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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.