Ear trumpet in the woods.

Crisis over - a new quote means that my books should not take a 75% hike in price (which was quite frankly, ridiculous).

Yesterday I drove to Edinburgh. It was a lovely drive. Or at least, it was until I encountered typical Scottish weather just past Lockerbie on the M74. What had started as a lovely hot sunny day became a deluge of constant unrelenting rain. One question I have for people from Livingston, is what is the huge ear trumpet that sticks out of the woods just before junction 4 of the M8? I have been wondering for some time now.

The next book: "Twinkle little star"

Has the price of books gone up dramatically over the last 12 months? I've just seen the quote for a print run of my next book, and it is around 75% more expensive than the last book.

A little trip into the M25 ring of fire.

London is a strange place to drive in. I've never actually liked driving there; once inside the M25 ring something happens to other drivers and they turn into the hooligan offspring of White Van Man and Audi Woman.

Now, I imagine there will be a fair few of you who have also driven in London and will be nodding your heads over this observation. Or perhaps you are a seasoned veteran of the capital's road network and just think "typical northern monkey". Well, try making the trip in a 44 ton lorry that is 40 feet long and 15'5" tall and see how many restrictions that there are. Not to mention poor roadsigns. Why is it that the closer you get to the centre, the less information is shown on the signs? I have a map that showed me to follow the A503. It would be nice if the signs would remind me which road that happens to be at the nonsensical junction I have approached. The thought occured to me more than once that a computer game "London rush hour lorry driver" might be a good one for adrenaline junkies. Mind those traffic wardens, cyclists and bus lane cameras.

Finsbury Park is surprisingly a nice place, despite the press it got over That mosque. I can recommend the pubs on the high street and the very friendly chicken/burger bar with the sweaty elephant's foot of Doner kebab rotating in the window. The flame grilled quarter pounder was especially nice after two hours in a down to Earth pub with a colleague. I didn't see a terrorist once.

Insert faintly amusing post title here.

I have learnt today that Arla foods in Leeds has a nice cafeteria that serves great food. I also learnt they don't take plastic in payment. Oh what a joyous 50 minutes I spent in there trying to ignore my stomach rumbling.

I get to visit the most unusual of places. Today's tally includes the factory where all the bacon in Asda comes from, a rail freight depot in Daventry that suspiciously has no rails, and a factory that makes butter allegedly with a workforce of cows if the adverts are to be believed though I beg to differ having seen the workforce for real. I also drove nearly 300 miles.

We live in interesting times - let us not forget that.

I wonder what it would be like to live in the future? No incurable diseases, bakofoil for clothes, food pills, flying cars and robots with personality disorders ("....Danger Will Robinson....!") to wipe our bottoms.

Actually, it is here. It is somewhat of an oxymoron, but we are living in the future. As I sit here on a computer with more computing power than the entire Apollo programme put together (actually, much more powerful than even the electronic innards of the Hubble telescope) and a connection at 20Mbits to most other computers around the globe sipping on my energy drink and wearing clothes made from a variety of hard wearing, low maintenance and comfortable materials reading about a possible cure for cancer on the internet as my personal mobile phone rang I have to admit that we aren't far off a version of the future envisaged by Arthur C. Clarke and his co-sci-fi writers. The flying car, however, is still grounded. But it has heated seats and cruise control so it isn't too bad.

People, we live in interesting times. Remember back to school history lessons where we learnt about things like the industrial revolution, the renaissance, the invasion of Viking hordes, the Great Depression and the coming of the telephone, the aeroplane or the railway. We live in times equally as fearsome for their technological advancement, and maybe we haven't noticed. It's easy to miss when you are exposed to change slowly on a day to day basis.

I remember a world before mobile phones, home computers and the internet. It wasn't all that long ago. It may seem like forever, but in the late 1990s the internet wasn't used for online shopping or downloading films and music. It was in some respects more of a novelty that didn't take off until ADSL broadband turned up and kicked sand in the eyes of all those 33.6 baud modems. To the younger generation: you haven't suffered until you have tried to download something important using a modem on a crackly phone line. In hell, the internet will be accessed via modem, and will be made of Flash animations and bandwidth eating pop-ups that you cannot block.

