A happy New year to our family and friends around the World

Have a great New Year to One and all

Michael and Becky are engaged on Christmas day

We are extremely pleased to announce that our son Michael has proposed to his girlfriend Rebecca (Becky she prefers) on 25th December and she has accepted. We are very happy for both of them.
Becky is the eldest of four children with two younger sister and one brother. The photo was taken 24 hours before we learn't the good news.

Christmas Cards-What an industry

This year, after considerable thought by Jennifer and me we have decided to send only e-cards to our friends overseas for the following reasons. The cost of postage and even the cost of cards seems to be increasing as well but for many years we have been buying charity cards which we hope wil make us and others feel better about spending the money. Charity cards can cost from about 30 pence upward, depending on card and charity, of which less than one third actually goes to the charity. Sending a card to Hong Kong costs about 50 pence by post and so plus the cost of the card you are somewhere near 80 pence, or more per card.
I am sure that the Charity appreciate the ten pence per card but frankly with our change of practice they will now receive about 80 pence per card or 800% more and so that is what we have done this year.
The only trouble about sending e-cards and also receiving them is that the only person who know about the card is the person who has sent it and the person who receives it and often the rest of the family do not know of its existence.
My new wheeze in future will be when receiving an e-card is to write their name on a new card and place it along with the others. This has two advantages in that
you can re-use it year and if you cheat a bit you show off the hundreds of cards you have received from around the world. Well perhaps not...
Anyway, for us e-cards with a donation to a charity of your choice is fully acceptable to us as the charities desperately need the cash

So in the meantime have a great Christmas and a Happy new Year.

The 'Rule of Law'

Whatever happened to good old honest 'Rule of Law'???

The politicians, who pay NO UK Tax also cheat on their expense claims in such a manner as to make you feel embarrassed to be British.

Chequer's The Prime Minister's Weekend Residence

I can well understand why the Scottish and Welsh want home rule and they can have proving the rest of the country doesn't have to bail them out each week. Perhaps the Scottish Parliament would like to take in all the Scottish based MP's and Lords and that could save us some money. Dar Gordon and his family have free accommodation at Number 10 Downing Street, actually they live in Number 11 as its bigger, and they also have full access to Chequers, A London Apartment which is fully Let and a home somewhere in the hills in Scotland. Not a bad property selection really but after all of this he has seemed fit to claim for the painting of his Garden Shed to the cost of £500 of Taxpayers (MY)money.

Crime has escalated in the last few year mainly due to the Police spending more time on form filling than actually guarding the streets from killers and rapist and the like. Billions of pounds have spent on schooling but we have thousands of teenager leaving school who cannot read and write and the only income they can get is 'dole money' and by joining the criminal elite. And if you are unemployed you can spend a little time in bed creating the next generation of unemployed. A youngish unmarried couple have just had twins on top of their two other children and apart from free housing they collect £25000 per annum form Government benefits. Its so tough for them that they pay £ 50 per month for cable TV and have just changed their BMW for an Alfa-Romeo??? How is this possible??

The troops in Afghanistan are probably wasting their time and must beginning to hate the locals who keep blowing up their mates. We are not going to win this war. The Russians failed and so did the Brits before. The current Iraq hearing, although somewhat censored, is beginning show that Sadam Blair lied through his teeth to his fellow MP's whilst Whitehall MOD were telling the General's how to run the war. If the MP's cannot complete their expenses form correctly how can they expect to control a war a few thousand mile away.

The good news is its snowing and expected to snow for the next few days which will ensure that absenteeism increases in the government sector whilst the rest of the population soldier on. On the other hand we don't have hardly any stock of 'Road Salt' to put on the icy roads and so that puts up the accident rate.
Well that's enough moaning for today.

Whoops, almost forget to mention the MP's Christmas Holiday is an unprecedented three week- say no more....

