Do you want to know the worst thing about being trapped inside the flat all day like some petty criminal with an electronic leg tag? I have nothing else to do but listen to the radio, and what I hear on the radio is often so incredibly insane it makes my head hurt.

For example:

During this crisis, I have been quite critical of the clean-up methods, and of a group of local people who are taking the council to task for not doing a better job. Four days after the snowfall, the sidewalks (excuse me, pavements) are still a dangerous morass of snow, ice and slush. The locals thought the council should have cleaned everything up and I was more of the opinion that people should have done more themselves.

In New York, if you have a sidewalk (in New York, they are ‘sidewalks’) running in front of your home or business, you go out and clean it off as soon as you can. This allows pedestrian traffic move freely and safely and it greatly assists in the general clean up.

In Britain, however, the law is, if you have a pavement running in front of your home or business, and if you clean it off, and someone then slips, you are liable, and you can be sued. On the other hand, if you just leave the snow, ice and slush lying there to trip up pedestrians and send them to the hospital with fractured wrists, broken legs or very sore bums, you are not responsible at all.

Can someone, anyone, explain to me how that makes any sense at all? Who is responsible for thinking up this tosh!

It’s the sort of thing that, for me, doesn’t so much address the mystery of how the British lost the Empire, but rather begs the question “How did they acquire it in the first place?”

Here’s an impromptu quiz based on some other tidbits from my reading and media viewing during my “house arrest”:

Question 1:

If you were faced with a formidable army, and all you had were 18,000 well trained, experienced soldiers (this would be the British Expeditionary Force at the start of WWI) would you:

A. Have these 18,000 soldiers train recruits in order to quickly build up an army of tens of thousands of well-trained soldiers?

or

B. Send your 18,000 well-trained, experienced soldiers headlong into machine gun fire to see what happened?

Question 2:

If you were engaged in the hunt for the fearsome German battleship, Bismarck, at the critical, early stages of WWII, and your battleship and the Air Force had it cornered, would you:

A. Provide supporting fire for the airplanes so they could get in close enough to deliver the coup de grace?

or

B. Try to shoot down your own aircraft so your ship could take credit for the kill?

If you gave the blatantly sane answer to either of those questions, then you have no future in British politics. On any level.

Now, granted, my two previous examples are a bit extreme, and the government no longer enjoys the opportunity to visit mayhem on the populace on that gargantuan a scale but, bless them, they clearly remain dedicated to taking out the population, one slipped disc at a time.