Garry Potter And The Same Old Nonsense, David Backhim [the mitten read aloud txt] 📗

get up in the morning, have a shower, go outside, and get soaked going to work in a shower. I get to work. My colleagues are an absolute shower ( and some of them need a shower). When I go out for lunch, I am in another shower. When work is finished, I go home in yet another shower, and on reaching home I settle down to watch the shower that masquerades as entertainment on television. I then go out in a shower and join the shower at the local pub where I shower myself with booze, before returning home in another shower. I then finish the day by having another shower.

THIEVES LIKE US
Every time that I step into a supermarket, an announcement immediately goes out in the store’s intercom: “could all security personnel return to their close circuit television screens at once”. I can no longer go shop-lifting, without fear of being watched and intimidated. What is this society coming to? Worst of all, supermarkets are just a social club where folks meet one another and exchange progress reports on their lengthy wait for a hip replacement operation. Then you get those couples who wish to share their dietary habits with an unwilling audience: “love, don’t get those baked beans again; you know they don’t agree with me.”

IN THE SUMMERTIME
You can always tell when summer has truly arrived: yet another Brit gets knocked out in the quarter-finals at Wimbledon, the England football team lose another penalty kick shoot-out in a major finals, train drivers on the London Underground take industrial action, and French air traffic controllers go on strike. I cannot wait for the next summer holidays, when my family spend the large majority of our two-week vacation at Heathrow Airport .

HOUSE-SHARING
Sharing a house with other people is perhaps second only to raising children as the hardest task in the world. It is difficult enough to live with one’s family and loved ones, so how much more taxing is it to share a house with complete strangers? House-sharing is almost a rite of passage for all students nowadays. Perhaps the only consolation with sharing a home with strangers is how ‘educational’ it is to survive in the company of people from different walks of life, with their assorted attitudes and values.
I recently shared a humble abode in London, where a man moved in, who told me that he had been living in the Belmarsh area of east London for the previous eight years. Shortly after, a young woman moved in to our house. She apparently had been living in the Holloway area of north London for the previous six months. Not long afterwards, a gentleman who had spent the last twenty years residing in the Broadmoor area also moved in. Well, all I can say is that I don’t know what these areas are like or what kind of upbringing these individuals have had, but ever since they moved in, a lot of items have gone missing in the house.

GAMBLING
There is a myth that book-makers cannot be beaten. In fact, I have been helpfully told that you will rarely (if ever) see a bookie on a bike – more likely in a BMW or Mercedes. However, my mixed fortunes as a gambler have demonstrated that you can change your life for better or for worse by having a hopeful punt. I came close to cracking the code to the safe, but ultimately I painfully discovered that gambling is one step forward, two steps back. I used to win big, but lose very big too. I was not interested in fun bets of a few pounds. I failed to see the thrill in having a silly little bet on a horse in a twenty-horse race, whose chances of winning, despite its’ proven track record, was basically one in twenty. The best gambles, in my semi-humble opinion, ought to be based on studying the mathematical probability of various outcomes, whilst ignoring the obvious. After all, if the obvious certainties really were certainties, then book-makers would never win, which isn’t exactly the case. I concentrated on singles bets where I backed one football team to beat another or one horse to finish ahead of another. In these instances, there are two possible outcomes for the latter bet and three different potential outcomes for the former scenario. Anybody who invests in accumulators is badly mistaken. Such bets were deliberately created by book-makers in the safe knowledge that the chances of winning are remote. Those football punters who for example back a mere four teams to win their respective matches should understand that the mathematical probability of this, irrespective of so-called form, is 1 in 81, although you won’t find the clever book-makers paying out £81 if you invest £1. Even this smart alec discovered that backing one cricket or rugby team to beat another is not as simple as it seems. I mean, if it were a straight-forward path to riches, do you think that I would feel the need to write this book?
I could repeat the old cliché that my only gambling problem was losing, but the major trouble that I have with gambling is that one tends to end up adopting a gambling psyche in other areas of one’s life. Gambling on football, greyhounds, and horses is one thing, but taking gambles in the traffic lane on the motorway, or gambling with other people’s lives is far more serious.

TEXTING
God forgive me, but I despise people who are constantly texting, instead of talking. Texting was invented for teenagers and people who cannot spell. By the time that you have reached 22 ( and almost come of age) you should be growing out of texting and short trousers. Instead of which, I am surrounded by chavs who want to communicate in code to one another. Worst of all are the insecure types: “my boyfriend hasn’t spoken to me in fifteen minutes. I’d better send him a text.” Get yourselves a life!

OUR PERVERSE SOCIETY
No, I am not going to pour scorn on the breath-taking hypocrisy of tabloid newspapers that scream outrage at the activities of a paedophile on one page while sexily portraying a teen sensation on the facing page.Instead, I am more concerned at the growing trend in the summer of men wearing shorts, while women wear trousers. Can there be anything more perverse than men showing off their hairy legs, and women hiding their (hairy) legs? Worst of all, a heatwave gives license to all sorts of less than attractive people to go out shopping, scantily clad. Yuk! If that is not bad enough, we have to endure the sight of seventy-somethings wearing shorts, sandals, and grey socks. I look at these coffin dodgers, and I wonder to myself about how we ever managed to win two world wars. (Disclaimer: the United States and France helped a bit too.) I then realise the truth: that granddad, rest his soul, landed on the beaches at Anzio or Normandy in his shorts, sandals, and grey socks. The Germans took one look at him, dropped their guns, and quite understandably made a run for it.

LONDON BUSES
A lot of people are frustrated by the tendency for London buses to be absent for fifteen minutes or more and then at least two appear at once. I , moreover, am perplexed by the enormous amount of London buses that are all travelling to a mysterious destination, entitled ‘Not In Service’. Could anyone in Greater London kindly inform me where this location Not In Service is? I must protest in the strongest terms at the large volume of buses all apparently going to this Not In Service area, which is clearly under-populated, because there is never any passengers on this route. I would humbly suggest that London United runs fewer buses to the Not In Service locality, because the route isn’t very popular, and concentrate on providing more buses to more populated areas. I would also like to draw attention to the bus passengers in London and elsewhere who choose to sit in the ‘aisle seat’ and not occupy the window seat so that nobody can sit next to them. They even feel that their bags of shopping are entitled to a seat whilst others on the bus have to stand. To all those ignorant men and women who feel that their bus ticket provides them with not one but two seats, shame on you.

BRITISH MUSLIMS
Being a semi-brave soul, or perhaps a fool with a death wish, I shall dare to speak on the controversial subject of Muslims in Britain . What fascinates me is that a lot of Muslims leave Asia and the Middle East for a better life in Britain, where they have expectations of a home, a job or state benefits in the absence of employment, as well as all the legal protection and human rights that are apportioned to any British citizen. However, a point that needs to be addressed to all immigrants, particularly Muslims, is that Britain has expectations of its’ new residents. Britain expects its’ new members to obey all areas of the law, and among other things, new citizens are expected to raise their children in the education system in much the same way as everyone else is required.
However, what we find increasingly is that many people come to Britain and ghettoise themselves, and form de facto independent states within specific areas of various British urban localities. This ‘ourselves alone’ separatism manifests itself in such ways as Muslims wishing to have separate education in which their offspring are perhaps taught values and attitudes which are at a tangent from what non-Muslims accept or expect. Yes, I am all for individuality and not necessarily mind-numbing conformity. However, fears are being raised that the extreme fascist followers of Islam would gladly introduce sharia law to parts of Britain . What is worse is when the Islamic extremists, egged on by their liberal, politically correct solicitors, complain that Britain is a police state. It would be outrageous