Choices? What choices?

As local elections loom this May I wonder how many people will actually turn out and vote? For years now we’ve seen less and less choice as the three main ‘conservative’ parties get harder to tell apart and people just don’t bother anymore. It’s particularly worrying when you look at the numbers of young people voting (or not as the case may be).

Each year we seem to be getting more and more like the United States where they have a choice between two very, very rich people who will do nothing different to the one before. Just compare Obama, Bush and Clinton if you don’t believe me – they are exactly the same. They all supported the same bankers, fought the same wars and ignored their own poor people. They made promises and then forgot them.

The scary thing for UK politics of course is if we do follow them. I mean, we have already adopted rather a lot of crass American culture in recent years, e.g. crap TV, junk food, obesity, Facebook, stupidity, celebrity-worship, shit on the environment, war against countries that threaten our oil pipelines, the list goes on…

Look at social mobility (already at an all time low after Blair), if this current bunch of privately schooled clowns get their way it’ll cease to exist altogether and we’ll all be eating dirt again.

But maybe there is a small silver lining to this cloud that hangs over us? George Galloway (Respect Party) won during his ‘Bradford Spring’ and UKIP (I’m a Tory Get Me Out Of Europe!) seem to be ahead of the third place Tory party (the Lib Dems) according to the opinion polls.

So perhaps the smaller parties, the Greens, Revolutionary Communists (and dare I say BNP?) can have more of a say this time around. In Wales, Plaid Cymru have a new socialist leader in Leanne Wood which means that the Welsh Labour Party will have to pull their finger out a bit which must also be a good thing.

Compare our choices and turnout to the current French presidential election where more than 80% voted. The last time that number went to the polls in the UK was 1951. In France of course they like storming the Bastille and burning sheep but at least they care enough to walk down to the local community centre. And they have real choice – right wing nutters, left wing nutters and everything in between. They are also a republic rather than a monarchy of course. Nobody mention street parties yet!

Some countries also have compulsory voting, e.g. Australia, Luxembourg, Belgium and Greece. Personally I think we should too. That way it would force people to turn up and at the very least spoil their ballot papers. It might result in people voting for someone they really want, e.g. The Green Party rather than the least worst of the top three.

And just think about all the ridiculous laws we’d have to obey if the Monster Raving Loonies got in? Couldn’t be worse than now though eh?

Haiku #3

June rain –
you smile
before leaving

butterflies
in the spreading oak tree
– heart murmurs

White sand in my rucksack
years later
I dream of Africa

Poem: Under a bubblegum sky

Under a bubble-gum sky

a beard of a hill

grows darker

by degrees

as bats emerge from the brilliant moon

she plays piano

next door
bathed in light too

trapped in the small room

and swifts split     the pure

night canvas

accelerating time

seizing the day

but

when the last day

comes

you pray

for the bats

to stay home

Taken from Dave Lewis’s third book ‘Sawing Fallen Logs For Ladybird Houses‘.

Ducks In A Row

Let me run this particular thought grenade past you guys.

I want to start an initiative. I want to initiate it in fact. Or at the very least set up a working party to look into the feasibility of setting up an initiative.

That is, once our committee of like-minded facilitators is set up (or initiated) and we’ve outlined a way ahead for our new initiative. But I guess that goes without saying.

Anyway, to the crux of the matter! I’m going to cut straight to the chase and go for it (if the committee deems it acceptable of course) and kick off my initiative. Yes, straight away. Now. Without further ado…

Mmm? Wales. And the Welsh… Firstly, don’t get me wrong, I love Wales and even love most things Welsh (especially Katherine Jenkins, Cerys Matthews and Catherine Zeta Douglas). But let’s be honest we are hopeless when it comes to making decisions.

Scotland are going to have smaller class sizes – done! Wales spent years toying with the idea of setting up a committee to look into whether we should ban plastic bags… then finally did. Although many shops seem to charge us for paper bags as well. Not sure why that is?

