Thursday 11 May 2017

Things that are hard to understand.

Once upon a time, long ago, employers used to give their employees a bonus, usually at Christmas time. It went along with giving the postman, the milkman, the newspaper delivery boy and anyone else who regularly delivered stuff to your house what they called a Christmas Box: a sort of tip. When did bonus stop being given to humble employees and begin to be given instead to people high up in management? Because they already receive quite high salaries, these bonuses tend to be huge amounts of money. It struck me that the state budget for health and education would be ridiculously huge if class teachers (not necessarily heads and deputy heads) and bog-standard nurses all received each year a bonus, just a bonus commensurate with their regular annual salary, not one running into millions. This bonus business is one of the things I find hard to understand in the modern world.

I am not sure that this still happens but it used to be that in some areas of employment in Spain employees received an extra month's salary in December. This always struck me as an eminently sensible way of organising things and keeping workers happy.

Today a BBC newsman had his foot run over by the car driving Jeremy Corbyn away. Maybe someone should tell Donald Trump and Theresa May about this new way of dealing with the media.

Having said that, I also heard that polls are going up in favour of Jeremy and the labour party.

An item is going around Facebook at the moment pointing out that Paul Nuttall, current leader of the UK Independence Party, despite having no MPs and having won only one council seat in the recent local council elections, has been invited twice to appear on BBC election specials prior to the soon to happen general elections. By contrast, the post goes on to tell us, Caroline Lucas and Jon Bartley, joint leaders of the Green Party, despite having an MP and the chance of a couple more in the general election as well as having won 40 local council seats, have not been invited even once. Could it be that Mr Nuttall makes, to some people's way of thinking, "better" television because he is more controversial the Green Party people will simply come across as sensible, sincere, thoughtful and a while lot more really good adjectives.

A person can really go off our media-obsessed modern life! 

The Labour Party's ideas about re-nationalising the railways and getting rid of university fees have been described by some as a desire to return to the Britain of the 1970s. Funnily enough nobody seems to have made the same comments about the desire to have more grammar schools and, oh yes, bring back fox hunting! That's another thing I find hard to understand.

Other things in the hard to understand list are:-

 Why my soon-no-longer-to-be-teenager granddaughter cannot keep her room tidy;

 Why they decided to paint double yellow lines outside our house;

 Why people start to complain that it is too hot as soon as the temperature goes up a degree or two; 

 Why a French driver felt that it was OK to deliberately drive into Chris Froome as he road his bike in France the other day;

 Why English strawberries are so much nicer-tasting than any others.

No doubt I'll come up with a whole lot more after I post this!

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