The rise of the internet alone is more significant to human history than the rise of the telephone, or even the coming of the railways. Look at how much it has changed, so radically and so quickly. We can now buy everything from our home and - in some cases like film, music and software - have it delivered instantly through a tiny cable. We can communicate with anyone around the globe without paying through the nose for it. We can even transfer huge amounts of information by the same way. Back in even the 1990s communication with overseas relatives was done with the Christmas day phone call via a crackly landline that cost a staggering £5 per minute to make. No wonder we never talked much. Now a good deal of the people I talk to every day live overseas yet I can video call them just like that in real time.

In the news recently is word that cancer may be on the verge of being cured. It is strange to think that in time this serious illness that is terminal for so many could be cured by nothing more than a course of tablets. Far fetched? Well remember this: Black Death, which killed around a fifth of the population of Europe, can now be cured by a simple course of penicillin tablets. In time maybe Cancer will be viewed as the Black Death of the 20th Century. It is amazing.

With all the stock markets in flux and commodity prices and inflation going through the roof, my parting comments will by mostly about the Great Depression and the 1926 General Strike and the Jarrow marchers. I didn't think it would take less than a century for the same shit to shaft us all twice at the hands of banker-wankers, but it has. History repeats itself because it seems that no-one in charge ever bothers listening. How true.

And finally, I see the Murdoch empire is starting to collapse. It is intriguing just how many enemies Murdoch and his cronies have made pissing people off through the various media outlets that he controls. They say when you climb the tree in business you should treat people well on the way up. Otherwise, when you fall they all take the chance to kick you to see how far you fall. Murdoch pissed a lot of people off, just like the Maxwells did a decade or more ago. There's a lot of people lining up to take a swing, and to be honest, it couldn't be happening to a more deserving bloke. Murdoch: you may feel free to sit on my raised middle digit and swivel for what you did to people I knew in my time in broadcasting.

Debts, jobs and a new book on the way.

You may have noticed that my blogging has slipped. I hang my head in shame for this. But in my defence, I have been exceptionally busy; doing the day job for around 60 hours a week as well as co-ordinating the refurbishment and improvement of our new house.

So far the library/dining room (of how pretentious it sounds) is done, as is the kitchen, office and bathroom. The back bedroom required nothing, though the front bedroom has changed out of all proportion to that which looked at us with the sad hang-dog look of peeling wallpaper and chintz curtains. All that has gone; swept away to be replaced by crisp clean walls and fitted furniture. The only thing left to do is have the carpets done which comes some time next week.

We're having our house warming party on Saturday. Some might ask why we've left it a month and a half. However the reason is simple: we wanted to be able to show the house complete, done and dusted. We wanted to avoid at all costs a party whose guided tour of the new pad consisted of telling people over and over again "Ignore this; it's going" and "If you can imagine it, we're going to be doing X, Y and Z just as soon as we get around to it". In that matter, we have succeeded.

I suppose those who come on Saturday won't truly appreciate how far we have come in a month and a half. So much has changed, but in a way that I suppose that if you did not see it before you would just think "oh, that's nice" and move on to the next room. Zoë and I will be content in knowing that we've more than left our mark on this new house - and I'm not talking about all the holes we've drilled in the walls (well, those pictures and paintings won't put themselves up you know).

Consequently I haven't had the time to do any writing. However the next book - 'Twinkle little star' is moving ever closer to publication. I've seen the cover, and it looks fantastic. I have a little space cleared on my library shelves for my proofing copy - and there are a lot of shelves in here I can tell you! Fingers crossed that it does even better than 'Bringing home the stars' did. It has a high mountain to climb to do that, but I'm confident for it.

Back to work in the morning. I went back to the other job full-time, for now, because we want the mortgage paid off as soon as possible. I have to admit that after so long in front of the keyboard day-in, day-out it is nice to get out and travel the country again. It also earns a lot of extra cash which comes in handy. I'm a strange person who has never been in debt before until this mortgage came along. I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of a debt, but it was the only way. Up until now everything I have ever bought has been bought outright. Until the mortgage is cleared, it is a necessary evil and a means to an end.