Anyway this sort of inaction and indecision in our so-called government makes us the laughing stock of the Western world (Italy, Greece, Spain etc. aside). People will be saying the WRUin, the people responsible for cleaning up Ponty baths or the bright spark who decided to dig up Taff Street, demolish the precinct and just… well, leave them like it, are doing a good job next!

So that is why I’m going to start an initiative. It will be bold. It will be direct. Efficient even? It will get things done. Achieve results! I’m going to set up an initiative whose job it is to oversee other initiatives! There! How about that one?!

I’ll get government funding, yes you the taxpayers will pay. I’ll have more public money to give to my cousin’s uncle’s sister who’ll design me a web site describing my new initiative. I’ll pay my friends (out of your taxes again) to work for my initiative as well as have a well-paid board of directors to sit yearly in a posh Cardiff hotel, all expenses paid with wives, girlfriends and mistresses flown in, given free wine in order to assess the effectiveness of my initiative. Of course if they decide that the initiative isn’t working (i.e. the wine was crap) we simply re-brand it, get another web site designed by my dog and start all over again.

But that’s not all. We will have… wait for it. Pencils designed. And stickers. We may even push the boat out and have Frisbees, badges and leaflets. In fact I plan to spend eight million quid of taxpayers money on our leaflets. We’ll translate them into the most obscure dialect David Attenborough can find in Papua New Guinea (just in case they join the EU see) and Bob’s your uncle! Well actually he’s not. He’s mine, and also the director of the largest pencil making company in China, but that’s another story…

Anyway, I confidently predict that if all incentivised parties involved in our initiative can bring to the table a new and innovative approach we can impact positively in a mission-critical way and leverage our assets to sort out Wales in a jiffy.

In a nutshell we’ll soon have all our ducks in a row. Now that’s worth thinking about! And always remember – the bigger the gorilla – the more fleas he has! Need I say more?

Government Experiment

Is it me or are we all undergoing some kind of weird government experiment?

The Tory (spit as always) / Liberal (unelectable ever again Judases) Demoprats that are busy tearing up what’s left of our country told people yesterday to go and panic buy petrol, you know, like in the old days when cornflakes, teabags, bread and  RPGs were in short supply. This time though it’s fuel. The thing that costs too much, is bad for the environment, makes us lazier and fatter when we drive to the Chinkie instead of walk but that thing we still have to have.

Why experiment I hear you ask? Well, cast your minds back to when Thatcher (Dawkins rest her soul), opps sorry, wishful thinking, she’s still hanging on to life isn’t she, a bit like the Falkland Islanders… Anyway, when the little grocer got to power the first thing she did was build up the countries coal supplies for the inevitable miners strike.

Well this time of course the poor, hard-up tanker drivers (£45,000 a year salary) are going to strike and we won’t have any petrol delivered.

So? You would probably say… or at least you would have if it wasn’t for this idiotic government telling us all to illegally fill our jerry cans, wellies, dog-poo bags, pockets, your neighbours pockets, the bath, basically anything that we can store vast quantities of that highly flammable liquid in.

Well, why are they doing this? To create chaos at the pumps, to pollute the air even more while we all queue for hours on end to fill up (sorry ‘top-up’)?

No! The answer is because they know we have too much petrol available at the moment. So they want us all to buy more, then waste it, use it, squander it, nah, fill our swimming pools with it, drink it, water our gardens with it and then buy some more.

Why though? Well, it’s a win-win for the not-as-dull-as-we-thought clowns in Westminster. They get more taxes plus they create a fuel shortage! Then over Easter (nearly 2 weeks away) we won’t be able to get to work and so we’ll all hate the lorry drivers even more than we do now since we discovered they earn twice as much as a school teacher!

It’s called divide and conquer I think. But… and here’s the thing. Who is to blame for the chaos we see? Yep, you’ve guessed it – us. If we ignored these buffoons telling us what to do, like when they told us to vote for them in the first place (bet you’re kicking yourselves now eh!) then we wouldn’t have the mess on our roads now.