The Copenhagen Conference-What a screw up

What a lot of old twaddle is this conference in Copenhagen which is hoping to solve the worlds pollution problems and also the changing weather climates in various parts of the world.I agree that it should happen but the process of paying other countries for the past errors and hope that the money is spent on assisting the population to overcome those challenges wil not make the slightest bit of difference. In the past the richer economies have helped the poor countries particularly when starvation is affecting large amounts of people, remember Ethiopia and Bob Geldorf. We all pumped large amounts of cash in to this country and they still have the same problems. I have had close family and friends working here and they agreed that no matter how much you pump in to the country it always ends up in the wrong hands. I wont mention the Billions of Dollars 'sort of mislaid or uncounted for in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Scientist's have been predicting the end of the world as we know it today and are recommending that we spending vast fortunes on a mixture of solutions. eg
Carbon Capture (not proven to work), millions of acres of solar panels, wave and sea power to help supply the required amount of electricity and also Nuclear Fusion. I haven't mentioned the acres of windmills and the work that the petrol companies are doing to introduce new forms of engines to power car using either bio-diesel or the new idea of green algae to create Hydrogen gas to drive vehicles. Over 150 private aircraft have landed at Copenhagen in the last few days and even George (simpleton) Brown flew in a private plane only a couple of hours after the Price of Wales also used a private jet. Over 800 vehicles are being used (non of them apart from two are non-pollution types) are being used to ferry the delegates around whilst they do their Christmas Shopping and visit the little mermaid and the Tivoli Gardens.I remember the UK in the 1960's when there were few cars on the road etc etc. Look at New Zealand today where there is no locally produced pollution as the headcount is low. Can you imagine only 4.5 million people in England, what bliss!!Prior to the arrival of the attendees the Danish Government placed leaflets in all of the Hotel rooms advising all participants not to contact the local prostitutes. This really upset the Copenhagen based 'Ladies of the night' and so they offered 'free sex' if you arrive with said leaflet. What is so stupid about all of this is that the problems we are causing this world are of our own making and are solely due to 'sex'.
The answer to all the problems is as per the following photo and given time then the population will decrease and the pollution problems will dissipate.

I’ve been got at

Well I suppose it was going to happen but in a surprising way.

On last Friday afternoon in mid afternoon there was a knock on the door and a courier in a motorcycle helmet hands over a small parcel with 'ere mate this is for you' .He then turned round and left and not even asking for a signature.

So as the largish purple plastic packed parcel was addressed to me I opened it and to my surprise found two Hi-Tech items, one an Apple Ipod-Touch and a TomTom Sat/Nav. Wow I thought perhaps Jennifer ordered them for me as a surprise Christmas present but NO!! We are saving money she said so it wasn't me. So I checked with Michael and Joanne and neither knew anything about it.

Upon phoning the supplier a mail order house called 'VERY' I asked what credit card had been used for this purchase anticipating it was connected to last week's entry but no again. It would appear to be a case Identity theft as when checking with supplier they had my full address detail's, telephone number and surprisingly my date of birth, Whoa where did they get that from??

It came as a complete surprise to me that you could just phone up and open a credit account without providing any payment method and just order six hundred pounds of the latest gizmo's and they would send it out. It would appear they had run a credit check on me and therefore the item was despatched to our home address. Wow I thought, when I was working some years ago my company would never have given that amount of credit to a customer without the accounts department getting three forms completed, multiple signatures and running bank check etc. How stupid are Very in their process.

When speaking to the Fraud Department at Very they were a little surprised at what had happened as it would appear that fraudsters use one of two of the following methods. The first order placed must be despatched to the registered home address and therefore a small item is ordered, of little value, but 24 hours later they order items worth a lot more and they are allowed to send it to a different address. So it looks like the fraudsters on my case screwed up.

I was advised also to be careful who you meet at your front door as fraudsters have been known to wait for the parcel to arrive by the official courier and then call at the house and apologise for the mistake and take the item away. They can get violent if you deny that you have received this parcel.

I have an ID Aware programme in place and so consulted them on what action to take whilst VERY would report this episode to CIFAS which is an anti-ID fraud organisation and this will know appear on my credit report but not upsetting my financial status.

Boy, did I not need this hassle when we had friends arriving for dinner in about one hour.

Did anybody read in the paper about the guys who broke in to a clothing warehouse in Wales and then left the scene after the robbery and drove their quad bikes at four o'clock in the morning down the main rail track expecting no trains but one did come along and killed two of the lads. Rough justice perhaps!!

