Cocks and balls

Cocks

I’ve exchanged some mails with a friend on Oz recently, and they are also having worries about fuel prices. It seems there’s on regulation or competition rules so essentially, garages charge what the **** they want regardless of what oil costs.

We have similar though not by such a margin. Every time the price of oil goes up, so does our fuel. Only when the oil drops, the fuel never does!

They’ve just announced fuel blockades again, which means ‘n‘ length of time with stupid queues at the few fuel stations that manage to get any fuel. They’re blockading the fuel depots to stop supplies getting out for “as long as it takes for fuel prices ot drop”.

Our current taxation is 66.5% on fuel, plus 17.5% VAT. Essentially, for every UK1.00 you spend on fuel, the government gets over 80p, the supplier about 16p and the shop that sells it 4p.

The issue is that because fuel duty is a percentage, the govt. can lower prices by reducing the percentage which is a fair point. However the rise in fuel prices is attributable to the fuel supplier. And given that they’re all multi-billion pound businesses, they don’t give a flying fig about sales dropping for a week or three.

The only people affected by the last fuel blockades a couple of years ago were customers. A large number of “one-man” garages closed as they couldn’t sustain the loss. Delivery companies, van hire (I lost a deposit on a van the last time as I couldn’t fuel it)… anything involving driving around suffered huge losses.

If I find any blockader bragging about what he’s doing in a pub, I’ll glass the ******* cock.

Balls

First a rant – the referee on Saturday was ******* ****. I know I go on about them often enough, but Alan Wylie took the piss as far as ineptitude was concerned. Anyone watching MotD will be aware of his glaringly stupid decision to pull play back and give us a free kick for no reason, when playing on would have put it in the best attacking position we managed all game. Well, the whole 90 minutes were filled with such examples. He was, frankly, a disgrace.

The nearside linesman was also bloody useless, flagging one of our players offside despite Zat Knight being 3 yards closer to the goal. The only reason I can find for this, is that the linesman mistook him for a wandering basketball player who’d found his way onto the pitch by accident and therefore didn’t count as part of the back four. Anyone know how tall Mr Knight is? I’d guess about 10’44”. Ish.

Second a nicer story. Kieron Dyer has had some shitty press the last few years (yob, bling-merchant, uncontrollable, driving Porsche’s into bridges and the like), but I heard a very different tale last week. Now, whether this nice stuff is never reported, whether he’s turned over a new leaf or whether this was a one-off I don’t know. What I can say is that it is utterly true.

Some work colleagues of a friend of mine took their son to a Japanese restaurant in Newcastle as a celebration a couple of weeks ago. He’d passed all 10 GCSEs with good grades. During the meal, Kieron Dyer and some friends came in and sat down to eat. One of the ladies with the kids approached him after a while and very politely asked if he would be kind enough to say something to the lads at the dinner table if he had the time.

Kieron couldn’t have been nicer. After his meal, he spent a good 30 minutes with the kid and his friends. He posed for photos, answered questions, joked with them – the ideal ambassador. After a final shake of hands, he and his friends departed.

The two ladies then started arguing over the bill (which was about £60). Who’d had what, how to split it and so forth. They finally sorted the argument out, only to find that Dyer had paid for it on his way out.

Now… how come stories like that never make it into the papers?