ballpoint

No matter how much I do for her, my wife's never happy. Nag, nag, nag. I bought her a stair lift for her birthday, but it just drives her up the wall.

If I had 50 pence for every maths test I've failed, I'd have £11.63.

Anyone know how long it takes to get hearing aids back from repair? I sent mine off two weeks ago and haven't heard anything since.

Coincidently, I had just watched the final episode of the excellent "SAS, rogue heroes" series when this news came out. It's a semi factual account of the creation of the SAS during WW2 in North Africa. In this episode, Churchill meets the first commanding officer of the SAS, David Stirling, in Cairo - which did actually happen after the fall of Tobruk in 1942, and tells him to "forget the etiquettes of war, do whatever it takes". (On an aside, in a previous episode, Churchill's son, Randolph, was sent by him to accompany the SAS on a mission where he could easily have been killed. This too actually happened, and the report he made to his father on his return drove Churchill's support for the SAS). I wonder what these brave men would make of this? Of course, these days it's become fashionable to deprecate Churchill - rightly in some instances, but he understood that the world was in a fight for survival, and what it took to win that fight. It's also fashionable in some quarters to deprecate the military, something that has been done by people in those quarters well before our lifetimes. Kipling pointed it out in his poem 'Tommy'; "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep", which was cited by George Orwell in his own quote “We sleep soundly in our beds, because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on those who would harm us". Politically polar opposites in agreement. Pity there's so little of that these days.

(With a preemptive "What dinosaurs?")