Bunker

Small, bijou

Horrific news story about a couple keeping their child in a coal bunker.

The radio newsreader described it as a converted coal bunker. Even as the better part of my brain was doing the 'poor kid...', 'how can anyone...', 'WTF...' things that come straight to mind, the other part was on semantics patrol, sniffing out that “converted”.

How do you convert a coal bunker? How small do your builders have to be? Are we all now so sucked into estate-agent speak that the slightest modification constitutes a conversion. It seems the bunker was just big enough to accommodate a single mattress and a potty. That's palatial if our old coal bunkers are anything to go by. You'd have to fold the mattress in half to stuff it into one of ours. Then they said that the parents (who can't be named) said, in their defence, that the child was only ever made to live in the bunker for a while after being naughty. Supernanny has made a career out of this sort of tripe. Naughty step becomes naughty room becomes naughty bunker. Try to sell the idea to social services and the crown prosecution service, and you're looking at porridge, go for the telly retards, and you've got a show, a series, a career and untold riches. Same theory, different degrees of bunker.

England have won another test match

Much as the politicians are excited by the Olympics, there's a lot of football and cricket going on this summer. Where will the drama be? The final test against South Africa as the top two nations in the game meet head-to-head? The European football championships? Or where people dive into a pool, swim up and down a bit, or where skinny folk run round in endless circles?

What is and isn't sport...

...purely my point of view. Take offence if you want to.

Not sport: if you need an expensive car, motorbike, or horse, it isn't sport. It's a rich-kid playground, it's all to do with gambling, or both. So-called motor-sport is just competitive commuting. If people hold up scorecards to decide the result, that's dancing or a variant thereof and not sport, either. See the Eurovison Song Contest. Or, like me, don't.

Pastimes: snooker, fishing, darts.

Borderline: golf.

Sport: football, cricket, rugby. Some other stuff.

Way too hot tonight...

...sweltering, the predicted rainstorms haven't arrived, yet.