Anyway, Christmas and New Year is approaching fast and we are expecting a full house on the 31 December to see in the new year with friends from our neighbourhood and we are both looking forward to this very much

A few days after this we shall be departing for Miami, Florida where we will travel around the State and then head off to Austin in Texas via New Orleans for a couple of weeks and sampling some Cajun food enroute

Credit Cards

Yesterday evening I received an automated call from Barclaycard telling me there was a chance of fraud on my MasterCard. But first I had to answer correctly multiple questions about who I was, date of birth etc until they came to the bit about, do I confirm if I made the following transactions.
There was a long list of transaction for £ 385.00 for ladies shoes and also £375.00 for some books and so on, about £ 1000.00 worth of stuff it sounded like.
So finally after about nine minutes of answering YES or NO by pressing the mobile phone keys I got to receive the opportunity to speak to YES ' a person' yes a real human being, this time from deepest BOMBAY. Now here I got even more suspicious as perhaps it was this chap just checking to see if I mind him using my card but NO it was the genuine article and so our cards are now cut up waiting for new ones. Here begs the question of how that 'someone' obtained our card details. Interestingly the date of use was Tuesday and Wednesday this week when neither Jennifer or I went near a shop or even used a credit card.
Oh the wonders of modern technology with the chip and pin which would solve the chance of fraud.
In the mean time if you had to deal with an internet problem this is most appropriate

It's worth a read

This article by Jeremy Clarkson was in this week's Sunday Times but has since been 'pulled' - probably by the subject of the article, Peter Mandelson. So much for free speech. But poor old manglebum fails to appreciate how the blogsphere works and in no time the article finds itself going viral round the world. Wonderful. Enjoy it - and feel free to pass it on if you enjoyed it.....

Jeremy Clarkson

Sunday Times 8/11/09

I have given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I am afraid I’ve decided that it’s no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I’m afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn’t alive any more.
He announced last week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the country’s top universities even if they have 4,000 A-levels, because all the places will be taken by Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the conniving idiot has leapt

I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn’t bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he’s resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.

There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can’t see the point because she won’t be going to university, because she doesn’t have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don’t live in America.

Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can’t stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can’t understand why they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation’s capital. They can’t understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can’t understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4x4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it’s racist.

And they see Alistair Darling handing over all of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn’t understand because he’s a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.

It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly, and you can’t go to Italy because you’ll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse’s head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for organising a plumber.

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can’t go to Spain because you’re not called Del and you weren’t involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can’t go to Germany ... because you just can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

Canada’s full of people pretending to be French, South Africa’s too risky, Russia’s worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too full of flies or too full of people who want to cut your head off on the internet. So you can dream all you like about upping sticks and moving to a country that doesn’t help itself to half of everything you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you go you’ll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an orange jumpsuit, gently wetting yourself on the web. All of these things are worse than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the wheel.

I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it’s been for decades, but the lunatics who’ve made it so ghastly are on their way out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South African nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run by a bloke whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly, a twerp in Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on the lecture circuit.

So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think it’s a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit. in the meantime.


"In retrospect it becomes clear that hindsight is definitely overrated!" Alfred E. Newman

Tim and Joanne's Wedding Poems

During the service at the Weybridge registry Office, Tim's mother Christine read out a poem she had written for this special occasion. It is transcribed below.

RECIPE FOR A HAPPY MARRIAGE

Tell her you love her every day,

Kiss her good morning and goodnight,

Keep faith with her throughout the years,

Sharing happiness, joys and tears.

Tell him you love him every day,

Kiss him good morning and goodnight.

Keep faith with him throughout the years,

Sharing happiness, joys and tears.

Be true to each other in word and in deed,

Let each others' happiness be your creed,

Whatever happens in your future life,

Stand together as husband and wife,

For no one else can take from you,

A love that is steadfast and grows ever new,

For love that is patient and always kind

Will unite you in heart and in mind.

As you embark on your new life together

We your parents and friends share your happiness too,

Our good wishes and love will surround you always,

Not just on this happiest day of days.

