturgeon.

In my young day we had a host of good British Imperial Units to brighten up our day. Ask one of today’s youngsters how many chains in a hundredweight and they look at you as if you’re mad. I still lament the passing of units like Furlongs, Rods, Groats, etc.  These have been replaced by foreign units like the Kilogram and Metre. In the past it was easy to know whether your car has good petrol consumption in miles per gallon but the automotive industry is no doubt in favour of the EU because no one has any idea of what constitutes good fuel consumption in metres per kilolitre. Another problem with these foreign units is that you only need to divide by tens to do conversions. Now we have a whole generation who are no longer able to divide by sixteen without using a calculator. 

Recently I had a problem with the plumbing a Chez Badgerstoke and I was recommended a number of plumbers. I got three estimates and the polish chap had the cheek to offer me the cheapest price. I went with the next person as he had a Liverpool accent. I must admit it was easier the understand the polish chap (who had the temerity to speak perfect English) rather than the one from Liverpool but I decided not to take the chance as the Pole probably had no idea what a ballcock was as it probably has a different name in polish.

And in the high street the creeping Europeanisation can also be seen. Our Favourite Indian restaurant was recently replaced by Polish Deli for example. And even in proper British shops like Lidl & Aldi, foreign foods are taking up more and more shelf space. It is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that soon proper British foods like sausages, baked beans, Heineken beer and Spaghetti Bolognese might disappear all together.

So I think things have gone far enough. I have done a little research on the World Wide Web and found a lot of information about what the EU has in store for us if we remain with them. Here are a few of the most alarming:

1. Pints and Miles are to be eliminated and it will become and illegal to use them.

2. British sausages are to be called “emulsified fat tubes” and only those produced in Germany can be called sausages.

3. Bananas must not bend too much. Any banana that does have too much bend cannot be sold in the shops and will be pulped and used to make banana milkshake. This will be the end of the banana split as that requires a bent banana to keep the ice-cream from sliding off.

4. All shop prices must be shown in Euros.

5. Immigrants must be put at the top of council housing lists and given benefits to make them feel welcome.

6. All Children must learn at least two European languages.

7. All people must own at least one item of ethnic European clothing (e.g. Lederhosen)

8. Schools must offer lessons in ethnic European musical instruments like the fulgelhorn or glockenspiel

  
There are lots more on the many unbiased websites that have suddenly appeared and you can look for yourself.

I think we must leave the EU and reconnect with the Commonwealth. Countries like India, Australia and Rhodesia have just been waiting for us to get back in touch and all the PM has to do is pick up the phone and we will be welcomed back with open arms. I’m sure Australia would be more than willing to junk its business links with it near neighbours if the old mother country asked them to. And if not we could threaten to stop the Queen ruling them and send Rolf Harris back.

Another possible approach for a post-EU Britain could be to ask other disgruntled European countries to join us. We could start our own organisation and I suggest calling it the Union of Europe (or UE). We could have a Singular Market to help businesses trade, freedom of movement so worker would work in any country, trade laws made centrally so that all countries traded equally, a central court which could ensure the rights of our citizen and lots more. We could have all this without the drawbacks of the EU.

So if I’ve convinced you then please vote leave on the 24^th June.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: Always treat foreigners with sympathy as they may not have had the pleasure of experiencing British cuisine.

Badgerstoke on WorldWideWeb

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Badgerstoke on Christmas

Badgerstoke on Christmas

I think it only right that I should write a few words to my many readers at this time of year. Maybe I’m even a little late in spreading my Christmas wisdom as some of the local Garden Centres have been selling Christmas decoration since September.

We have sent Christmas cards to everyone on our standard list. Mrs Badgerstoke is in charge of this duty and she takes the responsibility very seriously. Recipients are grouped into different levels. The top level is for close relations and friends, level two is neighbours and acquaintances, and level three is reserved for people we hate. There is a special group for people we don’t remember but who have sent us a card. We always get one or two cards from people we haven’t sent one to and we have a number of spare cards put to one side for an emergency last minute post.

