Grumpy old git..........

As I get older I guess I am getting grumpier.

What I find particularly annoying is the amount of pish and tosh, garbage and rubbish, balderdash and piffle that we have to endure daily from the chattering classes. Ignorance mixed with arrogance topped with indolence.

By way of example, there was this young spark on Radio 3 telling us that ‘today, September 15^th, is the anniversary of the Battle of Britain when the RAF defeated the Luftwaffe; over 300 of their planes were shot down, and the RAF only lost 31’, as if the BoB all took place on a single day.

Wrong, sonny. It lasted all summer. September 15^th was the day that the RAF knew they had won because nobody came. And nobody got shot down.

And I didn’t see any commemoration on TV or in the media.

I know it is easy for my generation to be critical of the lack of knowledge of our history by a younger generation. After all, the BoB is as remote from today’s 20-year old as the Battle of Omdurman was when I was 20. But the Battle of Britain film has been showing almost continuously for more than 40 years, so surely most people would have seen it by now.

Then we had the numpty on TV telling us that water was flowing down a Scottish river ‘at 20 knots per hour’. And a performance of ‘HMS Pinafore’ (admittedly Aussie) with the Captain sporting a moustache. Give me strength!

There was a TV show this week about the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The commentator referred to ‘enlisted men’. Only the Yanks have ‘enlisted men’, matey. We have ‘other ranks’ or, more generally ‘squaddies’. Incidentally, I was also appalled by the foul language used by the instructors. When I was an officer cadet, this was an absolute no-no. The instructors were there to train young men from all sorts of back grounds to be ‘officers and gentlemen’, not yobs with posh accents. Shortly after I was commissioned, I used the word ‘bloody’ when dressing down a scruffy squaddie. I got a roasting from the Company Commander who happened to overhear me. I never did it again.

The DT carried a ‘humorous’ piece about the Battle of Dale Farm. The writer said the land on which the ‘travellers’ had built their illegal dwellings was not an unspoilt piece of greenbelt but a former scrap-yard. It wasn’t. It was woodland and open farm-land.

All these incidents were scripted, not off-the-cuff. The perpetrators had not bothered to follow the elementary rule of journalism – check your facts. It’s not only the ignorance that gets up my nose. It’s the sheer laziness.

To add to my grumpiness, we had a red-haired youth by the name of Danny Alexander, who is Treasury Secretary or something (Lib-Dim, of course) who seriously told Jeff Randall on TV that the UK ‘should join the euro when the time is right!’ No wonder the government is in the merde if he is in charge of the books.

On a lighter note, the recent death of the great actress Googie Withers, reminded me of the announcer on a BBC comedy show years ago who said ‘And now your very own Googie Withers - and what to do if it does!’  Auntie has always been a bit naughty.

And all this talk of ‘productivity’ reminds of an official trip to Germany many years ago. A member of the party was a Yorkshire coal miner in his day job, by the splendid name of Jim Hawkins. One of the German hosts politely asked him ‘Und how many men vork in your mine, Jim?’

‘About two of the booggers’ he replied. The German stood there, eyes revolving.