Friday 8 April 2016

Rain stops play...so I have a few words to say (as usual!)

It's raining. Rain means no cycling. Andy's just sent a text and we've agreed to abort. No Westerham today, which was the plan. It'll have to wait until tomorrow – unless it rains.

Okay, so here's the deal. I've got 17% power left, which means I won't be writing for much longer. Phew! I hear you say. Well, for now, here's something to try. Try sitting on the floor cross-legged and then try to get up without using your hands or, indeed, your knees. It can be done but not by yours truly. My daughter can do it, but that's about it. In all honesty, I find it depressing. Well, not the fact that I can't stand up from a cross-legged position without using my hands or knees for support, but the programme on which I saw it being done. It was one of those programmes that make me anxious about life. You know the sort of thing: you could live to the age of 100 or more... if you are a vegan and don't drink or have any stress in your life.

In all honesty, on the food front, I'm not doing too badly. On average, I eat two vegetarian meals a week, roughly speaking. So I might have, say, lentils and rice with roasted aubergine once a week and possibly a mushroom risotto – or something similar – on another day. I tend to eat red meat just once a week – normally cottage pie, and my alcohol consumption has been drastically reduced over the last four years.

But when I watch programmes that seem to exist purely to make me feel afraid of life in general, I get depressed. I go to bed early and try to forget about human frailty, but then I wake up in the morning and it all comes flooding back.

Our plan today was to ride to Westerham and nip into the Tudor Rose for a mug of tea and some toast, but that still didn't stop me from making a bowl of cornflakes with a scattering of blueberries and a piece of toast. The healthy element of the meal was the blueberries. I've got 12% power left and guess what, the archbishop of Canterbury has had a DNA test and discovered that his old man was a diplomat and the man he thought was his father, well, he isn't! David Cameron is under pressure after it was revealed that he has been benefiting from an offshore bank account. Apparently, he's not broken the law, but he hesitated for a few days when asked a few difficult questions about his financial affairs and the story is rumbling on. Who can you trust? The answer is simple: nobody; particularly not the Prime Minister. It's the usual thing of one law for 'them' and another for 'us'.

I went on Facebook and raved about Cameron, but then, later, I realised that I'd probably have done the same thing. I mean, put it this way: if you heard today that in a couple of days from now something you created – a novel you wrote, anything – was going to net you a cool £3 million, what would you do? Well, if you did nothing you'd end up giving the honest Mr Cameron 50% of the money in taxes and that's the last thing you want to do. Me? I'd investigate how I could keep most of the money myself. To be honest, if keeping the money meant leaving the country, I'd be on the first flight out of here to wherever I could live and keep my hard-earned cash. Even if it was one of those odd scenarios where I would have to fly out of the UK once or twice a year, stay somewhere for six months and then return, I'd do it – I'd do anything – to avoid giving my money to the government. Who wouldn't? It's easy to sit there without having any money to invest in offshore accounts berating those who do, safe in the knowledge that the dilemma will never be yours to have; and that's my position if I'm honest.

Where Cameron went wrong was the way he hesitated; he must have thought 'I might be able to get away with this', but then thought, 'hold on, this ain't going away' and eventually he realised the game was up and the only way forward was good old honesty. Now you might be asking, quite rightly, even if you say that you'd do whatever you could to keep as much of your own cash as possible, you might be asking how can you trust Cameron now that he's hesitated, considered saying nothing until he realised he's been rumbled and then came out with the truth. The fact is this: you can't trust him. And that then makes you wonder about all the decisions he's making on your behalf, like supplying arms to Saudi Arabia, like supporting the Saudis despite the nation's appalling human rights record, cosying up to the Chinese, getting them involved in our nuclear power strategy, letting them ruin our national steel industry. All these things now need to be questioned for one simple reason – he's not to be trusted. Should he resign? Yes he should.

Here's a library shot of my Kona Scrap by the roadside
So there's no riding today. Apparently the weather is going to clear up as the morning progresses, but right now there's a fine drizzle and the ride is off. We've agreed to meet on the green at the same time tomorrow. The weather guys say the rain will ease off soon, which means I could ride over to mum's, but in all honesty, once a ride is cancelled due to the weather – especially rain (because the roads are wet and there are puddles, which means I still get a soaking) – it invariably means no riding. Hey ho!

Three Years Agoclick here.