It reminds me of those airport carousels where we should all wait behind the line for our bags and then when we catch glimpse of said Tartan holdall with Hello Kitty badges we move forward and collect them. Oh no the selfish bastards among us (that’s 99% of us btw) decide to hog / clog / crowd the airport version of the Generation Game in search of your own cuddly toy and bloody fondue set and stop anyone else from setting eyes on their rucksack until it’s done as many laps as a Le Mans Ferrari.

And that I put down to Thatcher too. I wonder if she’d like a massive swig of petrol? I’ve got plenty in the garage.

Poem: Forest

consider this forest closing her arms around you,

precise,

ejaculating dew-dawn soaked orchids, strangled by red and blue macaws in their paradise plumage and kaolin soaked beaks, and squawks rejoicing…                                        

later,

in midnight glazed rainfall, spurting bat flocks to blue moon, citrus stains henna-hard rock high above as a river rage passion fruit film plays on (call it water fall)

who longed for the forest to feel;
   to reveal a brief clearing,
   for jaguars and otters,
   and a trillion lustrous insects,
   canny kingfishers,
   some snakes,
   a lost golden king – perhaps?

maybe,

the forest could annually bloom; fresh monkeys, and lizards, and spiders, and tapirs, and rats the size of wheelbarrows?

and the trees stay muffled with soft moss
and perfume – never slate bare
of environmental concerns

and perhaps,

the forest will gestate with poison arrow frogs and haemorrhagic diseases and be safe from dietitians and drug dealers and soldiers and miners and loggers and prospectors and rapists…

and will consider closing her arms around herself,

precise.

Taken from Dave Lewis’s second book – ‘Urban Birdsong‘.

Sticks and Stones

‘Sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me’ – that’s what I got taught at a very young age and sure enough whenever the bullies started to call me names I ignored them and they usually went away or just stopped. Now, the sticks and stones that got hurled my way that is another matter but more on that later.

Now you may not realise it but this nursery rhyme sentiment is actually reflected in the common law of civil assault, which holds that mere name-calling does not give rise to a cause of action, while putting someone in fear of physical violence does.

So, earlier this week when I heard the terrible/slightly upsetting/ah well, shit happens (when compared to the Belgium bus crash) (delete as applicable) news of the footballer whose heart stopped I thought ‘oh dear’ and moved on. It sounds like he’s now getting better which is great news btw.

Anyway, when it happened a drunken idiot (by his own omission) tweeted (if the Daily Mail is to be believed) the following:

“LOL [laugh out loud], **** Muamba. He’s dead.”

Now let’s get one thing straight, I don’t think this is very nice, in fact it’s awful, but it isn’t ‘racist’. Nor should this clown be sent to jail for ‘saying’ it.

Whatever happened to free speech? As sad and sick as it might be if he wants to say crap like that shouldn’t we defend his right to do so. Then in the next breath we should tell him what a fool he is and ask him to retract it and apologise perhaps?

It’s claimed that he then went on and did utter some racist remarks which is a shame but even so, shouldn’t we all be allowed to say ‘I hate purple people’ if we believe it? Just as long as we don’t encourage others to kill, hurt, attack etc. purple people, as that would be wrong. (Cue: extremist Muslim protesters at a city near you)

Anyway, back to those sticks and stones. Ask youself a question, which would you prefer – a bomb going off underneath you or someone shouting rude words? And this bit of sage advice comes from 1872. We would do well to learn the lessons of the past sometimes.

Support Our Troops

Support Our Troops! This is the marketing genius of the Western governments who know that none of us will ever say ‘No’ to such a statement. So we, the people, go on blindly supporting our soldiers fighting imperialist wars on behalf of a ruling elite.

But what most people fail to understand is that since the 1940s, some say centuries earlier, when Britain became pals with the USA both these countries have embarked on the same foreign policy, i.e. don’t be especially nice to anyone who stands between us and our oil. Even if it’s their oil.

