Council Tax blues (slight return)

My previous blog entry regarding late Council Tax payment and the subsequent red letter threatening me with court - see "Council Tax blues" for more details - garnered me with a comment from ‘Oldham John’ (not his real name, methinks!) and even though I pay just £13 a month due to being employed part-time, this stalwart of the community dished up some choice words for me to ruminate over. I reprint his message below, verbatim:

I can't get no Enlightenment satisfaction

With last week’s blizzard whiteout stretching the length and breadth of the nation, I was obviously unable to use my bike for travelling to work and had to resort to flexing my boot soles back on terra firma for the first time a while. Of course, this consists of trudging an eight mile round trip just so I can saviour working in subzero temperatures within a forty foot metal container with no heating, a fantastic experience I suggest everyone should sample at least once in their lives before they die from the onset of pneumonia. Ah, the need to earn money and survive in a consumerist dream world, balanced against developing a life-threatening disease if you choose to work!

Secrets found within a lost mobile phone...

Being of a certain age (and the less said about this the better) I can recall living through both my pre- and post- teenage years in a less technologically-advanced time period than that of today’s youth, who are unconsciously intertwined with the microcosm of their existence through everyday virtual knowledge. This self-educational data is attained via the solid-state worlds of the internet, mobile ‘phones and computers and is a place where the kids all dwell without a care in the world, safe in the knowledge that old has-beens like me may be able to browse a website or two but this is where our cursory skills abruptly stop (oh, hang on a minute!).

More snowfall and the UK media frenzy starts again...

Winter has arrived in the blink of an eye again across the UK - and specifically my northern enclave of greater Manchester - swamping all with its chilled blanket of ice crystals and bringing the whole of civilisation to a standstill because of an overnight snow sprinkle. This happened last year at virtually the same time and I wrote then (see "Christmas, New Year & the Big Freeze" for more details) about the absolute uselessness of our culture to perform the most mundane tasks when faced with nothing more than fluffy-white, frozen water descending from the skies. It is certainly a worry to look back at how the machinations of a world power crumbled because of a lack of Cheshire rock salt but we learnt from those mistakes, didn’t we...? Well, no...

On your daily bike

As I bike to and from work each and every day, I have ample time to observe the minutiae of everyday life unfolding before my weary, weather-buffeted eyes in all its unusual and unexpected ways. Most of the time I ride quickly past certain events and happenings without showing any more interest than a quick side glance across or the break of a smirk upon my face; just occasionally however, I do feel a need to stop and offer a helping hand, and this is what happened just the other day as I cycled back from work during a cold morning sprinkled with winter’s first frosts.

Council Tax blues

One of the most dreaded postal arrivals throughout the UK is the yearly Council Tax bill. Arriving each April, this soul-destroying, single piece of A4 paper is concisely broken down into barely-manageable monthly payments of such magnitude that all across our fair country, people are living with a form of social schizophrenia induced by its financially-crippling brevity. How much we individually pay is dependent upon which band your property has been squeezed into and how many are dwelling inside your house at one time or another; whether these denizens happen to be employed or not is a moot point to these ‘State Shylocks’ because unemployment benefits of some kind will fill the monetary void, thus keeping everyone happy.

Playing the eBay buying game, again… Pt 2

So there I was, bereft of my new Asus 1001HA laptop due to it going missing in mid-transit: a transit, I may add, that I had had to organise myself due to the seller being a complete simpleton and not having the postage money until he’d transferred my PayPal payment into his bank account many days in the future. After speaking to the lads at Interlink Express late Tuesday, I was informed again there still wasn’t any further scanning of my item in their system, so the festering hate continued to rise within me, much like a hangover’s bubbling bile rise.

Playing the eBay buying game, again...Pt 1

Another day arrives and yet another laptop flops down onto my doorstep from a dubious eBay purchase to further complicate my newly-developed technophobic life to the stretching point of no return. I say technophobic because this is the fourth laptop I’ve bought from eBay, the world’s biggest car boot sale for unwanted shit and with each one bought, I’ve found myself plunged deeper and deeper into the buyers’ nightmare of having to trust the dredges of society in order to try and grab a bargain. As any undertaking to save oneself money will be plagued with potential problems, you’ll be glad to learn for your reading enjoyment that in this latest two-part instalment this infuriating situation is well catered for.

What the f**k is that...?!

Breaking News: Rampaging Bigfoot caught on camera destroying Cop car!

Happy birthday The Boiling Rage: one year on in blog land

The Boiling Rage blog is one year old today. I’ve now been tapping the plastic keys on my QWERTY keyboard for the last twelve months in the hope of getting accidentally discovered and being found to be mildly entertaining. During this time, I’ve tried to post at least a single article a week and I’ve stuck to this regime most of the time, although for some reason I’m looking at 44 posts for 52 weeks, which gives me a shortfall of eight missing entries, seemingly lost forever somewhere in the virtual ether my blog dwells. Now, it’s unknown whether these lost paragraphs and misplaced snippets are of any consequence to Humanity or if their eventual discovery will tip the balance of the universe in favour of good against evil, so conjecture is irrelevant (but nice to presume): personally, I’m not holding my breath, though anything’s possible when faced with the unexpected sighting of such wordily slop.