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Despite only being relatively new, extremely unprofessional, deliberately unresearched and occasionally bitterly objectionable little blog, VVB has attempted to give me a chance to talk about various things that interest or disturb me. Of late, the disturbing bit has been winning. That's why there will be a return to the motor car stories, at least for a while.

It was all brought home this eveningon Monday when I was watching the news, and the story about the fracas at the tennis came on. I started to rant about how we have the Muslims and various Africans as the current enemies of freedom and liberty (anyone see the piece on Tamworth?) and yet here we have the Serbs and Croats who have been at each other's throats in Australia for longer than I can remember. We must be well into second and third generation Australian born people (blokes, mainly it would seem) and it's like they've stepped straight off the boat. All the old emnities large as day and at the tennis, for crying out loud: probably the last sport where most people behave relatively sanely (Leyton not included).

So I was all, like, WTF? And started ranting.

Mrs VVB came in, remonstrated firmly about my behaviour, language, attitude and so on and said "Top Gear" is on. What a good choice. Funniest thing I've seen in ages. "The car should be over there! Where my eardrums are!" "What happens with an Aston Martin at this point?" "It breaks down" (all laugh).

Which is another way of saying that the world is getting far too intense that I should be reporting it.

Update, several days later.

Too much to do, too preoccupied when I come home, the sameness, the staleness of the debate or whatever it is has got to me. Mrs VVB and I were having yarn over dinner about water, why the council wants to - or has to - turn down the pressure: to minimise leakages from the pipes. Why do they leak? Because they're old. If they're old, why haven't they been replaced? Because we can't invest to replace them. Why not? Because we have to run a budget surplus or the ratings agencies will mark us down. Why is that? Because of Milton bloody Friedman and Friedrich bloody Hayek and Maggie bloody Thatcher and Ronald bloody Reagan and now every government this side of Panama is in thrall to the Washington Consensus, and that's why we have bloody PPPs which are just a way to get around Budget deficits and still get things built, except they don't do what they're supposed to, they're not cheaper because government can always borrow cheaper than a private company and in any case the bloody risk doesn't get bloody transferred to the bloody project proponent like it's bloody supposed to in the first bloody place. But it's the next generation of taxpayers who'll pick up the tab and we don't have to worry about them because they're 8 elections away.

It's bloody insane and it's wrong wrong wrong but even supposedly social democratic (hah!) parties have been bludgeoned into line. And everyone else has been deregistered, when did we get to vote on that?

And this, gentle reader, was the beloved and I just having a friendly tete-a-tete about current issues over a spot of home-made Thai green curry and I'm carrying on like a pork chop. How it it get to this, we ask ourselves?

Mrs VVB works in health care where the clients are in situations so dire you'd rip your ears off before you have to hear any more, and the funding she gets has been frozen for two years and has just been maintained at that level for another one or two or maybe a generation.

So....draws breath.....I am going to be otherwise preoccupied for a while, I have work stuff to do when I come home so we're are going into a little hiatus. I may pop up in comments on your own blogs - and there's only a very few special ones I go to now where the inhabitants are friendly - or I may just go for a bloody long walk.

My neck hurts. Goodnight.