For years we have exchanged cards with Alwin and Rolf in Bray and we have no idea who they are. I think they may have sent us a card by mistake years ago and we have exchanged cards ever since. However this year Rolf is missing from the card; maybe something has happened to him?

We have further subdivisions at each level for religious and non-religious people. My wife was worried about sending Mr Akram at the newsagents a card as be probably isn’t a Christian. However I pointed out that as he sold us the card in the first place then it should be alright. So we sent him a card with a robin on it and nobody can be offended by a small fluffy bird.

At this point I would like to point out to my many North American readers that the bird that you call a robin is not the same as the one we call a robin. Ours is cute and cuddly while yours is (like American cars) bigger than ours.

We have our normal artificial Christmas tree sitting in the corner of the lounge. This tree has done us good service for the last fifteen years. At the beginning of December I bring it down from the loft and put it together and put it in the garden for a couple of days to have a good “blow through”. An amount a sticky tape and string is now necessary to keep the thing in one piece but these are easily hidden behind a large amount of tinsel.

Mrs B (I sometimes call my wife this if I’m in a hurry) suggested we should have some outside lights like a number of our neighbours have started to do. I object to this as it was never a thing that was done in the past and it makes our street look like the Las Vegas strip (I have never been to Las Vegas before but I have seen the strip on TV in the comedy film Leaving Las Vegas).

Christmas is a time for families and this year my children will be home. We have two children, Brian and Gloria. Brian is nearing the end of his University degree in Modern Art with Media Studies and next year expects to take up a highly paid executive role. Gloria is a highly skilled hairdresser and lives with her husband Dean a short distance from us. Dean is currently on a Government scheme which has been preparing him for work for over a year now – he must be one of the most prepared people in the country.

Like most people we will spend the holiday eating too much and watching a lot of TV with such Christmas themes as suicide (It’s a Wonderful Life) and war (The Great Escape). Mrs B and I will watched the Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day but Dean refuses to watch this as he always objects to listening to anyone who has been more successful in life than he has, which is most people.

Badgerstoke’s Tip:  Giving presents at Christmas is a good opportunity to dispose of things you got last year that you didn’t want.

Badgerstoke on Wildlife

Badgerstoke on Wildlife

At this time of year you should feed the wildlife in your garden. Mrs Badgerstoke is a great lover of wild birds (well the pretty ones anyway, she doesn’t like pigeons) and always makes sure she puts out food for them. Her friend Madge from the cake shop will save any stale produce and she gives half of this to my wife for our garden birds.

My wife puts out food in the garden every morning and I have noticed recently that if I go outside before she has done this there are lots of birds watching me for various vantage points. This is like a scene from a Hitchcock film I saw once; it was about birds but I can’t remember the title.

My wife also used to hang up containers of nuts for the more agile birds like the blue tit or green heron. However she found that these attracted a squirrel. Now I’m alright with squirrels but Mrs Badgerstoke doesn’t like them. She say that the way the constantly twitch their tails reminds her of her Great Aunt Sarah.

I never met my wife’s Great Aunt but she tells me that Great Aunt Sarah had a facial twitch which used to happen at the end of each sentence and some times in the middle of a sentence as well if the subject matter was exciting enough. Apparently she attributed this nervous twitch to the fact that she’s once been stranded for several hours during the London Blitz in an air raid shelter, in total darkness, with twenty American Airmen.

I have noticed that some of the birds in our garden are becoming quite fat and the pigeons in particular have a little trouble taking off at times. Under normal circumstances this might have been a problem for them but my wife has also taken to feeding the stay cat that frequents our garden and that has also has become a little overweight and has no chance of catching even the most obese pigeon.

