Harvest Festival …….

Hands up all those people that took a tin of beans with them to their school harvest festival….
Hands up all those people that took the beans wrapper off and replaced it with another wrapper from a posh tin of salmon….

I didn’t like Harvest Festival much. My Mum never gave me anything nice to give – preferring to say that we needed food more than ‘them’. More than who, I wondered?

One day, I asked her.

"Mum, where does all the food that we give at Harvest Festival go to?"

"It goes to the poor people in the slums, the old people in hospitals and the tramps who don’t have anything to live in other than a cardboard box……
"That’s why we give them ‘beans’ – good, wholesome food in a handy tin ….. as long as those poor people have a tin opener, that is"….

I don’t think my Mum very much liked giving food away to complete strangers at all really.

My most feeble Harvest Festival gift was a few apples harvested from our manky back garden tree and a nearly unopened jar of raspberry jam. My Mum assured me they’d be ‘fine’….. All the other rich kids brought hampers as almost supplied by Fortnum and Mason’s. I felt like a right 'chav' taking my flimsy, bulimic effort up to ‘Skip’ and his troop of senior Scouters. Well I would have – if I’d known what a chav was then….

But I do now. I was fortunate to be listening to Simon Mayo on FiveLive when the 2 founders of a cult web site I’ve never heard of were being interviewed. These bods were so concerned about their safety they were using assumed names – due to the numerous death threats their contentious web site had provoked.

Intrigued, I had a quick look at the totally non contentiously titled www.chavscum.co.uk and take in some ‘cultism’…. Wall to wall Burberry, ‘Chav’ of the month and lots of other chav types, such as Neds, Townies, Kevs, Charvers, Steeks, Spides, Bazzas, Yarcos, Ratboys and Kappa Slappers. It’s clearly ‘chavery’ at its worst.

All things bright and beautiful…..not.



Blog Shares

I’ve had a quick look on the Blog Share Index to see just how incredibly vibrant, bullish and gilt edged ‘Alfie Corp’ blog stock is performing. Let’s just say I’m quietly confident, in a smug bastard, red braces, pink business newspaper kind of way.

Bloody hell – and bollocks in a Wall Street crash sort of way. It’s a cliff, it’s a vertical drop, it’s an abyss – stopped only by the bottom horizontal axis of the graph. It’s like Barings after Leeson and Ratners after Gerald, rolled into one almighty void.

It’s clear to see, Alfie Corp is in the departure lounge.

If I were you, I’d keep your pensions and endowment mortgages well away……



Pension Dodge - idea number 2

Alfie has been thinking ever so laterally lately - and has come up with a cast iron cure for the British pension crisis. All you do is make everyone in the Country a Westminster MP - all 60 million of us. That way, as soon as we shoe horn ourselves through the door, we'll all automatically qualify for an index linked,non contributionary pension.... plus to die for travel allowances and exclusive membership of the Commons overseas travel club. You know the sort of thing I mean? Trips undertaken by MPs to investigate injustice around the world. Some of the biggest problem areas have, in the past included such appallingly awful locations as Barbados, The Seychelles, Acapulco and Las Vegas.......

Back to Westminster. Admittedly, it'll be a bit of a crush getting into the lobby to vote - but I reckon that's a small price to pay - and maybe, just maybe I'll be able to rub shoulders with his Royal Blairyness......