On the cost of old age.

Today I've been listening a great deal to talk about reforms of the costs of care for the old. The essence of what is being proposed is that the threshhold for getting free care may be raised from a paltry £23,000 to £100,000. It surprises me just how readily older people have been shafted up until now. It seems that those who have clearly paid a lot into the national pot over the years through taxes in order to accumulate assets and save up for their future are severely penalised as a result. Whereas those who have not bothered to save at all are rewarded at the end by not losing anything when it comes to paying for the care in their old age. Yes, I know that that is a somewhat simplistic way of expressing it, but there are a lot of people out there who worked hard to amass a future only to have that future stripmined out from under them and in some cases losing around 90% of their assets.

In my own experience I've seen one of my Grandmothers fall victim to this. The powers that be were quite happy to try and take as much as they could despite my Grandfather being alive and well (although old and registered blind). Luckily for him they had had the foresight to seperate their accounts some years before, and they were unable to take his assets; only hers. That didn't stop them trying though. A lot of old people wouldn't have been so strong and would have effectively been mugged by the state.

When you think of the lifetime of taxes that they contributed, it is somewhat scandalous. And there are so many other people in that position too. It is also something that cannot be insured against. Whilst we 'insure' against medical issues through the NHS, and insure our homes and property through other insurance schemes, we are all left at the mercy of old age and the costs that it will bring. I know that I would be furious to find that after a lifetime of paying taxes I would be expected to lose almost all of my assets over the last few years of my life. I have little doubt that many old people feel the same, as they spend their last months or years watching the state happily take everything material that was of value to them.

I strongly believe that it is about time the system changed. In a time of such austerity there may be those who question affording this. But I say that this was money that they were never entitled to, morally. If this country is to be pulled from bankruptcy, it must not be done by taking from the old and infirm.

Sunburn and steam

I managed to get sunburnt yesterday whilst driving an Alfred Dodman steam traction engine that had just passed its first steam test. It was the first time the engine had moved under its own power.

"Stick it to the man"? I should coco.

I've been pondering the subject of the public sector strikes today, not least because of my own current and annoying dealings with public sector workers of late. My tax code has been messed up, and I currently pay 50% tax because of some nebulous "tax owed from a previous year" that Inland Revenue has failed on four occasions to explain and provide details of. Each time I telephone them, and explain patiently to the call centre drone that the amount of tax they claim I owe amounts to more than I have actually earned, gross, in the last four years. Each time they agree my PAYE amounts have been miscalculated by them, and each time they then fail to remedy it after promising me that it will be remedied.

These people who are mismanaging my tax affairs, are the same people that if the papers are to be believed have been exposed mismanaging the tax affairs of several million other people in this country. I am not alone. These people are also the same people who are anxious to protect their extremely generous pension deals, and the fact that they can retire a number of years earlier than the rest of us onto a pension deal far more generous than most of the rest of us.

It annoys me when I see so many posts on the internet - often from students - trying to rally support for striking public sector workers. I suppose it is always seen as the done thing for students and many of the low paid masses to "stick it to the man" at any opportunity. And when smug-face Cameron and his Liberal tea boy side-kick come on the box, I can see the attraction of sticking it to "the man". However, let us not forget that "the man" that is being stuck at, is in fact all of us as tax payers. Just think for a moment at what this is all about. What these public sector workers - the same incompetents who are mismanaging so many people's tax affairs, and similar incompetence in so many other government departments (see national papers' exposés every week for further details) - are actually whining about is the fact that they want you and me to continue to pay over the odds in NI and tax so that they can retire several years earlier than us with a pension deal far better than us that is all PAID FOR BY US. Just remember that the next time you feel like "sticking it to the man".

Maybe when the civil service delivers value for money and does a hard days work to match all the cleaners, plumbers, builders, bus drivers, call centre operatives and so on and so on, we might entertain paying some extra from our hard earned money for their privilege. But until we see that value for money from them, the public sector does not find favour at this door to skin me and all the other hard working citizens of this country to pay for their cushy retirement.