I did buy my wife a book on identifying garden birds for Christmas a few years ago and she kept a log for a while on all the birds she saw in the garden. However when I caught sight of the entries once I told her that I was a little doubtful that she’d actually seen a puffin as they tended to live on sea cliffs and we were fifty miles from the sea and our garden is quite flat (the only part that might come close to being a sea cliff is a small rockery). She did admit that it may have been a crow but that she’d already recorded one of those and so she though a puffin would be nicer.

Badgerstoke’s Tip:  Even Garden Birds will turn their nose up at Marmite.

 

Badgerstoke on Celebrity

Badgerstoke on Celebrity

 

Some years ago an artist called Andrew Walpole (a distant relative of the 18^th Century Prime Minister I am led to believe) said that “in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes”.

Mrs Badgerstoke and I haven’t had our fifteen minutes yet but out daughter Gloria has. In 2006 she won second prize in the regional hairdresser of the year competition. To win the prize she had to cut six people’s hair in half an hour. She was awarded points for style and neatness. I understand that she would have lost points if she had drawn blood from her subjects and the removal of a whole ear would have led to her disqualification. Anyway she was pictured in our local paper smiling broadly and brandishing a pair of scissors next to a worried looking man whose hair she was cutting. The headline read “A Cut Above”; the journalists on local papers are not up to the standard of the nationals.

Most TV quiz shows now have celebrity versions. I did watch the celebrity version of “Who Wants To Be Rich” last week and I could only identify one of the celebrities. There was a footballer for a lower league football club, an actress who had been in a situation comedy twenty years ago and a singer who’d come third in a TV talent show.

We have many more celebrities now than in the past. Take celebrity chefs for example, when I was young we just had Fanny Craddock on TV but now there must be twenty or thirty. For those of you who can’t remember Fanny Craddock she would not have allowed so many other people to intrude on her subject. The number of celebrity chefs seems to have led directly to obesity in the population and it would be a good idea for the Government to step in and regulate them. Setting up a regulator called OfNosh would meet with public approval I think.

Celebrities will fade from public view if they are not careful and one trick to keep themselves in the public eye is to appear on such programmes as “Help I’m A Celebrity Stuck In Australia” where they are given tasks to do such as eating the testicles of aborigines and sitting in a transparent box with a live alligator. I’m sure these things must be faked. I have heard that the alligator had been previously well fed with a meal of jumbucks. I’m not sure what a jumbuck is but you can’t get them in Tesco.

Another mechanism to keep themselves in the public eye is for celebrities to give their children unusual names. Dave Beckham called his first child Brooklyn because I understand the child was conceived in that place (I hope he chose somewhere private). I did read somewhere that he gave up this process with his second child which was conceived in South London as the name Peckham Beckham was just a little too silly.

Mrs B and I are still wondering what our fifteen minutes of fame might consist of. I hope it isn’t too exciting as my wife can get a little carried away sometime. As a teenager she met Cliff Richard and she has led me to believe that that incident led to a toiletry accident on her part.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: You will be soon forgotten if you become famous for doing something nice. If you want people to remember you then it is better to be very naughty.

Badgerstoke on Comedy

Badgerstoke on Comedy

The television comedy of today is not a patch on what it was in the past. In the 1960s and 1970s we had such comedy gems as Terry and June, On The Buses and Crossroads. There is nothing today to match that golden age. It really does worry me that the youth of today will grow up with no sense of humour and then where would we be? It is a well-known fact that people with no sense of humour are more prone to commit petty crime and it isn’t too much of a stretch to assume that much of today’s crime can be laid at the door of such new wave comedians as Ricky Jervase and Roland Atkinson.

In my day we had such enlightened liberal comedians as Bernard Manning and Jim Davison and we’ll never see their like again.

It all started to go wrong with so called alternative comedians in the 1980’s. I did try to get into the spirit of the thing at the time but I found that the bad language put me off. I did take Mrs Badgerstoke to see a new wave comedian at the civic hall just after we were married. This didn’t turn out to well as my wife put her finger in her ears every time she heard a swear word and so she tended to miss much of the show.

