Why so many posts in a day

Dashed sorry about all the posts on the opening day but had to move them from elsewhere as it was getting no attention and one thrives on attention, don't you know?

I would love to stay and chat but I have to pick up Maddy and give her a lift down to Much Vexing where she is helping to organise the village fete.

Perhaps next time...

The debt owed BY the new generation

I was propping up the bar down at the Surfeit of Lamprey last week with my old friend and fellow Peterville & Gonewylde man, Nigel Snipe-Razzel when we were joined by Henry. I should be more specific. I mean, of course, my long suffering brother-in-law, Henry Treadsoftly who is married to my sister, Hildebrande.

"Given a pass for an hour, old boy?" asked Nigel, with one of those grins.

"Oh, er, yes" Henry nodded "Hildebrande has gone off with the ladies of the Much Vexing Music Society to London. Apparently, they are seeing the premier of a new piece by Godfrey Overblown-Blythe."

"It's atonal" he added in a tone of dry distaste.

I digress, though. The issue I wanted to get onto was student costs. It came up because Henry and Hildebrande had laid on a meal for our nephew, Paul, my youngest brother's boy. He has just finished his last year at Warwick and is expecting a two-one or first in Business Dymanics & Demographic Accountancy. I am told it's going to be the in-demand skill over the next decade. William, being William refused to come to the rest of the family either to get the boy into a decent Cambridge college or for money so the lad is in debt to the tune of 16k before he has even started.

What I don't understand is why sucessive governments of this country thought that everyone needs to go to University in the first place. In my day, the top one to two per cent went, they were supported by grants and they came out and got decent jobs. Now, we are told that over half the pupils in the country are to go on to further education. At that level the country cannot afford grants or other intervention. Instead, we have a scheme that sucks them into a cycle of debt that many of them will not get out of for years after they qualify.

You know what this is about, don't you? It keeps the unemployment figures down while the interest fills the coffers of government. The losers are the students, of course. Set high goals, they go off, believing they have a bright future, come out the other end of this educational sausage machine and find the job pool won't support that many graduates so they end up working as agents in a call centre or in a pizza bar earning under twelve thousand a year.

And do you know how much it costs the parents if they choose to pay the fees and expenses for their progeny? About twenty thousand a year, I'm told, now. That's a fair whack even for us supposedly well-heeled types.

What I don't understand is why there is any problem with leaving school and becoming an electrician or a plumber. Lord knows, they cost me enough to bring in when there is work at the manor. I don't believe I have ever met a poor plumber, electrician or tree surgeon. They all tell me they are in demand and I can now believe it. The chaps who would have joined those ranks have all gone to university to study Applied Psychology or worse, Politics. (Although the latter isn't what it used to be. You can't even get your moat cleaned out on expenses, these days)

I have some sympathy with the young despite their noisy music, taste in clothes and that facebook thing. To be given aspirations and then let down is no way to begin your working life.

A snifter or two?

Had a quick one up at the Surfeit of Lamprey with an old school chum, Jeremy Enjoyse-Silk. He is resting, at the moment. You may recall him as the lead in that dashed thing a few years back where he played the head of a rich family and had affairs with various women characters while making and losing millions when the Southsea bubble burst. Must have been five or six years ago, now.

Anyway, we had a bit of a discussion about this matter of lowering the drink drive limit. Dashed if I care, really as I don't drive myself and I never permit my chauffeurs to drink alchohol on duty, don't you know. Seems to me, though, that it isn't the limit that is at issue.

It's this culture we have. I remember back at college how it was considered somehow heroic to get smashed every night. Trouble is, people don't grow up and keep doing it long after its sensible, if it ever was. Now I'm alright with the chaps going out after a big sporting event or whatever and having a few provided they take the train afterwards. But I must say, the village suffers its few disturbances every summer from groups arriving, drinking too much and then making a lot of noise and harassing folk.

Last summer, a group of rowdy young men and women decided they would remove the statuary along the top of the manor's west wall. I mean, dash it all, those were put up there in the 18th century. Some of those pieces were irreplacable. Fortunately, they only got two down before they were chased off by the staff. The local constabulary seemed to think it was a bit of a joke, which upset me more than the damage, at the time and I told them so. If the police don't react more seriously to vandalism, well, what chance do we have? You'd think, living in a police state, that property owners and upstanding members of the community would get more respect and help than they do. They seemed more interested in questioning my staff and I on how the chasing off had been conducted than catching the miscreants.

£6k it cost to replace those two pieces. Do you think six thousand pounds of damage is acceptable? I don't.

No, you won't change anything by altering the limits although make it one pint and I'd still be happy. It's the drink culture you have to change and it starts with making arrests as people get into cars at the pub and with a serious response to this unacceptable yob behaviour that bullies, worries and upsets ordinary folk.

On cones and motorway travel

Fifty is now the new seventy on motorways across our country. Perhaps it is just me being an old cynic or perhaps it is the inefficiency of over-burdened business these days but it seems to me, that only a year or so on from three years of roadworks on the M1 that one might have hoped to enjoy travelling in one's chauffeur driven limousine at seventy rather than fifty as soon as one got a few miles north of the original site for these interminable works.

It looks like a government sponsored scheme to catch frustrated motorists with the towering yellow "average speed cameras" that lurk along our roadsides like something out of "War of the Worlds" only without the grace to die off from the common cold and bother us no more. I have seen some with notices leaned against them stating they are not in use, so thinking about it, perhaps they are invaders from the red planet put to use in an alliance with the highways agency and the Department of Meanness & Disservice.

It wouldn't be so bad if these chaps were working all along the stretch which they close down but I saw a few hundred yards of work and plant and then twenty odd miles of cones before there were three machines in a fifty yard space and then nothing until the torture ceased.

Have you also noticed that even when they do finish, they leave signage and other stuff around. Often you will come into a patch with two fifty signs still standing before you realise, they have just been abandoned when the invasion ended and enough motorists had been defeated. Obviously, the profits from this roadside extortion and grief are sufficient that you can idly chuck away equipment when you are done.

I must look up the old school list and see if any of my chaps have jobs as civil servants or ministers in the DoMD. Otherwise I'll have to bang on at our local mp, again. Ah for the times when my ancestors would have hounded after the progenitor of such mean-spirited and badly organised works with a riding crop or a blunderbuss!

The gates of the manor open

So, against my better judgement and with much nagging from Lady Madelaine, I have agreed to open the grounds of Offputting Manor once a week to the unwashed masses. I know I shall regret this. I should have turned it into a golf course like everyone else is doing, these days, dammit!

Me? Well Squire Townshend St John De Grincheaux, of course! Who did you think I was, a damn tradesman?! And that's pronounced Town-shh-end Singe-en De Grinch-o. Singen not Saint John. Don't they teach you people anything at school, these days? Why when I was at Warboys, you'd have got one across the knuckles for pronouncing a good English name so sloppily.

I daresay the opening of the grounds will be the talk of Hogenroast Malpractice for some weeks. A subject of even greater tittle tattle than the annual garden show. And while we are on the subject of pronunciation, the proper way to say that is "Hoonroast", the g is silent. Roll it around your tongue and you'll get it right, eventually.

I daresay the ancestors will be turning in their graves at the idea of the greater populace treading our ancient lawns. If the stories are true, George, the third baronet used to hunt poachers with a blunderbuss and pickle stirrer across the fields and gardens of the manor.

Well don't stand around gawping. Haven't you got some honest work to be getting on with?