I was pleased to read about plans to return the Pump Room Gardens to their former 19th century glory.  The sooner we can fence the place off, the better.  Keep out the thugs, "hoodies" and ne'er-do-wells who congregate on the bandstand night after night.  Leamington has been in a steady decline for the last 150 years, with an influx of outsiders and their peculiar ways.  We haven't even got a Conservative MP any more, for crying out loud!  What on earth is going on?

The mystery cable at the bottom of the River Leam could be part of the problem.  External forces are at work.  People have already seen strangers, clothed in black, "repairing" the cable in the dead of night.  That is very suspicious.

Let's examine the evidence:  first the M40 was extended.  Secondly, we have our first Labour MP since the birth of democracy.  Thirdly, the so-called "Spring" is assembled outside the Parish Church.  Finally, a mysterious cable is discovered at the bottom of the river.  To me, that smacks of a Leftist conspiracy to take over the area.  The curly-wurly sculpture is almost certainly a mind-control device, feeding instructions from an unknown source, determined to crush the Leamingtonian spirit and make our town identical to all the others.

We must fight to maintain our traditions.  Keep those cans of beige paint at the ready, for the battle has only just begun!

Well, I've been transfixed by the Peking Olympics (none of this Beijing business - traditional values, and all that).  Our athletes have done better than ever before.  They should be rightly proud.

One thing bothers me, though.  The British are winning more and more medals.  Either the athletes are getting better or the races are getting easier.  In my day, 400 metres WAS 400 metres - well, in fact it wasn't 400 metres, it was 400 YARDS, but it was still difficult.  Nowadays, they run it in a flash.  Very puzzling.

I was talking to a friend of mine who used to be involved in athletics.  He says that in some meetings, if the athletes don't do very well, they can run the race over and over again, and the highest score is the one that counts.  When I was running races, you had to spend ages training for the race and in the end you had to run it - and if you failed, that was it.  Today's youngsters only have to run a part of the race at a time, and it all gets added up at the end.  They get it easy.

No, hang on - that's A Levels, isn't it?

Has the world gone mad?  I've just heard that one of these so-called "discount supermarkets" is about to open in the vicinity.  I can feel my house price falling even as we speak.

My wife (a woman of notable class and sophistication, who regularly drives to Waitrose to buy ready-buttered bread) was appalled when she heard the news.  Who can blame her?  A shop will be opening to cater for people who don't feel posh enough to visit Asda.

Mind you, it's on Myton Road, which is technically in Warwick, not Royal Leamington Spa.  Now I see the whole situation in a different light.  Those whinging, whining Warwickians have spent years moaning about every minor change, from the comfort of their palatial stately homes.  I say let's give them something to complain about.  Long live Lidl!

That's another thing that troubles me nowadays: cyclists.  Bolshy lot at the best of times, but the real pains are the ones who cycle at night without any lights.

I was driving my dear lady wife home from her late-night macramé class, and I had to avoid three of them in the High Street alone!

They career along the road or the pavement; they wear the darkest clothes they can find; they drift and dart all over the place without a care in the world; and not one of them has lights on their bikes.  Call me a mad old coot if you like, but aren't these cyclists breaking the law?

When I was a lad, you would have been hauled in front of the Beak and given twenty lashes just for having a defective dynamo.  Nowadays, I reckon they WANT to be run over, so they can call the "No win, no fee" solicitors and claim a fortune.

I blame the Sixties myself.  Bad parenting.

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!

I feel strangely relaxed, dude. The sun is shining. The grass seems greener than ever before. Even the idiot BMW drivers are acting responsibly, and I really like that curly wurly thing outside the Parish Church. Cool!

It all started last night. I sat down to have a nice cup of tea, smoke my pipe and watch some of that excellent Saturday night television – well worth the licence fee! I've been a pipe-smoker for years, of course. It's so much more civilised than cigarettes. You can really be at one with the world when you smoke a pipe!

These kids at the Peace Festival aren't so bad really. One of them (a friend of my granddaughter) gave me some organic tobacco to take home and try. It had a bit of an odd aroma, but you know what? It's not bad! I haven't had such a relaxing evening in years!

Peace, dude!

:-)

I’ve just got back from a couple of weeks in the country with the wife, and what do I find?  Leamington has been taken over by beatniks.  The Pump Room Gardens are full of tree-hugging Lefties, with long hair and straggly beards.  It’s some sort of “Peace Festival”, whatever that is supposed to mean.  It’s certainly not the kind of gathering that befits our splendid Georgian architecture.

This is the sort of hippy nonsense that started in the 1960’s, and led to such disasters as New Labour and GCSEs. These do-gooders even criticised me – me! – for parking my Range Rover in Dormer Place.  Outrageous.  What do these people know?  I’ve been burning fossil fuels for longer than most of them have been alive, and it hasn't done me any harm.  I’ll show them carbon footprints and global warming.

I would write to my MP about this, if I thought it would do any good.

Look, I've been having a good think about this over the weekend, and I've come up with the solution to two major problems.

Firstly, some people still don't like the idea of separating out their food waste into a different bin.  They need a bit of encouragement - it needs to be made a bit more fun.  Secondly, despite Warwickshire officially being the safest county in the UK, there are still some miscreants running around, causing havoc and annoying the rest of us.

The solution?  We need to install stocks in every town and village.  Show these young reprobates what's what, what?  Throw rotten vegetables at them, or mouldy cheese.  I'd happily empty the entire contents of my green bin over the heads of some of these people.  We could all gather together outside the Parish Church (next to that curly wurly thing) and pelt criminals with perishables.  Then, all of the remains could be scooped up in one go, and they wouldn't have to send the trucks round the houses to empty the bins.  OK, you would have to get the food waste into the town centre in the first place, but the bins have wheels, so it's easy!

I bet we wouldn't be allowed to do it, though.  Some Leftie do-gooder would ban it.  Health and Safety or something.  Might hurt the poor little blighters.  My answer to that: a blender.  We mix the waste into a nice, soft slurry and squirt it instead.  No hard bits to worry about then.  These people have got no imagination, that's their trouble.

I believe there is a competition running at the moment, to see how many made-up words you can fit on the side of a van.  The winner so far is "Geesink Norba Group - An Oshkosh Company" with the brand names Geesink, Norba, Kiggen and McNeilus.

What?!

I have no idea what any of that means, or what Messrs. Geesink and Norba actually do, but it's all a bit too silly for my liking.

Oh - and why isn't the van painted a nice beige colour?  It doesn't fit at all well with Leamington's architecture.