Special Guest Blogger: Rick Buckler

It’s a funny old business, this legacy lark. Especially when you were the bloke at the back, the one whose main job was to stop the other two from galloping off into the sunset at 180 beats per minute.
So, pull up a stool. Not a drum stool, mind you. My back can’t take it these days. Let’s have a natter about life, death and the peculiar business of being moderately famous.
People ask me what it was like, being in The Jam at the height of it all. And honestly, most of the time, it was a blur of polyester, perspiration, and the thump-thump-thump of a bass drum vibrating through my entire skeleton. My view, you see, was usually Paul Weller’s shoes and Bruce Foxton’s backside. A fine backside, I’m told, but it’s not exactly the panoramic vista you get from the frontman’s microphone.
We were young, daft, and dressed sharper than a packet of needles. And we were loud. Lord, were we loud. I’d be up there, bashing the hell out of my kit, trying to count us in and out of the songs without losing a limb, and I’d look out and see this sea of parkas and mods, all going absolutely mental. It was brilliant. Terrifying, but brilliant.
You don’t have time to think about your legacy when you’re 22 and trying to remember the fill for ‘In the City’. You’re just trying not to mess it up. For me, the achievement was simply getting to the end of the set without my head exploding. And, you know, getting paid. That was a decent achievement.
Now, being the drummer in a famous band is a peculiar sort of fame. You’re well-known, but you’re not known-known. You’re the other one.
You can be walking down the street, and someone will do a double-take. You see the cogs whirring. They know your face. They know that face. They’ve got it on a poster at home, somewhere between Abba and David Essex.
It’s a weird existence. You get the recognition, the stories, the occasional free pint in a pub where the landlord’s a committed Mod. But you also get to pop to Tesco for a loaf of bread without causing a national incident. It’s the best of both worlds, really. All the glory of having been there, with none of the nuisance of having to wear sunglasses indoors.
So, when did I die? The first time, metaphorically speaking, was in 1982. The day Paul decided to call it a day. Blimey, that was a shocker. It was like being on the fastest, most exhilarating rollercoaster in the world, and then someone hits the emergency stop button and tells you to get off. The ride was over.
And just like that, Rick Buckler the Famous Drummer was no more. He became, well, just Rick. Rick from Woking.
You can’t exactly spend the rest of your days reliving ‘Going Underground’. You’d go spare. So I did what any self-respecting retired rock god would do. I got a job. A proper job as a furniture restorer.
I kid you not. I went from hammering out beats for thousands of screaming fans to painstakingly repairing a delicate Chippendale chair legs. The noise level went down considerably, and the smell changed from stale beer and sweat to French polish and sawdust. And do you know what? I loved it. It was quiet. It was satisfying. You could see the results of your work right there in front of you. You can’t exactly put a perfect three-minute pop song on the mantelpiece, but you can a beautifully restored grandfather clock.
So, the rock star died. And in his place, a slightly baffled man with a passion for wood stain was born but i decided i could actually spend the rest of my days reliving Going Underground and set up a tribute Jam Band with Bruce Foxton and wrote several books about the Band because knocking out a dovetail joint is cool, but being a former rockstar is much more profitable.

