Is it just me, or does anyone else find Ben Stiller completely not funny in any way at all?
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Ahem, with apologies to the Monkees, 'Pleasant Valley Sunday', for the title of this post - sorry, just could not resist.

Courtesy of Mr FM, who regular readers may know is currently enjoying a somewhat weapons centric holiday in  the USA, I was able to take his peg on a driven day this Saturday.

The day started well, if cold, with a little fog and quite still and after our very hasty lunch break the wind piped up and the sky became a little less threatening, although we were to be denied sunshine.

The birds were scarce and stayed low, with the best drive at the end with the beaters coming through a thick woodland delivering a dozen or more to our guns.

Overall tally was a little over 30 - some landed the wrong side of a canal and it was too late too dark and frankly too hard to get them.



But we did have a good day.   The countryside was spectacular and we covered a variety of different terrain and the state of the Land Rover proof that we'd been through proper mud.   My tally was 4 I think, 3 pheasant and one partridge and I brought ...   more »

Well it's not all doom and gloom - one needs a distraction after all - and this years Rally of the Tests was a cracker.

Starting in Bournemouth and winding our way down to Exeter, Taunton, up to Malvern and then further up to Stoke on Trent before heading west to North Wales for the finish in Llandudno, it was 4 days of frenetic fun.



Big Mike and I have done the event twice before together and he's done it several more times.    Each time the real challenge is to finish without breaking down....it's not called a Reliability Trial for nothing.  

In 2005 in my BGT we managed to brake hard enough to shift the engine forward so the fan could try and corkscrew it's way through the radiatior.   This was in the Derbyshire Dales and we had to be towed back to the control in Buxton, where we (well, the rally mechanics to be more accurate) stripped the radiator out, fixed it and off we went again.    We'd lost a lot of time, so our result was not tip top.   But we finished.

In 2007 in Mike's BGT on a particularly rough stage in a Scottish forest we managed ...   more »

Boris Johnson in the Torygraph today rails against our dear leader, long since named 'Tax and Waste Brown' by otber bloggers, after the pre Budget announcements aimed to rescue our economy at a stroke.

What muppets.   As good old Boris says, you got us into this mess Gordy, with your NuLab policies.   And like a  broke and desperate gambler who has already lost the family siliver you are now putting the house on the next spin of the roulette wheel.    Our national debt will  increase to over 8% by 2010 - levels not seen since Harold Wilson.   It is madness.

I've been whingeing on about the level of government spend for as long as I've been blogging, but there is a statistic at the bottom of Boris' article that really brought it home to me....read on:

We now know that to fund this fiscal stimulus, taxes are going up on incomes over £40,000; we know there are going to be huge increases in national insurance that will hit employees, employers and the self-employed. How on earth is that supposed to boost job creation?

Might it not have been better, if you were going to splurge £20 billion in tax cuts, ...   more »

So, Gordon is lauded as the saviour of our economy, his fortune in the popularity polls has staged a dramatic comeback and he must be feeling a little smug that the Conservatives lost their deposit in Glenrothes.   Not that the latter was really ever in doubt and, I suspect, he is more pleased that the SNP rennaisance seems to have temporarily stalled.

But the big issue amidst all this economic drama has to be the big picture of what to do.   There is no panacea, quick win or low hanging fruit - they are as ephemeral as their titles suggest.   In todays immediate must have world the risk is that as a consequence of our impatience for action, we do the wrong thing.

This crash gives us - in fact requires us - to make some deeper long term decisions about our economy and its' place in the world.

The truth is that in pure terms of productivity we are quite insignificant.   We have built success on the back of global financial markets which until recently performed well.   Despite all the criticism of the fat cat bankers, remember that without the global liquidity they provided it would have been well ...   more »

I can hardly believe it has been a year.   360 days since I last posted.   And I think that is a sufficiently long break so will resume.   Irregularly, but nevertheless I will be trying.   more »