It’s a sign that Gary Glitter’s back in the country when it emerges that staff at Telford and Wrekin council in sunny Shropshire have been ordered to stop and question any adult that dares to set foot in Telford Town Park without at least one child to hold their hand.

Now, as you probably know, I’m the sort of chap that believes everything he reads in the newspapers and on the internet (if it’s in print, then it can’t be lies, can it?), so when I catch sight of a story in not only the Metro newspaper (free of charge to anybody brave enough to set foot on a West Midlands Travel bus), but also upon the esteemed BBC News website, well there can’t be any dispute in its validity.

So let us delve a little deeper into this story and extract a few tasty morsals upon which to chew.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

It stands to reason that the week Jeffman decides to pay his debt to society by roughing it in a caravan for five days, somewhere along the coast of England; the reasonable to fair weather we have so far enjoyed this year decides it’s also due a deserved break.

Now not being one to let a lie get in the way of a good story, it’s probably worth noting that Jeffman is no big fan of really hot weather, and whilst everybody else has moaned continually about how bad this summer has been, with continual rain and negligible temperatures, I consider it to have been rather all right.

After all, I can’t think of anything more unpleasant than being half suffocated by stifling heat whilst sitting in a puddle of your own sweat. A man shouldn’t need to be continually dowsed down. That way madness lies.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

If, like me, you experience on a daily basis the displeasure that is public transport then you’ll already know where Jeffman’s coming from.

There are those less charitable than my good self that might say the problem with public transport is that they let the public use it…

Well. There was a time, in some long-forgotten and rose-tinted past, when buses were exciting. Yes, you read that right, exciting.

Now before you dismiss this as the half-cut ramblings of some toothless, retarded deviant with an unhealthy bus fetish, who bolstered by a Methuselah of rum has decided it’s time to make his very own public confession of a sordid  past of bus-based self abuse, allow me a moment to explain.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

In what seems like a lifetime ago I promised mobile phones and technology for the second part of this article on how the art of conversation is not what it used to be… So, with no further ado it’s mobile phones and technology I deliver.

Once again fear stalks these halls; what seems sadly endemic in this modern society. But more of that later.

At the risk of sounding like quite the little Luddite, I accuse the proliferation of modern technology and unnecessary gadgetry for the breakdown in conversation, even more so than the lack of common ground between young and old. And how ironic that the most dangerous assassin out there could well be the very thing you’re reading this on. The internet.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

And so this prolonged car crash that is Gordon Brown and his treacherous band of thieves ploughs relentlessly onward as he makes not just one, but two policy U-turns in the space of a few days.

First off - in what’s up there with the quickest of embarrassing public U-turns to have been perpetuated by useless governments - there’s the decision to scrap one of the key elements of the plans to tackle what seems to have become a small-scale epidemic of knife crime.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…

Time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for me.
- The Rolling Stones, ‘Time Waits For No One’

Indeed. Apparently we don’t buy Oranges anymore. Well not big ones, anyway. You know the ones the size of a small beach ball that you need an ice-pick or similarly fashioned tool to remove the rhinoceros-like hide from. Nobody has time for that anymore. It’s now just the wee fellas. The ‘easy-peelers’. Rip the skin off with your thumb and consume in two bites. Nice and easy. Gives us all more time to rush around like headless chickens. More time to getting nothing done. More time to hurtle without focus along the narrow, unswerving highway to kingdom come.

No matter how hard I wish it to happen, time won’t stand still. I’ve tried every trick in the book in an attempt to get a grip on the passage of time, but to no avail. This includes such desperate measures as counting the minutes, counting the seconds… I even read back through this blog once… *shudder* Never again. But nothing can stop the momentum that has picked up around the life of Jeffman and is sending him hurtling ever closer to the only real certainty in this life.

Tickled your fancy? Read on…