Britain Tells USA You're On Your Own This Time

Last week the Chagos Island deal was a good one so said the Americans and this week it is a catastrophic mistake so what happened?
The most orange coloured American President ever asked if he could use the base in Diego Garcia which houses it's B2 bombers to start a war with Iran and Keir Starmer replied: 'Nah, we're not doing this one' and as the base is on British-controlled territory, America can only use them with Britain's explicit permission.
Britain has has been America's accomplice in genuinely awful stuff for decades, acting like a well trained poodle for all of America's dodgy wars over the past few years in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya but Keir Starmer did what Tony Blair never did and said we will need some better justification for bombing a sovereign nation.
Trump took the time out trying to make people forget that he was best buds with a notorious pedophile and probably partook in it himself, turned an even brighter shade of Orange and took his phone in his teeny tiny hands and ranted about how Britain was 'making a big mistake' in not helping him eradicate a highly unstable and dangerous Regime which is the ultimate pot and kettle when it comes to dangerous and unstable regimes.
What the sex pest President was asking Starmer to do was become a partner in a military strike on another nation, without a UN mandate, without a declared state of war, without a clear legal framework so when the bombs drop and Iran retaliates and the whole Middle East goes up like a cheap Aldi barbecue, we get to share the blame so Britain, who ethnically cleansed the land so they could build the airbase i the first place, went: 'Sorry, this one's too dodgy even for us'.
Last year when America attacked Iran's nuclear sites and only succeeded in making some big dents in some mountains, they flew the B-2 bombers directly from the States so they didn't need the UK then so why now and the only reason is similar to George W Bush's push for nations to join him in the Iraq misadventure, the legitimacy of having an ally on side so the optics are of a coalition rather than some suspected pedo starting a war because nuclear negotiations are moving too slowly for his childlike short attention span.
You have to remember that there was a working nuclear plan in place between the USA, EU and Iran before Trump pulled his side out of it and is now trying to use 19th Century gunboat diplomacy to bully Iran into another one or they will be bombed, and once they are bombed so will other places in the Middle East such as Israel as Iran hit out.
Whether the Mango moron attacks, strikes a deal or the whole thing somehow gets walked back, i am proud to say that Britain listened to Trump, and then treated his request with all the respect that Trump treats a Moscow Hotel Mattress, 

The Right To Repair

Wow the EU do come out with some cracking legislation and under this one going through the European Parliament, manufacturers of certain products will be required to make them easier to repair.
Many manufacturers, intentionally build products in a way that does not allow for disassembly, making it impossible to replace defective components when they break so  consumers are forced to scrap the entire item, when there is actually very little wrong with it.
Thanks to the new EU legislation, manufacturers of washing machines, dishwashers, televisions, lights and fridges are required to make their products easier to repair and spare parts will also have to be made available to professional repairers.
The EU state it will prolong the lives of popular household items and dampen demand for new ones, thereby reducing carbon emissions, cutting waste and saving consumers money.
Manufacturers, seeing their profits in Europe taking a huge dip, fought for concessions restricting the rights of consumers to repair products themselves which is fair, amateur repairs to phones and other electronic devices could prove dangerous and we all remember the Grenfell fire which killed 72 people and was started due to a faulty fridge which highlights the dangers posed by defective electrical goods, and raises legitimate questions about non-specialists repairing them.
As our parents said, they don’t make them like they used to and soon that will hopefully be true and something to celebrate.

Andrew Arrested

We would have to go back to King Charles I in 1647 to find the last time such a senior member of the royal family was arrested and that didn't rnd well for him as he was executed two years later for treason.
I imagine the knock on the door at 8am this morning at the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk was a lot less hostile than that conducted by the New Model Army back then but here we are with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office which is 'a serious wilful abuse or neglect of powers relating to the role in public office', according to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The force previously said it was reviewing allegations that a woman was trafficked to the UK by sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to have a sexual encounter with Andrew as well as claims he shared sensitive information with the US sex offender while serving as the UK's trade envoy between 2001 and 2011.
A former Police Chief said that this is massive because you don't have to arrest somebody that they are investigating, they can ask them to provide a statement or even invite them to a police station for a formal chat without arresting them so to actually arrest him, would suggest there is some significant and strong evidence.
Famously lying at every turn in his interview with Emily Maitlis with regards to Virginia Giuffre who took her own life, he will not know be able to flip off questions quite so easily and they will drill down on the allegations that she had had sex with him when she was 17 and claimed she had been trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein.
A statement from her family reads: At last. Today, our broken hearts have been lifted at the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty. We extend our gratitude to the UK's Thames Valley Police for their investigation and arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor'.
What effect this had on the future of the Royals is unknown but as it has been revealed that the King paid £3m of the reported £12 that Andrew gave to Giuffre in an out of court settlement to keep her from spilling the sordid beans on him, so he isn't is coming out of this clean.
Despite famously saying that he has a condition that means he doesn't sweat, i imagine the former Duke is sweating profusely today.

