17 December 2023 (Sunday) - Family Xmas Bingo

Last night “er indoors TM came home from the family gathering with a humungous slab of Stilton. I hope she hadn't been hoping that it might last the entire Christmas holiday; I scoffed the lot in twenty minutes. And for all the old wives' tales about not eating cheese before bedtime, I slept like a log through till five o'clock.
I got up, had toast, sparked up Netflix and watched an episode of "Harry Enfield and Chums". Can you believe that show is now over thirty years old? It's stood the test of time better than many of the shows of that time; even if it does date itself by having people still smoking in pubs... or actually being able to afford going in to pubs, come to that.
 
What with it being far too early on a Sunday morning for anything at all to be happening on Facebook I got ready for work, and set off without disturbing “er indoors TM or the wolf pack.
I set off up the motorway to Maidstone listening to some rather interesting program about ants, and how the average ant is rather "meh", but working together as a colony they can do amazing things... including capturing and enslaving other ants. There was an attempt to draw parallels with humanity.
There was then talk of how Israeli soldiers shot three of their captured hostages who were supposedly waving a white flag. It has to be said that having entered this conflict from the moral high ground and with world opinion initially on their side, the Israelis are doing their utmost to piss on their chips.
And there was a lot of talk about how Baroness Mone looks set to profit from the sixty million quid her company made flogging protective equipment during the pandemic. This *really* boils my piss. Not that she's making money from it, but because this is supposedly news. Are people really this thick? Leaving aside woolly-minded blathering, basically in the UK we have a choice of two political systems:
Socialist (Labour) in which the state provides pretty much everything that anyone might ever need... and you pay for it in high taxes.
Capitalist (Conservative) in which the state sells off pretty much everything that anyone might ever need. Private industries buy them and then you with what you need. At a cost to you and at a profit for them.
I'm not getting into the rights and wrongs of each side; there's good and bad for both schools of thought. But at the moment we live in a (democratically elected!) system in which the state expects pretty much everything that anyone might ever need to be provided by profit-making industries. So let's not act surprised to find out we've got what we voted for. Or didn't we realise what we were voting for? Democracy, eh?
 
I got to work and did my bit. And with my bit done I came home. Being the last weekend before Christmas we did the Christmas family bingo game by Teams. In the past we used Zoom, but after an hour, Zoom cuts out. So we used Teams, and it too cut out after an hour.
We played eight cards; a row and a full house on each. I won one of the rounds, so was only thirty quid down on the deal. “er indoors TM did a quiz after the bingo; I came second to last.
 
And in closing today here's a little tip for the festive season. Don't chuck any left over Baileys down the drain as it bungs them up. If any of my loyal readers understand the phrase "left over Baileys" could they please explain it to me.

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