The Grumpy Old Blog

The spotlight, fame, autograph-giving, fortune, the high-life, in fact everything associated with stardom is about to come my way. Yes, I'm about to star on the lower screen of a TV advertisement for a deodorant as one of the 79% of 221 people surveyed who agreed. With their guff. Mitchum, the deodorant people, collared me in my local supermarket in connection with this potential fame-making opportunity. A nice looking young lady, clip-boarded, rather microclimatically clothed to make a man of my age look at her twice, with the added value of no tattoos and all her own, rather than a set of purchased, teeth. In exchange for the aforementioned spotlight, fame, autograph-giving, fortune and the high-life I was actually given a bottle of Mitchum roll-on deodorant, but hey, beggars can't be choosers. I was asked a series of bland, tick-box questions (disguised as market research) about my deodorant-buying habits. I didn't have to lie to the aforementioned microclimaticall...

Well, to all my dear American friends, I have a suspicion you are shortly going to get the President you deserve. A slight saving grace is that the second term for President Obama has meant there is now not so much of a bar, but more of a skewer to be raised by his successor. On the one hand, one candidate seems to have a continual bad hair day, while the other enjoys a continual bad hair do. That the largest democracy in the world has to choose between Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber, seems to make the human pot-noodle, Kim Jong-un, somewhat of an attractive proposition. Of course we in the UK can't talk. We are in the unenviable position of having a leader of Her Majesty's Opposition akin to a school teacher who, despite being a teacher for the past 30 years, decided some 30 years ago at the start of his teaching career that he hated children. One, for the first time in most of our living memories, who is not referred to as the "Honourable Leader o...