Grumpy Granny's Blog

As I am retiring from public life, this is my last ever post- and I leave with all guns blazing! Richard Sharp and Andrew Griffith were a Director and Chairman of the Advisory Board respectively of the Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank founded by Margaret Thatcher. No doubt Rich & Andy got on famously. By 2013, two other people who were getting on famously were Rupert Murdoch, owner of....

Women tend to be more realistic than men. After all, we seem to spend a significant part of our lives listening to men, whilst knowing, realistically, that we cannot believe much of what we hear. All my many years of life have brought home to me two crucial pieces of realism. Firstly, about money. Money only has the value that the powerful are prepared to ascribe to it. The vast majority of....

I listened to discussions today on TV about the impact of alcoholic parents on their children. I would not wish to minimise this impact. Or the impact of  parents who gamble; or are drug addicted; or lazy; or unemployed; or low intelligence; or have no taste in clothes; or are anti-social; or are shy; or are over-confident or........ And so I could go on. The truth is that, on cursory ex....

A lot of rubbish is written about women's "rights". There are 195 countries in the world and in very few of them do women have the same rights as men. Of course, there are many countries where the majority of the population have few rights. Typically, these are countries where government and the economy are both under the control of small minorities, who allow their fellow citizens little wealth....

Apparently, Andrea Leadsom didn't mean to say that having children gave a parent a bigger stake in the future. SHE SHOULD HAVE MEANT IT - BECAUSE IT IS TRUE. Those without children fend for themselves, often very selfishly. They may play the role of affable Aunts and Uncles, but that is very much a " great to have them, better to give them back" scenario. Decent parents, on the other hand, are ....

Watching on TV so many ladies of my age again being rescued by boat from houses in Carlisle, only 6 years after being told it wouldn't happen again for 250 years, made me think about honesty in politics. Thinking done. There isn't any. There is so little governments seem to be able to do about any issue of import. The Prime Minister should have a sign on his desk " The Buck Has Died And Who The....

The United States has not had a female President since inception. To date, apparently, no mere woman has been equipped to fill the Oval Office. In 2015, are over 200 Million women living in the 50 States of the Union. Yet the males chauvinists deny that any one of  them is ripe to take over the reins of power? Hilary Clinton is a first-class candidate for the Presidency. Lets be honest.Th....

The tragic pictures from just off the coast of Sicily earlier this week highlighted the plight of many who will never take such a boat journey. Our planet is in a pitiless mess. Almost everywhere you look, there are huge problems  which seem insoluble. The most obvious, of course, are in the Middle East and North Africa, with Syria and Iraq both in a state of civil war. Then th....

I am not at all grumpy today  because I am off to wonderful Plumpton racecourse. Plumpton has always been one of my favorite tracks.  Firstly, it is easy to get to. 40 minutes from Victoria, you arrive at a little platform at the bottom end of the course. After that, it is a 5 minute stroll up the side of the course to the quaint old stand, where the great and the good mingle with their....

Female Genital Mutilation is one of the great scandals of our time. This barbaric act is estimated to have been carried out on over 170,000 women now living in the UK. There is NO justification for this brutality towards women. No cultural or religious excuse is acceptable. IT MUST STOP RIGHT NOW. So far, not one successful prosecution of either doctors or parents has been achieved in the UK. T....