Random thoughts .

On being gruntled or dischuffed this week.

I honestly don’t know why but my writing mojo seems to have resurfaced, perhaps because I am writing about interesting things to do with small boats rather than how I attached part A (of the boat) to part B while thinking about parts X Y and Z while swearing a lot. Now, I guess this time that only a few of you will recognize the words I used – gruntled and dischuffed but might realize that they are sort-of neologisms that are based on each other ; in fact they are well established terms in ‘Jackspeak’ which, basically, is the in house language of the British Royal Navy. Now, of course I am a mere sailor rather than a ‘bleedin matelot innit’ , which is a local term for RN seamen…..or semen perhaps. In fact I picked up a fair amount of jackspeak when I worked with naval doctors and nurses in my last NHS job ; in fact I was once regarded as a ‘Boris’ – the female version is ‘Doris’ apparently.

Being back in the flow, so to speak, I thought I would start to do, once a week, a more general blog about things that have happened during that week and about which I was either gruntled (happy or satisfied) or dischuffed ( unhappy or just plain pissed off. I might even make it a regularly irregular piece in the blog…..that’s a cardiology reference by the way.

This week’s dischuffed-ness then.

At the top of my list this week are two things that various local councils in the UK have decided to do without any consultation with the populace in their council wards. First up is that several have decided that they are leading the way with being 15 minute cities and what they have done , so far, is to place barriers and planters across the end of roads that causes the maximum dischuffed-ness to the population who live there. The basic idea seems to be that of sucking-up to the WEF inspired ideology of restricting people’s freedom of movement because it is “good for the environment”. The idea and ideology behind the this comes from a Parisian urban theoritician , that should give us pause, and that a city should be divided up into 15 minute (walking only) segments in which you will live, work, play etc and that it should be maximally difficult if not outright disallowed to travel to another ‘sector’ of the city. I wonder how that will work with large centralized supermarkets and getting the weekly shop home without using a car , or even how NHS workers for instance would travel to get to their place of work……they being rather useful people to actually have at work.

The second thing that happened this week comes from the same source and it is that many councils want to outright ban, impose fines on the use of or make it a criminal offence to use a woodburner and thus warm your own home in what is becoming a cold winter with massive rises in fuel and heating bills. Personally I am at the point of simple civil disobedience and non-compliance with that one but equally I think I would be out there un-manning the city barricades.

Gruntled this week.

First up, it’s been a nice week thus far, cold and clear overnight with a hard morning frost but so far, clear days and even warm in the sun. Hundreds of my spring bulbs are firing through the leaf mulch which means that we’re going to have a brightly cheerful spring garden

Secondly, when I got in from my daily walk around the woods and lanes I had an Email to say that my boat trailer has been finished and delivered to deepest darkest Cornwall so we’ll be grabbing our border passes and heading down there ‘dreckly’ as they tend to say ‘down ere’.

Thirdly this week I was very gruntled to see Kelly Jean Mishull’s (aka Posie Parker) speech in Glasgow in which she spoke up for the right of women and girls to have their own toilets and changing spaces that aren’t invaded by men claiming to be women. A lot of this just happens to coincide with a double rapist in Scotland being sent to a ‘women’s prison because he/she/it now claims to be a woman despite having done nothing to transition. A lot of the time I just wish feminists would go away and shut up or at least make me a cup of coffee but on this one I believe that their physical safety far outweigh’s some hairy bloke’s ‘human rights’. Even better is what happened when Scotland’s socialist dictator got completely tongue tied when she was unable to define what a ‘woman’ actually is……for goodness sake even I can do that and I don’t even pretend to run a country.

How was your week ?