And as more of our soldiers (who we do support of course) die in Afghanistan isn’t it time the media did what they are supposed to do and tell the people the truth? That none of the sacrifice that our troops are making is for the Afghan people, it’s not to stop the drug trade, it’s not to protect the human rights of women and children, after all George Bush bombed and killed many tens of thousands of women and children immediately after 11/9 because he wanted to ‘teach someone a lesson’.

No, it’s nothing to do with terrorism, in fact we’re probably more likely to be attacked the longer we stay there but the only reason we are there is to protect the oil & gas pipelines that flow from the east to the west.

When is someone going to spell this out? Are the media in on the con too? I guess so. Why? Well, they are owned by the elite, funded by the elite and so their agendas must be the same as the governing elite.  Far fetched?  OK, read this list of Top Ten lies for starters…

Question is – can we do anything about them?

Welsh Poetry Competition 2012

The 6th international Welsh Poetry Competition, 2012 is now open and accepting entries.

 

 

The judge this year is Welsh hero John Evans.

1st Prize – £300, 2nd Prize – £150 & 3rd Prize – £75 plus 17 runners up mentions in dispatches…

Just £4 to enter, poems in English, less than 50 lines and unpublished.

Entry forms available from our web site – click here.  Or send a SAE to Welsh Poetry Competition, 9 The Avenue, Pontypridd, CF37 4DF.

 

To see / read previous winners of the competition why not buy the Welsh Poetry Competition Anthology – available from the same address or buy online via PayPal here.

 

www.welshpoetry.co.uk

Poem: Boats

Boats

Water waiting

Sticky stranded seals

Cold as frozen rope

As abandoned as the night

Netted masts under skull shell sky

Breathless blood, salty seagull mud

Beached boats, beached boats

Sardine stained wood

Hollow hope

Boats

Taken from Dave Lewis’s first poetry book – ‘Layer Cake‘.

Water Water Everywhere…

How refreshing it was today to hear that the wealthy south-east have water shortages, whilst we in Wales, the north and Scotland do not!

London Mayor and complete bastard Boris Johnson has offered his fascist take on things by saying ‘…use the principle of gravity to bring surplus rain from the mountains to irrigate and refresh the breadbasket of the country in the South and East’.

No Boris! If you want our water then you can buy it! I’m thinking about 1p a litre plus £1.35 tax – the same price we have to pay for petrol maybe?

Frankly, I thing this Tory loudmouth has a cheek to ask the sodden and jobless people of the ‘wet’ areas of the UK to help repair the damage that his idol Meryl Streep did when she sold off the ‘water’ to foreign companies under her massive privatisation share scam in the 1980′s.

Of course, London could just use less water. Not everyone needs a swimming pool, sauna & jacuzzi after a hard day in the city do they?

Anyway, the problem of drought is not going away. Currently, swathes of the country from Lincolnshire to England’s south coast are either officially in drought or heading towards it, depending on the next few months’ weather. In some places, extraction of water from rivers, lakes and aquifers is already judged by the Environment Agency to be beyond what is sustainable.

But, Thames Water is Australian owned, so what do they care?

One aspect of the situation that is often ignored is this: people live elsewhere in the world with a lot less water than southern England receives and in London alone leakage accounts for a quarter of all demand!

Bloody great I say! About time the people from the south-east realised ‘we’re all in this together’

Stop Press: Free Book

Made my first poetry collection – ‘Layer Cake‘ – available FREE on Amazon kindle yesterday and within a few hours it made the Top 10 - Wow!

More on my books here.

Haiku #2

St. David’s Day –
   Eve has two daffodils
one for her doll

the seagulls battle
   with the gale
until they agree with it

students of the East
   walking
through the green wood

Bankers

It seems everyone is talking about bankers (with a capital W) and their bonuses this week, so here’s my take on it all.  Firstly, everyone is keeping on about a million pounds here or a million pounds there and we all say ‘Yeh, it’s too much etc.’ without really thinking about how much that actually is.