I was determined to give it another try on my own (nobody can say I give up easily) and watched a couple of stand-up comedians on a late night TV show and I now think I understand the secret of Alternative Comedy. What I noticed was that they were still telling the same old jokes that I’d heard in the past but their trick was to tell the joke in a very loud and aggressive voice and sprinkle in the F-word occasionally and for no apparent reason. This tactic disguised the fact that it was just an old joke that they were telling and allowed the comedian to reuse much material that had been discarded by other non-Alternative comedians because it was no longer funny.

Comedians seem to have calmed down a bit since the 1980s but they still haven’t got back to the quality of their heyday. Many of today’s shows like Little Britain save on material by just doing exactly the same sketches every week. I can only assume that they are hoping their audience have forgotten the previous show.

Mrs Badgerstoke insisted that we had Satellite Television so that we could continue to watch the delights of yester-year. She is a great fan of Are You Being Served and is particularly fond of allusions to Mrs. Slocombe’s pussy as she is an animal lover herself.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: You can always freshen up an old joke by talking loudly swearing.

Badgerstoke on Sexuality

A couple of weeks ago Mr Jones and Mr Chang who live at number 1 announced that they were coming out of the wardrobe and were in fact gay. This was not a great surprise as they’d already told everybody informally two years ago. I think the only reason for the announcement now was as an excuse for a party.

So last Thursday Mrs Badgerstoke and I went along in the evening with a bottle of fizzy wine that my cousin had given me for my birthday. Everyone from the close was there as well as a few others. My daughter Gloria, who lives two streets away, was there with her husband Dean. Gloria is a highly qualified hairdresser and will visit people in their homes and do their hair for a very reasonable price and she cuts Mr Chang’s hair every few weeks. If Mr Jones wasn’t completely bald then I’m sure he’d be a customer as well. It was a surprise to see my son-in-law Dean there as it is normally difficult to get him out of his armchair but I expect that the television programmes that evening may have been not very good.

I must say it was a really excellent spread. There was quiche, sausages on sticks, vol-au-vents, various cheeses and lots more. Also there were open bottles of wine on the table for people to refill their glasses as they pleased. At one point in the evening I made the mistake of filling my glass from the bottle that we’d brought along but when I realised this I disposed of it into a large pot plant when no one was looking.

As Mr Chang is a Chinese gentleman I was a little surprised that there was no oriental type nibbles but when I tackled him about this he said that he actually came from Wolverhampton. I should have guessed from his accent but in the past I had always thought that he must have had elocution lessons from someone who came from the West Midlands. I expect that also explained why there was ELO playing on the stereo instead of something more oriental.

At one point in the evening I found myself sitting next to Mrs Bradley the widow that lives at number 6. She was telling me about her in-growing toenails. The good thing about Mrs Bradley is that she doesn’t expect you to say anything during any conversation you have with her and so you can use the time productively to think about other things. Mrs Bradley’s husband was deaf so in a way they had the perfect marriage. After he passed on Mrs Bradley got herself a parrot as a replacement. I must say it is unusual to hear a parrot say “lumbago” and “bunions” instead of “hello” and “who’s a pretty boy then”.

Anyway as I was sitting there not quite listening to Mrs Bradley talking about her sciatica I started to consider a statistic I’d read once that one in ten people are gay. Well a quick check of the close and I found we had exactly thirty people living there and so there should be three gay people. Well if Mr Jones and Mr Chang were two of them then who was the third?

Later in the evening I was chatting to Miss Dingle from number 13 and I began to wonder if she was the missing gay person as to my knowledge she doesn’t have a boyfriend. Feeling more uninhibited than normal due to the six glasses of wine I’d drunk I asked her about her sexuality. She said she couldn’t talk about it there but I could come around to her house at nine o’clock the next evening if I wanted.

The party wrapped up quite late and we all agreed that Mr Jones and Mr Chang should go back in the wardrobe so that they could come out again next year.