Special Guest Blogger: Tony Slattery

Am I famous? Was I ever? It’s a slippery little eel, fame. For a brief, glittering, and frankly blurry period in the nineties, I was what you might call ‘televisual’. I was on the box so often you probably got sick of the sight of me. A whirlwind of questionable shirts, razor-sharp (and occasionally razor-dull) wit, and a metabolism powered by adrenaline, champagne, and cocaine. Mostly cocaine to be honest. Whose Line Is It Anyway? was the epicentre of it all. Thirty minutes once a week of pure, unadulterated improvisational terror, followed by a lifetime of people shouting 'Songs from the hat!' at me in Sainsbury’s.
They don’t make them like that anymore, do they? The modern route to fame seems to involve crying in a jungle but in my day, to get on the telly you had to at least have a go at being interesting. You had to learn your craft like I did at the Cambridge Footlights and then earn your stripes in grotty comedy clubs above pubs, dodging flying peanuts and the occasional heckler . It was a grind. It was character-building. It gave you something proper to be grumpy about later in life.
And then there were the ‘lost years’. The period where the main stage was swapped for a much smaller, sadder one. I won’t bore you with the details but it was what we call in the business 'an extended period of illness' and I hardly got any work although i did get the gig as the vending machine in Red Dwarf.
You know what though? It’s part of the tapestry. A rather frayed, beer-stained and smelling of Cocaine part of the tapestry, but it’s there. You can’t tell the story of the triumph without acknowledging the time you spent face-down in the carpet and waking up three days later. It adds texture.
Which brings me to the main event: my demise. Since we’re here, let’s get it right. How did I die?
Tony! Your suggestion from the audience is… a fatal heart attack!

E=MC2 v Pythagoras's Theorem

Despite not owning a jacket with leather elbow patches, my friend is a complete math's geek and for some reason that even now that i don't remember why, we were discussing E=MC2, i assume it was Big Audio Dynamites 80's hit of the same name because i can't see how we would get into it any other way.   
It all took a nasty twist when we went from a song about films to him saying that 'Many people think that E=MC2 is the most history changing equation but it isn't, there is one that had even greater impact'.
Obviously i did what any sane person would do and tried not to encourage by asking 'What's that then?' but he ignored what i assumed was my lack of interest by telling me anyway, Pythagoras's theorem.
According to someone who was oblivious to someone eyes glazing over while franctically searching for a sharp implement to shove in his ear, he explained that this theorem is a fundamental rule in geometry stating that in a right-angled triangle, the area of the square on the hypotenuse (\(c\)) equals the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides (\(a\) and \(b\)), expressed as \(a^{2}+b^{2}=c^{2}\) and is used to calculate unknown side lengths, with the hypotenuse being the longest side opposite the \(90^{\circ }\) angle.
Or something, i had lost the will to live by then but managed to squeak out a: 'Oh, that's good then' and willed my phone to ring for an emergency at the Office which would mean i would have to leave IMMEDIATELY!
I cut short some more boring stuff about math's by asking what use is Pythagoras's Theorem in my everyday life and after going through a couple of things which was to do with Construction (I'm not a builder) and Robotics (I'm not a scientist) he hit upon making sure pictures are hung straight.
So there you go kids, stay in school and pay attention in your Math's classes because one day you may look at a painting and see it is everso slightly wonky and you can straighten it and you will have Pythagoras to thank.
Either that or you can nudge it and then say to someone 'Does that look straight to you?' which is what the majority of people do who heard the word Pythagoras at school and thought..ppft...when will I ever need that and looked out the window at the trees instead.

Divorce Rings

The World Bank Population and Vital Statistics website shows that the countries that have the highest divorce rates are Maldives (5.52 per 1000 people), Liechtenstein (4.9), Russia (4.7), Kazakhstan (4.6), Belarus (3.7) and  Georgia (3.7) with the United Kingdom coming in at 2 per 1000 people with 23% of couples filing for divorce between 5 to 8 years of saying their vows with the most common reasons cited being adultery (32%), growing apart (27%), and lack of communication (11%).
The average age at divorce is 47 for men and 45 for women so many middle aged divorcees can now get in on the action of Divorce Rings.
Apparently it is now a thing that to celebrate? commiserate? becoming single again people are taking their engagement and wedding rings to jewellers and asking them to mash them together into new finger furniture.
The new fashion is to wear the ring on the middle finger to tell the World that you are divorced which could be seen as advertising your new found free and single status  although a quick look at the ones i have seen they are..to be kind...not delicate looking things.
I guess as it is two rings welded into one (or the repurposing of symbolic pieces reclaiming the life event as a positive move )they will be quite big and clunky looking things but if you are looking for a positive and empowering way to mark the end of a marriage and the start of a new, independent life then go for it, at least it's better than a tattoo.

