Hi Everyone If you a long time Rubbish reader, you will be aware of my opinion of HS2. That’s high speed trains to you and me. The original budget back in 2017 was £37Billion to build the railway from London to our second city, Birmingham and then onwards to Manchester in the west and Leeds in the east. In 2019, the then Transport Minister said it would cost £65Billion and that “we are on budget and on time” with the trains expected to be running in 2028. I called that an irr

Hi Everyone If you are a long time Rubbish reader, you will know two things about me. Firstly, that I am approaching middle age, and secondly, that I am a long time enthusiastic, frustrated, and suicidal supporter of my local football team. Back in my early days, the club was usually owned by a group of businessmen with a manager, a coach, and a trainer who ran onto the pitch with a bucket of coal water and a sponge to treat an injured player. The manager was the manager and

Hi Everyone Last weekend I went back to school. Fortunately, there were no teachers or head teacher there, so I managed to escape the cane, a detention or, worse still, having to write one hundred lines. On this occasion, it was a day long event with about 150 of us, with many approaching middle age, and with some even older than me. The school was a new, modern building with all the modern technologies, a lecture theatre, toilets for disabled students and lifts to the second

Hi Everyone I have to admit that I was not sure whether our King should go on his state visit to America, as I thought that Trump might use it to promote many of his own crazy ideas and opinions. The result was completely the opposite of what I expected. It was a triumph for our King as he brilliantly demolished all of Trump’s opinions in a gentle but devastating way while still gaining many standing ovations from not only the Democrats but also from the Republicans. Did it s

Hi Everyone My main blog page says, “I Support Ukraine.” That was put on my webpage in the first week that Russia illegally invaded an independent, democratic country. I am proud to have been involved in three small projects to help the people. Now four years on, Ukraine is still fighting for its future and as well as receiving help from its allies across the world, it has made great strides to help itself with homegrown drone and military technology. All this despite Trump'

Hi Everyone This week, I read an interesting headline which said: “What Trump could learn from Napoleon”. It did not persuade me to read the article, but I did decide to find out more about Napoleon's character to see what comparisons there were between the two men. Historians say that he was a small, highly intelligent man and was a superior organiser who could work efficiently for long hours. No comparison there then. He could charm people when he needed to, but could also

Hi Everyone This week, a teenager was asked which item cost the most, a first class postage stamp or five chocolate creme eggs. Back in 1914, just before WW1, a letter cost one penny in old money, less than half a penny in today's money. If you apply inflation to that one penny stamp from 1914 to now, a letter or greetings card should cost about twenty five pence to send anywhere in the UK. The answer to that question was predictably the postage stamp at £ 1-80. If you lived

Hi Everyone I expect that when you were at school, there was always a class bully eager to make your life uncomfortable. He - very rarely a girl - would usually have a couple of cronies who would enjoy bullying as much as he did, or maybe just playing up to him so that they could avoid being one of his targets. The usual tactic was to try to avoid them as much as possible, and if you had to engage them in conversation, then attempt to humour them. Almost eighty years on, I ca

Hi Everyone Something that you hear from young people today as they try to enter the job market is that if they are competing for a job, someone with experience will have a better chance. Then I read this week that where there are many applicants for a job, employers are using AI as part of the vetting process. Back in my day, before the days of computers, etc., if you advertised a job in the local newspaper, you expected an application letter. If, for example, you got fiftee

Hi Everyone The good news this week is that Trump does not like Prime Minister Starmer. He thinks that he is “a nice man” and that he has “a nice family”, but he cannot understand why he will not join his war. “He is the Prime Minister he can do anything he wants”. Well no, he has to consult his colleagues, the military experts, and his European friends. What Trump fails to recognise is that NATO is a defence alliance with no obligation to join America and Israel in a war tha

Hi Everyone When our son was a small boy, he looked forward to 5-00 pm on Saturday so that he could watch Dr Who on TV. That was the time when the Daleks, those alien robots, were threatening to take over the world. At the start of the he would sit crosslegged about 4 ft from the scene. The Daleks only spoke one word: “exterminate”. As the mayhem and conflict progressed, he would slowly shuffle backwards until, by the end of the episode, he would be sitting about 10 ft from t

Hi Everyone Fifty Three years ago, back in 1973, together with two work colleagues, we decided to leave our secure jobs working for a company which was part of a national building group, to start our own building company. We had a single rented office, a small storage area, a secretary and a van driver. To achieve our dream, we had to obtain working capital by borrowing from a bank in exchange for putting our homes at risk as security. In the spring of that year when we start

Hi Everyone It seems hard to believe that it is four years this week since Russia started its illegal invasion of Ukraine. I clearly remember saying in my Rubbish that we must do everything necessary to ensure that the country remains a free, democratic and independent nation, and I put the logo I Support Ukraine on my blog home page. I am not sure that countries have done everything to support Ukraine, but if Putin is allowed to claim any sort of victory, he will be back for

Hi Everyone This week, I lost a friend. He was the Main Contractor's cousin, and we first met in 1956, now seventy years ago. Four years later, he was my best man at our wedding. Just over a year later, he married his girlfriend, and they set up home in a caravan on the smallholding where his parents lived. We visited them on many occasions, but on one occasion, we arrived as they were having their evening meal. Being a caravan, there was, of course, limited space, a nd as we

All famous people seem to enjoy publicity, and indeed, they need some exposure to make sure that we are aware of them. The difference, however, is between publicity and intrusion, as the Royal family has found out at their cost over the years. Both Prince William and Prince Harry have had, and continue have a difficult relationship with the press, with the experience of their mother very much in mind. Ok, I know that sometimes they might deserve some adverse publicity, but no

Hi Everyone Back in 1986, I was the project manager of the child assessment unit on our local hospital site. It was an unusual project in that it was funded by local charitable donations. We started the work on site before the total funds needed had been collected, but it was thought that starting the work would encourage further donations. That proved to be the case, and the contract was completed on time and within budget. As the project was unusual and as the finished buil

Hi Everyone Having worked for six years as the building manager in the late 1960s and early 70s for a company that was part of a national construction group, I thought that I had enough experience to run a business of my own. At that time, the main way to advertise your business was the Yellow Pages. Every office had two thick directories - the telephone book and the yellow pages, or, as someone advised me, be a regular at a local pub, something that I never subscribed to. Wh

It is impossible not to talk about the Orange Idiot this week, and I make no apologies for calling him that, a man who is the ‘leader’ of one of the great countries in the world, who behaves like a spoiled child. He started the week in Washington, rambling on for nearly two hours about all the great things he has done during his first year in power. Many of the things he claims and the figures that tumble from his mouth are simply untrue, while he continues to rail on about f

Hi Everyone About four years after we moved into our first house in 1960 we decided that it was time to decorate the Lounge. After we finished work and our evening meal on Friday we started preparing the room, moving and covering what few bits of furniture we had, before working until almost midnight, sanding the woodwork before applying an undercoat of paint. We were up early the next morning to work all day and again late into the evening, only stopping briefly to eat. By S

Hi Everyone During my lifetime, our lives have been affected by a number of baddies like Hitler, Franco, Tito, Stalin, Mussolini, Idi Amin, and a few others around the world. Generally, they have either seized power or abused the power that the population has given them. On the other side are what is generally regarded as the goodies, as they are democratically elected and then removed from power as someone emerges that the public think can do a better job. That list would in