Whilst Noel read out the following poem as part of his 'Father of the Bride speech'

Love

by
Roy Croft

I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am when I am with you.

I love you,
Not only for what you have made of yourself,
But for what you are making of me.

I love you for
the part of me that you bring out

I love you because you have done
More than any creed
Could have done
To make me good,
And more than any fate
Could have done
To make me happy.

You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.
You have done it by being yourself.
Perhaps that is what
being a friend means, after all.

The rest of the poem is quite long you can find it on the internet but I thought that it made an awful lot of sense.

Tim and Joanne's Wedding 7th November 2009

Well, for the last few days we have been gearing up for the wedding of Tim and Joanne and finally the day has arrived. The sun was shining as Joanne left to have her hair done, then after a light snack for lunch we all headed off to the Weybridge Registry office for the formal part of the day.
The service was about 30 minutes long and was in a very nice room which easily allowed the 30 people who attended space to see the action. We then went outside for photographs in the sun, Yes the sun was shining all day and the temperature was around 13C, not bad for November.
Following the official part of the day we all departed to the Hurtwood Inn Hotel which is located approximately 25 miles away in Peaslake near Guildford. This is a beautiful part of the country and the Hotel is surrounded by rolling hills filled with sheep.
The reception was quite small just close family and friends, making for a lovely intimate occasion. The Hotel did a sterling job in keeping the event running and provided a lovely buffet which we all enjoyed.
The speeches were opened by Tim and then Joanne followed by David, Tim's elder brother who said that it was impossible to find any faults with Tim for him to expand on. Noel then did his Father of the Bride speech which had humour, facts, more humour and then an initiation for Tim into the Groves very special 'Parrot Club'.
As this was always going to be a quiet and private function Noel had some tricks up his sleeve including T-Shirts for the men with old photos of Joanne as a Brownie and Tim in his Robin Hood outfit, both photos were taken when they were about seven years old. Noel also had two shirts which were covered with other photos of Joanne at varying ages,these were worn to great effect by Noel and Michael.
In the evening a few other friends arrived for a quiet drink in the private room and the event finished about midnight when everybody was getting a little tired.
On Sunday morning we all left the Hotel around 11.30 and then Joanne and Tim were heading off to Dunster in Devon for their honeymoon for one week.
We wish them well in their new life together as man and wife.

NB. All wedding photos are on the Phanfare Picture Blog, so follow the link to
http://noelgroves.phanfare.com/4432050#imageID=85879007

The Albert Hall

Joanne was participating in the Cancer Research Charity function being organised at the Albert Hall last Saturday with 1600 other Choir members and musical support from Grime Thorpe Colliery Band and Brighouse and Rastrick Band.
Prior to arriving at the Albert Hall we did a little shopping in Kensington and then went to Whole Foods to have a look round and then decided to have a light dinner in the pasta restaurant. A starter and main course for us both and a nice bottle of wine all for £ 37.00 was not bad and NO tips!!
The Albert was pretty much full for this event and as we had left it a little bit late to book our tickets we were located very close to the British Airways 747 flying over the top of the building. The huge organ was magnificent if not a little loud as it easily outplayed the 1600 voices as times. The Bands were great and really excelled when they played tunes that they new very well and not the songs picked for the occasion.
Perhaps the excess heat of the building which tends to rise and partly affected  my views a lilttle but to it was such a shame not have more well known tunes than they did as both the choir and the band excelled with the well known more popular pieces. I understood it took three years to organise  this concerty which may have been due to the conductor apparently keep changing his mind over the songs to be sung and favoured some from his Yorkshire home rather than those well known in the rest of the country..
A number of people werre being treated for heat by the St Johns Ambulance and so I am not sure what happened to the air conditioning, or perhaps there is none, in this beatifull building where so much has been spent on renovation.

As it was Halloween there were many parties obviously taking place and there were lots of late teens and early to late twenties dressed up for the evening and perhaps it was all these ghouls that stopped the underground running efficiantly. Standing on the platform to hear the announcments of the parts of the tube network not running that night, makes me worry how they will cope with the Olympics!!!