May 2009 Archives

A quarter of all violent attacks are now carried out by women.

Every day 240 females are arrested for violent attacks.

We are supposed to be shocked by these new Home Office statistics.

But why?

Obviously what we are witnessing here are women demonstrating some long-hidden natural inclinations.

TV celebrity Bear Grylls has been appointed as the new Chief Scout. Mr. Grylls is the star of Channel 4's got-up action series "Born Survivor".

The show features the 34 years old supposedly surviving in hostile territory. But it has already been admitted that when he was portrayed as roughing it in the wild places of California he was in fact spending his nights in a luxury hotel.

The "sulphuric gases" that surrounded him turned out to be the work of his production crew and a smoke machine.

So presumably the nation's 450,000 Scouts can expect some fascinating new celebrity-style challenges under the guidance of their youngest ever leader.

Perhaps bracing outdoor weekends will in future be centred on the requirement to leave a hotel bedroom window open at night. And tough tests of enterprise will involve Surviving For 48 Hours Only On What Can Be Purchased From Waitrose.

The artificial tanners of Coventry are the heaviest users of sunbeds in Britain.

A new survey says that the average user in the City lies under the lamps 84 times a year.

That's way ahead of even the next three on the list, Leeds, Edinburgh and Gloucester.

No explanation has been offered for why Coventrians should be prepared to take more risks with skin cancer than anybody else in Britain.

Can't they afford proper holidays? Are they the vainest people the country? Or just the most dim?

Or maybe it has nothing to do with appearance at all.

Perhaps if you live in Coventry then the urge to go and lie down in a confined space shut off from everything around you is just irresistible.

The Court of Appeal has ruled that servicemen and women serving overseas are protected by the Human Rights Act.

This decision threatens to unleash a flood of compensation claims from the families of men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will also create a new level of nightmare on the battlefield. Senior officers feel operations will be hamstrung by decisions being affected by or even questioned under the terms of the Act.

If you are looking for the lost spirit of England then get yourself down to the village of Mersham in Kent.

This is where, 23 years ago, the ladies of the Mersham Afternoon Club decided to set about the task of knitting a model of their community.

A dozen or so of them set about the Royal Oak Pub, the shop, the bakery, the bungalows, the cottages and even the chickens and the flowers in the garden.

Dotty? Of course.

A little sad? Maybe.

But also innocent, eccentric and quintessentially English.

Alternatively you could head for Rylstone in Yorkshire where the ladies of the WI have just completed a remake of their famous nude calendar.

Ten years after the members first stripped off their idea has been subject to hundreds of attempted copies, each one tackier and more tasteless than the last.

But the WI ladies' remake - complete with straw hats and pearls - is as charming, witty and as English as the first.

Even so, one of the calendar models, Beryl Bamforth, is 75. The others are not much younger.

Down in Mersham the knitted village is now to be sold. The majority of the women who created it are dead and those who remain are in their Eighties.

So that old England does still exist. But only just.