So, let’s compare two jobs. One pays minimum wage (i.e. the sort of job the posh school educated CEO of a bank would be doing if he hadn’t gone to said posh school), we’ll say £5 an hour. He (or she) works 40 hours a week. So, that’s £200 a week, or £10,000 a year. Now lets compare it to a typical top bankers package. He (it’s always a he) gets £2 million a year, which at 40 hours a week is roughly £40,000 a week or £1000 an hour. Now those are figures we can relate to!

But come on, let’s be honest, as all these ‘experts’ keep saying ‘It’s such a difficult job‘ and ‘They work so hard‘.  So it must follow then that these ‘experts’ must also believe that all other jobs, like nurses, fireman, teacher etc. must be ‘easy jobs’ and ‘the people don’t work hard’.

And yes, I suppose we’d all have to agree. I mean running a bank – an organisation which has literally millions of people running up to you (day and night, even when you’re shut) and giving you their ‘not-so-hard-earned’ cash to gamble on the horses, opps, sorry, stock market, is just such a difficult job. Oh, how do these bankers sleep with all that cash blocking their path to the Slumberland?!

Compare this difficult job with the ‘easy’ job of being a heart surgeon. I mean, that’s child’s play. You turn up to work, a nurse thrusts a scalpel in your hand, you slit someone open, grab a heart (make sure it’s the right way up), slap it in, connect up those fiddly little blood vessels and Bob’s still your uncle, not a corpse.

And a fireman, dragging the burnt remains of children from houses whilst they are still clutching their teddy bears, ah such an easy job that one. Not like being a banker!

Of course I blame Blair, because whilst pretending to be a socialist he actually presided over a greater widening of social mobility in Britain than occured under Thatcher! So until we abolish the class system, and create a country where real talent and hard work is rewarded, the bankers, footballers, royalty and media-created celebrities will continue to laugh all the way to their country homes.

Greening Our Towns

I used to be a member of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, you name it. If it involved pretty girls in baggy sweaters, lentils and tree hugging I was in! But since graduating I’ve been far less active, or have I? I turn off my energy efficient lights, I’ve sold my car, I hardly ever watch TV (why would I?) and put on jumpers in winter to save on the gas bill but all these things are as part of earning too little amidst rising energy costs as they are part of my green intentions.

Reducing our carbon footprint to combat climate change seems like a good thing to do even though it’s probably sun spots that we really need to worry about. Yet most people believe it’s all about denying ourselves fun, i.e. less shopping, less travel etc. but I don’t think it has to be that way and believe many changes should come from government and local authority first.

For a start let’s forget Al Gore and his nine inconvenient untruths (High Court,London, 2007), his huge global business empire and his own mansion that uses more electricity in a month than the average American household uses in a year!

We need to reinvent our towns, redesigning the way they work and changing the way we live. Many towns import their energy, most of it not green. The trick is to harness and capture the energy that is already there from the Sun, ground and air, and create local energy distribution systems.

Firstly, the buildings of today will be around for many, many years, so it’s their energy performance that must change. Keeping an even temperature inside a building means insulating them, so there should be grants or local tax incentives available to help people green their homes?

Homeowners are more sensitive to energy costs because they have to pay for them directly. But office buildings are sometimes shockingly energy-inefficient and wasteful. Have you ever wondered how ‘green’ that new primary school is, the new multi-storey car park, new supermarket or offices in town? Are they using windmills or solar panels?

Secondly, how do we get to work or go shopping? Car sharing schemes anyone? Cutting private car use generally means civic leaders being prepared to risk a few brave decisions. For example, when a new suburb was built in the German city ofFreiburg, they ran a tram service from the moment the first resident moved in. This meant empty trams at first, but now nearly half of its residents are car free. Do you have a genuine transport choice in your area?

Is it just as cheap and convenient to go by bus, tram and local train as it is by car? Until it is, heavy traffic will continue to put people off walking and cycling, which are healthiest and greenest. And why aren’t new road developments built with proper, safe cycle lanes alongside?

