The View from the Hill on Sunday 28th February

The safest place to view an approaching tsunami is through a television screen on the opposite side of the world, and yet sitting in my reclining chair at 10.11pm last evening I shared the sense of impending disaster that those gathered on a hill above a beach in Hawaii must have felt.

The cameras all pointing out towards the horizon, every white horse becoming the target of scrutiny, every exposed rock a sign that the ocean was drawing back ready to unleash its fury on those volcanic islands.

CNN were reporting in their usual well respected manner, Fox News were blaming it all on Islam, Gays and Liberals.

By 10.55pm I had decided that I was going to wave the tsunami goodbye and I went to bed but first thing this morning I turned on the television and found that Hawaii was still there.

There are obviously two types of people in the world, the ones who run towards a tsunami to see it coming and those who climb to the very highest point of the island waiting for it to pass. Which one are you?

Poor Chile has taken a battering, the earth once again reminding us all of the fragility of our lives and the things we build and gather around us to make that life tolerable.

In the midst of all the economic and political upheaval we are experiencing, in the wake of disasters like the Chilean earthquake, how sad that the news found time to show two men not shaking hands.

I don't particularly like football and I have very little time for footballers, I did have a sneaking regard for John Fashanu and there are stories I could tell you....and perhaps will tell you about catching him driving his sports car in the early hours of a Sunday morning wearing only a short dressing gown...but perhaps I should keep those stories for another day.

Perhaps my dislike for the players of the beautiful game is based in their arrogance, ignorance, petulance,  decadence, imprudence, impudence, priapism and greed. Or perhaps I'm jealous?

Ant and Hand are back on Saturday night television - with a show that is a combination of the Generation Game, Family Fortunes and Simon. Two knob head families trying to out scream each other, showing the world how wonderfully crass the British lower classes can be. I doubt if we will see the Smyth- Hardings from Windsor or the Cholmondley-Creekshughes from Bath on Push The Button - no I suggest Ant and Hand will more likely turn up in the post industrial landscape of the north and perhaps Essex to find contestants.

I know my comments may well give rise to shouts of 'you snob' - well it won't be the first time that taste has been confused with class.

This is actually a tale of revenge as yesterday Mrs B and I were thought the lowest of the low because of where we lived. We were judged solely on our postcode and not our character by some tattooed harridan who obviously left school with one GCSE, and that was in keeping her legs and mouth open as long as possible, so what's good for the goose....


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On this day in 1939 the word 'dord' was discovered in Webster's Dictionary and somebody realised, wait a minute, there's no such word!

Apparently someone had sent a note to the publisher stating that 'D or d' could be used as an abbreviation for density and some clever clogs transposed the thing and stuck it in the dictionary.

Well I think I would like to resurrect the word and use it and I would ask all of you to try and use it on Facebook or wherever you can.

Let me give you some examples:

Did you see those families on Ant and Hand? They were dord!

How dord is John Terry?

Is that Nick Clegg? No, it's a dord farage!

This fog is so dord - I can hardly see my Hand in front of my Ant!

And don't forget to conjugate...dordly, dordest, dorder and such like.

I look forward to seeing the word dord being used in the future and perhaps we can win it a place in Webster's dictionary for good.

And that's a fact!