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 ....