On Friday I told Mrs Badgerstoke that I was popping out for a little walk and went to see Miss Dingle to ask her whether she was gay. I must say she has no idea of punctuality. I got there a few minutes after nine o’clock and she was still in her underwear. It was the sort that Mrs Badgerstoke used to wear only it was much more colourful and it took a lot less material to cover Miss Dingle that it does to cover my wife.

Miss Dingle was also wearing long boots and carrying a riding crop. I’d never realised that she was a horsewoman in the past (I wonder where she keeps her horse?). I came right to the point of my visit and asked her about her sexuality and she suggested that we should go into the bedroom to discuss the matter; I assumed that she wanted to put something on over her underwear. As we went she kept flicking the riding crop in my direction and I had to tell her she could have someone’s eye out unless she was more careful.

When we got to the bedroom I found that Miss Dingle has a most strange hobby; she collects police equipment. Hanging on the walls were handcuffs, chains, hoods and lots of other stuff that I didn’t recognise. She suggested that I might like to try some on but I declined and said I’d only come to talk and she seemed most disappointed. And so we returned to the lounge where I asked her straight-out about her sexuality and she assured me that she wasn’t in fact the missing gay person and she had no idea who it might be.

So I’m not sure who it is but I will keep my eyes open and be sure to let you know if I discover anything.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: Gay people are just ordinary people who happen to be gay. So they can be just as annoying as everyone else.

Badgerstoke on The Democratic Process

Recently we had elections for the role of Police Commissioner and I noticed with some sadness that the turnout was very low. King Charles II had his head cut off and King John signed the Magna Carta so that we could all have the right to vote.  I think it’s very important that we exercise that right even if we have no idea who the candidates are or what they stand for as was the case with the Police Commissioner elections.

The Badgerstokes go to the polling station, located at The Dame Deidre Bagshot primary school, as a family. Mrs Badgerstoke and I set off after tea and before the good television starts and we pick up our daughter Gloria, who lives just a couple of streets away, on the way there.

Gloria’s husband Brian is on a Government scheme which seems to involve a good deal of sitting in an armchair and watching day time television. I do encourage Brian to join us but he says he doesn’t vote on the principle that all politicians are a waste of space. I did point out to him that most people share that opinion but that doesn’t stop them voting but he was firm on his decision not to join us and to continue watching the television, especially as it was starting to rain.

Voting is a secret process and even Mrs Badgerstoke and I don’t know how each other vote although I did get a hint at the last General Election when my wife pointed out that the Liberal Democrat candidate was wearing tight jeans and had rather a nice looking bottom.

In order to ensure that people don’t guess my political allegiance I discourage any party that comes to our house canvasing by pretending to have the opposite opinion to their policy. For example when the Conservative party calls I tell them that I’m in favour of Nationalising The Royal Family and the Railways and that’s normally enough to make them go away. For the Labour party, telling them I’d like to privatise the NHS is normally enough to make them froth at the mouth and walk away muttering.

I did have an unfortunate misunderstanding a few years ago when I mistook some Jehovah’s Witnesses who called at our house for members of UKIP as they tend to dress in a similar fashion. When they told me that they could save me from eternal damnation I thought that that manifesto pledge might be going just a little bit too far.

I know the country did flirt with the idea of changing our voting system from first-past-the-post to AV (Alternating Vote) a little while ago and I’m glad we decided not to. The first-past-the-post system is quite simple to use (although it doesn’t in fact have a post involved anywhere in the process). It is a shocking fact that 50% of the population have less than average intelligence and hence are not able to understand AV and so I won’t describe it here in case any of them might try and read this and get a headache.

So I hope I’ve persuaded you of the importance of voting. Whether you vote Labour or Conservative or for one of the more offbeat parties it is important that you put your cross in the box.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: If you don’t know who to vote for it is acceptable to close your eyes and choose at random. After all it’s a secret process and no one will ever know what you did.

