The trouble with missing news for a day is the double dose the day after!

I didn’t catch any news yesterday – too busy coping with one of those swift kicks up the arse which fate delivers every now and then to remind us we’re never really Masters of Our Fate or Captains of Our Soul. So, today, a bit bleary-eyed, I awoke to forty-eight hours’ worth of news.

After 45 minutes reading the papers, watching TV, listening to the Today Programme and surfing online news sites (I’m dead multimedia, me), I was almost pining for another of Destiny’s little scatter-bombs to go off in my vicinity, so I could ignore everything happening outside Grønmark Towers.

Today’s the day many of Osborne’s Budget changes come into effect, so on comes Ed Balls to describe Coalition cuts as reckless (or “veckless” as he insists on pronouncing it) and to tell us how bad those savage cuts will be for Bwitain (and, I presume, Britain). I wonder how long it takes other viewers to start shouting obscenities at the television screen when any member of the last Labour government starts to speak. On a good day, I can last out for ten seconds: on a bad day, the effing and blinding starts as soon as they open their mouths – on a really bad day, the very mention of their names sets me off.   

Then we had Jim Naughtie on Radio 4 getting all teary because Bob Dylan has betrayed a generation of student radicals (i.e. the politicians who spent thirteen years destroying this country, plus all their chums in the media) by agreeing to perform concerts in China – a fascist regime which all those student radicals were only too happy to support when it was butchering millions of its own people back in the Sixties.

My morning paper tells me that David Cameron has apologised on behalf of this country for causing the current conflict in Kashmir, and that he followed this up by blaming Britain for many of the world’s major problems. I didn’t realise they taught a GCSE Keystage One “Grovelling to Foreigners Who Hate Us” course at Eton (mind you, how else would they have kept the Foreign Office staffed all these years?). Just as I began to wonder whether I should pop a blood-pressure pill, I read that British aid to Pakistani schools is to triple. Look, a million Pakistani “heritage” johnnies live here in Britain – just how much more am I expected to cough up in order to educate these people?  I don’t remember ever asking them to subsidise my son’s education.

Then I find myself staring at the bland, eyebrowless features of Nick Clegg, who has just declared war on those vicious, selfish bastards who use their own money and/or contacts to try to give their children any sort of advantage in life. Turns out Nick’s father arranged an internship for his son at a bank, having already revealed himself to be a conscienceless swine by paying for Junior to attend one of the finest private schools in the country. (Mind you, given that Nick has wound up leading the LibDems, I expect Daddy wishes he’d kept his cheque-book firmly under lock and key in the Louis Quinze escritoire that’s no doubt been in the family for centuries).

80% of the public believes the Coalition is too soft on crime. Well, who’d have thought! But, then, most of them don’t believe that Man is causing Global Warming, most of them want immigration stopped in its tracks, and the majority would like to see Britain leave the EU. Now choose the phrase which in your opinion matches the likelihood of any British government doing what the voters want on any of these issues - “None at all”, “Not a chance”, “You must be joking”, “ Pull the other one” or “Zero”.

Living in a modern European democracy seems to  mean never getting what you want. Ever!

Then I read that doctors trained outside the EU are four times more likely to be punished by the GMC following a complaint. But that’s not what pisses me off – it’s the fact that only 1% of British-trained doctors are struck off or suspended in the same circumstances that really gets my goat, because it means that no less than 99% of complaints against doctors are rejected. If I’m ever accused of a crime, forget the courts – I insist on being tried by the GMC!

And then I see a replay of the two dumb fouls that got Peter Crouch sent off against Real Madrid – followed by a replay of the Rooney swearing incident from the weekend – and wonder, not for the first time, whether English clubs have been subjected to some LibDem-style legislation forcing them to only employ players with  single-figure IQs. 

Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to use the British Air Force to oust an Arab dictator so that Al Qaeda can take over his country!

Then, after having given up on news on account of not wanting to burst into tears, I go through a stack of mail that I’ve been ignoring, only to find a leaflet urging me to vote for AV in the forthcoming referendum. Benjamin Zephaniah is cited as one of its proponents. There’s his picture. Benjamin Zephaniah. I mean, for God’s sake!

I’m beginning to suspect that giving news the elbow for the whole of this year might not be a bad idea.