Thirdly, what about hugging trees? Well, first off we need trees to hug. Are lots more big trees being planted? Are acres of new allotments available for us to grow our own or are local councils looking to sell them off to housing developers? Are parks and other green spaces being properly maintained?

Greenery is critical to counterbalance urban heat from hotter summers, when night-time temperatures remain high because of heat retained by brick and tarmac. Plants only cool the air if they stay green, which means capturing heavy winter downpours instead of letting them just flood the drains.

Talking of water, storage solutions can be cunningly disguised as beautiful water features. And greening a place properly includes the roofs. InSheffield, even bus shelters have green roofs to filter pollution.

There will be something else common to all truly sustainable towns: they will be more prosperous than unsustainable ones. This is because carbon emissions are only one sign of the inefficient way in which natural resources are being used.

As resources dwindle, economic pressure will grow to use them more wisely. Future-proofing a town means creating the markets for green businesses and green technologies, and designing the space and facilities to support them. In a well-designed, sustainable city, most residents believe their progress is linked to its future.

If you are on a low income, you may have little choice about where you live. So with fuel prices soaring, you want to live somewhere served by affordable public transport. You want your local authority to help with home insulation, and invest in local green energy which will protect you from perennial price hikes.

Whether you are looking at London leading on congestion charging, or San Francisco leading on solar power or recycling, it is clear that strong civic leadership matters most of all. We need that kind of vision, backed by serious investment, when it comes to planning and managing the towns of tomorrow. Why isn’t it happening in Wales? Ask a politician to explain.

And remember, making people proud of where they live cuts crime and makes people happier too.

Drunken Big Ben

It seems that London’s famous landmark, Big Ben, is leaning. And unlike either the Labour or Tory parties, to the left as well

Not to be outdone by those clever little marketing gurus from Pisa it seems that our very own construction workers have been hard at work undermining the foundations of the Palace of Westminster with an underground multi-storey car park and extensions to the Jubilee line.

There was a slight panic when Professor Burland of Imperial College said the lean should not be a big worry for at least ’10,000 years’ but it seems he forgot that global warming will have killed us all by then and London will be well and truly flooded.

So, what best to do? Personally, I’d love to see parliment building and a leaning Big Ben sinking into the Thames but only if we can make sure it is full to capacity with politicians when this happens and all the doors are locked.

Now that spectacle would certainly generate more tourists than Italy gets!

Djemma El Fna

Djemma El Fna, Marrakech

Poem: Marrakech

Salmon-pink
city of the living
teeming, steaming, shimmering
mottled mint tea afternoons

shade seeking shade
arch beyond arch, ‘neath
a cobalt sky

shell-brown beauties
hidden behind black

creep closer, venture on

Past cropped jewels
pale olive
skin craving sunshine

until bats burst
and cobras are
bagged
the signal
for end of shift

and fires grow
and smoke fills the air

and passers-by
can only stand and stare

for a thousand thousand years
or more

Taken from Dave Lewis’s third book – ‘Sawing Fallen Logs For Ladybird Houses‘.

Cash up for Grabs

When I buy a lottery ticket I do so because I want to win the lottery. Plain and simple. But whilst I know funding from lottery cash goes to various projects around the country I’m only vaguely aware of the ‘work’ that my money does.

Today, yet another news story gave me some insightful information. Five projects across Wales will share in £1,376,049 of the Lottery Fund’s BIG Innovation programme, which aims to specifically support projects that test new ways of tackling social problems. OK, sounds great until you look at what your money is wasted on.

One study is to be carried out over concerns that students in Wales are turning to prostitution to pay for their education. Swansea University’s £489,143 grant will enable it to conduct a study into how many students are now working in the sex industry in Wales and to try to find out why (I won’t say with money like that they could become part of the problem).

Anyway, I’ll tell you ‘why’ without doing any ‘research’ at all. They do it to earn a shed load of money to buy stuff the media tells them they want. And the excuse they’ll use will be ‘to pay my rising student fees’. Right, can I have the £489,143 now please?