Badgerstoke on Diets

There always seem to be a new diet fad that is being introduced and so I thought it would be good to give you the Badgerstoke wisdom on this topic.

My wife, Mrs Badgerstoke, is an expert on diets as she has been continuously on one for the last twenty years. It has not been the same diet for the whole time as she likes to try anything new that comes along. In this she cooperates with Madge, the lady in the cake shop where she shops on most days.

Mrs Badgerstoke was a large woman when we first met (she was a Miss Prendergast then of course) but she became much larger over the first years of our marriage. It started when she was pregnant with our first child Gloria and she got cravings for sherry trifle and coal (which was inconvenient because we had gas central heating). The first of these is fattening I’m led to believe although the second is not. She did try to get her figure back after Gloria was born but Brian, our second child, came along shortly afterwards and the cravings started again, this time for bacon rolls and ice-cream. Strangely she still has these same cravings twenty years later.

Since Brian was born Mrs Badgerstoke has tried many different diets to get back into her original shape but without much success. She is four pounds lighter than she was twenty years ago but it is difficult to know which diet to ascribe this to as there have been so many over that period.  So I have decided to describe just a couple of the diets she has tried and you can make your own mind up.

CalorieCounter: This is a diet where each food item is given a points value (1 for a slice of cucumber, 2 for a crème cake, etc.) and then you add up the points and make sure you don’t exceed a certain number each day. Once you have paid your money they will tell you the secret value of each piece of food and allow you to partake in the other part of the treatment, which is being publically weighted and humiliated each week.

Mrs Badgerstoke and her friend Madge from the cake shop did try this for a while but they didn’t lose any weight. The main problem seemed to be how to judge the points value of food. For example is a large piece of Dundee Cake worth more or less than three chocolate éclairs?  My wife did attribute some of her overall weight to the clothes she was wearing (she normally wears some fairly substantial underwear) and she did manage to lose a few pounds one week by leaving some of this off but when she came home from the weighing she said that she felt “all wobbly”.

So I’m afraid that she didn’t continue with this diet for very long.

Detox Diet: The theory here is that normal foods contain toxins which stay in the body and cause problems. One look at the contents label on a food packet in the past would have confirmed the truth of this with names like Monosodium Glutamate and Trinitrotoluene. Now manufacturers use E-numbers so you can’t see what the foods really contain which is very sneaky I think.

Mrs B (I sometimes call my wife this instead of using her full name just to add a little variety to our conversation) did decide to try a Detox diet (I can’t remember which one) and so she sent away a large amount of money and in return received a box containing tins of liquid that she was supposed to drink instead of eating meals.

The second part of the programme was something called colonic irrigation. The theory here is that food can get stuck in the final part of your digestive system and start to rot there and this can be removed by shooting warm washing up liquid up your bottom through a rubber tube. So every couple of weeks Mrs Badgerstoke would catch the number 17 bus to a clinic where this process would take place. She seemed to be quite taken with the young man called Kevin who was in charge of inserting the tube.

The trouble with this diet was that the liquid that my wife was supposed to drink tasted horrible and she soon gave up. Not wishing to waist the liquid we did try adding it to the dog’s food but he promptly threw up on the dining room carpet.  And so we tried it with a stray cat that often frequented our garden and we never saw it again.

Although my wife gave up the meal replacements she did decide to continue with the colonic irrigation. However the cost of this was a little steep and so after a few more visits to the clinic I suggested that I could undertake the process at home as I had a rubber tube and a funnel in the shed. However my wife assured me that as I didn’t have the years of training that Kevin had that she thought there was a real possibility that I might have an accident during the insertion.

So for financial reasons we also gave up on this diet.

There have been many other diets (F-Plan, Pineapple, Radish, etc.) but none have proved successful for my wife although they seem to work a treat for the celebrities that is publicising them.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: If your wife asks you if she need to go on a diet then honesty is not always the best policy.

