Freedom of speech wins the case

After all that hoo-ha about wicked Julian Assange (chief of Wikileaks that has revealed the secrets of the world) after he was going to be charged with rape (which he swears he didn’t do) and after he has been hounded by various powerful forces beneath the radar. There he was, in full and open view, speaking at Cambridge University recently, with hardly anybody turning up – never alone making a fuss. Could it be that freedom of speech has won the day? - In his case at least. We still live in hope that the various controversial leaders who have been appearing at number 10 Downing Street recently will be persuaded to see the error of their ways in this matter.

You have to laugh

There we are, complaining loudly, again and again, about the dreadful cuts that are being made to make our lives less bearable than they are. We are going to have to be a do-it-yourself society we are told. Then, blow me, the one person who recently complained about the cuts was the Prime Minister himself who wrote to his own constituency moaning about them. Why hasn’t he simply gone up to his chancellor, George Osborne, taken him by the scruff of the neck (metaphorically- speaking) and told him to stop this nonsense? If cuts really need making, then of course, we can expect David Cameron to set the example and take a pay cut himself – after all most of us will be having this done to us, one way or another.

Would our football fans manage?

It was very heartening to hear the French fans at a football match singing the Marseillaise, their national anthem, in a time of crisis. Could our football fans manage to sing our national anthem so well? After witnessing many a youngster unable to sing the words to the first verse recently, I wonder.

So now we know

We are told people have been clamouring to know how long it takes to walk from one bus stop in London to another (in the same city) so now we have a special map. Brilliant! I can already see a snag. One attempt to walk along the pavement in London and it becomes quite obvious that we don’t all walk at the same pace. I’ve known teenagers who can do a whole flight of stairs in three steps, and old folk who take ages to go a few feet. I guess we’ll just have to start wearing those new-fangled gadgets so that we can either adjust the time or break our necks trying to speed up, ignoring any obstacles, of course.

Do we need directors?

Rumour has it that local directors of large organisations receive in the region of £100,000 a year salary. I have every reason to believe that the director of our local train company is the same. However, one wonders just what he is doing for that money. The renovations to platform 2 on Ely station were due to be finished in October. I was there last week in November and guess what, they were still not finished, leaving vulnerable passengers having to stand in the freezing cold without a single waiting room in sight. Also, any clued up manager would realize that 4.30pm on a Friday afternoon is peak hour. It would be so easy to put in another service or two from Cambridge to Ely, but no, people exhausted from a hard day’s work have to stand nose to nose in the aisles. I wonder if he is instructing the same company to improve the stations up to King’s Lynn so that trains can take more than four carriages. Does he not know that hundreds more houses are being built in the area, which will mean a lot more people will be trying to use his trains as well?

Huh! So our children are fat!

Letters are being sent home to parents telling them that their children are fat. Wonderful! It’s not as if the parents and the children don’t already know. When someone tells me I’m fat, I go and eat a lot of chocolate - just to show them that I don’t care and I dare say youngsters will do the same. If the powers that be really want to make a change, they should take the Jamie Oliver stance and make things easier by encouraging low calorie substitutes in the diet and get the children involved in more activities.