Another project, the Ethnic Youth Support Team (also in Swansea) has been given a grant of £169,616 to run the Think Project, which will develop new ways of working with the most disengaged young white people in Wales. The project aims to respond to the challenges posed by the growing presence of far-right extremism in the UK and Europe, and the ‘growing normalisation of racist rhetoric, attitudes and behaviour at the local and national level’.

Mmm? Well firstly, I blame any ‘growing attitudes or behaviours’ on the heaps of politically correct crap we have to endure every day. The BBC, the radio, the news, magazines. Everywhere you turn someone is calling us all racists just ‘cos we stand on the cracks in the pavement.

OK, try this. ‘Oi you bunch of lazy b******s who didn’t listen in school or appreciate the free education you got or the wonderful teachers who tried to help you, get a life, stop moaning or blaming shit on black, fat or ginger people and get a job’. How’s that? Can I have my £169,616 now please?

Yet another super-rich charity, Barnardo’s, has been given £265,572 to develop standardised assessment tools for use with teenage girls who have engaged in sexually harmful behaviour towards others. OK, I give up, what is a standardized assessment tool?

And this one really takes the nicotine flavoured biscuit! Ash Wales has received £197,272 to create an interactive site on Facebook and establish a Twitter page to give young people information about the dangers of smoking.

Now this is fantastic! I’ll do both of those things for them in half and hour so that would put me on £394,544 per hour and make me richer than Rooney!

And finally, Sight Support has been given funding of £254,446 to create a referral contact centre for people with a visual impairment in Wales. Again… how about we use the existing charities and government agencies we already have doing this already?

Is it me or is the only way to make any money in this upside down country these days to work for a charity and get some bright spark to write an impressive ‘bullshit application’ to the lottery or other funding agency?

Right, here’s an idea, how about we get ‘the most disengaged young white people in Wales’ (I’ll be one if I can) to use the cash to teach others how to fill out a lottery grant funding application form and then we’ll never be poor again. Sorted!

Meanwhile, other countries can make things.

I Love Beer Bellies

Apparently, four out of five men confess to being unhappy about their body according to an online survey by Bristol Poly, and the biggest concerns were beer bellies and lack of muscles. Well I never?

Whilst 35% said they would trade a year of their life to achieve their ideal body weight or shape I feel I must point out to these people that because of their laziness, fondness for fatty food and copious amounts of lager that they may well have already lost 10 years off their lives already!

And shock, horror, the research also suggests that it is not just women who talk among themselves about their body image. No shit Sherlock! Men have been talking about their penises for millennia.

In England and the US for example, men have been asking is it too small and will she laugh, for ages. Of course, in Wales we’ve been wondering if it’s too big or how will she cope for the same time but that’s another story…

Anyway the study found the greatest issue men have is with their muscularity, with 60% saying that their arms, chests and stomachs were not muscular enough. Guess what? There is a gym down the road and in school you had PE lessons – remember?

Dr Philippa Diedrichs, who led the study said: “Body talk reinforces the unrealistic beauty ideal which reinforces leanness and muscularity.” But what she didn’t say was that with a little bit of effort, say 1 hour, 3 times a week in the gym and a healthy diet it certainly isn’t unrealistic!

She added that “This is traditionally seen as an issue for women but our research shows that men are feeling the pressure to conform too.” To which I’d respond with you get out what you put in. You feed your body crap and let it lie on a settee watching Big Brother or some other crap then it will respond by becoming a lard magnet. Oh the pressure, oh the pressure of just being a man! For Dawkins sake take responsibility!

She also went on to say “We need to take a collaborative approach to promoting an environment that values diversity in appearance and promotes healthy body image.” Yeh, that I would agree with. It’s no good every man being a fantastic muscle-bound sex god like us Welsh is it now? No, we need other races to devise silly surveys, write stupid reports and generally feel inadequate about themselves. Yo!

Right, where did I put my extra large tape measure? Oh yes, must have left it down the gym last night.