Badgerstoke on Astrology

I know that Astrology is dismissed by some members of the scientific community, and these are people who are supposed to keep an open mind on all things. My personal view is that it should be considered just as valid as its twin science of Astronomy. There are too many events where Astrological predictions have proved correct for it to be easily dismissed. I will give a couple of examples below that I hope will convince you of my point.

My first example is the case of our neighbour Miss Dingle who lives at number 12. She once read her horoscope in the local paper and it said that “she would have a lucky gain” and sure enough three months later she won ten pounds on the national lottery. That can’t be a coincident surely.

My second example is in my own family. My son Brian is away at University taking a degree in Modern Art with Media Studies. Brian is a Libra. He was born just after midnight in the early hours of 24^th September which makes him a Libra by a matter of a few minutes but I’m sure that would have been enough time to stamp the Libra character traits on him. It is a sobering thought that if Mrs Badgerstoke had pushed just a little harder then he might have been a Virgo and a completely different person.

Anyway I have looked up the characteristics of Libra and found them to be: Social, Artistic, Vacillating, Intellectual and Communicative. It goes without saying that he is both Artistic and Intellectual being on an artistically bias course at university. I also know him to be Social and Communicative as he is normally to be found in the student’s bar most of the time, drinking and talking with his friends on a range of subjects. I had to look up Vacillating in the dictionary and found it to mean indecisive and hesitating. Like most young men of his age Brian knows absolutely everything about everything and will quickly give the definitive opinion on any subject at the drop of a hat (a real chip off the old block) and so I’m afraid that aspect of the standard Libra character doesn’t match, but four out of five isn’t bad.

So as you can see from my examples there is a lot to be said for Astrology and scientists dismiss it at their peril.

Mrs Badgerstoke does read her horoscope in the local paper each week and, as she is a God fearing woman, I thought I’d check with the vicar what the church’s view on Astrology was. Unfortunately he told me that they rank it alongside the other dark arts like witchcraft, yoga and veganism. But as Mrs Badgerstoke does enjoy reading her horoscope I decided that she would be willing to risk eternal damnation to continue doing so and therefore I didn’t tell her of the vicar’s opinion.

Also people shouldn’t assume that the heavenly bodies do not exert an influence on our lives. I did read in a learned journal (I think it was the Boy’s Book of Basic Science that I had for my tenth birthday but didn’t read at the time) that two bodies will exert an effect on each other proportional to their mass. Well I’m given to understand that the planet Jupiter has a very large mass and Mrs Badgerstoke is not a small woman and so it stands to reason that they must have an effect on each other. I can confirm that Mrs Badgerstoke certainly has an effect on me.

I am happy with good clean British Astrology with its signs based on random collections of stars but there are other systems as well which don’t seem to have the same proven validity. Take Chinese Astrology for example which has each year represented by a different animal such as the Rat, Baboon or Scaly Anteater. If you follow this then everyone born in the same year would have the same characteristics. So you might have a whole year where everyone was an Artist and nobody was a sportsman. This would play havoc with the school system and so I don’t think it can be true.

So I hope I’ve said enough to convince you of the validity of the science of British Astrology.

Badgerstoke’s Tip: Always take note of your Horoscope as sometimes it will be correct.

Badgerstoke on The Sexual Revolution

For this post I will cover a topic that seems to be constantly on the mind of many young people. I refer of course to sex.

There wasn’t much sex before the 1960s. There must have been some as women tended to have children and sex is part of that process. However in the 1960s we had the “sexual revolution” which is where the youth went mad with desire brought about by an over-rich diet and taking LSD (which is a type of drug I’ve been informed) and started doing sex all over the place and sometimes with virtual strangers.