Special Guest Blogger: Geoff Capes

As you're reading this, I’m obviously dead.
I'm Geoff Capes. Yes, that Geoff Capes, the bloke who once lifted a small car like it was a bar of chocolate, won two World’s Strongest Man titles, and taught an entire nation that yes, fat blokes can run, well sort of.
Now, as I lie here reflecting on my legacy, I must say: it’s been a bumpy ride. Like a sack of spuds on a lorry. But a glorious one.
Let’s be honest, I wasn’t born strong. I was born large, weighing 12.4 pounds (5.6 kg) at birth. In my case, strength came as a welcome bonus to sheer mass. If the Olympics had a category for Men Who Take Up Two Seats on Trains, I’d have won gold, silver, and bronze just to be thorough but i had to make do with the two times Commonwealth champion, twice European indoor champion, competed at three Olympic Games and holding the British record for the shot putt.
Not many people know that before I started lifting cars, I was a proper athlete but then I got dropped so I moved on. Into strongman.
But back in the day, back when mullets were fashionable and trousers had elastic waists,I discovered something miraculous: I could lift things. Not just things. Heavy things. Cars, fridges, And people actually paid me to do it. Mad, that.
My finest hour? Winning World’s Strongest Man. Twice. In 1983 and 1985.
There was a time when I could carry an anvil uphill while being pelted with snowballs in Finland but at the end I struggled to carry my own body weight from the sofa to the fridge and i settled to a lifestyle of breeding budgerigars and goddamn it I was good at that to, becoming a European and World champion with my Recessive Pieds.
Being a hefty 27 stone does has an effect on the body and my heart said stuff lugging all this around and packed in but I gave Britain something to cheer for. Not in football. Good Lord, not in football. But in strength. I made people believe that a man with a paunch, a perm, and questionable fashion sense could still rise to the top.

Cannabis Is Not A Safe Drug

According to experts at the UK Border Force, seizures of Cannabis in the 90s contained approximately 4% tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient which produces the high while today the average THC level of seizures is at least four times higher at 16%.
You can generally tell a long term cannabis smoker because their brains are just that little bit slower, a fraction of a second to react and my own back of a fag packet reading is  backed by the overwhelming evidence from mental health professionals that smoking cannabis, particularly in your teenage years, there is a risk of mental health problems.
Cannabis was always considered a soft drug, far less dangerous than hard drugs like heroin and cocaine but even back then i remember talking to Mental Health staff who said that the reputation of cannabis as harmless was just plain wrong.
I have a lot of time for the leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, but his call to legalise cannabis which he states he has never tried, is just all kinds of ignorance.
A psychiatrist leading an early intervention in psychosis team at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, said that studies show that 'if the risk of schizophrenia for the general population is about 1%, the evidence is that, if you take ordinary cannabis, it quadruples to 4% and if you smoke the strongest strain (above 10% THC), you push it up to 8%'.
Data from 11 countries in Europe found that regular users of cannabis containing 10% THC were five times more likely than non-users to develop psychosis and severe mental damage in cannabis-consuming teenagers whose brains are still developing, were 11 times more likely to suffer a psychosis than non-users. In Denmark, researchers estimated that of male patients between 21 and 30 who suffered from schizophrenia, up to 30% of the cases were due to cannabis use.
The evidence for the cannabis-psychosis connection is now as strong that to call for making Cannabis legal and more freely available is downright dangerous and foolhardy.
as  the legalisation of cannabis legitimises it and sends a message that the government views it as relatively harmless whereas the message should be that cannabis can send you insane.

Brit Humour

 

How funny is this??? Visitors to the London Subway were greeted by the above poster to try and entice people to Visit America.
In the first picture is a smiling Donald Trump and his best buddy the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein with a young girl.
In the second are a couple of American racists in Trump red hats carrying burning crosses.
In the third is a young boy in a school holding a gun surrounded by dead classmates and in the fourth smiling ICE officials carrying away a crying, young girl.
So a pedophile president, racists, school massacres and incarcerating kids and non-whites are what the pictures show and to be honest, is exactly how people outside of America see this current rabble.
British sense of humour, love it.