At this time I was a teenager working for Mr Jenkins in his corner shop and delivering groceries on a shop bicycle. And I think that the “sexual revolution” must have been something that was exaggerated by the more sensation sections of the press as I never saw anything of it. I have discussed this with my wife, Mrs Badgerstoke, and she confirms my opinion although she did say that she’d had her bottom pinched once in 1968 whilst travelling on the number 39 bus. In those days of course she wasn’t Mrs Badgerstoke but rather Miss Prendergast but even then her bottom was of a size that the perpetrator of the crime would have had no problem in finding somewhere to grab hold of. My wife tells me that the bus was crowded with standing room only and although she tried her best, she never did find out who did it. She told me she even put an advertisement in the local newspaper offering a moderate reward next to a picture of herself (the one taken whilst wearing a bathing costume on the beach at Clacton) but nobody came forward.

Things seemed to setting down in the 1970s when the novelty of excessive and impromptu sex had worn off a bit but certain sections of the press tried to keep the thing going, probably to boost their circulation. The worst offenders were the women’s glossy magazines which encouraged women to assume that having multiple orgasms was their right. I discussed this point with Mrs Badgerstoke who assured me that having an organism tended to interrupt her train of thought and that she couldn’t imagine having a second one inside three months of the first and I’m not sure that, with that length of time between them, could be considered to be “multiple”.

We had an unfortunate incident in the close recently which illustrates the dangers that too much exposure to sex can bring. Another of our neighbours, Miss Dingle at number 12, read the book Fifty Shades of Grey. She said she thought it was a book on decorating for people with less colourful tastes. She seemed to have been deeply affected by the book and the vicar, Rev Snodgrass, has needed to give her extensive one-to-one counselling. You have to admire the devotion of the clergy as several times I have looked out of our bedroom window and seen him leaving Miss Dingle’s house in the early hours of the morning with a haggard expression on his face.

I will leave the topic of sex for now and come back to it in a later post as I understand some people can get a little over stimulated by the subject although neither myself nor Mrs Badgerstoke have ever suffered in that way.

However before I go, I had promised you some sage advice and so I will end each of my posts with a piece of wisdom under the name “Badgerstoke’s Tip” and here is the first one:

Badgerstoke’s Tip: It is best to have sex with the lights off, particularly if your chosen partner is not very attractive.

My name is George Badgerstoke and I’m starting this blog to pass on my extensive knowledge and experience to the younger generation.

I retired last year after forty highly successful years in the retail trade and since that time have made it my mission to help the younger generation who seem to have lost their way a little over the last couple of decades. Since my retirement I have on several occasions been in a position to impart my advice to a member of the younger generation and several of them have made suggestions as to what I could do with it. So I have created this blog for the benefit of the youth of the United Kingdom.

For my first post I will not impart any pearls of wisdom but rather I will introduce myself so that you understand where my future sage advice is coming from.

I live in a nice modern semi-detached house with my wife Mrs. Badgerstoke. My wife does have a first name but she doesn’t much care for it so everyone just used Missus. Even, two or three times a year, when we share our most intimate moments she still prefers me to call her Mrs. Badgerstoke.

We have two children, Brian and Gloria. Brian is away at University taking a degree in Modern Art with Media Studies. I’m not sure what career this will lead to be he assures me that there is a highly paid job awaiting him at the end and who am I to argue with someone who is clever enough to go to university.

My daughter Gloria is a highly skilled hairdresser and lives with her husband Dean a few streets away from us. Dean is on a Government scheme call “Job Seekers Allowance” which is for people who don’t want to work but like to practice their interview technique in case they change their mind in the future.

As I have already told you, I have recently retired and so a few words about my career are called for here. I started my career as an errand boy for a small shop delivering items on a shop bicycle and over the next forty years I rose to become the manager of a medium sized supermarket. My highly successful career has brought me into contact with many members of the public and allowed me to dispense my advice freely but since I have retired I have only come into contact with people who have already been advised by me on many occasions and they have encouraged me to go away and tell someone else and so this has been the main reason that I’ve decided to start this blog.

Well that is a brief introduction to me and my family. My next post will, I assure you, contain advice that you can take to the bank.